The multi-volume Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism is due to be published this autumn. The editors of this work met for a roundtable discussion in September 2022, to take stock of their work on the volumes, and to consider the current ‘state of play’ in the field.
Participants:
John McCafferty (University College Dublin) and James E. Kelly (University of Durham) - General Editors of the Series and Editors of Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530-1640
John Morrill (University of Cambridge) and Liam Temple (University of Durham), Editors of Volume 2: Uncertainty and Change, 1641-1745
Liam Chambers (Mary Immaculate College), Editor of Volume 3: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746-1829
Carmen M. Mangion (Birkbeck, University of London) and Susan O’Brien (University of Cambridge), Editors of Volume 4: Building Identity, 1830-1913
Alana Harris (Kings London), Editor of Volume 5: Recapturing the Apostolate of the Laity, 1914-2021
Katy Gibbons (University of Portsmouth): Chair of Discussion
Katy Gibbons: Thank you all very much for being here today. Perhaps we could start by turning to our general series editors to address the broader question of why: why now, or perhaps why then, when the project was first born, were you driven to embark on this project? What was it that prompted you to see this as a good time, in historiographical terms, or in terms of contemporary issues, to undertake a series of this scope and ambition?
James Kelly: One of our starting motivations was the significant research shift in the last two decades or so that’s been happening with Catholicism. There’s been a move away from the mainstream perception of the history of Catholicism as a ghettoised subject, where both sides—mainstream and confessional scholars—were happy never to meet. We had one side that could perhaps still speak to an account of Whig history, up until the present day, that saw Catholics as disappearing, or simply appearing now and then just to be executed or act as a scapegoat, when we’re talking of Britain. In Ireland, Catholicism was seen as so entangled in the national story and then state affairs that it often became lost as a separate subject in its own right. And then, on the other side, there were those who did study the history of Catholicism, often, but not always, from a confessionally-charged angle, that were happy to burrow away in their own little silo.
But, over the last few decades there has been a huge shift within the field. Part of that is because archives became available, and people became aware of archives in a way that they weren’t before. In particular, the archives of religious orders—and indeed some of the editors of these volumes have been central to this. So there’s been a huge groundswell there. Another factor is that the history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland really emphasises a number of contemporary issues. Some of the volume editors might want to talk further about these trends, including things like transnational dimensions, and the role of women.
John McCafferty: Part of the reason I was drawn to the project was that I have been teaching church history for over twenty-five years, and each year progressively, my assumption that the students would know anything about Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general, became further and further eroded. A few years ago, I ended up having to stop and explain the Adam and Eve story. It made me realise, especially in the light of public discussion, certainly on this island, about secularisation and changes in society, that people were working off a very simplistic set of notions about Catholicism, mostly based on their childhood experiences. I suppose it is like thinking you are an expert in Premier League soccer because you played football when you were six in your backyard! One of the things that we were concerned about was that Oxford University Press had done a multi-volume history on Anglicanism, and there had been a set of volumes on Dissent. We felt that Catholicism, as the other, for want of better words, great religious tradition on these islands, merited something that people could look at and actually acquire an expert and informed opinion on, about the role of the Church throughout these centuries. The Church has its own language, theology, reflection, and so on. And one of the things I’m really pleased about is that everybody who wrote for these volumes is fluent in Catholic, if you like. All the discussion, even of the painful subjects, is based on profound reflection and expertise.
James Kelly: To extend what John said—and my guess would be that some of the other editors have come across this as well—when you’re marking student (undergraduate) essays there can be language creeping in along the lines of ‘they weren’t Christians anymore, they were Catholic’. You can make a polemical point about that all you like, but that touches on what John’s saying, that sort of knowledge loss, or perhaps lack of knowledge.
John McCafferty: On the research turn, it shows in a lot of the volumes here that scholars in literature and literary studies have led the way on so much reflection on Catholicism, especially in Britain. I think that’s important. As historians approaching this, we’ve tried to reflect this work by having the chunky narrative chapters, and then more thematic ones, so that we’re bringing the best—the old wine of history—with some of the new wine from other disciplines.
John Morrill: James mentioned the use of the term ‘ghettos’. The other phrase we use is ‘silos’, and of course the other siloed histories are the histories of England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, being completely separate. I think one of your greatest intuitions in setting up this series was to make absolutely sure that we address that head on. So one of the great challenges of volume editing was to try to find contributors who were able to cover all three kingdoms in almost every chapter. That’s been one of the most rewarding aspects of editing the volume, to see people challenged, and then rising to the challenge. Because these remain separate histories, but they completely disrupt one another; they are disruptive presences all the time, and I think that has been one of the achievements in this series. I think that it, too, is the result of twenty or twenty-five years of serious work in other aspects of this history, but it’s never been attempted on this scale.
Katy Gibbons: For editors of individual volumes, how difficult was it to produce volumes where all of those nations, kingdoms, territories are being addressed? As John has noted it was very rewarding, but was it difficult to achieve?
Carmen Mangion: In some cases, we had to do quite a bit of convincing. Not everyone was comfortable in going outside their own geographic expertise as it relates to their own topic. We worked with authors, suggesting new work on either England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland, or primary sources on these areas. To give an example, for Scotland in the nineteenth century, Bernard Aspinwall was incredibly prolific. His work can be found in numerous journal articles and edited collections rather than a monograph. So, it was a matter of us as editors trawling through that work (much of which we would have read) and suggesting how it might be added to their analysis. I think it did require us to do a bit more work as editors than we normally would have for an edited collection. I don’t know if Susan wants to add something to this.
Susan O’Brien: Yes, there is a lot of good material and studies buried in local histories when it comes to Scotland, and in biographies, in less accessible places. Also, to return to John’s phrase about speaking Catholic, I don’t think when it comes to post-1800 Scotland, there are many professional historians who do this. So when it comes to the question about why this series now, when I look at the timespan covered by volume 4, part of the answer is to try and encourage more work, taking inspiration from the increase in scholarship about Catholicism that is taking place for other periods. For Britain in this period, if not Ireland, there’s been a bit of die back. This might simply be what’s happened to nineteenth-century history generally—that it had a sustained flourishing but that the focus of research for younger scholars has moved elsewhere. John’s right to say there is continuing research in other disciplines, but I think what we sought to do in volume 4 is to try to encourage new scholarship. Scotland might be taken as illustrative of that need, but I think it’s more general.
