Counter-Reformation Colonialism: The Knatchbull Catechism in Seventeenth-Century Maryland

The Knatchbull catechism is attributed to Brother Francis Knatchbull (1641–77), a Jesuit temporal coadjutor and schoolmaster for the Maryland mission between 1675 and 1677.^[1] The catechism, in manuscript, is bound into a nineteenth-century copy of the Douay–Rheims Bible and is held in the archives of the Maryland province of the Society of Jesus at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.^[2] In it, Knatchbull distilled how English Catholics navigated colliding worlds brought about by global Catholicism, the Protestant Reformations, and European settler colonialism. Knatchbull wrote his catechism for English Catholics living in Maryland during a period of crisis; at the same time, ships bound from Europe delivered news of anti-Catholic unrest in Britain and Ireland.^[3] Knatchbull’s intention was to reassure English Catholics in Maryland that they were wise to commit to the Catholic Baltimore proprietorship and the Jesuit mission to Indigenous Americans despite growing Protestant discontent.

Indigenous Americans and Catholic Empires in North America

The area of Maryland most densely populated by English colonists in the seventeenth century was a part of the lands of the historic Piscataway chiefdom, from the lower Potomac River to the Chesapeake, roughly the modern counties of Prince George’s, Charles, St. Mary’s, Calvert, and Anne Arundel.^[4] Gabrielle Tayac has explained that the Piscataway chiefdom allied the “Anacostan, Portobac, Mattawoman, Nanjemoy, and possibly the Maryland Pamunkey, Yaocomaco, and Virginia Tauxenent,” with each tribe paying tribute to the tayac (head) of the confederacy.^[5] On the eastern shore of Maryland, Nanticoke lands spread as far as Delaware, New Jersey, and southern Pennsylvania.^[6] Even farther east in the Delaware Valley were the Lenape people.^[7] To the north of the colony, the Susquehannock people lived in palisaded connadagos (towns) in the lower Susquehanna Valley.^[8] The Susquehannock were Iroquoian speakers with strong trade connections to Indigenous Americans in the northeast of the present-day United States, the Great Lakes region, and lower Canada. This led them to become important to English access to the northern fur trade despite the Susquehannock having inconsistent diplomatic relations with both Virginia and Maryland during this period.^[9] Tsenacomoco (Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom) in Virginia was another powerful, Algonquian force in the Chesapeake Bay, and its diplomatic relations with the Virginia colony indirectly affected Maryland politics.^[10]

This paper examines the English Jesuit mission to Indigenous Americans in the homelands of the aforementioned tribes. It is important to remember that until the end of the seventeenth century, settlers were acutely aware that the balance of power favored Indigenous people rather than colonizers. Although settlers have for the last four hundred years demarcated and negotiated the boundaries of the colony, and later the state of Maryland, the ancestral lands of Indigenous Americans in the Chesapeake were and are Indigenous land.

The current boundaries of the state of Maryland are different from those of the seventeenth-century colony, yet the best-known maps of Virginia and Maryland, produced by John Smith in 1612, Jerome Hawley and John Lewgar in 1635, and Augustin Herrman in 1673, fail to convey the wider colonial space in which Maryland and Virginia existed.^[11]

Figure 1. A map of the English colonies on the eastern seaboard, with Spanish Florida marked to the south and west. In an engraving to the bottom right of the map, at the top, an English trader sits beside a territory marker bearing the Royal Coat of Arms. He is assisted by a translator who is darker skinned but in English dress, which most likely demarcates him as an Indigenous convert to Christianity. The translator offers a trade of English manufactured goods to Indigenous people for the produce of the Americas. These American goods include the tobacco leaves at the feet of a wisoe (councilman) at the bottom left of the engraving, and the fish illustrated to the right of his feet, which are also smoked by English colonists in the background. Johann Baptist Homann (1673–1724), Virginia Marylandia et Carolina in America Septentrionali Britannorum (n.p., [1714]), map courtesy of the Talbot County Free Library]

The Johann Baptist Homann map (1714) pays greater attention to European colonization writ large in North America.^[12] Homann marks the Spanish territory of Florida, founded in 1565, which to the south and west practically encircled the English colonies of Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, East and West Jersey, and Pennsylvania, all of which were settled between 1607 and 1681. To the north, New France, which was founded in 1535, closed-in English colonies just north of New England that were settled between 1620 and 1636 (Plymouth, 1620; Massachusetts Bay, 1629; Connecticut, 1634–36; Rhode Island, 1636) in an area that encompassed most of modern-day Canada and much of the Great Lakes region.^[13] The Dutch founded New Netherland in 1614, and the Delaware colony was founded by the Swedish in 1638 but captured by the Dutch in 1655, and both were subsumed into the English colonies in 1664, which precipitated the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67).^[14] This means that when the Knatchbull Catechism was produced, the English colonies were surrounded by Catholic empires. This is important because after the Protestant Reformations (c.1517–1648), European diplomacy had a confessional dynamic. In Britain and Ireland, the English and Scottish Reformations (c.1525–90), combined with the Union of the Crowns (1603), resulted in closer ties between England and Scotland founded on Protestant identity. This identity was founded at the expense of the French–Scottish Auld Alliance (1295–1560), and in hostility toward the dominant Catholic empires of the day, the Spanish Habsburgs and the French Bourbons. Consequently, British and Irish Catholics were treated with suspicion and alienated from full subjecthood, especially those who migrated to the Continent to be educated and/or enter into religious life.^[15] The uneasy relationship between Catholics and the crown in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland meant that violent episodes involving Catholics in one kingdom had repercussions for Catholics in all others. The same was true of events in Europe when Catholic regimes flexed their dominance in international affairs.^[16] Consequently, latent fears of Catholic conspiracy with foreign powers, European or Indigenous, were often resurrected by Protestants in times of domestic crisis. In Maryland, territorial shifts between European colonizers, especially as the territories of two Catholic empires surrounded the English colonies, informed English views of European–Indigenous diplomacy and the seventeenth-century Jesuit mission.

Maryland 1675–77

The second Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert (b.1605), died in 1675, and his son, Mary- land’s governor Charles Calvert (1637–1715), temporarily returned to England to ascend to his barony. This transition and the instability it risked was ill-timed. Six years earlier, the freemen of Maryland, who were disproportionately Protestant, formerly indentured servants, had complained that proprietary officials had enforced excessive taxes. In response, Governor Calvert claimed that the taxes were necessary for the defense of the colony and were his prerogative to raise by extension of royal privilege codified in the Maryland Charter (1632). A year later, in 1670, Governor Calvert and his council introduced a property qualification for the franchise and abolished the headright system, which had awarded land to settlers upon completion of their indenture. Overnight, scores of settlers were disenfranchised, and they were primarily Protestant. Those who qualified for the franchise, in real and/or chattel property, were more often Catholic, and the kin of the Calvert family occupied the most influential positions on the proprietary council. The enfranchised were also typically slaveholding planters, whose capital invested in enslaved people also qualified them to vote.^[17] In 1670, the Virginia government enacted the same policy.^[18] Across the Chesapeake, colonists were further angered when the levies raised for the fortification of the colonies were supposedly misspent. In Virginia, Governor William Berkeley (1605–1677) built forts of limited use against Indigenous guerrilla warfare, while Governor Calvert elected to transfer the colony’s magazine to his own house at Mattapany (c.1671).^[19] These changes occurred at a time when the balance of power in North America was shifting. Before the 1630s, the Susquehannock had conducted mourning wars, which expanded their political influence by raiding rival Indigenous groups, including but not limited to the Lenape, Massawomeck, and Wendat. The Susquehannock adopted the survivors of their raids, who then became bridges to defeated nations in peacetime, secured by intermarriage and trade.^[20] The Wendat were closely connected to the French Jesuits, who called them Huron, and many Susquehannock who ventured into Wendake (Wendat territory) also adopted the Catholic faith.^[21] Importantly, Matthew Kruer explains that in the early seventeenth century, “with the common consent of the nations, [the Susquehannock] traded with the Swedish Söderkompaniet and William Claiborne of Kent Island.”^[22] In 1638, the Susquehannock refused to cooperate with Cecil Calvert when he directed them to trade with the colony of Maryland, not Virginia, as his charter stipulated. The Susquehannock did not recognize crown authority, only their own obligation to their existing partner, Claiborne.^[23] By the 1670s, the Söderkompaniet settlers had been absorbed into English colonial life, and the Susquehannock alliance with the Virginians had disintegrated, something the Susquehannock saw as betrayal. In response, the Susquehannock conducted mourning wars against the English and their Indigenous allies. Crucially, Kruer argues that “colonists under assault by Susquehannock enemies displaced their fears onto Native friends and came to see them in newly racialized terms, lumping different Indigenous peoples together into a single—and inherently antagonistic—category.”^[24]

In the mid-1670s, the English Atlantic was a tinderbox. Though at times she risks teleological conclusions about American republicanism, Noleen McIlvenna has nonetheless shown how the colonists involved in Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1676–77), the Davyes–Pate Rebellion in Maryland (1676), and Culpeper’s Rebellion in the Carolina colony (1677) challenged the concentration of power in a planter aristocracy, which in Maryland was predominantly Catholic.^[25] In the same period, colonists in the middle colonies received news from New England that the Wampanoag who warred with English settlers during King Philip’s/Metacom’s War (1675–78) were assisted by the French, and especially the Jesuits.^[26] There was also discontent at home. The Cavalier Parliament (1661–79) insisted that non-conforming Protestants accept a religious settlement that many considered to be Laudianism, or worse, popery, by the back door. Those who refused were removed from office in the Church of England (Corporation Act 1661; Act of Uniformity 1662) and forbidden from holding private, dissenting ser- vices (Conventicle Act 1664; Five Mile Act 1665). At the same time, Stuart relations with France grew increasingly close, and many in Parliament feared the Stuart monarchy would introduce an absolutist regime like that in France; in 1614, Louis XIII (1601–43, r.1610–43) disbanded the last Estates General to meet before the French Revolution (1789). Members of Parliament who had cautiously welcomed the Restoration (1660) considered their concerns reasonable, given that the Stuarts had regularly prorogued Parliament.^[27] When James, duke of York (1633–1701) converted to Catholicism in 1669, even the Cavaliers were alarmed.^[28] Thus in Maryland, colonists received unsettling news bound on ships from England concerning the ongoing Parliamentary crisis surrounding the 1673 Test Act, which had forced the duke of York’s resignation from government when the newly converted Catholic refused to swear an oath of allegiance that denounced papal authority to depose a sovereign.^[29] Later, Charles II prorogued Parliament for fifteen months in November 1675 in response to anti-Catholic bills introduced in the House of Lords after the marriage of the duke of York to Mary of Modena (1658–1718). In December 1678, Charles II prorogued Parliament again after it attempted to remove the Catholic duke of York from the line of succession, which is now known to historians as the Exclusion Crisis.

