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London: Eamon Duffy speaks on Gregory Martin in Tyburn Lecture


Professor Duffy

Professor Duffy

Professor Eamon Duffy, the distinguished Cambridge Professor of History, focused on the figure of Gregory Martin when he delivered the 15th Tyburn Lecture at Tyburn Convent, London, on Wednesday May 11.

Martin was the "closest friend" of St Edmund Campion, the celebrated Elizabethan martyr, and while he was in exile he translated the Rheims Douai Bible - described by Professor Duffy as the "crowning glory of Elizabethan prose".

He played a major role in transforming the English College, Rome, into a seminary fit for serving the English Mission, and he ensured that the Douai seminary curriculum placed a distinctive emphasis on biblical studies.

He also wrote Roma Sancta, a book through which, argued Professor Duffy, Martin proved himself to be an "original author of genius" with his "eloquent evocation" of the continuities between early Christian and Counter Reformation Rome.

The book was begun on the eve of St Edmund Campion's mission to England but remained unpublished. This was probably because it contained a 20-page eulogy to the martyr who, in the eyes of many English people, had become a "byword for a dangerous Talibanesque religious fanatic", Professor Duffy explained. Instead, Roma Sancta was published for the first time only in the late 20th century.

In his lecture, Professor Duffy speculated on whether the course of recusant Catholicism in England might have been altered if the book had been published before Martin's premature death from tuberculosis in 1582.

Professor Duffy said: "Elizabethan Catholicism has often been thought of as exotically marginal to the history of Elizabethan culture more widely, a perception that may be assisted by our proneness as Catholics to focus on the Elizabethan martyrs, men and woman almost by definition at odds with their own society.

"But that, understandable as it is, has tended to obscure the stature and wider cultural significance of two remarkable generations of Elizabethan Catholics in exile in Italy, Spain, France and the Low Countries who played a part in the wider Counter Reformation as well as in the cultural history of their own land. And of that comparatively little known Elizabethan diaspora, Gregory Martin is one of the most unjustly forgotten.

"Martin was one of a handful of early Elizabeth activists who shaped a vigorously aggressive recusant response to the Elizabethan religious settlement."

Professor Duffy said: "More than any other Elizabethan Catholic work in English, Roma Sancta attempted to promote militant Catholicism in England by relating an English struggle both to an heroic age of early Christian martyrdom and to the extraordinary European Catholic revival under (Pope) Gregory XIII."

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