This volume presents a critical edition of the immensely influential and popular first version of The Christian Directory, by the notorious Elizabethan Jesuit leader, Robert Persons. It was written during and immediately after the English Mission of 1580-1, which ended with the martyrdom of his companion Edmund Campion. Persons's work, originally entitled The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, appertayning to Resolution, attempts to persuade the reader to be resolved in the service of God. It deals with the motives and obstacles to such resolution. This edition includes a full apparatus of the alterations made to Persons's work by the Edmund Bunny, whose Protestant edition became an Elizabethan bestseller. It will be particularly useful to historians of the Catholic reformation and students of early modern English prose.
Robert Persons is recognized as one of the most intriguing public figures of the Reformation era in England. As the superior of the Jesuit English mission from 1580 until 1610, he was engaged in a campaign for the reconversion of England that had wide political, ecclesiastical, pastoral, and polemical ramifications--Prelim. page.
De Persecutione Anglicana has been described as the most famous martyrological work by an English Catholic during the Reformation period and is presented here for the first time in an accessible authoritative edition. Robert Persons (1546-1610) was a Jesuit activist, controversialist, missionary strategist and educationist whose importance has become increasingly appreciated over the past decades thanks to the rapid growth of early modern British Catholic studies. His prolific work is well known and widely studied but his Latin writing is neglected as inaccessible to many scholars"--
Bob Betterton has been a faithful Catholic for 80 years and is unafraid to show that the emperor often has no clothes. While courageously defending the church in a time when it's easier to back away from it than stay within and build it up, his suggestions for change have the authority of one who has studied the issues his whole life and knows what he is talking about. At once autobiographical, theological, and spiritual, Saving the Catholic Church While Sitting in a Pew is a timely book for others who love the church and are interested in preserving what matters most."--Michael Leach, author of Why Stay Catholic? "If all the clerics in America would honestly consider what this book makes so clear, the "future American Church" might stand a chance."--William J. O'Malley SJ, author of The WOW Factor"Objective research, illuminated by imagination, humor and common sense, makes Saving the Catholic Church While Sitting in a Pew a hope-filled treatise for frustrated Catholics. Read it, underline what resonates, then buy a second copy for a friend.--Barbara G. Reynolds, former Chair Religious Studies Department, Fordham Prep"Critical analysis of the American Catholic Church by Lay Persons currently has some very articulate voices, both from Journalism and from Academe. Think: Curran, Gibson, Lakeland, Leach, Steinfels and Wilkes. Here, now, is an articulate voice which quite literally rises up from the pews to define the genre of the "Critical Catholic." No one I know of has attempted to assay the size of this group. I do know that this book will attract a lot of new members to it. One "C" to which Bob's first book did not refer is most important in this one: Constructive!"--Ronald A. Naumann, MD, Non-complacent Pastoral Council Member
This volume presents a critical edition of the immensely influential and popular first version of The Christian Directory, by the notorious Elizabethan Jesuit leader, Robert Persons. It was written during and immediately after the English Mission of 1580-1, which ended with the martyrdom of his companion Edmund Campion. Persons's work, originally entitled The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, appertayning to Resolution, attempts to persuade the reader to be resolved in the service of God. It deals with the motives and obstacles to such resolution. This edition includes a full apparatus of the alterations made to Persons's work by the Edmund Bunny, whose Protestant edition became an Elizabethan bestseller. It will be particularly useful to historians of the Catholic reformation and students of early modern English prose.
As we enter a Community of Faith for the first time, we are naturally drawn to a shared spirituality. It may be a congregation, synagogue, mosque, or temple. It is shared spiritually of the people at prayer which attracts us and draws us to unite with others in prayer. There are three shared stands of any Community of Faith: their shared faith tradition, the culture of the community, and the personalities of the members. This book examines the elements of tradition, culture, and personal temperament to determine how the three become spiritually integrated at the moment of prayer. The conclusion is that through an explicit assessment of these three elements, members of the faith community can enrich their personal spiritual life, resulting in spiritual growth and can ultimately revitalize the spiritual prayer life of the community of faith. The books is a spiritual intervention of a Presbyterian congregation in Central New York in the 1980s. I'm grateful for the prayer group that committed there Wednesday nights during 1986. This is their story of how they were able to revitalize the spiritual life of a 150-year-old three-hundred-member Presbyterian congregation.
