Susan Juster’s book is an important contribution to the historiography of Catholicism in the Americas because, despite its title, it explores Catholic identity and belonging with a broader lens than most historiography of religion in the English Atlantic has done before. The book focuses on English colonies in modern-day Canada, USA, and the Caribbean in the period c. 1600-1750. Juster’s first aim is to provide a count of Catholics in English North America, rather than English Catholics. The distinction is important, because it enables Juster to count other European Catholics, especially Irish indentured servants and planters, as well as Indigenous American and Black Catholics. The impact of this is profound because, as Juster notes, in English North America Irish and Black Catholics were more numerous than English Catholics but until recently have been less studied. By counting all Catholics, Juster achieves two things: she offers a more inclusive history of Catholicism in English North America, and she shows that Catholics were a significant population whose presence was not marginal to the cultures of plantation societies there.

Juster observes that ‘the almost universal assumption that English America was a Protestant place…’ is a perennial problem for the historiography of religion in English colonies because it has meant that ‘…historians have paid less attention to how people of rival faiths – Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish – also experienced their own forms of colonial encounter and creolization in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.’ (p. 2). Juster contrasts this to the impressive work done by historians of Indigenous American and Black ‘encounter’, ‘coexistence and adaptation’, and ‘cultural syncretism and creolization’ to explain how Indigenous Americans and Africans survived the brutal systems of colonisation and enslavement (p. 2). She therefore borrows techniques used by historians of Indigenous America and Atlantic slavery alongside similar methods used by historians of English recusancy, such as Alexandra Walsham’s work on church papists, to seek out fragmentary and fleeting references to Catholicism in a vast array of sources, from court records to archaeology (pp. 3-5).Footnote ¹ Juster uncovers expected accounts of anti-Catholicism, and the effects of it on underwhelming or exaggerated estimates of the Catholic population given by Church of England, Crown and even Catholic authorities with which Juster contends, but which she argues have often been accepted uncritically by earlier historians (pp. 29, 33-36, 42, 64-65, 72-74).

In the process of counting Juster also finds unusual, sometimes disturbing, but often moving records of lived Catholicism. For example, a series of advertisements placed in colonial newspapers seeking to recover enslaved people who had absconded from their enslavement in a Protestant area, and who can be identified as Catholic by the description that they wore shirts ‘marked with a Cross on the left Breast’, or other material identifiers such as a cross and the Latin insignia of Jesus Christ ‘I H.’ (p. 70). On the same page, Juster cites the will of Jane Fenwick (1660) who offered conditional freedom to William Payne; after his manumission he was to make an annual payment of one hogshead of tobacco to the Catholic Church and if at any point in his life he apostatised, he was to be enslaved by the church (p. 70). In her efforts to compile these fragments of Catholic life, beyond well-mined documentary evidence from Catholic elites and Jesuit missionaries, Juster brings to light the intersectional reality of prejudice in English North America. Juster states that ‘the further the story moved away from the lives of white English recusants, the greater the degree of speculation in my account’, but in doing this, Juster helps ‘[uncover] the lives of marginal peoples living a clandestine faith on the edges of empire’ (p. 289). Another major finding of the book is that Catholics and Protestants alike struggled to meet the demands of their faith on the colonial frontier where ecclesiastical structures were weak outside of non-conformist New England and the Chesapeake. In the latter case the established church had a resident episcopacy after the Glorious Revolution, and a Jesuit mission that endured into the eighteenth century.

In the second half of the book, Juster gives serious consideration to faith as a real and affective connection to the divine, which was sustained variably by ministry, material culture, prayer, and the sacraments. Across all her examples, Juster’s careful analysis makes abundantly clear that whatever their confession, racial or ethnic identity, free or enslaved status, Christians living in English North America were forced to make adaptations to their religious practice that were unorthodox in Europe. This defies the assumption that Protestants in English North America had privileged access to their faith. For example, Juster provides ample evidence that Anglican clergy demanded fees to conduct baptisms, marriage, and funerals to supplement meagre wages which their congregations denounced as a slip-back to pre-Reformation indulgences which even the Jesuits had abandoned (pp. 180, 194-195). Other adaptations were made to reflect racial and class difference, such as wealthy planters’ preference for private baptisms on the plantation rather than in church where indentured servants and enslaved people were also baptised. This was true for Protestants and Catholics alike. Still, as Juster remarks, the colonial frontier produced hierarchies of belonging and exclusion which caused Protestants to domesticate their religion in ways that in England were only typical to non-conformists and Catholics (pp. 191-194).

Domestication is another important finding of the book. Juster shows that demographic pressures in the colonies forced compromise, and just as Catholics had done at home as recusants, they maintained Catholicism along matrilineal lines. Sons could access secular power yet secretly practice their Catholic faith in the home that their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters maintained with devotional objects, literature, and private chapels (pp. 55, 58, 222-223, 282). Juster argues that continued control of household faith by Catholic women after migration to the colonies elicited the same Protestant fears that Catholicism was a deviant and feminine religion (pp. 284-286, 288). The potency of this misogynist anti-Catholicism was amplified by the presence of Catholic women who were Indigenous American and African, and even Protestant women who had lived amongst Catholic Indigenous American nations because ‘[r]edeemed captives became living reminders of the power of Catholicism to invade hearts and households’ (p. 286). Across the colour-line there were experiences familiar to Catholics of all races and ethnicities in which women took the lead, to the despair of Protestants. This was especially true when the latter identified unnervingly similar cultural practices between Catholics of different races, such as Indigenous American, African, and Irish mourning rituals of ‘howling’ and ‘keening’ (pp. 240, 269-270). Juster reveals that there were rare moments of interracial cooperation amongst Catholics, such as in the sponsorship of baptised children (p. 203), but interracial marriages remained controversial in English North America, where racial boundaries were heavily policed (p. 229). As Juster notes, ‘[i]t is not surprising that we have no firsthand accounts of Black and white Catholics sharing communion in colonial North America.’ (p. 215).

Juster’s A Common Grave changes the field of early modern Catholic studies because it is so expansive. Juster incorporates Black and Indigenous American Catholics as well as Europeans; she takes English Catholic studies beyond the confines of Britain and Ireland and continental Europe. She also moves beyond Maryland as the epicentre of Catholicism in the English Americas and approaches it as one of many colonial examples of religious pluralism offered as antecedent to the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Juster states in her conclusion that she offers a pointillist approach to continuity and change across almost two hundred years of history and a large geographical expanse. She acknowledges that her methodology can flatten local contexts and major shifts in policy in English North America across the four dynasties that reigned in this period: the Tudors, the Stuarts, the House of Orange, and the Hanoverians. For those interested in histories of individual colonies in English North America, other works which Juster cites in her introduction (pp. 19-28) would be more helpful. Jane Ohlmeyer’s Making Empire is also an important examination of Irish Catholics in the British Empire writ large, including the Caribbean and Maryland.Footnote ² A Common Grave has disrupted assumptions that English North America was a Protestant place, and that Catholics were marginal to life on English plantations. Though Juster gestures towards this with examples from French and Spanish borderlands in the Americas, it remains to be seen how far Catholics in English North America were integrated into a global Catholic Church and, as Ohlmeyer has done for the Irish, the extent to which Catholics in English North America were networked into the global British Empire. This book is a step in that direction to be advanced by future scholars.