Continuum Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England

About the Author Peter Lake is University Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of the History of Christianity, Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, USA. From 1993-2009 he was Professor of History at Princeton University, USA. He is the author of many books including The Boxmaker's Revenge and a forthcoming volume on Shakespeare's history plays.Michael Questier is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History, University of Vanderbilt, USA. He also holds an honorary chair in the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham, UK. He is the editor of Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England: Manuscript and Printed Sources in Translation(2010; with G. Crosignani and T. McCoog), and the author of Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621-1625 (2009) and Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550-1640 (2006). Product Description Review 'It is not a work about a saint so much as a very skilfully argued analysis of religious politics... This book exposes not sanctity so much as the confusion, conflict and misery of a beleaguered minority, and the damage wrought by political imperatives on quiet faith.''The authors do a superb job of analysing these fault line. They take the time to place Clitherow's story in the context of her family life and political events but they are not afraid of drawing broader conclusions. In their hands Clitherow's sorry tale reasserts itself as one of the most important prisms through which to view the puzzling internecine struggles of Elizabethan Catholicism as well as the contours of early-modern martyrdom. We'll continue to argue about Clitherow; was she saintly or stubborn? The best place to begin any study of this conundrum is this outstanding book.''The narrative is detailed and intriguing, because Lake and Questier have turned up a wealth of new evidence to defend their case. Thanks to this, we enter the world of Elizabethan religious politics in all its intensity. Who are the heroes and who the villains? The scholarly debate is advanced by this book, and is set to run still further.'