Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland
ISBN-10
0199533407
ISBN-13
9780199533404
Category
History
Pages
231
Language
English
Published
2008-07-10
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Christopher Highley

Description

In contrast to recent studies that treat Catholics only as a despised 'other' against which British Protestant narratives of the nation were constructed, this book examines the ways in which Catholic writers between the reigns of Mary Tudor and James I fashioned their own competing discourses of national and cultural identity. The book considers a broad range of non-canonical material produced by a diverse Catholic community in both print and manuscript: religiouspolemic, ecclesiastical histories, martyrologies, and correspondence. Scholars like Thomas Stapleton, 'intelligencers' like Richard Verstegan, secular priests like William Allen, and Jesuits like Robert Persons helped shape debates about national identity both in response to Protestant polemic andas part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted various factions against each other, including expatriates from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Finally, this study focuses on how Catholics' experience of exile from 'home' conditioned their alternative writing of the nation.

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