As its title suggests, Young's study of a Catholic gentry family and their community aims to be both local study and ‘family history’. His reconstruction of the Gages and their world shows a ‘socially interdependent Catholic community’ in which both influential gentry families and the ‘plebeian’ Catholics of Bury St Edmunds were indispensable. Young's main archive is the Hengrave Manuscripts held at Cambridge University Library, with Catholic mission registers, returns of papists and non-jurors providing most of the other important data. The study is not immune from the typical hazards of family-based history – long lists of marriage alliances, and the necessity of periodically checking which Gage is being talked about. Coverage of the wider Suffolk Catholic community is stronger for the second half of the period (mainly due to the availability of sources); however the Gage family correspondence is extensive for 1640–70, making possible a valuable case study of a Catholic gentry family living through the upheavals of the Civil War era. There is enough allusion to the Gages' European connections (from links with Henrietta Maria's French court, to participation in the War of Polish Succession) to make one wish for more – the author notes that the Gages maintained a ‘strikingly cosmopolitan outlook’ (p. xiii) but does not really expand on this observation. Young's study of the Benedictine mission of 1727–41 suggests a Catholic community ‘emerging from gentry control’; his account of the Jesuit mission (beginning in 1755) shows a relative of the dominant gentry family, John Gage sj, using his own and his family's money to establish a town-based mission chapel independent of gentry patrons: thus the Gages actually helped the transition from ‘gentry chaplaincy’ to ‘proto-parish’ (ch. v). The book includes some useful appendices, including a generous number of documents (twenty-seven) printed from the Hengrave Manuscripts, transcripts from the Mission Registers and a table of Bury St Edmunds Catholic family names from 1715 to 1767. This is a valuable case study for students of religious history, local history and the early modern gentry.