Jenna Lay states that she wishes to change perceptions of English literary history. Observing that writings by early modern Catholic men are slowly making their way into mainstream scholarship, she suggests that the work of Catholic women remains largely marginalised. Convincingly, she argues that Catholic women – and, in particular, nuns – were part of the early modern written landscape, whether as contributors or as only partially acknowledged subjects. In Lay's opinion, scholars can only hope to gain a better grasp of the English literary canon by including Catholic women's participation in it; they were not locked away, at home or in a cloister, but were engaged with early modern literature. This is a convincing, forceful argument and undoubtedly a necessary one. More problematic is the next part of Lay's thesis: that it is not for lack of writing that Catholic women are absent from the scene but because they were deliberately obscured by their contemporaries for gender and confessional reasons. Whilst this reviewer broadly agrees with Lay's claim that this means Catholic women offered an alternative canon, it does raise the dangerous temptation to read everything counter-intuitively. To follow Lay's line of argument, even when Catholic women are absent from literary texts, this only proves that they have been deliberately removed. For example, Lay examines the writings of Gertrude More, a Benedictine nun at the English convent in Cambrai, alongside Thomas Middleton's play of 1624, A game at chess. She finds that both consider issues of obedience and authority so suggests that Protestant writers were aware of such convent issues, even if they did not necessarily read the nuns’ literary output. This probably was the case but it is a big leap from recognising this awareness to placing Catholic women at the centre: could Middleton simply not have been aware of domestic intra-Catholic splits over recusancy or the taking of the Oath of Allegiance, both discussions which were framed in reference to matters of authority and obedience? This may purely be the concern of a historian reviewing the work of a literary scholar and there are other things that historians will notice, particularly Lay's use of John Bossy's loaded term when describing a group of English Catholic letter-writers as a ‘nonconformist community’ (p. 137). Nevertheless, there is much to admire in Beyond the cloister and a great deal of worth to be taken from it, such as Lay's forceful charge that rather than constantly viewing Catholic women – and nuns in particular – as victims, scholars need to recognise that they were participants in early modern literary culture. Just as there are alternative narratives of English history involving Catholics, so the same is true of the nation's literary path, offering new ways of reading the most well-known authors and playwrights of the day, including Shakespeare. These are important arguments even if the hint of special pleading requires a little tempering.