This highly useful and well-conceived collection of sixteen essays is the result of the latest gathering of the long-running conference, ‘Britain and the Netherlands’, which has met regularly since 1959, but which the editors rightly note has changed much since its beginnings. Originally intended to facilitate contact between barely acquainted scholars from these nearby nations, and to provide a forum for a wide variety of historical topics, the latest conference brought together scholars who are part of a ‘global community’ of historians, whose research is ‘international and comparative,’ and whose task was to explore a specific theme: the experience of Catholics within largely Protestant states.

Willem Frijhoff lays down nicely the comparative agenda of the book, noting the still fairly recent shift in the study of religious history generally from ecclesiastical preoccupations and national historiography to ‘problem-oriented’ cross-cultural history informed by anthropology and other social sciences. The study of minority religions more specifically has also shifted, from almost exclusive focus on ‘victimisation’ to exploring as well the ‘positive, vivid aspects’ within such groups. He concludes with astute comparisons between specific conditions in the two lands, not to mention a helpful list of questions still needing study.

Most of the insightful essays that follow focus on either a Dutch or English topic, but each is careful to make comparisons with conditions in the other country, thus sharpening definitions and understanding. Charles Parker outlines the ‘cooperative confessionalisation’ among Catholics in the Dutch Republic, where a shortage of priests and moderate political repression motivated laity and clergy to work together: the lack of a clear, on-site church hierarchy long made historians place the Republic outside the sphere of the Counter-Reformation, but Parker notes that if the old top-down model of Reform has been shown to be deficient even in officially Catholic countries then the absence of a hierarchy in the Republic should hardly be taken as fatal for revived spirituality there.

Michael Mullett argues similarly in his chapter on relations between the clergy and laity in England. Both had to cooperate to survive, but in England, where their lives and ministries were more threatened than they were in the Dutch Republic, priests were even more dependent on the laity. The Tridentine ideal of the authoritative, independent priest was damaged in a fundamental way here by their instability in income and housing.

Benjamin Kaplan addresses the ‘pillarization thesis’ (which says that by around 1650 Dutch society had segregated into separate communities) by looking at religiously mixed marriage, which was in fact rare after 1700. But sources are too irregular to reveal decline or increase or constancy from previous decades and centuries. More fundamentally, even if mixed marriages did decline it does not mean that other sorts of cross-confessional interaction declined too. Plenty of evidence shows people of different faiths interacting in numerous spheres; a more nuanced view of interaction than ‘pillarization’ is therefore needed.

William Sheils discusses how English Catholics ‘got on’ and ‘got along’ with non-Catholic neighbours, or in other words how they (especially those below the rank of gentry) improved their standing while in the process not offending dominant groups. He ranges widely, from the Midlands and rural Uplands to the urban centres of York and London, to explore a variety of strategies, responses and conditions. Most local Catholics and Protestants, he concludes, ‘when left to themselves, opted to “get along”’, and this was upset only when national political concerns forced their way onto the scene.

Judith Pollmann focuses on burial practices to ask why Dutch Catholics were more upset by the loss of their sacred spaces, through the confiscation or ruin of their churches and chapels, than by any other form of discrimination that they suffered. The answer, she argues, is that they were not completely shut out of such spaces, and were thus constantly reminded of their loss. Reformed churches were open to all for burial and baptism and marriage, but Catholics who could afford it preferred to bury their dead near the ruins of former churches, where the pain of loss was still great but not as great as seeing a church that had been converted to Reformed services.

Alexandra Walsham discusses how Catholic ritual changed in England after the Reformation, against the new backdrop of Protestant repression and international Catholic renewal. Orthodox practices ‘were reconstituted in ways that allowed them to survive’ and prosper, with a focus on the home, special landscapes, books and rosary beads rather than on priestly sacraments. Some of these ways ran contrary to Trent, and in some circles ‘post-Reformation English Catholicism was a religion less reliant on sacraments that it was on sacramentals’.

