Tudor Catholics: Catholic Reformation and Devotional Accountability in Henry VIII’s England
Devotion, English Catholics, Catholic Reformation, Henrician Catholicism
In this work, I argue that the most definitive and enduring feature of Henrician Catholicism was the printed advertisement of notions of devotional accountability. By examining Catholic devotional publications printed by Thomas Berthelet (d. 1555), who became King’s Printer in 1530, I demonstrate how much Henrician Catholics were, even before the establishment of royal supremacy, already engaged in strategic and polemical uses of the printed word, as well as particularly attuned to the devotional implications of the Reformation. Among printed sermons, prayer treatises, and even farming manuals, Catholic writers in early sixteenth-century England were actively encouraging their readers to take responsibility for their own devotional lives. Between the 1510s and the 1520s, English Catholics experienced a particularly creative and transformative period in their history, which modern scholarship has yet to fully acknowledge.