Half Recusants? Refusal to Receive Communion in Early Modern England

Abstract

Historians have traditionally treated refusal to receive holy communion as a stepping stone to “full recusancy” and traced its steady displacement by non-attendance at church as the principal marker of Catholic dissent. The article re-examines the phenomenon of non-communicating, underlining the persistence of partial and occasional conformity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It probes the significance of abstaining from the Lord’s Supper within both the Catholic community and Protestant communion culture. It also reassesses how far the Tudor and Stuart state sought to coerce the consciences of it subjects by legislating against this offence. It suggests that official efforts to test political loyalty and identify traitors paradoxically fostered the very forms of dissimulation they were designed to eliminate. Non-communicating is a chapter in the larger story of how English society came to terms with the religious pluralism unleashed by the Reformation.