In 1624 the playwright John Webster lauded Thomas More as a learned and worthy poet, placing him alongside Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Philip Sidney. It is clear that More was celebrated by Webster not only for the quality of his literary writing, but also for the wider political, social and historical influence of his literary output. This article uses the production of the 1557 folio of More’s English Workes to explore the literary, political and religious influence of More’s writing in the 1550s and beyond, and situates More’s Workes within the wider context of folio production in Renaissance England. It also explores how the publication of More’s Workes in folio established a distinct literary position for Thomas More in the mid-1550s, and highlights the unusual nature of the folio’s compilation and production within the mid-Tudor book trade.

The success of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy was a remarkable achievement. Between 1618 and 1630 Rome made a staggering nineteen episcopal appointments in a kingdom that was ruled by a Protestant king. Documenting the achievements of the initial period only paints half the picture, however. The implementation of the Tridentine reforms and the thorny issue of episcopal authority brought the religious orders into a head-on collision with the secular clergy. This protracted dispute lasted for a decade, most notably in the diocese of Dublin where an English secular priest, Paul Harris, led a hostile attack on the Franciscan archbishop, Thomas Fleming. The longevity of the feud, though, owed at least as much to the intervention of Lord Deputy Sir Thomas Wentworth as it did to the internal tensions of the Catholic Church. Despite Wentworth’s influential role, he has been largely written out of the conflict. This article addresses the lacunae in the current historiography and argues that the lord deputy’s interference was a decisive factor in exacerbating the hostilities between the secular and regular clergy in early seventeenth-century Ireland.

In the summer of 1615, a newly discovered Catholic conspiracy prompted William James, bishop of Durham, to vigorously correspond with the archbishop of Canterbury. On 3 August, in the midst of the crisis, the bishop incarcerated a professional dancer, Robert Hindmers (b. 1585). Together with his wife Anne, Robert was associated with the Newcastle-based secular priest William Southerne and involved in Catholic evangelising in the diocese of Durham. This article discusses the biography and career of Robert Hindmers, and speculates about the role of dancing within the Durham Catholic community. It also analyses how the activities of the Hindmers were perceived by the ecclesiastical authorities. The case of Robert Hindmers traverses and links many related issues, such as Counter-Reformation culture, traditional festivity, religious politics, and the interconnectedness of elite and popular cultures. But above all, it expands our understanding of Catholic missionary strategies in post-Reformation England by suggesting that dance instruction might have been used by Catholics to access households and assist the mission.

The Tudor Welshman, Sir Edward Carne (c.1496-1561), gained a wide reputation as an outstanding diplomat and lawyer. Chosen by Cardinal Wolsey to enter the service of King Henry VIII, he was sent to Rome as excusator in the process of annulment of the king’s marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon. After the Rota had refused to annul Henry’s marriage, Carne returned to Glamorgan, and continued his career as a civil servant. He was appointed justice of the peace, master of requests and was made a member of the Council in the Marches of Wales. His next main appointment was as English envoy to the Holy See during the reign of Mary I. Carne was entrusted with the difficult task of restoring diplomatic relations between England and Rome. He remained in Rome until his death in 1561. His attachment to Wales and his staunch Catholic faith are evident in the burial memorial erected to his memory in a church in Rome by two Welsh friends.

Despite receiving particular praise from a range of early modern commentators, from Nicholas Sander to Pedro de Ribadeneyra, most historians have seen the Italian merchant Antonio Buonvisi playing a fairly negligible role in the history of mid-Tudor Catholicism. This article challenges this interpretation. After reassessing some rather simplistic assessments of Buonvisi’s religious beliefs, this article explores his actions and activities following his self-imposed exile from England in 1549. Using research conducted in both the State Archives of Lucca and the Vatican City, it suggests that Buonvisi played a far more significant role in ensuring the survival of English Catholicism over the first decades of the Reformation than is usually acknowledged. Indeed, it argues that Buonvisi may have helped lay core foundations for the Catholic restoration of Mary I’s reign, the success of which has recently been highlighted by historians such as Eamon Duffy.

In this article, I address Bernard Williams's famous objection to immortality. Following others, I conceive of Williams's argument as presenting a dilemma for those who hope in immortality. The first lemma involves utter boredom, while the second lemma involves loss of one's distinctive character. I argue that each lemma fails to admit realistic alternative possibilities. The first fails to admit the possibility that our disposition to boredom is a radically contingent disposition. The second fails to admit the possibility that we retain some of our most important desires and projects in immortality – even while cycling through an array of desires and projects.

Michael Tooley has developed a sophisticated evidential version of the argument from evil that aims to circumvent sceptical theist responses. Evidential arguments from evil depend on the plausibility of inductive inferences from premises about our inability to see morally sufficient reasons for God to permit evils to conclusions about there being no morally sufficient reasons for God to permit evils. Tooley's defence of this inductive step depends on the idea that the existence of unknown rightmaking properties is no more likely, a priori, than the existence of unknown wrongmaking properties. I argue that Tooley's argument begs the question against the theist, and, in doing so, commits an analogue of the base rate fallacy. I conclude with some reflections on what a successful argument from evil would have to establish.

What are the demands of religious inquiry? It can be tempting to think of these demands in strictly epistemic terms, e.g. as a function of the inquirer's background beliefs, cognitive faculties, natural cognitive ability, intellectual skills, and intellectual character. In this article, I extrapolate an alternative model of religious inquiry from three stories by the Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964). According to the model, a person's fitness for religious inquiry also depends on whether she possesses a certain moral posture. In particular, I argue that something like moral humility functions as an epistemic virtue in the theistic domain.

I develop a model of providence on which God brings about good states of affairs by means of evil states of affairs, but without intending the latter. The model's key ingredient is a backward-looking counterpart of the distinction between intended and merely foreseen consequences of an action: namely, a distinction between intended and merely foreseen means to an end. The model enables greater-good theodicies to avoid worries about whether a perfect being could intend evil.

In this article, I use the extended mind literature to elucidate religious phenomena that are normally left well outside the purview of analytic philosophy of religion. I show that the extended mind literature casts light on how the potential relationships of the ordinary believer to extra-natural power dictate cross-culturally re-occurring ways of structuring religious praxis. This application of the extended mind illuminates a diverse but subtly interconnected set of religious phenomena, from the cross-cultural appeal of magic as a negative category to the role of other-worldliness in the major world religions.