In June 1587 large crowds flocked to a Left-Bank church (Saint-Severin) to witness a tableau that had been inspired by the works of Richard Verstegan, displaying the sufferings of the Catholics in England. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots the year before had intensified Parisian interest in English affairs. This is just one example of a host of details that Katy Gibbons has trawled through many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections of earlier sources to present to us in her good book on the experiences of English Catholic exiles in Paris. She has also uncovered some interesting archival material, above all the Parisian notarial, and the university records. Gibbons has done a good job of making her witnesses speak, but since her concern is not intellectual but social history, more in the way of specific social and topographical context could have ben provided. Particularly helpful would have been a map or several maps, plotting the various houses and churches and routes between them as a way of making the material live. Just as in London, Paris developed networks of people sharing trades often living very close one to the other. On the other hand, this would perhaps be a good exercise for an undergraduate class. In the same way, more detail on the networks of some of these figures would have been possible: the sometime servant of the executed Thomas Howard, 3rd duke of Norfolk, Ralph Liggons, had in fact himself a servant (Alexander Hayford) in Paris by 1580, whom he sent back to his brother in Worcestershire, providing further evidence for the point that Gibbons wants to make on p. 25 about the continuing relationships of particular families between the two countries. Without the explicit ideological and intellectual engagement that Gibbons eschews (chiefly because that kind of material is not what her actors produced), there is a risk of dryness for some (though not for the present reviewer). Beyond these various details, however, Gibbons is attempting, she says in her conclusion (p. 172), to nuance a 1965 article by the excellent John Bossy. That article made, inter alia, two claims: one, that English Catholic relations with France were never particularly positive and two, that it was the Ligue that had brought Catholics to France and its demise that led them to abandon it. One should choose one's battles, however. The latter thesis has, I think, been silently dropped by historians, though there is certainly a debate to be had about the first claim, a debate to which Gibbons contributes very successfully. It is obvious that the model of historiography is the kind found in Alex Walsham's wonderful book, Church papists. But that model occured in a different context. The accumulation of telling detail to back up a strong and underappreciated thesis was just right for Walsham's contribution to pre-existing debates. Perhaps Gibbons has overegged the importance of attending to nuances in Catholic identity (or, perhaps better, identification), since this is a battle that no one is fighting anymore. If that is the case, perhaps a slightly different model of historiography would be apposite. Unless, of course, the work is driven by a more explicitly topographical and antiquarian impetus to excavate the networks of streets and scribes and churches, which would also have been a very welcome approach, but which Gibbons jettisons partially in order to engage in debates. But given the absence of ideological and explicit intellectual comment in these debates, perhaps that was a historiographical decision that might have been rethought.

The question of the division of labour between genuinely archival material and repetition of recent, slightly more specialised material will not go away. The present reader kept coming back to questions of audience. Those interested in the history of Paris will probably not learn very much. The work on localities of Paris and their interaction with ‘strangers’ seemed to this reviewer rather dependent on the excellent earlier book, and its citations of earlier secondary literature, of Sahlins (Unnaturally French, London 2004). To that extent, therefore, this book is redundant. On the other hand, those English historians who are not interested in Paris (and that is many of that isolationist and notably endogamous breed) probably will not know this material at all. Therefore Gibbons is to be congratulated for a book that is as excellent in content as well-judged in its contribution to debate. Which route to choose? In the end, the decision to nuance Bossy's earlier positions seems rather tacked on at the end, and the substance of the book can speak independently of this drive. In the end, too, if you expand who and what counts as Catholic, obviously you will come to a different answer about the first limb of Bossy's thesis. Furthermore, in the end, I remain convinced that, on the whole, the notably uncourtly Catholic exiles did find progress through the court of Henri iii rather tough, just as Bossy long ago suggested. The linguistic difficulties were surely a powerful bar: Sir Thomas Fitzherbert's knowledge of French was obviously better than Charles Arundell's. Gibbons speaks mainly in terms of the difficulties caused by lack of funds (p. 38). I would like to have known how much French each person knew. Gibbons's workmanlike prose style does not draw attention to itself, but it is also the result of the historiographical style of the work. This is a work of synthesis and there is not much in the way of close reading. There is an exception in the shape of the French translation of Leicesters commonwealth (copies of which, Gibbons should have mentioned, were found in Arundell's Paris lodgings: TNA, SP15/29/39), though the precise relationship between this and the derived text in Latin is not explored. I wondered, too, whether a pun wasn't concealed in the world arundelles at p. 101 n. 102. Still, you pays your money. Finally, there are a few minor errors ranging from the merely careless (I don't know any printed martyrologies that were not [p. 87] in either Latin or the European vernaculars) to the grammatical (this reviewer considers ‘a plethora’ to require a singular verb: p. 38) to the amusing (Gibbons invents an inapposite new discipline called ‘prosography’ at pp. 164–5 n. 121) to the merely typographical (aberrant French majusculation p. 3 n. 9; ‘multilingualism’ is not to be hyphenated p. 45 n. 169) and stylistic (the usage of the word ‘trope’ at p. 68 is catachrestic). There was a notable absence of books in Latin or German in the bibliography, and it would have been helpful to cite Daniela Buesse's helpful thesis, Die Katholische Aufstand von 1569 in England (Osnabruck 2002), despite its confessional bias. On the whole, the work is well produced however, and will serve as a useful introduction to those unfamiliar with the cultures of foreign Catholicism in Elizabethan England. It is, in many ways, an excellent book, lucid, honest and reliable. It will command a wide audience in any course on English religious identities, and deservedly so.