This new collection from Brill deserves to be standard reading by all historians of the Renaissance. It reveals to those of us in English-speaking universities, with our predominant focus on vernacular texts, how little we know about the Reformation. Part of the Jesuit Studies series, the book examines the extent to which the international Jesuit network enabled the spread of English and Welsh Catholic ideas, texts, and objects throughout Continental Europe, where members of the Catholic diaspora helped to shape the Counter-Reformation in ways mostly unrecognized by existing historical accounts.

Contributors focus on prominent English members of the Society of Jesus (Campion, Persons, Gerard, Garnet) and also on lay Catholics who depended on Jesuit networks for safe passage, housing, and education. As English Protestantism established itself and the use of the vernacular rose to prominence in liturgy and in ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and literary discourse, Catholics instead began to write, read, and speak in Latin. Both at home and in the numerous exiled communities throughout the Continent, this new generation of Latinate English Catholics were rapidly becoming some of the most international of all European citizens.

At once meticulously researched and wide-ranging in scope, the collection explores numerous fields in which the Society of Jesus enabled English culture to influence the broader European world: music and drama, philosophy, law and economics, liturgy, and ecclesiology. We learn that one of the sources for Shakespeare's Timon of Athens may have been a Jesuit school play and that English relics were frequently rescued by Jesuits who then redistributed them to emerging sites of English worship on the Continent. We learn that Jesuit library collections attest to the European interest not only in writing by English Catholics or anti-Catholic writing by English Protestants, but also in the subtle ways in which writing by English Catholics abroad was appropriated by Protestantism.

In the initial years of its establishment, the Church of England had almost no written materials for prayer or devotion beyond the Book of Common Prayer, early translations of the Bible, and printed sermons. To fill the gap, many Catholic spiritual texts were reproduced, with all explicit Catholic material excised. Jesuit manuscript collectors in mainland Europe purchased these texts, sometimes annotating them in detail to record textual variances between the Catholic and Protestant versions. This close observation of Protestant intellectual and spiritual practice by Catholics abroad is also evident in sprawling historical narratives such as Pedro de Ribadeneyra's Historia. The text places the struggle of English Catholics within a broader narrative of the visible church as it exists within the full sweep of Christian time. By doing so, it seeks to understand the English struggle, both spiritual and earthly, that, although geographically unique, implicated the whole church.

This collection also signals areas of new inquiry, the pursuit of which scholars of early modern religious history ought rightly to consider urgent. It offers an exploratory account of Jesuit financial arrangements, with a view to uncovering lines of influence established through the vast networks between the society and its donors. Christopher P. Gillet's analysis of Jesuit allegiance politics during the early years of the English Civil Wars suggests how varied were the theological and political positions that English Catholics took to navigate their increasingly fraught dual allegiance to civic and religious authorities. In doing so, groups of Catholics of different stances wrote to Rome, to friends on the Continent, and to the Jesuits themselves, to clarify the theological integrity of their positions. These conversations form a crucial but little-studied part of English Reformation controversy and attest to the detailed and informed thinking with which ordinary Catholic citizens sought moral clarity.

Perhaps most enticing to further study is Maurice Whitehead's work on the records kept at the main Catholic colleges, either owned or overseen by the Society of Jesus: at Douai, Valladolid, Seville, Saint-Omer, and Rome. Primarily training colleges for English and Welsh Catholic novices, these institutions also provided education for many young men who did not intend to proceed to the priesthood but were barred from all English and Welsh institutions by virtue of their Catholicism. Each institution collected biographical accounts from students when they arrived. Much of this information is codified because of its value to Elizabeth's Privy Council.

Each entry offers an account of the student's family, how many of them were Catholic, how many Protestant, of their home county, their state of health, their education to date, their social standing. At Douai, records also contain information about the future careers of those students who did not proceed to the priesthood. At Valladolid alone over five hundred records survive. This archival material provides information about thousands of Catholic men and their families who are now lost to history. But it also potentially offers crucial information about those historical figures already well documented in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, whose Catholic allegiance was hidden, but whose subsequent life and work in England was in fact shaped by a clandestine Jesuit education.