Early Modern Catholicism makes available in modern spelling and punctuation substantial Catholic contributions to literature, history, political thought, devotion, and theology in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than perpetuate the usual stereotypes and misinformation, it provides a fresh look at Catholic writing long suppressed, marginalized, and ignored. The anthology gives back voices to those silenced by prejudice, exile, persecution, or martyrdomwhile attention to actual texts challenges conventional beliefs about the period.The anthology is divided into eight sections entitled Controversies, Lives and Deaths, Poetry, Instructions and Devotions, Drama, Histories, Fiction, and Documents, and includes sixteen black and white illustrations from a variety of Early Modern sources. Amongst the selections are texts which illuminate the role of women in recusant community and in the Church; the rich traditions of prayer and mysticism; the theology and politics of martyrdom; the emergence of the Catholic Baroque inliterature and art; and the polemical battles fought within the Church and against its enemies. Early Modern Catholicism also provides a context that redefines the established canons of Early Modern England, including such figures as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and BenJonson.
Bireley explores the anti-Machavellian tradition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the writers who cultivated it, including Giovanni Botero and Justus Lipsius. The tradition produced an international political literature that is immensely important for understanding the Counter-Reformation, Baroque culture, and early modern politics and diplomacy. Originally published in 1990. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
This book challenges the adequacy of identifying religious identity with confessional identity. The Reformation complicated the issue of religious identity, especially among Christians for whom confessional violence at home and religious wars on the continent had made the darkness of confessionalization visible. Robert E. Stillman explores the identity of “Christians without names,” as well as their agency as cultural actors in order to recover their consequence for early modern religious, political, and poetic history. Stillman argues that questions of religious identity have dominated historical and literary studies of the early modern period for over a decade. But his aim is not to resolve the controversies about early modern religious identity by negotiating new definitions of English Protestants, Catholics, or “moderate” and “radical” Puritans. Instead, he provides an understanding of the culture that produced such a heterogeneous range of believers by attending to particular figures, such as Antonio del Corro, John Harington, Henry Constable, and Aemilia Lanyer, who defined their pious identity by refusing to assume a partisan label for themselves. All of the figures in this study attempted as Christians to situate themselves beyond, between, or against particular confessions for reasons that both foreground pious motivations and inspire critical scrutiny. The desire to move beyond confessions enabled the birth of new political rhetorics promising inclusivity for the full range of England’s Christians and gained special prominence in the pursuit of a still-imaginary Great Britain. Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England is a book that early modern literary scholars need to read. It will also interest students and scholars of history and religion.
This work places the Syriac New Testament in the Antwerp Polyglot within a new appreciation of sixteenth century Catholic Syriac and Oriental scholarship. The Spanish antecedents of the Polyglot and the role of Montano in its production are evaluated before the focus is turned upon the Northern Scholars who prepared the Syriac edition. Their motivation is shown, particularly in the case of Guillaume Postel, to derive from both Christian kabbalah and an insistent eschatological timetable. The principles of Christian kabbalah found in the Polyglot are then shown to be characteristic also of Guy Lefevre de la Boderie's 1584 Paris edition of the Syriac New Testament dedicated to Henri III. This work completes the account of sixteenth century Syriac bibles begun in the companion volume Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation which also appears with Brill.
From one of the leading historians of Christianity comes this sweeping reassessment of religious freedom, from the church fathers to John Locke In the ancient world Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build. Chronicling the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, Robert Louis Wilken shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how "the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day.
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