original sources. The standard modern life, however, is Christopher Devlin's The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr, London, 1956. As the prefatory letter to his poems "The Author to his Loving Cousin" implies, Southwell seems to have composed with musical setting in mind. One such contemporary setting survives, Thomas Morley's provision of music for stanzas from "Mary Magdalen's Complaint at Christ's Death" in his First book of ayres (1600). Elizabeth Grymeston, in a book published for her son (1604), described how she sang stanzas from Saint Peter's Complaint as part of her daily prayer. The best known modern setting of Southwell's words is Benjamin Britten's use of stanzas from "New Heaven, New War" and "New Prince, New Pomp", two of the pieces in his Ceremony of Carols (1942). In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, Southwell and his companion and associate Henry Garnet were noted for their allegiance to the doctrine of mental reservation, a controversial ethical concept of the period. Under Southwell's Latinised name, Sotvellus, and in his memory, the English Jesuit Nathaniel Bacon, Secretary of the Society of Jesus, published the updated third edition of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Societatis Iesu (Rome, 1676). This Jesuit bibliography containing more than 8000 authors made "Sotvel" a common reference. Southwell was beatified in 1929 and canonised by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales on 25 October 1970. Southwell is also the patron saint of Southwell House, a house in the London Oratory School in Fulham, London. Critical views In the view of the critic Helen C. White, probably no work of Southwell's is more "representative of his Baroque genius than the prose Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares, published late in 1591, close to the end of his career. The very choice of this subject would seem the epitome of the Baroque; for it is a commonplace that the penitent Magdalen, with her combination of past sensuality and current remorsefulness, was a favourite object of contemplation to the Counter-Reformation." Southwell's poetry is largely addressed to an English Catholic community under siege in post-Reformation Elizabethan England. Southwell endeavored to convince remaining English Catholics that religious persecution by the State represented an opportunity for spiritual growth. In his view, martyrdom was one of the most sincere forms of religious devotion. Southwell's poem "Life is but Losse" is an example of this concern. Throughout the seven stanzas, Southwell describes the