The book claims to explore “early modern Catholic imaginings of the nation” and thus to contest the widespread assumption that such “imagining of the nation was an exclusively Protestant endeavor” (1). At points, Highley does address this subject: most notably re the vision of England as Mary's dower, a Catholic counterpart to the Foxean story of English exceptionalism. However, the book does not really focus on “Catholics writing the nation.” As Highley notes, there was no distinctively Catholic image of nationhood, since the “factionalized Catholic community both in exile and at home disagreed about what it meant to be English and Catholic” (22). Yet some English Catholics were engaged in “writing the nation”: Nicholas Sander's Suetonian histoire scandaleuse of the Henrician apostasy; Bishop Leslie's Tacitean narrative of an ancient nobility crushed by the ruthless Elizabethan state apparatus; Persons's richly imagined blueprint for a new-model Catholic England; the Appellants’ passionate defense of “indigenous Catholic traditions” against the Jesuit avant-garde (159). Highley has written about some of this material elsewhere, but very little gets into Catholics Writing the Nation, despite its centrality to the book's ostensible topic.

One can perhaps justify these omissions, since, in truth, the writers Highley treats were not attempting “to think through what it meant to be English and Catholic” (4) but to re-Catholicize England. As he himself admits, Persons's “Lancastrian” view of English history was simply special pleading on behalf of the Infanta's title (16–17, 194). Highley has a fascinating chapter on Catholic depictions of the English as kin to Turks, Scythians, and other savage races of the North. Early modern ethnography provided some support for this view, but, as Highley notes, the point was to create a “Catholic ‘black legend’ about the inhuman cruelty of north European heretics and, especially British, Protestants” (70), whose savagery could only be “kept in check by the civilizing influences of a southern religion brought from Rome” (79). Since the same writers elsewhere contrast the Turks’ religious tolerance to Protestant persecutory bloodthirst, one wonders whether these Catholics believed their own ethnographic model: whether we are dealing with the “imaginings of the nation” or with the exigencies of religious polemic.

Yet Highley does have a story to tell: one not about English Catholics writing England but about British Catholics not-writing Britain. The Catholic exiles Highley studies included English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots refugees, all of them fleeing from the same English Protestant authorities, yet, “although loosely held together by the desire to restore the Catholic faith to their homelands … [this] diaspora was the epitome of disunity” (83), with surprisingly little sense of any religious and geopolitical commonality binding the “peoples of the Atlantic archipelago” (81). Instead, what Highley finds are loyalties both more parochial and more universal than what we typically think of as nationalism. On the one hand, the exiles insist upon, even intensify, the ancient ethnic particularisms of Saxon and Celt. The English Jesuits refuse to allow Irish students into their seminary at Valladolid. The exiled Brigettine nuns decide not to admit local women but remain “little self-enclosed Englands that shut out the foreign cultures around them” (183). From Campion's disparaging Irish history (ca. 1570) to Verstegan's celebration of England's exclusively Anglo-Saxon heritage (1605), English Catholic writers tend to underscore their distinction from and rightful dominance over the Celtic population of the archipelago, a tendency greatly exacerbated by the outpouring of anti-Scots polemic intended to thwart a Protestant succession by exciting old fears and hatreds. These were not one-sided animosities. The Welsh-run Roman College expelled its English students. Welsh and Irish Catholics (Highley has less to say about the Scots in this regard) looked forward to the day when “Rome would intervene to re-establish the ancient birthright of their people” by bringing back the old religion and driving out the Saxon invaders (90–91, 97). The Irish historian Beare extolled the Spanish origins of his Hibernians, their inborn love for all things Spanish, their inborn hatred toward Spain's enemies. Such attitudes meant that only those few English Catholics able to stomach the prospect of a military as well as spiritual reconquista would conceivably favor an “archipelagic Catholic nationalism” (135). For most Catholics, ethnic parochialism trumped shared religious identity.

Great Britain, Highley thus concludes, remained “irrevocably linked with the Protestant cause” (106). Yet, if the Catholic exiles acted locally, they also thought globally. In place of James I's “vision of a Protestant empire … his catholic adversaries clung to an alternative imperial ideal of a reunited Christendom” (116). Allen and Persons's unremitting efforts to raise a pan-Catholic army for the forcible reconversion of their homeland presupposes such transnationalism. In Persons's vision of a new Catholic world order, “when our English merchantes may traffique freely … when our home gentlemen may travel with lyke libertie … when our English students may visit forrayne universityes without restraint, and strangers come to ours” (175), the universal Catholic church makes possible a world without borders: an ideal going back to Orosius's fifth-century Christianized Pax Romana but resurrected in the sixteenth as the visionary telos informing the Spanish dream of world empire. The book ends, in fact, with an obscure ex-Jesuit's 1623 poem on the Spanish Match that imagines England “absorbed within a Habsburg super-state” ruled from Madrid by a Catholic Charles Stuart, the new Holy Roman Emperor (197–98).

If Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland seems somewhat unsure of its own argument, it nonetheless has something interesting to say, and even its weaknesses make an important point about the conceptual scramble that comes of putting all one's eggs in the “nationalism” basket. Early modern Britain was not a nation in any meaningful sense, nor early modern Ireland; perhaps the Old Irish thought of themselves as a natio in the Classical sense (a people, gens, ethnos), but what about the Old English, who had, after all, been living in Ireland since the twelfth century? A nation may be an imagined community, but not all imagined communities are nations, and without a richer lexicon for such multiform conceptual units of allegiance and identity, it truly is hard to describe the spheres of belonging about which Catholics in early modern Britain and Ireland write.