Stories of the deprivations and recoveries of Catholic worshipers in early modern England populate Lisa McClain's book, and her archival research is only the first of its strengths. More important, she avoids a common shortcoming of studies that rely heavily on anecdote and excerpt; that is, she never loses sight of broader conceptual claims or fails to connect those claims to ongoing revisionist work on English Catholicism. And what popular work it has become recently: figure studies of Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell; titles on Henrician and Marian spirituality from Ashgate's Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700, series; new books by Michael Questier and Arthur Marotti; studies on Catholic Shakespeare like Richard Wilson’s; and the essays edited by Ethan Shagan. Surveying this crowded table, readers may find McClain's assertion of 2004—that none has yet studied religious ritual, identity, and community among Catholic laypersons (6–7)—happily less accurate today. However, McClain's own cultural history remains unique. Whereas Shagan defines the approach as “post-confessional” (Catholics and the “Protestant Nation” [Manchester, 2005], 1), McClain instead narrows confessional focus, identifying many fluid, informal Catholic communities that sought spiritual unity with ancient Catholicism, if not always with the present Roman church. She asserts the laity's role in maintaining and adapting outlawed Catholic rituals and also distinguishes “pastoral clergy,” who often had to negotiate Rome's inflexible institutional mandates with local, situational nimbleness, from Continental clerics—especially church administrators and theologians—who promoted Tridentine doctrine in print (10–11).

These alternative Catholic communities remained intent on obtaining salvation despite new obstacles—rituals were illegal, priests were scarce, and churches were no longer theirs. McClain repeatedly admires early modern Catholics’ practical, tenacious motivation to reside among the saved, and her dramatic title foregrounds this main goal nicely. Accepting the loss of ideal institutional forms of worship, these lay communities embraced innovations that kept alive the earlier forms’ spiritual functions (14–15). What results from McClain's emphasis is a new kind of worship: flexible, vital, capable of giving options amid circumstantial constraints. Such worship was based on lived experience and accommodation and was neither pre-Reformation nor post-Tridentine in nature (4–7). Thus she takes issue with influential studies by Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh that presuppose ongoing pre-Reformation mentalities and eventual Catholic decline. Those presuppositions overlook evolving habits of worship: “As the resources of a religious community change, the religion itself must alter to fulfill believers’ needs” (106).

The first chapter proper broadly defines Catholics as those who believe in the sacraments and rituals of Catholicism and who desire to participate in the spiritual life of that faith (26–27). This formulation encompasses recusants as well as conformist Protestants who inwardly preferred Catholicity. McClain emphasizes the many priorities and secular responsibilities of worshipers, and she focuses on belief rather than behavior as a means of confessional identification. Merely expressing an oath to a Protestant monarch did not erase “patterns of a lifetime's worship” (28). She usefully summarizes those Catholic “priorities” that inform worship practices—immanence, priestly mediation, the economy of salvation—and argues that around 1590, when hopes for Catholic restoration waned, many believers began more seriously to seek ways to duplicate the functions of traditional practices in alternate forms: masses might be said without vestments, one kind of devotion might replace another, and a printed primer might stand in as a “virtual” priest (47). The textual, clerical nature of many of these alternatives, and of so much historical evidence, complicates McClain's lay emphasis; although she persuasively treats the importance of believers “of middling and lower ranks” to the Jesuit mission (40–42), statements by the likes of William Allen, Robert Persons, John Gerard, and Robert Southwell occur more frequently than expected. This chapter and the introduction portray the English Renaissance religious landscape, including differences of practice and political events affecting the toleration of these differences. This readable, sensitive summary would work well in undergraduate and graduate seminars alike. However, some specialists may grow impatient at this lengthy setup and proceed to the more concentrated themes of the middle sections.

The next three chapters, on evolving approaches to religious space, the rosary, and the mass, contain McClain's most fascinating research and constitute the heart of her study. Their traditional religious spaces desecrated, Catholics visited the ruins of these spaces or sacralized everyday space by ritualized use, as when Lancashire believers met in a neighbor's home and performed the Good Friday creeping to the cross. They also returned to spaces now used by Protestants but did so intent on physical, ritual, or imaginative separation (55–62). Drawing on Victor Turner and Michel de Certeau, McClain sees ritual and secrecy as essential to community formation, and she builds upon existing research of these communities at contested sites such as prisons, trials, and executions. The Catholic transformation of a prison into a distribution center or “college of priests,” for instance, displays the resilience and resourcefulness that most interest the author. McClain turns to material culture's effects on piety in treating the rosary, and she shows how clerical authors offered isolated lay believers what she suggestively calls a “menu of options” (83, 138). Priests underscored rosarists’ membership in a worldwide body of believers, and more militant images of Mary replaced modest or sorrowful portrayals in this conflicted age (92–104). Modifications to the mass provide the most theologically rich material, and they raise questions McClain does not fully answer. Deprived of “sensory contact with Christ” (109), some Catholics focused instead on Christ's physical body rather than the host or equated their own bodies with Christ's (especially during times of pogroms). Spiritual reception of sacraments and private examination of conscience, along with talk of Catholics forging a “direct channel to God's grace” and “one-on-one relationships with God” (136–38), resemble views of Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel, and others. McClain, true to task, avoids interconfessional analyses, yet this perspective would have deepened certain investigations.

McClain fortifies claims for Catholic diversity by next employing the familiar mode of regional study. She downplays London's more amply documented aristocrats in favor of a “web of acquaintances” including Catholic prisoners, the poor, tradespeople, foreigners, and priests (156). She examines the active relic trade and traces of Catholic geography that Protestants could not so easily abolish. Turning to Cornwall, she points to peninsular independence and Celtic influences, existent within institutional church structures, to question simpler notions of Catholic decline (175). Lancashire presents greater disruption, aggression, and de facto toleration. Yet northern Catholics still interacted variously with authorities, from creating separate burial grounds to infiltrating parishes with rush-bearings and misrule celebrations (212–17). She concludes this section by addressing the area's permeable borders and Anglo-Scottish identity. In the final chapter, McClain distinguishes further between Catholic identity and community and addresses especially the sense of continuity with the ancient church and its martyrs (234–42). This association with a universal, transhistorical church influenced communities centering on prayer, books, and the dead and diminished English identification with the present Roman church. This outlook informs Catholic frustration and miscommunication during the Oath of Allegiance controversy. McClain insists that English Catholics, by separating their loyalties to secular and religious authorities, did not defy Rome but rather redefined their relationship (265). Rome makes for a natural ending, yet much of this chapter might have been spared certain redundancies. On facing pages, one finds the phrases “Again,” “as we saw so many times in chapters 2 through 4,” “As argued earlier,” and “as discussed in chapter 1” (244–45). Yet reiteration clarifies McClain's main points, and she has given structural order to what on first impression seems like far too much material. More felicitously, the martyr Margaret Clitheroe haunts different parts of this book. At her trial a frustrated Protestant minister asked her, “What is the church?” McClain's study suggests we have not yet found a sufficient answer.