Over the course of more than twenty years, Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, has cemented an enviable reputation as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of early modern British Catholicism. Her first significant foray into the field was the book Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (1993) – remarkably, a revised version not of her doctoral but of her master’s thesis. More than any other publication of the time, this helped set a new agenda for the study of post-Reformation Catholicism, directing attention away from what had become a rather stale ‘continuity’ versus ‘discontinuity’ debate, and towards a greater understanding of the creatively evolutionary character of an English Catholicism which should by no means be equated with recusancy. Walsham went on to produce a string of important monographs on the religious culture(s) of post-Reformation Britain, but her subsequent work focused specifically on Catholicism has to date all been in article form.
Scholars and students of British Catholic history therefore have particular cause to welcome the current volume: a collection of eleven of Walsham’s most significant articles and essays first published between 2000 and 2011 (and now, in varying degrees, revised and updated), accompanied by a substantive (50 page) new introductory essay, which combines a masterly overview of the recent historiography with a lucid exposition of Walsham’s own key themes and concerns.
These concerns are reflected in the four-part structure of the collection. Three essays in Part I, ‘Conscience and Conformity’, extend and develop the core themes of Church Papists, examining how Catholics navigated the pressures from the state to conform to the requirement to attend Church of England services, and from (most of) their own missionary clergy to adopt a stance of strict recusancy. Together, these pieces reinforce the insight (shared by some other recent scholars) that Nicodemism was a force to be reckoned with in early modern Europe, and that English Catholicism ‘is better thought of as semi-separatist’ than as a ‘fully segregated sect’ (p. 94).
The second part, ‘Miracles and Missionaries’, largely concerns the extent to which late sixteenth and seventeenth-century English Catholicism can be considered ‘Tridentine’ in character and ethos. The three essays here are interpretative lenses of varying degrees of magnification: a localised case-study of the shrine at Holywell in Flintshire, a thematic assessment of the Catholic cult of angels, and a broad overview of the missionizing strategies of the Jesuit and seminarist clergy. In each case, we are warned against an artificial contrast between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’, the persistently medieval versus the pristinely Counter-Reformation. The undoubted transformations of Catholic culture in the period drew imaginatively on existing ritual and devotional resources, a finding that mirrors some of the best work on continental Catholic reform, by scholars such as Marc Forster, David Gentilcore, and the late Trevor Johnson.
An impulse to probe and question inherited assumptions is equally evident in Part III, ‘Communication and Conversion’. In what has already become a classic discussion, Walsham demonstrates how printed texts, once considered the natural allies of Protestantism, served as ‘dumb preachers’, with the potential to become ‘a powerful surrogate for the personal pastoral discipline exercised by the Tridentine episcopate and parish clergy on the Continent’ (p. 244). The claim that Catholicism, too, was a ‘religion of the book’ is underlined in perceptive assessments of the reception and impact of the Douai-Rheims Bible, and of the battle for public opinion occasioned by the arrival of Jesuits on the English scene, waged relentlessly in print.
Books were instruments of official control, but could also be agents of lay empowerment and independence. This kind of paradox is explored further in the two essays of the final part of the collection, ‘Translation and Transmutation’, which focus on the lay experience of lived religion, and the necessary adaptations to the ritual life of Catholics consequent on being members of a proscribed and persecuted sect. Much of this inevitably deals with some well-documented recusant gentry households, but there is also an admirable effort to enter the world of plebeian Catholicism, and to explore the sacral and ritual potential of the landscape – a theme Walsham has investigated on a broader scale in a recent prize-winning monograph.
Inevitably, the essays in this collection exhibit some degree of overlap, but they are nonetheless a remarkably coherent and satisfying anthology. Those who prefer the meat of historical interpretation unseasoned and neatly dressed will find Walsham’s characteristic insistence on paradox, complexity, and the mapping of ‘irregular faults and fissures’ (p. 314) in the cultural landscape challenging, perhaps even frustrating. And some historians of post-Reformation Scotland and Ireland may feel that Walsham’s ‘Britain’ has a very strongly Anglo-Saxon flavour (though Wales – for once – is often fully integrated into the account).
Admirers of Walsham’s work, those with a particular interest in Elizabethan and Stuart Catholicism, and those (like this reviewer) who fall into both categories, will likely have read these essays before. But seeing them together allows one to appreciate what a significant body of work they represent, and how many fruitful lines of enquiry they have initiated or extended. From that perspective, this volume has a good claim to be the most important contribution to its field since John Bossy’s foundational study, The English Catholic Community (1975). Walsham is not by instinct a polemical historian, and there is little here that reads like pointed refutation of Bossy’s seminal insights. But in important ways, Walsham consistently directs our attention to aspects of early modern English Catholicism that Bossy neglected or underplayed: its crucial British and international contexts, its myriad connections to majority Protestant culture, its untidy extension beyond the bounds of strict separatism. The result is a considerably more rounded picture, and a marker of how far the subject has travelled over four decades of academic study. Just occasionally, even Homer nods. Robert Bellarmine (p. 253) was not a ‘French Cardinal’, but an Italian one.
