The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai may sound unfamiliar to modern readers. The bishopric of Cambrai dates to the sixth century but only became an archdiocese and, consequently, the centre of a church province in the sixteenth century. The elevation of the see resulted from the heavily contested reorganization of the diocesan map of the Low Countries by King Philip II in 1559. The new province included the medieval sees of Arras, Cambrai and Tournai, as well as the newly created bishoprics of Saint-Omer and Namur. Its borders were established to encompass the French-speaking Walloon provinces in the south of the Low Countries, territories that are now divided between France and Belgium.1 In the early modern period, this area was already a border and transit zone between France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles. The province’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was deeply marked by recurrent and devastating warfare between the kings of Spain and France, eventually resulting in the transfer of significant territory to France.2 However, the Province of Cambrai was also the scene of frequent cross-border mobility, and a safe haven for Catholic exiles originating from the British Isles, France and other parts of the Low Countries.

On two occasions, in 1580–1 and 1587, the Worcestershire gentleman Ralph Sheldon of Beoley and Weston (1537–1613) undertook to attend services in his parish church. This article seeks to make sense of these occasions of ‘conformity’, in the context of the situation and choices facing Catholics in Protestant England. It argues that Ralph consciously rejected the Jesuit message about non-attendance at the state church, a view he never abandoned. Never described by his contemporaries as ‘papistically affected’, let alone as an ‘obstinate recusant’, his later reputation as such is mistaken. By exploring the evidence relating to these occasions of official conformity, it is possible to see how he managed the challenge of being a Catholic living within the law. He could be regarded, and treated, as an obedient subject. He might thus be viewed as a church papist. However, since occasional conformity must itself also suggest recusancy, a more nuanced understanding of his position requires a reconsideration of some of the evidence.

Scholarly attention to the Irish Catholic experience on the Continent in the early Stuart era is increasing.1 Interest in Irish pilgrimage to continental sanctuaries in the early modern period is one facet of that broader historiographical trend. However the surviving evidence tends to favour the travels of those of higher social standing, and it is their experience which has received attention.2 The present text, by contrast, arose from the journey to Rome of two brothers, soldiers who had been serving in the Irish regiment in Flanders. Having visited the Marian shrine of Loreto (north-east of Rome) on the way, while in Rome they made a petition to be employed in the papal military service. Their request is at several levels. Irish participation in Spanish military forces both in Flanders and Spain in the early seventeenth century has been of interest to scholars in recent decades; Irish involvement with the papal military forces in the same period is less well noted.3 Early modern soldiers regularly faced unemployment arising from a cessation of hostilities; in the case of two soldiers in the Spanish Netherlands, this document throws light on the need to find a new employer, and on strategies adopted to that end. Further, in presenting themselves to the Pope as a prospective employer, the petition illustrates how Irish soldier exiles fashioned an assertive Catholic identity for themselves, in which the family’s experience of religious persecution in their homeland was linked with subsequent military service against heretics on the Continent. Hence the significance of the text presented here. The brothers’ army career was outlined, with referees indicated, and some possible openings in the papal forces were suggested. These professional elements were integrated into a family narrative of persecution for the Catholic faith, and personal religious devotion, with a view to making an informed request for employment in papal service.

This article examines the functional nature of English Benedictine poetry in order to understand the bespoke literary systems that flourished within convent settings. Even as form has emerged as a primary concern within scholarship on early modern women writers, so too are literary critics starting to show interest in the early modern convent as a site of literary production. Uniting these two scholarly strands, this article explores the formal implications of texts written by and for the six English Benedictine convents founded on the Continent during the early modern period. This analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Benedictine poetics reveals that English cloisters on the Continent actively cultivated alternative approaches to textual production, developing monastic modes at odds with the secular literary system of the time. Poetry provides an ideal case study for this discussion of convent style due to its relatively high status among literary forms. By considering Benedictine theories of speech as well as the formal qualities of the verse that nuns read and wrote, this essay will outline how the English Benedictine convents on the Continent developed a distinctive literary system that rejected secular modes in favour of a poetics aligned with monastic humility.

This article considers the transcultural dynamic between English Catholicism and mainland Europe in the early 1840s through the lens of the reception of two famous Tyrolean women bearing the stigmata. After the publication of the account of their supernatural qualities by John Talbot, sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury, Waterford, and Wexford they became the controversial subject of the heated debates on the nature of English and universal Catholicism, and by extension on the nature of religiosity at large. This article argues that adopting a transnational approach to the study of supernatural phenomena within Catholicism in the 1830s and 1840s allows us to look beyond the history of institutions and key figures in the polemic, and to shed light on more nuanced religious and devotional interactions between the British Isles and the Continent. As such this article also argues for the inclusion of supernatural phenomena in the transnational history of English Catholicism.