Readers of this journal scarcely need reminding that the past two decades have witnessed advances in the study of English, indeed, British Catholicism. An important trend in much recent scholarly outpouring has been the mitigation of confessional provincialism by embedding British Catholic history within broader Reformation and post-Reformation narratives. Another healthy, if more halting trend, has been to think about British Catholicism as part of a larger movement linked to continental reforms during the post-Tridentine era. The remarkable collection of essays reviewed here shows the benefits of these trends and reminds us that the fruits of recent scholarly re-orientations are yet to be harvested fully.
This book constitutes the proceedings of a conference held in Kraków on subversive publishing and censorship in early modern Poland and England. Given the setting, it is appropriate that Part I, dedicated to exploring complex Anglo-Polish relations—especially the seepage of English books into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—should be the most eye-opening section. Mirosława Hanusiewicz-Lavalle’s essay shows the many ways recusant prose—controversy, theology, martyrology—was translated, printed, and embedded into a Polish scene. Among the books treated, we find Nicholas Sander’s De origine ac schismatis Anglicani, several contemporary translations of Edmund Campion’s Rationes decem, and perhaps most interestingly, a newly discovered Polish translation of Robert Persons’s De persecutione Anglicana. Martin Murphy discusses the apparent attentiveness of James I/VI regarding Scottish missionaries in Poland and the publication of several subversive polemics on British subjects in Poland to comment on Polish situations. Jolanta Rzegocka lists a range of English or English-themed plays performed at Jesuit educational institutions that argued for confessional rigor in a society that prized tolerance. In a slight shift of focus from Anglo-Polish relations, Magdalena Komorowska deals with polemical battles between Jesuits and the University of Kraków that reveals a movement toward hardening censorship activities along Counter-Reformation and statist lines in the seventeenth century. Again, straying somewhat from the stated anglicizing focus of this section, Clarinda Calma offers a survey of one noble’s (Mikolaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł) efforts to promote Catholic reform by supporting Jesuits and the press (including the publication of some English polemical works).
The final two sections explore more familiar, though equally stimulating territory, for Anglophone readers. Thomas McCoog, SJ, provides a useful outline of early English missionary activities as conceived by individual missionaries and the mastermind behind the early Elizabethan mission: William Allen. Hannah Thomas reconstructs a seventeenth century Jesuit missionary library in Wales and notes the dual emphasis therein on polemics and asceticism. Alexandra Walsham’s remarkable essay focuses on the English translations of spiritual works by Fray Luis de Granada and his appeal to both Catholic and Protestant readers. By exploring how Spanish spiritual books could take root in a religiously divided England, she complicates confessional narratives that focus on post-Reformation mutual exclusiveness. Victor Houliston discusses the contexts that produced the infamous libel, Leicester’s Commonwealth, and its authorship. He emphasizes its dialogic elements as a sign of true collaboration and conversation among differently striped recusants. In the only essay in this collection to discuss Polish things in England, Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa shows how translators/editors ‘manipulated’ Laurentius Grimalius Goslicius’s De optimo senatore to de-Catholicize it while conserving elements that could speak to English debates on episcopacy. Gerard Kilroy, whose knowledge of all things Campion remain unmatched, describes the gestation of Campion’s Rationes decem and its reception. Earle Havens uses a range of sources to describe lay Catholic book ownership and underline the presence of spiritual works against a tendency of scholarship to focus on polemics. He reminds us that English Catholics were connected to a broader, global Catholic Church. Marcin Polkowski, in a somewhat splotchy final essay, describes Richard Verstegan’s career, discusses a favoured genre (the epistle), and provides a general account of his literary output linked to the contours of his experiences as recusant and exile.
As a prelude to the essays very briefly described above, the book begins with an introduction emblematic of what might be called the collection’s mapping impulse. In it, Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba provides a general description of recent Polish bibliographical research. Most usefully, the essay provides a description of tools available for locating early modern books in Poland and a statement about the work that needs to be done to fill big gaps in our knowledge of what riches lay hidden in Polish libraries. Though this information is most welcome, the volume merited a proper introduction providing a clear synthesis of the collection as a whole to draw out important implications. Such a chapter would have been especially useful here because the preponderance of the book’s essays are descriptive. While broader themes might be touched on and key implications might be stated, they often seem tacked on without sufficient elaboration.
And yet, by showing the many ways we did not know subversive texts crossed confessional, legal, and linguistic borders, this book reveals that despite the terrific efforts of many scholars to date our knowledge remains partial. Until scholars rewrite the history of the Counter-Reformation or early modern confessional strife more generally based on the types of insights provided by this book, our understanding of these phenomena will remain dim and dull. For anyone interested in chasing texts around Europe in hopes of achieving a more accurate understanding of early modern confessional/intra-confessional strife as a transnational, messy phenomenon, this is an essential volume filled with marks of deep erudition, rigorous scholarship, and many surprises.
