This is a wonderful edition of the poems of Henry Constable (1562-1613), the alleged favourite of Elizabeth I and polemical defender of Protestantism in the 1580s, who converted to Roman Catholicism by 1590, lost his living in England and embraced a life of exile, imprisonment and chequered politics. The book is not just the most authoritative edition of Constable’s poems to date, replacing Joan Grundy’s edition of 1960; it also contains a series of accompanying essays, making it a great single-volume introduction to what one might call the ‘English Catholic experience’, at least of élites in Elizabethan to Jacobean England. Central chapters focus on major topics: a detailed biography, discussion of the amatory and dedicatory sonnets, discussion of the Spiritual Sonnets, consideration of Constable amid ‘the Sonnet Form’, his critical reception, and extended, expert explanation of the edition’s textual practices. Only then (p. 155), do we come to the ninety sonnets which make up the canon of Constable’s poetry, followed by substantial explanatory notes and a bibliographical description of the main sources. Pérez-Jáuregui situates this work amid mounting enthusiasm for ‘the socioliterary history of texts and manuscript studies, together with the revival of Catholic Studies’ (p. 131). Though in the end the poetry is the thing, readers who forbear jumping forward to it (or indeed looking beyond) will be rewarded.

The zeal with which religious books were written and refuted shows everybody recognised their persuasive power: ‘a pamphlet penned by an enemy could not be left unanswered’ (p. 15). Equally striking is the change of life a Catholic conversion entailed. A liberal addresser of sonnets to women including Penelope Riche (better known through Sir Philip Sidney), Arabella Stuart and several others, Constable renounced the amatory mode on his conversion: ‘[t]here is no mention of any woman being a part of his life again’ (p. 18). Pérez-Jáuregui suggests that chastity and obedience to religious authorities followed Constable’s need to ‘rely on the goodwill of others’ (p. 18).

The poet’s political life was tied to Henry IV of France, the pope and James VI of Scotland (later, James I of England): ‘By 1598, Henry Constable had become a man with a mission: ensuring greater toleration for Catholics in his country and … seeing England return to the Roman fold under a converted King James’ (p. 23). Though recusancy fines were suspended in 1603, Constable’s sense of James as a man of reason open to persuasion is striking. Pérez-Jáuregui puts this down to his ‘faith in the king’s friendship’ (p. 28). However, this was upturned when Constable sent secret correspondence to France via an untrusted courier, and it was discovered. ‘His career was essentially over’ (p. 29).

Such a decision begs questions and the poetry suggests answers. Constable was a sonneteer, his art, since Petrarch, brief and lengthy, plaint and plaudit. Giving a scattered effect, his sonnets are also missives, sometimes critical, to Elizabeth I, James I and dignitaries including the princess of Orange. Pérez-Jáuregui suggests the term ‘cluster’ or ‘collection’, rather than sequence, for these amatory and dedicatory sonnets (p. 33), and Constable gave them up to ‘employe the remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts lesse sweete and lesse bitter’ (p. 222). Spiritual Sonnets followed, but restlessness is constant.

As a Protestant writer of secular love, Constable reached bravely for Catholic images. A seemingly conventional piece like ‘To his Ladies hand upon occasion of her glove which in her absence he kissed’ thus sees him reaching for St Francis: ‘Now as Saint Francis (if a Saint) am I;/The bow which shotted these shafts a relique is’ (p. 175). Here one sees not just an outward Protestant invoking a Catholic saint, but also a Protestant subtly posing a question: ‘a Saint) am I’? Pérez-Jáuregui notes punctuation in the sources of this poem as a ‘substantive variant’ (p. 268). Yet Constable’s combined conversion to Catholicism and spiritual sonnets shows sanctity became his defining quest: in the Spiritual Sonnets, sanctity is realised strikingly and variously. There is ‘the Blessed Martir Mayre, Queene of Scotland’ signalling Catholic fates in England: ‘like a Lambe unto a scaffolde ledd./Unworthy Alter to be honoured’ (p. 245). There are distinctive paeans to established saints. For example, a sonnet to Mary Magdalene imagines how ‘like a woman-spouse my soule shalbe’ (p. 244), finally hoping the ‘uncloth’d’ soul in death will be ‘clasped in the arms of god’ to ‘enjoye / by sweet conjunction, everlasting Joye’. Few English poets think heaven so physical.

None of this appealed to advancing Protestant England. Constable was dismissed in the seventeenth century, rediscovered in the nineteenth, but still viewed with deep ambivalence in the twentieth, even by promoters like Grundy. Yet Pérez-Jáuregui makes it clear: in his day he was respected. Venerated alongside Sidney by Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, Constable closes critical gaps between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ sonneteers, anticipating (and casting into relief) John Donne. Showing the worldly and sacred as ‘inherently permeable categories’ (p. 105), Constable’s sonnets are important: ‘a model for the sonneteers that followed – Michael Drayton, Barnabe Barnes, and Bartholomew Griffin, among others’ (p. 107).

Pérez-Jáuregui rightly argues Constable ‘should be read by all students’ (p. 143), and to that end she has given us the most complete and sophisticated edition of his work to date. A ‘clear text’ edition with scribal variants recorded in the apparatus (p. 152), the text of his poems is based on all the known sources: including a second manuscript of the Spiritual Sonnets, the Berkely Castle manuscript, previously ‘unknown to editors of Constable and largely ignored’ (p. 92). Important too is Pérez-Jáuregui’s discovery in the Beinecke Library at Yale University of a prose treaty of 1587 by Constable: a response to Cardinal William Allen, revealing Constable’s commitment to the Crown and the Earl of Leicester at that stage (pp. 5-6). I have just two quibbles in relation to the volume as a whole. First, although the socioliterary case made for Constable here is unquestionable, I would like to see Pérez-Jáuregui make the literary case explicit. Second, for a book aimed at all students, the price ($115) is high. Let’s hope a cheaper, paperback edition may appear.