One has to say that, if one were to rank topics in early modern history in order of sheer excitement, casuistry would not normally be near the top of the list. Nor has casuistry itself always had a good reputation, and never less so than in the early modern period when its alleged abuses were made notorious in, for example, the treason trials of Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet. However, this really well edited volume in this respect bucks the trend. It comprises two overlapping manuscripts, both assigned to the Jesuit Thomas Bacon, alias Southwell. The texts are his teaching notes for his lectures in pastoral theology at Liège. However, as the introduction stresses, his work circulated in manuscript and was perhaps actually used in practice by missionary clergy. As the editor says, ‘the English cases of conscience … are chiefly of interest because of the light they cast on the difficulties facing Catholic priests and layfolk in England in the reign of Charles i’ (p. xvi), though of course those difficulties were hardly exclusive to Charles's reign. They are a good guide to exactly what Catholics did find most difficult; there are, inter alia, sections on the 1606 oath of allegiance, of course, and on patronage rights of Catholic owners of church livings.

Why is all this significant? First because it is an indication of how a casuistry teacher worked, how he compiled and deployed sources and so on. But arguably it is even more interesting as a revelation of how far the penumbra of Catholicism extended in post-Reformation England and Britain; in other words, how far an individual with clearly Catholic beliefs and proclivities could go in order to avoid public and hard line separatism and the legal consequences that went with it. Here also we have a version of the differences between what the practice of Catholicism in post-Reformation England was like compared with what Tridentine Christianity looked like on the continent. There is, exactly as Holmes points out (p. xxiv), a link between these cases (Holmes dates them to the 1630s) and the recent controversy and strife among the different fractions of the Catholic clergy triggered by the attempt in the 1620s to reinstitute episcopacy within the Catholic community. For example, case 98 and its discussion of whether the sacrament of confirmation is essential was one of the principal issues in the so-called ‘approbation’ dispute of the later 1620s. The cases on marriage are not exclusive to the English scene of course but questions concerning marriage were also part of the approbation business, caused by the bishop of Chalcedon, Richard Smith's aggressive attempts to exert his jurisdiction over both clergy and laity. Casuistical discussion was certainly not something that occurred in a vacuum.

Of course, one has to remember that, to the modern mind, if that is the right term, there is still something convoluted and pointless about casuistical arguments over questions that seem not really to matter, at least not now. But we know, or can prove, that the issues which casuists addressed were precisely the ones which mattered to, and served to define, those who approached them for advice. Peter Holmes has therefore done an enormous service to this section of the field of early modern studies by making these texts available. Here we have a major casuist's voice, and by extension the voices of his pupils, when they had to deal with pressing problematic topics which were brought to them both by their spiritual clients and by the state, topics on which their identity as Catholics depended. Here we have an outline of how we might think about the identity of Catholicism itself in seventeenth-century England and Britain. Holmes himself gestures at the mantras which have established themselves in so-called mainstream accounts, i.e. that Catholicism rapidly became a small sectarian minority. Yet these casuistical topics demonstrate exactly how a Catholic might preserve his or her identity and yet, to most intents and purposes, present a conformist face to the world. This in turn suggests to us some of the ways in which Catholicism might have extended through the fabric of contemporary society without necessarily leaving obvious traces in the kinds of record to which scholars have conventionally turned in order to locate it.