The editorial team has compiled a solid collection of essays that highlight the creative innovations and adaptations some English Catholics engaged in to maintain a sense of Catholic identity and community once the public organisation and sacramental structure of the English Church was no longer tied to Rome. Moreover, many of the essays' authors weave English Catholics back into broad narratives of English and British history, such as the quest for national identities and conversion experiences, that have been related largely in terms of Protestant contributions and ideologies. English Catholic women's work is highlighted in many of the essays, making this a rich source for historians of Early Modern European women and Catholic women.

The collection is the result of a conference on ‘Early Modern English Catholic Culture’ held in 2002 at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The authors adopt a broad definition of culture and delve into sources as varied as material objects (such as orange peel rosaries and clerical vestments), physical space (from seminary chapels, homes and outbuildings to the engraved walls of prison cells) and written texts that range from popular romances and seminary entrance questionnaires to letters, poems, polemical treatises and hagiographies. Authors glean their sources from England as well as from the English Catholic diaspora on the continent.

English Catholics living with Protestant restrictions upon Catholic worship could not simply recreate medieval Christian culture, nor could they conform to the strict tenets of the Council of Trent. The most interesting essays, therefore, are those that reveal English Catholic efforts to create new, yet orthodox, Catholic cultures based on medieval Christian traditions and English history yet meeting the new needs of believers who found themselves practising their faith illegally or else dispersed beyond the borders of the British Isles.

Outstanding essays of this type include those by Sophie Holroyd, Mark Netzloff and Heather Wolfe. Holroyd's exhaustive study ‘“Rich, embroidered churchstuffe”: the vestments of Helena Wintour’, examines the collection of mass vestments that Wintour stitched for itinerant priests on the English mission. Typically, historians researching textiles must use descriptions remaining in written documents since the actual items no longer exist. Holroyd has the real thing, which she examines, stitch by stitch, looking for patterns, interpreting symbols and placing the vestment collection in the context of Jesuit and Tridentine spirituality as well as Wintour's own preferences for placing Marian emphases on traditionally Christological events and symbols: ‘Wintour left no textual trace behind. But where text has been erased, Wintour's textiles speak for her’ (p. 74).

Mark Netzloff analyses the writings of expatriates William Allen, Robert Persons and Richard Verstegan, whose distance from England, Netzloff argues, allowed them the flexibility to conceive of nationhood in new ways. As Netzloff suggests, there were many competing visions of what constituted Englishness in this period. Although a distinctly English or British national identity is typically presented as a Protestant-driven development, Catholic writers were an important part of the debate. Writers within the English Catholic diaspora conceived of a nationhood linked more broadly with continental Europe and even the English colonies in the Americas and transformed by contact with these regions.

Wolfe examines the Benedictine nun Barbara Constable's innovative role in creating an institutional memory for English Catholics in England and on the continent. Through her work in compiling and reframing Catholic texts, translating them into the vernacular and arranging for their circulation, Constable both preserved the institutional memory of the Roman Church in England and also transformed it for the readers who prayed and thought based on her guidance.

The essayists also ask provocative new questions about oft-analysed topics. For example, Jane Stevenson analyses English Catholic women's contribution to Catholic cultures and communities in light of their participation in broader Latin culture. Peter Davidson takes a fresh look at architectural elements of English seminaries and recusant houses. He goes beyond the usual analysis of priests' hiding holes to look at subtle design nuances that often would only be recognisable as Catholic to other Catholics. He then compares these architectural features to spiritual recommendations about sacred space made in pastoral works directed at English Catholics. Anne Myers and Molly Murray take the familiar figures of William Alabaster and John Gerard but ask new questions about the nature of conversion experiences and the circulation of relics among English Catholics.

All the essays are solidly grounded in primary research. Because the essays in this collection originated in 2002, however, much of the secondary scholarship on English Catholics is not as up to date as one might wish for a work published in 2007. The editors' introduction, however, takes into account a good quantity of more recent scholarship published after 2002 to point readers in new directions, particularly in the introduction's endnotes. Finally, considering the large number of essays devoted to topics involving women, a more explicitly gendered analysis within such essays would have been enlightening. Catherine Sanok's examination of the ways in which hagiographies of English and British women saints were used both to construct national identity and to encourage contemporary male Catholics to emulate the sacrifices of heroic women is a notable exception to this critique.

Overall, this collection serves as a thought-provoking and valuable addition to English Catholic scholarship of the past decade – such as that by Alexandra Walsham, Peter Lake, Michael Questier and Anne Duffy – that attempts to deepen appreciation of the complexities of English Catholic identities and communities while weaving English Catholics at home and abroad back into the fabric of English and British national narratives. The subjects and evidence are often familiar, but the questions asked and the insights gleaned are new.