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The ‘True and Zealouse Seruice of God’: Robert Parsons. Edmund Bunny, and The First Booke of the Christian Exercise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Brad S. Gregory
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Extract

It appeareth (I saye) what an exacte lyfe the trew lyfe of a Christian is: which is a continuall resistance of all sinne, bothe in thought, word and deede, and a performance or exercise of all good woorkes, that possiblie he can deuise to doe.

God requireth at our handes, that we should make his lawes and preceptes our studie and cogitations: that we should think of them continuallie, & meditate vpon them bothe day and night, at home and abrode, early & late, when we go to bedde, and when we rise in the morning: this is his commaudement, & there is no dispensation therin.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , April 1994 , pp. 238 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 P[arsons], R[obert], The first booke of the Christian exercise, appertayning to resolution. Wherin are layed downe the causes & reasons that should moue a man to resolue hym selfe to the seruice of God: and all impedimentes remoued, which may lett the same., [Rouen] 1582, quotes at pp. 36, 413Google Scholarrespectively; Bunny, Edmund, A booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to resolution, that is, shewing how that we should resolve our selves to become Christians in deed, by R. P. Perused, and accompanied now with a treatise tending to pacification, by Edm. Bunny., London 1584, quotes at pp. 26, 394Google Scholarrespectively.

2 Parsons renamed his treatise A Christian directorie beginning with the 1585 second edition, which explains why scholarship mentioning the work usually refers to the Directory rather than the Exercise; because this article deals with Bunny's reading of Parsons's, editio princeps of 1582Google Scholar, however, I have referred throughout to the Exercise rather than to the Directory.

3 The popularity of the Exercise persisted well into the seventeenth century: another nineteen editions of one or another version of the work appeared between 1601 and 1640, and eight more of Parsons's version between 1650 and 1700. The sixteenth-century editions are as follows: Parsons's version: 1582, 1584, 1585, 1598; complete editions of Bunny's version: 1584 (twice), 1585 (15 times), 1586, 1589, 1594, 1596, 1597, 1598, 1599; partial editions of Bunny's version: 1590, 1591, 1592, 1594, 1598, 1599. This information is derived from STC 1475–1640 ii. 217–18, and Short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books printed in other countries 1641–1700, ed. Wing, Donald, 2nd edn, New York 1988, iii. 22Google Scholar.

4 STC 1475–1640, i. 298; ii. 228–9.

5 State Papers, Dom. Eliz., clxxxv, no. 73, quoted in Thurston, Herbert, ‘Catholic writers and Elizabethan readers’, The Month lxxxii (1894), 457–76 at p. 468Google Scholar.

6 STC 1475–1640, ii. 217.

7 Gerard, John, The autobiography of a hunted priest, trans. Caraman, Philip, New York 1952. 2Google Scholar.

8 Weston, William, An autobiography from the Jesuit underground, trans. Caraman, Philip, New York 1955, 225–6, 232 II. 19, quote at p. 226Google Scholar.

9 Baxter, Richard, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1/1, London 1696, 3Google Scholar. Baxter wrote most of part one of this first book in 1664. He would have been fifteen years old in 1630.

10 For a recent treatment that identifies the experience of conversion as the core of Puritan religious sensibility, see Cohen, Charles Lloyd, God's caress: the psychology of Puritan religious experience, Oxford 1986Google Scholar, although Cohen's account of Puritan experience (as opposed to prescriptive, practical divinity) deals mostly with early seventeenth-century New England. The importance of texts in certain Puritan conversion experiences is examined by Watkins, Owen, The Puritan experience, New York 1972, 53–69Google Scholar, who (pp. 59–60) notes the archetypal significance of Augustine's conversion in this regard.

