Aspects of Recusant History

T.A. Birrell (25 July 1924–22 May 2011) was Professor of English and American Literature at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and Editor of the international periodical English Studies. In 1985 he retired from university in order to return to England and devote himself entirely to bibliographical and historical research. He became known as the historian ‘who charted the miraculous survival of the Old Royal Library’ (The Independent, 10 August 2011) and was a prominent member of the Catholic Record Society. He published extensively on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century book culture and recusant history. Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Frans Blom studied English at the Radboud University, Nijmegen and were subsequently appointed to teaching and research posts at the same university. Both together and separately they published extensively on English literature, history and book culture. Their collective editions (with Dom Geoffrey Scott of Douai Abbey as the fourth member of the team) include English Catholic Books 1701-1800 (1996), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (2007) and Catalogus Librorum Bibliothecae Benedictinorum Anglorum Sti Edmundi Parisiis MDCCII (2017).

Introduction; 1 Catholic Allegiance and the Popish Plot: a study of some Catholic writers of the Restoration period; 2 Non-Catholic writers and Catholic Emancipation: an aspect of Sidney Smith, Shelley, Coleridge and Cobbett; 3 Latter-day recusants; 4 English Catholics without a Bishop 1655–1672; 5 Robert Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal (1680); 6 Joseph Berington, The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (1793); 7 James Maurus Corker and Dryden’s conversion; 8 English Catholic mystics in non-Catholic circles: the taste for Middle English mystical literature and its derivatives from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries; 9 Recusant historiography: an historian looks at the achievements of 25 years’ study of recusancy; 10 William Leslie, Henry Howard and Lord Arlington 1666–67; 11 John Brown, Scottish Minim (1569–1643): a tale of three title pages; 12 English Counter-Reformation book culture; 13 Review of Paul Arblaster, Antwerp & the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven University Press 2004); 14 William Carter (c. 1549–84): recusant printer, publisher, binder, stationer, scribe – and martyr