This well-researched monograph represents a significant contribution to the history of post-Reformation English Catholicism, and poses productive and thought-provoking questions about the character and potential of the entity which John Bossy termed — in what has become a surprisingly problematic phrase — ‘the English Catholic community’. Bossy’s account of that ‘community’ was never insular or parochial, but it was firmly focused on how a majoritarian religious culture eventually became a minority sub-culture, ‘a branch of the English nonconforming tradition’. Liesbeth Corens, by contrast, focussing on the period c. 1660–1740, invites us to prioritise the idea of an English Catholic community which was neither confined to nor defined by the boundaries of England itself – a ‘virtual, imagined community’ (p. 193), constituted by social, ideological and cultural bonds that reveal themselves only when we widen our angle of vision. The interpretative key is ‘mobility’; English Catholics were very often people with bodies, and minds, on the move.

Of course, the international context of post-Reformation Catholicism is scarcely a new topic. Catholic exiles, individually and collectively, have long been a staple of scholarly research, and confessional diasporas of various flavours are increasingly regarded as fundamental features, rather than peripheral by-products, of the European Reformations as a whole. Corens’ insistence on the term ‘mobility’ serves purposes of historiographical positioning and critique. The conceptual concern with ‘exile’, she argues, has led to an undue concentration on separation between England and the wider Catholic community, a privileging of the clergy over the laity, and an unfortunate emphasis on passivity and victimhood. English Catholics, we are repeatedly told, ‘had agency’. These supposedly pervasive scholarly sins are, however, often unattributed. Recent scholarship on diasporic Catholicism has hardly been characterised by a lack of interest in laity or, indeed, agency; Corens’ approach is arguably swimming with, rather than against, prevailing interpretative currents.

But if, in places, the drum is beaten a little too loudly, the overall rhythms of this book are lively and engaging. Its six chapter titles crisply embody different facets of itinerant Catholic experience: ‘The Exile’, ‘The Fugitive’, ‘The Educational Traveller’, ‘The Pilgrim’, ‘The Intercessor’, ‘The Record Keeper’. Between them, these chapters produce a convincingly layered portrait of how travel and mobility shaped both social practices and the English Catholic imaginary. The idea of exile, with its rich biblical resonances, was one that early modern English Catholics embraced. But Corens makes an intriguing case for narratives of exile being less important to Catholics than to Protestants. The former were more likely to turn to Acts than to Exodus for an understanding of their situation, and to imagine themselves as apostles and missionaries in a line back to the early Church. We are properly reminded that the political parameters of Catholic mobility were relational rather than physical, since ‘early modern societies and politics were fostered through bonds and allegiances which were not determined by territory and physical locality’ (p. 4). Here, Corens provides a particularly interesting and original discussion of the official travel passes with which many seventeenth-century itinerant Catholics were supplied. Such documents were ‘alternative bonds’ of allegiance, confirming their bearers as subjects of the king under the protection of the law, but without ceding distinctions of confessional identity. A welcome characteristic of Corens’ approach is the blurring of sharp lines of demarcation between activist, ideological motives for itinerancy and other reasons for travel abroad. The phrase ‘the grand tour’ was indeed coined by the priest and private tutor Richard Lassels (d. 1668), and, for elite English Catholics, ‘gentlemanly education’ overseas and ‘confessional education’ were mutually reinforcing.

Nor are the spiritual dimensions of mobility neglected. Corens explores how late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English Catholics actively participated in patterns of European pilgrimage, and how metaphors of redemptive journeying informed the self-understanding of Catholic expatriates. She also takes seriously prayer and intercession as some of the principal means by which bonds between English Catholics were maintained across distance and across national frontiers. Women were of particular importance here, with the overseas English convents widely regarded as ‘power houses of intercession for the English Catholic community’ (pp. 142–3). More tangible, perhaps, were the collections of documents being put together from the later seventeenth century to commemorate the earlier, ‘heroic’ phase of English missionary Catholicism, such as the martyrological materials gathered in Rome by the Jesuit Christopher Greene. This was a distinctly polemical form of antiquarianism, involving the creation of ‘counter-archives’ which challenged Catholic exclusion from the prevailing Protestant narratives of English identity, and which produced powerful ‘alternative assertions of belonging’ (p. 166).

All in all, Corens’ book is a remarkably wide-ranging and ‘joined-up’ account of English Catholic identity in the later Counter-Reformation era, and to point to possible gaps in it may seem overly punctilious. Nonetheless, a couple of questions are begged, or at least not directly asked. The focus throughout is very much on English Catholics in relation to other English Catholics, and we do not hear a great deal about host communities in the locations to which English people travelled, or in which they were based (an exception is the interesting snippet that locals sometimes joined in significant numbers the confraternities founded in English houses, such as that of the Sepulchrines in Liège, or of the Jesuits in Watten). Yet the admixture of familiarity and otherness that English Catholics sensed in co-religionists abroad must surely have been a formative, and at times unsettling, cultural experience. Nor does Corens have much to say about English dealings with other Anglophone Catholic exiles. The extent to which a shared experience of exile and exclusion promoted, or precluded, a common ‘British’ identity among Catholics has been discussed elsewhere (by Christopher Highley and others) for the sixteenth century. One would surely welcome further discussion of it here, particularly as the 1707 Acts of Union fall squarely at the centre of Corens’ chronology. But such desiderata do little to detract from the value of a stimulating and imaginative study, one which (in parallel with the work of Gabriel Glickman) encourages us to view the decades either side of 1700 as a fruitful period of English Catholic history in their own right, rather than as a muted coda to the illustrious recusant era.