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.
Luisa de Carvajal in Anglo-Spanish Contexts, 1605–14
This article reexamines the life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, a Spanish noblewoman who traveled to London in 1605 hoping to be martyred in service of the Catholic faith. By placing her at the intersection of a series of international, intra- and interconfessional tensions created by the sustained religious division of post-Reformation England, Carvajal emerges as a sophisticated political actor. She offers not only a unique account of female Catholic agency and opposition in early Stuart England, but also a lens through which to view the nature of religious identity and division in a period of Anglo-Spanish peace.
Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789
Connoisseurs of the recent scholarly attention given to the social and 
cultural impact of the sixteenth-century religious reformations will welcome 
Hoffman's fine study of the Counter Reformation in the diocese 
of Lyons, even though much of his story will come as no surprise to 
readers of Bossy, Delumeau, Perouas and others. The rise of the seminary 
and the doctrinal "reeducation" of the Catholic clergy; the substitution 
of the priest as a moral and spiritual etre a part in relation to the 
parish for the priest who had been an essential but barely distinguishable 
part of the village community; the coming of the new clerically controlled 
and devotional confraternities at the expense of the purely lay 
and somewhat festive confraternities that had been nearly congruous 
with the village; the crabbed campaign against quasi-sacral charivaris, sportive pilgrimages, and irreverent saints' days-the whole promiscuous 
intermingling of the sacred and the secular-all of these general 
features of the Catholic Counter Reformation find their particular variants 
in Hoffman's diocese of Lyons. More committed than his predecessors, 
however, to the Braudelian longue duree, Hoffman takes nearly 
the entire Old Regime as his province and carries his story to the onset 
of dechristianization on the eve of the French Revolution.