11 Cf. Spufford's, Margaret contention that those in the lower reaches of the social order showed considerable interest in printed religious matter in early modern England: Small books and pleasant histories, London 1981Google Scholar; and ‘Puritanism and social control?’, in Fletcher, A. and Stevenson, J. (eds), Order and disorder in early modern England, Cambridge 1985, 41–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Thurston, , ‘Catholic writers and Elizabethan readers’, 464–71Google Scholar; White, Helen, English devotional literature 1600–1640, Madison, Wise. 1931, 69–88, 140–9Google Scholar; Southern, A. C., Elizabethan recusant prose 1559–1582, London-Glasgow 1950, 184–5Google Scholar; Martz, Louis, The poetry of meditation: a study of English religious literature in the seventeenth century, New Haven 1954, 6–7Google Scholar; Hambrick-Stowe, Charles, The practice of piety: Puritan devotional disciplines in seventeenth-century New England, Chapel Hill, NC 1980, 28Google Scholar.

13 Wiener, Carol Z., ‘The beleaguered isle: a study of Elizabethan and early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, P&P li (1971), 29–62, at pp. 43–5Google Scholar; for a more sophisticated view of Elizabethan anti-Catholicism, see Lake, Peter, ‘The significance of the Elizabethan identification of the pope as AntiChrist’, this JOURNAL xxxi (1980), 161–78Google Scholar.

14 Some literary scholars have produced valuable studies of early modern devotional writing, e.g. Martz, Poetry of meditation, and Cave, Terence C., Devotional poetry in Francec. 1570–1613, Cambridge 1969Google Scholar. In general, however, these works have not underscored the point that works of devotion could be and frequently were intended as part of the campaign to transform the religion of the spiritually tepid as much as to deepen the piety of the already devout.

15 Bassett, Bernard SJ, The English Jesuits from Campion to Martindale, London 1967, 34–40, 44–6Google Scholar.

16 Letters and memorials of Father Robert Persons, S.J., ed. Hicks, L. (CRS xxxix, 1942), 95 n. 3Google Scholar.

17 Ibid. 107; Southern, , Recusant literature, 359, 360Google Scholar.

18 Letters and Memorials, 107.

19 Bossy, John, The English Catholic community 1570–1850, London 1975, 16–20Google Scholar; see also idem, ‘The character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, in Aston, T. (ed.), Crisis in Europe 1560–1660, London 1965, 243Google Scholar.

20 Bossy, , English Catholic Community, 20–3Google Scholar; see also Clancy, T. H. SJ, ‘Notes on Persons's “Memorial for the Reformation of England” (1596)’, RH v (1959–1960), 17–33Google Scholar.

21 Loarte, Gaspar, The exercise of a Christian life, trans. Brinkley, Stephen [London 1579]Google Scholar; Driscoll, J. P. SJ, ‘The supposed source of Persons's “Christian Directory”’, RH v (1959–1960), 236–45Google Scholar. On the context for the composition of the Exercise, see also Bossy, John, ‘The Society of Jesus in the wars of religion’, in Loades, Judith (ed.), Monastic studies: the continuity of tradition, Bangor 1990, 229–44 at pp. 230–2Google Scholar.

22 Dent, Richard, The plaine mans path-way to heaven, London 1603, sig. A4rGoogle Scholar.

23 Parsons, , Exercise, 11Google Scholar.

24 Haigh, Christopher, ‘From monopoly to minority: Catholicism in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. xxxi (1981), 129–47 at p. 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 When Parsons says ‘at the leaste, in resolution of mynde’, this does not imply that he was content to effect change that stopped short of concrete practice; rather, the Exercise was conceived as the first of a three-book project, the first seeking to convince readers to make the resolution to serve God devoutly, the second showing them how to begin this well, and the third how to persevere in it: Parsons, , Exercise, sig. Av, p. 9Google Scholar. Neither of the her projected volumes appeared, probably because Parsons was preoccupied with other, plicitly political concerns from the spring of 1582 until early 1585, though in a letter to luaviva written from Rouen on 12 Feb. 1585, he said that he wanted to finish the irk: Bossy, , ‘Society of Jesus’, 232–3, 236–7Google Scholar. The Exercise differs greatly from Loarte's sercitio, which provides selections for daily meditation: Driscoll, , ‘Supposed source’, 239Google Scholar. parsons's concern in the Exercise is not with actual material for or methods of prayer, but her with convincing readers that living a self-conscious, scrupulous Christian life is essary.

