This article seeks to identify a vein of ‘Puritanism’ running through orthodox religious culture in England over the century or so prior to the Break with Rome. It suggests that alongside the strong emphasis on the sensual and material in worship, it is possible to identify a current of austere and moralistic teaching, which was guarded or sceptical about the value of relics, images and pilgrimage. In the religious ferment around the turn of the fifteenth century, such attitudes developed alongside the forms of heterodoxy known as Lollardy, but were often explicitly anti-Lollard in intention. The article argues further that the strain of ‘puritanical’ Catholicism survived and developed through the fifteenth century, and into the sixteenth, partly as a consequence of the ability of print to preserve and promote old arguments. It converged with currents of Christian humanism, as well as providing a point of connection and reception for emergent evangelical ideas in the 1520s and later. The article thus aims to shed new light on the proposition that the origins of the Reformation are best looked for within the confines of late medieval orthodoxy.

This essay considers the life, death, and afterlife of William Cowbridge a religious eccentric executed for heresy in 1538. It explores the significance of his religious beliefs, which became the source of a heated controversy between the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe and the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Harpsfield. The case casts light on a range of issues, including the dynamic between Protestant and Catholic controversialists, the use of the label of ‘madness’ in argument, and the value of archival documentation alongside the use of oral sources in Reformation-era polemic. It also yields insight into Thomas Cromwell’s authority over the English Church during the late 1530s, and highlights his position among Henrician evangelicals as a source of influence and aid. Finally, it offers a critique about interpretations of early modern belief and the designation of the label ‘Lollard’.

Rome’s decision to name an archpriest and to erect a highly irregular administrative structure, the archpresbyterate, surprised secular clergy and Jesuits who had advocated the establishment of bishops. Recent tension between Jesuits and secular clergy highlighted the need and importance of an hierarchical, ecclesiological office. But the appointment was made in such a way that some secular clergy questioned its legitimacy and authenticity. Until they ascertained that the decision had in fact been made by the pope, they withheld recognition of the archpriest. As they awaited a reply to their appeal, two Appellants, John Colleton and William Clarke, debated the matter with two Jesuit supporters of the archpriest, Henry Garnet and Edward Oldcorne who apparently failed to see the canonical issue involved, as they perceived anti-Jesuitism as the motivating factor.

This essay adds to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring Catholic musical culture in Lancashire. This was a uniquely Catholic village, which, like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundell family this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns. The ballads performed in Little Crosby highlight a vibrant Catholic community, where musical expression was fundamental. Performance widened the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This essay uncovers the way Catholics used music to voice religious and exhort protest as much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, I demonstrate how priests serving this network used ballads as part of their missionary strategy.

The systematic proselytisation of Catholic children institutionalised under the New Poor Law of 1834 was felt by the Catholic community as a very serious grievance. The legislation was framed so as to make the ministrations of the state church an integral part of the workhouse regime, while providing safeguards for the religious rights of non-Anglicans, both adults and children, through a conscience clause which however was not envisaged as applicable to children perceived as having no meaningful family connections. Loose wording allowed locally elected poor law bodies to frustrate the intentions of Parliament, and nullify all efforts of relatives and others to secure appropriate religious upbringing for Catholic children. The problem was particularly acute in the London area. Earlier lobbying initiatives came to nothing, but a fresh campaign begun in 1859, waged with the participation of Catholics at all levels of society, and persisting in the face of repeated setbacks, succeeded in 1868 in bringing about a change in the law, whereby procedures were established to enable the transfer of all poor law children of proven Catholic background to voluntary institutions under Catholic management, with funding for their maintenance paid from the poor rates.

On 31 May 1964, Dr Anne Bieżanek travelled from Wallasey to Westminster Cathedral to attend Mass and receive Holy Communion. She was flanked by hoards of reporters, who over the previous six months had fueled extensive media coverage of her establishment of one of the first Catholic birth control clinics in the world, alongside her intertwined personal story of the physical and emotional strain caused by ten pregnancies. Repeatedly refused the sacraments by her local parish priest in consequence of these activities, and unable to gain satisfaction from the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Bieżanek wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster to announce her intention to ‘resolve the issue’ through an ethical adjudication at the Communion rails.

As the first sustained exploration of this exceptional woman and her sensational life story, this article examines Dr Bieżanek’s private correspondence and public persona to illustrate the ways in which her idiosyncratic re-negotiation of spiritual and sexual politics was path breaking in articulating a ‘modern’ Catholic approach to love and sex and in anticipating the cacophony of such voices elicited by the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. As such, it illustrates the form and force of contrasting and modulating Catholic discourses about love, marriage, and contraception in the post-war period and demonstrates the continuing and critical interplay of religion, infused with the insights of sexology and psychology, when negotiating the sexual and spiritual revolutions of the sixties.