Cosmopolitanism is the principle that all humanity constitutes a single community based upon some natural, divine, ethical, or philosophical commonality. In medieval Europe, the belief in a unified Christian commonwealth under the authority of the papacy relied on a religiously based cosmopolitanism that theoretically superseded other worldly loyalties and which compelled Christians—particularly monarchs—toward correct behavior. As Europeans redrew the boundaries between temporal and spiritual governance during the Reformation era, they had to reconsider whether there was, in fact, any such universal community of humankind. With the Catholic worldview disrupted and the ecclesiastical hierarchy on the decline, on what would a single, universal community now be based and who would restrain temporal power gone awry? What authority could restrain tyranny?

In Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth, Brian C. Lockey traces how Catholic and Protestant English authors participated in debates over such issues during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after Henry VIII's break with Rome. In doing so, he attempts to construct a bridge between the medieval, Catholic Christian commonwealth and the eighteenth-century vision of secular cosmopolitanism imagined by Enlightenment philosophes such as Immanuel Kant. The many political and religious tracts, fictional works, letters, and translations Lockey analyzes in this text experiment and hypothesize about who might act as a sort of imperial overseer to guarantee right, legitimate governance: Protestant bishops, members of the Privy Council, monarchs of other nations, poets, nobles, transnational groups of Protestant elect, and even Robin Hood.

Intellectually intriguing chapters analyze a succession of writings that explore variants of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism that are frequently rooted in religion and conservativism rather than secularism and reason. Lockey begins with an analysis of late sixteenth-century Catholic and Protestant writings, including those of English Catholic exiles and Jesuits, such as Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, who understandably evinced a traditional Christian cosmopolitanism and transnationalism stemming from their situation and mission. In a play of Campion's, Ambrosia (1578), however, Lockey finds the seed of change: a suggestion that the corrector of the sovereign could be a secular person, not an ecclesiastic. According to Lockey, Campion influenced Protestant writers of this era, such as Anthony Munday, John Harington, and perhaps the better known Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, who continued to promote the traditional idea of a united Christian commonwealth but who replaced Catholic leadership with secular oversight.

Later authors and translators publishing around the time of the English Civil War and its aftermath replaced the secularized Christian commonwealth espoused by Munday with a new model of a united, ecumenical Europe ruled by Christian monarchs who policed one another, peer to peer. In one of his strongest chapters, Lockey explores how John Milton, in his writings after the Restoration, presented religion as transcending national loyalties. No country, not even England, was particularly favored by God to become the new Israel or Jerusalem. Milton envisioned a transnational Protestant elite providing the advice, criticism, and restraint necessary to correct abusive rulers through councils, congregations, and election of members of Parliament. Parallel to Milton's transnationalism, Lockey presents Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677, 1681) as demonstrative of a different force—international commerce—driving new types of identity that did not favor one nation over another.

Although individual chapters are engaging and enlightening about the texts explored, Lockey's greatest challenge comes in linking them together in a gradual building of ideas from the medieval era to the Enlightenment. For example, although Lockey briefly explores Innocent III's role in establishing papal authority as necessary to depose and correct princes, this power did not go uncontested in the medieval era. Lockey might have provided a stronger benchmark in medieval thought regarding the transnational boundaries of spiritual and temporal power rather than beginning with Campion. Furthermore, Lockey wants to argue that there is a progression of influence from Campion through to Behn, from Catholicism through Protestantism, royalism, and capitalism, on through the Enlightenment era. The connections are often coincidental and speculative at best, such as Lockey's suggestion that the Protestants Munday and Harington were influenced by writings of Campion and other Catholic exiles but without the evidence necessary to prove such influence, which would, admittedly, be hard to find. Some authors, like Milton, were clearly trying to address the problem of transnational authority: others, like Spenser, seem only incidentally part of the discussion.

Despite such challenges, the value of this text is in its presentation of a variety of cosmopolitanisms emerging in the space between the traditional Christian commonwealth and secularized brotherhood of nations, regardless of whether Lockey can successfully link them. Lockey's analysis reveals a variety of hybrid understandings of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism based on combinations of religious, secular, capitalist, philosophical and other influences that are much more varied than in the usual, secularized nation-state narratives. In traditional histories of England's nationhood, voices that do not fit the master narrative are frequently left out. Lockey incorporates such voices and their alternative visions of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism back into this larger history. In some of these works, fictional lands, such as Faerie, have no national boundaries. Characters, such as Captain Thomas Stukeley, evince transnational religious and secular loyalties that can accommodate a national loyalty to England.

This text is most useful for advanced scholars. Historically, Lockey places himself alongside the scholarship of Michael Questier and Alison Shell, exploring the complexities at the intersections of Catholicism and English national identity. Considering his focus on transnationalism and discussion of Catholic exiles, Lockey's work stands alongside recent scholarship by Claire Walker and Gabriel Glickman. With his analyses of political theory, Lockey engages with long-running debates over British identity represented in the works of J. G. A. Pocock, David Armitage, Willy Maley, and David J. Baker. Lockey's interests also place this work within deliberations regarding secularism and the public sphere by Jurgen Habermas and, more recently, Charles Taylor. Overall, Lockey widens the number of voices, particularly religious ones, involved in England's transition from being one member of a universal Christian commonwealth to becoming an independent Christian commonwealth in its own right.