Robert E. Scully, S.J.

  • Professor History

Contact

email
scullyre@lemoyne.edu

Location

RH 407

I probably first developed a love of history growing up in northern Manhattan near the Cloisters, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My developing interests led me to the study of history, law, and theology. I earned graduate degrees in these disciplines at Fordham University, Seton Hall University, and the Jesuit School of Theology/University of California, Berkeley. I have taught at Le Moyne for about thirty years and my areas of teaching and research include early modern Europe and American legal/constitutional history. With regard to early modern studies, I teach courses on the Renaissance and Reformation, and Tudor-Stuart Britain and Ireland. My class on the History and Spirituality of the Jesuits combines areas of both historical and theological interest, whereas my course in the History of American Law delves into both historical and legal studies and methodologies. All members of the History Department regularly teach the two-semester course in World Civilizations, which is an integral part of Le Moyne’s core curriculum. My research has focused on the areas of the Reformation, Tudor England, and early Jesuit history. These combined areas of interest led to the publication of Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales,1580-1603 (2011). I have also written numerous articles and book reviews, which have been published in The Catholic Historical Review, The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Journal of Jesuit Studies, and other scholarly journals and books of collected essays. Based on my past and ongoing scholarship, I was honored to receive Le Moyne’s Rev. Richard M. McKeon Scholar of the Year Award in 2015.

My most recent major publication was as editor and contributor to a volume of twenty essays entitled, A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation (2022).

Areas of Specialization

  • Early Modern Europe
  • Tudor/Stuart Britain and Ireland
  • History and Spirituality of the Jesuits
  • American Legal History

Honors and Awards Received at Le Moyne

  • Rev. Robert E. O’Brien, S.J., Service Award (2008)
  • Rev. Richard M. McKeon Scholar of the Year Award (2015)

Publications

  • “From the Periphery to the Center–and Back Again: The Trajectory of British and Irish Catholic History and Historiography,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 11 (2024): 475-486.
  • ” ‘He may be a father to the soul that is a son to the body’: Robert Southwell (1561-95) and Divided Family Loyalties in the English and Catholic Reformations,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 9 (2022): 511-529.
  • A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation, editor (Leiden: Brill, 2022).
  • “Pedro de Ribadeneira and the Use of Sources: Critical History and Hagiography in the Early Society of Jesus,” Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies (2021).
  • “Catholic/Counter Reformation,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Margaret King (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)
  • “St. Francis Xavier,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Margaret King (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)
  • “The Lives of Anne Line: Vowed Laywoman, Recusant Martyr, and Elizabethan Saint,” in Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, ed. Alison Weber (New York: Routledge, 2016).
  • Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales: 1580-1603. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011.
  • “Saint Winefride’s Well: The Significance and Survival of a Welsh Catholic Shrine from the Early Middle Ages to the Present Day,” in Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World, ed. Margaret Cormack (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007)
  • “Trickle Down Spirituality? Dilemmas of the Elizabethan Jesuit Mission,” in The Formation of Clerical and Confessional Identities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wim Janse and Barbara Pitkin (Leiden: Brill, 2006)
  • “The Society of Jesus: Its Early History, Spirituality, and Mission to England,” in Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection, 1538-1850, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006)
  • “‘In the Confident Hope of a Miracle’: The Spanish Armada and Religious Mentalities in the Late Sixteenth Century.” The Catholic Historical Review, 89 (October 2003): 643-670.