From Mary Queen of Scots to the Scottish Capuchins: Scotland as a symbol of Protestant persecution in seventeenth-century Italian literature
Italian authors of the seventeenth century produced a myriad of historical texts, tragedies, oratorios and poems that dealt with the events of Mary Stuart's life. The tremendous outcry that her story caused all over Europe made Scotland one of the most powerful symbols of persecution of Catholics by Protestants. It was the image of Scotland as a land of martyrdom that possibly prompted the publication of two seventeenth-century Italian ‘biographies’, narrating the vicissitudes of the lives of two Scottish capuchins, and which ran to multiple editions down to the eighteenth century. This article explores the literary reception of Mary Queen of Scots in seventeenth-century Italian literature and, in so doing, opens up religious, cultural, and political implications, pointing to links between Scottish Catholic and European intellectuals, and the publishing networks of sympathetic Marian writing.
Polemic as Piety: Thomas Stapleton's Tres Thomae and Catholic Controversy in the 1580s
This article examines the triple biography of Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Becket and Thomas More, published by Thomas Stapleton in 1588 and generally regarded as a work of pious hagiography. By focusing on the circumstances in which the book was written and published, the article demonstrates its polemical significance at a time of rapid political change in Catholic/Protestant relations in both England and Europe. Conceived as a Catholic alternative to the history of the Christian past produced by Foxe, Stapleton's book also addressed contested issues within Catholicism: how to deal with the Elizabethan regime, and the status to be accorded to recent martyrs. In answering these questions, Stapleton's views reflect the complexity of Catholic thought at this time, and its fluidity in response to the shifting political circumstances of the late 1580s.
Catholicism, Kinship and the Public Memory of Sir Thomas More
Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post-Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism's political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.