Liesbeth Corens's Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe—a revision of her PhD thesis completed at the University of Cambridge under Alexandra Walsham—tackles a big topic in an ambitious manner: early modern English Catholic migration. This topic has been the subject of a number of books in recent years, with scholars, including James Kelly, Claire Walker, and Katy Gibbons, producing excellent research on life in exile. Confessional Mobility is an attempt to change the historiographical debate, pushing research away from the subject of exile—which, Corens argues, reduces an expatriate's “entire identity to that label as their key characteristic” and makes their “victimhood, passivity, and separation” the main points of engagement for scholars (2)—and instead replace it with the study of “confessional mobility.” By focusing on the act of movement rather than solely on life in exile, Corens encourages a switch in focus to assess the agency of those going abroad with increased attention on the push-and-pull factors driving migration. In making her case, Corens highlights how, by going abroad, English Catholics were not simply submitting to their fate to become an inert, separate group but instead were using their time away from England to support the wider English Catholic cause.

Where Confessional Mobility also differs from previous studies of English Catholic “exiles” is in its chronological scope. The vast majority of studies of English Catholicism have focused on events before the Civil Wars, with historians debating the origins of broader trends. Confessional Mobility, meanwhile, investigates the period 1660 to c.1720 and examines the continuity and persistence of developments that had begun in the Elizabethan and pre-civil wars period. Corens argues that English Catholics had not passively submitted to Protestant rule but instead continued to dream of the reestablishment of Catholicism. Throughout the book, Corens contends that the expatriates, from their position abroad, were able to provide support to the broader English Catholic community, sustaining it by training priests who would return to England and deliver the sacraments, by educating children as good Catholics, and by publishing Catholic texts. Through this support, expatriate Catholics helped sustain Catholicism in England. In making this argument, Corens draws attention to the vitality of late seventeenth-century English Catholicism and challenges the historiographical orthodoxy that English Catholics had, by this point, resigned themselves to minority status.

The book is organized into three parts, each with two chapters. In the first part, “Distance,” Corens uses confessional mobility to explore a more flexible understanding of belonging than migration or exile convey Whereas the terms migration and exile encourage the idea that expatriate Catholics had deserted England, Corens highlights that expatriate Catholics maintained continuous contact with those in England. Those abroad actively attempted to foster cohesion and, consequently, fostered a community that transcended borders. Chapter 1, “The Exile,” emphasizes the ways in which expatriate English Catholics viewed themselves as a key element of the English Mission and were a part of the broader set of activities aimed at re-Catholicizing England. Chapter 2, “The Fugitive,” highlights the nuanced understanding expatriate English Catholics had in their relationship to their monarch by challenging the idea that geographical distance from England had isolated English Catholics from developments in England.

In part two, “Mobility,” Corens takes issue with the tendency in the historiography to focus on the moment of departure and the subsequent life in exile, be it in a religious institution or geographical location, thereby portraying exile as a permanent, static experience. By focusing on temporary periods abroad in “The Educational Traveller” (chapter 3) and “The Pilgrim” (chapter 4), Corens reminds us that, for many, expatriate life was just a short period of their lives before a return to England. Experiences abroad could be a transformative experience, a chance to grow as an individual.

In the final part, “Orientation,” Corens focuses on English Catholicism's positioning within wider Counter-Reformation culture. Recent studies, for instance, that by Alexandra Walsham, have reconsidered post-Reformation English Catholicism in light of new developments in Counter-Reformation historiography, but these have been primarily focused on the domestic realm. By avoiding the sense of victimhood inherent in the term exile, Corens advocates that mobility allowed late seventeenth-century English Catholics to be part of wider Counter-Reformation developments. Chapter 5, “The Intercessor,” highlights how English Catholic expatriates did not choose “between either participating in Catholic life in their host society or maintaining bonds with their home countries” but instead engaged with both (163). They were determined to maintain their own traditions while participating in the universal church, creating tensions that had to be negotiated. Chapter 6, “The Record Keeper,” explores how English Catholics wrote their own histories, creating archives that provide the backbone of source material for scholars of English Catholicism to this day. Corens stresses that these source compilations were not neutral repositories of documents but were created for a specific purpose: to record the experiences of post-Reformation English Catholics and to create a sense of community and identity.

Scholarship on English Catholicism has, in recent years, begun to take greater account of its European and international dimensions; Corens's book, which draws on diverse source material from archives in Britain, Belgium, and France, is an important contribution to this line of scholarship. It presents a convincing case for the vitality of English Catholicism in the late seventeenth century and for an expanded understanding of expatriate Catholics. It shines new light on the subject of early modern migration, and future scholarship will no doubt expand on these ideas, looking at other geographies and periods, as well as other groups of travelers and migrants.