William Alabaster

Abstract Educated at Cambridge University, William Alabaster (1567–1640) started life as a literate anti-Catholic. His Elisaeis, a Latin panegyric to Queen Elizabeth, modelled on the Aeneid, features Satan persuading the pope to promote the Catholic cause in England. In 1597, however, Alabaster converted to Catholicism through the oYces of a Catholic priest, Thomas Wright, and the reading of William Rainoldes’s defence of the Rheims New Testament, A Refutation of Sundry Apprehensions (1583), as he recalls in a memoir. Subsequently, Alabaster gave evidence against pro-Spanish Catholics abroad, revolted from the Catholic faith, recanted, and wavered back and forth several times before his death. As a new Catholic in 1597–8, Alabaster prepared himself for martyrdom and wrote religious verse in what was to become the new metaphysical style of Donne and his followers.