“Three Thomases”: Tres Thomae, a Catholic work by Thomas Stapleton
Here is another text-searchable PDF file of an early modern text. Here's the link. This is the second (1612) edition of Thomas Stapleton's account of the lives of Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Beckett and Thomas More. The first edition was published in Douai in 1588. Somewhat neglected these days, Stapleton was a leading Catholic controversialist…
Protestant / Catholic polemic: Lucius Cary (Viscount of Falkland), Thomas White and William Chillingworth
The 1660 edition of Lucius Cary's Discourse of Infallibility (first published in 1646 ) is my latest book scan. There's more interest these days in Cary's mother, Elizabeth (1585–1639), the first woman writer known to have written a play. Elizabeth Cary's literary career isn't really relevant here, but she plays a part in the complex…
The Gunpowder-Treason: with a discourse of the manner of its discovery
Go straight to the scanned book Although this work was published many years after the events it describes, and its main content is reprinted, it also contains the first printing of a number of letters relating to the plot. It is not a scarce work, and there is at least one other online copy (in…
A 15th-century manuscript book of hours
Go straight to the scanned PDFs This week's book scan is a bit different from my usual fare. It's a manuscript, it's from the 15th century, it's not primarily related to suffering and - because of the limitations of OCR (optical character reader) software - it's not text-searchable. But if you have any interest in…
MAURUS SCOTT, CATHOLIC MARTYR (SCANNED DOCUMENT)
It's a common enough tale, I suppose. Young man goes to Cambridge, studies law, goes to the inner Temple to complete his training, gets converted to Catholicism and ends up being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Maurus Scott was one of some 355 Catholics who were either put to death or died in prison…
What’s wrong with Pain, Pleasure and Perversity?
To say I wrote it in 9 months flat, not much. Two years after publication I've had enough feedback and enough time to think about it to be able to reflect on it and, while one or two flaws have been pointed out to me, nothing particularly damaging to my basic argument has come to…
Protestant Reception of Catholic Literature
This is a PowerPoint presentation I made at the Reformation Studies Colloquium, Edmund Murray College, University of Cambridge, September 12th, 2014. It contains the gist of two recently-published papers, "The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature in England to 1700" (Recusant History, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2014), pp. 67-89), and "Robert…
The Terrifying Coldness of St. Agnes
In early modern literature, the powerful, dominating female is frequently depicted as a temptress, an agent of evil, enticing her victims to ruination, but torment and destruction can come at the hands of the virtuous as easily as at those of the wicked. A man loses his head to the righteous Judith just…
Suffering Saints
During the seventeenth century, there were more than a hundred Catholic editions in English of exemplary lives of saints and other holy people, most of which emphasize a willingness – amounting sometimes to what appears to be a compulsion – to suffer pain and degradation, in conjunction with avowals of chastity and a rejection of…
