De Persecutione Anglicana by Robert Persons S.J.

De Persecutione Anglicana has been described as the most famous martyrological work by an English Catholic during the Reformation period and is presented here for the first time in an accessible authoritative edition. Robert Persons (1546–1610) was a Jesuit activist, controversialist, missionary strategist and educationist whose importance has become increasingly appreciated over the past decades thanks to the rapid growth of early modern British Catholic studies. His prolific work is well known and widely studied but his Latin writing is neglected as inaccessible to many scholars. Written in England but with a Continental audience in mind and influencing key European leaders such as Philip II of Spain, the Duke of Parma and leading members of the papal curia, Persons' work is an essential text of the period. The more scholars attend to his Latin works, the more they become aware of the European context of English Reformation-era history, an historiographical desideratum that is widely recognized.