Alarmed by the news of the Long Prorogation (1675–76) alongside the burgeoning local crisis, in 1676 Protestant Marylanders published a petition addressed to Parliament that justified the rebellions in Maryland and Virginia respectively. The petitioners claimed that Lord Baltimore and Governor Berkeley of Virginia “tell a great many over smothed Contraries,” but that in reality, “Pope Jesuit is determined to over terne England, with feyer, sword and distractions, within themselves, and by the Maryland Papists, to drive us Protestants to Purgatory within ourselves in America, with the help of the French spirits from Canada,” and that with Baltimore’s and Berkeley’s encouragement, Indigenous people were to “give Virginia a good Blow if not an overthrow by Maryland Piscattaway Indians in Potomoke River, who [are] encouraged by their own if not a Popish Divell.”^[30] Whether Protestant fear of French and Indigenous alliance was an imagined threat or not is debatable, but it is certain that English Jesuits had contact with their French confrères and with Algonquian and Iroquoian people. In a letter dated October 24, 1674, Fr. Claude Dablon (c.1619–97), the Jesuit superior of the missions of Canada and rector of Quebec, reported to the Jesuit French provincial, Reverend Father Jean Pinette (1609–90), that Fr. Jean Pierron (1631–1700) had journeyed to Maryland and there encountered two priests and one brother.^[31] Pinnette informed the French provincial that given the relatively large Catholic population in Maryland compared to other English colonies, “these two Fathers alone do not suffice, [and so] Father Pierron cheerfully offers to go and assist them, and at the same time to establish a Mission among the neighboring Savages, with whose language he is familiar.”^[32] In the end, Pierron returned to the French mission in Quebec. Still, it is worth noting that however deep were English Catholic connections to New France and the French Jesuits, if Pierron’s visit to the English Jesuits in Maryland was indiscrete, his presence may have exacerbated Protestant fears that the Jesuits and “Savages” they converted had maleficent intentions just as colonists’ frustration was escalating toward the outbreak of Bacon’s Rebellion in May 1676.

Brother Francis Knatchbull

Brother Francis Knatchbull was admitted to the Society of Jesus in 1671 as a novitiate temporal coadjutor at Watten, in Spanish Flanders. Knatchbull’s parentage and education are not recorded in the catalogs breves and the catalogs triennales held at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), but if he studied at an English Catholic college in continental Europe, he most likely received a Jesuit education since all colleges were Jesuit-run except for the secular colleges at Douai and Lisbon.^[33] Geoffrey Holt, S.J. uncovered that in 1672, Knatchbull spent time at the English College of Saint- Omer (St. Omers in English usage).^[34] Since Knatchbull is not recorded in the student registers for St. Omers, he was presumably teaching at the college while a novice coadjutor.^[35] Two years later, in 1674, Knatchbull obtained permission to join the mission in Maryland, arriving there in 1675. According to the annual letter of 1677, after laboring as a schoolmaster, Knatchbull died in the colony on June 6 the same year.^[36]

Henry Foley, S.J. was the first to identify Knatchbull as a member of a gentry recusant family that had numerous members enter into religious life in seminaries and convents on the Continent.^[37] Since neither the catalogs breves nor the catalogs triennales for the English Jesuit mission record Knatchbull’s parentage, it is difficult to identify his lineage precisely; for this reason, I present all possible genealogies.^[38] Recent prosopography produced by Katharine Keats-Rohan and others working on the “Who Were the Nuns?” (WWTN) project at Queen Mary University of London, as well as Bronagh McShane’s work on the Irish side of the family, reveals that Knatchbull could feasibly have belonged to one of two branches of the Knatchbull family. According to the WWTN, Knatchbull may have been the son of Thomas Knatchbull Esq. (1572–1623) of Maidstone, Kent, and his wife Eleanor Astley (dates unknown).^[39] If he was, his parents and siblings were conforming Protestants; including a brother, Sir Norton Knatchbull, first baronet (1602–85), a member of Parliament and respected biblical scholar.^[40] If he belonged to this branch of the family, Knatchbull chose to depart from the conformity of his immediate family and convert to the Catholicism of his cousins. However, if Knatchbull’s parentage has been misattributed to the conforming Thomas Knatchbull, then Knatchbull may have been the son of the former’s Catholic cousin, also called Thomas Knatchbull, who was the father of two Benedictine nuns, Mary and Margaret.^[41] According to the Ghent Annals, this Thomas Knatchbull had studied for the priesthood at the English College of St. Albans at Valladolid before electing to marry.^[42] If Knatchbull was the son of the Catholic Thomas Knatchbull, then he would be the nephew of Fr. John Norton Knatchbull, S.J. (d. c.1631–33) who was appointed vice-president of Douay College in 1609. After joining the Society at Liège in 1618, Norton Knatchbull is listed in the records of the vice province of the English Jesuits in Belgium as a procurator from 1620 to 1623 and consultor to the vice provincial at Brussels in 1622/23; he was then the third rector of the Jesuit tertian house in Ghent (1625). Thereafter, Norton Knatchbull moved to Spain, where he was procurator for the province at Toledo (1627); at the same time, he was also rector of St. George’s English College at Madrid (1626–1630) and its procurator from 1630. Soon after his arrival in Spain, Norton Knatchbull became the confessor of Queen Isabel de Bourbon (1602–1644), consort of Philip IV (1605–1665), and remained so until 1631.^[43] Elizabeth Knatchbull (1584–1629), named in religion as Lucy, the first abbess of the Benedictine Convent of the Immaculate Conception, also in Ghent, was therefore Br. Knatchbull’s aunt, and his cousin was Mary Knatchbull (1610–96), named in religion as Mary, who like her aunt became the abbess of Ghent in 1650.^[44]

Least likely, Br. Knatchbull was a son of Reginald Knatchbull Jr. (dates unknown), whom Katharine Keats-Rohan was unable to fully identify. Reginald Knatchbull Jr. was the brother of Thomas Knatchbull Esq., Fr. Norton Knatchbull, and Abbess Lucy Knatchbull. Their father was Reginald Knatchbull Sr. (dates unknown). The unidentified son of Reginald Knatchbull Jr. was the father of Vincent Knatchbull of Ballyfrance (sic), Ireland (dates unknown), and a godfather to a child of the Langton family in Kilkenny in 1677; his wife had been godmother to another in 1674.^[45] In order to act as godfather to the Langton child, Vincent Knatchbull should have at least been old enough to have received Holy Communion, or about sixteen years old.^[46] Likewise, after the Reformation, to be legally married, Vincent Knatchbull and his wife were required to be at least twenty-one years old according to canons 46–55 of the Synod of the Clergy of (the Church of) Ireland (1634), unless their parents permitted them to marry as minors.^[47] Even if Vincent Knatchbull was sixteen when the first Langton child was baptized, this would mean that Br. Knatchbull would have been about seventeen years old when Vincent Knatchbull was born. It is possible that Br. Knatchbull was Vincent Knatchbull’s father, but it is not probable.

That Br. Knatchbull’s lineage belongs to the Catholic branch of the family is perhaps corroborated by the fact that members of this branch were acquainted with some of Maryland’s earliest colonists and missionaries. Keats-Rohan lists the parents of Fr. Norton Knatchbull as Reginald Knatchbull Sr. (dates unknown) and Anne Elizabeth Crispe of Dover (dates unknown).^[48] However, in the student registers for St. Gregory’s English College of Seville, Fr. Norton Knatchbull and his younger brother Thomas, also a student in Seville, are listed as the sons of Reginald Knatchbull Sr. and Eleanor Copley (dates unknown) of the Copleys of Gatton.^[49] Presumably the senior Reginald Knatchbull married twice. Importantly, Eleanor’s kinsman was Fr. Thomas Copley, S.J. (1596–1652), alias Philip Fisher, whom Thomas McCoog, S.J. has identified as the son of Sir Thomas Copley of Gatton (1532–84). Fr. Copley was born in exile in Madrid, educated at Liège, Louvain, and Ghent, gained experience on the English mission, and then traveled to Maryland, where he died in 1652 as superior of the mission there.^[50] In the course of his duties in Spain and Flanders, Fr. Norton Knatchbull would have encountered Fr. Copley and the first superior of the Maryland mission, Fr. Andrew White, S.J. (1579–1656), who was educated at the English Colleges of Valladolid, Seville, and Douai and later took up professorships in theology and scriptural studies at Louvain, Liège, and Lisbon.^[51] As confessor to the queen consort, Fr. Norton Knatch- bull was a member of the English faction at the Spanish royal court that championed but failed to secure the so-called Spanish Match between Charles Stuart, prince of Wales (1600–49), and the Spanish Infanta, María Ana (1606–46).^[52] The first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, was also a member of this faction while he was secretary of state (1618–25) to James I/VI.^[53] Finally, the branch of the Knatchbull family that descended from Reginald Knatchbull Sr. were kin of the Butlers and Plowdens. Both families were experienced colonizers in Ireland, while Sir Edmund Plowden (1590–1659) made an abortive attempt to establish the New Albion colony in present-day Pennsylvania and Delaware (1632).^[54]

