Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. She has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 1999 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009. She is co-editor, with Steve Smith, of the journal Past and Present, is Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the British Academy's Central Research Awards Committee and has served as a panel member and chair for Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Church Papists (Royal Historical Society Studies in History, 1993), Providence in Early Modern England (OUP, 1999), Charitable Hatred (MUP, 2006) and The Reformation of the Landscape (OUP, 2011).

1: In the Lord's Vineyard: Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain; I: Conscience and Conformity; 2: Yielding to the Extremity of the Time: Conformity and Orthodoxy *; 3: England's Nicodemites: Crypto-Catholicism and Religious Pluralism *; 4: Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry and Confessional Identity *; II: Miracles and Missionaries; 5: Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission *; 6: Holywell and the Welsh Catholic Revival *; 7: Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels *; III: Communication and Conversion; 8: Dumb Preachers: Catholicism and the Culture of Print *; 9: Unclasping the Book? The Douai-Rheims Bible *; 10: This New Army of Satan: the Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion *; IV: Translation and Transmutation; 11: Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation *; 12: Beads, Books and Bare Ruined Choirs: Transmutations of Ritual Life *

This collection, which brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of post-Reformation Britain. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who conformed with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life adapted itself to a climate of repression.