Overview

The half-century following the Glorious Revolution has been viewed as a time of retreat and withdrawal for English Catholics: the response to tightening penal laws, periods in exile and the failures of the Jacobite cause. This book argues that the perception has arisen because research has been directed into the wrong places. It aims to recapture the eighteenth-century Catholic 'recusant' imagination through a study of hitherto unexplored treatises, manuscript literature and private correspondence preserved in family and religious archives. Contrary to the image of seclusion, Catholic lives were penetrated by questions of national identity, religious liberty and the authorityof an international church: conflicts experienced not merely within their own nation, but in the European courts, seminaries and universities that supported them in exile. Their writings can be understood as commentaries on the state of a community trapped between the political, cultural and intellectual divisions that cut across the Roman Catholic world. Many were actively promoting change in church and state within Britain and Europe, and their arguments shaped the emergence of a 'Catholic Enlightenment' that outlasted the commitment to Jacobitism. The English Catholic Community investigates Catholic education and family life, scholarship, poetry and spirituality. Itoffers a fresh contribution to debates surrounding the history of the Jacobite movement, the construction of British national identity, and the origins of the Enlightenment. Gabriel Glickman is a lecturer in history at the University of Oxford.

Full Product Details

9781843834649

Table of Contents

Reviews

An extraordinarily complex account and analysis, based on extensive scholarly research in manuscript holdings as well as printed texts that are difficult to locate. (.) This is an important book on a neglected subject and it brings much that is new both by way of material and interpretation. It is based on fine scholarship, meticulously footnoted and proof read. It is of interest to readers wanting to understand Catholic intellectual culture of the eighteenth century and to those wishing to have a more nuanced understanding of Catholic support for the Jacobite court in exile. H-WRBI A triumph of archival recovery. (Glickman's) novel monograph is likely to produce a significant shift in perspectives on this period. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT An important study of both the vigorous survival of recusant Catholicism in Britain and its considerable influence on the wider Jacobite community. It is, moreover, a nicely produced book. THE JACOBITE

(A) masterful and useful study. ANGLICAN AND EPISCOPALGlickman's own work brilliantly succeeds in re-integrating English Catholics into their wider transnational confessional world. (...) We are presented with a nuanced and convincing portrait of a Catholic community torn between different imperatives. (It) is a major achievement. The maturity of judgement on display is rare in a first book (...) The English Catholic Community immediately becomes the core monograph for its subject. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW Detailed, well informed, and fast paced. It adds a vitally important dimension to what is already known about eighteenth-century English Catholicism. JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES This important book breaks new ground. (...) This well-written and sympathetic study offers a brilliant insight into an often forgotten Catholic world, and in doing so makes a vital contribution to late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English history. JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY This is an outstanding and clever book which provides a definitive treatment of English Catholicism and its relation to Jacobitism in the much neglected first half of the eighteenth century. (...) Never before has the story of such complexity and European breadth been narrated. ROYAL STUART JOURNAL Based on a wide reading of primary sources, and displaying a firm command of the subject's historiography, it is an extremely thorough, well-written, subtle and interesting study. As so often, one is struck by how sustained, painstaking research, rather than fleetingly fashionable methodologies, yields fine results. HISTORY An extraordinarily complex account and analysis, based on extensive scholarly research in manuscript holdings as well as printed texts that are difficult to locate. (...) This is an important book on a neglected subject and it brings much that is new both by way of material and interpretation. H-WRBIA triumph of archival recovery. (Glickman's) novel monograph is likely to produce a significant shift in perspectives on this period. TLSAn important study of both the vigorous survival of recusant Catholicism in this period. TLSAn important study of both the vigorous survival of recusant Catholicism in Britain and its considera

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Countries Available