26 Parsons, , Exercise, 2Google Scholar.

27 Ibid. 3.

28 Haigh, Christopher, ‘The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, PP xciii (1981), 37–69 at pp. 55–7Google Scholar.

29 These biographical details about Bunny are derived from the DNB iii. 271.

30 Bunny, Edmund, The whole summe of the Christian Religion, giuen forth by two seuerall methodes or formes: the one higher, for the better learned, the other applyed to the capacitie of the common multitude, and meete for all: yet both of them such, as in some respect do knit themselves together in one, London 1576, fo. 2r–vGoogle Scholar.

31 Ibid. fo. [7r–v]. For this attitude as characteristic of English Puritans, see, for example, Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan movement, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1967, 21–44Google Scholar; Lake, Peter, ‘Puritan identities’, this JOURNAL XXXV (1984), 112–23 at P. 116Google Scholar, and Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker, London 1988, 1–3Google Scholar; Cohen, , God's caress, 4Google Scholar.

32 Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, Cambridge 1982CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Bunny, , A treatise tending to pacification: by laboring those that are our aduersaries in the cause of religion, to receive the Gospel, and to join with us in the profession therof., London 1584Google Scholar.

34 Bunny, Exercise, sig. *2r. This statement by Bunny is further evidence for the popularity of the Exercise.

35 Ibid. sig. *4r.

36 Ibid. sigs [*6r–*7v].

37 Ibid. sig. [*7r–v]: Deletions have been made ‘for that most of those things seem rather to be added by some that had the perusing of the booke, before it might be allowed among them to come to the print, than by the proper Author therof: they do so little oft times agree with the argument that there he hath in hand, nor with the maner of handling of it’. It is probably impossible to determine whether he really thought this, or in fact strongly suspected that the treatise was written by a Catholic, and accordingly wanted to cover himself. Thurston doubts Bunny's sincerity, since Parsons had a wide reputation in England by 1582, by the time of Bunny's 1588 reply to Parsons's preface he knew who the author was, and by 1590 Parsons's, name was explicitly mentioned in the introductory address: ‘Catholic writers and Elizabethan readers’, 469–70Google Scholar.

38 Parsons, , Exercise, 39Google Scholar; the passage deleted would have appeared on p. 29 of Bunny's text had he retained it. Subsequent references will follow this format: a ‘P’ or a ‘B’ to indicate Parsons's or Bunny's edition, respectively, followed by the page number on which the passage in question either appears or would have appeared had it not been deleted (the reference in this footnote would therefore be P 39/B 29).

39 P 124–9/B 109ff. Bunny also deletes a long sentence on the possibility of being saved by means of ‘the purgyng fire’ in the next life, provided that one dies outside a state of mortal sin (P 246/B 226).

40 P 163–5, 166/B 143–5. Probably for similar reasons, Bunny entirely cuts a passage that Parsons had drawn from [pseudo-] Augustine about the visions of good and evil angels often vouchsafed by God to the soul on one's deathbed, a passage that Parsons had buttressed with references to Cyprian, Gregory the Great and Bede (P 111–13/B 98–9).

41 P 356/B 339. For other examples where Bunny disagrees with the sense of a particular passage of Scripture as stated or implied by Parsons, see P 17/B 7; P 135/B 116; P 327/B 308; P 333/B 315; P 367/B 351 (though here Bunny concedes that ‘Divers’ interpret the sort of fear in I Peter iii as Parsons does); P 369/B 353; P 417/B 398.

42 The philological dispute concerns the way that Parsons follows Augustine and Jerome in their interpretation of Psalm xiv. Bunny says that ‘seeing that this whole treatise in these four next sections, viz. [paragraphs] 16.[–] 19 is grounded upon a wrong text, therfore it is to be read so much more warily: and no further to be accounted of, than it may be found to have the word of God to warrant the same’: P 360/B 343. The three examples where Bunny grants Parsons's point but not on the basis of the biblical texts he cites are found in P 237/B 218; P 343/B 325–6; P 406/B 387.

