Robert Persons. The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit, 1546-1610.

Everyone has always acknowledged the importance of the English Jesuit Robert Persons but he has until now lacked a biographer. In part this was because of the immense range of his activities and ideas. He was a prolific writer within several different disciplines, a political activist of extraordinary energy, a zealous puppeteer of the separated English Romanists, and also one of the very few Englishmen to enjoy real influence within the courts at Rome and Madrid. Perhaps more than any other English papist he had a coherent vision of what opposition to the regime really meant in English circumstances. Consequently a study of his attitudes and modes of action is essential for an interpretation of …