| Recent scholarly attention has turned from narratives of early modern Protestant triumphalism to the ongoing dissident Catholic minority within English society during the Elizabethan institutionalization of a permanent reformation of the national church. A historic focus on the institutional and ecclesiastical histories of Catholics and the Catholic Church in its reaction to Elizabethan persecution has led, in discursive terms, to a corresponding focus on elite religio-political polemics and ecclesiastical apologies, with little corresponding understanding of the material and cultural circumstances surrounding their production, distribution, and consumption within the English Catholic community, or to the emergence of alternative spiritualist works that were also reflective of the aims of the Catholic missionary movement; namely, to provide lay Catholics access to missionary priests and sacramental worship, and to introduce to England the reformed spirituality of a renewed Tridentine Roman Catholicism.;While still deprived of ready access to priests and worship, and subjected to an intensifying program of conformity under coercive threats of fine, imprisonment, torture, banishment, and execution, Elizabethan Catholics became increasingly reliant upon a contemporary Catholic literature to provide renewed sources of religious education and spiritual edification, as well as confessional solidarity and survival. This dissertation turns from a pervasive scholarly emphasis on the institutional history of Protestant confessionalization and Catholic decline toward a more social and material cultural reassessment of Catholic life under Elizabeth, as seen through the lens of its illicit print culture. What emerges is a deliberate, though haphazard and generally ineffective, state effort to censor and suppress Catholic texts, and corresponding evidence of sustained access among the laity to Catholic education and literacy, and to the oral and printed transmission of Catholic religious information and culture. The movement's resilience is also reflected in largely successful systems, foreign and domestic, of underground missionary printing and book smuggling, and in empirical evidence of lay Catholic book ownership that, together, reveal a broader identification on the part of Elizabethan Catholics with the renewed international Catholicism of the Church in Rome and the major Catholic polities of Europe. |
