Revisionist scholarship has transformed our understanding of the Catholic community in post-Reformation England. A story of defeat and isolation has given way to one of endurance, adaption, and revitalization. English Catholic religious culture was not cut off from its continental wellsprings, or from England's religious past, nor was it confined to a handful of aristocratic families or a few heroic missionary priests. The emphasis now is on the creative casuistry that kept Catholic controversialists agile, the modes of piety still possible without an ecclesiastical structure, and the embrace by Catholics of the media of print that were once considered the preserve of Protestantism. Alexandra Walsham has been central to this process of revision, with important books on church papists, on the power of providence, and on the ancient sanctified landscape.

All of the chapters in Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain have been published before, as journal articles or book chapters, but this is still a new book. Walsham has seized the opportunity to revise, improve, or correct her earlier work in light of the most recent research. She understands the collaborative nature of historical scholarship and gives generous acknowledgement to those who have preceded, accompanied, or followed her in this intellectual journey. Her introductory essay and extensive bibliography serve both as summaries of recent research and foundations for future efforts.

Walsham's chapters are grouped in four sections. Part one considers the response of English Catholics, both clerical and lay, to the legal restraints on their faith and the requirement of attendance at Church of England services. Some Catholics paid recusancy fines and remained absent, but others found ways to resolve their consciences (and save their money) by partial accommodation. Crypto-Catholics and Church Papists coexisted with the die-hard faithful, and some developed strategies of casuistry and dissimulation. These chapters reveal a wide range of ways of dealing with the moral, spiritual, and political problems of belonging to a proscribed minority religion.

Part two traces the impact of continental-trained missionaries, Jesuits, and seminary priests, on the English Catholic remnant. Whereas some of these clerics sustained the faith of a shattered minority, others sought the wholesale reconversion of England to Rome. Several, of course, became martyrs. Crucial to this project, and a topic Walsham covers better than anyone, was renewed attention to miracles, the reformed Catholic cult of the Angels, and the mysteries and devotional value of holy wells. Cut off from their churches and barred from traditional forms of worship, many catholic layfolk found spiritual succor in what might be called a folk religion. Saints' lives, relics, and sacramentals became conduits and touchstones of the holy.

Part three counters the notion that only Protestants mobilized the power of printing, by showing how post-Reformation Catholics (from the safety of continental Europe) deployed a variety of texts, treatises, devotional handbooks, prayers, and pamphlets in English, some of them finely illustrated, to argue their case and sustain their flock. These smuggled items substituted, to some degree, for the prescribed services of the largely absent priesthood. Some of them also took on the sanctified flavor of holy relics or totems. A chapter on the bibles produced at Rheims in 1582 and at Douai in 1609 (based on Walsham's 2003 article in the Journal of British Studies 42, no. 2: 141–66) shows the willingness of the post-Tridentine church to promote a vernacular bible for missionary purposes, so long as it followed the Latin Vulgate.

Part four probes more deeply into the consequences of two Reformations: the Protestant revolt that left English Catholics stranded and the Catholic renewal that provided them with hope. Lacking an episcopal structure, it was hard to implement the reforms of the Council of Trent, but England was not isolated from continental developments, to which English Catholic theologians made significant contributions. Nonetheless, there were indigenous features to early modern English Catholicism that drew on the history of the British church and on its heritage in the landscape. Walsham provides no conclusion, perhaps because this history is not yet finished.

Some Jacobean Catholics looked on England as a “lost lamb” or a “devastated vineyard,” to be prayed for in despair. Others regarded it as an active mission field, with prospects for reclamation. The quiet majority of English Catholics more likely framed their problem in local and domestic terms, through their private relationship with their god. Walsham recognizes that the demography of the Catholic community is unknowable and does not speculate whether it was shrinking or growing. She acknowledges recent research that reveals urban, artisan, and plebian Catholicism, alongside the better-known seigneurial families. It would have been interesting to learn her view of the estimate that 1 percent of the general population, 10 percent of the gentry, and 20 percent of the nobility were Catholics in the reign of Charles I, and that their needs were met by 1,000 Catholic clergy, including 500 secular priests, 250 Jesuits, about 100 Benedictines, 30 Franciscans, and 20 Dominicans. Walsham, wisely, put her faith in stories rather than numbers.