This volume originated in a conference at Durham University’s Centre for Catholic Studies in 2013, on the theme ‘What is Early Modern Catholicism?’. Its leading theme, identity, is traced in the editors’ introduction, confronted head-on by Brad Gregory in the opening essay and vigorously challenged by the late John Bossy in an idiosyncratic and entertaining afterword. Bossy, for whom the use of the term ‘memory’ to replace ‘history’ is puzzling, nevertheless suggests that the question of identity is not ‘What is [or was] Early Modern Catholicism?’ (an historical question) but ‘What did Early Modern Catholics believe they were?’ (a question of memory). His answer is, ‘people who thought, rightly or wrongly, that their beliefs and practices were the same as those of the western or Catholic Church before the Reformation’ (p. 253), but this is only half the story, as it is told in the volume as a whole. Especially after the advent of the Jesuit English mission in the 1580s, which Bossy himself sees as the beginning of early modern Catholicism, many English Catholics thought of themselves as part of the visible monarchy of the worldwide church. They were papists.

Brad Gregory locates the beginning of early modern Catholicism in the Henrician reformation, arguing that its story is one of gradual recognition of religion as ‘separate and separable from the exercise of public political power and the social relationships constitutive of society at large’ (p. 17). This grand narrative has impressive theoretical foundations, but is open to question. Had any English Catholic, even by the end of the eighteenth century, which limits the scope of this collection, altogether abandoned the belief that church and state ought to be coterminous, even if the hope of restoration of Catholic England had faded? Still, the bulk of the essays collected here deals, in one way or another, with adaptation to the reality of an enduring Protestant state in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. There is a welcome shift of focus, in what used to be called ‘recusant studies’, from the intense effort, associated with Persons and Allen, to restore England and Wales to their traditional allegiance to Rome, to Catholic dilemmas and predicaments in the seventeenth century and beyond, with Ireland and Scotland getting a greater share of attention. There is a sense of a lifting of horizons, a diversification of Catholic experience and a more European perspective.

Even where Robert Persons looms large, it is in his role in facilitating devotion, rather than as an activist. Thus Eamon Duffy draws our attention to the Manual of Prayers (1583), which allowed English lay people to use the vernacular in their domestic devotions without betraying their authenticity as Roman Catholics. This was apparently compiled by Persons’s printer in Rouen, George Flinton, of whom we know very little except that he was a very zealous and pious merchant. The Manual is prominent also in an analysis by Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton of the role of the London prisons in the distribution of Catholic books; by far the most numerous were Persons’s Book of Resolution (1582) and the Manual of Prayers. The relation of devotion to polemic is addressed in Bill Sheils’s exposition of Thomas Stapleton’s biblical commentaries, the two Promptuaria (1589 and 1591), which pointedly challenged Protestant interpretation. But this is the polemic of religious controversy, not of political resistance. It is only in Susan Royal’s discussion of Catholic ripostes to Foxe, branding the Lollards and their Protestant successors with sedition, that the political conflict is central.

If it seems that the Jesuit mission is relatively under-represented in this collection, the reason is that several conference papers have been separately published in a special issue, ‘English Jesuit Mission’, of the new Journal of Jesuit Studies (vol. 1, issue 4, 2014). Accordingly, space is reserved here only for Thomas McCoog’s account of the fortunes of the English Jesuits at the time of the suppression of the Society. He uncovers the irony that it was English law that protected the Jesuits’ property and contributed to their survival. By contrast, the nuns, in their cloistered communities in France and the Netherlands, were nourished both by their Catholic environment and by their immersion in medieval English spirituality. In a particularly illuminating essay, Jaime Goodrich shows how two memorable phrases from Julian of Norwich were appropriated by and nuanced in the seventeenth-century convents, where a contemplative ‘attending’ to God in Christ replaced the more ecstatic and dynamic ‘intending’ of the medieval recluse.

As a stock-taking of early modern English Catholic studies, this collection invites comparison with Lowell Gallagher’s Redrawing the Map of Early Modern Catholicism (Toronto, 2012), which has a much stronger literary and theoretical emphasis. Its appearance coincides with the passing of two giants: Patrick Collinson (d. 2011) and John Bossy himself (d. 2015). Collinson’s final work, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013), published in the same year as the conference was held, was edited by one of the leading contributors to the conference, Alexandra Walsham (regrettably not represented in this collection). This points to an important challenge—the integration of Protestant and Catholic research initiatives. The collection attempts to rise to this challenge, with several contributors registering an overlap between Protestant and Catholic experience. In the only literary essay in the collection, Susannah Monta’s recovery of John Austin’s Devotions (1668) enters vigorously into a wider debate on the nature of early modern religious lyrics. Other essays explore how the English Catholic community, both at home and abroad, was simultaneously part of a regional social fabric and a cohort of the church militant and universal. The architectural politics of Ugbrook Park in Devon is a case in point: Martin Murphy argues that the Clifford family, with its Jesuit chaplain, was preparing to take its place in local government, so long denied. What English Catholics were doing in the eighteenth century could well be what early modern English Catholic studies is doing today: moving out of the margins.