How Catholic was the Pope? Not Pope Innocent XI, who had to compete with King James VII to appoint bishops in Ireland, but Alexander Pope, the English poet. He was born Catholic, but apart from the baroque splendours of Eloisa to Abelard there hardly seems to be a Catholic line in his poems or a Catholic bone in his body. The Dunciad (1728–1743) is arguably the most important literary work produced in Britain or Ireland in the period covered by this volume. Along with fellow-Catholic John Dryden, Pope gets a brief mention and no more. This raises in an acute way a question about the conception of British and Irish Catholic history. The ambitious series of which this is the second volume claims to be marking an emergence from a ghetto. Should we expect to see a wider range of historical matters drawn into Catholic history? Or Catholicism play a larger part in British and Irish history generally? Might major developments in cultural and intellectual life – such as the Royal Society, satire, the enlightenment generally – be profitably reconsidered from a Catholic perspective, especially when some of the leading figures have a close connection with Catholic traditions?
This second volume of the series faces the challenge of characterizing a period much less familiar to readers interested in Irish and British Catholic history than the reformation period, with the dissolution of the monasteries, the Marian reversals, the Elizabethan martyrs, and the Gunpowder Plot. The theme expressed in the subtitle, “Uncertainty and Change,” is encapsulated by Laurence Lux-Sterrit: “a time of adaptation and transformation, a time to reclaim bonds with a happier past whilst designing a new brand of Catholicism which bore the distinctive marks of a faith under siege” (p. 136). Where Catholics in the sixteenth century lived in hope of restoration, they now had to come to terms with confessional cohabitation, inflected by periods of revived hope on the one hand, and intensified hostility and persecution on the other. Gabriel Glickman observes that as commerce and trade came to replace religion as the centre of gravity of national identity, Catholics and Protestants often found themselves aligned with rather than opposed to each other (pp. 110–111).
The book’s structure echoes that of the first volume, with the opening three chapters providing the narrative framework for the themed chapters that follow. After 1697, when, Eoin Devlin tells us, “Efforts to persuade Rome to support a Jacobite restoration effectively ended” (p. 71), the story ramifies into chapters on penal laws and overseas interests, with further treatment of the eighteenth century reserved for the final two chapters. The focal points are the “Catholic moments,” the Confederation in Ireland (1641–1652) and the reign of James VII (1685–1690 in Irish chronology), and the periods of precarious survival, the Cromwellian conquest in Ireland, and the Titus Oates debacle in England. In between these crises, the process of consolidation, rehabilitation, and innovation, settling into the practice of a partially proscribed religion, went forward.
Several chapters bear testimony to the diversification of Catholic experience under varying degrees of pressure. Overseas expansion and mercantile networks, as Gabriel Glickman and Paul Monod show, offered new opportunities and freedoms to enterprising Catholics, new ways of being Catholic under Protestant rule, which fed back into the archipelago itself. Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsden treat material culture as a gauge of the climate of suspicion, when to dismantle a chalice and when to hang a banner. There are instructive chapters on architecture, music, and literature in Gaelic, Irish and Welsh, and two whole chapters, as well as two oddly conjoined half-chapters, are given over to religious houses.
Adjustment and reinvention are evident also in Catholic political thinking. Inherited theories of jurisdiction and the sources of ecclesiastical and royal authority gained or lost their purchase in the approach to the English civil war, in response to the growth of Jansenism in France or the Blackloist group in England. The question of the papal deposing power, which had so exercised controversialists in the reformation period, gave way to consideration of the constitutional basis for religious freedom. Anti-popery exhibits a similar interplay between ideology and circumstance. It invoked a scary version of papal pretensions and designs, but it was not, Adam Norton argues, a consistent element in popular mentality so much as a weapon to be used for advantage when needed.
It is not easy to judge how far current Catholic historiography, as represented by this volume, has advanced beyond its supposed former narrow confessional limits. It certainly bears a new and fresh face. The chapters attest to a lively and growing research interest. The similarities and differences, the interchanges and the mutual debts, of Catholicism in Ireland, Britain, the continent and further overseas, come under sophisticated scrutiny. The sheer complexities of circumstance and happenstance, however, leave many authors struggling to find adequate formulations or a compelling line of argument. The collection as a whole is wide-ranging rather than comprehensive, reflecting the particular interests of individual authors, so that there are numerous gaps: nothing on Irish music, little on English literature, sporadic treatment of the religious orders, especially the Jesuits. It would be ungenerous to describe the volume as premature or hastily put together, but it lacks the reach and assurance that would make it a definitive survey of the current state of the field.
