Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England (Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700)

Amongst ecclesiastical historians, there has been increased interest in English Catholicism over the past twenty years as a result of the re-evaluation of religious conflicts in early modern England, especially the role of the Jesuits. Speculation about Shakespeare's Catholicism has focused the attention of literary scholars on the experience of Elizabethan Catholics. This book bridges the gap between historical and political studies of the career of the Jesuit Robert Persons on the one hand and literary studies of Shakespeare and other authors, by concentrating on Persons' contribution as a writer to the polemical culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Offering a study of the writing career of Robert Persons, leader of the Elizabethan Jesuits, seen as an apostolate as well as a polemical contestation, this book relates Persons' interventions in various controversies during the period 1580-1610 to the formative purposes of the "Christian Directory" (1582), his famous and phenomenally successful work of devotion. This book was originally known as the "Book of Resolution", which also refers to Persons' indefatigability as a writer. The study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the polemical context of post-Reformation Catholicism in England, and to the Jesuit notion of the 'apostolate of writing'.