Francis Young has edited the surviving papers of the Rookwood family, of Coldham Hall, Stanningfield, Suffolk, from the collections now held at the Suffolk County Record Office and Cambridge University Library. Thirty-seven documents are printed, of dates ranging from 1636 to 1818 (the last item being extracts from a ‘family memoir’ written in about 1818); Young's introduction provides a detailed history of the family. The Coldham Rookwoods are known to historians chiefly because one of them, Ambrose Rookwood, was executed for his part in the Gunpowder Plot in 1606; some may also know of his direct descendant, another Ambrose Rookwood, who was executed for his part in the Barclay Conspiracy against William iii in 1696. The Rookwoods survived both these disastrous excursions into national politics, and remained significant landholders; the last Rookwood heiress, Elizabeth, established a Jesuit mission in Bury St Edmunds and her marriage allowed her descendants – called Rookwood Gage – to combine the estates of three Suffolk Catholic gentry families. The documents printed here are mainly marriage settlements, wills and pleas submitted during legal cases, including several concerning a dispute between Thomas Rookwood and his brother Charles over inheritance in the early eighteenth century. Others record Thomas Rookwood's attempts to maintain his estates by remote control while in exile from about 1693 to 1705, and his efforts to gain permission to return home. The editor suggests that the Rookwood papers pre-dating 1606 may have been destroyed during a search of Coldham after the Gunpowder Plot; papers between 1606 and 1636 are also said to be scarce, although Young refers to two documents in the Cambridge collection of 1612–13 (one of them Elizabeth Rookwood's rental book), and it is unclear why these are excluded. Perhaps of most interest are the library catalogue and household inventory compiled in the eighteenth century (chiefly by Elizabeth Rookwood). The detailed inventory of Coldham Hall includes lists of vestments and altar plate; the library catalogue lists 1,889 books. The latter is printed selectively in this volume, essentially including works of peculiar English Catholic interest, of which there are 522. As Young suggests, this library may have been the missionary library of the Jesuit district, the ‘College of the Holy Apostles’, which would put the Coldham catalogue alongside those of two other known English Jesuit libraries (from Holbeck Hall, Nottinghamshire, and the The Cwm, Herefordshire) (p. xlix). Related to the library catalogue is a catalogue of English Catholic authors compiled by Thomas and Elizabeth Rookwood; this is the earliest known attempt at an English Catholic bibliographical catalogue. It is not printed here, but represented by a list of the authors found in it, so anyone interested in how its compilers ‘attempt[ed] to tell the story of the English Catholic community through its books and their authors’ will need to consult the original (pp. xlvi–xlviii). The Rookwood papers are of undoubted interested to the study of Suffolk and Suffolk Catholicism; and some are of wider interest to the study of religion, historical culture and gentry culture in the eighteenth century. The Rookwoods are also, of course, a remarkable case study in English gentry Catholicism. They stand, one has to conclude, as a striking example of just how much a landowning dynasty can get wrong and still survive.