Importantly, Br. Knatchbull’s indirect connection to these courtly circles likely contributed to his formation as much as his time spent in Spanish Flanders. British and Irish colleges and seminaries were interconnected with Jesuit missions globally through epistolary networks, and news spread fast along them. Jesuits remained connected to friends and relations inside and outside of the Society through personal correspondence, and to the Society writ large through the circulation of annual letters and ex officio proceedings of business.^[55] Provincial and domestic consultors, like Frs. Norton Knatchbull, Copley, and White, collated the information prescribed by the Formula scribendi (1573–80) for inclusion in these reports. To keep reports concise, not all information survived the editorial process, and so Frs. Norton Knatchbull, Copley, and White would have been privy to information that might have been shared with Br. Knatchbull but that has not survived for posterity.^[56] Additionally, Caroline Bowden has shown that Br. Knatchbull’s cousin, Abbess Mary Knatchbull, claimed an extensive epistolary network in Flanders, France, and England that enabled her to support efforts to bring about the Stuart Restoration from within the confines of the convent at Ghent. During the Interregnum (1649–60), she exchanged at least forty-two intelligence letters with Charles II’s chief advisors, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon (1609–74), Sir Edward Nicholas (1593–1669), and her distant kinsman, James Butler, 1st duke of Ormond (1610–88).^[57] If Br. Knatchbull sought out a precedent for ad- dressing a political crisis, he could find it in his cousin’s intrigue. This meant that Br. Knatchbull, like any other Jesuit, was well placed to learn missionary practice from all four corners of the world through the centralized government of the Society of Jesus, but his kin network of exiled English and Irish Catholics received intelligence derived from privileged access to news from the Spanish court and the English mission. Even if we cannot determine his exact parentage, we at least know that Br. Knatchbull’s kin were well connected in Counter-Reformation Europe, and they had a strong interest in American colonization, which likely influenced Br. Knatchbull’s decision to join the Maryland mission and how he encountered it.

The Formation of British and Irish Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe

Few records of the novitiate at Watten survived the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution (1789–99) and the suppression of the Society of Jesus (1773–1814). What did survive is now held at Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school in Lancashire, England. The majority of the archives concern St. Omers College, but some records have provenance from the secular and Benedictine colleges at Douai, the novitiate at Watten, and the tertianship at Ghent.^[58] In many cases, even where binding can date manuscripts to the seventeenth century, their provenance is unclear. For this reason, it is impossible to say with certainty that Br. Knatchbull had access to the contents of the modern archive at Watten and St. Omers. Yet, we can be certain that if Br. Knatchbull was teaching at St. Omers, the curriculum in which his students were trained had its foundations in the Ratio studiorum (1599).^[59] The Ratio codified that Jesuit collegii minores teach young laymen a curriculum of rhetoric, poetry, and middle and upper grammar. At St. Omers, that curriculum consisted of classical authors including Cicero (106–43 BCE), Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Livy (d.17 CE), Virgil (70–19 BCE), and Ovid (b.43 BCE), as well as St. Chrysostom (d.407), Aesop (c.620–564 BCE), and Pope St. Agapetus I (c.489–536, r.535–36). Grammar studies also included Greek Catechism and the Tabula of Cebes.^[60] At the collegii maiores, clerical and lay students studied theology and philosophy, including the natural sciences. The theology curriculum consisted of Origen (185–254), Augustine (354–430), Jerome (c.347–420), the Antiochene School (c.350–450), and Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–74), the interpretation of which remained informed by the church fathers and medieval scholars like Bede (c.672–735) and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153).^[61] By the seventeenth century, Jesuit education was impacted by Spanish-inflected baroque Scholasticism, which had developed as a response to an increasingly global, Catholic Church brought about by the Reconquista (1492), and Spanish and Portuguese expansion in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.^[62] Baroque Scholasticism was heavily influenced by the so-called Salamanca School of students tutored by the Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Domingo de Soto (1494–1560); the school was eventually recognized as the cradle of the modern law of nations (ius gentium).^[63]

In addition to the typical Jesuit curriculum in place at St. Omers, Janet Graffius has revealed that material culture played a vital role in forming a martyrological English Catholic identity in exile.^[64] At St. Omers, Fr. Giles Schondonch (d.1617) developed the “Customs Book” to entrench quotidian religious habit in the student body and develop a confessional identity encapsulated in the St. Omers sodality that would sustain a life of clandestine worship and lethal risk until the (re)conversion of England was achieved.^[65] For example, Thomas Muir cites the Memoir of Edmund Poins (vere Mathews ^{[1653–1667]}), who recounts his childhood education at St. Omers in which he movingly described his personal devotion of kissing the portraits of English martyrs that lined the walls of the school corridors.^[66] Graffius also highlights the importance of relics to school life.^[67] In one example, she notes that a “reliquary manuscript […] dated 1614, consists of a drawing of a cross formerly in the possession of [the priest] John Redman (d.1671).”^[68] The cross was populated by the relics of the apostles Peter, Paul, Andrew, and Bartholomew on the left arm; and the church fathers and doctors “Chrysostom (c.344–407 CE), Gregory, Jerome (347–420 CE), and Bernard of Clairvaux” on the right arm. The upright contained relics pertaining to the Holy Family and the passion of Christ, including relics of St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist as well as a piece of the true cross. Beneath this were the relics of four virgin-martyrs of the early church and other early female saints; in the base were the relics of the founders of the great medieval orders displaced by the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41); then martyred bishops and deacons including the English saint Thomas Becket of Canterbury (1118/20–70). Finally, also in the base were relics of the “then-recent beatii of the Society of Jesus: Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556), Francis Xavier (1506–52), Luigi Gonzaga (1568–91), and Stanisław Kostka (1550–68).”^[69] Crucially, Graffius argues that the reliquary was probably paraded publicly in the town of Saint-Omer by the English Jesuits on feast days:

Taken as a whole, this reliquary spans the history of the Catholic Church as it then stood, from the time of Christ, through the martyrs of the early church, encompassing the great female saints, fathers, theologians and philosophers, bishops, deacons, founders of international orders, and the saints and beati of the Counter-Reformation. [Yet], there are a number of significant relics that tie this reliquary very firmly to St. Omers College.^[70]

If he were teaching at St. Omers around 1672–74, Br. Knatchbull would have been required to be sufficiently familiar with the aforementioned literature that comprised the Ratio in order to provide his students with the requisite education. Perhaps more importantly, Br. Knatchbull would have been accustomed to the assemblage of reliquaries and the devotional pattern of life constituted by Schondonch that promoted an English Catholic identity enmeshed in the fabric of an ancient, universal, and global Roman Catholic Church.

The Knatchbull Catechism and Confronting Crisis

The Knatchbull catechism is short, only forty-eight pages long, contained within twenty-four double-sided leaves of paper, and in a secretary hand. Though not explicitly titled as such, four sections of the catechism are discernible: a defense of the Roman Catholic Church including a Thomist exposition of the doctrine of extra ecclesiam, nulla salus (out of the church, there is no salvation), pages 2 to 7; an explanation in section 2 of the meaning of “true faith” and the obligation to defend the church even to the point of martyrdom, pages 8 to 11; a defense of the antiquity and universality of the Roman Catholic Church with special reference to English saints is presented in section 3, pages 12 to 17; and in the final section a defense of the Catholic doctrine of the transubstantiated Eucharist, including a meditation on the sacrament entitled “Ad majorem Dei gloriam: The Blessed Eucharist,” pages 18 to 48.^[71] The rest of this article focuses on sections 1 to 3 to argue that in his catechism, Br. Knatchbull leveraged his Tridentine training to reiterate to Maryland Catholics that their communion with the church, and the mission to Indigenous Americans, was not contingent on the physical safety of Jesuit missionaries or the laity.

In the seventeenth century, the standard catechisms employed in lay education by Jesuits worldwide were the Doctrina christiana (1589) and the Summa doctrinae christianae (1555) written respectively by the Jesuits Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) and Peter Canisius (1521–97). Both were short, intended for pastoral use rather than the training of priests, were heavily influenced by St Augustine’s De doctrina christiana (397), and were presented as applicable to any Catholic, at anytime, anywhere.^[72] Doctrina christiana was widely circulated in Northern Europe, where Protestant religions were strongest; Summa doctrinae christianiae was widely circulated outside of Europe and translated into sixty languages.^[73] The call-and-response structure of the Knatchbull catechism is generic, but it is not a verbatim copy of Doctrina christiana or the Summa doctrinae christianae, nor any other contemporaneous catechism for that matter.^[74] This was not unusual: Antje Flüchter explains that, more often than not, Jesuits adapted catechisms so that the central tenets of the Catholic faith were relevant to local contexts. For example, Anand Amaladass notes that Roberto de Nobili, S.J. (1577–1656) crafted his own catechisms in Tamil rather than translate an existing catechism produced in Europe, something Amaladass calls “cultural translation.”^[75] Likewise, John Steck- ley has shown that Jean de Brébeuf, S.J. (1593–1649), who was a part of the French mission in North America, preferred to adapt and translate into Wendat a Spanish catechism written by Diego de Ledesma, S.J. (1519–75) rather than translate popular French catechisms.^[76] Knatchbull’s approach to catechesis is therefore not unique, but the missiones intra to English Catholics, and the missiones extra to Indigenous Americans in Maryland as he understood them, were peculiar to time and place. The Knatchbull catechism is an original attempt to reassure those subject to the complaints of disgruntled Protestants who targeted their frustration at English Catholics and Indigenous Americans alike.

