Elizabethan Recusant Prose

Sometimes, I come across a book that reminds me of how little I actually know. I’ve read a lot of books over the years, but as I’ve said elsewhere, my learning is broad but shallow. So, I always appreciate reading an author with true depth of knowledge is a specialised subject - e.g., A. C. Southern’s Elizabethan Recusant Prose: 1559-1582.

Who is A. C. Southern? I actually couldn’t find much about him, except that this work is a revision of his Ph.D. thesis. I only stumbled on this book by accident, and all I could find when searching for more information were reviews of this book from about the time of its release in 1950. As for his book, it’s an overview and bibliography of exactly what the title describes: the prose works of Recusant authors (i.e., those Catholics who fled the persecution of Queen Elizabeth).