It is something of an irony that in simultaneously producing two books which continually explore the tension between the monastic and the missionary, Downside Abbey Press has acted with something like an un-contemplative haste. Still, the life of contemplation’s loss is the historian’s gain with the publication of Dominic Aidan Bellenger’s essays. The books are designed as companion pieces, the first, Monks with a Mission, focussing largely on the penal period (though bleeding into the nineteenth century), the second, Monastic Identities, covering the modern period from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. The latter is expressly focused on the community of St Gregory’s, currently based at Downside Abbey; the former looks more widely within the English Benedictine Congregation, although, understandably considering Bellenger’s Downside links, the same community, located at Douai for its first two centuries, remains the anchor point.

Written in a fluid style throughout, each essay is easily digestible in one sitting and undaunting, even for those with no prior knowledge of the history of the English Benedictines since the break with Rome. In the first volume, Bellenger raises three major theories surrounding the revived English Benedictines. Firstly, in the early sixteenth century, the Benedictine movement evolved as a half-way option between the Jesuits and the secular clergy for those who had a vocation. Secondly, looking outwards, the Benedictines were the third face of Catholicism, even if one that has been somewhat neglected in the historiographical concentration on Jesuits and secular clergy. Lastly, that historians should not really think of it as an English Benedictine movement as, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the order was being given new life by Welshmen.

Each of these ideas is highly plausible and it is emblematic of Bellenger’s approach that they are just that: floated ideas. These are not necessarily essays heavy on evidence but designed more as creating wider theories for the study of the English Benedictines. For instance, one cannot help but wonder if the Welsh interest and the ‘half-way’ house option explain each other, both having famously affected Rome’s English College in the sixteenth century, when the College bounced from one difficulty concerning Owen Lewis and its Welsh students, to another of resentment against Jesuit involvement in its governance.

For Bellenger, the French Revolution was a moment of rupture in the story not just of English Catholicism but the Benedictines in particular. In Bellenger’s estimation, the Revolution just might have been the event that saved the monasteries. Hitting the financial buffers and with the flow of vocations steadily dwindling, the move to England came at an opportune moment. Moreover, it was the English Benedictine Congregation’s commitment to its missions in their homeland – an unusual priority for European monks – that saved them, giving them a defined purpose in the turmoil of increased Catholic emancipation in England. The nineteenth century gave the monks the opportunity to re-invent themselves – if with difficulty, as Alban Hood has recently argued in From Repatriation to Revival. Continuity and change in the English Benedictine congregation, 1795–1850. They now embraced their British character, providing men to found the Australian church hierarchy, as well as bishops for Mauritius; they could even be found siding with the Empire rather than the locals in the latter.

Monks with a Mission finishes here but points to the theme running throughout Monastic Identities: the battle between the un-Benedictine-like missionary impulse and the younger reformers within the congregation who had never tasted exile and wanted a monastery to be just that. Much tighter in focus than the first volume in its expressed concentration on the community of St Gregory’s, Monastic Identities is made up of a number of character studies of monks. In several very revealing chapters, Bellenger explores the ‘Downside Stirs’, a series of disputes over the very tensions of mission versus monastery. By then settled in Somerset, some newer members of Downside started to look for a stricter or more primitive monasticism, echoing the similar monastic movements in France in the nineteenth century.

Again, the very English reinvention is evident. In an absorbing chapter on Bede Camm, the well-known author of Forgotten Shrines, Bellenger judges that Camm’s work was part of Edwardian nostalgia for the country house rather than the industrial city. Thus, the story of the martyrs was focused there, moved from under the life of the church to the country house at the heart of English life. Simply put, Camm portrayed the martyrs as very English, rather than very Church Militant.

However, Bellenger does cover an exception in the form of the Downside satellite at Mount St Benedict’s at Gorey in Ireland. From its beginning it had nationalist links but these only grew following the Easter Rising of 1916 to the point where its great defender, Dom Francis Sweetman, resisted his own superiors by keeping it open despite their increasing anxieties. As Bellenger points out in a neat link to his first volume, Sweetman was a man out of time, looking more like the eighteenth-century monk missioner landed in a very monastic twentieth century congregation.

Monks with a Mission and Monastic Identities would best be described as anthologies of Bellenger’s writings rather than collections, so there is some overlap and repetition between chapters. Some essays also represent interesting diversions rather than vital meditations, such as the inclusion of Dom Hubert Van Zeller’s caricatures of the other members of his community. It should also be recognized that the essays are literally re-produced, not updated in any way from their original publication. Thus, for example, references are sometimes made to chapters or illustrations that are not in the present volumes. Nevertheless, the two volumes are enjoyable, thought-provoking reads; they offer some provocative considerations and ideas deserving of serious consideration and further investigation.