Sermons, Separatists, and Succession Politics in Late Elizabethan England
Abstract In late 1599 the population of York was able to witness a fairly extraordinary sight. In York Castle, the Catholic prisoners of conscience, as they saw themselves (though others regarded them as dangerous political dissidents), were being compelled to listen, once a week, to a Protestant sermon. These sermons were preached at them by a slate of godly ministers. This exercise was something the prisoners actively contested by murmuring, blocking their ears, shouting, and attempting to rush out of the hall. The prisoners' antics provoked the authorities into increasingly coercive measures to make them hear the Word of God. This outwardly rather ridiculous and unseemly charade went on, week after week, for nearly a year, at which point the whole business was abandoned by the lord president, Lord Burghley, as a waste of time. However, by decoding the extant manuscript narrative that we have of the sermon series and by looking at who was involved in this business and why, and what political messages were being sent during the course of it, we can say something about the popular politics of late Elizabethan England. In particular, we can comment on the strategies adopted by those who were anticipating the moment, surely not far off, when Tudor power would be extinguished and Elizabeth's crown would pass to her successor.
Solitary Sparrows: Widowhood and the Catholic Community in Post-Reformation England, 1580-1630
by Jennifer Ashley Binczewski, Ph.D. Washington State University December 2017 Chair: Jesse Spohnholz This dissertation examines the gendered nature of the sixteenthand seventeenth-century English Catholic community through widows’ attempts to preserve Catholicism. Catholics in post-Reformation England faced new challenges in their resolution to remain faithful to Rome following the passage of a wave of anti-Catholic laws in the 1580s. These legislative attempts to root out Catholicism resulted in the creation of a clandestine community where private households became essential sites for the survival of Catholic worship. My research extends prior studies of English women – as a general category – in the preservation of Catholicism by considering how marital status affected an individual’s ability to support and maintain the underground Catholic Church. By merging the study of widowhood with spatial analyses of Catholic households, I argue that early modern patriarchal structures provided specific opportunities inherent in widowhood that were unavailable to other men and women, whether married or single. Through their legal autonomy, economic independence, and the manipulation of gendered cultural stereotypes, many Catholic widows used their households to harbor priests, host clandestine Mass, and preserve Catholicism for future generations. This argument maintains that a broader interpretation of the role of women, one that includes an analysis of marital status, is essential to understanding the gendered nature of religious survival in the face of persecution.
The colonial ethnological line: Timor and the racial geography of the Malay Archipelago
This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia's work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia's classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of ‘Portuguese Timor’. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace's famous ethnological line.