It’s still hard for scholars to move across the particular silo of the nation. In most chapters in volume 4 we went for a thematic approach. However, in a few cases we went for a nation-by-nation approach— with education, for example—because the set-up was different in each. Working across the two islands wasn’t necessarily comfortable for many of us: we had to stretch. It’s that horrible feeling isn’t it—do I really know enough about the context? It was the same when I was working on a history of the Daughters of Charity who had a strong presence in Scotland, and realised my own ignorance of the Scottish legal system, ecclesial landscape, educational culture and so on. But we do believe the stretching across had considerable rewards for refreshing the historical narrative.
Liam Temple: It was certainly a challenge for volume 2. On top of the difficulties of finding scholars to write on certain topics, finding ones who felt comfortable with addressing issues across the three kingdoms was an additional challenge. We tried to encourage our authors as much as possible to think in this way and also suggested sources to aid this, and several authors have told us it was rewarding for them to move out of their comfort zone. John and I tried to reflect this in our introduction to the volume, linking the sacking of the chapel at Somerset House in London in 1643 by Sir John Clotworthy to his role in the Ulster Rising, for example.
Alana Harris: Thinking about surveying our centuries through this comparative national lens was phenomenally challenging, I think, for all of us. For the twentieth century volume (volume 5), there are these huge gaps, gaping lacunae. So actually I sought out people who ‘speak Catholicism’, but perhaps as a ‘second language’! They are bilingual or multilingual to the extent that I had to enlist people who work on Anglicanism or some other strand of the history of religion, and to encourage them to move theologically sideways, to then augment and expand what they have previously done, to be able to speak into some of those open vistas. The survey of Catholic education, across England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is a good example. A very challenging brief, substantively, methodologically, to write into something of an empirical void! And, indeed, there was bespoke archival work that had to happen for them to even attempt to start, and to then point towards fertile lines for future research and new directions.
These contributions made me think extensively about the mixed methodologies and interdisciplinary perspectives that are gathered in volume 5. It assembles the views of sociologists, anthropologists, quantitative analysis of data and literary scholars, and braids together a social and cultural historical approach with political history, the history of ideas, and theological perspectives. This variety is manifest in the different source bases deployed, and most especially in the context of trying to hold in the same frame the island of Ireland with Britain in its complexity, given the profound political and constitutional changes of the twentieth century. Editing this volume required thinking creatively through the use and practice of comparative history, with an accent on ‘illuminating differences’, thinking through dissonance and contrasts, rather than forcing comparability. In many instances there were unexpected parallels and resonances, alongside some analogous developments, but in the final analysis the differences between Britain and Ireland (without yet factoring in Wales and Scotland) are quite profound. This prompted authors to think about the art of comparative history, and how one holds those complexities together elegantly, across the comparatively short span of a chapter: this was a very challenging brief for all our contributors.
Liam Chambers: Like everybody else, I think we found it a real challenge to deal in a balanced way with the four nations in volume 3. Indeed, for the period covered by the volume (1746-1829), major constitutional changes take place, as they do for other volumes. To pick up on Alana’s point about comparative history, volume 3 doesn’t have separate chapters for the different nations; this meant encouraging the authors, in so far as they could, to balance out their contributions. This involved an exercise in comparative history to some extent, but it became obvious that one couldn’t do this artificially. And in terms of balance, one couldn’t assign 25% for each nation; that would not have worked and attempting it would have been a mistake. In some chapters, then, it was possible to have more of a balance than for others. For example, if we take the chapter on Catholic emancipation in the 1820s, that is very much an Irish story. There is an English dimension and a Scottish dimension to it, and there is also a Welsh dimension; but it is predominantly an Irish story, driven by events in Ireland and the activities of the Catholic Association there. But then if you turn to something like music, and there’s a great chapter on the subject in the volume, the chapter predominantly concerns England. There’s relatively little Scottish or Irish material in the chapter, partly because research on the subjects has been lacking, at least until very recently. This is changing: Maura Valenti is working on new research on music in Catholic Ireland, and I think that’s going to transform our understanding of the subject. But it is only beginning to appear, so it doesn’t really make its way into the volume. In other words, there was an attempt to ensure a balanced coverage, but it could only really get so far, I think.
James Kelly: John and I have both had the overview of what you’ve all been doing, so it’s interesting for us to hear your thoughts, and some of them definitely reflect our instincts of where they were when talking to you. It’s quite interesting to hear that each had their own separate challenges. Liam, we did think that volume 3 in some ways would be the toughest one, because there’s a concept, certainly within Britain, that nothing really happens in your period as far as Catholicism is concerned, that it just disappears. It’s a wrong one, as people will see in the volume, and that was one of the things that drove us to do it. With Alana’s volume, we have the situation where Catholicism is so disparate when it comes to the modern period, that the idea might be to try and bring it together, but it doesn’t work. Some of the pre-twentieth century approaches don’t really work when it comes to the modern period. And then, when Susan and Carmen were talking about the nineteenth century, there’s the feeling that we had that maybe thirty years ago, as far as the history of Catholicism went, the nineteenth century was where it was at, but had in recent times ended up painting itself into a bit of a cul-de-sac: work on the period had become so focused on Newman, meaning it ended up being all one place, and it stopped there. That is a caricature, but it’s probably fair to say there is something in this, and talking to Susan and Carmen it was quite exciting to see how the nineteenth century scene has changed, but quietly, without having, perhaps, the headlines that it had thirty years ago, or at least still has in popular perceptions that the nineteenth century is all about Newman.
Alana Harris: I think it’s also got to do with the methodological approach, too, in terms of wanting to foreground different types of history. Susan, you can take that up.
Susan O’Brien: That’s absolutely right. I think we were able to draw on a wide range of historical approaches, although I still have a sense of being frustrated, for Britain at least, by the strength of the general framing of the history into the three groups of converts, Irish, and ‘Old Catholics’ or recusant families. It’s rather constraining and I’m not sure how well we (or I at least) were able to escape it because it’s so powerful within the literature. Future scholarship may well do that in one of two ways: either by more detailed studies in localities or by more uncovering of networks, connectivity, mobility across and between places and social groups. The tripartite division elides the importance of social class and of generational change and tends to both take for granted and underplay the significance of the Irish in Britain to Catholic history.
Carmen Mangion: I wonder, too, if that has something to do with the paucity of research on the laity, and I suspect this is resonant in other volumes, too. There is now a historiography of women religious, though more work needs to be done on men religious, but there is material there, and obviously the clergy and the bishops and Manning are covered. But we still, particularly for Britain, have hardly anything on the laity. And yet there is (primary source) material out there. I was astounded about the different types of lay organisations that were out there. The Catholic Men’s Society, for example. They were huge. It’s not simply about pious organisations, the confraternities and sodalities, but there are so many different types of Catholic organizations. One hopes there’s some material somewhere in archives about them, though I’m not exactly sure. But there is a lot more we need to say about the laity, and I think that would help to break up the tripartite assumptions and divisions if we drummed up some interest in doing more research on lay Catholics.
