It is not often that a full-length work on recusant history appears in a foreign language, and for this reason the Reverend Bruno Navarra's book in Italian, Filippo Michele Ellis: Segni e la sua Diocesi nei primi del ‘700 (Roma, Centro Studi del Lazio [1973], Piazza Montecitorio, 115), should be brought to the attention of Recusant History readers. This book on Philip Michael Ellis, O.S.B., first Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, and later Bishop of Segni in Italy, should be most welcome to anyone interested in English Catholicism during the time of James II and the early years of the eighteenth century. There has been a noticeable lack of biographical research, either general or particular, on those involved in the organization of the English Catholic Church at the end of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the time has come for a more specific picture of this period; to a very limited degree Navarra has filled some of the lacuna.

Bernard Burder, Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Bernard's, Leicestershire, from 1853 to 1858 is largely forgotten today; but for a few years in the middle of the last century his activities were important, and to a considerable extent, anticipated those of Archbishop Manning in the field of reformatory education. Burder's spiritual progress was similar to Newman's: he began life as a nonconformist, was then converted to Anglicanism and finally joined the Catholic Church one year after Newman. That same year, 1846, he entered Mount St Bernard's and on the death of its first Abbot, Dom Bernard Palmer, in 1853, was, in December of that year, elected to succeed him.

Maude Domenica Petre (1863-1942) has long been associated with the Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, but for the most part she has remained in the background. Whatever has been written about her has usually been in connection with George Tyrrell, since as his close friend, biographer and literary executor, she is a key source of information about him. Apart from that, there is her own apparent desire to stay somewhat in the background. She tells us very little about herself in her writings, and even in her quasi-autobiography, My Way of Faith, written in 1936 when she was 73 and could look back on a long and full life, she is very reluctant to focus on herself. And yet, in her own right she was a remarkable woman. Apart from the books which she either edited or translated, she wrote more than fourteen books of her own on a variety of subjects, as well as numerous articles. This paper, then, will focus on Maude Petre herself, using her own writings and the Petre Papers which were presented to the British Library some time after her death.

It is not unusual, when reading about Modernism, to notice references to the ‘Ward Family Papers’. De la Bedoyère and Barmann both had access to the von Hugel letters from the Ward Family Papers when they wrote their studies of the Baron; Laubacher's study of development of dogma in Tyrrell used his letters to Ward, the originals of which have recently been found. Ward's involvement in the Synthetic Society heightened interest in the papers for what they might yield about various late-nineteenth-century thinkers. Finally, no one has been sure how many of the papers and documents used by Maisie Ward still exist and how many of them might contain more information. I spent the summer of 1976 sorting, classifying and arranging the Ward Family Papers, a task made easier by the methodical work of Thomas Michael Loome some years ago. I classified the papers stored in London, surveyed the Ward material now housed on the Isle of Wight and retrieved some items that had been stored at Crosby, near Liverpool. The present Wilfrid Ward has, at his house on the Isle of Wight, the library of Wilfrid Ward with his annotations, and two small minute books of the Synthetic Society. The book collection may or may not be complete, and Ward's notes in them are not many and seldom legible. There is nothing else at the Isle of Wight house except personal family papers, the letters of Ward and his wife, some of the papers of Josephine Ward and her letters to various other people, and the letters of some of the children. The papers of Maisie Ward and Leo Ward (Wilfrid's children) are housed with the Sheed and Ward collection, still in private hands. The papers and letters from Crosby have been added to the London papers.