Although the association between orality and post-Reformation English Catholicism follows naturally from the kind of censorship and repression recusants suffered, Alison Shell's Oral Culture is the first book-length study of how Catholics shaped—and were shaped by—oral traditions in early modern England. Shell's primary aim is to examine how various types of popular print reveal the ways early modern English Catholics expressed a “stubborn desire to talk … sing … and act themselves into recusancy” (169) and to further consider how Protestants responded to such recalcitrance. Drawing on a range of genres and forms, from sacrilege narratives and Gothic novels, to spells, charms, and other types of folklore, to ballads and libels, verse polemic, laments, mottoes, motets, puns, narrative poems, and popular anecdotes, the book offers a rare and illuminating glimpse into the oral cultures of recusant life.

The relatively unruly archive suggested by the above list is given form in the introduction through the rubric “popular mnemonic,” a term designed to show the “practical effectiveness” and “social operations” of such speech acts (20). As the term suggests, one of the most important functions of early modern Catholic orality was to keep the pre-Reformation past alive in the present, even when that effort was not explicitly nostalgic, which Shell insists it was often not. One of the advantages offered by such a study of “popular mnemonic” is that it concretely demonstrates that English Catholic culture was shaped not just by gentry and priests but by individuals from many levels of society.

The first of four chapters examines the sacrilege narrative or “a story which demonstrates God's providence by showing the dire consequences of violating or demeaning a person, object, or place publicly dedicated to worship of God” (23). Usually studied as a subordinate part of the Gothic novel, Shell inverts critical convention by first considering the sacrilege anecdote as a form unto itself. Beginning with Sir Henry Spelman's The History and Fate of Sacrilege (1698), Shell observes that anxiety about owning appropriated Church lands manifests largely as a concern over posterity. Eventually connecting this anxiety over posterity in the sacrilege anecdote to concerns about genealogy in the Gothic novel, Shell first adduces Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House and a lyric by Patrick Carey to demonstrate two different ways such anxiety informs pre-Gothic literary depictions of appropriated Church buildings. After readings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and the various sacrilege narratives surrounding Netley Abbey in Hampshire, chapter 1 concludes by arguing that anxieties about Catholicism in the Gothic novel should not be overlooked as a metaphor for some other anxiety, because, after all, “what distinguishes the late eighteenth century from previous periods in England is, precisely, the … increasing conspicuousness and legal toleration for Catholics” (52). While this example of the purloined letter principle is highly provocative, its ability to explain the uncanny power of sacrilege narratives goes largely untested in Shell's essentially historical approach to the Gothic novel.

Chapter 2 turns to an examination of oral modes that were designed to have a prophylactic or magical meaning. Focusing particular attention on how Protestants fashioned such folkloric modes as dangerously popish, this chapter discusses how spells, incantations, dirges, folkloric collections, and prophecies became associated with Catholic superstitions. Admirably attentive to localities, Shell includes a section discussing the importance of place to the formation of folkloric culture—a culture she concludes that both Protestant and Catholic orthodoxies distanced themselves from.

Chapters 3 and 4 argue that an oral culture of Catholic dissent served as a means of resistance and that members of varying levels of society participated within this culture such that it appears to have provided an effective means of popularizing recusant opposition to Protestant authority. Focusing on religious controversy written in verse form, chapter 3 describes how such poetry was couched in metrical forms that “aided memorisation and could be sung” (83). The advantage of these forms, Shell explains, is their versatility and labile quality and that they are difficult to censor. Part of Shell's aim here is to emphasize how early modern writers tended to distinguish between religious controversy written in prose and that written in meter and to show how the latter often gave rise to debates about form as well as theme. The overall result of this attention to style, Shell asserts, is a deepened sensitivity to “the mechanics of controversy” (106). Indeed, what is ultimately demonstrated in chapter 3 is how the Reformation concern with words, texts, and meanings affected not only humanist exegetes, but also the readers, writers, and oral disseminators of verse controversy.

Chapter 4 examines how the patterns of exemplarity provided by Catholic martyrs were communicated by “a wide range of material intended for oral transmission” (115). This particular branch of Catholic oral culture was especially concerned, Shell argues, in “celebrating martyrs and making confessors,” meaning those who announce their recusancy either in public or in private. The aim of orally transmitted works designed to express and inspire a martyrological ideal bears witness to the collective nature of the Catholic exemplia being promulgated in recusant culture. It is thus significant that the book's most intriguing analyses center around the onomastic puns used in representations of martyrs, where the apparent contingencies of an individual name become signs of a universally relevant exemplarity.

The conclusion takes the limitations of any study of oral tradition as the occasion to address the very question of tradition itself, a question hotly debated during the Reformation. Taking John Dryden as her test case, Shell shows, among other things, how even one and the same person could hold competing ideas about the value of accrued tradition. Like the book as a whole, the conclusion is informed by a rich set of archival documents that are used to illuminate—and be illuminated by—canonical works, thereby producing an image, however necessarily fragmentary, of an oral culture whose afterlife is still, in strangely intriguing ways, with us. Also like the book as a whole, the conclusion reveals an unusual degree of insight into where the field needs to go. Even in those rare moments where Shell's analyses of the stylistic features of popular oral forms becomes strained, or when she uncritically suggests that historically responsible interpretations of martyr stories necessarily preclude critiques of the ideology of martyrdom, the picture of the early modern period that emerges feels new and in need of further discovery. I thus suspect that this important book will be thumbed and cited with the same frequency and enthusiasm as Shell's first, influential work on early modern English Catholicism.