Liam Chambers: I absolutely agree with that, and it resonates with the experience of working on volume 3. But I’d like to go back to something that struck me in relation to volume 3, and that is that while there’s been significant new work, especially on the earlier part of the period covered by volume 3, there is a sense in which the period has not witnessed the level of historiographical reinvigoration that is evident for earlier and later periods.
One of the things that struck me forcefully as I was writing, and it was in my head beforehand, but I didn’t know how it would pan out, was the strength of the traditional interpretations of the period, and how those could filter through in unexpected ways—which relates to what Susan and Carmen have said. For example, I was reminded of the power of the idea of a ‘second spring’ for English Catholicism, and the significance of Emmet Larkin’s ‘devotional revolution’ thesis for interpreting Irish Catholicism, or the importance of the emergence of mass Irish migration into Scotland and Wales for how we think of Scottish and Welsh Catholicism. All of these things mean that the period running from the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth century can be presented (inaccurately, in my view), as something of a prelude, that it’s a foregrounding for something that’s going to take off in the nineteenth century. Therefore, an important aim of volume 3 is to view the period in its own terms, and understand it in its own complexity. This can be a little bit tricky, for it doesn’t always come out in the longer term historiography.
One other interesting thing, I think, will be to see how the ‘British and Irish’ approach of the volumes is read in Ireland, because the history of Irish Catholicism does by and large ignore English, Scottish and Welsh Catholicism, with the exception of the migration question.
James Kelly: Touching on Liam’s first point, and in connection to what Susan and Carmen were saying, one of the questions you asked us was what was the most surprising element of working on these volumes. For me and John as series editors, that is actually the nineteenth century as an aberration. The nineteenth century is often presented to be very clerical, with powerful bishops, almost like the old liberal historiography, as evident in, for example, the rhetoric surrounding the role of Cardinal Cullen. But actually, looking at the whole longue durée for the series, there is the historiographical issue that has been highlighted, but also, just in terms of seeing what’s going on, it is evident that the nineteenth century in the history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland is the aberration. The laity seem to be driving things a lot more in other periods than perhaps they do in the nineteenth century. We suspect that there’s some connection with the ultramontane currents there, and how much it’s influencing both Britain and Ireland, because it is clear that it’s an aberration when you read all of the volumes, and I don’t think it’s just a historiographical thing. I think there’s a peculiarity about it as well.
John Morrill: I think one of the interesting things is that you have chosen dates which go against the trend of these general histories, which have tended to give very neutral dates, which have no particular significance. Look at the history of Ireland, for example. We were given the chronology of 1641-1745, so we were being drawn into looking at two doomed enterprises, and to cast Catholicism, in a sense, against that backdrop of two doomed visions of how you can recreate Catholic Britain and Ireland. We were drawn then to highlight political theology and the whole question of how Catholics relate politically, with a small ‘p’; of what sort of state the state is; and the rights of Catholics within this multiform state. But also there was the question of how Catholics relate to their neighbours and the consequences of events in Ireland or in Scotland or in England on those trying to live out a life as a Catholic in the other kingdoms. For example, the consequences of the 1649 rebellion in Ireland for the conditions of English Catholics were very dire indeed.
It was interesting that we begin our introduction by saying in 1641 everybody believed the lie that Charles I had authorised the Irish rebellion. Everybody, both Catholic and Protestant, wanted to believe it. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie assumed that every Catholic was supporting him whatever he said, and therefore his job was to persuade Protestants. Of course, that annoyed a very large number of Catholics, and he finished up with no support at all. So, the sense in which the political framework with a large ‘P’ affects the political framework with a small ‘p’, is something which I had not really thought through before. I think this also leaves space for the social leaders amongst the Catholic community to be attributed a more powerful role in relation to the clergy than I think conventionally appears in the historiography. Obviously, it is the clerical voice which comes through in print. It is virtually impossible for Catholics to say anything significant, at least religiously significant, in print. The first volume is going to have some very powerful polemical writing about the rights and duties of Catholics in the political world. But one of the things we found was just how much after 1641 Catholic writing falls back on being devotional, and also being quietist. So whatever the political context, the overwhelming emphasis of religious writing, either by priests, or priests being instructed what to say by powerful laymen, becomes very powerfully quietist; and I don’t think I had quite anticipated that.
Liam Temple: One of the things that John and I both agreed on was the opportunity for the volume to say something about the problems of periodization. Lots of works on early modern Catholicism, particularly in England, stop around 1640 or 1641. We were eager to talk both about continuity—issues that had concerned Catholics earlier on that continued to affect them—and change—new issues that emerged. When looking at the historiography, we realised that a critical mass of work concerning the period 1641-1745 had built up, and that it was time to capitalise on this. I think we were driven by the idea that the period had not really been given the justice it deserved and, as John says, we did find some really surprising things as a result.
John Morrill: There is a real historiographical, perhaps historical, cesura at 1689. The narrative of 1641-1689 still has to do with the experience of persecution and its consequences, whereas the narrative of 1689-1745 has to do with Jacobitism. Of course there is less persecution (at least in England) after 1689, but Jacobitism as a political theology has swamped out a lot of other themes. Jacobitism, especially as a politics of nostalgia has tended to be a study of obsessives by obsessives and the themes of Catholic Enlightenment have been undervalued, and the transitions from the world of the martyrs to Richard Challoner are obscured.
One of the things we struggled with most in volume 2, beyond getting people to talk about the three kingdoms or four countries, was getting people to write thematic chapters to cover the whole period. The latter was actually more difficult in retrospect. The trouble was saying ‘write about all three kingdoms over a hundred years’. My whip, at any rate, was very much on the geographical coverage. Although we did point out to people that they were uneven in their chronological coverage, I do not think we succeeded as well in getting a consistency about that.
Liam Temple: I cannot blame our authors for being slightly daunted by the task we were setting them. But many of them rose to the challenge admirably. I would agree that as volume editors the greatest challenge was trying to ensure full chronological coverage, that is, getting authors to write about 1641-1745 in its entirety. It was one of those problems we didn’t really predict in the earlier stages of the project, but hindsight is always easier than foresight.
