In this recent volume on the famous Jesuit saint and martyr Edmund Campion we have an attempt to rewrite some of the history of mid- to late Elizabethan literature and politics. The author's contention is that interest in and sympathy for Campion went much further than the relatively restricted coterie of individuals who are known to have been directly associated with him. To demonstrate this, Gerard Kilroy has deployed his linguistic skills and his elaborate reconstruction of how specific Catholic manuscripts concerned with Campion circulated and among whom. In particular, he points to the evidence of Sir John Harington's concern with Campion's writings. He has also unearthed connections between Campion and Elizabethan Catholics, notably Viscount Montague, that were previously almost unknown. Indeed, it might have been possible to say more about the political and religious significance of transmission of manuscript material of this kind (when, for example, Thomas McCoog has demonstrated that there were relatively few martyrological accounts in circulation among Catholics within the Tudor's English realm before 1603). He also deals with the coded imagery of Sir Thomas Tresham's well-known Northamptonshire residences.

Much of this constitutes a necessary corrective to many recent accounts of the English Catholic community, accounts that tend to depict it as a hermetically sealed entity, defined primarily by the refusal of its members to cooperate and comply with the statute law on conformity; they were hence cut off by their deliberate act of separation from mainstream society in the later sixteenth century and for a long time after that. If this were really true, then the violence of antipopery would be very hard to explain (unless, that is, we construe it as mere hysteria on the part of the Protestant godly). A reconstruction of how Catholic interests and concerns were shared by those whom historians would not generally portray as Catholics or Catholic sympathizers provides us with a valuable aid to the historical understanding and interpretation of late sixteenth-century society. Equally important is Kilroy's emphasis, in various parts of the book, on how far the ties of kinship could cut across formal confessional divisions.

At the same time, there seems to be a heavy hagiographical overlay in Kilroy's account—not that there is anything wrong with hagiography in itself. But many of the assumptions in the book are identical with contemporary martyrological narratives about the relationship of Catholics to the Elizabethan regime. There is a tendency to suppose that those who opposed the ecclesiastical program of Elizabeth's government were motivated exclusively by “a sense of justice and love of freedom.” This was certainly what many contemporary Catholics said. But others would have seen it differently. They would not have agreed that “fevered nocturnal searches” (3) were the product merely of brutality. Robert Persons, the friend of Campion, was also Persons the friend of Spain and Persons the republican ideologue. Indeed, the entire mid-Elizabethan Jesuit mission to England was politically problematical and deeply controversial. The Jesuit general himself had severe reservations about the consequences of allowing it to proceed. We badly need other contexts and perspectives in order to interpret why Campion's “legacy” might have been a “commitment to truth, intellectual freedom and debate” (18). Otherwise we simply replicate contemporary accounts that were themselves serving elaborate rhetorical purposes. To put it bluntly, if we, in a sense, divorce these actors in late sixteenth-century politics from the parts of their surroundings with which we may feel uncomfortable (i.e., even if we also genuinely believe that they were the victims of what, to a modern way of thinking, appears to be quite sickening state-sponsored brutality), we are often left with little clue as to what their relationship with the regime, the state, and contemporary society actually was. This is clearly the case with contentious issues such as Campion's alleged confessions. These are extremely controversial (and do not even survive in their original form). They were circulated for the regime's political advantage. And yet the way they are phrased is odd. Campion allegedly admitted that he had betrayed some of his harborers but still claimed that he had not revealed the names of anyone not already known to the regime. The state's own account of Campion's confessions thus makes an otherwise quite unnecessary concession to the Jesuit. Even Persons did not directly deny them but merely said that “no man thought” the story “to be probable.” Clearly it was not true that Campion had confessed “what soever they had demaunded of him.” The regime itself, by conceding that he had not revealed “the secrets … declared” in his hosts’ houses, in effect acknowledged that he had not simply revealed all (126, 127).

The thesis of the book, then, is in many ways quite simple and clear. Transmission of manuscripts occurred among people who were not all paid-up members of a separated English Catholic community, as well as among those, for example, Sir Thomas Tresham, who clearly were. This seems fair enough, and it accords with recent thinking about the development of post-Reformation Catholicism. At the same time it leaves us slightly in the dark about the meanings of such material for those who read and kept it, other than a presumed sympathy for those who generated these poems and other literary pieces in the first place. If we posit a distinction between religion and politics and simply equate the former with purity of motive and the latter with impurity, and then use this distinction in order to determine why people behaved in certain ways, this can sometimes lead to analytical problems. This does not, of itself, mean that we should assume that all contemporary religious accounts of the conflict between those on opposite sides of the confessional divide in this period were merely coded ways of asserting particular kinds of political imperative and therefore not really “true.” But it is necessary to keep perpetually in mind that both those who generated these accounts and those who received them would have attributed a wide range of meanings and values to their content and would not have read them, as it were, in a vacuum.