Received accounts of Elizabethan Catholic gentry are largely de politicised , obscuring the extent and range of gentry political behaviour and assuming a general withdrawal into apolitical quietism. This thesis is an attempt to restore Elizabethan Catholics as political animals, identifying a range of political engagement, putative and real. It locates an analysis of the activities of the Lancashire Catholic community, recusant and non recusant, within revisionist historiography on the tongue duree of the English Reformation and within the 'new Tudor political history' , with its emphasis on political clienteles, conflicts of patronage and ideology, and interactions between regional and court politics. Leading Catholic gentry are found to display a range of behaviours connected to national, British, and European political currents. In the process two prevailing assumptions are questioned : that Lancashire communities were 'remote' and 'peripheral', detached from the mainstream of English political and intellectual life, and that the behaviour of Lancashire Catholic gentry in the Elizabethan period can be written entirely within a 'loyalist' paradigm.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:604548 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Hammond, Wilfred |
| Publisher | Lancaster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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