Blessed Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion was the most brilliant mind of his generation, a young Oxford scholar who could have had everything the world offered. Instead, he chose the rack and the scaffold. This 1908 biography by American poet Louise Imogen Guiney captures the startling drama of a man who turned his back on royal favor to become a Jesuit priest in an England where Catholic worship meant death. We follow Campion from his Catholic childhood in London through his dazzling academic rise at Oxford, his secret ordination in Rome, and his doomed return to Protestant England as an underground missionary. Guiney writes with fierce sympathy about the intellectual and spiritual crucible that shaped this saint, recreating the claustrophobic danger of Elizabethan persecution, the agonizing choices faced by English Catholics, and Campion's own fierce, witty, ultimately triumphant refusal to recant. Though written over a century ago, this remains the most vivid English-language portrait of one of history's most courageous believers.