Tudor history in general and Elizabethan history in particular have generated a considerable degree of attention in recent years, both at the scholarly and popular levels. Jesuit history, especially pertaining to the early Society of Jesus, has also been a very fertile field in terms of both religious and cultural studies. The objective of Thomas McCoog's book is to examine multiple facets of the Jesuit mission in the Elizabethan era, focusing on various Jesuit strategies and activities in England as well as abroad. This is a collection of thirteen essays which, while in some ways interconnected, focus on specific individuals, strategies, developments, and conflicts. As such, this approach is not a comprehensive study of the Elizabethan Jesuit mission, but rather a combination of specialized topics that collectively broaden our understanding of this significant enterprise. In the preface the author states that eleven of these articles have been previously published in various venues, but he makes clear that these have been re-worked and updated, including the deletion of repetitive background information (although a certain amount of repetition does remain and is perhaps unavoidable). In the introduction the author discusses some of the general historical background and historiography, especially as related to the specific essay topics. While this provides a certain foundation, a bit more might have been said in order to place this mission in its broader late sixteenth-century, Renaissance, and Reformation contexts.

Even so, one of the real strengths of this collection is the breadth and depth of its scholarship on the Elizabethan Jesuits. As is clear from the extensive bibliography as well as from the fulsome and detailed footnotes, McCoog is a very gifted archivist and historian. The archival and published primary sources are particularly impressive in both their quality and quantity. The collection of secondary sources is also quite extensive. The articles, as is clear from the footnotes, are heavily grounded in primary sources. While the author might have given a bit more background and context in some of the footnotes with regard to various secondary sources and historiographical debates, the overall scholarship here is well grounded and gives the reader a fair degree of confidence that, whether or not one agrees with some of the author's particular judgments or conclusions, they are based on extensive scholarly evidence.

The topics addressed here include religious, political, literary, cultural, dynastic, diplomatic, and martyrological history, and they present a range of insights into the Elizabethan Jesuit mission that will surely be of value to early modern scholars. Several essays focus on the work and impact of individual Jesuits, including one each on Everard Mercurian (the Jesuit superior general who eventually approved the English mission), the enigmatic James Bosgrave, and the gifted writer and poet Robert Southwell. Edmund Campion, perhaps the most famous and influential of the English Jesuits, merits two essays: one on his early Jesuit life in Bohemia and a second on his role as a polemicist. Two articles address issues of lifestyle, including how and where the typically peripatetic English Jesuits lived as well as what they wore as they tried to stay undercover. McCoog focuses more specifically on the intersecting worlds of religion and politics in three essays: on Queen Elizabeth's proposed French Match, the question of the queen's successor in the later years of the reign, and the ever-thorny issue of potential or actual divided loyalties to God and Caesar. International dimensions of the mission come to the forefront in essays on English Jesuits in Seville and Jesuit nuncios in Ireland, with the latter touching on aspects of the “new British history,” as related here in some interconnections between England and Ireland. In addition, an article on martyrdom and its construction brings together several areas of current scholarly interest and debate.

This is a compelling collection that enlightens the reader on many aspects of the exciting and at times perilous Jesuit mission in Elizabethan England. At the same time, the book is certainly stronger on the historical and scholarly than the literary front. While the scholarship is very impressive, the prose is a bit dense at times, as is not infrequently the case with specialized historical studies. With regard to the length of the essays, they are generally in the range of twenty to thirty pages and discuss the relevant topics in reasonable depth. The longest one, however, “Harmony Disrupted” (on the succession question), at sixty-four pages is overly long, although the last dozen pages or more include some intriguing letters from Robert Persons and Henry Garnet. In all, this is a major contribution to research and scholarship on “Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England.” It touches on a number of issues that are currently being researched and debated in the interrelated fields of early modern, Reformation, Jesuit, and Elizabethan studies.