This volume does not purport to give a comprehensive account of what became vitally important institutions in terms of the maintenance and evolution of early modern British and Irish Catholicism. Instead, it offers a series of case studies and snapshots of different colleges at various moments of their existence. The introduction to the collection provides something of a spine with a crisp overall account of the evolution of the colleges, although greater length and some contextualisation of the English, Scots and Irish colleges in the context of other expatriate seminaries in European Catholicism would have been welcome. Some of the essays are very good, such as Marc Caball's investigations of Gaelic print culture and the Irish Franciscans at Louvain. This provides both the fine detail of close reading of important poems with a fluent grasp of the wider context. Both the editors provide strong pieces. Thomas O'Connor in his chapter on ‘Irish collegians in Spanish service (1560–1803)’ offers an insight into a neglected aspect of the continental colleges in terms of providing services to the Spanish crown, both with regard to valuable artisan and military/naval immigrants and in providing English-speaking clerical personnel when this became necessary in America. For his part, Liam Chambers provides a careful scholarly investigation of the Irish College in Paris during the post-Napoleonic restoration. It is one of the strengths of the book, indeed, that it considers the nineteenth-century history of these institutions when they continued to perform important functions, even if they were of less centrality than in the era prior to the refoundation of Catholic seminaries in Ireland and Britain. One of the highlights of the collection is a very interesting essay by Ana Sáez Hidalgo which examines the almost entirely neglected topic of how the recusant presence in Spanish dominions impacted upon the local print culture. Of particular importance, too, is a somewhat uneven essay by Cairan O’ Scea which situates the controversies and struggles for control in the Irish colleges within the context of the expulsion of the Moriscos and the political dominance of the first duke of Lerma. As with all collections of essays, different readers will find individual essays of more interest than others but overall the editors have produced a volume which provides a series of insights into a phenomenon of genuine importance to British and Irish Catholicism.