Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700 addresses all varieties of religious behaviour extending beyond traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It is interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. It understands religion, primarily of the 'Catholic' variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms. Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700 will appeal to academics and students interested in the history of late medieval and early modern western Christianity in global context. The series embraces any and all expressions of traditional religion, books in it will take many approaches, among them literary history, art history, and the history of science, and above all, interdisciplinary combinations of them.
By Seán Alexander Smith
June 10, 2019
The career of the French saint Vincent de Paul has attracted the attention of hundreds of authors since his death in 1660, but the fate of his legacy - entrusted to the body of priests called the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists) - remains vastly neglected. De Paul spent a lifetime working ...
By Michael Bush
June 10, 2019
The Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular uprising in the north of England against Henry VIII's religious policies, has long been recognised as a crucial point in the fortunes of the English Reformation. Historians have long debated the motives of the rebels and what effects they had on government policy....
By Gabriella Erdélyi
June 06, 2019
In 1517, the usually tranquil friary in the Hungarian town of Körmend found itself at the centre of controversy when its Augustinian friars, charged with drunkenness, sexual abuses and liturgical negligence, were driven out and replaced with observant Franciscans. The agent of change in this ...
By Laurence Lux-Sterritt
November 28, 2005
This short study offers a contribution to the flourishing debate on post-Reformation female piety. In an effort to avoid excessive polarization condemning conventual life as restrictive or hailing it as a privileged path towards spiritual perfection, it analyses the reasons which led early-modern ...
By Anthony D. Wright
June 09, 2005
Modern scholarship has effectively demonstrated that, far from being a knee-jerk reaction to the challenges of Protestantism, the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fuelled primarily by a desire within the Church to reform its medieval legacy and to re-enthuse its ...
By William Wizeman
May 28, 2006
Few areas of early modern English history have roused such passions and interpretations as the rule of Mary Tudor and her efforts to return the country to Catholicism following the reigns of her father and brother. In this book, Dr Wizeman explores Catholic theology and spirituality according to ...
By James E. Kelly, Caroline Bowden
August 29, 2013
In 1598, the first English convent was established in Brussels and was to be followed by a further 21 enclosed convents across Flanders and France with more than 4,000 women entering them over a 200-year period. In theory they were cut off from the outside world; however, in practice the nuns were...
By Elizabeth C. Tingle
May 31, 2017
The concept of Purgatory was a central tenet of late-medieval and early-modern Catholicism, and proved a key dividing line between Catholics and Protestants. However, as this book makes clear, ideas about purgatory were often ill-defined and fluid, and altered over time in response to particular ...
Edited
By Thomas F. Mayer
May 25, 2017
The Reformation used to be singular: a unique event that happened within a tidily circumscribed period of time, in a tightly constrained area and largely because of a single individual. Few students of early modern Europe would now accept this view. Offering a broad overview of current scholarly ...
By Jean-Pascal Gay
May 24, 2017
Founded in 1540, the Society of Jesus quickly established itself as one of the most dynamic, influential but divisive orders within early-modern Catholicism. Yet whilst the order's role in combating Protestantism, reforming the Catholic Church and advising rulers during its first century has been ...
By Giorgio Caravale
May 22, 2017
This book delineates the attempt, carried out by the Congregations of the Inquisition and the Index during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, to purge various devotional texts in the Italian vernacular of heterodox beliefs and superstitious elements, while imposing a rigid uniformity in ...
By Thomas M. McCoog, S.J.
May 22, 2017
English Catholic voices, once disregarded as merely confessional, are now acknowledged to provide important perspectives on Elizabethan society. Based on extensive archival research, this book builds on previous studies for the first thorough investigation of the Jesuit mission to England during a ...
