The author of this lightly revised collection of previously published essays has long been a champion of those who have been trying to reintegrate the experiences of post-Reformation Scots and Irish Roman Catholics into the transnational cultural mix that was ‘the Universal Baroque’, (to borrow the title of Davidson’s well received book of 2007). The author’s facility with the relevant modern and ancient languages and his willingness to engage with both the plastic and the literary arts make him the ideal guide to the ‘lieux de memoire’ which British Catholics created, adapted and remade for themselves as they sought to cope with actual and imagined exile. After a prologue which sets the tone for what is to follow by insisting on the need for the reader to be ever alive to the circulation of objects and ideas in multiple directions and open to ‘conjectures of connection’ (p. 10), the volume is divided into three parts, whose titles point to the enduring relevance or better pioneering nature, of Davidson’s oeuvre. Part I: ‘Centres and Peripheries’ comprises five essays that range from a deeply meditated consideration of the unpublished travel journal of James Fraser (1634-1709), Episcopalian minister of Kirkhill near Inverness, to an engagingly limned sketch of a leading protagonist of the ‘shadowy community of British exiles in Rome’, James Byres (1733-1817), son of the laird of Tonley in Aberdeenshire, who showed Edward Gibbon around the Eternal City on the latter’s visit in 1764. Fraser, described by Davidson as: ‘a test case of baroque connectedness’ (p. 30), with one foot in Celtic culture as a Gaelic-speaking Highland sage and the other in the ‘Latinate, diasporic commonwealth of cosmopolitan, highly educated Scots, and thence in the international republic of learning’ (ibid), joined a regiment of the Papal guard when he reached Rome in 1658, in order to supplement his diminishing resources, but did so without losing his cultural and religious identity: ‘I looke upon myself now as a privileged Roman, I am one of their number, none of their nature, I love their Reson (sic) not their Religion’ (p. 42). Byres, by contrast, was a prominent member of that group of British Catholic intermediaries resident in Rome, who as tour guides and art dealers were ‘essential for the Grand Tour to function’ (p. 97). However, while Byres was leading Gibbon and other members of the British Protestant elite around Rome by day, by night and during what leisure time that remained, he was researching and writing an illustrated study of the art of the Etruscans: ‘in part because he saw their relations with the belligerent Romans as analogous to those of the Jacobite northern Scots with the aggressive Whigs of England and Lowland Scotland’ (p. 96). Part II: ‘Materialities’ reminds us that Davidson was engaging with material culture long before the currently fashionable ‘material turn’ refocused historians’ attention. This part contains seven case studies, including an extended and richly rewarding account of a procession, involving word, image, emblem, and music, to celebrate a damaged statue of the Virgin through the streets of the city of Valladolid to the English Catholic College and seminary of St Alban in 1600 under the direct patronage of the Queen of Spain. Known as the ‘Vulnerata’ (lit. wounded), this statue had been desecrated by English raiders on the town of Cadiz, led by the Earl of Essex, in 1596. Such colleges as that at Valladolid (together with those at St Omer, Seville, Rome, Lisbon and Douai) were seen as ‘site[s] of authenticity, the seedbeds – ‘seminaries’ in the literal sense – out of which true Englishness could be restored to England itself’ (p. 122). An ostinato theme of all the essays is the role played by all the arts in constructing historical narratives for not only the Roman Catholic Scots diaspora and the English College in Valladolid is no exception. The high altar displaying an image of the English protomartyr St Alban, was originally flanked by statues of the martyred king St Edmund and St Thomas Becket. In another essay, Davidson speculates at how the detail of the ‘audacious’ and extraordinary iconography’ of the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I which shows the Queen standing on a map is possibly a direct reply to the use of a similar device in the altarpiece by Durante Alberti in the chapel of the English College in Rome where the blood of Christ is shown falling onto the wounded land of England. This example is part of the wider argument that Davidson makes in this essay: that the whole cult of Elizabeth was in fact largely improvised in response to Roman Catholic iconography. This suggestive rather than conclusive line of argument is to be found in several of the essays in this volume, a feature which I think adds rather than detracts from its value as a source of stimulation and occasion for reflection. Another stand out essay from this section is that on ‘The Jesuit garden’. Though not a new topic —the Jesuits themselves generated an extensive literature in the seventeenth century, notably in Louis Richeôme’s La peinture spirituelle (1611), whose section describing the symbolic significance of the gardens of the Jesuit novitiate at S. Andrea al Quirinale in Rome has already been widely discussed, most notably perhaps by Gauvin Bailey —Davidson takes the less familiar text of Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s De florum cultura libri VI (1633) and uses it as a key to explore the gardens of the Villa Buonaccorsi, not far from Macerata in the Marche, central Italy. Part III of the book, entitled: ‘Designs of the Imagination’, is appropriately enough given the title, even more suggestive than conclusive in its arguments. For me, the stand out chapter is dedicated to Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie, later first Earl of Dunfermline and Lord Chancellor of Scotland (1555-1622). Davidson focuses his attention on ‘a partial library list’ which shows just how significant was the role played by such eminent ‘Church papists’ who had received their education on mainland Europe (in Seton’s case at the Collegium Germanicum-Hungaricum, Rome). The books listed include not only many illustrated works concerned with art and architecture, but also volumes from Cesare Baronio’s massive Annales Ecclesiastici (1588-1607) and ten works by the most significant Catholic apologist of the age: the Jesuit Roberto Bellarmino (1542-1621). Given such a library, equipped not only with works on Roman Catholic art and architecture but also with the very latest weapons from the Roman Catholic arsenal of polemic, it is perhaps less surprising that Seton’s daughter Sophia appears to have built with her husband, David Lindsay one of the very first free-standing post-Reformation Catholic churches in Britain. My only substantive gripes with this charming and enjoyable volume are that the author does not take advantage of the ‘Afterword’ to include precise bibliographical details of where the originals of these collected pieces first appeared and that Manchester University Press did not see fit to reproduce the black and white images to an altogether higher standard. Given the volume’s price one might have hoped for better.