ABSTRACT
The study of Catholic women patronesses, which has hardly begun, also promises to tell us much about the ways gender and social status inflected Catholic patronage networks and the religious and political uses to which they were put. This essay takes as a case study the patronage activities of Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel. Who contributed in material and intangible ways to the dissemination of texts Elizabeth I's government deemed dangerous, and to the fortification of a staunchly recusant strand of English Catholicism both in England and abroad. As scholars have increasingly recognized, biographies of early modern Catholic Englishwomen were used, inter alia, as instruments for intra-Catholic maneuvering. Overheated anti-Catholic polemicists and sympathetic historians alike have recognized that Catholic women were crucial to the sustenance of the faith, in part through their roles in educating their children.
