The Materiality of Catholic Resistance in Sources for the English Jesuit Mission

Abstract

The Society of Jesus played a critical role in preserving the material culture of English Catholicism, which came under assault following the Reformation of the 1530s. The relics, sacred objects, liturgical items, and other devotional materials that the Jesuits employed in the English mission helped to preserve the memory of England's place in the wider history of the Roman Catholic Church and sustain the links between the two. Contemporary records kept by members of the English mission in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries likewise testify to the spiritual as well as political significance of sacred objects in England. The surviving sacred objects and the records the Jesuits kept of them helped to craft an alternative sense of history and identity for English Catholics that challenged the Protestant establishment that took hold in England after the Reformation.As in other parts of Europe, relics and other sacred objects were criticized by religious reformers in sixteenth-century England for encouraging superstition and idolatry. 1 The relic collections and devotional materials of religious houses came under particular scrutiny after King Henry VIII (r.1509-47) broke with Rome in 1534, as part of a wider project to dissolve the monasteries from 1536 to 1540. Supposedly fraudulent relics were seized and exhibited in London, while others were burned or defaced. 2 Religious houses were physically dismantled, liturgical materials were melted down and repurposed, and the nuns and monks were turned out. Apart from the reign of Mary Tudor (r.1553-58), in which Catholicism was temporarily restored from 1553 to 1558, a succession of monarchs in England passed increasingly restrictive laws to discourage and diminish Catholic forms of devotion in the sixteenth century. 3 These culminated in the parliamentary legislation passed in 1571 and 1581, which in addition to making conversion to and 1 Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman have suggested that Protestant influences and suspicion of materialism contributed, until recently, to a neglect of material culture in religious studies: see their introduction to their edited volume Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1-24. Caroline Walker Bynum, however, has pointed out that pre-Reformation religious art and objects survived in abundance in German Protestant lands despite this suspicion.