As Christopher Highley demonstrates in this superb new book, early modern English Catholics had different ideas about “nationhood” than their Protestant compatriots. In exploring how “England's Catholic subjects imagined the territory, history, culture, and people of a place they called variously England or Britain” (4), Highley provides an important new dimension to recent scholarly work on emerging ideas of the early modern nation, in the process making accessible a rich body of writing produced by Continental exiles in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

After an introductory chapter that briefly traces the national imaginings of stay-at-home and Marian Catholics, Catholics Writing the Nation concentrates on the literature that emerged from the “textual community” of English Catholic exiles, beginning with the “steady stream of theological, ecclesiological, and polemical works” (37) that poured from English pens in Antwerp and Louvain during the first twelve years of Elizabethan rule, and expanding to include controversial writings from English Catholics scattered across the Continent, especially in Douai, Rheims, Valladolid, and Rome. In the course of pursuing different polemical agendas, this material created visions of English and/or British nationhood (the terms are somewhat elided, both in the primary material and in Highley's analysis) that served the Catholic cause. Whereas Protestant narratives of nationhood portrayed Catholicism as the religion of dangerous foreigners, Catholics reversed the argument, emphasizing the foreignness of Protestantism as a German import, insisting on the importance of England's historical ties to Rome and Spain, and humanizing and domesticating such villains of Protestant national rhetoric as the Hapsburgs and the Earl of Tyrone. As Highley's analysis demonstrates, Catholic depictions of the nation traffic in the same racial, ethnic, and geo-humoral discourses crucial to Protestant imaginings of the nation. Chapter 3, for example, shows Catholic writers arguing that the inherent weakness of “overheated” northern bodies made the English “prone to what one Catholic writer called ‘the unnatural heat of heresies’” (74); English Protestants were also characterized as barbarous northerners, akin to Turks and Scythians. In Chapter 4, Highley reveals the geo-humoral and ethnic assumptions undergirding Anglocentric Catholic accounts of English history, especially Thomas Stapleton's translation of Bede, The history of the church of Englande (Antwerp, 1565), called “the most pestilential book ever published” (85) by an English informer. This Anglocentrism buttressed both Catholic views of English nationhood, and ongoing tensions between the actual English, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Catholics in Rome and Valladolid. Ethnicity was central to the conflicting opinions of Ireland held by English Catholics such as Edmund Campion, who “regarded the country as England's inferior in both religion and culture,” and Nicholas Sander, who “was able to subordinate national prejudices and parochial rivalries to the daring vision of an archipelagic Catholic nationalism” (135). Humoral and ethnic assumptions similarly fueled attacks of the “Hispaniolized English Catholic” by both Protestants and some anti-Spanish Catholics, who suggested, for example, that the light-skinned northern bodies of English exiles at Valladolid were in danger of being weakened by “enervating heat and dangerous unfamiliar ‘airs’” (160).

By illuminating the discursive structure and national imaginings of English Catholics abroad, Highley's book makes a significant contribution to recent re-conceptualizations of the English Catholic community. Work by literary scholars and historians such as Alison Shell, Alexandra Walsham, Lisa McLain, and Anne Dillon has shown how post-Reformation English Catholicism developed from a dynamic merging of pre-Reformation Catholic traditions on the one hand, and the political and devotional values of the post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation on the other. The latter found its way to England through many means, including smuggled books, manuscript networks, letters home, and the priests who secretively ministered to what Highley calls the “internal,” Catholic exiles who remained in England (7). In providing a rich sense of the political ideas embedded in the writings of “external” exiles, Highley illuminates not only the Catholic mission abroad, but also, potentially, the shadowy world of domestic English Catholics, which was fed through religious and political lifelines to the Continent. The book also persuasively suggests that we can only fully understand the powerful Protestant narratives of English and British nationhood, which were ultimately to win the discursive field, when we also understand the Catholic images of the English nation against which they were polemically constructed.