Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In recent years, the study of religion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has turned new attention to the history and impact of Catholicism in post-Reformation England. The continuity of Catholicism within England and England's relationship to Catholic and Protestant European powers comprise the main branches of this study. Within those two large categories belong the study as well of English Catholic writing, the prosecution and persecution of English Catholics, and the negotiated identity of the English Catholic. Historians have led much of this work, but increasingly literary scholars have been working in tandem with them. While it is now apparent that omitting attention to the Catholic presence coincided implicitly with a working assumption that English Renaissance literature was by definition a Protestant literature, the historical and critical emphases that will replace that construct are not yet clear. At the very least, a revisionist account needs to take in hand the degree to which Catholics remained in dialogue with Protestants. That recognition both reintroduces the Catholic activity and clarifies the degree to which Protestant writing was not merely anti-Catholic in general, but often constituted a reply to a specific Catholic challenge. The introduction of Catholic matters into discussions that have been oblivious of any English Catholic presence also embellishes ... log in or subscribe to read full text