Lest We Be Damned

Practical Innovation & Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642

Lisa McClain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135885021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Through compelling personal stories and in rich detail, McClain reveals the give-and-take interaction between the institutional church in Rome and the needs of believers and the hands-on clergy who provided their pastoral care within England. In doing so, she illuminates larger issues of how believers and low-level clergy push the limits of official orthodoxy in order to meet devotional needs.

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1 York Minster Library, Add MS 151, 58r.

2 Defined as prior to the first English Reformation initiated by Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy in 1534. It is now generally accepted that pre-reform English Christians were neither champing at the bit for reform of a decaying church nor universally and uniformly participating in an idyllic religious culture fiercely devoted to the Pope and the doctrinal teachings of Rome. For a detailed examination of this culture, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) who describes the varied experiences of the majority of pre-refomn Christians who were loyal to and involved with their faith.

3 Duffy, Stripping, 3.

4 See Virginia Reinburg, “Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 3 (1992): 526–546.

5 No longer recognized as sacraments were confirmation, penance, extreme unction, holy ordination, and marriage.

6 The Catholic clerics with the most influence over lay Catholics were priests directly ministering to the laity within England. The secular priest John Sergeant, for example, criticized English Catholics' propensity to be guided by no one but their immediate priests, writing that “because they have been too long without the curb of Episcopal authority…there is no church discipline or other superiority over them further than that priest whom they please to take for their ghostly father and whom generally they look upon as a kind of honorable servant alterable at pleasure.” This document is unsigned but John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975) 256, attributes it to Sergeant. Quoted in Colleen Marie Seguin, Addicted unto Piety: Catholic Women in England, 1590–1690 (PhD Dissertation, Duke University, 1997) 48.

7 After the Council of Trent (1545–63). The Council of Trent, through its decrees, attempted to reform and streamline Catholic belief and ritual and tighten clerical authority over the laity. See Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman P. Tanner, original text established by G. Albergio, J. A. Dossetti, P. -P. Joannou, C. Leonardi, and P. Prodi, in consultation with H. Jedin (London: Sheed and Ward, Ltd., and Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990).

8 Duffy, Stripping; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) and “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation.” Past and Present (GB) 93 (1981): 37–69; See also J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1984); Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

9 See Haigh, Reformations- Bossy, ECC; See also J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976).

10 J. C. H. Aveling, Northern Catholics: Recusancy in the North Riding, 1558–1791 (London: Dublin Chapman, 1966); S. J. Watts, From Border to Middleshire: Northumberland, 1586–1625 (Bristol: Leicester University Press, 1975); A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969). Other fine county studies include Haigh, Lancashire, and Roger B. Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex: A Study of the Enforcement of the Religious Settlement, 1558–1603 (Bristol: Leicester University Press, 1969).

11 See Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993) and more recently, Sara Heller Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Crawford, however, does not focus her analysis exclusively on Catholic women. See also Roland Connelly, The Women of the Catholic Resistance: In England, 1540–1680 (Edinburgh: The Pentland Press Limited, 1997); Seguin, Addicted; Dorothy Latz, Glow-worm Light: Writings of Seventeenth-Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts, Salzburg Studies in English Literature (Salzburg: Aus Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1989).

12 Haigh, “Continuity,” 61–3. Haigh looks primarily at efforts of priests to maintain late medieval traditions, what Haigh refers to as “survivalism” of older Catholic traditions. When Catholics lost access to the priests and sacraments, Catholics “slipped into conformity” with the Protestants. Bossy, ECC, 108–110, looks as well at traditional performance of collective religious and sacramental acts to chronicle what he saw among both the laity and clergy as the “death of the church.”

13 The flexibility of the Roman Church's efforts to convert pagan England in the sixth and seventh centuries through St Augustine of Canterbury and his successors provides an excellent example.

14 For example, see Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Lucy E. C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Royal Historical Society, The Boydell Press, 1999) chaps. 2–3

15 This is in contrast to Wooding's conclusion that “The [English Catholic intellectual] writers [of the Elizabethan years]…were perhaps more representative of common feeling, and to understand their m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter1 “Knitting the Remnants”:Catholic Challenges and Priorities in Protestant England
• Chapter 2 A “Church” without a Church: English Catholics' Search for Religious Space
• Chapter 3 Using What's at Hand: English Catholic Reinterpretations of the Rosary
• Chapter 4 Reclaiming the Body: Receiving the Benefits of the Mass in the Absence of Priests
• Chapter 5 Lawyers, Jailbirds, Grocers, and Diplomats: Catholic Options for Piety and Community in London
• Chapter 6 Katholik Kernow: Catholics of Cornwall
• Chapter 7 “Border of Wickedness?”: Catholics in the Northern Shires
• Chapter 8 From the Old Comes the New. Catholic Identities and Alternative Forms of Community
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index