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…
Archbiship Laud: A History of the Troubles and Tryal
The scanning continues! I had some technical problems that needed dealing with, so I'm two or three months behind with the early modern book scans, but I'm back in production now. Henry Wharton's 1695 edition of Laud's account of his imprisonment and trial, published as A History of the Troubles and Tryal of the most…
All you ever wanted to know about the Reformation…
... in one 15-minute video!…
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…
Protestant Polemic and the Japanese Martyrs
This is my first post for a while, partly because I've been focusing on other things, and partly because, when I did turn my attention in this direction and tried to post, the blog had disappeared! It took a while, but eventually I managed to sort out the problems and get it back, so here…
Early modern discourse communities: Catholics and Protestants
A discourse community can be defined as having six clear characteristics: 1. “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.” 2. “A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.” 3. “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.” 4. “A dis…
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…