Law and Conscience

Examining Catholic elaboration on the relationship between state and Church in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, this book casts light on the ways in which a distinctive religious minority was able to adapt itself within a singular political context. In so doing it contributes to the significant question of how different religious affiliations could (or might) be integrated within one national reality, and how political allegiance and religious belief began to be perceived as two...
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Examining Catholic elaboration on the relationship between state and Church in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, this book casts light on the ways in which a distinctive religious minority was able to adapt itself within a singular political context. In so doing it contributes to the significant question of how different religious affiliations could (or might) be integrated within one national reality, and how political allegiance and religious belief began to be perceived as two different identities within one context.Current scholarship has offered a nuanced and accurate picture of the English Protestant Church, which is now seen not as a monolithic institution, but rather as complex and fluid. This book offers a complementary view of the English Catholic Church as an organism within which the debate over how to combine the catholic feature of the Church of Rome with its status of a minority 'sect' involved a profound redefinition of both political and theological issues.