How Catholic was early modern England? And how English, for that matter, was early modern English Catholicism? In their introduction to this fascinating and stimulating collection of essays, Ronald Corthell, Frances Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur Marotti locate their volume within an ongoing scholarly reassessment of the role of Catholicism in post-Reformation England, and of English Catholicism in relation to continental and archipelagic religious practices. Too often, they argue, Catholicism has been marginalized in accounts of early modern English history and culture, or has been represented in too starkly and unremittingly oppositional terms. Corthell and colleagues, by contrast, see their volume as part of a movement—responding, in part, to “the serious and balanced reexamination of English Protestant history by Patrick Collinson and others”—which “[questions] the assumption that the Reformation was a decisive and wholly positive change and [reimagines] Catholics as participants in, rather than obstacles to or exiles from, post-Reformation English history” (2). The editors’ expressed hope is that their own collection of essays will “encourage an ongoing reappraisal of early modern English Catholic culture and the complex religious orientations of the men and women of the period” (15).

The versions of Englishness and Catholicism presented in this volume are, as one might consequently expect, markedly nonuniform and nonmonolithic. Likewise, the definition of “culture” cited—and implicitly endorsed—in the introduction is the most expansive of the “three basic meanings” identified by Raymond Williams: “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general” (3). The “culture” examined in these eleven essays encompasses architecture (the recusant spaces constructed by Thomas Tresham and others in Elizabethan England), education (of women, in Latin), embroidery (Helena Wintour's liturgical vestments), court entertainments and political intrigue (the court of Henrietta Maria), and missionary activity (as practiced by Jesuits like Father John Gerard or promoted by the English colleges in Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries). Understandably, given the institutional affiliations of many of the contributors, the collection shows something of a bias toward textual culture, with essays by Jane Stevenson on women's Latin writings, Gary Kocher on Robert Southwell's Mary Magdalene's Funeral Tears, Heather Wolfe on the manuscripts produced by Dame Barbara Constable, Molly Murray on William Alabaster's conversion narrative, Catherine Sanok on recusant historiography, and Donna Hamilton on Anthony Munday's translations of chivalric romances. Of these, however, only Kocher's study of Southwell focuses on what might be described as a conventional literary artefact—a published devotional poem. At the other end of the textual spectrum, Wolfe's essay on Barbara Constable's surprisingly numerous writings follows recent trends in historicist and materialist criticism in focusing on unpublished manuscript materials, and in ranging between originally authored (though firmly source-based) texts through translations to compilations and scribal copies. The volume also devotes considerable attention to the activities and representation of women within Catholic culture, with no fewer than six of the eleven essays concerned with female writers, artists, or literary subjects. It is an irony fully acknowledged by the editors that this emphasis on women in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England reproduces but subverts the patterns of early modern Protestant polemic, which frequently sought to discredit Catholicism by gendering it as feminine.

As the editors imply, one of the principal obstacles to research on early modern English Catholicism has been lack of knowledge of the primary materials. One of the ways in which this volume is likely to prove most useful to other researchers is through calendaring sources or by drawing little-known repositories or collections to scholarly attention. Thus Jane Stevenson's article on “Women Catholics and Latin Culture” lists a surprisingly numerous array of female English Latinists, many scarcely known to academic scholarship, while Molly Murray's consideration of the “serial convert” William Alabaster (195) draws on manuscripts compiled and still held at the English College at Rome—“an important and virtually unknown source for the study of early modern Catholic life-writing” (190–91). Wolfe's chronological list of Barbara Constable's known manuscript compilations—now dispersed in the repositories of four English abbeys, one stately home, and one municipal French archive—will be a boon to students of manuscript culture, women's writing, and seventeenth-century conventual practices. But it would be misleading to imply that the volume is concerned only with topics and materials that, to date, have been neglected and obscure. Many of the articles engage, sometimes vigorously, with mainstream areas of recent scholarship. Thus Murray, for instance, uses the example of Alabaster to interrogate the accepted understanding of life-writing as a Protestant—even Puritan—genre. Perhaps the most outstanding contribution to the volume, Caroline Hibbard's reevaluation of Henrietta Maria (“A Cosmopolitan Court in a Confessional Age”), is a significant reappraisal of a figure who has divided opinion for over 350 years. Hibbard's article is sure to become required reading for scholars of Caroline England.

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England derives from a conference held at the Newberry Library, Chicago, in October 2002; but these origins—for good or ill—are only rarely visible in the published volume. No single collection of essays can do everything, but it seems regrettable that only one of the contributions to the volume—Kocher's article on Robert Southwell—engages to any significant degree with the cultural manifestations of Catholic theology. The volume is also noticeably polite in its treatment of Protestant anti-Catholicism, which is necessarily mentioned on numerous occasions, but is rarely discussed in any detail. Overall, this wide-ranging and knowledgeable array of essays not only is a significant addition to the scholarly literature on its own account but should also do much to open up a diverse area to further research.