Catholics and Treason takes the narratives generated by the contemporary law of treason as it applied to Roman Catholics, during and after the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century, and uses them to explore the Catholic community's writing of its own history. Prosecutions of Catholics under the existing law and via new legislation produced a great deal of documentation which tells us much about contemporary politics that we could not garner from any other source. The intention here is to locate the narratives of persecution inside the context of the 'mainstream' history of the period from which, for the most part, they have been routinely excluded but out of which they partly emerged. In that respect, this is the history of the post-Reformation Church and State with the politics (of violence) put back. This volume takes as its starting point the magnum opus of Bishop Richard Challoner, his Memoirs of Missionary Priests, and it works backwards from that book into the period that Challoner describes. Historian Michael Questier seeks to reassemble as far as possible the historical jigsaw puzzle on which Challoner laboured but which he could not complete, thinking about the implications for our view of the post-Reformation and of the way in which Challoner and others described the Catholic experience of in/tolerance.

About the Author
Formerly professor of history in the University of London, and Leverhulme Research Professor 2015-2017, Michael Questier moved to a research chair at the University of Vanderbilt in 2018 and is now attached to the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham.

Reviews
Singlehandedly and without funding, Questier rescues the martyrs and their martyrologists, especially Challoner, from marginalized oblivion. Building on the research of Anne Dillon, Brad Gregory, and others, the author "takes the topic out of its conventional hagiographic wrapper, or at least the one that is often assigned to it, and reroutes it via an archive led process of reconstruction of the origins of the relevant documents in order to put it back into the contexts out of which it came. * Thomas M. McCoog S.J., Journal of Jesuit Studies *
Bringing into attention a complex topic and offering a history of the Catholic, Reformed and Anglican Churches in England, Michael Questier's book entitled: Catholics and Treason: Martyrology, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Reformation, published by Oxford University Press in 2022 represents not only an useful tool in the understanding of the history of the Christianity in Britain, but also a lecture that enriches any category of reader, inviting him to discover sources, memorials or documents and to see the complexity of a beautiful story. * Dr. Iuliu Marius Morariu, Astra Salvensis *
This work will be a critical counterpoint to that position and will contribute to and inspire new studies. It will be a crucial study and reference point for all historians of Early Modern England, the British and European Reformations and Catholic history for many years to come. * MARK WILSON, Roundtable, Roehampton Journal for Academic and Creative Writing *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192847027
Author Michael Questier
Format Hardback
Page Count 688
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1291g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 162mm * 43mm