The Reckoned Expense

This volume forms the first modern study of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit priest executed at Tyburn in 1581, and through him focuses on a theme that has been attracting growing interest among sixteenth-century historians: the passage from a Catholic to an Anglican England, and the resistance to this move. The title of the volume takes up a phrase of Campion's, 'The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun...'. The essays collected here investigate the historical context of Campion's mission; different aspects of his writing and work; the network of colleagues with whom he was in contact; his relationship with contemporaries such as Sir Philip Sidney; the effect of his English mission; and the legacy he left.