On 25 March 1586 the civil authorities of York ceremoniously tried Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic citizen, mother, and butcher’s wife, and then crushed her to death with heavy stones. This barbarous punishment (peine forte et dure) resulted from Clitherow’s refusal to plead to an indictment under a 1585 statute that made the harboring of a Catholic seminary priest a felony. Sheriff Roland Fawcett, part of her mother’s social circle, and prominent citizen Henry May, her stepfather, played supporting roles in the execution as did local clergymen and neighbors. After her death John Mush, her chaplain, wrote an account that celebrated Clitherow’s exemplary piety in life, her unwavering support of the Catholic Church, and her uncompromising constancy in death. Largely on the basis of this narrative, Catholics have long honored Clitherow as a saint and martyr, though she received official canonization only in 1970.

Distinguished historians Peter Lake and Michael Questier seek to “set Clitherow and her fate within a series of contexts, familial and local, national and international, ideological and cultural, political and religious” (xiii). Their analysis reveals the complex interplay of forces that drove both the woman herself and the good citizens of York to that bloody conclusion, and that continued long after her death. Drawing credible inferences from many sources in manuscript and print, they explore the tensions within the Clitherow marriage and within the Catholic community of York, particularly as citizens there, as throughout England, struggled to balance the demands of conscience with the desire to survive increasing scrutiny and stiffening penalties. The difficulty (or impossibility) of remaining faithful to Church and to country evoked various responses to the crucial issue of recusancy, or the refusal to attend the Church of England services. Hardliners like Robert Persons and Henry Garnet forbade such attendance as scandal and a “sign distinctive” of heresy. Catholic clerics like Alban Langdale and Thomas Bell, however, argued that Catholics could attend such services under certain circumstances and variously preached strategies of compromise, resistance, and “church papistry,” or merely external conformity. This larger national debate on recusancy frames Clitherow’s many refusals — her refusal to attend Church of England services, to play the obedient Protestant housewife, to obey the statutes against harboring priests and hearing mass, to respond legally to the indictment, to plead possible pregnancy, to listen to Protestant divines sent to catechize her, to accept any interpretation of her religious conviction as civil sedition, to surrender the dictates of private conscience to public authority.

Lake and Questier place Clitherow’s trials in other revealing and larger contexts. They call attention to the legacy of Northern uprisings, and the 1572 emergence of the Puritan Earl of Huntingdon and his campaign against popery, which raised the stakes and the tensions in Elizabethan York. They shrewdly analyze Edmund Bunny’s notorious bowdlerization of Person’s Christian Directory as a calculated insistence on the essential Christianity of the national faith and, hence, its acceptability to all Catholics. They discuss even apparently unrelated events — the projected match with Anjou, the execution of Mary Stuart, the publication of “Leicester’s Commonwealth,” the maneuverings in Scotland by James, the threat of Spanish invasion, the entire succession question, and the later Archpriest controversy — as parts of a web with surprising and previously unnoted connections to Clitherow and her story. What emerges is a layered, nuanced, and persuasive analysis of the many tensions and contradictions attending early modern religious identity and political loyalty.

What may be lost, however, is Margaret Clitherow herself, as the authors pass quickly over her biography (family background, education, social milieu, and conversion) and her theology (the nature of her devotional practices and the spiritual foundations of her commitment to martyrdom). Clitherow does not come to any sort of recognizable human life in the first half of the book and largely disappears from the second. There the authors might well have continued their discussion of her as a divisive figure for Catholics by attending to her posthumous reputation, particularly to her exclusion from some lists of Catholic martyrs because of her supposed theological ignorance.

And yet, the book compellingly combines vertical and horizontal scholarship, close readings of primary texts (even “reading against the grain”) and far-reaching inquiries across large cultural and transnational landscapes. Its learning and insight significantly deepen our understanding of the many paradoxes suggested by its subtitle, “the politics of sanctity.”