The cover picture of this book adds to the confusion created by the title. It shows a detail of a suffering Christ with blood spurting from his side as he hangs on a cross that is enveloped in a scarlet cloak, the Holy Spirit as dove fluttering above his head and a gravely bearded Father apparently fluttering unconcernedly above the dove. It is all very Italian-florid and indeed the original was and is in a church in Rome. Open the book and look at the list of contents. It is divided into sections mainly by genre: ‘controversies’, ‘lives and deaths’, ‘poetry’, ‘instructions and devotions’, ‘drama’, ‘histories’, ‘fiction’, and ‘documents’ – this last consisting of papal bulls from 1231 (the Inquisition), 1493 (the colonization of the world), 1515 (the publication of books), 1570 (the excommunication of Elizabeth I). Most of the sections begin with works from outside the early modern period (Augustine/Bede/eleventh-century prayers etc.).

Yet this is a book about (Roman) Catholic writing by and for Englishmen mainly (but not exclusively) in the English language in the period 1520–1640. It thus contains medieval works by Augustine, Bede, a Kempis etc., translated within the period; and works in translation by a few continental writers of the period – Erasmus, Ignatius Loyola, Francis de Sales. So it has fuzzy edges. The church in Rome with the picture detailed on the cover is in fact the Venerable English College, so many of the mission priests whose work is extracted in this anthology will have dined beneath the trompe d'oeil of spurting blood painted in 1583 by Durante Alberti. To write about Catholic writing is, of course, to write about a self-consciously hyper-national tradition. But Oxford University Press is flattering to deceive with a title and a blurb that leads the reader to expect something that is also multi-national.

Of course an anthology of this type is welcome and necessary. English Catholicism, as Alison Shell pointed out so vigorously in her Catholicism, controversy and the English literary imagination, 1558–1660 (1999), is more in need of affirmative action than any other tradition of writing in the early modern period. There is a strong denominational historiography that emphasizes the polemics of martyrs' blood and of physical suffering rather than a battle of the pen, a battle for the intellect. This denominational history is more interested in the way the Catholic community sustained itself than in the way it debated with its enemies. There is also a strong Protestant historiography that accords the Protestant victors all the best arguments if not all the best tunes.

Furthermore, this is an acute and well-managed selection, designed for class-room use. Its decision to organize itself by genre is fully justified in that sense, although the bleeding hunks of play-texts in the drama section make little sense. That section also includes extracts from the barely Catholic works of the Catholic convert Ben Jonson (Sejanus and The Alchemist) but the more controversial decision to include Shakespeare as a covert Catholic (what exactly is gained by perfectly familiar hunks of Hamlet or Measure for Measure?), and the hardly less controversial decision to include parts of Philip Massinger's The Renegado (Massinger ‘may or may not have been a Catholic but at times wrote like one’) and of James Shirley's St Patrick (Shirley, an Anglican priest, ‘may have become a Catholic’). This whole section seems designed to ensure that genre quotas in literary courses are met. There is one excellent extract from a Jesuit drama, but alas it is a Latin work never performed in England, and only recently translated. There were good Jesuit dramas performed in the Stuart kingdoms, but none is chosen. The historian can pass the drama section by on the other side.

While I am recording my irritations, I should add my concerns about the inclusion of Donne's poems on the grounds that he carried much of his Catholicism with him into the deanery of St Paul's; and, at the other extreme, the inclusion of Latin prayers from the Tridentine missal under the heading of William Byrd, because he set them to music. This book has even more very fuzzy edges.

Now, back to the good things. Most of the sections are a judicious selection of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the big names, and forgotten ones. Richard Vestergan appears as a poet, as a writer on antiquities and in some of his magnificent engravings – of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and the grisly martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow from Theatrum crudelitatem haereticorum (1587), which would have benefited from some of the exegesis to be found in the excellent Anne Dillon, The construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community, 1535–1603 (2002). The book as a whole has seventeen full page illustrations, all an integral part of the subject, not just adornments, and Edmund Campion appears as author, and as the subject of one of the martyrdom tracts. There is a substantial extract in the ‘Histories’ section from Robert Persons' the Treatise of three conversions (1603–4), but nothing from his more popular works and I missed him in the ‘Controversies’ section where he could certainly have taken the place of Robert Bellarmine, an Italian who never set foot in England and could not write a word in English, despite his knowledgeable intervention (in Latin) into English affairs.

Miola offers generous extracts, not just snippets. His medieval extracts in early modern translation are an important reminder that Catholics saw themselves not as a sect reacting against Protestantism but in continuity with an English and a universal past. This pays heavy dividends in the section on instructions and devotions, although the emphasis is very much on lonely piety rather than on renewed sacramental awareness. It is this more than anything else that leads me to advise that this is a useful, well-arranged but rather fuzzily conceptualized classroom book, not a work of spiritual writings. The introduction, which pays far too little attention to explaining what the book is and what it is not, reinforces this impression. It makes the case for affirmative action for English Catholic thought; it does not fulfil the case it seeks to make.