English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris: 79 (Royal Historical Society Studies in History New Series) - Tapa dura

Paint[s] a rich, nuanced picture of Elizabethan Catholic life. EUROPEAN HISTORY QUARTERLY

Engaging and stimulating. CATHOLIC HISTORICAL REVIEW

[It] will serve as a useful introduction to those unfamiliar with the cultures of foreign Catholicism in Elizabethan England. It is, in many ways, an excellent book, lucid, honest and reliable. It will command a wide audience in any course on English religious identities, and deservedly so. JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

A fine account. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW

[A] well researched and finely crafted monograph. [.] This study deserves to be widely read. Its careful analysis of exile movements, motivations, and connections suggests further reasons for rejecting the simplistic binary of "loyal" and "disloyal" papists around whom the study of post-Reformation Catholicism was until recently configured. SIXTEENTH CENTURY JOURNAL

A welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that places the Early Modern British Catholic experience in the context of European politics and religious struggle. [It is] a well-researched and elegant book that adds an important new dimension to our understanding of Early Modern religious exile. RECUSANT HISTORY
BR> [An] engaging and stimulating book [and] and important contribution. CATHOLIC HISTORICAL REVIEW

Religious exile was both a familiar and a deeply discomforting phenomenon in Reformation Europe. In the turbulent context of the later sixteenth century, a group of English Catholic exiles in Paris became a source of serious concern to the Protestant government at home and a destabilising presence in their host environment; their residence in Paris coincided with and contributed to a crisis in authority for the French Crown, and the buildup to the Spanish enterprise of England.
This book uses a range of evidence from both sides of the Channel to investigate the polemical and practical impact of religious exile. It reconstructs the experience and priorities of the English Catholic laity and clergy in Paris, moving beyond contemporary stereotypes of the exiles, and the traditional historiographical view of English Catholicism as isolated and introverted. It emphasises the importance of placing English Catholic experience into a broader European context, shedding light on the significant place of France in their activity, thus offering a new angle entirely on the relationship between England and the continent in the early modern period.

Katy Gibbons is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth.