| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines how geopolitical circumstances at the start of the Thirty Years War allowed English Catholics to imagine, and attempt to enact, radical changes to the existing post-Reformation religious settlement, exposing both the remarkable instability of that settlement and the centrality of religious difference in political calculation. In the early 1620s, the Stuart regime engaged in a series of marriage negotiations with the leading European Catholic dynasties, first with Spain, then France, in an attempt to resolve the compounding conflicts on the continent sparked by the Bohemian crisis. Both proposed cross-confessional marriages would require a papal dispensation, the associated demands of which included the relaxation of laws governing religious conformity across the British Isles. The dynastic conjuncture, therefore, opened a space for English Catholics to enter into the public and political arena with force.
In thinking across different confessional identities and national contexts, this dissertation draws together a number of sources usually considered separately—integrating detailed engagement with parliamentary records; an analysis of diplomatic maneuvering through the correspondence of in/formal state agents; and the interrogation of those sources which speak to the politics of a broad-based public sphere, including sermons, plays, circulating manuscripts, and print. This expansive source base is read against the activities and expressed intentions of English Catholics, captured in surviving clerical newsletters and reconstructed with particular attention to divisions within the English Catholic community. The resulting narrative depicts politics-in-motion, reconstructing the effects of sustained religious pluralism, from the local to the transnational, and back down again. A political narrative attentive to English Catholicism offers a fundamentally different view of the English crisis of the 1620s—a crisis which looks less like an Anglo-centric, Puritan-centric, constitutional conflict, less exceptional on some path toward modernity, and rather more like one part of a European-wide effort to deal with the religious difference imbedded within and between states by the doctrinal and legal Reformation of the sixteenth century. | |
