There is burgeoning historiographical attention to the early modern Catholic experience. Noteworthy is the adoption of a three-kingdom approach in the case of the Tudor and Stuart realms. This is reflected in the current collection of twelve essays: one deals with Scotland, three with Ireland, and the remaining eight with the English Catholic community. The focus is largely on the seventeenth century, with three contributions devoted to the eighteenth century, a period which hitherto has received less scholarly attention.
Regarding Catholic migration to the continent, considerable attention has been given to studying the various national colleges established from the later sixteenth century. However, with the exception of the Irish Franciscans, religious communities, especially for women, have until recently suffered neglect. In the volume under review, four essays treat of dimensions of convent life for Englishwomen (there were over twenty English convents). Jaime Goodrich explores the Stuart allegiance of English Benedictine convents in the long seventeenth century, showing how links were forged with the Stuarts under Queen Henrietta Maria, a relationship intensified under the Catholic James II and his wife Mary of Modena, especially when the Stuart court was established at Saint-Germain near Paris after 1690. The convents’ Stuart identity was expressed in commemoration integrated into prayer life, in serving as centres of information for recent arrivals, and in facilitating convent entry of women from the extended Stuart family. In return the royal family offered financial support, but limited in light of their straitened circumstances.
Essays by Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Caroline Bowden show how the convents also actively reinforced English Catholic identity by closely following developments at home, both on the political scene and by sharing vicariously in the sufferings of their co-religionists, through maintaining correspondence with family members in England. These women were separated geographically from their homeland, but through ongoing links with kinfolk they saw themselves at the heart of the English recusant community, an identity intensified in their new overseas setting. Far from being cut off from family origins, religious communities depended for their survival on support networks based on kinship in England, in addition to forging new relationships in the host country. Drawing creatively on one convent's records which included accounts of various mystical experiences, Jessica McCandless explores the mystic and affective layers accruing to spaces within the convent premises; the essay contributes to the study of Catholic material culture.
The leadership cadre of Irish religious had lengthy exposure to continental Catholicism through years of study, and, in some cases, of teaching and administrative experience, before coming back to Ireland. Some, chiefly Franciscans and Dominicans, were chosen to become bishops on their return. For the first half of the seventeenth century, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin explores the relationship between bishops and regulars in Ireland, less acrimonious than in England, due to bishops who themselves were religious, and because Jesuits were a small minority among Irish religious more generally. Diocesan clergy, and their colleges, predominated in the Irish ecclesiastical community in early modern Paris. To complement this focus, Liam Chambers provides an overview of the presence of Irish regular clergy in the city, generally as students at the university. John McCafferty explores Irish Franciscan efforts at reshaping their order's history for the global Catholicism which was emerging from the sixteenth century.
A further strand is the contribution of English and Scottish Benedictine monasteries on the Continent. English monks established houses at Douai, Paris and in Lorraine. A fundamental tension emerged between the stability characteristic of the monastic vocation and the group's commitment to serving pastorally the scattered Catholic laity in England. James Kelly uses the writings of Augustine Baker O.S.B. to explore his English confreres’ place within the wider early modern Benedictine movement — attention to the continental context is a welcome feature of the essay collection as a whole. Geoffrey Scott in his essay makes the case that Benedictine commitment to creating and developing gardens in their continental monasteries contributed to the evolution of horticulture in England, largely through the influence of their schools. In eighteenth-century intellectual history, historian Ulrich Lehner has drawn attention to the Catholic Enlightenment, and in this collection Thomas McNally explores the scientific and educational contribution of the Scottish Benedictines in the German-speaking lands (through their three monasteries).
For the decades prior to the collapse of the monastic system on the continent in the revolutionary 1790s, Cormac Begadon presents a positive assessment of the English and Scottish monks’ efforts to modernise their schools by adapting to new state-imposed systems. As Shaun Blanchard relates in his essay, a more combative approach to the emerging world at the end of the eighteenth century was that of Charles Walmsley, a Benedictine who served as one of the four vicars apostolic in England. Arising from his interest in the New Testament Book of Revelation, he composed a broad historical survey, suffused with a negative view of Enlightenment and Protestantism. The book became widely popular (echoes are found in the Irish agrarian disturbances of the 1820s); the author had experienced the fury of a Protestant mob who wrecked his house during the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780.
Drawing comprehensively on specialised archival research, these essays help illuminate the world of British and Irish men and women who lived in religious communities on the continent down to the collapse of the ancien régime in the 1790s. Given the geographical spread of the themes covered, the absence of maps is regrettable. By noting ongoing links with the Catholic community in England, and engagement with broader intellectual and cultural trends in the host countries, together with a focus on communities of women, the collection expands our understanding of the Catholic presence from England, Scotland and Ireland on the continent in the early modern era.
