In this study, Dr. Maryks offers a detailed analysis of early modern Jesuit confessional manuals to explore the order's shifting attitudes to confession and conscience. Drawing on his census of Jesuit penitential literature published between 1554 and 1650, he traces in these works a subtly shifting theology influenced by both theology and classical humanism. In particular, the roles of Tutiorism' (whereby an individual follows the law rather than the instinct of their own conscience) and 'Probabilism' (which conversely gives priority to the individual's conscience) are examined. By integrating concepts of theology, classical humanism and publishing history, this book offers a compelling account of how diverse forces could act upon a religious order to alter the central beliefs it held and promulgated. 

This book provides a study of the writing career of Robert Persons, leader of the Elizabethan Jesuits, seen as an apostolate as well as a polemical contestation. It relates Persons's interventions in various controversies during the period 1580–1610 to the formative purposes of the Christian Directory (1582), his famous and phenomenally successful work of devotion. This book was originally known as the Book of Resolution, which also refers to Persons's indefatigability as a writer. The study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the polemical context of post-Reformation Catholicism in England, and to the Jesuit notion of the 'apostolate of writing'.