From its emergence during the late sixteenth century through its flowering in European and North American contexts during the seventeenth, ‘Puritanism’ defined itself by, among other things, an unremitting and implacable hostility to all things Catholic. Indeed, the ongoing drive for further reformation that lies at its core was marked by ongoing frustration at the pace of reform in the English church and a visceral objection to ‘popish’ remnants remaining there. That said, as the chapters in this volume make clear, Puritanism dynamically transformed the early modern Atlantic world and shaped the contours of the British empire even while it coexisted, uneasily at times, with an often-significant Catholic presence in its midst. Gribben and Spurlock’s Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600-1800 approaches this uneasy coexistence from a number of different perspectives; the volume’s contributors shed a great deal of light on both Puritans and Catholics, in a variety of times and places.

The chapters vary widely in scope. Some focus on individuals, families, or single artifacts. Francis Bremer, for example, explores the ways in which various members of the Winthrop, Davenport, and Goffe families navigated intra-familial religious differences. Ema Vyroubalová provides a carefully detailed explication of the words and imagery in Samuel Ward’s controversial 1621 print The Double Deliverance. Other authors paint on a broader canvas. Scott Spurlock focuses on the ‘liminal…space at the frontier of English colonial expansion’ (p. 38) occupied by Catholics, who played an important role in the empire’s reach not only in Maryland and Ireland—where scholars have long noted their influential presence—but in places like Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, and St. Christopher. Not surprisingly, Ireland also appears in several other chapters. For example, Robert Armstrong’s account of Irish Presbyterianism emphasizes Ireland’s role as a destination for anti-Catholic Protestants. ‘The 1690s saw the largest in-migration of Scots to Ireland of the entire seventeenth century,’ (p. 196) he notes, a movement of people and practices that reverberated not only across the British Isles but throughout the early modern Atlantic.

Invoking the Catholic threat was one of the most common and powerful Puritan rhetorical tropes in early modern England, and it tended to emphasize several important touchstones: The Spanish Armada, The Gunpowder Plot, The Ulster Rebellion, The Fire of London. As would become clear during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, however, the presence of such rhetoric often tells us more about domestic English politics (in the case of Ward’s Double Deliverance, for example, about opposition to the proposed Spanish match) than it does about any concrete threat from actual Catholics. Philip Lockley illustrates, in his account of communalist Protestant sects, how accusations of Catholicism were frequently employed to cast suspicion or voice hostility towards unorthodox Protestant neighbors, particularly those that embraced practices like celibacy. This point about the rhetorical dimension of early modern religio-political debate holds more generally as well: David Manning shows how the purported wickedness of Port Royal, Jamaica ‘took on a multifaceted cameo role in constructing Restoration anti-Puritanism…. The wickedness of Port Royal was very much an expression of London’s late Reformation angst’ (pp. 132, 152).

Not all of the chapters in the volume focus on Puritans and Catholics; others direct their attention to intra-Protestant contention, of which there was certainly no shortage in the early modern Atlantic world. Michael Winship chronicles the collapse of ‘big tent Puritanism’ (pp. 89-90) in the 1630s and 1640s, when New England ministers engaged in a series of testy exchanges with their English brethren over the apparent Separatism of New England’s church polity. Polly Ha traces the divisive debate over intercessory prayer within the Church of England, where Presbyterians and Laudians argued over who truly represented the English Protestant tradition. Accusations about the ‘spiritual treason’ of Laudians in the English Church return us again to the notion of a Catholic threat, this one in the very heart of the established church. And Edward Simon’s essay on Puritanism and the creation of an American identity in New England raises provocative questions about sacred space, though unfortunately its brevity prevents those questions from being fully addressed.

Not only do the essays in this volume tell us a great deal about Puritans and Catholics, they also highlight the networks of communication and the circulation of texts, ideas, and people throughout the early modern Atlantic. Using Catholic sources to speculate about Indians as lost Jews, according to Andrew Crome—whose chapter shows how Protestants were willing to invoke Catholic authors if they promised to help them understand puzzles in the world around them—illustrates ‘the way in which [the Jewish Indian theory in England] was developed and publicised, as well as the Atlantic information network that gave it birth’ (p. 116). Movement and migration also figure heavily into Spurlock’s and Bremer’s chapters.

It would have been helpful to know, perhaps as part of the volume’s Introduction, what sort of working definition of ‘Puritanism’ the editors embraced for the volume. Given the many ways in which the term has been employed such a clarification would have been welcome. And whichever such definition the editors had in mind, one wonders how Jordan Landes’s account of the growth of Quaker administration and organization fits. To be clear, it is a fine discussion of the multifaceted role played by the various Meetings built over the course of the 1670s, and the ways in which those Meetings participated in a trans-Atlantic project of maintaining the Society’s unity while defending it from threats from without. It just seems a bit out of place in a volume on Puritans and Catholics. And in terms of temporal parameters, the groups under consideration in Lockley’s essay stretch well into the nineteenth century. What comes through most powerfully in all of these chapters, though, is the fluid, dynamic, early modern Atlantic world as a world in constant motion, powered by the simultaneous hostility and mutual dependence of Puritans and Catholics.