This paper studies the interaction between clerical and lay English Catholics on the Continent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In contrast with Protestant exiles, who established separate exile churches, Catholic expatriates did not create churches specifically for the exiled laity. Catholics abroad did nonetheless get support…[Read more]

This article challenges the predominant identification of English national identity and Anti-Catholicism. By means of English travellers’ accounts of the English nunneries they visited in the Low Countries, it argues that these offer more complex identity formation. Travellers did not bluntly repeat the Anti-Catholic stereotypes historians have…[Read more]

This paper proposes a Catholic case study in a field dominated by studies on Protestant migrants. One of the main differences between the confessions was the institutional provision for the liturgical and devotional lives of laity abroad. Catholics did not found separate institutions similar to Protestant exile churches which channelled the sense…[Read more]

Medieval women are often misrepresented, or just plain missing, from literary historical survey courses.

What is the value of a terminal M.A?

Introduction to special issue of the journal Pedagogy: Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid

Innocent III’s decree requiring annual confession for all Christians led to the production of an astounding number of religious texts–initially, texts meant for priests to use to educate the laity but then also, and increasingly, texts intended for private consumption by the laity. This article explores the place of these texts in English…[Read more]

This article offers an analysis of the complex and contradictory nature of lay religious texts produced in England at the turn of the fifteenth century. These works are interesting because they include statements of both encouragement to and anxiety about lay Christians who pursue more singular forms of devotion. I focus on one text in…[Read more]

This article explores the unlikely parallels between OJ Simpson’s sensational confessional memoir If I Did It and The Book of Margery Kempe. Similarities between the two can be productive in the classroom.