43 P 153/B 134; P 155/B 135; P 172/B 150; P 175/B 153.

44 P 229–30/B 209.

45 P 234/B 214.

46 London goldsmith Arthur Wodenoth, writing in 1645, recalled how at the age of sixteen he had read the account of Augustine's conversion in Bunny's rendition of the Exercise and had become confused, unable to decide whether Catholics or Protestants had the better claim to Augustine and so to ‘the true Christian Religion’: ‘The journal of Sir Roger Wilbraham, Solicitor-General in Ireland and Master of Requests, for the years 1593–1616, together with notes in another hand, for the years 1642–1649’, ed.Scott, Harold Spencer, in Camden Miscellany x, London 1902, 3–139 at pp. 118–21Google Scholar. I would like to thank Alastair J. Bellany for this reference.

47 P 25/B 16.

48 P 362/B 345.

49 P 421/B 403; for the same change from ‘sins’ to ‘sin’ by Bunny, see P 262/B 243; P 306/B 287; P 426/B 407.

50 P 192/B 170.

51 P 223/B 203 (my italics). The two clearly disagreed about the character of this service too, as appears from the way that Bunny overhauled Parsons's, understanding of Christian philanthropy (see below, p. 252)Google Scholar.

52 P 396/B 377. For similar deletions regarding intercession, see P 14/B 4 (angels) and P 42/B 32, where Bunny simply omits the sentence ‘That is, by your riches of this worlde, purchase vnto you the prayers of good people, that by their intercession, you may enioye lyfe euerlastinge.’

53 P 82/B 69.

54 P 282/B 263; for an analogous instance involving Ecclesiasticus, see P 406/B 387.

55 P 395/B 376.

56 P 174/B 152. For two other examples of outright additions by Bunny, see P 236/B 216; P 403/B 385.

57 Kendall, R.T., Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, Oxford 1979, esp. pp. 8–9, 51–76Google Scholar.

58 P 300/B 281; P 399/B 380.

59 P 249/B 229. In a similar manner Bunny alters Parsons's specific allusion to Paul the hermit (from Jerome's Vita Pauli heremitae) generalising the passage and omitting altogether the reference to the work itself: P 323/B 305.

60 P 340/B 322 (Bunny's original italicised; my emphasis on ‘worldly’ and ‘secular’); for another instance of the same substitution, see P 33/B 23.

61 P 41/B 31.

62 P 36/B 26. In all these examples of what Bunny retained, I have followed Parsons's spelling; any words in which Bunny diverges from Parsons are noted in the footnotes.

63 P 93/B 80. Bunny also retains the converse of this prescription: ‘Be a shamed then (good Christian) of this thy ingratitude, to so greate, so good, & bountifull a Lord: and resolue thy selfe for the tyme to come, to amende thy course of lyfe and behauyour towardes hym’: P 96/B 84.

64 P 319/B 300.

65 P 322/B 303; P 323/B 305.

66 P 326/B 307.

67 P 414/B 395.

68 P 413/B 394.

69 P 429/B 411; Bunny says ‘bonds’ instead of ‘bandes’.

70 For example Delumeau, Jean, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, London 1977Google Scholar; Bossy, John, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, New York 1985, esp. ch. viiGoogle Scholar; Hsia, R. Po-Chia, Social discipline in the Reformation: central Europe 1550–1750, London-New York 1989Google Scholar.

71 The recent historiographical trend in this direction when dealing with Puritans began with a socio-economic emphasis in Hill, Christopher, Society and Puritanism in pre-revolutionary England, London 1964Google Scholar, and with a political slant a year later in Walzer, Michael, The revolution of the saints: a study in the origins of radical politics, Cambridge, Mass. 1965Google Scholar. More recent contributions are too numerous to mention, but a few notable examples include Wrightson, Keith and Levine, David, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling 1525–1700, New York-San Francisco-London 1979Google Scholar, a micro-historical social history; Wrightson, Keith, English society 1580–1680, New Brunswick 1982Google Scholar, a social history with a wider compass; and Hunt, William, The Puritan moment: the coming of revolution in an English county, Cambridge, Mass. 1983Google Scholar, a study of the social, political and ideological context leading to the events of 1639–40 in Essex. More recently, Roper, Lyndal has argued that Lutheran theology was used by artisanal householders in Reformation Augsburg to legitimate patriarchy in a number of ways, in The godly household: women and morals in Reformation Augsburg, Oxford-New York 1989Google Scholar. For Catholicism, a position emphasising marked social control of laity by clergy was taken for the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by Tentler, Thomas N. in Sin and confession on the eve of the Reformation, Princeton 1977Google Scholar; another example, this one a social history of Lyons during the Counter-Reformation that views social elites and post-Tridentine clergy using religion as a means of social control, is Hoffman's, Philip T.Church and community in the diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789, New Haven 1984CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 P22/B 12.