Alana Harris: Thinking about something that I knew was always going to be a profound contrast between volume 5 and the other volumes in the series—touching upon the issue of the capitalised or lower case ‘p’ in politics—all the other volumes have a chapter about anti-Catholicism, and there isn’t one in the twentieth century volume. This was an editorial decision early on, and it was interesting to think about what is implicitly signalled through this omission about the legalities and changed perceptions of Catholicism as a ‘recusant’, non-conformant, or persecuted minority/majority. The decision speaks to profound religious transformation, it is saying something about contemporary religious diversity within our societies, and implicitly speaking into debates about secularisation, and how ultimately, for the period 1914-2021, we are thinking about the changing inflections or even displacements of religious prejudice perhaps. One can’t properly characterise that as anti-Catholicism. There are strains of sectarianism and strains of otherness and difference to be noted, but actually it is fundamentally not the same as in previous centuries.
John McCafferty: Liam mentioned things that surprised us, and I just want to share two things that surprised me the most of all the stuff I read. One was in Michael Snape’s piece on Catholics in the British Army and the Armed Forces. It explained something that I’d wondered about for years and years, which is the unbelievable popularity of the RAF with Irish Catholics. When you talk to people in Ireland, who’ve had people in the British armed forces it will very often be with the RAF. And it was all to do with the fact that the uniform of the RAF and indeed the RAF itself, had no backstory. They’re not red coats.
And the other thing that I found that was really surprising, is again, from a later period than my own. If they were alive today, Cardinal Newman would be on social media, the whole time going on about stuff, and Manning would actually be down in Whitehall negotiating with the unions and getting on government ministers. That was fascinating for me. James alluded to Newman studies, and I think we may be criticised for not having a chapter on Newman, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how that plays out.
Susan O’Brien: We made a decision at the outset that no chapter would be dedicated to a single prominent individual as we wanted to integrate those dominant personalities within the chosen themes. We just have to make sure that the index to volume 4 enables Newman to be found integrated within the different thematic chapters such as architecture or devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary but also as a focal point in the chapter on modernism and anti-modernism.
Katy Gibbons: Could I ask a slightly different question that has occurred to me as I listen to the conversation. It’s about the importance of language and languages across the long sweep of time covered by the volumes. Parts of these kingdoms or territories are Anglophone, and I’m wondering about the significance and the dominance or otherwise of English, in relation to other languages. Do you as editors have a strong sense of how the political resonances of different languages at different points play into this in the longer-term narrative?
John McCafferty: One of the things that these volumes bring out is that up to the Famine, Irish is increasing its number of speakers year on year. Prior to the Famine, you have the highest number of Irish speakers ever. So the narrative which says that Irish is on a long trajectory of decline doesn’t fit. I think one of the most interesting things for me was the vibrancy of the Celtic languages and their traditions right through. But also, one thing that was intriguing to me was the degree to which Latin was actually an asset for the Church in early modern Ireland, where perhaps 85 percent of the population is hibernophone, and another 10 percent is probably bilingual. Latin allowed Catholicism in Ireland to speak to both Anglophone Old English, and to Gaelic Irish, by having a liturgical language that was neutral to both. It turned out to be a very serious asset, so in that case, the marking that Latin has in Ireland, is very different, it seems to me, to the marking that Latin ends up having in England, and in Scotland as well, where Latin becomes a suspect language outside of universities. I found that fascinating.
John Morrill: Yes, and of course, it becomes seen as a suspect language precisely because it is a Catholic language. For volume 2, it was interesting that we decided to have a chapter about the languages other than English, or at least the other vernacular languages other than English. We could not find anyone who could cover all of them so in the end we had a chapter which combined the work of three authors. But the interesting thing was that the vibrancy of Catholic writing, specifically Catholic writing in Wales, was far greater than it was in Scotland. In fact, when we recruited someone to write about Scotland, he cautioned us that there was not any real Catholic writing in Scottish Gaelic. This was in contrast to Wales, which I would not have anticipated. It was very good news for us, because I’m afraid we thought very much in terms of the three kingdoms, and I think Wales did suffer in terms of content overall. But the extent to which the Gaelic Scottish Catholic community failed to generate a distinctive literature is something I had not anticipated.
Liam Temple: Again, offering a chapter on language allowed us more opportunity to discuss the overarching theme of ‘continuity and change’ in our volume. The post-1641 Welsh material shows a change of priorities from polemical material aimed at conversion, to catechetical material focused on the pastoral needs of Welsh Catholics, for example. Combining the work of three experts on Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots Gaelic, has produced, I think, a very original chapter on material that will be new to many scholars. I was certainly thankful for their contributions and learnt a lot from them as a result.
Liam Chambers: This is obviously a very important question for volume 3 as well. I can tell you that in relation to literature in Welsh, that vibrancy had certainly disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century. We have a chapter in volume 3 as well, looking at languages other than English, in terms of print and manuscript cultures, because when you extend into manuscript culture in Irish, and to some extent in Scottish Gaelic, it’s very, very rich indeed.
Of course, that return to Irish language sources on the part of historians, has been closely connected to the resurgence in Jacobite studies. Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Vincent Morley, Breandán Ó Buachalla and others have encouraged us to read Irish language material afresh, and that means it has to be taken very seriously for this story, that is the Catholic story, as well. One of the things that I was interested to see coming out of that was the extent to which there was, or wasn’t, crossover between the languages. For the period covered by volume 3, one could see crossover in the work, for instance, of Richard Challoner. Challoner was translated into Welsh, into Scottish Gaelic, and into Irish. There’s a question there about the extent to which that is disseminated, and which of his works are more successful than others. But that kind of quietism that John Morrill alluded to earlier, that you can pick up in Challoner, that’s something that seems to resonate across linguistic boundaries, and might be worth thinking about a little bit more. This point is not a new one, because some other scholars have picked up on it, but it’s something that that probably was a little bit surprising to me.
James Kelly: On a practical level, the first three volumes all have chapters dedicated to non-English language texts, and by that we don’t mean Latin, we mean the various languages of the isles. To touch on something covered by John and Liam, in regard to the relative vibrancy of the Welsh language, it’s clear that at least with the Irish language it’s a deliberate development—here I’m relying on John McCafferty’s work—and it has backing from the Franciscans. Irish becomes, as John Morrill says, the Catholic language, and tied to national identity. So it was something of which we were very conscious. I think the really interesting thing that comes out in volume 3 especially, perhaps not so much in the earlier volumes, is the translations of different texts. I don’t know if that’s because it doesn’t happen earlier, or if it’s because scholars picked it up more for volume 3. That might be an interesting question to explore: does the use of translations evolve into the period covered by volume 3, or not?
