Going Nowhere Fast? The Historiography of Catholicism in Post-Reformation Britain

Abstract

abstract:The way that scholars have discussed Catholicism inside the Church of England after the Reformation has been problematic. If the English Reformation is, as some have claimed, an anomaly, then post-Reformation Catholicism in England and the British Isles can sometimes seem to be an irrelevance. This essay revisits the recent historiography of the topic and makes the case for a "narrative turn" in the way that we think and write about it. If we do this, the subject might be rescued from its tendency toward introspection and made compatible with the best current writing on the rest of the English Church in that period, and indeed the politics of the Reformation more generally.