73 P20/B 10.

74 In the later 1580s and 1590s William Perkins, following Beza more than Calvin, was to combine this sort of introspective self-examination with a strong sense of the signs of predestination, creating what Kendall, R. T. has called ‘the experimental predestinarian tradition’ in England: Calvin and English Calvinism, 8–9, 51–76Google Scholar. It is evident from Peter Lake's reconstruction of Puritan practical divinity in the 1580s and early 1590s that these elements were also present among other members of the godly such as Chaderton, Laurence and Ashton, Abdias: Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 116–68Google Scholar. This sense of ‘consideration’ also pervades other Jesuit devotional treatises, for example Bellarmine's, RobertDe ascensione mentis in Deum (1615)Google Scholar, where the title of each of the work's fifteen subdivisions includes the term. Bellarmine, begins his work by simply stating, ‘Si quis vere cupiat scalas in Deum erigere a sui ipsius consideratione incipere debet’ (‘If anyone really desires to build a ladder to God, he ought to begin with consideration of himself’): Opera omnia, Paris 1873, viii. 241Google Scholar.

76 P 80/B 68 (my italics).

76 P 101/B 89 (my italics).

77 P 340/B 322 (my italics); for other examples of such use of ‘consider’ or ‘consideration’ see P 63/B 51; P 132–3/B 112–13; P 148/B 128; P 182–3/B 160; P 317/B 298; P 374/B 359.

78 Lake, , Moderate Puritans, 128Google Scholar.

79 P 26/B 16.

80 P 32, 33/B 23, 24.

81 P 35/B 25.

82 P 51/B 41.

83 P 60–1/B 48.

84 P 63–4/B 51.

85 P 65–7 at 67/B 53–5 at 55.

86 P 76–7/B 63–5.

87 P 75/B 62.

88 P 94/B 81–2.

89 P 96/B 84.

90 P 132–3/B 112–13 (my italics). Precisely the same sort of calculus of temporal and eternal pain and pleasure was employed by Parsons's younger Jesuit contemporary, Bellarmine, Robert, in his influential seventeenth-century treatise, De arte bene moriendi (1619), ii, P xviiGoogle Scholar where he writes ‘Quis optaret viginti annos summae et liquidissimae voluptatis, si certo sciret, ob eam voluptatem in ardentissima fornace mansurum se ad annos bis mille et amplius? Et essetne ullus homo tam vecors, qui tormentum omnium maximum subire vellet ad annos, non dicam bis mille sed bis centum, ut postea ad annos viginti voluptate quamtumvis maxima potiretur? Quid si nunc addamus, tormentum gehennae non annos bis mille duraturum, sed finem nullum habiturum?’ (‘Who would wish for twenty years of the greatest and most assured pleasures if he knew with certainty that for this pleasure he would remain in the most intense furnace for two thousand years and more? Is there any man so mad that he would be willing to undergo all torment to the limit, not, let us say, for two thousand years but for two hundred, so that afterwards he might enjoy however much of the greatest pleasure for twenty years? What if we now add that hell's torment will endure not for two thousand years, but will have no end?’): Opera omnia, Paris 1873, viii. 620Google Scholar. Devotional treatises and sermons in the Counter-Reformation were replete with vivid descriptions of the suffering in hell; see, for example, Delumeau, Jean, Sin and fear: the emergence of a Western guilt culture, 13th–18th centuries, trans. Nicholson, Eric, New York 1990, 373–82Google Scholar; Camporesi, Piero, The fear of hell: images of damnation and salvation in early modern Europe, trans. Byatt, Lucinda, University Park, Pa. 1990, esp. pp. 69–89Google Scholar.

