The Catholic nobility in Utrecht and Guelders, c. 1580-1702
This thesis examines the Catholic nobility in the provinces of Utrecht and Guelders in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on topics including the religious diversity within noble families, interconfessional interaction, religious tolerance and intolerance, the religiosity of the Catholic nobility and their support of the Holland Mission. The Catholic nobility as a socio-religious group is studied against the backdrops of Dutch society and of the Holland Mission, and their behaviour is understood in the context of the changing political, social and religious circumstances in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.
From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England
Robert Parsons, the Jesuit, compiled his account of the transition of English Catholicism from monopoly to minority status in 1599–1600, and called it ‘A story of domestical difficulties which the Catholic cause and promoters thereof hath had in defending the same, not only against the violence and persecution of the heretics but also by sundry other impediments among themselves, of faction, emulation, sedition and division, since the change of religion in England’. This version of Tudor ecclesiastical history supplements Nicholas Sander's attention to evil Protestants and politicians by an examination of the Catholic response to the Reformation. The Parsons story has two groups of villains, the bishops and the parish clergy, who betrayed their faith to hold on to their livings; it has two groups of heroes, who rescued the faith by their self-sacrifice, the Jesuits and the seminary priests they inspired, and the Elizabethan Catholic gentry; and it goes something like this. The early Tudor monopolistic Church was weakened by spiritual decadence and mere conformism, and its leadership divided by ambition and faction, so it could not resist the challenge of heresy.
Women in medieval society
Early medieval women exercised public roles, rights, and responsibilities. Women contributed through their labor to the welfare of the community. Women played an important part in public affairs. They practiced birth control through abortion and infanticide. Women committed crimes and were indicted. They owned property and administered estates. The drive toward economic growth and expansion abroad rested on the capacity of women to staff and manage economic endeavors at home. In the later Middle Ages, the social position of women altered significantly, and the reasons why the role of women in society tended to become more restrictive are examined in these essays.