Writing in 1532, the elderly Erasmus reflected on the hazards of marriage and parenthood: friendship, he concluded, is the prime source of comfort in human life, praecipuum humanae vitae solatium, ‘but even there trust is rare and inconstancy is common’. Given the span of acquaintance covered by the eleven volumes of correspondence collected by P. S. Allen in his Erasmi epistolae, Erasmus had plenty of opportunity to test this rather pessimistic view. Indeed, one suspects that it derived as much from his own touchiness as from the unreliability of his friends. Few of his friendships have received so much attention as that which he established with Thomas More, a relationship which lasted some thirty-six years, from Erasmus’ first visit to England in 1499 down to More's execution on 6th July 1535, and indeed until Erasmus’ own more domestic death in Basel almost exactly a year later. From an early date this was seen as a model friendship, something to be celebrated in the Republic of Letters. As we shall see, its religious implications were to prove more complex; but for much of the twentieth century More and Erasmus were conveniently paired as representatives of Christian humanism, a perception reinforced by More's canonization in 1935.

Between July and October 1580, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, who had landed at Dover in June, ‘passed through the most part of the shires of England, preaching and administering the sacraments in almost every gentleman's and nobleman's house that we passed by, whether he was Catholic or not, provided he had any Catholics in his house to hear us’. Between Christmas 1580 and Whitsun 1581 Campion went on a similar journey to the North, the itinerary of which can be recovered in fair detail from entries in the Acts of the Privy Council and from a summary of the subsequent examinations which was annotated by Lord Burghley. The mission of Campion and Persons (and of the dozen or so others who accompanied them from Rome) has rightly been regarded as a pivotal event in the story of Elizabethan recusancy. But no serious attempt has ever been made to reconstruct their itineraries in 1580.

None of Robert Southwell's writing illustrates as do the texts of A Shorte Rule of Good Life the conditions under which he wrote and the manner in which his work was transmitted by manuscript copy and printed book. Until recent years it was known only in rare printed copies representing a series of editions issued in rapid succession following Southwell's execution in 1595. The first, issued from Henry Garnet's second secret press in 1596 or 1597, was probably edited by Garnet himself. The volume also contained the first printing of Southwell's Epistle to his Father. There can be little doubt that ‘The Preface to the Reader’ preceding the Rule, though unsigned, was written by Garnet himself when the grief of loss was still raw. This was followed by two more editions from secret presses in England and further editions from Douai and St. Omer. The first commercial printing in London was that of Richard Field for William Barret in 1620, when the text was crudely adapted for English readers with Puritan sympathies in a volume that gathered together verse and prose already established in popularity, although the author was still identified merely as ‘R. S’.

In her recent study of the Bayeux tapestry, Suzanne Lewis argues persuasively that we cannot use only the simple Latin tags on this long embroidery (it is not a tapestry) to come to know its story. The more we attend to the exceptionally detailed images, the more we see ambiguity and complexity. Why does Harold have two hands on reliquaries for oath-taking? Why does he look in one direction while a ship leaves in the other? Why does the Fable of the Fox and the Crow appear three times?

The late lamented Antony F. Allison published in Recusant History, May 1995, a characteristically richly researched article, ‘An English Gallican: Henry Holden, (1596/7–1662), Part I (to 1648)’, but alas did not live to produce the sequel which he planned, a draft of which does not seem to have survived. Shortly after the appearance of the article I wrote to congratulate him on the recent publication of the second (multilingual) edition of what is now commonly called A&R2, and to tell him that the Articles proposed to the Catholics of England, signed T. H., Paris, 2 April 1648, of which the authorship he convincingly attributed to Holden, said by the latter to have been printed by 13 September 1648, and extant in a single imperfect copy dated by George Thomason 2 April, otherwise only known from contemporaneous manuscript and later printed summaries, had been re-published in 1946, without identification of the author, by the late Professor C. E. Whiting of Durham University. Whiting reported that the manuscript he copied was from the library of the late Canon Whitley of Bedlington (Northumberland) and had been made available to him by Major J. D. Cowen, F.S.A. In 1947 Cowen gave it to Ushaw College Library, as coming from his late aunt, Miss A. J. Thompson of Whickham (Co. Durham). In the 1950s or 1960s I was shown it by the then Librarian of Ushaw, Fr. Bernard Payne, and recognised an inscription at the beginning as in the distinctive hand of John Cosin, the eminent Anglican divine who, after being a canon of Durham Cathedral, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Dean of Peterborough, and exile in France 1644–60, finally became Bishop of Durham, 1660–72.

Anthony Wood (1632–1695), the Oxford biographer and historian, was accused of being a ‘papist’ from the early 1670s until his death on 29 November 1695. These accusations were given credence because Wood had many Catholic friends and acquaintances; had a genuine affection for manuscripts and monuments of the pre-reformation past; wrote bio-bibliographies of many noteworthy Catholics who were graduates of Oxford colleges or were associated with the university; had a view of the reformation that Gilbert Burnet, later the bishop of Salisbury, saw as ‘unseemly’; and never joined any campaign against Catholics before or after James II reigned in Great Britain. This essay deals with Wood's relationships with Catholics and his attitude towards Catholicism.

In early 1687, an unnamed Jesuit enthusiastically wrote to a colleague at the Jesuit college in Fribourg about the influence of the Society of Jesus at the court of King James II, and of the wonderful progress of Catholicism in the kingdom. The letter merits re-publication:

A career in business was one of the few outlets open to Catholics in eighteenth century London, yet among such businessmen only Thomas Mawhood, the Smithfield woollen draper, and the publisher J. P. Coghlan have been studied in any depth. Bryant Barrett, who will be the subject of this article, is in a different category. His contacts with the wider world of Georgian society allowed him to cross boundaries of class and religion, and although he made his considerable fortune by supplying high society with its luxury fashion accessories, his private life was marked by unostentatious piety and a practical Christian ethos inspired in part by his mentor Richard Challoner. Though his two marriages brought him within the fold of the Catholic gentry, and his wealth earned him the status of a country squire, he remained true to his origins.

Professor Birrell has remarked that there is ‘an extensive literature on how to describe a book, but there is no literature whatever on how to describe a library or a library catalogue’. Well, what follows is an account of a library in a Northumbrian-Catholic-Jacobite peer's house, not, admittedly, a common category but one having some cultural and recusant interest nevertheless.

In his 1990 article ‘Holzhauser and England: Three Episodes' T. A. Birrell tells the story of John Dryden's intervention with the Secretary of State, Sir William Trumbull, on behalf of a Catholic publisher who had got into trouble with the authorities for publishing and disseminating ‘several popish and seditious books’. The publisher's name was Thomas Metcalfe, his main crime was the publication of Constitutiones clericorum saecularium in commune viventium, and Dryden asks Trumbull to be lenient since Metcalfe is ‘a young man and this is his first offence’. Moreover Dryden predicts, that ‘upon asking pardon’ Metcalfe will promise to offend no more.

In volume twenty-three of Recusant History an attempt was made to consider the origins of St. Edmund's House at Cambridge in the light of changing ecclesiastical attitudes to the admission of Roman Catholic undergraduates to study at the ancient universities. The present article examines some of the vagaries in governance and managerial construct that were to prove inimical to the fulfilment of a widening function for the Cambridge foundation.