Catholic Appetites: Food, Faith and Englishmen in Counter-Reformation Rome

This article examines the role of English Catholics in 1560s Counter-Reformation Rome. Working with the methodologies of micro-history, it focuses on their feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, celebrated at the English Hospice in the city in December 1569. It brings together diverse strands of social and cultural enquiry—on inventory records, the urban environment and culinary history—to highlight the interconnections between the feast and the faith-based practices of this influential group of men, at a crisis moment in relations between England and the Holy See. This examination highlights how the material and spiritual practices associated with contemporary food cultures shaped post-Reformation English Catholic piety. Two different celebrations were invoked at the dinner commemorating St Thomas’s martyrdom: one was a secular hybrid meal of English and Mediterranean cultures, the other the sacred, but now disputed commemoration of the eucharist, as it was contested by Protestants. The article argues that these forms of lived religion had political consequences, by tracing a number of the celebrants beyond the meal itself and into the papal deliberations that resulted in Elizabeth I’s excommunication.