SOURCE: Jensen, Phebe. “Ballads and Brags: Free Speech and Recusant Culture in Elizabethan England.” Criticism 40, no. 3 (summer 1998): 333-54.

In the following essay, Jensen discusses how the religious censorship practiced by the Elizabethan government was challenged in a sermon by Bishop John Jewell and a manuscript by Edmund Campion.

Writing to a friend in 1586, the English Catholic exile Sir Francis Englefield described the attempt to reconvert England to the old faith: “In stede therfore of the sword, which we cannot obtayne, we must fight with paper and pennes, which can not be taken from us.”¹ Although the Counter-Reformation in England is usually characterized by those few dramatic episodes of violence—the Rising of the Northern Earls, the Spanish Armada, the Babington and other conspiracies to assassinate Elizabeth—which were successfully used by the government to galvanize public opposition to Catholicism, in fact the Catholic assault on England was primarily...