Essays to Commemorate the 850th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket (c. 1118-1170) | Foreword by Mgr Philip Whitmore Rector of the Venerable English College, Rome. Essays by Judith Champ, Peter Davidson, Eamon Duffy, Peter Leech, Peter Phillips, Carol M. Richardson, Nicholas Schofield. Edited by Maurice Whitehead | The murder on 29 December 1170 of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, sent shockwaves across the Christian world. The combination of his martyrdom, his canonization in 1173, and the creation of a shrine to him at Canterbury in 1220 increased the importance of the Via Francigena – the ancient pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome: indeed the English Hospice, founded in Rome in 1362 for pilgrims from England and Wales, was dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity and St Thomas of Canterbury. The transformation in 1579 of the English Hospice into a new English College in Rome, preparing future priests to serve on the dangerous post-Reformation mission to England and Wales, engendered further martyrdoms: between 1581 and 1679, forty-four members of the Venerable English College, Rome, were executed for serving as priests on the mission to England and Wales. Exploring three major themes – Memory, Martyrs, and Mission – this volume analyses, on the 850th anniversary of his death, the enduring legacy of St Thomas of Canterbury, expressed in English seminaries in continental Europe through their distinctive spiritual, artistic and literary activities; the resilience of those institutions to radical change over the centuries, in the face of revolution, war and social upheaval; and the challenges and opportunities for the effective formation of priests ready to meet the changing demands of mission in the twenty-first century. The volume concludes by demonstrating how music associated with St Thomas of Canterbury has resonated across the centuries, from soon after his martyrdom down to the present day.

A priest of the diocese of Westminster, has been Rector of the Venerable English College in Rome since 2013. Formerly a Prize Fellow in Music at Magdalen College, Oxford, he studied for the priesthood at Allen Hall and the Venerable English College. After his ordination in 1993, he served as Precentor at Westminster Cathedral. He has lived in Rome since 1999, having worked both at the Congregation for Bishops and at the Secretariat of State.

Lectures in Church History at St Mary’s College, Oscott, Birmingham: she has been involved in the formation of priests for England and Wales for over twenty years. Her most recent publication, The Secular Priesthood in England and Wales: History, Mission and Identity (2016), explores the ways in which priestly identity has been shaped by the unique historical experience of the Church in England and Wales. She is also the author of William Bernard Ullathorne (1806–89): a different kind of monk (2006) and The English Pilgrimage to Rome: a dwelling for the soul (2000). In 2017, she was made a Dame of the Order of St Sylvester in recognition of her professional work for the Church and was also elected Chair of the Council of the Catholic Record Society in London, the premier historical society devoted to the study of Reformation and post-Reformation Catholicism in Britain.

Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and a member of the English Faculty. He has held posts at the Universities of Leiden, Warwick, and St Andrews as well as the Regius Chair of English at Aberdeen, where he was latterly Scholar-Keeper of the University Collections. He has published extensively on Catholic culture after the Reformation, especially in his monograph The Universal Baroque (2007) and in numerous articles. He is the lead editor for the Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of St Robert Southwell, which will draw particularly heavily on primary texts held at the Venerable English College.

Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity in the University of Cambridge, and a fellow and former president of Magdalene College. His books include The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (1992), Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (1997), The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (2001), and Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the conversion of England (2017).

Conductor, musicologist, singer and keyboard player with research interests covering a wide range of subjects including seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and Irish Catholic music, Restoration-era court music, the musical patronage of Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart in Rome, Baroque music in the global Jesuit diaspora, and Russian Orthodox sacred music. He is a lecturer in the School of Music at Cardiff University.

Priest of the diocese of Shrewsbury, where he is also the Diocesan Archivist. He taught for a number of years at the seminary at Ushaw College, Durham. He has a long-standing interest in post-reformation British Catholic history, and, in 2008, published a biography of the priest and historian, John Lingard. He currently holds an Honorary Fellowship at the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University.

Professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Edinburgh where she teaches early modern visual culture in Italy. Her monograph, Reclaiming Rome (Brill, 2009), considered the college of cardinals in the fifteenth century and her articles have covered subjects from St Joseph and St Peter to Bernini’s Baldacchino and, most recently, Thomas Becket at the English College. In 2013 she co-edited Old Saint Peter’s, Rome, a partnership with the British School at Rome, and in 2018 a collaborative project, translating into English for the first time Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters (1564) in which she argues that it was the reassertion of Catholic tradition that impacted artists most as a result of the Council of Trent. She is presently completing a book-length study of the 1580s fresco cycle in the English College in Rome, The Last English Catholic Church in the World.

Studied at the Venerable English College between 1997 and 2001 and is currently a parish priest in west London and Archivist of the Archdiocese of Westminster. He has written several books, including a history of St Edmund’s College, Ware, one of the two lineal descendants of the English College at Douai. He has also edited a collection of articles from the magazine of the Venerable English College, The Venerabile, entitled A Roman Miscellany. He is both a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Research Fellow and Director of Heritage Collections at the Venerable English College since 2015. He is also a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome; an honorary professorial fellow in Catholic history at the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University, his alma mater; and Emeritus Professor of History at Swansea University. His many publications in the field of Catholic history include English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762-1803 (Burlington, VT: Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).