Image Source: The English Convent in Bruges, Belgium

On Monday this week on the Son Rise Morning Show, we discussed Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's "Mementoes" for two Catholic Martyrs, Blesseds John Shert and Thomas Ford. I used a portrait of Blessed Thomas Ford on my preview blog post, published on Friday, May 19, which I found on his Wikipedia page. Here's some information about its source, the English Convent in Bruges, Belgium. Professor Francis Young posted some comments on his blog after he visited that site on Carmersstraat 83/85, B-8000 Brugge in August, 2015:

The Priory of Nazareth of the Augustinian Canonesses Regular of St John Lateran, to give it its full title, was founded from St Monica’s Priory in Louvain in 1629 and, with the exception of the colleges for training secular priests at Rome and Valladolid, it is the only English Catholic religious house in Continental Europe, the sole survivor of dozens of communities founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the sons and daughters of recusants. Virtually all of the communities on the Continent went into ‘exile’ in England in the 1790s, fleeing the French Revolutionary armies (a notable exception was the Benedictine Priory of St Edmund at Douai in France, which was forced out by anti-Catholic laws as late as 1904 and is now located at Woolhampton, Berkshire). The Canonesses of the English Convent were no exception; what was exceptional was that the Bruges community, led by their redoubtable Prioress Mother Mary Augustina More (1732-1807) returned to the Low Countries after the Peace of Amiens in 1802 and have been there ever since.

I encourage you to read the rest of his post, which explains his interest in the community, the location of their exile in England, and of course, the connection to Saint Thomas More, ancestor of Mother Mary Augustina More. She was one of the daughters of Thomas More VIII and Catherine Gifford, a direct descendant in the male line of John More, St. Thomas More's only son. See this list of the descendants of the male and female lines of St. Thomas More and his first wife Joanna (Colt), beginning on page 10 for that generation of Mores.

On the English language version of the convent's website, you'll find a commentary on Saint Thomas More as one of their "Inspirers". On the French version, they cite two other sources of inspiration from the Devotio Moderna tradition, Gerard Grote and Thomas a Kempis.

As the pattern is for these English Catholic nuns in exile after the English Reformation, they had to return to England for refuge during the French Revolution--and were mostly welcomed with some sympathy for their plight. But as Professor Page points out, these nuns returned to the Continent.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Because the staff of the Son Rise Morning Show take the Memorial Day Holiday off, I will not discuss any of Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's "Mementoes" on Monday, May 29. The next Preview Post will be on Friday, June 2 and the next segment on Monday, June 5!

Francis Young's Survey of English Reformation History Scholarship

I do not have access to this review article which Francis Young announced on his blog:

My review article ‘Surveying a Field Come of Age’ has just been published in the journal British Catholic History. The book is a review of Robert E. Scully and Angela Ellis’s Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland, but also goes beyond that to take stock of the historiography of early modern British Catholicism and the field’s recent evolution. The appearance of summative companions like Scully and Ellis’s is an indication that the field is approaching, or has attained, maturity and is seeking ways to define its identity and communicate it to scholars in other disciplines as well as to the wider public.

Nevertheless, I just wanted to capture this great list of references I can see:

1. See Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

2. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Boydell, 1999).

3. See, for example, Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

4. John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975).

5. Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

6. Frederick Smith, ‘The Origins of Recusancy in Elizabethan England Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal 60:2 (2017): 301–32.

7. Ceri Law, Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge, 1535–1584 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018).

8. Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011); Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

9. Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009); James Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

10. R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ulrich Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

11. See, for example, James Kelly and Hannah Thomas, eds. Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580–1789: ‘The World is our House’ (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka, eds. Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

12. Richard P. Williams, ed. Mannock Strickland (1683 – 1744): Agent to English Convents in Flanders: Letters and Accounts from Exile (Woodbridge: Catholic Record Society, 2016); Philip Perry, Essay on the Life and Manners of Robert Grosseteste, ed. Jack Cunningham (Woodbridge: Catholic Record Society, 2022).

13. Victoria Moul, A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

14. Emilie Murphy, ‘Adoramus te Christe: Music and Post-Reformation English Catholic Domestic Piety’, Studies in Church History 50 (2014): 240–53; Emilie Murphy, ‘Music and Catholic Culture in Post-Reformation Lancashire: Piety, Protest and Conversion’, British Catholic History 32:4 (2015): 492–525.

As Young indicates, the field of English Reformation and Early Modern Catholic history has come a long way from the days when Maurice Powicke's The Reformation in England and H. Outram Evennett's The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation were highlights of the academic, non-confessional study of that era. It's just too bad, for me at least, that so many of these resources are so expensive! The book that tops his review essay, for example, costs $299.00!

A Church Papist's Hidden Catholic Chapel? and Drops of Blood and Water

Author Francis Young posts on his blog a link to an article he co-authored with Brigitte Webster in The Catholic Herald (and the link seems to work now/not behind a pay-wall):

This month’s Catholic Herald contains an article by me and Brigitte Webster, the owner of Old Hall in Barnham Broom, Norfolk, about a 16th-century domestic chapel discovered inside the house earlier this century, but whose significance has only recently been realised. The chapel (which may date from the 1570s) features a distinctive pattern of black and white drops representing the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side, as well as an aumbry and the probable remains of a piscina. The decorative scheme quite closely resembles a well-known chapel at Harvington Hall in Worcestershire. Since the Chamberlain family who lived at Barnham Broom were never recorded as recusants, it is likely this is some of the first evidence of a domestic oratory used for Catholic worship by a family of church papists. If true, this is confirmation of the case advanced by Alexandra Walsham and other historians that church papists were every bit as committed to Catholicism and to their Catholic identity as recusants; church papists simply chose to express their Catholicism in a different way.

