This paper examines the lives and careers of two Welsh Catholics, David Stradling and Hugh Owen, who sought refuge on the Continent during the reign of Elizabeth I. Whereas something about Hugh Owen's life is known, particularly of his career as the creator of an intelligence service which countered that of Sir Francis Walsingham, David Stradling's life has, in contrast, remained somewhat obscure. Little is known of him other than some details of his family background and his education. My recent research at the Simancas Archive and at the Archives Royales de Bruxelles, however, has revealed hitherto unknown sources that now provide further information on both men. In describing the events of their flight from England to the Continent and their establishment there, I re-examine the circle of well-known English Catholic refugees in the Spanish Low Countries and in Spain.

This article compares and contrasts the 1580 texts A briefe discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church by Robert Persons, and Gwssanaeth y Gwŷr Newydd by Robert Gwyn. Both books deal with church papism, and were written whilst the authors were in Rome together. Despite the simi-larity of theme, and the fact that the two most likely consulted each other about the work, many significant differences remain between the two texts. This article seeks to discuss these differences, and to assess what conclusions can be inferred from them as to the relative conditions of English and Welsh Catholicism, and the effect that this had on the authors’ work.

This paper will discuss the history of the College of St Francis Xavier, the Welsh territorial district of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, and the history of Jesuit association with its headquarters, the Cwm farms at Llanrothal, near Hereford. One of 12 territorial divisions created by the Society of Jesus upon the creation of the English Province by 1623, the College of St Francis Xavier and its extensive surviving library, now housed at Hereford Cathedral, is being analysed as part of a three-year project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC]. The article argues for a re-evaluation of the Welsh District and its importance to the successes of the English Jesuit Province, concluding that, far from being a small, local missionary outpost of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, the College of St Francis Xavier, or the Welsh District, was in fact a diverse, vibrant and crucially important lynchpin in the successes of the Jesuits in England and Wales.

The Bishop's Palace at Ely was used as a prison for Catholics between 1577 and 1597, and between 1588 and 1597 was exclusively a prison for lay recusants. Its inmates included Abbot John Feckenham between 1577 and 1580 and Thomas Tresham, who was imprisoned in Ely four times. Unlike Wisbech Castle, however, the Palace at Ely's period as a prison for recusants has received little attention. This article draws on the documentary evidence for the Catholic prisoners in official records, as well as Tresham's extensive writings during his Ely imprisonment. It also draws on a newly discovered inventory of the Palace's contents in 1581, arguing that the prisoners, and Tresham in particular, were affected by their stay in Ely. It makes the case for the prisoners’ rich cultural life, as evidenced by the prison writings of Tresham and a fellow inmate, George Cotton, who used his time to translate Jesuit letters from Japan. The prisoners in the Bishop's Palace at Ely may have made less public noise than their fellow prisoners at Wisbech Castle, but like Wisbech, Ely was a focus of Catholic culture and resistance during the late Elizabethan period that deserves to be better understood.

Convent autobiography took many forms. We find it in conversion narratives and vidas por mandato, as well as in less obvious places, including chronicles, trans-lations, poetry, saints’ lives and the myriad forms of governance documents that structured convent life. Sometimes nuns wrote under their own names, but frequently they composed anonymously. How do we locate autobiographical acts within anonymous texts? This article proposes a new genre called ‘subsumed autobiography’ to describe anonymously composed texts whose authors shape and influence their work around themes that grow out of their personal interests, theology, politics and so on. It analyses the authorial strategies deployed by the first chronicler of the English Augustinian community of St Monica's (Louvain), and pays particular attention to the themes of Catholic education, Latinity, and the legacy of Sir Thomas More. This work is predicated on an earlier article in which the anonymous author of the chronicle was identified as Mary Copley (1591/2–1669).