Thomas White alias Blacklo, an English Catholic priest, natural philosopher and theologian, was the leader of a small group of Catholics, known as ‘Blackloists’, who in the 1640s and 1650s wrote in support of Oliver Cromwell. This article seeks to explain the ecclesiological, theological and political arguments put forward by White and his followers in order to justify their approach to the Independents and later to the Lord Protector. After putting into context and interpreting some of the issues elaborated in White's circle, the reaction of the Holy See to Thomas White and to his political and theological positions is examined. While contemporary historiography seems to agree that the majority of English Catholics were on the king's side during the civil war, the evidence that emerges from White's case shows that the Roman hierarchy was of a different opinion.
This article investigates certain aspects of the first mission of the Society of Jesus in England in the context of the current historiographical debate on the issue of religious dissimulation. While traditionally English Catholicism and the Jesuit mission to England have been linked to Nicodemism, or the need to dissimulate one's religious faith in order to escape persecution, this article argues that the clandestine conditions in which the Catholic missionaries were forced to operate constituted an ideal background to experiment with another form of dissimulation, more akin to the kind of 'offensive' dissimulation suggested by Machiavelli to his Prince and systematized during the seventeenth century as 'honest' dissimulation.
This article explores the relationship between theology and documentary criticism in Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici in their own historical and intellectual context. The first two sections of this article are devoted to analyzing two episodes in Baronio’s work, which most clearly show the role of erudition and historical criticism in articulating crucial and controversial political and theological positions in post-Reformation Rome. The third and final section assesses the significance of Baronio’s historical methodology in the context of post-Reformation Catholicism and its importance for our understanding of the relationship between post-Humanist historiography and post-Reformation apologetics and, more generally, for our understanding of the nature of ecclesiastical history.
text, not only in the context of English or British debates over the succession to Elizabeth, but also in a European-wide scenario. Such an approach, I argue, can allow historians of early modern England to gain a deeper and wider understanding of English Catholicism and of its relevance in European political and religious history.In 1595 A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland was published in Antwerp, under the pseudonym of R. Doleman. 1
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