N.D. versus O.E.: anonymity's moral ambiguity in Elizabethan Catholic controversy

Florida State University

Notes

(1.) This percentage was figured from the publications listed in A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, eds. and comps., The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, 2 vols. (Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar Press, 1994), Volume II: Works in English. Only first editions of books published between 1559 and 1603 were counted. Authors or translators using initials were not considered anonymous.

(2.) Cyndia Clegg's recent book, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), offers the most comprehensive picture of the laws and enforcement against illegal Catholic publication in England. She notes that Catholic controversialists of the 1580s and 1590s were on several occasions perceived by the government to cross the line between devotion and sedition. The laws enacted to prevent the transmission of their books were quite harsh. Adrian Morey also outlines the laws and proclamations aimed at suppressing Catholic activity in England, particularly in the 1570s and 1580s, in The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), 59-73. A. C. Southern discusses the difficulties and dangers of producing, distributing, and owning Catholic books in Elizabethan England in Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559-1582 (London and Glasgow: Sands & Co., 1950), 30-43. Likewise, Nancy Pollard Brown details some of the evasive tactics of Catholic book producers in her essay, "Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England," in English Manuscript Studies: 1100-1700, vol. 1, ed. Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 120-43.

(3.) The search for terms to describe the various camps and points of view in early modern controversies continues to occupy scholars who want to capture both the subtle varieties of opinion and the polarized rhetoric of controversy literature. See Anthony Milton's discussion in Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought: 1600-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7-9. This essay utilizes the somewhat reductive terms, "English Catholic" and "English Protestant," to describe the basic opposition, but it also attempts to highlight the naming and self-naming within the controversy texts themselves.

(4.) For general studies of recusancy and Catholic activity in Elizabethan England, see Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under tile Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Royal Historical Society; Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1993); Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond and Briggs, 1976); John Bossy, The English Catholic Community: 1570-1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976).