The introduction to David Salter’s book states that Saint Francis and the Franciscans have largely been given attention in works that are ‘religious and historical in their focus and orientation’, and argues for the need to study ‘the Franciscans of the imagination’ in English literature (p. 3). This may be true, and Salter does detailed, well-researched and thorough work on the representation of Franciscans in literary texts by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and others. However, the framing of this work is fundamentally flawed: the claim that the physical, tangible Franciscan presence in England ended with ‘the Order’s dissolution in 1538’ (p. 16) is simply not true.

Salter, for example, contends that ‘The Franciscan Order had no visible presence in England since its suppression by Henry VIII in the early years of the Reformation’ (p. 128). Such a claim would have surprised the Franciscan martyrs John Jones, John Woodcock and John Wall, all of whom were executed in England. It would have confused the theologian and friar Christopher Davenport as he worked towards the reunion of the churches in the 1630s, and the Capuchin Franciscans at the court of Henrietta Maria as they served at the public Catholic chapel at Somerset House in the heart of London. Finally, it would have bewildered the hundred-strong Franciscan missionaries of the English Province of Observant Franciscans at work in England and Wales in 1687, spread across Osmotherley, Abergavenny, Edgbaston, Monmouth, York, Warwick and Hexham, amongst other places.

Yet this is the claim repeated throughout Salter’s book. ‘After the suppression and disappearance of the Order in the late 1530s, it became impossible for authors to imagine contemporary Franciscans as native to England’, we are informed, instead replaced with ‘fictional friars…displaced beyond the frontiers of England itself’ (p. 79). More than this, to sixteenth century writers, Franciscans ‘must have appeared to be figures who belonged more to the distant past or to far off lands than to the quotidian world of the here and now’, suffering from a total ‘remoteness from contemporary English life’ (p. 123).

The root cause of the problem lies in the book’s conceptualization of the Reformation in England. Salter claims that, after the execution of Thomas More, England became ‘an autonomous and self-contained nation’, and the ‘symbolic boundaries of Englishness—which had formerly been porous—were now tightly sealed’ (p. 16). The ‘split from Rome’ meant that ‘membership of the international community of the Catholic Church was no longer officially available to the English’ and those that wished to retain it had to do so by ‘compromising their loyalty to their country’. Such a claim might have passed muster half a century ago, but scholars of the history of Catholicism today will be alarmed at the assumptions underpinning such a statement. ‘The English’, Salter claims, ‘saw themselves as threatened and besieged by their European Catholic neighbours’ (p. 17). Such an assertion suggests a return to a conceptualization of the Reformation that has rightly been undermined by vigorous research: that England transitioned from ‘Catholic’ to ‘Protestant’ incredibly rapidly. ‘The lost world of the Catholic Middle Ages’, we are informed, ‘had been swept away in the sixteenth century by the Protestant Reformation’ (p. 78), a moment of ‘historical rupture’ between ‘the medieval past of Catholic belief and practice’ and ‘the Protestant England of early modernity’ (pp. 25-26).

It rapidly becomes apparent that when the subtitle of the book refers to ‘English national identity’, it actually means ‘English Protestant identity’, although no discussion is really given to subdividing this equally problematic homogenous grouping. ‘English Catholics’ are almost entirely absent from the book as a result, alongside any discussion of how this religious minority might have understood their own ‘Englishness’ and fiercely protested their loyalty and national identity in the light of anti-Catholicism. This denominational absence is translated into an actual physical absence by Salter: ‘while friars and the other Catholic clergy may have completely disappeared from the English landscape during the radical upheaval of the Reformation, the human characters and personalities…are still to be found in society’ (p. 43). The reader is thus left with the impression that Catholicism simply ceased to exist in England after the Reformation, echoing an antiquated and confessional approach to English religious history that has been systematically dismantled across the past few decades. Salter confirms this conceptualization by arguing that a process of ‘cultural amnesia’ was initiated after the Reformation by ‘advocates of reform’, one which sought to confine ‘the Franciscans, along with the wider Catholic culture of late-medieval England, to oblivion’. ‘The thoroughness with which they carried out this project’, we are told, ‘still casts a shadow today’ (p. 35). While some might have sought this goal, the historical reality was drastically different and Catholicism more persistent than recognized here.

As previously stated, the original contribution of the book is the detailed and well-researched explorations of Franciscan themes and references to Francis of Assisi in texts by Chaucer, More, Shakespeare, Thomas Malroy, Edward Gibbon, and Ann Radcliffe, amongst others. Particularly interesting is the exploration of Franciscan values in the art of William Hogarth and the life of Sir Francis Dashwood. Yet we again must wonder: where are all the Catholics? Or indeed, where are all the Franciscans? How would Salter’s conclusions about the prevalence of Franciscan themes in literary works have been changed had they considered, for example, the translations and poetry of the English Franciscan nun Catherine Magdalen Evelyn, or the writings of the English Capuchin mystic Benet of Canfield? What about works smuggled into England from Catholic presses on the continent? Or indeed printed covertly in England itself? How different would the argument be had the Franciscan books in English published between 1559 and 1640, diligently researched and listed in this journal by A. F. Allison in 1956, been given central focus? To not engage seriously with works by English Franciscans, or even Franciscan works in English, undermines the book’s conclusions.

‘In the brave new world following Catholic emancipation’, Salter concludes, ‘the English have continued to write about and represent the Franciscans; to praise and vilify them; and to contest their legacy’. As England has become ‘an increasingly secular nation’, they insist, ‘no longer so weighed down by the burden of religious history’, people are now ‘much more free to imagine Saint Francis—and to respond to him— in a plurality of ways’ (p. 190). It is a shame that this book did not embrace such an approach in its own methodology.