I first encountered the letters of the English Catholic priest Charles Plowden (1743–1821) as a graduate student during my earliest forays into archives on both sides of the Atlantic. I was transfixed by Plowden’s polemical style and talent for gossip, though I struggled mightily with his feverish script. One of his principal correspondents was his old friend John Carroll (1736–1815), a Marylander he studied with as a Jesuit novice. Carroll was consecrated the first Catholic bishop of the new American Republic in 1790, at a ceremony in Lulworth Castle (Dorset) in which Plowden gave a laudatory homily. For me, this articulate and bombastic son of a famous Shropshire recusant family emerged from the archives and the three-volume edition of The John Carroll papers (1976; edited by Thomas O’Brien Hanley) as, by far, Carroll’s most interesting conversation partner. Since Hanley’s volumes covered only Carroll’s outgoing letters, and Plowden’s hand is so difficult to decipher, I remember hoping that one day some diligent scholar would print the complete correspondence.

Thomas W. Jodziewicz, emeritus professor of history at the University of Dallas, has answered this prayer with a mammoth volume of over 600 pages. The correspondence of John Carroll and Charles Plowden, 1779–1816 reproduces and interprets the decades of conversation between these two leading English-speaking Catholics. The cover indicates that Jodziewicz contributed an ‘introduction and notes’. The introduction (pp. xiii–xxi) and epilogue (pp. 449–51) are relatively short given the material they comment upon: 179 letters exchanged between the two close friends, adding up to 448 pages.

The cover attribution, however, is misleading: each of the letters includes an introduction by Jodziewicz. These function as a running commentary and occasionally seem to equal the word count of the letters themselves. Additionally, the volume contains nearly a hundred pages of ‘notes’ that are printed in very small typescript. These footnotes add up to a kind of subterranean series of short essays. For me, this was exceedingly welcome. While I did not always follow Jodziewicz’s interpretations and judgements, this extensive commentary is erudite and very useful, the fruit of what must have been years of painstaking archival labour, as well as a great deal of work with secondary source material ranging from Eamon Duffy’s early work on the Cisalpines to recent scholarship on everything from the Napoleonic wars to early America to the political struggles of Irish Catholics. Taken in tandem with the truly fascinating insider view afforded by Plowden and Carroll’s frank exchanges, it all adds up to a very rich harvest for early modernists. Some readers would probably have benefited more from accompanying thematic essays rather than the method employed, which could feel unwieldy for those approaching various subfields for the first time. In my view, the chosen path confirms that specialists are the target audience – or, at least, people who wish to dive in by drinking from a firehose.

One reason why Carroll and Plowden are wonderful conversation partners to eavesdrop on is that their backgrounds and temperaments were significantly different, and yet they forged a connection in their formative years that blossomed into a friendship. This friendship endured two wars between their home countries, the decimation of their beloved Jesuit order and probably the greatest political and ecclesiological strain that European Catholicism had been subjected to since the Reformation. Since Catholics in eighteenth-century England and America needed to go abroad for seminary education, Carroll and Plowden overlapped at several institutions in France and the Low Countries. By the time that Carroll returned home in 1774, the two priests were close friends, but the Society of Jesus had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV the year before, and the American colonies were on the brink of rebellion.

The extant letters between the two ex-Jesuits in this volume span a thirty-seven-year period bracketing an inviting window for a variety of fields, including Jesuit studies; Enlightenment studies; the history of the British Empire; transnational, global, English; and American church history. For example, for the Americanist, the letters span from the Revolutionary War, through the drafting of the Constitution, ending just after the conclusion of the War of 1812. As the first US Catholic bishop, Carroll is far more well known than Plowden. His ecclesial significance is clear, but his fame is greatly enhanced by his family: his cousin Charles Carroll was probably the richest man in the colonies and the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, while John’s brother Daniel was one of only five men to sign both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution (and one of only two Catholics to sign the latter).

