This volume represents a commendable and wide-ranging project to expand the discussion of the place of religion in early-modern England and English texts of the period. As such it takes forward the nuancing of the religious positioning of the Protestant majority, as much as offering new discussion of those who stood outside it. The collection is notable for its contribution to the tracing of a distinctively female spirituality in early modern England, as it is in tracing a nascent secularism. There is much of great interest in the volume about Judaic perspectives and about the relations of Judaism to the early-modern Protestant community. The intensive mainstream sponsorship of the study of Hebrew in the three kingdoms from the late sixteenth century is one of many factors which render this focus both timely and interesting.

It is the first three essays in the volume, which will be of the greatest interest to readers of this journal, in that they concern themselves with early modern Catholicism. All three gain considerably from the breadth of religious perspective in which they are set, which positions recusant Catholicism as one of numerous divergences from a state Church which was itself relatively diverse. Arthur Marotti returns to territories in which he is widely experienced: the verse of the recusant Catholics which circulated (mostly) in manuscript to investigate the oppositional potential of Marian verse in Elizabethan England. Phebe Jensen returns to the recusant squire William Blundell of Little Crosby and his 1611 discovery of the Harkirk hoard of coins – the subject, incidentally, of a new display in the British Museum. Lowell Gallagher considers the structure of the Painted Life of the English foundress Mary Ward, the remarkable series of biographical pictures preserved since the1660s in the Wardist house in Augsburg (there is a set of copies at the Bar Convent, York).

Arthur Marotti’s piece offers a thoughtful re-examination of the extent to which the Elizabethan cult of the monarch as Virgin Queen rendered any verse in honour of the Blessed Virgin to some degree oppositional. He traces, in the course of a discussion which takes in a wealth of poetry circulated and preserved in manuscript, the Anglican waning of devotion to the Virgin, despite a surprisingly vigorous defence from Latimer of the honour due to the Mother of Christ. One of the many useful features of this work is the extensive quotation of the manuscript poems which are cited, including a Marian hymn originating from very close to S. Edmund Campion, and quite possibly his work.

Phebe Jensen re-examines the Harkirk Hoard, already studied by Daniel Woolf, and contexts it more completely in the recusant concern with English history and more particularly with the analogical reading of history whereby the Protestant apologists broadly aligned themselves with the indigenous Britons, whereas the recusant historians, dramatists and controversialists aligned themselves with the Saxons. As a study of the books available to one recusant squire and the use which he made of them, this work is of considerable value.

Lowell Gallagher offers a beguiling and highly speculative set of possible readings of the Painted Life of Mary Ward, giving due weight to the fact that they were made at a time when Ward’s project and community were in ecclesiastical eclipse.

While there is much to praise here, there are inevitably small difficulties and discrepancies, many of them associated with geographical remoteness from the sources and places under discussion. Thus Marotti continues to undervalue the Stonyhurst manuscript as a source for S. Robert Southwell’s verse as it circulated in the Recusant community, and proceeds as if unaware of the re-datings of Southwell manuscripts offered by Peter Beal, or indeed of the present author’s complete edition of the verse. Similarly, the assertion on Professor Jensen’s first page that Little Crosby is near Chester pulls the modern reader up short – the village lies to this day north of the estuary of the Mersey in the region strongly identified as ‘Catholic Lancashire’. Which identification make much sense of several of the phenomena discussed in this essay: the level of support which the recusant squire could command locally and among the Lancashire gentry, as in the episode of the 1624 fracas at Inceblundell, despite his sufferings at times of coordinated national persecution. It quite possibly casts a different complexion on the burial of a recusant in Cross Lane near to a surviving stone cross. It connects Blundell more securely even than his Douai education does, to a nexus of lively recusant thought about the past which would encompass such phenomena as likenesses of Saxon Royal Saints displayed in English exiled houses in Lisbon and Seville, drama and relic cults focused on the figure of Chad as the indigenous saint who conformed to Rome, even Saxon names in the recusant community. Even so, this article draws welcome attention to the whole rich phenomenon, on which much work remains to be done, of recusant collecting, and of the Reformation as a direct stimulus in all communities to the collection of the British past.