BARLOW, WILLIAM RUDESIND

English Benedictine writer and administrator; b. Barlow Hall, Lancashire, 1584?; d. Douai, Sept. 19, 1656. He was the son of Sir Alexander Barlow and brother of Ambrose (Edward) barlow, the martyr. William entered Douai College in 1602, left to join the Benedictine Order in 1605, was professed in Spain in 1606, and was ordained in 1608. Barlow took doctorates in divinity at both Salamanca and Douai. From 1614 to 1620 and again from 1625 to 1629, he was prior of St. Gregory's, Douai. He served as president general of the English Benedictine Congregation (1621). He was for many years professor of theology at the College of St. Vedast, Douai. Equally renowned as a theologian and a canonist, he figured in two celebrated ecclesiastical quarrels: (1) with Richard smith, bishop of Chalcedon, whose claim to possess ordinary jurisdiction over Catholics in England he vigorously opposed in his Epistola … ad RR. Provinciales et ad Definitores … (1627–28), commonly known from its opening word as "Mandatum," and (2) with Augustine Baker of his own order on the subject of conventual life. Baker drew an unflattering portrait of him in An Introduction or Preparative to a Treatise on the English Mission (1638).

Bibliography: t. b. snow, Necrology of the English Congregation of the Order of Saint Benedict from 1600 to 1883 (London 1883). j. gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534 to the Present Time (London and New York, 1885–1902; reprint 1961) 1:136.

[a. f. allison]