Resistance and Compromise
The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics

Dr Holmes analyses the plight of Catholics in Elizabethan England.

Peter Holmes (Author)

9780521109536, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 February 2009

288 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.6 cm, 0.4 kg

The plight of Catholics in Elizabethan England has long attracted the interest of historians and it has long been appreciated that the key to understanding their position lies partly in the voluminous polemical literature which they published. Nearly three hundred tracts were printed in English and Latin and more circulated in manuscript. The purpose of this book is to use such material as a source for understanding the political ideas of this religious minority in the age of the Wars of Religion. Dr Holmes concentrates on the two principal dilemmas which faced Catholics: whether they should remain loyal to the Queen or might resist her government and how far, if loyal, they might accommodate themselves to the religious laws she imposed on all Englishmen. He sees the Catholic response to both these problems as being in essence an interplay between the desire to resist and the need to find compromise or some means of peaceful accommodation with the political and religious status quo.

Preface
Introduction
Part I. Political Non-resistance: 1. Half-hearted non-resistance: the Louvainists 1558–68
2. Resistance and the return to non-resistance 1569–79
3. Enthusiastic non-resistance 1580–83
4. Persecution and non-resistance
5. The background to non-resistance
Part II. Religious Resistance: 6. Recusancy
7. Opponents of recusancy
8. Casuistry and recusancy
9. Casuistry and the resistance of the laity
10. Casuistry and the resistance of the clergy
Part III. Political Resistance: 11. The development and exposition of ideas of resistance 1584–96
12. The Catholic critique of Elizabethan England
13. Resistance theory
14. The end of resistance: Persons' 'Memorial of the Reformation of England'
Part IV. Non-resistance Again: 15. Opposition to the ideas of resistance 1584–96
16. The laity
17. The Appellants
18. Robert Persons and non-resistance 1596–1603
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]