This rewarding collection of essays, prefixed by a usefully orientational editors’ introduction, stems from a 2013 conference held at Ushaw College, Durham, to celebrate the contribution to Catholic history of Eamon Duffy. Duffy himself supplies a characteristically lively and insightful contribution, taking as its starting-point the surprising appearance of a bowdlerised text from the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer in the detailed post-mortem liturgical prescriptions (1587) of the staunchly Catholic Oxfordshire gentleman, William Lenthall. From here, Duffy ranges widely across the post-Reformation Catholic culture of prayer, with particular attention to ‘the most important of all recusant religious texts’ (p. 217), the Manual of prayers of 1583. Most of the prayers in this work were of medieval, or even older provenance, but Duffy demonstrates the manner of its compilation and presentation to have been determined by the ‘carefully orthodox and ecclesiologically correct’ (p. 225) piety of the Counter-Reformation Low Countries.
This points to a defining theme of the volume as a whole. In the later decades of the twentieth century historians debated whether the Reformation experience of English Catholics was characterised by ‘continuity’ or ‘discontinuity’ – the latter being the leitmotif of John Bossy's seminal study, The English Catholic community (1975), which argued that in both cultural and sociological terms an entirely new Catholicism came into existence in the years after 1570. Readers of the current book are likely to come away thinking this to be, if not a false, then at least too stark a dichotomy. James Kelly's contribution examines the English convents in exile, and shows how a concern with the custodianship of relics helped to shape an identity that connected nuns to the medieval monastic past, while still being recognisably Tridentine. In a more narrowly focused case study, the literary scholar Jaime Goodrich explores how the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich was read, and repurposed for contemporary spiritual concerns, in the English Benedictine convent at Cambrai. Susan Royal demonstrates how the anti-Lollard writings of the fifteenth century provided ammunition for the Counter-Reformation critics of John Foxe, while William Sheils draws attention to the biblical commentaries of the influential exile Thomas Stapleton, finding in them both a distinctly polemical edge and a Counter-Reformation sensibility nurtured by the Augustinian biblical scholarship of Douai and Louvain. The ability of English Jesuits to surmount and maintain their identity across a later rupture – the suppression of the Society in 1773 – is ably elucidated by Thomas McCoog.
Even as Catholics negotiated for themselves a place in the post-Reformation polity, they were concerned to assert their links to the past. Matthew Martin, an art historian, intriguingly explores a 1776 poem by Joseph Reeve, chaplain to Lord Clifford, which celebrates his patron's park at Ubrooke, at the same time implying that Catholicism was an aristocrat's natural religion, rooted in the very soil of the English landscape. The value of the volume's interdisciplinary character is similarly well illustrated in a brace of essays from literary scholars. Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton offer a close reading of a manuscript book inventory of 1587 to illuminate the usually hidden world of recusant book circulation (an enterprise in which women were noticeably prominent), while Susannah Monta, in a particularly perceptive and innovative contribution, explores the devotional lyric of the seventeenth-century Catholic writer John Austin. His work blended poetry and liturgy, and emphasised modes of communal performance. In noting the obscurity of Austin, and the more general scarcity of Catholic writers in the modern literary canon, Monta wonders whether the privileging of spontaneity and self-expression in scholarly appraisals of lyric in fact reflects an unconscious debt to specifically Protestant ideas of what constitutes worth and authenticity in prayer.
Most of the chapters (grouped in sections headed ‘Identity’, ‘Memory’ and ‘Counter-Reformation’) view their object through a narrow aperture, but a couple employ a noticeably wider lens. In an outstanding contribution, gently subversive of the volume's title, Gabriel Glickman bemoans the long-standing reluctance of Catholic historiography to adopt a ‘British’ perspective, a diffidence rooted in the romantically English character of traditional ‘recusant history’, as well as a scholarly perception that the very concept of ‘Britain’ in the early modern period was pre-eminently Protestant. None the less, Glickman argues that the civil wars produced a ‘moment’ in which the idea of an ‘archipelagic’ Catholic community could come to the fore, its networks subsequently sustained by shared loyalty to the Stuart cause and common participation in Atlantic colonisation.
‘Englishness’ is further scrutinised in a wide-ranging and stimulating contribution from Brad Gregory, ‘Situating early modern English Catholicism’. Noting the importance of migration and diaspora, Gregory rightly insists that ‘English Catholicism was more than Catholicism in England’ (p. 27). An emphasis on the European dimension serves to critique Bossy's influential argument that Catholics should be seen as part of an English non-conforming tradition. No Protestant dissenters had such crucial international connections, and nor did they possess an inherited medieval past. In problematising ‘English’, Gregory also interrogates the periodisation of the volume's title, arguing that the beginnings of a recognisably ‘early modern’ Catholicism belong to the 1530s, rather than the 1570s – though in staking this important claim he is somewhat left adrift by the book's other contributors, all of whom adopt a more conventionally ‘post-Reformation’ time-frame.
The inclusion of an ‘Afterword’ from an eminent senior scholar has become a regular feature of essay collections in recent years. Quite often, these are dutifully gracious if a little bland. Not so here. John Bossy takes the opportunity, contra Gregory, robustly to restate his view that the nature of English Catholic ‘community’ changed dramatically in Elizabeth's reign, and he questions whether there was ‘much depth’ to the seventeenth-century ‘British’ moment identified by Glickman. For good measure, Bossy expresses earthy scepticism about the volume's organising concepts – identity (‘pretty impenetrable’) and memory (‘I am foxed by the idea that this equals history’) – but he displays enthusiasm and excitement about several individual chapters. Bossy's contribution must have been one of the last things that he wrote prior to his death in October 2015, and it captures well that blend of querulousness and generosity familiar to all who knew and admired him. If his demise represents the passing of a baton in English Catholic studies, this volume suggests that the subject is in safe hands.