John McCafferty: One thing also that’s striking, and which is there through the entire arc of the five volumes, is the incredible assiduity of Catholics, in translating, not between the languages of the islands, but constantly translating from the Romance languages. There is this vast pipeline of especially French, Spanish, and Italian material, entering the Catholic bloodstream, constantly and endlessly. This goes right up to and into the twentieth century: my own childhood recollection is of the little pamphlets at the back the church, of the lives of the saints. These were often written by Americans, so there is a washing back into the system here, with a very distinctive, it seems to me, US kind of devotion. So that area of translation, I’m very excited about that. I think we’ve covered that well throughout the volumes.
And for me, one very important theme, and for James, as well, is Catholicism as a global religion. What’s happening in these islands is affecting global Catholicism, as Tadgh O hAnnracháin has pointed out for our period. And in reverse there are the motions of global Catholicism, the other issues and debates which have nothing to do with the politics of these islands. For example, the ultra-montane versus gallican rows are matters for the wider church, which are then played out and mapped onto the politics of these islands. Or the debate on the activity of grace that appears in the mid-seventeenth century, again entwines itself around the politics here, but is something actually generated offshore.
John Morrill: And also, John, the attention to the translation of all the great classics across the whole of Catholic history, in other words, the hermeneutic of continuity. Not even necessarily polemically, against the Protestant hermeneutic of discontinuity, but just as a reassurance that this is a perpetual religion. So Bonaventure, Thomas à Kempis, and so on, going right back. There are endless retranslations making them more appropriate. I think there’s a kind of climax of this in the early seventeenth century, although it carries on after that. Probably there was a huge amount of this from the 1570s onwards but particularly reaching a climax in the second quarter of the seventeenth century.
Alana Harris: All this links to the brief that the general editors gave us about the use of ‘Roman’ coupled with Catholicism or, more precisely its non-use as a denominational designation in the volumes. This was set from the outset, and I was delighted to see that. But, in the process of developing volume 5, it became more and more apparent how astute an editorial direction that was. Within the imperial aspirations and activities that are such a characteristic of the twentieth century, the European, transnational and global manifestations of Catholicism render a ‘Roman’ descriptor incongruent and anachronistic. Obviously the volumes on the nineteenth century and twentieth century needed to think through issues of empire and the collapse of empire and missionary activity abroad. But there is so much more to the framings of the global and the transnational that also came through in the fifth and fourth volumes, such that it’s quite interesting to think not only about the differentiated power and standing of the denomination in both islands, but also how in that ‘Catholic’ mapping you can illuminate Britain and Ireland’s unacknowledged shared enterprises and entanglements (for example in joint missionary activity in Africa) across the century.
Katy Gibbons: Would anyone else like to chip in on that question of Catholic rather than Roman Catholic, or indeed, the broader more global approach that Alana is alluding to there?
James Kelly: Well, as Alana alluded to there, it was something that John and I were keen on from the beginning, and happily everyone agreed with us! Everyone was with us on that for a number of reasons. Alana has touched very much on the global issue, and about putting everything into that international context, showing, as John alluded to, both the effect of global Catholicism coming to these islands, but also these islands affecting global Catholicism and other issues surrounding it. Alana was alluding there as well, to take a modern example, to the building of a Syro-Malibur rite cathedral in England and Wales. And so terms like Roman begin to tell stories that they shouldn’t be telling if you want to understand what’s happening across the five volumes. So, internally, Roman Catholicism could be taken sometimes to indicate a certain point of view. We’ve touched on an easy example, the nineteenth century ultramontane and cisalpine divisions: the use of the word ‘Roman’ there has a particular connotation, if you look at it just internally. And there is also the recognition that the term Roman Catholicism might not mean a lot outside particular Anglican, Anglophone contexts. And also there’s the issue of a deliberate othering that went on with it: you see a huge burst in the usage of the term ‘Roman Catholicism’ in the nineteenth century—what’s being said there? That it’s not English, it’s not Scottish, and so on. Really, it makes it sound like this church is just a Western Church as opposed to a global one, when it should be in a global perspective.
Alana Harris: Susan, this is probably for you too. But also in the context of the twentieth century and volume 5, which has a chapter on ecumenism, the theological baggage that goes with the idea in terms of Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism: using the framing of Catholic allows you to think in more interesting ways about ecumenism (within and outside institutional doctrinal dialogue, especially as undertaken by the Catholic laity around shared actions stemming from religious conviction) in the twentieth century, too.
John McCafferty: To add to that, from my slender knowledge of the twentieth and twenty first century—apart from living in it. I was very struck recently, when there was a very sad drowning of two boys in a lake near Derry. They were both from Kerala, and they were buried in the local parish church, but with the Syro-Malibar rite, and eight priests of that rite were there. But the parish priest gave the sermon. That really struck me in terms of what James was saying. And the last volume talks about the new communities in both Britain and Ireland: for people from the Philippines, from Kerala, from Nigeria, the whole Roman/Anglo discussion makes no sense of their experience. So, one of the areas that we’re going to be looking at in the future is the experience of all these groups who are in Britain and Ireland, and the Polish community, too. So, I’m very glad our decision reflects, in its way, the lived experience of recently arrived communities.
James Kelly: And if we are really engaging with contemporary communities, we only have to look at Ukrainian rite Catholics who have been arriving in these isles recently due to current events.
Katy Gibbons: I wonder if anyone here, having gone through this long process, and having discovered all these surprises and gaps and lacuna along the way, has any thoughts on the ‘Where next?’ question. Is it possible to identify emerging areas of research activity? Or areas that you feel should be prioritised, or deserving of new attention, within the frameworks of transnational, global, and Catholic rather than Roman Catholic?
John McCafferty: Well, I think one thing needs to be done, and I think this came out of all volumes, is that there is enormous work to be done on Scottish Catholicism. I know that’s not transnational in this sense. A lot has been written over the years but there’s so much more to be done there, and sources do exist. One thing that was confirmed for me in reading the volumes is that historically the SNP were very anti-Catholic, they were a very Presbyterian group. However, the SNP have retooled themselves and extended their appeal out to the very large Catholic—or culturally Catholic—population in Scotland. It seems to me that there’s a moment where Scotland’s wider Catholic story can be told, not just in terms of a comfortable narrative about Irish people flocking to work in places such as the dockyards of Glasgow. So I think there’s a great opportunity. There’s a wonderful researcher called Karie Schultz, who is working on the Scots Colleges, and much on political theology. There will be more of this. I’m very hopeful about the Catholic history of Scotland.
