As with other aspects of the cult of the saints, relics faced increasing official scrutiny during the early modern period. Drawing on legal cases and a new and burgeoning genre of relic manuals, this chapter examines the evolving but ultimately vexed methods of identifying and authenticating relics in response to Protestant attacks and Catholic reform.

The cult of the Virgin Mary went global during the early modern period, as Catholics embraced her with renewed fervor in the wake of Protestant attacks. Using one of Mary’s most famous advocations as a case study, this chapter investigates the origins, spread, and reinvention of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Mexico, and in the Philippines, demonstrating both the causes and limitations of her success across different parts of the Spanish empire.

When Catholicism went global during the early modern period, it did so through the practices, idioms, and procedures of sanctity, in an uneven, messy, embodied process that often escaped control. Well beyond the papacy’s formal processes of beatification and canonization, the worldwide early modern Catholic community was united by belief in the continued immanence of the sacred and the supernatural in everyday life, especially through the cult of saints. The quest for and defense of sanctity defined early modern Catholicism. Every aspect of its pursuit also refuted the new Protestant dogmas of sola fide, sola Scriptura, and sola gratia. This Companion therefore offers sanctity as a new prism through which to envision the Catholic Church in the early modern era.

Catholics continued to make pilgrimages, near and far, during the early modern period, despite the challenges of the Reformation. Drawing on examples from Western Europe and beyond, this chapter follows pilgrims on their quests for healing, penitence, and spiritual growth and demonstrates that shrines and saints continued to act as focal points for devotion.

The origins of the Jacobite movement lay in the Revolution of 1688, a confessional Revolution that drove out the Catholic James II and VII and his family. Like most revolutions this was a traumatic event, inaugurating profound changes in the nature of politics and government. This chapter correspondingly explores the Jacobites’ role in terms of both resisting the new order through civil war in Ireland and Scotland and by allying themselves with the new order’s enemies in Europe. The strains and difficulties of winning the war at home and abroad then forced the Williamite regime to take measures to defeat them that compromised its initial objectives and disillusioned key elements in the Revolution’s support base.

The three kingdoms were at war for nineteen of the twenty-five years that followed the Revolution of 1688 and it was in this context that the Jacobites developed an underground movement in each of the three kingdoms and a shadow-government-in-exile. These sought to undermine the new order by political and propaganda subversion and to overthrow it by violent uprisings. But the Jacobite shadow-government and the Jacobite movement in each kingdom faced different problems and was presented with different opportunities. The Jacobite court was the site of a prolonged struggle between the movement’s Protestant and Catholic parties, while each kingdom’s Jacobites responded to the opportunities and problems they faced in different ways and with different levels of success. Hence the creation of a pragmatic government-in-exile, the decline of Jacobitism in England, the consolidation of the Jacobite base in Ireland and the development there of a culture of resistance, and the rise of Jacobitism in Scotland as a consequence of the constitutional Union of England and Scotland in 1707.

The Jacobite movement had a profound impact on the British Isles for seventy years following the Revolution of 1688. It sought to overthrow the new order by armed uprisings on multiple occasions and fostered widespread disaffection and alienation for three generations. In time it failed, but on more than one occasion it had the potential drastically to change the course of English, Irish and Scots history. It was the way not taken, and yet it forced the controllers of the British state to take directions and decisions they might otherwise have avoided. Ironically, the radical threat it came to pose has been airbrushed out of our understanding of the eighteenth century.

Historians have approached Jacobitism in many different ways, and here they are divided up into three groups: the optimists, who assume that the Jacobites were an important political movement that could have succeeded; the pessimists, who accept they were important but doubt they could have succeeded; and the rejectionists, who regard time spent studying Jacobitism as time wasted. The chapter then outlines the historiography of the subject and describes new developments in the field, most notably the explosion of work on Irish Jacobitism, the role of women in the movement and Jacobitism in America and the empire.