Church Papists outwardly conformed to avoid the fines for not attending Church of England services and the harassment and other penalties of being Catholic in Protestant England. Young is suggesting that this hidden chapel is evidence of their efforts to remain faithfully Catholic. The connection of the decoration of the chapel with the "distinctive pattern of black and white drops representing the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side" and that same decoration in the secret chapel at Harvington Hall is important, since the latter was the home of known recusants, who paid the fines and suffered the inconveniences of their faith.

In the article, Young and Webster make it clear that even being a Church Papist during Elizabeth I's reign was dangerous:

Because we usually have no evidence of legal proceedings against church papists (for the obvious reason that they stayed under the radar of the authorities), we have very little evidence for who these people were. However, in the 1560s and ’70s the gentry of East Anglia were notoriously sympathetic to Catholicism and both recusancy and church papistry were rife – so much so that, in 1578, Elizabeth came on progress to Norfolk and Suffolk as part of a crackdown on Catholics. The Queen deliberately visited Catholics, singled them out, humiliated them and arranged their trial and imprisonment.

Catholicism in East Anglia was never quite the same after the royal progress of 1578, which stamped out the widespread and semi-public crypto-Catholicism of earlier years and confined Catholicism to a core of the most committed families, such as the Bedingfields of Oxburgh. We cannot know whether the celebration of Mass in the secret chapel at Barnham Broom Old Hall survived this crackdown or not, but the chapel transports us back to a murky world where it was eminently possible for those who remained Catholic at heart to attend Protestant services in the parish church while also hearing Mass in private – sometimes celebrated by the same parish priest.

Here's a perfect example of how Elizabeth I "deliberately visited Catholics, singled them out, humiliated them and arranged their trial and imprisonment": Edward Rookwood of Euston Hall.

But since this is July, the month of devotion to the Precious Blood of Christ, shed during His Passion, in the Agony in the Garden, in the Scourging and Crowning with thorns, and on the Cross, it's appropriate to highlight those symbolic drops of blood and water representing the Blood and Water that flowed from His pierced Heart on the cross as described in St. John's Gospel ("But one of the soldiers with a spear opened His side, and immediately there came out blood and water. And he that saw it hath given testimony, and his testimony is true"). From the early days of the Church, Christians have meditated on the meaning of that Blood and Water, usually identifying the Blood with the Eucharist and the Water with Baptism. It's also appropriate to recall the great devotion to the Five Wounds of Christ in England before the Reformation. 

They may have been hiding it, but the Chamberlain family maintained their traditional devotion, and for a time at least, may have had a priest to celebrate Mass, consecrating bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ.

Yesterday evening I was able to attend Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite for the Feast of the Most Precious Blood at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church! A good start to the month, as will be the First Friday Mass at our Cathedral today! 

From the Litany of the Precious Blood of Jesus:

Blood of Christ, falling upon the earth in Agony, save us.
Blood of Christ, shed profusely in the Scourging, save us.
Blood of Christ, flowing forth in the Crowning with Thorns, save us.
Blood of Christ, poured out on the Cross, save us.
Blood of Christ, price of our salvation, save us.

New Blog Added; New (Revised) Book Announced

I added a blog to my list of blogs I follow (on the right hand column of my blog): that of Francis Young, historian and author:

Francis Young is a UK-based historian and folklorist specialising in the history of religion and supernatural belief. He is the author of 14 books. His research interests include monasticism, saints, the history of magic and ritual (especially exorcism), early modern Catholicism, fairy belief and European paganism. He is especially interested in the history of England, Ireland and the Baltic states. He is also a professional indexer and a translator specialising in medieval and early modern Latin.

Francis was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and studied Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and Classics at University of Wales, Lampeter before receiving his doctorate in History from Cambridge University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was Volumes Editor for the Catholic Record Society between 2015 and 2017. He spent several years as Head of Sixth Form at an English cathedral school, and is a Reader in the Church of England. Two of his books have previously been shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award.

Recently on his website/blog he announced that he's signed a contract to revise an important study of Catholicism in England with the author of the original edition of English Catholicism 1558-1642 published by Routledge:

Published in 1983, Alan Dures’s textbook for A Level and undergraduate students English Catholicism, 1558-1642, is something of a minor classic; long out of print, it remains the only textbook on English Catholicism ever written at this level, as an introduction to the field for students just setting out on the academic study of History. Alan Dures and I have just signed a contract with Routledge to bring out a thoroughly revised second edition of this important textbook in Routledge’s Seminar Studies in History series. The second edition will be thoroughly revised and updated to reflect the seismic changes in the historiography of English Catholicism in the last 40 years, and it will (we hope) become a key resource for students developing an interest in the phenomenon of English Catholicism at an early stage in their studies.

I ordered a used copy of the first edition so that if I can later obtain a copy of the new edition, I will be able to compare them. So when I read this book in either edition, I'll be a teenager again. It's a textbook for A Level students, after all:

Advanced Levels or A-Levels are subject-based qualifications that British students aged 16 or older must get if they plan to enter university or just want to gain better knowledge in a particular study area or profession they’re into.

A-Level courses are provided by Sixth Form Colleges and Further Education Colleges. In essence, these two institutions are the same except that Further Education Colleges operate separately from high schools, offer a wider range of courses and qualifications, plus ensure a different learning environment compared to high schools.

Perish the thought!