James Kelly: Liam, I’m going to throw it over to you, because I think it’s volume 3 that opens up a lot of different avenues. I already suspect, and I think it’ll come out even more, is that plugging into work on the Enlightenment and Catholic Enlightenment is important.
Liam Chambers: Yes, I think the Enlightenment is very important, and there is a fine chapter in the volume on Catholic Enlightenment by Shaun Blanchard. I think that raises all kinds of questions about how to understand Catholic Enlightenment, whether it’s an applicable term in England, Scotland, and Ireland. There has been some attempt recently to argue that there was no Irish Catholic Enlightenment, and that in fact there could not be an Irish Catholic Enlightenment. In my view that’s a narrow position to take, but I think the development of discussion on that subject can only be useful.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised by this, but one area that needs a lot more work for the period covered by volume 3 is the question of empire. My research interests meant that I was especially open to the international and transnational dimensions of British and Irish Catholicism, and I was delighted to see that foregrounded by the general editors. For the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, one simply can’t understand British and Irish Catholicism without taking the international into consideration. The impact of the French Revolution is a very obvious example. But one of the more surprising things to come out of the volume for me was the chapter on empire written by Aidan Bellenger. I was aware of British engagements with empire in the period, but I wasn’t really aware of their depth, and I think that we really need to open up more conversations on empire in the pre-1829 period. Fortunately, new material on the subject is appearing.
For example, Karly Kehoe’s new book: Empire and Emancipation: Scottish and Irish Catholics at the Atlantic Fringe, 1780–1850 (Toronto, 2022), appeared too late for consideration or inclusion in volume 3. That book is a significant contribution to a conversation, not just about the way Irish and Scottish Catholics participated in imperial expansion, but about their interactions with indigenous peoples and all the questions that arise from that. And a further subject, I think, that is alluded to only in a footnote in the volume, is the wider question of how Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Catholics engaged in imperial expansion through other empires. It’s slightly beyond the parameters of the volume, but British and Irish Catholics participated in Spanish, French, Portuguese and other imperial projects. Scholars like Thomas O’Connor have looked at this. I think that the issue arises for the periods covered by other volumes in different ways as well, but it’s one of the things that would be an obvious area for further research.
John Morrill: Yes, we would echo that. You can see it already emerging strongly into your period. For our earlier volume, we have two chapters by Paul Monod and Gabriel Glickman which really fit together very nicely. The extent of Catholic merchants getting involved in international trade, as well as the colonial armies and administrators, is striking. I think that that is clearly a very strongly emerging theme, which goes straight on into your period. I hope our chapters and your chapters will dovetail very well.
Liam Temple: I’d second what John McCafferty has said about the need for more work on Scottish Catholicism. As John Morrill has just said, the turn towards global narratives has influenced chapters in our volume, especially those by Glickman and Monod. I do think, however, that the transnational element of early modern Catholicism is an area that is only going to keep growing in strength, and that it is leading to re-evaluations of how we see certain aspects of Catholicism in the three kingdoms, such as the global reach of the religious orders for example.
James Kelly: Leading on from what Liam Chambers was saying, that Empire element is a big one. I was going to say, just on a practical level as well, that in the introductions to each volume everyone has noted potential avenues of future research, which is where it’s clear that there is a need for more work on Scotland. Perhaps here Susan and Carmen can talk to volume 4?
Susan O’Brien: Yes, we’ve already touched on lay women, and laity in general. The fact that we now know quite a bit about women religious for the nineteenth century rather highlights the fact that there is relatively little scholarship on all the other women, who comprised the majority.
And the subject of Catholic childhood and children’s experiences which has been opened up for earlier centuries, for example, by Lucy Underwood, is another potentially very fruitful one for the nineteenth century. It’s a way of enlarging the focus out from education and schooling to include family dynamics and neighbourhood settings. It could engage with some of the newer approaches, like the history of emotions. I think there is a lot of potential here.
Carmen Mangion: Methodologically, too. We read some wonderful work from Irish scholars on Ireland: methodologically, they are thinking about material culture and spaces or places, and emotions, suggesting all sorts of different ways to interrogate Catholicism in Britain. British historiography seems to have stalled with regards to using new methods to think about nineteenth-century Catholicism.
Katy Gibbons: That’s interesting to hear, from the perspective of a sixteenth century historian. For the early modern period there’s lots of work related to all of those issues. Early modern scholars have been doing this for a while, so it’s interesting to note that there is less of this for the nineteenth century.
Susan O’Brien: It seems to me that recent work on the nineteenth century is really leaning into the early modern scholarship, learning from it, for example on material culture and devotional life. Material culture, explored in a cross-disciplinary way, seems so obviously rich for the nineteenth century. A number of Irish historians have led the way in this respect and the themes are well represented in volume 4.
Liam Temple: We have some great work in volume 2 on architecture, music, and material culture in the early modern period that I think really reflects the strength of research in those areas. The fact our chapter on material culture is written by two early career researchers, Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland, suggests the field will only continue to grow in strength.
Alana Harris: Yes, dovetailing with that, ultimately it’s got to do with these issues of very persistent narratives that tend to constrain debates to certain well-worn territories and characterize things around ‘common sense’ and ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions—for example the secularization narrative from the nineteenth century onwards means it is in part an explanation for the ghettoization of Catholic studies and a scholarly stagnation, removed from vibrant debates about materiality, communities of emotion, or the history of childhood.
Which leads me back to Katy’s ‘what next’? Obviously the twentieth century volume struggled with highly politicised, emotive, contemporaneous developments—including sexual abuse within Catholic settings. Originally this issue wasn’t intended to be tackled in a stand-alone chapter, as I was going to ask contributors to interweave it (and indeed they have too, where relevant). But through the commissioning process it became apparent that it actually needed its own chapter, to be front and centre and to be tackled squarely and directly. And this required dealing with trauma and writing about violence, abuse and trauma. There are urgent histories to be written on these issues, but they are very difficult histories to write (and read).