Paul Arblaster emphasises the importance of the Habsburg or Spanish Netherlands for not only Dutch and English Catholics but for Catholics all over north-western Protestant Europe. Its historical ties with all north-western Europe, its geographical convenience, its apparently strong model of Reformed Catholicism, and its willingness to provide refuge, all made the Habsburg Netherlands a crucial place of travel, study, exile and imagination for Catholics in these largely Protestant societies.

Claire Walker likewise shows the importance of the Habsburg Netherlands, if more specifically for English Catholics, arguing that the experience of men and women in this continental land ‘did much to shape the contours of English Catholicism’. She focuses on exiles, especially the religious men and women in English colleges and convents in Brussels, Douai and elsewhere, who ‘nurtured existing and future generations of Catholics’ in their homeland.

Charles de Mooij takes up the ‘extraordinary situation of Catholics’ in the Generality Lands, who lived in a similar situation to Catholics in Ireland: an overwhelming majority of the population belonged to an outlawed religion. The second-rate status of all Dutch Catholics hurt even more in the Generality Lands, precisely because they were in the majority. Yet despite this, despite their obvious preference for a Catholic state, and despite conflicts, the Generality Lands were not torn apart by religious differences, thanks largely to Dutch political rulers not enforcing religious laws too strictly.

Ute Lotz-Heumann demonstrates Catholic survival strategies in Ireland, where a ‘dual confessionalisation’ of both Protestant and Catholic identities occurred, although the Protestant version was relatively weak. The strategies among the huge Catholic majority were varied (and reminiscent of those in the Generality Lands), including secret schools, private tutors, strong social networks, poor relief and organisation of masses and catechism classes (often by women). Cooperation existed too, in the governance of towns and in confessionally mixed marriages, but Catholics got into trouble when, as in the Dutch Republic, the Church ‘ventured into public space’.

Joke Spaans shows the recruiting of boys, girls and women for the Holland Mission before 1650. Her findings confirm Parker's: laypeople, as well as remaining priests, had plenty of scope to experiment and cooperate. Most significant here are the klopjes, women who were not quite religious but not lay or beguine either. They provided a remarkable range of services: music for clandestine services, making discreet invitations to those services, copying books and scores, gathering or making devotional objects, and more. They overcame opposition by being ‘indispensable’, at least until after 1650 when the number of priests increased. As in war, so in extraordinary religious times, women's opportunities increased.

Marie Rowlands continues with the role of Catholic women, now in England, where they also made significant contributions to religious life. In this light, the priests of England do not look quite as dependent as in others, for if Catholic women took the initiative they also cooperated gladly with priests, whom they tended to put on pedestals, given the dangers these men regularly faced. Catholic women also led the way in promoting the cults of English martyrs, many of them also priests.

Xander van Eck seeks to answer a specific question: were the paintings created for Dutch Catholic churches typically Dutch, or was there a distinctive school of Dutch Catholic painting? The earliest efforts, in the 1610s or so, were strikingly old-fashioned, but by the 1620s Dutch painters clearly had grasped trends in international Catholic art. In the end it is hard to classify the Dutch efforts as distinct from either Dutch art, or international Catholic art, mostly because there was not a large enough critical mass of patrons to develop a distinctive style.

Richard Williams also discusses Catholic art, but in England, noting that it occurred on a smaller scale than in the Netherlands not only because there were fewer places of worship, but because in England large altarpieces were not necessarily regarded as the highest form of religious art, especially not as long as the material from which an object was made was seen to give it much of its value. And the preference for smaller objects was not a sign of inferiority to Dutch art, or others, but rather a sign of vitality, and reflected the tastes of English Catholic spirituality.

Finally, Judith Pollmann and Benjamin Kaplan tie the volume neatly together, skillfully explaining how these essays ‘disrupt’ and add to past directions in research on the religious history of both countries. They not only yield sharper images through their comparisons, but also challenge the image of an incapacitated or segregated Catholicism in Protestant lands. Though backward in some ways, the mission territories teach students of the Counter-Reformation ‘not to underestimate the ability of laypeople and their priests at the grass roots to forge religious change’.

Well-chosen illustrations only enhance the value of this collection, which will be especially useful to scholars and graduate students of Britain, the Netherlands or religious history more broadly, for it contains more than a few inspiring examples of how religious historians might profitably go about their work.