Another Recusant Scholar

From  I News:

They were monks who disavowed worldly possessions and are best known for their monastic scholarship and abstinence. 

But far from living a cloistered existence, sixteenth and seventeenth century Benedictines refused abstinence, died in duels and went off to war, a study has found. 

The Monks in Motion project led by Dr James Kelly of Durham University’s Department of Theology and Religion has also found that they spread illegal Catholic doctrine. 

It has brought together records of English and Welsh Benedictine monks exiled in Europe in a first-of-its-kind searchable database to uncover some of their remarkable histories.

Read the rest there.

Dr. James Kelly of Durham University:

I am St Cuthbert's Society Research Fellow in Early Modern British and Irish Catholicism and have been a member of Durham University's Department of Theology and Religion and its Centre for Catholic Studies since 2012. I am also Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded 'Monks in Motion' project, which is investigating the experience of the English and Welsh Benedictines in exile, c.1553-1800.

After completing my PhD at King's College, London, I was a member of the AHRC-funded ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ project and Project Manager of its AHRC-funded follow-on initiative, both at Queen Mary, University of London.

My interests are in post-Reformation Catholic history in Europe, with a particular focus on Britain and Ireland. The experience of the British and Irish Catholic communities at home and in exile is the main focus of my research.

I lead the History of Catholicism research strand within the University's Centre for Catholic Studies. I am also an associate and member of the steering committee of the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English, as well as serving as secretary of the Catholic Record Society.

Here's more on that "Who Were the Nuns?" project. It's clear that the recusant Catholic community, clerical, religious, and lay, offers many avenues for research. A review of the table of contents for Dr. Kelly's co-edited book, Early Modern English Catholicism, demonstrates that:

Part I: Identity

1. Situating Early Modern English Catholicism by Brad S. Gregory

2. Creating an English Catholic Identity: Relics, Martyrs and English Women Religious in Counter-Reformation Europe by James E. Kelly

3. A British Catholic Community? Ethnicity, Identity and Recusant Politics, 1660–1750 by Gabriel Glickman

4. ‘Libera nos Domine?’ The Vicars Apostolic and the Suppressed/Restored English Province of the Society of Jesus by Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

Part II: Memory

5. ‘Attend to Me’: Julian of Norwich, Margaret Gascoigne and Textual Circulation among the Cambrai Benedictines by Jaime Goodrich

6. English Catholics and English Heretics: The Lollards and Anti-Heresy Writing in Early Modern England by Susan Royal

7. Joseph Reeve, SJ, the Park at Ugbrooke and the Cliffords of Chudleigh by Matthew J. Martin

Part III: Counter-Reformation

8. Underground Networks, Prisons and the Circulation of Counter-Reformation Books in Elizabethan England by Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton

9. The Gospel, Liturgy and Controversy in the 1590s: Thomas Stapleton’s Promptuaria by William J. Sheils

10. Praying the Counter-Reformation by  Eamon Duffy

11. John Austin’s Devotions: Voicing Lyric, Voicing Prayer by Susannah B. Monta

Afterword by John Bossy

English recusant historians are discovering a world and people that were ignored for centuries. They are finding out how Catholics survived and endured through oppression and persecution, in exile and in their underground communities.

Recusant Studies's Rising Scholars

History Today asked Jessie Childs 20 questions and one of them was:

Q. What’s the most exciting field in history today?

A. Recusant history. So many brilliant scholars coming up - Emilie Murphy, Liesbeth Corens, Katie McKeogh …

Here's what those three "brilliant scholars" are working on, according to their online presence:

Emilie Murphy:

Music and Catholic culture in post-Reformation Lancashire: piety, protest, and conversion in the October 2015 issue of British Catholic History from Cambridge University Press:

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.

Dr Liesbeth Corens:

I am an early modern historian studying the intersection between religious, cultural and social history in a cross-border perspective. My work has focused on English Catholicism as an insightful case study to analyse the Counter-Reformation. 

My first book assesses the lay English Catholic expatriate experience in terms of a broad concept of ‘confessional mobility’. I bring to light a diverse spectrum of mobility, which nuances the traditional focus on exile and its implications of stasis, isolation, and victimhood. By recognising the role of transient contact and ephemeral networks integrating mobile and stay-at-home Catholics, the significance of expatriates in shaping religious and political life in England becomes clear. 

My current project is on the ‘counter-archives’ which English Catholics started to create in the later seventeenth century. They accumulated disparate sources of their recent past in an attempt to save theirs and their ancestors’ stories from oblivion. Historians have used the individual records in these collections as direct sources for the sixteenth century, but thereby lose the context of the commemorative culture of the seventeenth. I am mainly fascinated by the practices of compiling the collections: how these were part of a vibrant devotional life, how the collections helped them to make sense of their situation as a dispersed community (uniting through their collecting activities English Catholics scattered all over England and across the Channel), and how they deliberately talked to posterity.

Here's more information about her first book which is based on her dissertation, under contract with Oxford University Press.

I can see why Jessie Childs is lauding Katie McKeogh, a D.Phil. candidate at the University of Oxford:

Thesis: Early Modern Catholic Identity and Culture in the Circle of Sir Thomas Tresham, 1580-1611

Supervisors: Susan Brigden and Alexandra Gajda

My doctoral research centres around Sir Thomas Tresham (1543-1605) and his circle between 1580-1611. My work examines his world through personal relationships, reading, book-collecting, and patronage alongside the more traditional subjects of resistance and loyalism. Through recourse to extensive family correspondence, access to his library and use of hitherto understudied manuscript sources intimately connected to Tresham and his circle, my thesis will provide a significant contribution to our understanding of gentry Catholic culture and identity in this period, as well as illuminating these immensely rich sources in their own right. It draws on scholarship by historians of the book and historians of libraries to enrich traditional historiographical methods. I have worked extensively on Tresham's personal library and a large donation of books to St. John's College, Oxford, and have also undertaken an in-depth study of Bodleian MSS Eng. Th. b. 1-2, a two folio-volume manuscript work by the layman Thomas Jollet, which has resulted in new arguments about its authorship, compilation, content, and broader significance. Through an original synthesis of these strands of Tresham's world, my thesis offers a reappraisal of this important figure and in particular his role as a leader of the loyalist cause.

More broadly, I am interested in the religious and cultural history of early modern England, and in incorporating musicology, literary criticism, biography and the history of the book into traditional historical research.

Katie McKeogh reviewed Jessie Childs' book on the Gunpowder Plot, God's Traitors for the History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland: you may find a link here. And here's more of her publications and lectures.