From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the English Catholic community showed its robustness, resilience and complexity through its own periodical press. The subject, however, has been relatively neglected, specialist research amounts only to a bare handful of studies, and a full and definitive study which exploits the wealth of available materials has not yet been written. This thesis is therefore intended to present what has long been overdue, the first full chronological account of the foundation and development of the English Catholic periodical press from the Mercurius Catholicus to the Dublin Review. The work also serves specifically as a balance to Susan J. Acheson who argued in 1981, in her Oxford M.Litt. thesis on Victorian Catholic journalism, that the Emancipation Act of 1829 was the single most important influence on the Catholic periodical press in England. Against Acheson, my study shows that the Catholic periodical press did not owe its life to one major event early in the nineteenth century, but was rather the result of the religio-political activity which accompanied a long and difficult struggle for relief measures begun nearly two hundred years before. In describing the attempts by Catholics, often in difficult conditions and hostile circumstances, to develop a regular literary means of representing , and defending themselves, my thesis does not avoid the fact that the periodicals were often sustained and made exciting by internecine quarrels and struggles. Indeed, it concentrates on the tension between two groups of Catholics, about whether to stress division from or similarity with a Protestant state and society, which marked the early history of the English Catholic periodical press, and concludes that the final victory belonged to the party which emphasised distinctiveness over eirenicism.