Abstract
Some scholars researching the puritans have noted parallels between their
approach to spiritual formation and that of the Catholic religious communities of the
medieval and early modern periods. Specifically, an ascetic or pietistic orientation,
emphasizing the methodical practice of spiritual disciplines such as meditation, has
been acknowledged in both groups. Some have suggested that early puritan writers
knowingly adopted elements of the Catholic ascetic tradition, but relatively little has
been done to prove or disprove this claim. An analysis of popular religious writings
circulating in Elizabethan England reveals evidence supporting the notion that
similarities between the two traditions were more than coincidental. During the
Elizabethan period, several Catholic texts were illegally circulated in England, which
taught ascetic devotional methods in a basic format suitable for lay readers. These
Catholic ascetic treatises, written by authors such as the Spanish Dominican, Luis de
Granada (1505-1588), and the English Jesuit, Robert Persons (1546-1610), were
patently unique among the approved religious texts sold in Protestant England. Their
originality was underscored by Catholics, in fact, who criticized English Protestants
because they had produced nothing similar. However, in 1603, the puritan Richard
Rogers (1550/1-1618) published a devotional guide called the Seven Treatises,
significant features of which are reminiscent of this ascetic genre. Rogers and others
portrayed his work as a "counterpoyson" to Catholic books, expressing confidence
that it would effectively silence the boasts of Catholic writers who claimed to hold a
monopoly on devotional instruction. It appears that Rogers composed much of
his Seven Treatises in conscious emulation of the Catholic texts whose influence he
hoped to suppress. What's more, it is likely that his work inspired many seventeenthcentury
puritan writers, whose devotional manuals reflect the same ascetic emphases.
Such evidence suggests that the observed similarity between the puritans' spiritual
approach and that of the more ancient ascetic tradition was, in part, a result of their
conscious imitation and adaptation of that tradition's teaching, as it was expressed in
these sixteenth-century Catholic ascetic manuals.