Scholars primarily interested in the history of the Jesuits or transnational/global Catholic history can delve into the thought of two highly articulate and influential anglophone ex-Jesuits through a correspondence that almost exactly spans the suppression of the Society (1773) and its restoration by Pius VII (1814). For all the discussion of ecclesiastical politics, theology and pastoral practice – fields in which Carroll and Plowden were significant actors – the most enduring legacy of both men was possibly in education. Carroll, of course, was the founder of what became Georgetown University, now one of the leading Catholic research universities in the world. The glimpses provided of Carroll’s view of education dovetail with his enlightened Catholic ideals of toleration, ordered liberty, irenicism and moderation. For example, the Marylander supported a liberality in education and formation, in part so that students would not act out once they inevitably tasted a bit of freedom (see, for example, p. 341).

Plowden’s work in education was quiet, calm and sacrificial, in contrast to the odium theologicum that his lengthy pamphlets indulged in at the expense of his putatively heterodox co-religionists in England. This volume reveals him in his most sympathetic light as a Jesuit tirelessly devoted to education, community life and the formation of the young. Long after his death, Plowden was recalled as a kind of founding father of Stonyhurst College (which, since 1794, has educated generations of young English Catholics) and as a pivotal labourer in the re-founding of the Jesuits in England.

Plowden’s faults are far more visible and obvious than Carroll’s, but the former was sincerely devoted to his friends and students. At the age of sixty-two, Plowden left a very comfortable position as the chaplain of Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle (the wealthy Catholic patron who gifted Stonyhurst estate) to labour in education and formation for the next thirteen years. Fittingly, his last letter in the collection, written before he had received news of Carroll’s death (7 January 1816), poses the happy worry that he might not have room for the number of postulants arriving in the summer (pp. 447–8). Details from this phase of his career round out the picture of the man. While Plowden could be rigorous – he thought taking tea in the afternoon a waste of time – he was also rigorous about what he deemed theologically sound comforts, like serving wine at every Sunday dinner. He instituted bell-ringing throughout the day precisely as done during his own Jesuit education, and he washed the feet of each new novice to welcome them. His devotional reflections remained in regular use until after the Second World War (see esp. notes 348 and 358).

There is so much more that could be said, which is a credit to Jodziewicz’s painstaking editorial work and commentary. Worthy of more discussion are the ecclesiological and political debates occasioned by the many upheavals of this period. Scholars interested in Catholicism and Enlightenment, conspiracy theories and apocalypticism (Plowden was a devotee of Abbé Barruel and Charles Walmesley), the immediate prehistory to the rise of nineteenth-century ultramontanism (Plowden was one of the few English Catholics who advocated for papal infallibility) and the failure of Reform Catholicism will find tremendous resources in these pages.

For this reviewer, Charles Plowden’s gruelling struggle with the English Catholic Committee (founded 1782) and its successor, the Cisalpine Club (founded 1792), was by itself worth the price of admission. Jodziewicz rightly calls this cluster of debates ‘a battle for the soul of English Catholicism’ (p. 292). As the debate dragged on further into the 1790s, the opponents of the Cisalpines relied more and more on the pens of Plowden and John Milner, a future vicar apostolic. Paired with John Carroll’s far more conciliatory (if still critical) perspective on the rapidly unfolding events in Church and society, Plowden looks gossipy, extreme and inclined towards the worst possible interpretation of his opponents and their intentions.

Nevertheless, the picture of male friendship that arises is an endearing one. Late in his life (1802), Carroll called Plowden his ‘best friend’ and bemoaned he had so little time to write to him (p. 340), as he suffered the burden of administrative overload that often besets those with the misfortune of being competent and agreeable. I was left wondering if maintaining this genuinely close and affectionate friendship might have actually been easier with an ocean between them. Carroll, living under the benignity of the First Amendment, never really needed to take a side in the Cisalpine debates or refuse a relief oath. Plowden could simply put his American friend in a different box altogether, while internecine debates raged in England, Ireland and France.