In the 1530s and 1540s, 191 Catholics (mostly men) exiled themselves from England rather than conforming to the new Protestant policies enacted under the reigns of Henry viii and Edward vi. Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England is the first sustained study of this group – which Smith styles the ‘Henrician and Edwardian émigrés’ – and traces their physical, spiritual and political mobilities between Britain and continental Europe over the course of the mid- to late sixteenth century. Smith embraces the complexities of the exile experience and its legacies, highlighting in turn the trauma of dislocation, the freedom to engage with new ideas and the resourceful pragmatism of these transnational individuals, about a quarter of whom returned to England under Mary i to take pioneering roles in her Church, only for many of them to flee again at the end of this short Catholic restoration. The book's structure follows the émigrés’ journeys in four parts, from their initial ‘Departure’, to their ‘Translation’ of texts and ideas from abroad, to their ‘Repatriation’ in Marian England, and finally to the émigrés’ ‘Legacies’ in Elizabethan England and for the bigger story of the Counter-Reformation. Smith paints a compelling picture of agency and mobility in religious exile, and of the ways that the exile experience itself shaped English Catholic identities in the sixteenth century.

Smith situates his work in relation to historiographies of both the Counter-Reformation and of religious exile in early modern Europe more generally. In each chapter, the particular experiences of the Henrician and Edwardian émigrés are insightfully connected to these broader themes. Chapter i unpacks the ‘messy’ and at times ambiguous motivations for these individuals to leave England in the first place. While historians have traditionally represented religious exiles as the most persecuted and intractable defenders of faith, Smith reveals his émigrés to have entered ‘exile’ voluntarily – sometimes even with the king's approval – and to have done so for a variety of personal reasons and with some hesitation and deliberation. By the later part of the century, Catholic and Protestant texts alike represented these émigrés as a homogenous and purposeful religious group (of true believers and of papists, respectively), yet Smith's use of personal exile accounts shows the complexity of émigrés’ concerns and their ability to ‘refashion’ their stories to suit their own purposes, which frequently tended toward gaining the support and patronage of their European host communities. Chapters ii and iii explore the émigrés’ adaptations within these new spaces and over the course of their years spent in exile. Smith weighs the tendency of displacement to foster both an open-mindedness to new and foreign spiritualities as well as a hardening or radicalising of faith as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Away from home, the imperative to adapt and the freedom to experiment with and translate eclectic religious ideas and practices, even humanist and evangelical ones, led the émigrés to adopt a more irenic attitude towards resolving the fissures in mid sixteenth-century Christendom than one might expect. Simultaneously, as time wore on, the émigrés’ sense of their own Catholic identity ‘crystallised’, particularly in comparison to their conforming corelgionists at home in England, and they came to understand that Henry's divorce from Rome was the historical turning point for all of England's troubles. In chapters iv and v, we see the émigrés return to Mary's newly re-Catholicised England, where many of them take up powerful positions in the Church and as royal advisors, including figures like Cardinal Reginald Pole. Smith astutely picks apart the tensions which simmered between émigrés and their compatriots after their decades apart. The former exiles lost no opportunity to criticise the conformity of those who had remained and in turn faced accusations of having abandoned the realm and become foreign, in tastes and allegiances. Smith's argument that their experiences of exile had indeed altered the émigrés’ identities and priorities for religious reform, especially in their championing of a more interior, ascetic piety and in making them more inclined to demand papal obedience than their compatriots (who had just come off a steady diet of anti-papal propaganda and were reluctant to return former monastic properties), is thoroughly compelling. Chapter vi examines the legacies of the Henrician and Edwardian émigrés as ‘agents of the Marian Counter-Reformation’, following the end of Mary's short reign. Smith shows that, upon their new exile under Elizabeth i, many of the émigrés continued to advocate for non-conformity with the religious settlement at home. And, though most English Catholics did conform, the efforts of the émigrés in Marian England were, perhaps surprisingly, held up for a time afterwards as an exemplary template for the Counter-Reformation programme in Europe.

Using the ‘lens of mobility’ to look at the Henrician and Edwardian émigrés is highly fruitful. Smith eschews historiographical assumptions of victimhood and generates new questions about the motivations and agency of these early modern religious exiles, who are revealed throughout the text to be emotional and complicated individuals. Indeed, Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England gives the reader poignant, human glimpses into the ways that exile tested the ties that bound. Émigrés left wives and children behind them, yet they also kept in touch with family and friends in England, and even continued to perform charitable works in their home parishes from abroad. At the same time, they forged new networks and invested a great deal, spiritually and financially, in their host communities. One question that is not asked, though the answers are implied, is why many of the émigrés returned to England under Mary, especially considering their rather successful integrations into life in Europe and the fact that many other of the émigrés did not return. In Marian England, the ‘former’ émigrés finally (albeit briefly) had considerable power to affect religious reform at home, but they also missed Europe and faced resistance and mistrust from kith and kin after such a long and formative time apart. Certainly, Smith shows that lived experiences of exile and of conformity shifted understandings on both sides of what it meant to be Catholic and what it meant to be English. These divergences in identity shaped Marian England in unique ways and resulted in a new generation of exiles under Elizabeth.

With Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England, Smith aptly demonstrates that neither the Marian nor the wider European Counter-Reformation can be fully understood without appreciating the interplay of people and ideas between the two, from at least as early as the 1530s. Consequently, this study of the Henrician and Edwardian émigrés and of their transnational movements and legacies for European memory will be of great value to any Counter-Reformation scholar. Further, Smith's findings about the inherent complexities and dynamism of the exile experience make this monograph interesting to early modern scholars of religious dislocation and confessionalisation more broadly.