Life on the margins: Early modern Catholics negotiating gender, national identity, and religious loyalties in the southern Anglo-Welsh borderlands

This study examines how mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth-century Catholics in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and Glamorgan made sense of their position on the geographical and spiritual margins of the increasingly unitary Tudor-Stuart state. Generally, the scholarship in post-Reformation British Catholic history concentrates on the experiences of the English while works that address early modern Welsh religious history tend to look at Protestants rather than Catholics. Furthermore, what little research exists on the Anglo-Welsh borderlands usually locates itself in the Middle Ages. Thus, this dissertation strives to bring together these frequently neglected strands (early modern Catholics in the marches of Wales) on the assumption that the political, religious, ethnic, and linguistic frontiers of a kingdom are critical to the story of the center.;Not surprisingly, the English led the realm's Catholic community. Nevertheless, some of the most heavily recusant areas of the kingdom were located along the southern Anglo-Welsh marches. What is more, Welsh and border Catholics sometimes expressed their religious identity in ways specific to their ethnicity and even gender. For example, so few women from these four counties joined exile convents that more than simple geographical distance must have shaped their decision to eschew the religious life. As for their male relatives, they became priests and monks in larger numbers yet struggled to resign themselves to the reality that the English would dominate the reconversion mission.;Other findings in this dissertation illuminate the condition of Catholics in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and Glamorgan during Charles I's personal rule. For instance, comparing ecclesiastical and secular prosecutions for recusancy reveals that the bishops' courts convicted a wider spectrum of the religious recalcitrant than did the assizes or quarter sessions. During the same period, the Council in the Marches of Wales almost entirely lost its ability to police the religious behavior of those within its jurisdiction. Finally, the experiences of the recusant Vaughans of Ruardean in Gloucestershire show that limited toleration for Catholics might be purchased from the Caroline regime. In sum, my dissertation offers an alternate perspective on the process by which both England and Wales became predominately, but not universally, Protestant.