91 P 146/B 125–6.

92 Pace social control historians of Puritanism. Hunt, William, for example, seems to regard the threat of eternal torment as a convenient fiction cleverly deployed by godly ministers when he states that ‘In sixteenth-century England the ideas of social and spiritual reform were inseparable – indeed, they were virtually indistinguishable. Religious precept, purportedly backed by supernatural sanction, remained the most effective means of regulating behavior’: Puritan moment, 81Google Scholar. On the other hand, Duffy, Eamon stresses the Puritan sense of missionary obligation and compassion towards the poor in seventeenth-century England: ‘The godly and the multitude in seventeenth-century England’, The Seventeenth Century i (1986), 31–55 at pp. 31–3Google Scholar. For the way that sixteenth-century Italian confraternity members understood confinement of the poor as liberating them from sin and temptation, see Black, Christopher, Italian confraternities in the sixteenth century, Cambridge 1989, 214Google Scholar.

93 P 171/B 149.

94 Perhaps because it was only later under Perkins's influence that experimental predestination became a dominant concern in English Calvinism, Bunny was able to follow Parsons here in a way that Puritans of the early seventeenth century might have found less amenable: Kendall, , Calvin and English Calvinism, 51–76Google Scholar.

95 P 183/B 160–1.

96 Parsons and Bunny frequently refer to the statements ‘of the holy ghost’ after citing Scripture; for example, in dealing with the issue of the dangerous vanity of worldly wealth, both cite numerous Old and New Testament passages as evidence and refer to these as ‘spoken by the holie ghoste’ and as being the ‘earnest admonitions of God himselfe’: P 315/B 296. For a few other similar instances, see P 308/B 289; P 319/B 300; P 322/B 303; P 378/B 363–4; P 419/B 400; P 425/B 406; P 430/B 412. Though it is sometimes said that one can ‘get anything one wants’ out of the Bible, this is too glib when applied to the sixteenth century; it is very doubtful whether anyone could have read it then and concluded that there was no such thing as an afterlife, Last Judgement, or heaven and hell, or could have thought that human actions on earth had no bearing on these. Those disagreeing with the implications of these realities would have to have found some way around the connection between beliefs and practical implications – which is exactly what Parsons and Bunny anticipate and rebut in part two of the Exercise.

97 Cf. Cohen, , who, writing on the effect of conversion on Puritans, states that ‘By its very nature, conversion impelled them to toil and trouble in the world’: God's caress, 22Google Scholar, and also pp. 128–31. Cf. also Lake, , Moderate Puritans, 282Google Scholar: ‘In short, what was involved in puritanism…was the insistence on the transformative effect of the word on the attitudes and behaviour of all true believers. It was this, applied to the public sphere, and particularly to the person of the magistrate and the councillor, that lay behind puritan campaigns for further reformation in church and state and the concomitant attempts to purge the social order of its sins and corruptions.’ For similar passages implying the primacy of Puritan religious experience, see ibid. pp. 18–19, 125–6, 149–50. In so far as this concrete action in the world was in part engendered by a devotional treatise like the Exercise, we can go further than Cave's, observation that the French Catholic and Calvinist devotional traditions shared much in common – they also sought to produce Christians who would be zealous activists in the world: Devotional poetry in France, 18–23Google Scholar.

98 This is not meant to belittle the obvious importance of rhetoric in the Exercise, but rather to emphasise the rational core of its endeavour and the basic implications of Christian faith underlying Parsons's and Bunny's use of language. For lucid remarks on the historical relativity of reason, see Skinner, Quentin, ‘A reply to my critics’, in Tully, James (ed.), Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics, Oxford 1988, 231–88 at pp. 238–44Google Scholar, especially his critique of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie at pp. 242–3. I share Tracy's, James D. view that ‘the challenge of historical scholarship is to capture the compelling contemporary logic of precisely those viewpoints that may now seem distasteful or even repugnant’: ‘With and without the Counter-Reformation: the Catholic Church in the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, 1580–1650’, Catholic Historical Review lxxi (1985). 547–75 at p. 571Google Scholar.

