The tumultuous climate of early modern England had a profound effect on its Catholic population's domestic life, social customs, literary inventions, and political arguments. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism explores the broad spectrum of the early modern English Catholic experience, presenting fresh and often startling assessments of the most problematic topics in post-Reformation English Catholicism. The contributors to this volume – all leading or rising scholars of early modern studies – conceptualize English Catholicism as a hazardous series of contested territories divided by shifting boundaries, requiring Catholics to navigate with vigilance and diplomacy their status as 'insiders' or 'outsiders.' This collection also presents new ways to understand the connections between reformist and Catholic inflections in the emerging canon of English poetry, despite the eventual marginalization of Catholic poets in English literary history. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ably demonstrates the profoundly experimental as well as recuperative character of early modern English Catholicism.

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation is an interdisciplinary collection that brings together leading scholars in the field to demonstrate the significance of early modern English Catholicism as a contributor to national and European Counter-Reformation culture.

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace explores the complex intersection between the geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. By examining the religiously motivated markets and marketplace practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales, the volume presents religious praxis as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the social and economic markets. Within the volume, the authors address first spiritual markets and marketplaces, discussing the intersection of Puritan and Protestant Ethics with the market economy. The second part addresses material marketplaces, including the marriage market, commercial trade markets, and the post-Reformation Catholic black market. In the third part of the volume, the chapters focus specifically on publication markets and books, including manuscripts and commonplace books, as well as printed volumes and pamphlets. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of the literary marketplace, with analyses of plays and poems which engage with and depict both spiritual and material markets. Taken as a whole, this collection posits that the "modern" conception of a division between religion and the socioeconomic marketplace was a largely fictional construct, and the chapters demonstrate the depth to which both were integrated in early modern life.

Long ghettoized within British and Irish studies, Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland demonstrates that, despite many challenges and differences among them, English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Catholics formed strong bonds and actively participated in the life of their nations and their Church.

This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse t

The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe is a comprehensive and ground-breaking survey of the lives of women in early-modern Europe between 1450 and 1750. Covering a period of dramatic political and cultural change, the book challenges the current contours and chronologies of European history by observing them through the lens of female experience. The collaborative research of this book covers four themes: the affective world; practical knowledge for life; politics and religion; arts, science and humanities. These themes are interwoven through the chapters, which encompass all areas of women’s lives: sexuality, emotions, health and wellbeing, educational attainment, litigation and the practical and leisured application of knowledge, skills and artistry from medicine to theology. The intellectual lives of women, through reading and writing, and their spirituality and engagement with the material world, are also explored. So too is the sheer energy of female work, including farming and manufacture, skilled craft and artwork, theatrical work and scientific enquiry. The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe revises the chronological and ideological parameters of early-modern European history by opening the reader’s eyes to an exciting age of female productivity, social engagement and political activism across European and transatlantic boundaries. It is essential reading for students and researchers of early-modern history, the history of women and gender studies.

Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical "disciplined" subject of church-state power.