Recusant Women in Elizabethan England Recusant Women in Elizabethan England Author Bonnee Dullaard Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Bonnee Dullaard, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Gender Women Published file. Updated metadata proofed Created File. Review of article finished. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Bonnee Dullaard Bonnee Dullaard

Bonnee Dullaard was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/

O, it is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant. (Isabella, Measure for Measure, 2.2.135–137)

Introduction to English Recusants

In the 16th and early 17th centuries, unity of religion was considered essential to civil peace within the state. This was the problem that Elizabeth I faced when she became the Queen in 1558, as she sought to unite England under Protestantism after the tumult of her father Henry VIII’s 1533 break with the Catholic Church, his son Edward IV’s reforms to move the new Church of England even more strongly in a Protestant direction between 1547–1553, and Mary I’s returning England to Catholicism during her brief reign from 1553–1558. The ruling elite and the people of England remained divided about religion, with conflict between moderate Anglicans and more radical Puritans, as well as the presence of a significant Catholic minority. Among this Catholic minority were people termed recusants for their refusal to attend the mandatory services of the Church of England.

In 1559, the Act of Supremacy abolished papal supremacy and made Queen Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church of England. At the same time, the Act of Uniformity restored the 1549 Book of Common Prayer as the official order of worship. It also required everyone to attend a Church of England service on Sundays, with fines imposed if they did not comply. Recusants in Elizabethan England denied the fundamental claim of the monarch as the head of church and were viewed as a threat to both political and civil order. They were fined, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their failure to comply with the law. William Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, was one such recusant citizen, fined in September 1592 for failure to attend required church services.

Religious Disunity in Measure for Measure

In Shakespeare’s 1606 play Measure for Measure, the turmoil of the state, which the Duke attempts to remedy, reflects what would supposedly happen without religious unity. Yet also present within the play is resistance to the control exerted by the state over religion and morality. The play is set in Vienna, Austria, a Catholic nation, but scholars believe that the situation it depicts also reflect conflicts in early 17th century England. The play’s heroine, a young Catholic novice named Isabella, resists the corrupt regent’s Angelo’s sexual advances at the same time she attempts to control her own and her imprisoned brother’s destinies. Likewise, under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, many women rejected state authority and boldly held onto their own religious convictions and, like Isabella, suffered for their various acts of resistance.

Recusant Women

Since the 1970s, scholars of women’s history and women’s literature have challenged early modern renderings of women as quiet and obedient, documenting case after case of women who were both vocal and obstinate. Historian Merry Wisner Hanks claims that Catholic women left convents, refused to leave convents, preached, prophesied, discussed religion with friends and family, converted their husbands, left their husbands, wrote religious poems, hymns, and polemics, and were martyred on all sides of the religious controversy (314). In fact, William Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna Hall was cited as a recusant in June 1606 for failing to receive Communion in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on Easter of that year.

Margaret Clitherow

One English recusant, Margaret Clitherow, was first cited in 1576, when a list of Catholic dissenters in York was demanded. Significantly, many of these were women: 55 of the identified 67 dissenters were women, and of these, 26 were married to conformist husbands, including Clitherow, according to Peter Lake and Michaell Questier, whose 2011 book The Trials of Margaret Clitherow, discusses the details of her case.

Margaret Clitherow converted to Catholicism in 1574, 3 years after her marriage to John Clitherow, who conformed to the Church of England. She refused to attend the Anglican services, earning for herself the label of recusant. Following her conversion, she transformed her household into a center of Catholic activity; it was used as a priest’s house, a location for the celebration of prohibited Catholic Mass, and a Catholic school. From the mid 1570’s, for a period of about 10 years, she faced continual official harassment, from fines to imprisonments.

Then, in 1586, Margaret was arrested for harboring Jesuit and seminary priests, which had been made illegal in 1585. In two separate appearances in court in March 1586, Clitherow was obstinate, refusing to plead to an indictment under the statute of 1585. Although there were those who certainly did not want to see her executed, due to Margaret’s highly public and rebellious acts, authorities needed to make an example of her. As for Clitherow, she was willing to be martyred for her beliefs. If she were to die, she accounted it a great comfort…to die in God’s quarrel (Lake and Quartier 99).

Her case was presided over by Judge Clench, who explained what would happen to her: If you will not put yourself to the country, this must be your judgement: you must return from whence you came, and there, in the lowest part of the prison, be stripped naked, laid down, your back upon the ground, and as much weight laid upon you as you are able to bear, and so to continue three days without meat or drink, except a little barley bread and puddle water, and the third day to be pressed to death, your hands and feet tied to posts, and a sharp stone under your back.(Lake and Questier 95)

Historians Lake and Questier note that this punishment was called the peine forte et dure, a French phrase translated as strong and harsh punishment, a medieval method of torture used on those who refused to plead. About 200 English Catholics were executed by this and other means, included hanging and burning. Clitherow and 39 other English Catholics executed for their faith were canonized by Pope Paul VI in October 1970.

Key Print Sources Ellison, James. <title level="m">Measure for Measure and the Executions of Catholics in 1604. English Literary Renaissance vol. 33, no. 1, 2003, pp. 44–87. Houliston, Victor, and Aislinn Muller. The Elizabethan Martyrs. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom. Ed. Paul Middleton. John Wiley & Sons, 2020, pp. 322–337. Lake, Peter, and Michael Questier. The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. Smith, Frederick E. The Origins of Recusancy in Elizabethan England Reconsidered. The Historical Journal vol. 60, no. 2, 2017, pp. 301–332. Wiesner, Merry E. Beyond Women and the Family: Towards a Gender Analysis of the Reformation. The Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 18, no. 3, 1987, pp. 311–321.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. Years 1591–1592. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/reference/chronology/years1591-1592.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Best, Michael. Years 1604–1606. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/reference/chronology/years1604-1606.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Nelson, Katie, and Olivia Meikle. The Saint Margaret Clitherow. WhatsHerName Podcast. 1 Jan. 2018. https://whatshernamepodcast.com/margaret-clitherow/. Screti, Zoe. Margaret Clitherow, the Pearl of York. Historic UK. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Margaret-Clitherow. Accessed 5 Mar. 2025. Teysko, Heather. Catholics in Elizabethan England. Renaissance English History Podcast. Episode 26. 13 June 2017. https://www.englandcast.com/2017/06/throwback-episode-catholics-elizabethan-england/. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. St. Margaret Clitherow. Encyclopedia Britannica. 1 Jan. 2025. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Margaret-Clitherow.