In recent years historians of Catholicism in the early modern British Isles have become increasingly attuned to its cultural and intellectual connections with mainland Europe. James Kelly and Hannah Thomas’s collaborative volume contributes to that discussion by examining how the Society of Jesus encouraged such connections. The volume arose from a conference titled ‘Early Modern Catholics in the British Isles and Europe: Integration or Separation?’ which took place in Durham in 2015. In the introduction, Hannah Thomas explains that its aims are to situate the English Jesuit mission within wider efforts to de-centre the Catholic Reformation and to demonstrate the ‘strong and continuous links between the British Isles and mainland Europe during the early modern period’ (p. 5).
The volume sets out to achieve these aims in four parts, with chapters contributed by scholars who will be well-known to readers of this journal. Part One, ‘Rediscovering the English Mission’, aims to shed new light on the careers of the first Jesuits sent into England. Chapters by Gerard Kilroy and Clarinda Calma focus on Edmund Campion’s preaching and his influence as a teacher at the Jesuit college in Prague before his departure for England in 1580. Calma’s chapter draws upon a recently rediscovered manuscript compilation of Campion’s sermons, now housed at the Cieszyn City Library in Poland. Recorded by Campion’s pupils at the Jesuit college, the sermons serve as an affectionate memorial and a testament to Campion’s popularity as an orator who was called upon to commemorate key events in the college and city. Victor Houliston’s contribution to this section examines Robert Persons’s career in Europe after leaving England in 1581, demonstrating Persons’s importance to the Society as a diplomatic agent between the Jesuits, the Inquisition, and the king of Spain.
The second part of the volume focuses on the Jesuits and English culture, with chapters on drama, material culture, and music. Sonja Fieletz considers whether a school play written by the German Jesuit Jakub Gretser may have been one of the sources for Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, and whether this may account for the marked stylistic differences of the latter when compared to Shakespeare’s other plays. Jan Graffius examines how the relic collections of the English Jesuit College at St Omer (now housed at Stonyhurst College) emphasised the unbroken continuity of Catholicism in England and English Catholicism’s integration with the wider Roman Catholic Church. Andrew Cichy’s chapter examines Jesuit contributions to English Catholic liturgical music through patronage of English Catholic musicians and support of musical instruction at the English Colleges.
Part Three turns to English Jesuit influences in mainland Europe. In a chapter on English books collected at the royal Escorial Library in Spain, Ana Sáez-Hidalgo uses annotations and shelf marks to demonstrate how English Jesuits assisted the Inquisition in scrutinising English-language books for censorship. Thomas McCoog outlines how financial support for the English Jesuits shifted from the Spanish to the Austrian Habsburgs and the dukes of Bavaria in the seventeenth century, and examining how that support fluctuated with their successes during the Thirty Years’ War. Svorad Zavarský considers how English religious controversies informed the writing of Martinus Szent-Ivany, a Jesuit professor in the Hungarian Kingdom, and how Szent-Ivany’s writings found their way back to England in the eighteenth century. Christopher Gillett examines how the Jesuit provincial Henry More, together with Thomas Brudenell, tried to re-negotiate the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance with the papacy and the New Model Army in the 1640s, in the context of the Thirty Years’ War.
The last part of the volume explores ‘Pan-European Networks of Communication’. Spencer Weinreich traces the wide-ranging sources for the Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Historia Ecclesiastica del Scisma del Reyno de Inglaterra, arguing that the work’s organisation shows England’s religious conflicts as part of a universal Christian and providential history. Hannah Thomas considers the practice of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises in diverse missionary environments, by examining the readings, prayers, and meditations recorded in ‘spiritual commonplace books’ from the Welsh Jesuit mission and the English Sepulchrine community in Liège. Maurice Whitehead provides a comprehensive overview of life at the Venerable English College, Rome under Jesuit administration. James Kelly closes the volume with an examination of the correspondence of the eighteenth-century Jesuit John Thorpe with the English Carmelite nuns in Lierre, providing a window into how English Catholics abroad viewed themselves as part of the universal Church.
The book is well-presented: many chapters include colour photographs and the ends of some chapters include appendices with transcriptions of primary sources. Gerard Kilroy’s chapter, for instance, includes high-resolution photographs of manuscripts in the British Jesuit Archives (London) and the Cieszyn Library (Poland), and concludes with an appendix that provides transcriptions of verses written by Edmund Campion, which are currently held in private archives. Jan Graffius’s chapter contains beautiful photographs of some of the relics and reliquary illustrations in the collections of Stonyhurst College. The appendix at the end of Ana Sáez-Hidalgo’s chapter provides a transcription of the book inventories she examined in the Escorial Library. The additional resources that the volume provides, in the way of high-resolution photographs of manuscripts and annotated book pages, as well as transcriptions of some archival materials in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, will make it a useful resource for graduate students. The volume may also be of use to those teaching on various aspects of English Catholicism, post-Tridentine Catholicism, and Catholic missions to undergraduates.
As the title indicates, this is a book about England and mainland Europe, with other parts of the British Isles and the rest of the early modern world making only brief appearances. The Scottish Jesuit mission, for instance, is mentioned in Thomas McCoog’s chapter, and while Christopher Gillet brings an Atlantic dimension into his essay on the Oath of Allegiance, the book’s claim to demonstrate that the English Jesuit mission was fully part of a global missionary network might have been made stronger with more consideration of connections to Catholic missions outside of Europe. That being said, the collection amply demonstrates the integration of English Catholicism into the wider European Catholic Church. The essays stand out particularly in their demonstration of the depth and geographical breadth of the cultural connections between Catholics in England and continental Europe, which is in part facilitated by the thematic focus on the Jesuits (the book is part of Brill’s Jesuit Studies series). On the whole, the volume paints a vibrant picture of the intellectual, artistic, and literary contributions of English Jesuits to the Society’s missions in early modern Europe, and enriches our understanding of the Jesuits’ significance in cultivating ties between English Catholics and their European neighbours.