This begs questions of who does that work (survivors, scholar-allies, Royal Commissions) and how do we tackle the ‘archive of silence’ (Robert Orsi’s term). We also need to consider how we support ourselves in doing that, because it must be undertaken. Yet such an appraisal can extract a heavy emotional toll on the people doing the research. So, for me, the history of (modern religious) childhoods offers a way into thinking about the clerical abuse crisis and framing it beyond a purely media-constructed narrative. Guiding and supporting the joint authors of that chapter, but also other contributors writing about religious institutions and the family, I have come to think about a ‘shadow’ or dark ‘domestic triad’ ecclesiology—attuned to surfacing through this revisionist frame a toxic religious socialisation and theological culture present not only in parishes and schools, but also in some Catholic families and lay institutions. Thinking beyond the 1960s and onwards, and indeed into the twenty-first century, analysis beginning to tackle issues of power and abuse needs to be trauma-informed and survivor-centred so as to amplify ‘lived religious histories’ in all their pain and complexity. As John and James know—and I am so very grateful to Mary Daly and Marcus Pound for undertaking the highly fraught and complicated brief in writing a chapter about clerical abuse—that section was the most difficult element of the entire enterprise for me.
John McCafferty: One thing I think that was important about that chapter is the drawing up of a basic timeline of what was happening in the different jurisdictions. It was astonishing that no-one had done this. It surprised me very much that we even didn’t even have the basic narrative framing for this story.
Alana Harris: Yes, and without that you just have the media framing, which is not to suggest that the media framing has not been phenomenally important in terms of opening up the issue in the first place. But while it spotlights certain individuals and certain institutions, the broader contexts and cultures, and the intertwined and mutually complicit ‘enabling structures’ have not been subject to as much scrutiny. So, I’m immensely grateful to those contributors. Also, the chapter itself has been through multiple versions of informal peer review, from canon lawyers through to practising psychiatrists, and it was important to me to have it put before many people and diverse audiences for accuracy and accessibility. I was gratified that someone who has worked extensively in this field, in the context of American Catholicism, said of that chapter that they think it’s going to be a really important survey, a primer for people to try to get a sense of what is happening and some of the issues at play. It does some of that very basic mapping beyond an exclusively religious history optic too, within the political, cultural and legal ecosystems of modern British and Irish society. I believe this will be an important contribution, and I hope it provides a platform for others to build on.
Katy Gibbons: Perhaps we might now discuss the issue of archives and conditions for researchers. Would any of you like to say anything more about the impact of the opening up of some archives, and the impact of some digitization projects—I’m conscious that all of you here have been involved in some of these. What do you think that might mean in terms of areas of emerging research, or how accessible this topic might be in the future for a range of different researchers?
John McCafferty: I think the model that Durham had been using in the Centre for Catholic Studies, of approaching the archives problem by making partnerships, with religious orders and institutes, has been very helpful. We did it ourselves with the Franciscans years ago, but I think Durham have used a similar model, and done it really well. The issue of archives of all sorts, diocesan ones, congregational ones, vulnerable archives is a big one. The archive of the Catholic Men’s Bowling Association—where does it go? It is a big issue, but I’m hopeful now, in a way I wasn’t, ten years ago. I think now there’s a recognition, certainly, with religious orders, and to some extent with the diocese, that they either partner up with a university, or they employ a professional archivist, and we’re seeing more and more of that, at least from the Irish perspective.
Liam Temple: I think the opening up of more archives of the religious orders is a really exciting development. We have seen the impact it has had on the study of women religious, for example. I’ve seen through my work with the Capuchins that accessing new archives has impacts across multiple periods, from early modern through to modern. It is so vital that issues around archives and the preservation of material are not left unaddressed.
Susan O’Brien: And from the English and Welsh perspective, the Bishops’ Conference for England and Wales is intending to carry out a review of the diocesan archives. It’s vital for England and Wales. There are some dioceses where research is a bit of a pitch in the dark. The opening hours are minimal, which poses problems of time and money for those who want to carry out research. So it’s crucial that that this review happens and that it draws on the people with knowledge.
James Kelly: At the Centre for Catholic Studies, we have been working on an archive strategy with the Catholic Archives Society. There needs to be a proper strategy, and the diocesan review should hopefully kick start that. We have to talk then to religious orders about the plans for their archives. The end goal may be the creation of a centre that would take in those archives without a home, but this is currently the topic of an AHRC-RLUK-funded project at Durham University.
Alana Harris: In view of some gains that were made, and then some retractions, it’s worth noting the digitization of Catholic newspapers, and just how vital that is. One assumption about British newspapers generally, and particularly when you get into the modern period, is that you’re going to have digitalization and lots of access. But actually negotiating electronic versions of The Tablet or the Catholic Herald (no longer so easy), or retrieving all of those very large A1 bound volumes of The Universe within the British Library (when it was accessible around COVID): there are really important issues about paywalls and equality of research access. It’s about money and resources, and the economic pressure on the Catholic press generally means that some earlier digitization projects and indexing initiatives have stalled or been retrenched.
James Kelly: And there’s an interesting issue there which I have talked about with you, Alana: that digitisation can end up skewing the historiography, and this is true for work on Ireland too. Lots of scholarship is citing The Tablet, but actually in terms of readership numbers The Tablet is negligible. Whereas something like The Universe, for example—where, as Alana says, there are difficulties regarding digitisation—that is a publication with mass readership. So to return to the question of studying the laity, The Universe would help us to know what the laity are looking at. And so digitisation on one level is brilliant, but on the other side it has resulted in this quite significant skewing.
John McCafferty: With the Franciscan archive as well, things of national or wider historical importance are embedded in Catholic archives, either because they ended up there, or because of what Catholics did, and that’s tremendously important, when we come to things like the AHRC and funding bodies. It’s important that we’re saying this. For example, if you want to know everything about women’s health, you should look in convent archives. Or for example, the accounts of the Franciscans in Cork which has been published, is loved by economic historians because it’s the only continuous record of prices of things like butter from the eighteenth century upto 1954. So I think that’s very important, and actually in terms of the five volumes of OHBIC, where people are going to be able to take these five volumes and read about things that are very significant, even if they’re not interested in Catholicism.
Katy Gibbons: Thank you. That’s made me think about how in some ways the label of ‘Catholic archive’ may be putting historians or other scholars off in some ways, and that there’s a missed opportunity there. There’s considerable potential for scholars who wouldn’t view themselves as doing Catholic history, a richness of source material that that is not being used. And that’s a really interesting thing to think about in terms of what these volumes do, and being clear about what they can actually do.
Alana Harris: It goes back to that metaphor of ‘speaking Catholic’ and of translation broadly considered. We have tried to make sure that we’re speaking to the historians of religion and the historians of Catholicism that read our volumes. But it’s also about making sure that the chapters also contribute to broader debates, across our periodisations, so that there’s a sense in which the richness that is within each volume can resource other historiographies and conversations, including interdisciplinary agendas.