99 P 114/B 99.

100 P 142/B 122.

101 P 149/B 129; for other instances where the rationality of the devout is either explicit or implied, see P 25–6/B 16; P 46/B 35; P 82/B 69; P 145/B 124; P 148/B 128; P 185/B 163–4; P 302/B 283; P 342/B 325; P 370/B 355; P 372/B 357; P 383/B 367–8; P 397/B 377.

102 P 75/B 63.

103 P 191/B 169.

104 Baxter, , Reliquiae, 3Google Scholar.

105 P 239–40/B 219–20.

106 P 248–61/B 228–41.

107 P 292/B 273. This sort of worldliness ought to be distinguished, in Parsons's case, from the wariness necessitated by the dangers of the Catholic missionary effort to England, as well as from the narrowly political activities Parsons became involved in between 1582 and 1585 (even though he himself expressed his desire for respite from these by Feb. 1585 in a letter to Aquaviva): Bossy, , ‘Society of Jesus’, 236–8, 240Google Scholar.

108 Stone, Lawrence, The crisis of the aristocracy 1558–1641, abridged edn, New York 1967, 249–67Google Scholar; this included rural and urban building, an expansion of the scale and variety of food consumption, extravagant spending on clothing, the growth of gambling into a costly obsession, and provisions for lavish funerals and elaborate tombs that perpetuated worldly status beyond death. Puritans with landed wealth in the early seventeenth century were ambivalent about conformity to such cultural trends, often engaging in many of the practices that Parsons and Bunny condemned: Cliffe, J T., The Puritan gentry: the great Puritan families of early Stuart England, London 1984, 125–45Google Scholar.

109 P 332/B 314; P 29/B 19; P 107/B 95; for other examples of the folly of worldly indulgence, see P 62/B 50; P 78/B 65; P 115–16/B 100–1; P 181/B 158–9; P 305/B 286–7; P 310–12/B 292–3; P 403–4/B 384–5; P 411/B 392.

110 P 323/B 304.

111 P 342/B 324. Contempt for vanitas mundi is a pervasive theme in early modern Christian religious literature, both Catholic and Protestant; see, for example, Cave, , Devotional poetry in France, 39–47, 147–56Google Scholar; Bayley, Peter, French pulpit oratory 1598–1650 Cambridge 1980, 122–48Google Scholar; Delumeau, , Sin and fear, 120–3, 519–22Google Scholar, passim.

112 P 423/B 340.

113 P 427–8/B 409–10.

114 P 35/B 22.

115 Haigh, , ‘Continuity of Catholicism’, 55–7Google Scholar. For criticism of Haigh's view that the missionary priests were unconcerned with converting heretics, see McGrath, Patrick, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism: a reconsideration’, this JOURNAL XXXV (1984), 414–28 at pp. 425–6Google Scholar.

118 Haigh, , ‘Continuity of Catholicism’, 64Google Scholar.

117 Thurston, , ‘Catholic writers and Elizabethan readers’, 472–6Google Scholar.

118 Martz, , Poetry of meditation, esp. pp. 1–13Google Scholar.

119 [Parsons], , A Christian directorie guiding men to their salvation. Devided into three bookes. The first wherof apperteining to resolution, is only conteined in this volume, deuided into two partes, and set forth now againe by…th' author himself, with reprofe of the corrupt and falsified edition of the same booke lately published by M. Edm. Bunny., [Rouen] 1585, fos 7v–16rGoogle Scholar. Parsons considerably expanded his work in this renamed second edition.

120 Ibid. fos 9r, 14r.

121 Parsons, , Exercise, 148/B 127Google Scholar.

122 See the remarks by Harline, Craig A., ‘Official religion – popular religion in recent historiography of the Catholic Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte lxxxi (1990), 239–62, esp. pp. 240–5Google Scholar.

123 Hill, , Society and Puritanism, 495Google Scholar; Hunt, , Puritan moment, 129Google Scholar.