Knatchbull opens his catechism with the question “What was the commission Christ gave his Apostles when he sent ’em to preach the Gospel?” to which he pro- vides a response derived from the Gospel according to Matthew (28:19), “go and teach all nations,” before answering the subsequent question, “what does this Commission mean?,” with the reply:

That it was not only given to the Apostles, but to all their successors, Bishops, Priests and Pastors to the end of the world […] [who] have power and authority to teach us, and we are Bound under pain of damnation to believe and obey crn [sic] That tho Jesus Christ has suffered and did die for us, yet we shall not be saved, unless we believe what the Church teaches us and commands us.^[77]

Both Catholic and Protestant audiences were targets of the missiones intra in England, and appealing to both groups in English catechisms from their outset was established precedent. For example, in the preface of his translation of Canisius’s Summa doctrinae christinae (c.1592–96), Henry Garnet, S.J. (1555–1606) sought to convince Christians in Elizabethan England that just as God had preserved the Hebrews during their enslavement in Egypt, the Catholic Church remained the source of salvation despite Elizabethan persecution: “All honour then and glory be (as it is worthy) yeelded vnto him, who least we walking in darkenes know not whither to goe, hath prouided vs a Candell of his holy doctrine euen in the middest of Egypt, and set it vpon a candlesticke in the Catholicke Church.”^[78]

Like Garnet, from the outset of his catechism Knatchbull made clear that only the Catholic Church offered salvation. On pages 3 and 4, he warns against the Protestant idea that Scripture is the source of all human knowledge of God (sola scriptura) because “there are many things, which all agree are necessary to be believed and observed, which are not set down in Scripture, as the Baptism of Infants, number of the Sacraments, keeping the Sunday and not Saturday etc.”^[79] In answer to the subsequent question of why a Christian must adhere to the teachings of the Catholic Church, Knatchbull first answers that Christ commanded it, before justifying the excommunication of heretics using the Gospel according to Matthew (18:17). Knatchbull writes: “Q. What has he said? A. He that hears you, hears me, and he that does not hear the Church, let him be to you as a heathen or a publican [tax collector].”^[80]

English Catholics knew that the threat of excommunication was not an idle one. In 1570, Pope Pius V (1504–72, r.1566–72) expelled Elizabeth I (1533–1603, r.1558–1603) from the Catholic Church. In the preamble of Regnans in excelsis (1570), Pius described the church as “unum sanctam Catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, extra quam nulla est salus” (one holy Catholic and apostolic church, out of which there is no salvation).^[81] The doctrine of extra ecclesiam, nulla salus applied to all people, in all places. Thus, on page 8 of his catechism, in answer to the question “what are the qualities of true Faith?,” Knatchbull replies that “it must be firm, whole, and entire and we must believe in a true motive.”^[82] Knatchbull continues that to be firm in the faith, Catholics must “be willing to lay down our very lives in defense of it, and to believe everything the Church teaches with more firmness than if we saw it.”^[83] In answer to a question that follows shortly after, “what is the true motive?,” Knatchbull states “not because we are bred and born this way, not because our parents are such; but because it is the only true faith revealed by Al[mighty]. God; the only true Religion or Church out of which there is no salvation.”^[84] To an audience of English Catholics, the connection to the missiones intra in England, which produced hundreds of martyrs at the hands of the Protestant state, is obvious.^[85] In Maryland, the anti-Catholic violence of Protestants was transformed in a new, colonial context that was exacerbated by hostilities with the Susquehannock. Knatchbull’s reference to Matthew 18:17 directly follows a defense of the church and its mission to “teach all nations” and precedes a lengthy, Thomist exposition of true faith and the limits of culpability for lack of it based upon Vitoria’s De Indis noviter inventis (On the Indians recently discovered ^[1532]). In that treatise, Vitoria delineated the difference between dissemblers, heretic Christians, and “invincibly ignorant” animists to defend Catholic conversion of Indigenous Americans facilitated by Spanish conquest.^[86]  In section 3, Knatchbull adopts Vitoria’s position to write the missiones extra in Maryland into a history of the English Catholic Church, which he argued extended as far back as the patristics, through the sixth-century Gregorian mission, and into the seventeenth-century missiones intra. Collectively, the order of questioning used by Knatchbull in his catechism was purposeful: it was intended to reiterate to English Catholics living in Maryland that their salvation was dependent on their communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and that regardless of Protestant violence, they were obligated to bring into that communion Indigenous Americans who without conversion remained outside of the church and the salvation of Christ.

Vitoria’s use of the word discovery in the title of his work is significant. By the fifteenth century, settler colonialism and slavery were intertwined with conversion missions through the canon law principle extra ecclesiam, nulla salus and the three papal bulls Dum diversas (1452), Romanus pontifex (1455), and Inter caetera (1493).^[87] Since the biblical Genesis was believed by Christians to be the one and only creation, in Christian theology all human beings are necessarily descended from a single origin.^[88] Uniquely, Catholics believed that salvation was achieved through baptism, which metaphysically bound an individual into the Communion of Saints as well as absolving the recipient of original sin.^[89] For this reason, before the Protestant Reformations, Christians in the Latin rite believed that the papacy was obligated to pursue conversion and salvation of all human beings on earth, and that secular authorities could be levied to aid this mission. The theological underpinnings of this policy relied heavily on Aquinas, especially his Summa contra Gentiles (c.1265) and his Summa theologiae (c.1273).^[90] Aquinas was revered because of his exegesis of the soul (anima), grace, and the human condition, which was later adapted to justify white supremacist ideas about the inferiority of African and Indigenous American reason, which in turn had implications for defenses of enslavement and settler colonialism. According to Aquinas, human reason is a natural gift of God, but it can be clouded by sin; grace does not rule reason but only perfects it so that the human will is intuitively inclined toward God.^[91] Importantly, because humans have the capacity to reason, they have the capacity to be converted to Christianity, or reject it.^[92] Thus, by the fifteenth century, Catholics widely accepted that if a human being rejected Christ, that person could be legitimately enslaved and the kingdoms of non-Christian rulers could be colonized. However, the discovery of the Americas in 1492 forced the papacy to clarify the meaning of extra ecclesiam, nulla salus because at the point of contact, Indigenous Americans had never been exposed to Christianity. To enslave or colonize entire Indigenous American nations necessarily violated natural law if it was impossible for Indigenous Americans to reject a faith of which they had no prior knowledge. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de la Casas (1484–1566) put these arguments to Pope Paul III (1468–1549, r.1534–49), who subsequently issued the papal bull Sublimis Deus (1537).^[93] The bull confirmed emphatically that Indigenous Americans were capable of reason; they were therefore in possession of a soul, and their evangelization was a priority.^[94] The Knatchbull catechism explicitly cites the culpability of non-believers schematized by Vitoria in De Indis noviter inventis. Knatchbull explains to English communicants that those alienated from the Roman Catholic Church include the “obstinate” (heretics), the “neglectful” (equivocating Catholics), the “indifferent, who do not care about their souls,” and “th[os]e who are out of it thro’ invincible ignorance,” namely those who “know no better, and not to be able to know better, and the [s]ame time to be disposed that if they did know better they would embrace the true faith at any rate.”^[95] Over one hundred years earlier, to explain vincible and invincible ignorance, Vitoria also cited the sinner who refused to hear Christ and his church (Matthew 18:17):

Negligence with regard to the subject-matter is requisite for ignorance, even though it be vincible, [which is] to be imputed as, and to be, a sin, as, for ex- ample, that the man refused to hear or did not believe what he did hear […]; on the other hand I say that for invincible ignorance it is enough that the man bestowed human diligence in trying to learn, even if in other respects he is in mortal sin […]. For the aborigines [of the Americas] to whom no preaching of the faith or Christian religion had come will be damned for mortal sins or for idolatry, but not for the sin of unbelief, as St. Thomas […] says.^[96]

Evidently, Knatchbull claimed that Indigenous Americans in Maryland were invincibly ignorant of Christ and that his purpose, and that of his confrères, was to incorporate Indigenous Americans into the Catholic Church by their baptism. It is unclear if the Jesuit mission to Indigenous Americans continued after Ingle’s Rebellion (1645), because few of the annual letters returned to Europe for the period 1645 to 1689 are extant, if they were ever sent.^[97] However, the Knatchbull catechism suggests that the mission did continue into at least the 1670s, and that Brother Knatchbull was forced to present a Thomist response to English Catholics who challenged the Jesuits they feared imperiled them to anti-Catholic, anti-French, and anti-Indigenous violence.

Importantly, to solidify his appeal to English Catholics to fortify a universal Catholic Church to which they and Indigenous Americans belonged, in section 3 Knatchbull legitimizes and celebrates the English contribution to Catholic missions past and present. He was not the first to make this argument: the Catholic priest and controversialist Thomas Stapleton (1535–98) famously produced the first modern, printed English translation of the Venerable Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica de gentis anglorum (Ecclesiastical history of the English nation [c.731]) to reclaim the antiquity of the Catholic Church in England. Titled The History of the Church of Englande (1565), Stapleton naïvely dedicated the translation to Elizabeth I in the hope that

the matter of the History is such, that if it may stande with your Maiesties pleasure to [view] and […] shall clerely see as well the misse informations of a [few] for displacing the auncient and right Christen faith, as also the [way] and meane of a spe[e]dy redresse that may be had for the same, to the quietnesse of the greater part of your Maiesties most loyal and lowly subjectes cō[n]sciences.^[98]

Echoing Stapleton, Knatchbull defended the sanctity of the Catholic Church by citing the “eminent holiness and sapienty” of patristic doctors of the church St. Chrysostom (d.407) and St. Ambrose (d.397), alongside St. Austin (d.604), or Augustine of Canterbury, and St. Gregory the Great (d.604), who together launched the Gregorian mission to convert the English to Christianity in the sixth century.^[99] Telling of their utility to Tridentine reformers, in the seventeenth century, St. Chrysostom was heavily associated with the conversion of Jews and gentiles in fourth-century Antioch, and St. Ambrose was a celebrated missionary among gentiles and a defender of the faith against Arianism in fourth-century Milan.^[100] William Haugaard’s impressive survey of the circulation of patristic texts in sixteenth-century England, in Greek, Latin, and English, demonstrates that there was appetite for the wisdom of the early church fathers among Protestant and Catholics alike. He notes that, of eighty-four English editions of patristic texts, seventy-four were printed in 1536, shortly after the inauguration of the Henrician Reformation (1534), and that while St. Augustine accounted for thirty-six volumes, St. Chrysostom accounted for the second highest volume of editions printed at eleven, and two works by St. Ambrose were published.^[101] Wherever he accessed his sources, by citing patristic authors and medieval English missions, Knatchbull makes clear that the English Catholic Church boasted an illustrious, missionary past that was applicable to the new, missones extra in the Americas. This was not a novel idea.

