Over the last few decades, scholars of gender in the post-Reformation British Isles have focused on the unique role of Catholic women in the underground community. Since John Bossy’s assertion in 1975 that women played an important part in the English Catholic community, scholarship has grown from characterising women as tools for assisting men to understanding women as individuals with active roles. In Divided Loyalties? Pushing the Boundaries of Gender and Lay Roles in the Catholic Church, 1534–1829, Lisa McClain furthers the conversation, not only by examining the evolutions in gender roles experienced by men, but also by questioning the flexibility of religious authority. For McClain, gender is only part of the story. It is equally necessary to understand how the laity and clergy negotiated roles differently. By recounting individual stories of Catholic experience over three centuries, McClain argues that the Catholic laity were allowed, even encouraged, to transgress accepted religious and gender norms by the Church in an effort to preserve Catholicism. However, amidst such adaptations, the Church stood firm in its commitment to apostolic succession, as shown in the treatment of Mary Ward.

The book’s all-encompassing title suggests a study of all Catholicism from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, yet McClain’s evidence throughout leans heavily on English examples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, making the book more about early modern English Catholics. The date range in the title signals the true scope of the book to readers, that it is a study of British Catholicism spanning Henry VIII’s break from Rome to Catholic Emancipation. Aside from the misleading title, McClain’s work is an important read for scholars of the post-Reformation British Catholic community. The first chapter succinctly explains the argument of the book, while introducing the reader to Mary Ward, the laywoman who created an active ministry of unenclosed women. Ward’s harsh suppression by Pope Urban VIII, yet eventual re-admittance to the English Mission, forms the backbone for this study on the limits of adaptation in gender and religious roles for Catholics. Following the Introduction, the book is divided into two thematically categorised sections. The first, comprised of four chapters, examines the negotiated gender roles among Catholics in the Protestant British Isles. Chapter two, ‘The New Normal’, explains why Catholics had to adapt in the first place. By discussing dominant gender roles and the religious and social limitations enforced by the penal laws, McClain sets the stage for the rest of the book. Chapter three, ‘Disobedient Women’, details the experiences of Catherine Holland, Gertrude More, and Mary Ward, three women who defied male authority. In a time with the expectation that the ‘fairer sex’ would be obedient and subservient, Holland chose a convent over marriage in spite of her father’s wishes, More challenged blind obedience to clerics, and Ward created an Institute that defied religious orthodoxy. In desperate times, the Church allowed women to resist and disobey, if it was in support of spiritual truth (p. 75). Chapter four, ‘Wodehouse’s Choice’, discusses gender roles for men parallel to the analysis of women in chapter three. McClain argues that men had to redefine notions of masculinity in their attempt to be both ‘good men’ and ‘good Catholics’, since penal laws made it nearly impossible to be both. The first section’s final chapter, ‘Amending the Marriage Contract’, merges the topics of the previous two chapters to investigate the relationship between men and women amidst these new gender roles. McClain shows that boundaries of obligation and obedience ebbed and flowed within marriage, resulting in some spouses valuing faith over expected gender roles, and vice versa (p. 120).

The second section, comprised of three chapters, unearths transformations in religious authority between the laity and clergy. In chapter six, ‘The “Good Catholic”’, McClain argues that Catholic writers, both lay and religious, praised and promoted heroic and militaristic values in Catholic women, while encouraging patience in men. Such disordered gender roles point to a gender-inclusive and evolving characterisation of a ‘good Catholic’ (p. 183). Chapter seven, ‘Sharing the Job: Cooperation Between the Priesthood and Laity’, suggests that the laity re-imagined their spiritual role in the sacraments by undertaking some of the duties of clerics amidst the shortage of priests (p. 209). While this reader was hoping, perhaps unfairly, for an update on the adaptation of space, ritual, and objects in the clandestine practices of Catholics, as seen in McClain’s exceptional previous work, the chapter offers an interesting perspective on how people consciously adapted their role at the altar.

The last chapter, ‘Where the Catholic Church Draws the Line’, brings the previous chapters to a head with a final examination of Mary Ward. McClain questions why the Catholic Church repressed Ward while it encouraged other women to be militaristic, defiant, and unorthodox, and suggests that the answer lies in the doctrine of apostolic succession. The Church was willing to bend on gender roles and certain situations of religious authority, but when complaints arose that the English Ladies were acting like priests, the Church stood its ground against the ordination of women—a stance upheld to this day.

McClain includes engaging anecdotes to reinforce her argument throughout, and each account reveals an evolution of gender or religious roles. However, I wonder about individuals who accepted their prescribed gender roles as a strategy against Protestant authorities, thereby embracing instead of ‘pushing the boundaries’ of convention. For example, the widows Anne Howard, Dorothy Lawson, Lady Magdalen Montague, and Dame Cecily Stonor all utilized their status as widows, independent and removed from society, to harbour priests. Widows who conformed to gender norms oftentimes had social and economic autonomy following the deaths of their husbands, which complicates some of the gendered categories in McClain’s analysis of Catholic laity. For example, in chapter four’s discussion of the reorganisation of masculine hierarchies, she ponders how the usually perceptive Jesuit Robert Southwell could have ‘displayed startling ignorance’ in his work, A Short Rule of a Good Life, when he argued clerics should hold a high degree of authority in their hosts’ households (p. 86). It is possible that Southwell did not have a lapse in judgment, since at the time of writing he was living under the protection of a woman—the widow Anne Howard. Infusing marital status as a category of analysis could deepen a discussion of negotiated gender roles, since marital status could and did dramatically influence a woman’s social, economic, and legal situation. Like any good book, McClain’s study stirs new questions and exciting avenues of further analysis. Her contribution is engaging, and packed with detailed stories of men and women who pushed the boundaries of official orthodoxy and defied early modern conceptions of natural, common, and divine law in order to survive amidst an onslaught of restrictions and conflict.