Without Church, Cathedral, or Shrine: The Search for Religious Space among Catholics in England, 1559-1625

Saints in Exile: The Cult of Saint Thomas of Canterbury and Elizabethan Catholics in France

“…90 The ongoing process of Reformation for the most part denied Catholic laity their traditional means and spaces of devotion. 91 However, as we have seen, an attachment to Saint Thomas could last beyond the official Protestant campaign against his cult. Within England, the relationship between the evolving character of post-Reformation English Catholicism and one of England's most popular saints was complex.…”

‘Virgo Becomes Virago’: Women in the Accounts of Seventeenth-Century English Catholic Missionaries

“…5 Lisa McClain recently pointed out that the spiritual lives of Catholic believers in England depended upon flexibility; she highlighted that both men and women 'pushed the limits of orthodoxy, all the while remaining within the rather flexible bounds of the multi-faceted interaction between the institution of the Roman Church and the needs of believers'. 6 Thus, as priests worked for the preservation of the faith on English soil, lay women used their own skills with such success that they soon provided much of the secular infrastructure of the English mission. As expediency replaced customary gendered specialization, some female recusants were, for the first time, allowed to play roles which would, in ordinary circumstances, have incurred the censure of the clergy.…”

Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation*

“…60 Robert Southwell, for example, sought to counteract the consequences of Catholicism's ejection from the cathedrals and churches which had been its ancient patrimony by encouraging the laity to consecrate domestic and natural spaces to spiritual use -from the rooms of their houses to barns, fields and woods. 61 Ritual expulsion of demons was a further instrument by which priests repeatedly sought to reconcile schismatics and convince Protestants that Catholicism was the single true religion: exorcism was at once a powerful metaphor and a practical mechanism for the expulsion of heresy and it is increasingly clear that the celebrated episode at Denham involving William Weston and twelve other priests in 1585-6 was not the only occasion on which the clergy tried to transform these compelling but unstable spectacles into propaganda for the Tridentine cause. News of miraculous visions of the Virgin Mary and other saints was similarly harnessed in support of contested doctrinal tenets like transubstantiation and purgatory.…”