Lesley Abrams has demonstrated that in the early modern world, the Gregorian mission was a respected source of authority for all Catholic missionaries and especially the Spanish Habsburgs who sheltered British and Irish Catholic exiles.^[102] For example, he notes that in the 1580s, copies of the Gregorian Epistles and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum were included in the libraries of the Convent of San Sebastián in Mexico City and the Convent of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, in Puebla.^[103] Copies were also listed in the personal libraries of Salamanca School theologian José de Acosta, as well as Bartolomé de las Casas.^[104] As a missionary in Peru in 1574, Acosta published a treatise on conversion that cited Gregory’s Pastoral Care and referred to the miracles worked by Augustine and the other Gregorian missionaries as told “in [Bede’s] [H]istoriis anglorum.”^[105] In his discouragement of violent, forced conversions, de las Casas stated that Pope Gregory sent to England “not armed forces but a certain monk, Augustine, and forty pious monks” before echoing the sentiments of Gregory in his letter to Abbot Mellitus that converts should come willingly to baptism and without fear of the total destruction of their culture.^[106]

Importantly, we have evidence that the English colleges on the Continent were distributors to the Americas of texts and visual culture related to the early Christian missions to Britain and Ireland. Michael E. Williams notes that in 1630, the rector of the English College of St. Gregory’s in Seville sent books to Fr. Bartolomé Martín Linero of the Order of St John of God, who was then in Panama.^[107]  In another example, Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644) produced a series of portraits of King Lucius of Britain for the English College in Valladolid and the Bridgettine convent of Syon Abbey in Lisbon. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1095–1195), the legendary King Lucius of Britain converted to Christianity and then appealed to Pope Eleutherius (d.189, r. c.174–89) to support the conversion of Britain. At the turn of the seventeenth century, a copy of the portraits at the English College and Syon Abbey, also attributed to Pacheco, was sent to the Spanish mission in New Spain, which is now held at Museo de Arte Colonial in Bogotá, Colombia.^[108] Susan Webster notes that Pacheco was regularly commissioned to produce iconography by Francisco de Peralta, S.J., rector of the English College of St. Gregory in Seville, and by Rodrigo de Cabredo, S.J., who was first a rector of the English College at Valladolid (1591–94) and later the provincial of New Spain (1609).^[109] Webster suggests that Peralta and Cabredo so admired the missionary efforts of King Lucius and their contemporary English confrères exiled in the Iberian Peninsula that they commissioned Pacheco to produce a copy of the portraits of King Lucius at Valladolid and Lisbon to inspire Spanish missionaries in Bogotá and the Musica people, on whose sacred site Quijicha caca (Grandmother’s foot) the Jesuits had built the Montserrat Sanctuary, where the painting was hung.^[110] The global Spanish missions were also didactic for Catholics returning to England from the continental colleges. The library at the English College in Valladolid held copies of Thomist literature and martyrologies from the Japanese and Chinese missions, one of which was annotated by Robert Persons, S.J. (1546–1610), who founded the college in 1589.^[111] Finally, during his tenure at St. Omers, Knatchbull may have witnessed student plays including “Montezuma Sive Mexici Imperii Occassus” (Montezuma; or The sunset on the Mexican Empire [n.d.]). Dana Sutton notes that although this play did not directly cite Aztec religion as reason for conquest, the soliloquy of the play’s villain, Quicuxtemocus, resembled that of the Canaanite commander, Seresar, in another play inspired by the book of Daniel, which valorized the constancy of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who preferred martyrdom to the paganism of their Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.^[112]

By citing early church fathers alongside the Gregorian missionaries, Knatchbull defended Catholicism from what he perceived to be a novel, Protestant heresy and reminded Maryland Catholics of their special place in the history of a global Catholic Church. In a question directed at Catholics who for their safety might have considered conforming to the Church of England, even if only as dissemblers, Knatchbull writes “is it not a sufficient reason to profess a Religion because it is established by law?” and answers “No, human laws are not the Rules, which God would have us act by in point of religion: they are subject to error and change. If that were the case, I might as well be a Turk, Jew etc.”^[113] He continues with the question, “But there is no being Catholick without being exposed to and suffering many hardships. Is not the avoiding those difficulties reason not to be a Catholick?” before responding with an answer derived from the Gospel according to Mark (8:36–39): “No, if they were the Martyrs & Saints who suffered so much were the greatest madmen upon earth. We must remember what Christ has said, vie, what will it avail a man to gain the whole world, and lose his soul.”^[114] Knatchbull potentially contended with English Catholics who saw little benefit in a mission to Indigenous Americans, which, to their Eurocentric eyes, seemed to produce imperfect converts, who, even if they sincerely believed in a Christian God, continued distinctly Indigenous cultural and religious practices such as the celebration of the Green Corn Festival and the Feast of the Dead.^[115] Bluntly, Catholics who were unconvinced by Indigenous conversion may have questioned whether such converts were worth the risk to their lives. Read within its colonial context, the catechism implicitly connects issues of casuistry in the missones intra in England and the dangers of the missones extra in Maryland to argue that such risks were a mark of adherence to the true faith.

Again, Knatchbull’s exile on the Continent provides some insight into his “Turk” and “Jew” analogy. In Europe, anxieties about sincere belief versus opportunistic conversion were expressed through references to non-Christian communities in a racialized linguistic framework common to both Protestant and Catholic controversialists.^[116] In the Mediterranean world, and especially in the Iberian peninsula, polemical texts expressed doubt over the sincerity of converted Jews, known as Conversos or Marranos, and Moors converted to Christianity from Islam, known as Moriscos.^[117] Christians were especially suspicious of Moriscos because Islam explicitly permits believers to dissemble if they are at risk of death or enslavement until a time when it is safe to re- veal their true, constant but inward adherence to Islam; this rule is known as Taqiyya (Qur’an 16:106).

Christians also feared the reverse scenario. The Qur’an (2:177) recommends freeing enslaved people who have converted to Islam. Barbary corsair raids were common in Europe, and captives were regularly sold into slavery in Muslim territories. This meant that those who escaped their enslavement and returned home, by whatever means, were suspected to have converted to Islam to secure their freedom. In English ephemera, this was often pejoratively called “Turning Turk.”^[118] When he made a comparison to Turks and Jews to rebut the idea that a threat to personal safety excused apostasy, Knatchbull implied that dissembling Catholics who publicly conformed to the Church of England were as morally defect as those who had renounced the Christian God and “Turned Turk,” or Conversos and Moriscos who secretly refused to acknowledge the Christian God.^[119] Significantly, we can potentially trace the sources for Knatchbull’s accusation to St. Omers. A cursory search of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database for texts produced by the English Press at Saint-Omer reveals that at least thirty-three polemical texts printed referred to the conversion of Turks, Jews, Pagans, infidels, and heretics, which also contained a defense of the antiquity of English Christianity, for which the missionary work of St. Austin, St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose, and St. Gregory was cited as proof.^[120] One of these texts even extols the conversion of “Indians” directly to prove the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church and the solidarity of its communicants worldwide.121 Though his message is subtle, Knatchbull chided English Catholics who would conform to the Church of England for their security and at the same time have the audacity to question the sincerity of Indigenous Catholics or, worse still, withdraw their support for the Jesuit mission to fulfil Christ’s instruction to “teach all nations.” In 1675, Maryland was beset by crises to which Knatchbull apparently found a response in analogies centered on the alterity of Muslims, Jews, and other non-Christian believers, alongside Catholic hagiographies of English saints and/ or missionaries who defended the true faith. Though it is impossible to know Knatchbull’s formation with certainty, vestiges of it are exposed in his catechism; a florilegium of Counter-Reformation tactics and the English martyrological devotion to which he was likely exposed at St. Omers. To ease the concerns of Maryland Catholics, in his catechism Knatchbull communicated a devotional history of English Catholicism, of which the Jesuit mission to Indigenous Americans was a natural extension. Significantly, because Knatchbull deployed his Tridentine training to address local issues, he provided us with an insight into the precarity of the religious toleration in Maryland when it was met with English Protestant violence against Catholics and Indigenous Americans who asserted their sovereignty.

Conclusion

The Knatchbull catechism demonstrates that in Maryland, Tridentine-trained Jesuits did not distinguish between the English missiones intra and the Maryland missiones extra. The Jesuit mission in Maryland cannot be understood without incorporating into any analysis the kin-oriented British and Irish Catholic diaspora to Counter-Reformation Europe and the intellectual environment it created in the libraries of British and Irish colleges, monasteries, and convents on the Continent. In his catechism, Knatchbull confessionalized colonialism with inspiration from a Catholic tradition that made the church universal and eternal, the local global, and the global local. Though few annual letters from the Jesuit mission in Maryland are extant after Ingle’s Rebellion in 1645, the production of the Knatchbull catechism forces us to reevaluate the consensus that the Jesuits were indifferent to the conversion of Indigenous Americans after that point. Importantly, the contents of the catechism justify incorporating the formative, intellectual training of British and Irish Catholics in exile on the Continent into analysis of all Jesuit records produced in Maryland in the seventeenth century. If we do, we stand a better chance of understanding Jesuit interpretation of Indigenous lives in order to recover from Jesuit narratives how Indigenous Americans resisted settler colonialism by conversion.

