Following the promulgation of the statute law on uniformity, the rhetorical tradition of parrhesia - "free" or "bold" speech - was enlisted not only by Puritan but also by Catholic writers to defend their refusal to conform to the state church. This article traces the deployment of parrhesia in polemical and literary works produced during the English mission, with a focus on the writings of Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell. It argues that the rhetorical code of parrhesia underlies Catholic efforts to fashion an oppositional identity poised between deference and defiance in the face of authority. The competing demands of loyalism and evangelization place considerable strain on recusant appeals to free speech, pulling at the seams of parrhesia's "figured" performance of liberty. Yet the literary affordances of this rhetorical figure prove indispensable both as a defensive strategy and galvanizing discourse in recusant writing aimed at emboldening Catholics to profess their faith fearlessly.
The article starts by discussing puritan responses to the demands for conformity and subscription. This part of the argument turns on two vignettes designed to bring out the subtleties and contradictions in the puritan position at two distinct moments in the history of conformity, and how it was glossed and enforced. We then compare Catholic and puritan responses to the demand for conformity. Those were diverse, determined not merely by the tensions between those doing the enforcing and those on the receiving end of the enforcement, but also by disagreements on both sides of that equation, over-determined by attendant political circumstances. (The role of political contingency is emphasized throughout.) The tentative conclusion is that among both puritans and Catholics the issue of outward conformity may not have been as central in determining and defining the categories and identities of puritans and Catholics as the existing literature suggests.
Modern Ireland repeatedly exposed the limits of English religious policy. In England, anti-recusancy legislation, though always delicately balanced between the sweeping rhetoric of its enactment and the messy compromises of its enforcement, nevertheless had by the end of the sixteenth century helped reduce Catholicism to a small though influential minority. But in Ireland by 1600 the country was overwhelmingly Catholic, and determined to remain so. This posed a dilemma for English governors. Those in Dublin wanted to use the full power of the state - finally extended to the whole island after the victory over the native Irish in the Nine Years War - to impose conformity. Those in England, worried at the danger of alienating the Catholic population and the threat of further rebellion, repeatedly reined in the authorities in Dublin arguing, whether by conviction or pragmatism, that persuasion was better than coercion. This paper analyzes the competing religious and political perspectives of this three-decade-long attempt to turn Ireland Protestant, and places it in the wider context of the reluctant, Realpolitik acceptance of toleration by European states with divided religious loyalties.
Historians have traditionally treated refusal to receive holy communion as a stepping stone to "full recusancy" and traced its steady displacement by non-attendance at church as the principal marker of Catholic dissent. The article re-examines the phenomenon of non-communicating, underlining the persistence of partial and occasional conformity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It probes the significance of abstaining from the Lord's Supper within both the Catholic community and Protestant communion culture. It also reassesses how far the Tudor and Stuart state sought to coerce the consciences of its subjects by legislating against this offence. It suggests that official efforts to test political loyalty and identify traitors paradoxically fostered the very forms of dissimulation they were designed to eliminate. Non-communicating is a chapter in the larger story of how English society came to terms with the religious pluralism unleashed by the Reformation.
The recusant may have been a fugitive figure in the two centuries after the Reformation, but after the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 the recusant became a conspicuous presence in the English Catholic imaginary. Why, in an age of relative religious toleration, did so many novelists, poets, and artists find religious martyrdom and secrecy so fascinating? This essay argues that we need to see the recusant in post-Emancipation culture in relation to the shifting politics of Catholicism in England. I begin with Victorian literary responses to recusancy, from historical novels by Charles Dickens and Hugh Benson to poetry by Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, and Louise Imogen Guiney; they reflect optimism, and ward against complacency, as Catholic emancipation signaled an age of liberal toleration. The second half of the essay examines the ways in which the recusant becomes, in twentieth century fiction and essays by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, a symbol of the failed project of liberal modernity.
Relegated to Catholic safe spaces on the continent or the privacy of the home, the English Catholic stage was free to speak openly about the confessional conflict in England. It often vigorously promoted nonconformity. Focusing on the Latin tragicomedy Captiva Religio (1614), written and performed at the English College in Rome, and a vernacular religious play by Robert Owen, The History of Purgatory (c. 1630), this article examines how the two plays achieve their polemical ends. While Captiva lampoons the Protestant establishment and productively links questions of genre and conformity to provide models of behavior that might help Catholicism survive in a hostile society, The History of Purgatory combines polemical drama with affective piety to mend the broken bonds between the living and the dead and to warn against church papistry. Recusant drama shaped the boundary between orthodoxy and heresy, stimulating both actors and audiences to commit unequivocally to recusancy.
The rhetorical figure recusatio, deployed in classical literature, later became strongly associated with writers who eschewed pagan subject-matter in favor of Christian. This article explores its use by the Elizabethan Jesuit priest, poet, and martyr, Robert Southwell (1561-95), extending and reconfiguring the idea of sacred parody which has figured in previous critical considerations of Southwell's work. Themes and acts of refusal are foregrounded within Southwell's imaginative writing. In Marie Magdalens funeral teares, centered on the episode from the Gospels where the risen Christ refuses to be touched, Southwell redirects the genre of prose romance towards an advocacy of spiritual fulfilment. His long poem "St. Peter's Complaint" compares Peter's denial of Christ to the spiritual predicament of the church-papist, and uses the apostle's subsequent repentance to orient readers towards recusancy. Southwell's characteristic opening gambit - a declaration that secular literary composition is a dangerous waste of time - became a conventional beginning for literary works on sacred themes, thanks to his wide posthumous influence.
Although the historiography surrounding its precise origins has been somewhat contentious, most historians have assumed that English Catholic recusancy was, fundamentally, an Elizabethan phenomenon. This article challenges that assumption, arguing instead that both the practices and rhetorical foundations of an articulate English Catholic separatism can be traced as far back as the Henrician break with Rome. Through analysis of the actions and arguments of some of the English reformation's earliest opponents, this article demonstrates that the religious changes inaugurated by Henry VIII sparked debates about the possibility of conformity and the necessity of separation which were fundamentally the same as those that later troubled Elizabethan recusants. By underlining the continuity of English Catholic separatism in this way, this article not only proposes a fundamental re-think of recusancy's origins, but it also calls for a broader reassessment of the chronology of "post-Reformation" English Catholicism itself.
