Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons's Jesuit Polemic, 1580-1610

by Victor Houliston, Giorgio Caravale, Ralph Keen, J Christopher Warner

Overview

This book provides a study of the writing career of Robert Persons, leader of the Elizabethan Jesuits, and seen as an apostolate as well as a polemical contestation. It relates Persons's 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's 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'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781409479802
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	06/28/2013
Series:	Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
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About the Author

Victor Houliston is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Table of Contents

Publishers’ Note; Series Editor’s Preface; Preface; Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations; Chapter One The Legend of Father Parsons; Chapter Two The English Mission: Writing The Christian Directory; Chapter Three The Spanish Connection: Satirizing Burghley; Chapter Four The Myth of England’s Catholic Destiny: Persons’s Political Vision; Chapter Five Reclaiming the Past: Combating Foxe and Coke; Chapter Six A Jesuit Apologia: Appellant Abuse; Chapter Seven Making England Safe for Catholicism: Liberty of Conscience under James; Chapter Eight Mastering the Polemical Scene;

Editorial Reviews

’... a wholly convincing and reasoned reconsideration of Persons...’ The Tablet ’Victor Houliston’s critical history of the career of Robert Persons makes a timely contribution to scholarship on early modern English Catholicism.’ Review of English Studies ’So easily does Houliston take the reader into the arguments that one might be in the debating chamber with Persons and his Protestant antagonists. Indeed, Houliston appears to have immersed himself in Persons’s work for so long that history has become a mere slip of time and Robert Persons has become as familiar to him as his own family might be.’ Recusant History ’... Houliston’s work makes a strong contribution to Catholic Reformation thought and historical literary studies.’ Religious Studies Review

From the Publisher