The English Benedictine Congregation was revived by papal breve in 1619, some decades after the dissolution of the monasteries. Taking its cue from monastic reform movements in Spain and Italy, it was a centralised, un-Benedictine-like umbrella body consisting of several houses of monks and nuns founded in mainland Europe. Alban Hood's study of this conglomerate starts with the flight to England from France of the English Benedictine Congregation's houses in the teeth of the French Revolution: St Gregory's at Douai eventually became Downside, St Laurence's at Dieulouard became Ampleforth, St Edmund's in Paris returned to France, only to finally relocate to Woolhampton as Douai Abbey in 1903 following a further bout of French anticlericalism, and the Cambrai convent eventually became known as Stanbrook Abbey. Hood examines the English Benedictine Congregation's first fifty-five years in their new surroundings: despite the majority of individual members being born in England, the monasteries had never existed anywhere but in exile. Always conscious of placing the communities in a wider setting, Hood details the challenges facing them, including a religious revival gaining momentum in their homeland, developments in European Catholicism which were building towards the ultramontane movement, a revival of English Catholicism post-emancipation and the booming of new religious orders, not to mention a European monastic revival. In this context, Hood finds the English Benedictine Congregation somewhat out of place, not necessarily stagnant but clinging to continuities from its exiled past, as it attempted to ensure its survival having lost so much at the French Revolution. One of the main challenges was that, unusually, monks of the English Benedictine Congregation had been far more likely to work on the mission than live in their monasteries; the novel presence of these monasteries on home soil required new thinking, particularly with the vicars apostolic fast gaining the authority that would lead to the return of a Catholic hierarchy in 1850. In the face of this, the Congregation frequently seemed reluctant to accept that times had changed. In a very interesting final chapter that considers the English Benedictine Congregation's role in the Empire, Hood judges the monks to have made the same mistakes, the tensions between monastery and mission still not resolved. Nevertheless, in Mauritius and Australia, they did bring organisation and a sense of stability; but old habits die hard and they remained reluctant to adapt to the situation, steadfastly resisting innovation. In Hood's opinion, continuity rather than change was the overwhelming ethos of the English Benedictine Congregation in this period. From repatriation to revival focuses more on the experience of the admittedly larger male English Benedictine Congregation contingent than the female, but it is a highly readable overview that points the way towards future research, not least, as Hood himself suggests, the need for more research into the contribution of English Catholicism to the wider story of nineteenth-century national missionary fervour.