James Kelly: One of the guiding principles we had for the project was to show how the Catholic story links to the wider national one: both what it’s got to say as part of that story, but also to speak to those broader debates mentioned by Alana. We’ve already talked a lot about the various cutting-edge trajectories and where they could go as well. Another deliberate intention was to recover the political element surrounding British and Irish Catholicism that sometimes, certainly in the early modern period, was in danger of being slightly lost in a kind of a soft-focused, cultural approach.
Returning to something John said towards the beginning of this conversation, another guiding principle was to remember that there were theological, ecclesiological and spiritual factors all at play. Because again, sometimes in the early modern at least, it is sometimes being neglected in the scholarship. For example, when women religious are studied, some approaches can give the impression that they were a sort of Bloomsbury set, getting together because they wanted to read and write, neglecting the spiritual imperative that was actually the driving factor.
Katy Gibbons: I was wondering about what you say about the recovery of the political element, and how that sits, or doesn’t sit easily, with the attempt to talk about lay Catholics. There needs to be a way in which recovering the political element, or the ‘high politics’ in a traditional sense doesn’t drown out those other voices. Some scholars might feel that the social and cultural approach is missing out some of the political. But there’s also a danger that a purely political narrative reduces the scope to give space to other voices that aren’t necessarily addressed in the political narratives as narrowly conceived.
Susan O’Brien: For our period, for volume 4, we were really trying to introduce more of that, looking at material culture, spaces, social factors, because there has been a considerable focus on what I would call ecclesial politics, focus on what you might call lots of rows between people inside the church. I wanted to move away from that. I don’t think we’ve got to the point where things have got knitted together. That’s not where we’re at, so it seemed important to push on some of the things that were not so dominant in the historiography.
James Kelly: Yes, I think that when the pendulum is swinging, there’s a situation where it’s going too far one way, and then it needs to be corrected, and then it ends up swinging too far the other way. Perhaps political was the wrong word. I was using it as a catch all term, thinking more of wider, often secular politics, rather than ecclesial. If we come back to what Liam was talking about with volume 3—that in Britain they tend to forget Catholic emancipation is an Irish story—people also forget it’s a lay-led story. It’s not the bishops who get the emancipation.
Liam Chambers: Yes. And I was just thinking that in the politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the laity are quite dominant. Catholic relief is absolutely pushed by the laity: the bishops are largely appalled by the idea of assertive public campaigning from the outset. This carries right through into the 1820s, but there is a sense in which the bishops are wresting control towards the end of that period in a more general sense, even if the laity probably still have a dominant voice politically.
James Kelly: Yes, that’s interesting, and that is another thing we picked up on where the nineteenth century is slightly different. When you read all the volumes, it is evident how little influence, ultimately, the bishops have. Often the laity do what they want to do, and then bishops catch up a bit later. The nineteenth century again, is the slight difference, the aberration. We tend, I think, to look at the Victorian era and think that it’s typical—for example, its grip on the imagination makes people think it’s the typical Christmas. Similarly, there is a temptation to look at Victorian religion and Catholicism in the period and think that this is the typical story of what Catholicism looks like, but actually it’s the difference. If we go to the early modern period in England and Wales, they even end up kicking out the bishop, because nobody listens to him.
John Morrill: And on his gravestone he actually had engraved ‘betrayed by false friends’.
James Kelly: That’s one way of looking at the laity, John, but we can open that up as another story! Ultimately, it’s how the bishops aren’t as significant as sometimes has been given in the story.
John Morrill: I think there is a danger of not looking at the whole of the laity, to get too obsessed with the powerful laity. There is obviously a dialectic, which runs all the way through and which splits both of them. You have ultramontane gentry or nobility, and you have cisalpine ones all the way through. But nonetheless, the clergy formed on the continent are predominantly ultramontane and the nobility are predominantly wary of Rome, don’t want to be over-identified with Rome, and want to make deals with the government which Rome would never countenance. But it is a complicated story.
Beyond that, when I was working on East Anglia— although it only comes through very vestigially in the volume—I was amazed at the number of people who came forward to the seminaries who came from communities which were not supposed to have any Catholics in them, and I do not believe that they were the only Catholic in in their towns. I think there were far more pockets of lay Catholicism surviving and supporting themselves by a devotional life that is not sacramental, but is a daily routine of sacralising the day, and there’s a lot more there than the public records ever show.
Liam Temple: Exactly John, and Laurence Lux-Sterritt has produced a fabulous chapter for our volume that touches on that exact theme. The ‘sacralization of time’ in the private houses of recusant Catholics, mirroring that of the religious houses, is such an interesting concept.
John Morrill: What I hope is a theme that comes through in our volume is that sense that you do not need a priest to be a Catholic. There are Irish examples of that, too in the early modern period. We just assume about the modern obsession with sacramentalisation, but there are other ways of being Catholic than going to Mass every Sunday.
Susan O’Brien: The story of the nineteenth century is that sacramentalization, and that is, that is a massive story, isn’t it? There is are lots of Catholics who maybe don’t buy it in a fulsome way, but what gets defined then is that connection between confession, and regular mass attendance, even if you’re not receiving communion, and then the increase in reception of communion. It’s a sort of ongoing story, isn’t it?
John Morrill: Certainly, before then in Britain—it is a different story in Ireland—most Catholics were double baptised and they were certainly buried in Anglican churchyards, and that is one of the things that is going to change. I mean they were certainly sufficiently catechised—they never received communion in non Catholic churches, but they certainly were accessing the Anglican church, in order to become, as it were, recognized as citizens who had these vestigial rights. So I think that is a big nineteenth century shift, and I think that will be quite a surprise to quite a lot of non-specialist readers.
Alana Harris: And, in all of this, thinking about what that sacramentalization does in terms of this definition of who belongs and who doesn’t, through gendered terms. This also goes back to Susan’s point about this tendency to think about the aristocracy and the Old Catholics, the Irish and the converts—underpinning this are questions about class. There’s a sense in which this doesn’t have a foregrounded conceptual apparatus in Volume 5, but tensions and tussles about class and class dynamics, as well as gendered change, run through most of the chapters. And this begs the almost Newman-inspired question: ‘who are the laity?’ and, ‘what are the laity doing?’ In the twentieth century, are these the mostly (educated) middle class laity who leave an archival paper trail? Where are the working-class laity, and how does greater attention to them also require increased sensitivity to differences around race and ethnicity? So it’s interesting to think across this five-volume sweep, across these very long trajectories, to consider how some of the terminology and constitutional framing might change while also noticing some perennially recurring and common agendas. I’ve found the conversation today, across more than 500 years of Catholic history, really fascinating.
