Saint Edmund Campion: Priest & Martyr [Paperback]

Evelyn Waugh (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Sophia Institute Press (September 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0918477441
• ISBN-13: 978-0918477446
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,414,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A compelling Witness for Belief, August 8, 2002

By 

David Powell (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Saint Edmund Campion: Priest & Martyr (Paperback)

I first read this book after having exited the anguish of a doubting Christianity into the calm of a composed agnosticism 40 years ago.

I return to this book again and again and probably re-read it every 3-4 years. Never missing an opportunity to recommend it.

It reads like a thriller. The story unfolds inexorably to its inevitable climax, from the scholarly peace of Oxford where Campion was a foremost scholar of genius in the early part of Queen Elizabeth's reign, to its ultimately savage and bloody end on the gallows at Tyburn.

The story could be seen by some as one of undoubting faith. By others, perhaps, as a story of a scholar obligated by an absolute intellectual integrity and then driven helplessly, to his destiny, by an academically remorseless logic after his conclusion of the fallibilities of the reformation.

Whichever view one takes Campion was a hero in voice and in deed. His life was a poem. His writings those of genius - his ringing words still echo.

Evelyn Waugh, a convert himself, tells a story as good as any fiction but far more compelling and sobering because of the true biography that it is.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Starts slow but wll worth it, January 14, 2000

By 

Richard T. Rossiter "Richard T. Rossiter" (National Park, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Saint Edmund Campion: Priest & Martyr (Paperback)

Waugh's details of Campion's European whereabouts gets a bit tedious but once Campion returns to England you can't put the book down. Waugh leaves you thinking which queen rightfully deserves the adjective Bloody.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Terse But Sketchy Biography of a Great Saint, April 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Saint Edmund Campion: Priest & Martyr (Paperback)

Edmund Campion is a saint more often enshrined in myth and legend than he is in historical fact, and it is for this reason that Evelyn Waugh states in his introduction why he set out to write this book about (at that time) a nearly forgotten martyr. Yet Waugh's training as a novelist rather than a historian begins to show quite quickly as one flies through the well written but shallow history of England's greatest martyr, save Thomas Becket and Thomas More. The scant historical depth to the biography may either be a product of Waugh's instinctive tendency to tell a story rather than teach, or, more appropriately, the lack of hard data on the life of Campion. Mind you, this book is definitely a good read and worth buying, but to the reader uneducated in Elizabethan England this book may not go historically far enough. My congratulations and gratitude are nonetheless given to Waugh for providing us with the only biography of a historically neglected saint.