Professor W. J. Sheils — “Bill” to his many friends — is renowned, among other things, for being a scholar with a remarkable aptitude for getting along with colleagues. But his work is notable for his care in studying early modern religious interactions of this type, in which he has displayed a ready appreciation of the subtleties of ideas and forms of conflict, and a strong grasp of the influence of socioeconomic factors in the working out of religious convictions. Moreover, his work has been quietly pioneering in studying both Puritans and Roman Catholics. It is therefore wholly appropriate that this richly deserved Festschrift tackles the idea of “getting along” head-on and with reference to both Puritan and Catholic religious groups. The main risk with work on everyday ecumenicity in the early modern period is the tendency for scholars sometimes to slip into sentimentalized readings of community cohesion. This has never marred Sheils’s own work, and the editorial introduction also adroitly avoids this danger while providing a shrewd overview of the recent historiography.

The editors rightly emphasize the degree to which early modern communities “were capable of housing tendencies towards tolerance and intolerance simultaneously,” and trace the complex dialectic of inclusion and exclusion at work. The chapters that follow engage fruitfully with these issues. Alex Walsham provides a valuable thematic, cross-confessional, and chronological expansion of Patrick Collinson’s observation that separatists who sundered their religious lives from their neighbors were thereby apparently more at ease in interacting with them in the purely social sphere. Peter Marshall tackles the fascinating topic of clandestine Catholic burials, and uses them to illuminate the tense and constantly renegotiated socioconfessional boundaries within early modern communities. R. N. Swanson provides an admirably balanced analysis of the tense and ambiguous relationship between chapels and parishes in the late medieval church. Emma Watson uses Elizabethan church court records to document a ubiquitous anticlericalism, which was often triggered by the social factors that are otherwise often invoked as the sources of cohesive cross-confessionalism. Andrew Cambers uses richly documented cases from Jacobean Northamptonshire to investigate how libels were read and circulated, and the lively role that they played in the divisive religious politics of the area, while Rosamund Oates provides a careful account of the wide-ranging role played by different accounts of the history of the church in promoting different visions of the church in Elizabethan England, and their varying impact on people’s consciousness. Katy Gibbons argues that, just as recent scholarship has challenged the idea that recusant and conforming Roman Catholics were a rigidly demarcated group, so Elizabethan Roman Catholic exiles were not hermetically sealed off from the debates, activities, and dilemmas of their fellow Catholics who remained in England.

Peter Lake’s study of the play Sir John Oldcastle shows how it worked as a defense of moderate Puritanism and an implicit attack on bishops, but also argues persuasively that it was a meditation on problems of conscience and conformity that were central to the dilemma of Catholics as well. A speculative remark in the final footnote that this combination of the two religious traditions around the problem of conscience could also reflect the career and experience of one of the authors — Anthony Munday — is especially enticing. Moving later in the seventeenth century, Stuart Carroll and Andrew Hopper provide intriguing evidence for the existence of an underground support network for Quakers in 1650s Paris, possibly based on contacts with the refugee Vaudois community, while Simon Johnson provides some interesting reflections on Thomas White and the Blackloists, albeit with no reference to the recent work of Stefania Tutino. One hopes that historians will soon be able to study Blackloists without prefacing their work with the remark that they are in need of historiographical rehabilitation. Overall, this is a volume that avoids the dangers of rigidly confessional or nonconfessional views of the period, and instead sustains a persuasive emphasis on the complexities, tensions, and ambiguities of social and cultural interaction between different confessional communities.