Robert Persons is a crucial figure in the annals of English Catholic history. He is also a figure of greater European importance, although his place in ‘mainstream’ English histories and broader Counter-Reformation narratives is only just being recognised. He has, for example, emerged as a central figure in Peter Lake’s recent reconfigurations of English political and religious culture, in Stefania Tutino’s work on Catholic intellectual history, and is an important figure in my forthcoming book on transnational polemics, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the reign of Philip II. A three volume document collection overseen by the eminent literary scholar, Victor Houliston, will ensure Persons’s embeddedness in narratives outside of English Catholic precincts. If volume one is any indication, his efforts will be among the most important early modern editorial ventures in recent years.

This first volume covers Persons’s unpublished writings from his initial travels across Europe (1574–75), through his (and Edmund Campion’s) pivotal mission to England (1580–81), and stops just before his arrival in Spain after the Armada (1588). Within its chronological scheme, the editors have chosen a policy of maximum inclusion. The collection contains a range of documents—personal correspondence, policy papers, manuscript propaganda—and encompasses sources that cannot be attributed to Persons himself, but that are surely related to him and his circle(s).

As expected from such expert editors and exacting scholars, the book pays excruciating attention to detail. All sources are provided in their original language and are accompanied by translations. If on occasion these translations can be a bit ‘stiff’, they are consistently clear and accurate. Documents are preceded by extensive notes: summaries, list of copies in archives across Europe, explanations of ambiguities and contexts. These notes will shed new light even on oft-used sources by scholars of Persons. For example, an important letter to the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra describing English martyrdoms is accompanied by a two-page listing of alternate versions that show how it was part of a broader public relations campaign (pp. 495–96). The volume also catalogues, to the extent possible, documents no longer extant but mentioned within the surviving correspondence—a true feat of historical reconstruction! Thus, the editors are able to point out that a letter from the Jesuit general Claudio Acquaviva seems to have been sent to Persons in December of 1583, even though the letter was strangely left out of Acquaviva’s register held in Rome (p. 413). The editors also allow readers to reconstruct missing sources by including many letters sent to Persons in response to his now-lost correspondence. Moreover, proper historical sleuthing is facilitated by copious footnotes, which are a wealth of linguistic clarifications, textual variants, and judicious references to scholarly disagreement.

Without a doubt, this volume supersedes its predecessor. When Leo Hicks edited Persons’s correspondence up to 1588 for the Catholic Records Society (1942), English Catholic history was still written in a ‘confessional’ mode. His volume remains a landmark and is exemplary of his deep scholarship, but to read its paratextual material and its footnotes is to step back into a world of polemics framed by the marginal status of English Catholicism within a Protestant environment. Moreover, even despite Hicks’ Herculean efforts, this new collection reveals the incompletion of his volume. Perhaps most importantly, this volume includes fresh translations of documents previously published in the Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu (1999) by McCoog from the Fondo Gesuistico stored at the Jesuit archives in Rome. These are crucial exchanges between Persons and Acquaviva dealing with aspects of the 1580/81 mission to England and the aftermath on the Continent—a time of great inner turmoil and outward productivity for Persons.

This project is an admirable example of editorial objectivity and scientific precision. Perhaps too much so. Indeed, the distant editorial stance precludes overt analytical engagement. Thus, for example, the volume’s introduction seems underdeveloped. Although the editors ably describe ‘tendentious’ debates surrounding Persons and give a useful, short, narrative of Persons’s activities between 1574 and 1588, I wish they had provided readers with a bit more guidance on how the constitutive sources might contribute to a re-interpretation of Persons. There are hints sprinkled throughout the introduction and notes, but given the erudition of the editors, the absence of their ‘voices’ is palpable and, to a certain extent, lamentable.

This might be an unfair criticism. After all, the volume’s mission is clearly met. It gathers essential documents to facilitate the kind of scholarship that will fill holes and rectify weaknesses in current Personian scholarship. After the publications of these volumes, there will be no excuse for the absence of a satisfying biography of the man, which, despite several previous efforts, is sorely needed.

This and subsequent volumes must be the starting point for any scholarship on Persons. Further, these tomes should be consulted by anyone interested in early modern politics and religion. To read these pages is to encounter a European figure par excellence and an exemplar of Counter-Reformation zeal like few others.