Notes:
[1] “Knatchbull, Francis: Lay Brother,” in The English Jesuits 1650–1829: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Geoffrey Holt, S.J., Catholic Record Society, Record Series 70 (Southampton: Hobbs Printers, 1984), 140.

[2] Francis Knatchbull, “The Knatchbull Catechism,” GTM.GAMMS119, Box 4, Folder 9, Maryland Province Archives, Special Collections (Washington, DC: Georgetown University). The date of production estimated based on Brother Francis Knatchbull’s arrival in Maryland in 1675 and his death in 1677; see Edwin Beitzell, The Jesuit Missions of St. Mary’s County, Maryland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1959), 36, 177.

[3] Colonial trade enabled news and rumors to circulate back and forth by letter and by word of mouth between Maryland and Europe. For example, Emmanuel Ratcliffe testified in court that he received news that “Plimmouth Dublin and Killkenny was Burnt” in a trial centered on the murder of a Protestant family by Indigenous Americans, whose crime, according to witnesses, had been encouraged by Catholic colonists. See “Deposition of Emanuel Ratcliffe” [August 29, 1681], in Archives of Maryland Online (AOMOL), 7:140.

[4] Rebecca Seib and Helen C. Rountree, Indians of Southern Maryland (Baltimore, MD: Maryland Historical Society, 2014), 3.

[5] Gabrielle Tayac, Spirits in the River: A Report on the Piscataway People (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 1999), iii.

[6] Frank Porter, Nanticoke, Indians of North America Series (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 19–17.

[7] Porter, Nanticoke, 2; Francis Jennings, “Glory, Death, and Transfiguration: The Susquehannock Indians in the Seventeenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, no. 1 (February 1968): 15–53, here 17.

[8] Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 13.

[9] Matthew Kruer, “Bloody Minds and People Undone: Emotion, Family, and Political Order in the Susquhannock–Virginia War,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 3 (2017): 401–36, here 402–3.

[10] Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture, 1st ed. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 3–9, 12–14.

[11] John Smith (1580–1631) and William Hole (d.1624), Virginia ([London], [1624]), map, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/99446115/ (accessed April 27, 2025); Jerome Hawley (1590–1638) and John Lewgar (1602–65), Noua terrae-mariae tabula, or Lord Baltimore’s Map (n.p., 1635). Second edition by John Ogilby (n.p.,1671), Columbus State University Archives and Special Collections, http://digitalarchives.columbusstate.edu/items/show/14 (accessed April 27, 2025): Augustin Herrman (1621–86), Maryland and Virginia (London, 1673), map. Reproduced in Cassandra Farrell, “The Herrman Map of Virginia and Maryland,” Encyclopedia Virginia (February 14, 2022), https://encyclopediavirginia.org/en- tries/150386 (accessed April 27, 2025).

[12] Johann Baptist Homann (1663–1724), Virginia Marylandia et Carolina in America Septentrionali Britannorum (n.p., [1714]), map. Talbot County Free Library, Digital Maryland Collection, https://collections. digitalmaryland.org/digital/collection/tcgc/id/10/rec/5 (accessed April 27, 2025).

[13] The Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock in December 1620, but colonists remained aboard the ship until March 1631 while the settlement was established and a treaty negotiated with the Wampanoag. The colony never received a royal charter. Massachusetts Bay Colony received a royal charter in 1629, and colonists settled the area in 1630. Early settlements in Connecticut were established at Wethersfield (1634), Windsor (1634), and Hartford (1636). The colony only received a royal charter in 1662. Rhode Island at Providence was established in 1636 after Roger Williams, an exile from Massachusetts Bay Colony, purchased land from the Narragansett. The colony received a royal charter in 1663. All of these colonies, except for Rhode Island, confederated in 1643 as the New England Confederation for which the region is named. Likewise, although New France was founded in 1535, the first permanent settlement was erected at Quebec in 1608, but population growth only accelerated with the establishment of La Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France (Company of New France) in 1627.

[14] Though the Dutch founded New Netherland in 1614, the region was not permanently settled until Fort Orange at modern Albany was established in 1624 to allow the Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie (Dutch West India Company) to operate its monopoly of the fur trade, which had been awarded by the Staten-Generaal (States General) of the Netherlands in 1621.

[15] William J. Shiels, “Historical Overview, c.1530–1829,” in A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation, ed. Robert E. Scully and Angela Ellis (Leiden: Brill, 2022), chapter 1, 28–56.

[16] Adam Morton, “Anti-Catholicism: Catholics, Protestants, and the ‘Popery’ Problem,” in Scully and Ellis, Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy, 410–48.

[17] Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 117; Antoinette Sutto, Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630–1690 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 216–17n1.

[18] John Kolp, “Elections in Colonial Virginia,” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, December 7, 2020, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/elections-in-colonial-virginia (accessed April 27, 2025).

[19] Lois Green Carr and David William Jordan, Maryland’s Revolution of Government 1689–1692 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 16–17; Noeleen McIlvenna, Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 78.

[20] Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy, 16–18.

[21] Kruer, Time of Anarchy, 31–33.

[22] Kruer, Time of Anarchy, 25–27.

[23] Kruer, Time of Anarchy, 26–27.

[24] Kruer, Time of Anarchy, 11.

[25] McIlvenna, Early American Rebels, 79–96.

[26] Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill: Christian Indians and English Authority in Metacom’s War,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1996): 459–86, esp. n. 2.

[27] James I/VI (1566–1625, r. as king of England 1603–25, r. as king of Scotland 1567–1625) had prorogued Parliament in 1614 and 1621; Charles I (1600–49, r.1625–49) prorogued Parliament in 1629 and forced a complete dissolution in 1640.

[28] Shiels, “Historical Overview,” 37–39.

[29] Shiels, “Historical Overview,” 38.

[30] “Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and Crye,” AOMOL, 5:134.

[31] “Father Claude Dablon, Superior of the Missions of Canada and Rector of Quebec to Reverend Father Pinette, Provincial of France” [September 24, 1674], in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, OH: Burrows Brothers, 1900), 59:71–75.

[32] “Father Claude Dablon, Superior of the Missions of Canada,” 75.

[33] Only the breves catalogs record Knatchbull’s career. No other information is provided. See: Francis Knatchbull, Nouity [sic] Coadjutores [1672], Catalogus 3us Personarum Provincia Angliae Soctis Jesu. Anno 1672. Catologues Breves 1632–1680. Provincia Angliae (Hibern. Scot.). Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI). Rome, 11:431; Francis Knatchbull, Coadjutores Temporalis [1676], Missio Marilandiae, Catalogus 3us Personarum Provincia Angliae Soctis Jesu. Anno 1676. Catologues Breves 1632–1680. Provincia Angliae (Hibern. Scot.), ARSI. Rome, 11:465; Thomas O’Connor, “Exile Movement: Male Institutions, 1568– 1640,” 203–22; and Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann McShane, “English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad, c.1530–c.1640,” in The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, vol. 1, Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640, ed. James E. Kelly and John McCafferty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 223–41.

[34] Holt, English Jesuits 1650–1829, 140.

[35] Geoffrey Holt, S.J., St. Omers and Bruges Colleges, 1593–1773: A Biographical Dictionary, Catholic Record Society, Record Series 69 (Norfolk: Lowe & Brydon Printers, 1979), 155.

[36] Henry Foley, S.J., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus: Historic Facts Illustrative of the Labours and Sufferings of Its Members in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Burns & Oates, 1875), 3:392–93, 393–95n31.1–2; Holt, English Jesuits 1650–1829, 140; Holt, St. Omers and Bruges Colleges, 1593–1773, 155; Thomas Hughes, S.J., History of the Society of Jesus in North America: Colonial and Federal (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 2:681; William P. Treacy, Old Catholic Maryland and Its Early Jesuit Missionaries (Swedesboro, NJ: St. Joseph’s Rectory, 1889), 97.

[37] Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 393–95n31.

[38] Francis Knatchbull, Nouity [sic] Coadjutores [1672], ARSI, 431; Francis Knatchbull, Coadjutores Temporalis [1676], ARSI, 465.

[39] The Knatchbull family tree, “Appendix: Knatchbull,” CD-ROM in English Catholic Nuns in Exile 1600– 1800: A Biographical Register, ed. Katharine S. B. Keats-Rohan (Oxford: Prosopographica et Genealogica Occasional Publications, 2017); also available online at the Who Were the Nuns? (WWTN) project in the entries for each Knatchbull woman who entered into religious life. See for example: “Family Tree (Knatchbull): Margaret Knatchbull, in Religion Margaret (d. 1637),” WWTN, Queen Mary University of London, https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/search/search.php?uid=GB117 (accessed April 27, 2025). For details of all Knatchbull women who entered into religious life, see Keats-Rohan, English Catholic Nuns in Exile, 322–23.

[40] Nicolas Keene, “Sir Norton Knatchbull, First Baronet (1602–1685), Politician and Biblical Scholar,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://www-oxforddnb-com.proxy.library. nd.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-15703 (accessed April 27, 2025).

[41] “Margaret Knatchbull, in Religion Margaret (d. 1637),” WWTN; “Mary Knatchbull, in Religion Mary (1608–1627),” WWTN, https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/search/search.php?uid=GB116 (accessed April 27, 2025).

[42] “Margaret Knatchbull, in Religion Margaret (d. 1637),” WWTN.

