Focusing on England, this volume investigates written communication in the two centuries before and after the introduction of printing. It explores the boundaries between script and print and considers the relationship of these media with the culture of speech. Contributors consider the applications of script and print by a variety of individuals, groups and communities in the spheres of religion, law, scholarship and politics. They also reassess long-standing assumptions about the impact of printing and the historical divisions it had come to represent.

Belief in the importance of angels was as widespread and intense in the early modern era as it had been in the middle ages. This volume is the first to consider how ideas about the nature, existence and activities of angels negotiated the religious, intellectual and cultural upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The contributors explore the fate and fortunes of these heavenly protectors and messengers against the backdrop of the Renaissance and Reformation and in the context of scientific change. Ranging from the British Isles and continental Europe to New England and Latin...

Church Papist' was a nickname, a term of abuse, for those English Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established Protestant Church and yet inwardly remained Roman Catholics. The more dramatic stance of recusancy has drawn historians' attention away from this sizeable, if statistically indefinable, proportion of Church of England congregations, but its existence and significance is here clearly revealed through contemporary records, challenging the sectarian model of post-Reformation Catholicism perpetuated by previous historians. Alexandra Walsham explores the aggressive reaction of...

Charitable Hatred presents a challenging new perspective on religious tolerance and intolerance in early modern England. Setting aside traditional models that seek to chart a path of linear progress from persecution to toleration, it emphasises instead the complex interplay between these two impulses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book examines the intellectual assumptions that underpinned attitudes towards religious minorities and the institutional structures and legal mechanisms by which they were both repressed and accommodated. It also explores the social realities of...

Founded in 1415, the double monastery of Syon Abbey was the only English example of the order established by the fourteenth-century mystic St Bridget of Sweden. After its dispersal at the Dissolution, the community survived in exile and was briefly restored during the reign of Mary I; but with the accession of Elizabeth I, some of the nuns and brothers once again sought refuge on the Continent, first in the Netherlands and later in Lisbon. This volume of essays traces the fortunes of Syon Abbey and the Bridgettine order between 1400 and 1700, examining the various ways in which reading and...