scholarly journals The Contested Appropriation of George Gervase's Martyrdom: European Religious Patronage and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
Catholic Mission

AbstractFrom the beginning of the seventeenth century, Englishmen professed as Benedictine monks in mainland Europe began returning to their homeland. Until that point, the Catholic mission to England had been run by secular clergy and Jesuits, relationships between the two clerical parties growing increasingly troubled over how the Catholic Reformation should be implemented in England. The arrival of the Benedictines saw the offering of a “third way” to England's proscribed Catholics. Yet with the various missions dependent on lay Catholic resources and support both in England and in mainland Europe, it was necessary for the Benedictines to justify their presence in this often fraught environment. As such, they forcefully laid claim to contemporary English Benedictine martyrs against rival claims by other clerical groups. These battles for validation reached a new level of intensity following James I's serving of the Oath of Allegiance. This article explores how competing groups of English missionary clergy sought to justify their presence in England. Taking the case of two conflicting images of the executed George Gervase, it argues that the contest for martyrs sheds new light on the ways in which martyrdom was exploited by different groups; it also contributes to debates about the Oath of Allegiance, which was threatening to derail the wider Catholic Reformation across mainland Europe. By placing these clashes over English religious identity in both domestic and international contexts, the article makes evident that events on the peripheries of mainland Europe affected discussions at its center.

scholarly journals Political Mysticism: Augustine Baker, the Spiritual Formation of Missionaries and the Catholic Reformation in England

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
JAMES E. KELLY
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Formation ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Catholic Mission

Augustine Baker, the seventeenth-century Benedictine monk, is primarily remembered as an advocate of mystical spiritual contemplation. This reputation was shaped by a contemporary supporter, whose synopsis of Baker's works is the source most commonly consulted by historians. However, by reading Baker's complete ‘Treatise of the English mission’ and recontextualising this manuscript, it is evident that he was addressing problems of his day. His treatise is a polemical response to debates about the implementation of the Catholic Reformation in England, advocating a vision of clerical formation and personal spiritual reformation for all those active in the English Catholic mission.

‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama

Conversions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Houston
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.  

Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Sephardic Jews ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Jewish Descent

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Forrestal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Significant Research ◽  
Catholic Reform

For information on the life and work of Vincent de Paul, historians still depend mainly on the standard biography produced by the Vincentian Pierre Coste, the triple volume Le Grand Saint du grand siècle, even though it is close to a century since this was published. It is now widely recognized that while the disruption of the Wars of Religion (1562–98) meant that the drive for Catholic reform began later in France than elsewhere, once it was set in motion it reached levels of intensity and creativity over the first six decades of the seventeenth century which were unmatched in any other region. The Introduction locates de Paul within the historiography of the Catholic Reformation and French religious renewal, by offering a survey of the findings of the most significant research in these areas, and identifying the questions that these evoke for the assessment of de Paul’s activities.

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Forrestal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Congregation Of The Mission ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
The Church ◽  
And Training

This book offers a major reassessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul. Confronting traditional explanations for de Paul’s prominence in the dévot reform movement that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion, it explores how he turned a personal vocation to evangelize the rural poor of France into a congregation of secular missionaries, known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Lazarists, with three interrelated strands of pastoral responsibility: the delivery of missions, the formation and training of clergy, and the promotion of confraternal charity. It demonstrates that the structure, ethos, and works that de Paul devised for the Congregation placed it at the heart of a significant enterprise of reform that involved a broad set of associates in efforts to transform the character of devotional belief and practice within the church. The book’s central questions concern de Paul’s efforts to create, characterize, and articulate a distinctive and influential vision for missionary life and work, both for himself and for the Lazarist Congregation, and it argues that his prominence and achievements depended on his remarkable ability to exploit the potential for association and collaboration within the dévot environment of seventeenth-century France in enterprising and systematic ways. It is the first study to assess de Paul’s activities against the backdrop of religious reform and Bourbon rule, and to reconstruct the combination of ideas, practices, resources, and relationships that determined his ability to pursue his ambitions.

Inventorying St Alban’s College Library in 1767: The Process and its Records

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-189
Author(s):  
Marta Revilla-Rivas
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
College Library ◽  
Insight Into

St Alban’s English College in Valladolid, established at the height of the Catholic Reformation for the training of English secular clergy under the rule of Spanish Jesuits, underwent an alteration in its management after the expulsion of the religious order from Spain in 1767. As part of this process, numerous valuable archival records were produced which have not, thus far, been studied. This article analyses a portion of these documents: the surviving manuscript inventories of the library. It also considers the series of governmental orders issued by the Spanish authorities as part of the process of expulsion and examines how these orders shaped the production of the library inventories. It offers an overview of the contents of the catalogues, with descriptions of some of those specific book entries that make these inventories unique. The study of these archival documents provides insight into, and understanding of, a key moment in the College history: its shift from Spanish Jesuit control to an English secular one and the difficulties that the Spanish authorities faced because of this change in the College’s national identity.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 276-292
Author(s):  
Peter Lake ◽  
Michael Questier
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Secular Clergy

The concluding chapter sums up the arguments of the book and points towards the long-term significance of the Archpriest Controversy for the later relations between the English Catholics and the English crown, organized around such topics as tolerance and the acceptance de facto or de jure of religious pluralism and the consequences thereof. The chapter takes the account of these points of contact between the Catholic community and the crown down to the later seventeenth century, looking in particular at the petitioning and lobbying that occurred in 1603–4; at the gunpowder conspiracy in 1605; at what happened when the power of episcopal regulation was granted in the 1620s to members of the secular clergy; and also at the strain of so-called Blackloist thought among English Catholics during the Interregnum.

State intervention in disputes between secular and regular clergy in early seventeenth-century Ireland

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-326
Author(s):  
Mark Empey
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
The Catholic Church ◽  
Episcopal Authority

The success of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy was a remarkable achievement. Between 1618 and 1630 Rome made a staggering nineteen episcopal appointments in a kingdom that was ruled by a Protestant king. Documenting the achievements of the initial period only paints half the picture, however. The implementation of the Tridentine reforms and the thorny issue of episcopal authority brought the religious orders into a head-on collision with the secular clergy. This protracted dispute lasted for a decade, most notably in the diocese of Dublin where an English secular priest, Paul Harris, led a hostile attack on the Franciscan archbishop, Thomas Fleming. The longevity of the feud, though, owed at least as much to the intervention of Lord Deputy Sir Thomas Wentworth as it did to the internal tensions of the Catholic Church. Despite Wentworth’s influential role, he has been largely written out of the conflict. This article addresses the lacunae in the current historiography and argues that the lord deputy’s interference was a decisive factor in exacerbating the hostilities between the secular and regular clergy in early seventeenth-century Ireland.

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