In 1649 Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, papal nuncio to Ireland, described in his relation to Innocent x the fierce Catholicism of the people whom he had encountered in Galway. Rinuccini was so moved by their ‘expressions of loyalty’ (p. 230) that he suggested the possibility of learning from their example, and from other Catholic communities on the peripheries more broadly:

Such a reciprocal and dynamic relationship between the centre (Rome) and countries on Europe's periphery forms the basis of Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin's extensive new monograph, Catholic Europe.

In recent years, scholars have fundamentally redefined the role of the Council of Trent in the Catholic renewal of the early modern period. As a consequence a more nuanced picture has emerged which has viewed processes of reform as flexible, and adaptable in response to local conditions, and dismantles the notion that Tridentine decrees were uniformly implemented. Ó hAnnracháin builds upon this work to draw closer attention to the significance of the period between 1592 and 1648, in order to re-emphasise the degree to which processes of renewal and reform were ‘shaped in response to contemporary conditions’ (p.1).

Ó hAnnracháin's study is divided into four main chapters (with chapters i and vi as introduction and conclusion), which focus on seven peripheral societies of Catholic Europe. In chapter ii Ó hAnnracháin considers and contrasts three nations on the ‘Western margins’ – Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands. As well as their geographic proximity, these territories were united through governance by hostile Protestant states. The effectiveness and vehemence of the Protestant establishments, however, varied widely.

The persecution, imprisonment and execution of Catholic priests and their harbourers in England was unrivalled elsewhere during this period, making it the world's most dangerous mission territory. None the less, despite the fact that English Catholics were a small minority, ‘England constituted a vitally important imaginative space’ for European Catholics and texts such as Robert Persons's De persecutione Anglicana libellous circulated widely in multiple vernaculars after its initial publication in Latin in 1582 (p. 30).

Meanwhile, in Ireland, Catholicism remained the religion of the majority as the Elizabethan and Stuart Churches failed to make Protestant converts, not helped by widespread ministerial failure to learn the Irish language. Catholic reform, on the other hand, gained impetus via a flourishing Irish Catholic literature, facilitated largely by the Franciscans at the college of St Anthony in Louvain (founded in 1607). This literature supported the ‘determined self-fashioning of the island's disparate ethnic communities as Catholic’ (p. 46), and the ‘gradual erosion’ of ethnic differences laid the groundwork for an Irish nationalism founded upon religion rather than language (pp. 57–9).

Ó hAnnracháin focuses on the Netherlands to further underline the variable experiences of Catholics living within these marginal societies. One such variance lay in the possibilities for female religious life in the territories. Ó hAnnracháin argues that the notional understandings of conventual life in England and Ireland were shaped more by the ‘Tridentine obsession with secure cloistering’ than in the Netherlands, where the domestication of Catholic practice facilitated the formation of alternative religious communities known as the kloppen (p. 72).

Women played a vital role in the propagation of Catholicism more broadly during this period. In chapter iii Ó hAnnracháin compares the variegated East-Central European territories of Poland, Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, where Protestant communities were ‘re-catholicised’. In Poland, for example, Ó hAnnracháin highlights the significance of the Dominican confraternities of the rosary as focal points for Catholic female piety, which formed a significant part of the mendicant spirituality that supported the renewal of Catholic piety. In Bohemia the cult of saints was identified as an important tool in constructing a new Czech Catholicism, and Ó hAnnracháin draws particular attention to the ‘intrinsically Bohemian’ devotion to the Infant of Prague, which was underpinned by female aristocratic patrons (pp.114–15).

The attractiveness of Catholicism to elites was a critical force behind the Catholic renewal in Hungary, and Ó hAnnracháin's work on the northern Balkans is particularly illuminating. Ó hAnnracháin dedicates two chapters to case studies of this vast, linguistically and confessionally diverse area that has received relatively little attention from Anglophone scholars. Chapter iv focuses on ‘opposition to Islam’ and explores papal patronage of war with the Ottomans. He concludes that whilst Rome ultimately failed in the anti-Turkish war, the diplomatic endeavours ‘represented an important aspect of the papacy's claim to moral authority within a supra-national confession united in common cultural convictions’ (p.172).

In chapter v Ó hAnnracháin traces missionary activity in the northern Balkans and brings issues into focus that were also present in other Catholic territories around the world, such as rivalry between different religious orders. In this chapter (and elsewhere) Ó hAnnracháin underlines the significance of alternate, non-Jesuit facets of Catholic devotional practice, which, he argues, have ‘run the risk of being under-estimated’ (p. 115). In the northern Balkans there was also a burgeoning relationship between the commercial and spiritual, and Ó hAnnracháin explores the way in which local Catholicisms were shaped, for instance, by the financial support of Franciscan convents by Bosnian merchants, and the issues arising from their rivalry with fellow merchants from Ragusa.

The period between 1592 and 1648, Ó hAnnracháin demonstrates, was uniquely animated ‘by a sense that the confessional boundaries of Europe could be altered dramatically’ (p. 213). The strength of Ó hAnnracháin's work lies in the breadth of his comparisons between territories on the margins, and he makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the peripheral communities of early modern Catholic Europe, as well as their diverse relationships with the centre.