In contrast to recent studies that treat Catholics only as a despised 'other' against which British Protestant narratives of the nation were constructed, this book examines the ways in which Catholic writers between the reigns of Mary Tudor and James I fashioned their own competing discourses of national and cultural identity. The book considers a broad range of non-canonical material produced by a diverse Catholic community in both print and manuscript: religious
polemic, ecclesiastical histories, martyrologies, and correspondence. Scholars like Thomas Stapleton, 'intelligencers' like Richard Verstegan, secular priests like William Allen, and Jesuits like
Robert Persons helped shape debates about national identity both in response to Protestant polemic and as part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted various factions against each other, including expatriates from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Finally, this study focuses on how Catholics' experience of exile from 'home' conditioned their alternative writing of the nation.