Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons's Jesuit Polemic, 1580-1610

This book provides a study of the writing career of Robert Persons, leader of the Elizabethan Jesuits, and seen as an apostolate as well as a polemical contestation. It relates Persons's interventions in various controversies during the period 1580-1610 to the formative purposes of the Christian Directory (1582), his famous and phenomenally successful work of devotion. This book was originally known as the Book of Resolution, which also refers to Persons's indefatigability as a writer. The study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the polemical context of post-Reformation Catholicism in England, and to the Jesuit notion of the 'apostolate of writing'.