ABSTRACT
Late medieval Christianity has aptly been described as ‘a ritual method of living’. 1 It hinged upon the solemn performance of rite and revolved around the assumption that the sacraments dispensed by a spiritually elite caste of priests were conduits of an invisible grace that was essential to individual salvation. Actions had soteriological implications: they directly affected the state of the believer’s soul and its destination after death. Underpinned by the conviction that the material world was a touchstone of holiness, pre-Reformation Christianity was also a religion of immanence which engendered a vast repertoire of holy objects and a dense and complex geography of sacred places. The advent of Protestantism in England presented an acute theological threat to this system of practice and belief. Monasteries, convents and shrines were dissolved, destroyed and allowed to decay into ruin and the churches and cathedrals in which congregations had prayed for centuries were appropriated and iconoclastically purged of ‘abominable idols’ to befit them for reformed services. Hearing mass was prohibited upon pain of a crippling fine and the missionary priests whose activities were vital to the spiritual health of the faithful were hunted down, tortured and executed. In 1585 harbouring and helping them became a treasonous crime for which laypeople themselves could pay the ultimate price. Although the intolerance of the Elizabethan and Stuart state was tempered by the combination of connivance and charity that typified inter-confessional relations at the grass roots, the fact remains that English Catholic ritual life in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was severely constrained. Catholicism’s clandestine existence as an underground Church forced it to dispense with much of the ceremony and apparatus that had hitherto shaped liturgical experience and inhibited its ability to mimic the rich baroque culture of worship that was evolving in Italy, Spain and southern Germany. Drawing on comparative material from other parts of the British Isles, this essay examines the subtle and creative transmutations in devotion and piety that took place against the backdrop of both Protestant repression and the programme for the reform and renewal of the Church of Rome encapsulated in the decrees of the Council of Trent. As we shall see, orthodox practices were reconstituted in ways that allowed them to survive and indeed to thrive as emblems of anti-heretical defiance, but also sometimes brought them into tacit conflict with Tridentine priorities, not least because they were conducted in arenas and spaces which instinctively evaded ecclesiastical oversight, notably the home and the natural environment. Close attention to these processes illuminates the mixture of cooperation and tension that marked relations between the clergy and laity and sheds incidental light on the extent and nature of interaction between the members of competing faiths in English society, who co-inhabited a landscape that remained encrusted with potent memories of the Catholic past.
