There has been an exponential growth in interest in the history of post-Reformation English female religious orders over the last two decades, much of it informed by the Who Were the Nuns? project funded by the AHRC in which the author of the book under review played a significant role. With the exception of the continuing community of Syon Abbey, which eventually found a home in Lisbon, the history of these communities began in 1598 with the founding of a Benedictine community in Brussels, though it is important to note that some women had already joined local continental communities and the first abbess at Brussels had previously spent twenty years with the Benedictines in Rheims. By the later seventeenth century there were twenty-one English convents representing nine religious orders. One of the key purposes of this volume is to provide a summation of this recent rich historiographical output, and this is achieved in clear and lively prose in which the argument is illustrated by a pacey narrative with well-chosen examples emanating from a deep familiarity with the material. The chapter on recruitment shows the importance of geographical and familial networks in shaping the choices which young women made in deciding which house to enter, but ecclesiastical politics also played its part, with the split between Jesuits and seculars at home being an important factor in the earlier years. Much of the material in this chapter is drawn from these years and it would be interesting to know how enduring those patterns were after the 1660s, when there were more convents to choose from and the character of the English mission had changed. In discussing enclosure Kelly declares his other purpose in the book, to show that the English convents, while identifying with the mission, were part of the wider, what he calls ‘global’, Catholicism following Trent. Undoubtedly the convents were committed to enclosure, marking it with elaborate ceremonial and continually worrying about the impact of their schools, necessary both for the English mission and their own finances, on the practice, and they were noted for their adherence to it, approvingly by the bishops in whose dioceses their houses were and disparagingly by some of their English Protestant visitors. Notwithstanding the ladder required to gain access to the Conceptionist house in Paris, survival required communication with the outside world, spiritually through confessors and chaplains, almost always English priests, and materially through agents, usually English gentry or merchants, and suppliers of goods and services, mostly from the local community, and the houses were always under the authority of the local diocesan bishop. Finances were raised largely from English sources and through the dowries brought by their mostly gentry novices, though some houses received considerable support from the Spanish and imperial royal households, and senior French ecclesiastics seem to have been generous to the Paris houses. These gifts were by nature political, and potentially problematic, as with the crucifix carried into battle against the Elector Frederick and given to the Antwerp Carmelites by the Spanish friar Dominic Ruzzola. English gifts were also potentially fraught and it is worth considering the Benedictine house at Pontoise, which became closely associated with James ii and later the Jacobite diaspora, enjoying a period of prosperity in the 1690s and 1700s, but less so after 1745 so that vocations fell off and its finances collapsed, making it the only English convent to fail when it closed in 1786. That fact points to the resilience of the other houses, and in chapters on religious culture and liturgical life Kelly provides a picture of a rich artistic and musical culture of a European Tridentine nature. Indeed music was so important to convents in making their churches attractive to local elites that in the early 1700s the Paris Augustinians were prepared to forgo dowry sums in order to procure the best singers for their choir. The devotional life of the convents also expressed European Tridentine values: at Bruges the Augustinians promoted the Stations of the Cross as a means of contemplation, and as early as 1702 had a painting depicting the new devotion to the Sacred Heart in their noviciate. One feature of events in England placed these convents at the centre of Tridentine devotion: martyrdom. With the opening of the catacombs in 1588 relics abounded in Catholic Europe and the convents sought and received many from Rome, some procured through the English College in Rome and at least two through members of the unenclosed, and thereby suspect, English followers of Mary Ward, whose Ignatian spirituality did not sit well with papal understanding of the female religious life. As English convents they had, of course, relics of their own from the recent past, thereby linking the sufferings of English Catholics with those of the early Christians, providing the convents with a special place in the Tridentine world. Kelly undoubtedly demonstrates the case that these convents were part of the wider Catholic Reformation as well as being part of the English mission, but when we come to consider the balance within that dual identity the question becomes more complex. Kelly notes that the convents rarely looked to non-English confessors or chaplains, willing to accept Scots only as a last resort, and he notes also that there was very little contact between these houses and the male colleges and other houses from either Scotland or Ireland. There is no evidence of contact between the English convents and non-English houses of their orders. Perhaps this was not of their choice as most were restricted to recruiting English sisters by the bishops in order to prevent their houses from being in competition with local convents. Furthermore, politics made such contact difficult and closed off opportunities, but the exasperation expressed by the Benedictine sisters at Paris about their French servants suggests other factors also came into play. This is an excellent survey based on close reading of the recent literature, which opens up new questions about the lives of these resilient and redoubtable women who contributed significantly to post-Reformation English and European Catholicism.