This article analyses the conversion of 379 English Protestants to Catholicism in Malta between 1600 and 1798. It explores the motivations behind their recantation, the agents of their conversion and the role of dissimulation in discarding their Protestant faith. It ends with two remarks. First, people in the Mediterranean ‘knew no religious frontiers’.1 Malta, like other Mediterranean territories was a place with a mixed religious profile. Second, though English Protestants considered themselves to be the ‘elect’ and their country the new Israel, the two faiths were not mutually exclusive and could find common ground over the defence of Christendom.

This article analyzes the procedure of the Maltese diocesan court in dealing with clerical misconduct in the second half of the eighteenth century. The clergy were accused especially of physical and verbal abuse as well as of sexual incontinence. They were given a fair hearing, being assisted by a lawyer, presenting their own witnesses, and having the right to appeal the sentence. The article also discusses how the court tried to protect the clergy's honor and reputation in an attempt to avoid anticlericalism. Convicted priests could stop proceedings against them with a fine, and those of them guilty of immoral behavior were assigned another parish or else transferred to an oratory where they did penance.

Samuel P. Huntington has described the encounter between Christianity and Islam as the ‘clash of civilizations’, and so have Norman Daniel and R.W. Southern. This Manichean vision is the result partly of political and religious rivalry which demonizes ‘the other’. Such an interpretation has been challenged by scholars who emphasize a more complex reality and refer to ‘a shared discourse of the Ottoman and European worlds’.

Revelations, apparitions, voices, stigmata and ecstasies were extraordinary phenomena and profoundly emotional, in which God was perceived as communicating with human beings through bodily phenomena. It was up to churchmen to regulate and control divine intervention in daily life and separate truth from deceit. But attempting to fulfil this pastoral duty was a complicated matter. Were these experiences authentic, really proceeding from God or were they illusions of the devil, the deceiver par excellence and able to capture human trust? Furthermore, besides the devil’s deceit, might there not also be an element of human simulation or ‘false sanctity’, that is, a mixture of lies and hypocrisy? This was the art of the actor, who makes the audience believe what is untrue. Hypocrites have one sole aim: to obtain praise and fame through the exercise of sham virtues.

This micro-study examines the Maltese parish of St Mary's (Qrendi) in the second half of the eighteenth century. First it will be argued that – as in many other contemporaneous communities – migration to other parishes made its population extremely fluid. A second interest lies in the extent to which social distinctions and unruly behaviour further disrupted village solidarity. Finally there will be a consideration of the thesis that such unstable elements were counterbalanced by various integrative ties that bound the Qrendin together, such as charity, the obligations of neighbourliness and an intense devotion to the parish, kinship and godparenthood.

According to Protestant eschatology, the dead are no longer with us. In the forceful words of Eamon Duffy they are ‘gone beyond the reach of human contact, even of human prayer’. But if this was the most devastating change in the mind of Protestants, Catholics affirmed Tridentine teaching on the cult of the dead by an ‘obsessional multiplication’ of suffrages or intercessory prayers, especially post mortem masses. This belief was still strong in eighteenth-century Catholic Europe. Italy, Spain and south-west Germany all exhibited such religious ‘frenzy’. Only France may be cited as an example to the contrary. Michel Vovelle has successfully proved that in Provence the will became simply a legal act distributing fortunes, with no reference to the pious clauses. However, we cannot extend this thesis, as Philippe Aries has mistakenly done, to the entire Catholic West.

Having lost northern Europe to the Protestants the Catholic Church tried to preserve control over what remained of the respublica Christiana. The attempt was twofold. First, it was political. The popes declared the entire Catholic world for their diocese. The government of the Christian peoples’, Pius V observed, ‘belongs to Us and We should see that they are governed with charity’. Second, the popes admitted that the Reformation had been the result partly of the religious and spiritual shortcomings of the Church itself and tried to make the requisite internal reforms. The Council of Trent defined Catholic doctrine and anathemized whoever disagreed with it. Seminaries were set up to train the clergy while the lay population was held under tight control. The Jesuits and the Office of the Holy Roman Inquisition were the main instruments of discipline. In this article I will explore the ways in which the Holy Office impinged on Maltese society during the time of the last eight inquisitors. Fortunately the archive deposits of the Inquisition in Malta are nearly complete and the recent opening of the Vatican archives has added further to our knowledge of the Maltese Holy Office.

Parish priests in late eighteenth-century Malta often grumbled about their poverty, but their excuses were generally self-serving and related to the financial demands of their bishop; like incumbents in mainland Europe, they were not in a bad financial situation. Their relative affluence was a result of revenues such as tithes, mass legacies and surplice fees. In small communities this income may have been tiny, but parish priests were not entirely dependent on parochial revenues, since they were generally drawn from middle-rank families and might possess personal wealth in addition.

Although the Catholic Church claimed to control marriage, in late-eighteenth-century Malta the faithful still considered matrimony to be a personal affair. The study is based upon episcopal court records and parish registers, which reveal substantial numbers of clandestine marriages, contravening the Council of Trent's directives concerning entry into marriage. Couples separated from each other at will, without the Church's consent. A few took other partners, despite the inquisitors' nets. Couples viewed sexual relations as matters for themselves to regulate, and sex outside marriage as not something into which the Church was to intrude. Especially noteworthy in this respect were relations between betrothed, since a man would not marry a woman who could not bear children.