[43] Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., Monumenta Angliae I: English and Welsh Jesuits; Catalogues (1555–1629), Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu: A Patribus Eiusdem Societatis Edita 142 (Rome: Institutum Histo- ricum Societatis Iesu, 1992), lxxxv, lxxxvi, lxxxviii, 403; McCoog, Monumenta Angliae II: English and Welsh Jesuits; Catalogues (1630–1640), Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu: A Patribus Eiusdem Societatis Edita 143 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1992), 421; Edwin H. Burton and Thomas L. Williams, eds., The Douay College Diaries: Third, Fourth, and Fifth with the Rheims Report 1579–80; Vol. 1, Catholic Record Society, Record Series 10 (London: J. Whitehead & Son, 1911), xvii; Edwin Henson, ed., The English at Madrid, 1611–1767, Catholic Record Society, Record Series 29 (London: J. Whitehead & Sons, 1929), ix; Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., ed., English and Welsh Jesuits 1555–1650, Part 1: A–F, Catholic Record Society, Record Series 74 (Southampton: Hobbs Printers, 1994), 93, 95; McCoog, ed., English and Welsh Jesuits 1555–1650, Part II: G–Z, Catholic Record Society, Record Series 75 (Southampton: Hobbs Printers, 1995), 254; Foley, Records of the English Province, 393n31; Albert J. Loomie, S.J., “Olivares, the English Catholics, and the Peace of 1630,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 47, no. 4 (1969): 1154–66, here 1160.

[44] Keats-Rohan, English Catholic Nuns in Exile, 322; “Mary Knatchbull, in Religion Mary (1610–1696),” WWTN, https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/search/search.php?uid=BB107&quote=no&given=&religion=& surname=&variants=on&cid=0&sdate=0&edate=0&loc=# (accessed April 27, 2025).

[45] “Appendix: Knatchbull,” CD-ROM; Bronagh Ann McShane, Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530– 1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration, Irish Historical Monograph Series (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2022), 109–10; “Laus Deo. AD majorem Dei gloriam,’ Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society 5, no. 1 (1864): 85–108, here 100.

[46] David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 154; Clodagh Tait, “Spiritual Bonds, Social Bonds: Baptism and Godparenthood in Ireland, 1530–1690,” Cultural and Social History 2, no. 3 (2005): 301–27.

[47] Maria Luddy and Mary O’Dowd, Marriage in Ireland, 1660–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 26, 26n2; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 312.

[48] “Appendix: Knatchbull,” CD-ROM.

[49] The Thomas Knatchbull recorded in the Seville College registers is Thomas Knatchbull, father of Mary and Margaret Knatchbull, and who according to the Ghent Annals studied at Valladolid. Martin Murphy, ed., St Gregory’s College, Seville: 1592–1767, Catholic Record Society, Record Series 73 (London: Hobbs Printers, 1992), 78–79; Edwin Henson, Registers of the English College at Valladolid, 1589–1682, Catholic Record Society, Record Series 30 (London: John Whitehead & Son, 1930), 38.

[50] “Philip Fisher,” in English and Welsh Jesuits 1555–1650, Part 1: A–F, 169–70.

[51] In 1622/23, Fr. White was prefect of studies and professor of sacred studies at the seminary in Louvain at the same time that Fr. Norton was consultor to the vice provincial in Belgium. Fr. Copley was listed as a student at Louvain under his alias Philip Fisher the same year. “Andrew White,” in English and Welsh Jesuits 1555–1650, Part 2: G–Z, 329–30; “V. Provinciae Angliae catalogus tertius domiciliorum quae sunt in Belgio [1622/23],” in Monumenta Angliae I, 301–2.

[52] Loomie, “Olivares, the English Catholics, and the Peace of 1630,” 1159–63.

[53] John D. Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 24–26, 51–52, 58–59, 64, 111.

[54] L. [Lou] H. Roper, “New Albion: Anatomy of an English Colonisation Failure, 1632–1659,” Itinerario 32, no. 1 (2010): 39–57, here 42.

[55] Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., Monumenta Angliae I: English and Welsh Jesuits; Catalogues (1555–1629), Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu: A Patribus Eiusdem Societatis Edita 142 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1992), xxviii–xxxiii.

[56] McCoog, Monumenta Angliae I, xxix. As well as the information he collated under the direction of the Formula scribendi, Norton Knatchbull, S.J. had access to information circulated in the epistolary networks of the English Benedictines at Brussels, Spanish Flanders. For some of the nuns, he translated letters at their request. See Bronagh Ann McShane, “Visualising the Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Nuns’ Letters,” Journal of Historical Network Research 2 (2018): 1–25, here 17.

[57] Caroline Bowden, “The Abbess and Mrs. Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and Royalist Politics in Flanders in the Late 1650s,” Recusant History 24, no. 3 (1999): 288–308, here 289–90.

[58] Joseph Reed, “A Descriptive Catalogue of the Early Modern MSS (c.1550–1779),” Stonyhurst Museum and Archives, 2024, 4.

[59] Maurice Whitehead, “‘Provide for the edifice of learning’: Researching 450 Years of Jesuit Education and Cultural History, with Particular Reference to the British Jesuits,” History of Education (Tavistock) 36, no. 1 (2007): 109–43, here 112.

[60] Table 5 in Thomas E. Muir, Stonyhurst College 1593–1993 (London: James & James Publishing, 1993), 157.

[61] Muir, Stonyhurst College 1593–1993.

[62] For a survey of the transformation to “normative knowledge” produced by the Salamanca School, see: Thomas Duve, “The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge Production; Introduction,” in The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge Production, ed. Thomas Duve, Christiane Birr, and José Luis Egío (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 2:1–42, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004449749 (accessed July 31, 2025). For the effect of the “normative knowledge” on British political philosophy, see Francisco Javier Gómez Díez, “Tyranny and the Usurpation of Spiritual Power: Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Francisco Suárez, and Robert Persons,” in Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought, ed. Leopoldo J. Prieto López and José Luis Cendejas Bueno (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 222–33.

[63] Thomas Izbicki and Matthias Kaufmann, “School of Salamanca,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (Fall 2023 ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/ entries/school-salamanca (accessed April 27, 2025).

[64] Janet Graffius, “Relics and Cultures of Commemoration in the English Jesuit College of St. Omers in the Spanish Netherlands,” in Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c.1580–1789: “The world is our house?”, ed. James E Kelly and Hannah Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 113–32.

[65] Graffius, “Relics and Cultures of Commemoration,” 116–20; Muir, Stonyhurst College, 30–31.

[66] Muir, Stonyhurst College, 31. See also J. H. Pollen, ed., Memoir of Edmund Matthew alias Poins at St Omer’s College, 1667, Catholic Record Society, Record Series, Miscellanea 3, no. 4 (London: J. Whitehead and Son, 1906).

[67] Photographs of St. Omers now in possession of Stonyhurst College can be found in Muir, Stonyhurst College, 15, 16b.

[68] Graffius, “Relics and Cultures of Commemoration,” 125.

[69] Graffius, “Relics and Cultures of Commemoration,” 125–26.

[70] Graffius, “Relics and Cultures of Commemoration,” 125–26.

[71] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 2–48.

[72] Alexandra Walsham, “Wholesome Milk and Strong Meat: Peter Canisius’s Catechisms and the Conversion of Protestant Britain,” British Catholic History 32, no. 3 (2015): 293–314, here 300; Kathleen M. Comerford, “Clerical Education, Catechesis, and Catholic Confessionalism: Teaching Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., ed. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 241–65, here 247.

[73] Antje Flüchter, “Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: An Introduction,” in Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures, ed. Antje Flüchter and Rouven Wirbser (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 1–49, here 21.

[74] For the evolution of Tridentine catechisms in different Jesuit missionary contexts worldwide, including to illiterate and/or poor Catholic populations in Europe, see Flüchter, “Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: An Introduction,” 17–23; Comerford, “Clerical Education, Catechesis, and Catholic Confessionalism,” 242–43, 246–48, 245–55.

[75] Anand Amaladass, “The Writing Catechism and Translation Strategies of Three Jesuits in South India: Henrique Henriques, Roberto de Nobili, and Joseph Beschi,” in Flüchter and Wirbser, Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures, 170–94, here 173.

[76] John Steckley, “Inventing New Words: Father Jean de Brébeuf’s Wendat Catechism of 1632,” in Flüch- ter and Wirbser, Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures, 127–69, here 132–33, 166–67.

[77] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 2.

[78] Peter Canisius, S.J., “A Summe of Christian Doctrine: Composed in Latin, by the R. Father P. Canisius, of the Society of Iesus; With an Appendix of the Fall of Man & Iustification, according to the Doctrine of the Councel of Trent; Newly Translated into Englishe; To which Is Adioined the Explication of Certaine Questions Not Handled at Large in the Booke as Shall Appeare in the Table,” trans. Henry Garnet, S.J. (London [c.1592–96]), in the digital collection Early English Books Online, vol. 2, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A69066.0001.001 (accessed April 27, 2025).

[79] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 3.

[80] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 4. Matthew (18:17) reads: “And if he will not hear them: tell the church. And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican.” Christ’s instruction that the disciples alienate sinners just as they did “heathens” or “publicans” was historically contingent to the early Jewish-Christian experience of life in the Roman Empire but was later interpreted through the lens of St. Paul’s instructions to “put away the evil from among yourselves” in his first letter to the Corinthians. See Matthew 18:17 and 1 Corinthians 5:1–13. DRB.

[81] Pius V, S.D.N. Pii Papae V: Sententia declaratoria contra Elisabeth prætensam Angliæ Reginam, & ei adhærentes Hereticos, etc. (Rome, 1570). British Library, C.18.e.2.(114*.)

[82] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 8.

[83] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 8.

[84] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 8.

[85] Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Forty Martyrs of England and Wales,” Encyclopedia Britannica, October 8, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Forty-Martyrs-of-England-and-Wales (accessed April 27, 2025).

[86] Francisco de Vitoria, Des Indies noviter inventis, trans. John Pawley Bate, reprinted in The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and His Law of Nations, ed. James Brown Scott, 4th ed. (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2008), appendix A, i–xlvi.

