True to the image on its cover, illustrating loosened restrictions against Catholic worship, this book covers the period between the battle of Culloden of 1746 and Catholic emancipation in 1829 by the Westminster parliament. Its editor, Liam Chambers, highlights both the importance of considering Catholicism in a broader context (such as the Catholic Enlightenment, the French Revolution or the suppression of the Society of Jesus) and the varied experience of Catholics across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. He insists on ‘the value of writing the history of British and Irish Catholicism together’ (p. 4), notably to reconnect isolated historiographies, developed in separate national silos.

Although not formally divided, the volume is composed of four thematic parts: the first one is dedicated to a chronological assessment of the political significance of British and Irish Catholicism. Carys Brown’s chapter, on the two first decades of the period under consideration, shows how Catholicism and Jacobitism were no longer assumed to go hand in hand at the death of James iii in 1766. However, the situation for Catholics did not improve, not least because of the endurance of anti-Catholicism, economic disability, a declining gentry and an insufficient missionary presence in Scotland. Likewise, James Kelly’s chapter discusses how the repeal of the penal laws against Catholics (the idea of a Catholic Relief) was contemplated when Catholic military recruits were needed to maintain the British Empire. Despite a general progress of the Catholic cause, several ‘no popery’ riots, such as the Gordon Riots (1780), exposed the tensions in public opinion on Catholic Relief. Kelly points out that Catholics across Britain and Ireland did not coordinate their campaigns, which slowed down the process of legal recognition. Marianne Elliott’s chapter focuses on the impact of the French Revolution in the British and Irish sphere, which stopped Catholic relief in its tracks. As France was perceived as an example of a nationalised Catholic Church and this met with disastrous consequences, British and Irish Catholics leaders became hostile to the suggestion of state payment of the clergy or a Crown veto over Church appointments (important aspects in the negotiations for Catholic Relief). Despite attempts to associate Catholic leaders with sedition (1793), it is only later, with the Irish Rebellion (1798), that such a fear materialised and was repressed. Michael Mullett’s chapter analyses the integral influence of the lay Catholic Board, founded in 1808, in the interests of Catholics in the negotiations between the British Crown and the Holy See for civil rights. Mullett notes that, at the time, the Church was undergoing a revival (with John Milner as a crucial figure leading the way towards a Rome-oriented Church), but that the Catholic laity were at the forefront of the campaign for emancipation in the 1820s. Similarly, Thomas Bartlett’s chapter addresses the Catholic Rent (1824) and the political importance of associating Catholic liberation, education and peasant grievances with the cause of emancipation. The growing politicisation of Ireland led Home Secretary Robert Peel and Prime Minister Arthur Wellesley, duke of Wellington, to concede Catholic emancipation in 1829 while safeguarding Protestant interests to avoid a civil war in Ireland.

The second theme of the volume focuses on the transformations of the Church’s growing infrastructure in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cormac Begadon presents a very useful account of the (uneven) developments of physical and pastoral infrastructures, such as chapel-building, school-building, fundraising networks, resulting from better economic fortunes and patterns of migration. Comparatively, Peter Phillips explores the consolidation of Catholic communities (a growing Catholic middle class and poor labourers) through liturgy and sacraments given in an increasingly public manner, supported by the increase in confraternities. In his chapter, Colin Haydon reconstructs the complex relations between Protestants and Catholics and pays attention to both violent and tolerant attitudes, emphasising the difference in experience of Catholic gentlemen and Catholics from more humble backgrounds. Anti-Catholicism did not disappear after Catholic emancipation and strengthened due to the papacy’s nineteenth-century revival, fears of ‘Crypto-Papists’, Irish migration to England, Scotland and Wales, as well as the rapprochement between Irish nationalism and Catholicism.

The focus of the volume is then directed onto international networks and mobility. Tonya Moutray presents the situation of women religious – in Ireland, England and Europe, as exiled communities lived abroad before the French Revolution – whose traumatic experience of ‘returning’ migration, coupled with an adverse political response to their return, drove a desire for the redevelopment of religious orders both in Britain and Ireland and on the Continent. Liam Chambers’s chapter explores the situation of male religious orders and their Continental networks, along with a few colleges founded in response to the French Revolution, such as Maynooth. Colleges abroad played vital roles in the survival of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, as well as supervising the migration of Catholics abroad. In a noteworthy chapter, Aidan Bellenger maps Catholics and the Catholic Church in relation to British imperial history, showing the importance of the laity, for example, in Gibraltar, and the issues with territories with an established Catholic presence changing allegiance after a war or treaty, including New France or the Caribbean. The links between British Catholicism home and abroad seem anecdotal: ‘if it contributed to the emancipation debate in Britain it was more about accommodation than principle’ (p. 223).

Finally, the volume examines the literary, intellectual, musical, material and architectural expressions of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. Michael Tomko identifies a distorted perception of eighteenth-century Catholics, long perceived as having no literature of their own, and offers an alternative vision of their identifiable print culture, despite the absence of native Irish authors, which ranged from apologetics and polemics to daily devotionals, supporting the unity of a national Catholic community and Catholic emancipation. Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh summarises the modest Catholic literary production of Wales, Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, emphasising how crucial both translations – at a time when the institutional Catholic Church in Ireland was not favourably disposed to the Irish language – and oral culture were. Shaun Blanchard explores Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland through the interest of Catholics to present themselves as rational and tolerant (which contrasted with the Continent where ‘enlightened’ policies were promoted and enforced from the top of society). Many Catholic intellectuals, such as John Lingard or Charles Walmesley, focused on resisting transalpine ideas and justifying the inclusion of their community. Thomas Muir’s analysis of church music reveals the musical imperatives driving liturgical meanings, for example, Haydn’s Nelson Mass and its reinforcement of political themes, as well as the dissemination of classical-style Catholic music into non-Catholic society, including through embassies. As a strategy, Catholics emphasised the points of difference with Protestants: the liturgy in Latin, neo-Gothic churches and plainchant, which was associated with Rome. Carol Richardson strongly emphasises how material culture, even mundane objects such as fabrics, ‘represented the cumulative and collective experience of religious identity’ (p. 307). In a reassertion of continuity within Catholicism, British Catholics capable of assembling assets were careful to document and authenticate the fragments that gave material form to their faith (for example, artefacts rescued from the French Revolution).

This is a very valuable collection of essays bringing seasoned scholars together. It convincingly draws attention to the relevance of Catholicism in the study of both Britain and Ireland’s history, pushing back against the widespread view that English Catholics disappeared at the Reformation. As stated by the general editors of the series, the political importance of Catholicism is tightly intertwined with the growth of the nation. This volume is an important milestone in scholarship: it situates the significance of religious history within a broader history, which allows for the consideration of the more international aspects of British and Irish Catholicism, connected to larger networks on the Continent and in the British Empire. It would have been interesting for the discussion surrounding how in return British Catholicism transformed European Catholicism to have been developed, especially on the topic of ‘global’ Catholicism and its meaning in regard to the British and Irish context, or how colonial and anti-colonial behaviours intersected with religion. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this volume is the challenge of finding evidence on Welsh and Scottish Catholicism. Despite its aim to consider all four nations together, the volume is stronger in English and Irish cases (information is often provided for Ireland or England and missing for Wales and Scotland), which is made clear by the contributors themselves. The volume highlights the research that still needs to be done, especially regarding the integration of women’s history (except for the chapters on infrastructure and women religious, women are mostly discussed incidentally). Masculinities, femininities and sexualities are a blind spot.

A strong basis for future endeavours, this volume is crucial for the historical understanding of the tensions, adaptations and continuities in British and Irish Catholicism.