Mary Ward, one of the most interesting and attractive figures in early modern history, was born in Yorkshire during a period of relentless persecution for English Catholics. At a time when strict enclosure was prescribed for religious orders of women, she felt called by God to found a new congregation, modelled on the Society of Jesus: self-governing, unenclosed, and available for apostolic work worldwide, including the support of priests on the dangerous English Mission. Whether engaged in travel by sea and long, mountainous journeys, or planning with supportive Catholic princes for the...

First published edition of documents and letters from a highly-significant incident within the nineteenth-century Catholic church.

In 1538 John Russell, secretary to the Council of the Welsh Marches, acquired the dissolved priory of Little Malvern, where his descendants, the Beringtons, still live. This selection from the family letters in the Worcestershire Record Office vividly illustrates the impact on Worcestershire of the Reformation and the Civil War. Among much else, it includes correspondence with Thomas Cromwell and Lord Chancellor Audley (who was John Russell's brother-in-law); Elizabethan medical prescriptions and business letters; correspondence about evading the penal laws against Catholics; a mock-heroic...

These letters, covering the years between 1850 and 1872, illustrate the complex issues facing the newly-established Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. Bishop Alexander Goss was closely involved in the struggles to assert diocesan independence from Westminster and undue interference by Rome and was a determined upholder of his episcopal rights, -strong and resolute almost to vehemence - the crozier, hook and point- as Cardinal Manning claimed. At the same time, as leader of the diocese with the largest number of Catholics in England and Wales, he faced the problems of serving the needs...

Between 1728 and 1744 the Catholic lawyer Mannock Strickland (1673-1744) acted as agent for English nuns living on the Continent, including St Monica's, Louvain, the Brussels Dominicans and the Dunkirk Benedictines. Most convent archives perished at the French Revolution, but Strickland's papers survived in the archives of Mapledurham House, Oxfordshire, offering a unique insight into the workings of English convents. These extraordinary documents reveal the reality of exile for a group of formidable yet vulnerable women, -doubly dead- to English law. Two hundred letters tell stories of...