[87] R. [Richard] H. Helmholz, “Human Rights in the Canon Law,” in Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction, ed. John Witte Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 99–112, here 99–106; Gordon M. Sayre, “Prehistoric Diasporas: Colonial Theories of Origins of Native American Peoples,” in Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, ed. Philip Beidler and Gary Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 51–76, here 53–54; Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 103–42.

[88] The Communion of Saints is a spiritual connection between all Roman Catholics in the three states of the church: Militant (those alive on earth), Penitent (those in purgatory), and Triumphant (those already in heaven). See “‘The Communion of the Saints,’ Part One: The Profession of Faith, Section Two; The Creeds, Chapter Three, Article 9, Paragraph 5,” Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1993, http://www. vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM#fonte (accessed April 27, 2025).

[89] Harald Bollbuck, “St. Thomas in Wittenberg: Thomism before and in the Early Reformation; The Case of Karlstadt,” Angelicum 93, no. 2 (2016): 281–96; Jacob Schmutz, “From Theology to Philosophy: The Changing Status of the Summa theologiae, 1500–2000,” in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae: A Critical Guide, ed. Jeffrey Hause, Cambridge Critical Guides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 221–41, here 221.

[90] Robert Pasnau, “Thomas Aquinas,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (Winter 2023 ed.), sections 2–5, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/ aquinas/ (accessed April 27, 2025).

[91] Pasnau, “Thomas Aquinas,” sections 7–8.

[92] Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 37.

[93] “The Bull Sublimis Deus of Pope Paul III, June 2, 1537,” in Documents of American Catholic History, ed. John Tracy Ellis (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Company, 1962), 7–8.

[94] “The Bull Sublimis Deus of Pope Paul III, June 2, 1537,” in Documents of American Catholic History, ed. John Tracy Ellis (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Company, 1962), 7–8.

[95] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 7.

[96] Vitoria, Des Indies noviter inventis, section 2, clause 9, appendix A, xxviii.

[97] Before the eighteenth century, the “Indian mission” was last mentioned in a letter dated 1655, in which Superior General Goswin Nickel (1582–1664, in office 1652–64) informed George Gray, S.J. (1608–86), secretary to the English provincial, Matthew Wilson, S.J. (c.1582–1656), that Fr. Thomas Bradford was unfit for the mission because of his “levity.” The next mention of the mission occurs in 1740, in a letter from Superior General Franz Retz (1673–1750, in office 1730–50) to the lay brother John Wiseman (1705–63) accepting his offer to join the “Indian mission.” See “General Nickel to Fr. Gray” [December 25, 1655], in Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America: Colonial and Federal, Documents (1605–1838) (Cleveland, OH: Burrows Brothers, 1908), 1:part 1, 42, 80.

[98] Saint Bede, The History of the Church of Englande: Compiled by Venerable Bede, Englishman; Translated Out of Latin in to English by Thomas Stapleton Student in Diuinite (Antwerp, 1565), 2–3.

[99] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 11.

[100] Donald Attwater, “St. John Chrysostom,” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 21, 2024, https://www. britannica.com/biography/Saint-John-Chrysostom (accessed April 27, 2025); Peter R. L. Brown, “St. Ambrose,” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 22, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Ambrose (accessed April 27, 2025).

[101] William P. Haugaard, “Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-Century England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 10, no. 3 (1979): 37–60, here 43–44.

[102] Lesley Abrams, Bede, Gregory, and Strategies of Conversion in Anglo-Saxon England and the Spanish New World (Jarrow: St Paul’s Church, 2013), 20.

[103] Abrams, Bede, Gregory, and Strategies of Conversion, 22–27. Janet Graffius also remarks that even the relics of English martyrs of the seventeenth century found their way to Mexico City in the same endeavor. See: Graffius, “Relics and Cultures of Commemoration,” 115n8.

[104] Abrams, Bede, Gregory, and Strategies of Conversion, 29–30.

[105] José de Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute, ed. Luciano Pereña (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1984), 316, 387, 484; Renate Dürr, “Early Modern Translation Theories as Mission Theories: A Case Study of José de Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute (1588),” in Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, ed. Helmut Puff, Ulrike Strasser, and Christopher Wild (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 209–27; Gregory J. Shepherd, José de Acosta’s De procuranda Indorum salute: A Call for Evangelical Reforms in Colonial Peru (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), chapter 3, 59–84.

[106] Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered across the Seas, trans. and ed. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 253.

[107] Michael E. Williams, St Alban’s College Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1986), 264.

[108] Susan V. Webster, “A British King in Colonial Bogotá: A Portrait of Saint Lucius Attributed to Francisco Pachecho,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 34, no. 4 (2015): 48–57, here 48–53.

[109] Webster, “British King in Colonial Bogotá,” 53–55; Julio H. Bonilla Romero, Edier H. Bustos Velazco, and Reyes Jaime Duvan, “Arqueoastronomía, alineaciones solares de solsticios y equinoccios en Bogotá-Bacatá,” Revista científica 27 (2017): 146–55, here 153.

[110] One of the Valladolid students who may have consulted the books was the Catholic Thomas Knatchbull, a candidate for the paternity of Br. Knatchbull. The books are still held in the Pigskin Library at St. Albans and include Bartolomæo à Medina, Exposito in Primam secundae Angelici Doctores D. Thomae Aquinatis (Salamanca, 1582), which bears annotations dated 1641; Luis de Guzman, S.J., Historia de las missiones que Han Hecho los religiosos de la Campañia de Jesus para predicar el sancto Evangelio en la India Oriantal y en los Reynos de la China y Iapon (Alcalá, 1601). The text annotated by Fr. Persons is Bartolomeo à Medina, Expositio in tertiam D. Thomae partem (Venice, 1582).

[111] Dana F. Sutton, “English Jesuit Drama in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Oxford Handbook: Topics in Literature, online ed. (Oxford Academic, 16 December 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.003 (accessed May 5, 2025); Daniel 3:16–18, DRB.

[112] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 12–14.

[113] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 13; Mark 8:36–39, DRB.

[114] Tayac, Spirits in the River, 9, 15, 30, 43–47, 51.

[115] William Haugaard cites an example from a Protestant, Meredith Hanmer, who in 1577 described what he perceived to be the corruption of the church as first “came in the Pope, then the Turke, then came in the devell for altogether.” See Haugaard, “Renaissance Patristic Scholarship,” 45.

[116] Maurus Reinkowski, “Hidden Believers, Hidden Apostates: The Phenomenon of Crypto-Jews and Crypto-Christians in the Middle East,” in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis C. Washburn and Kevin A. Reinhart (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 409–33, here 409–15.

[117] Jonathan Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2002): 35–67; Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapter 3, 55–80.

[118] Knatchbull, “Knatchbull Catechism,” 12–14.

[119] Texts were identified using a keyword search of texts printed by English College Press at St. Omers (1608–1700) listed in EEBO. Keywords selected were used by Knatchbull in his catechism. All texts contained one or more of the search terms, Austin*; Augustin*; Ambros*; Chrysostom*; Gregor*; and then when refined by a secondary search contained one or more of the search terms: Turk*; Jew*; Pagan*; Infid*; Hereti*.

[120] The author admonished the Jacobean government for failing to deliver religious toleration for Catholics: “And suppose he [Protestant] could make an end of [priests who are] all his owne Countreymen, God would raise vp men of other Nations to learne the language, and supply their want; as we see he doth in the Conuersion of the Indians, and of other Gentiles.” Anon. A Proclamation Published Vnder the Name of Iames King of Great Britanny. with a Briefe & Moderate Answere Therunto: Whereto are Added the Penall Statutes, Made in the Same Kingdome, against Catholikes; Togeather with a Letter which Sheweth the Said Catholikes Piety; And Diuers Aduertisements also, for Better Vndersatnding of the Whole Matter; Translated Out of Latin into English (Proclamations. 1610-06-02); Sovereign (1603–25: James I) (Saint-Omer: English College Press, 1611). 50, http://proxy.library.nd.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/proclamation-published-vnder-name-iames-king/docview/2240870506/se-2 (accessed April 27, 2025).

APA

Kilburn, H. (2025). Counter-Reformation colonialism: The Knatchbull Catechism in seventeenth-century Maryland. In A. Corsi, C. Ferlan, & F. Malta Romeiras (Eds.), Circa missiones: Jesuit understandings of mission through the centuries (Proceedings of the symposium held at Lisbon, Portugal, June 12–14, 2023) [Special issue]. International Symposia on Jesuit Studies, 3(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.51238/ISJS.2023.18

CMOS

Kilburn, Helen. “Counter-Reformation Colonialism: The Knatchbull Catechism in Seventeenth-Century Maryland.” In “Circa Missiones: Jesuit Understandings of Mission through the Centuries (Proceedings of the Symposium held at Lisbon, Portugal, June 12–14, 2023),” ed. Alessandro Corsi, Claudio Ferlan and Francisco Malta Romeiras, special issue, International Symposia on Jesuit Studies 3, no. 1 (2025): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.51238/ISJS.2023.18.

MLA

Kilburn, Helen. “Counter-Reformation Colonialism: The Knatchbull Catechism in Seventeenth-Century Maryland.” Circa Missiones: Jesuit Understandings of Mission through the Centuries (Proceedings of the Symposium held at Lisbon, Portugal, June 12–14, 2023), edited by Alessandro Corsi, Claudio Ferlan, and Francisco Malta Romeiras, special issue of International Symposia on Jesuit Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–25. https://doi.org/10.51238/ISJS.2023.18.

Turabian

Kilburn, Helen. “Counter-Reformation Colonialism: The Knatchbull Catechism in Seventeenth-Century Maryland.” In “Circa Missiones: Jesuit Understandings of Mission through the Centuries (Proceedings of the Symposium held at Lisbon, Portugal, June 12–14, 2023),” ed. Alessandro Corsi, Claudio Ferlan, and Francisco Malta Romeiras, special issue, International Symposia on Jesuit Studies 3, no. 1 (2025): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.51238/ISJS.2023.18.