Catholics and Treason

Catholics and Treason takes the narratives generated by the contemporary law of treason as it applied to Roman Catholics, during and after the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century, and uses them to explore the Catholic community's writing of its own history. Prosecutions of Catholics under the existing law and via new legislation produced a great deal of documentation which tells us much about contemporary politics that we could not garner from any other source. The intention here is to locate the narratives of persecution inside the context of the 'mainstream' history of the period from which, for the most part, they have been routinely excluded but out of which they partly emerged. In that respect, this is the history of the post-Reformation Church and State with the politics (of violence) put back. This volume takes as its starting point the magnum opus of Bishop Richard Challoner, his Memoirs of Missionary Priests, and it works backwards from that book into the period that Challoner describes. Historian Michael Questier seeks to reassemble as far as possible the historical jigsaw puzzle on which Challoner laboured but which he could not complete, thinking about the implications for our view of the post-Reformation and of the way in which Challoner and others described the Catholic experience of in/tolerance.

Formerly professor of history in the University of London, and Leverhulme Research Professor 2015-2017, Michael Questier moved to a research chair at the University of Vanderbilt in 2018 and is now attached to the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham.

- Preface - Part I - 1: Introduction: Martyrs for the Faith? - 2: Catholic Martyrdom and the Writing of English Reformation History - 3: Martyrdom and the Construction of Martyr Narratives - Part II - 4: 'Sentenced to Die as in Cases of High Treason': The Elizabethan Settlement and the Coming of Intolerance, c. 1558-1582 - 5: After Campion - 6: Catholic Martyrs and the Political Crises of the Mid-1580s - 7: The Incestuous Bastard Queen Persecutes the Faithful Servants of Christ - 8: Catholic Radicalism and the (Re-)Emergence of Catholic Loyalism - 9: The Coming of Toleration in Late Elizabethan England? - 10: The Appeal to Rome and the Struggle for the Memory of the Martyrs - Part III - 11: Tolerance and Intolerance in England after the Accession of James VI - 12: Mid-Jacobean Confessional Politics and Anti-Popery - 13: The Protestant Turn Turns Sour - 14: Towards Toleration? The Change of the Times in Late Jacobean and Caroline Britain - 15: Back to the Future: Catholicism, Persecution and the Outbreak of the Civil War - 16: The Restoration and the Popish Plot - 17: Conclusion: The afterlife of the Early Modern English Martyr Tradition