In the nearly two decades since Claire Walker's foundational study of the early modern English convents (Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe [Palgrave Macmillan, 2003]), literary and historical work on these exilic communities has flourished. Most recently, monographs on the English convents have explored particular genres of writing, such as Victoria Van Hyning's Convent Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 2019), or specific orders, such as Laurence Lux-Sterritt's English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2017), to name just two examples of the scholarly work made possible by attending to focused aspects of the convent archives. James E. Kelly's English Convents in Catholic Europe offers a broad-ranging overview of these possibilities, drawing on archival materials from multiple communities across two centuries in order to situate the English convents more generally “in a wider context of Catholic reform” (9). The result is a volume that elucidates the current state of the field and should prove a valuable resource to scholars interested in staking out its future directions.

Kelly's work as a conference organizer, scholarly editor, and former member of the “Who Were the Nuns?” project has positioned him well to offer a learned contextualization of the early modern English convents. In six chapters, a detailed introduction, and a brief conclusion, Kelly demonstrates his extensive knowledge of the convent archives and the scholarly conversation that has developed around them. He describes his project as one of both synthesis and reorientation, bringing together “the different strands of this burgeoning scholarship to offer a new and much-needed overview of the English convents from the start of the exile movement at the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of its main phase at the end of the eighteenth century” while suggesting that other scholars have not done enough to recognize the convents as “vigorous expressions of Tridentine Catholicism” (8, 10). His book is especially effective in the synthetic mode: by drawing together detailed descriptions of the practices through which English nuns’ religious lives were constituted, Kelly sheds new light on the particularities of these convents and their close relationship to the broader project of the Catholic Reformation.

In chapters organized “to take the reader through the experience of a nun” (16), Kelly provides a wealth of information describing aspects of monastic life, from initial entry to devotional practices. His first chapter offers a strong foundation for the book in its case study approach. Here, Kelly investigates “convent recruitment from Essex and the surrounding region” in order to “test the notion that the type of clergy missioning in a specific area in England might affect convent recruitment in mainland Europe” (26). By exploring the Jesuit influence in one region—and grounding that focus in the influential Petre family's patronage—Kelly is able to make a broader case for how “the strong Jesuit persuasion that dominated the family's lives . . . subsequently influenced those Catholics who lived in the surrounding geographical area and in turn affected the shape of convent recruitment patterns” (40). This work helps develop a fuller picture of how individual nuns may have been drawn to a particular convent and how the spiritual practices of a given community could develop in relationship to broader geopolitical factors.

Kelly's second chapter explores the relationship of the English convents to the Council of Trent's enforcement of enclosure, suggesting that “English women religious actually embraced it with fervour” (52). Kelly's analysis of the available evidence also reveals the importance of nuancing this claim, as he later acknowledges that “enclosure at the English convents could be somewhat porous on a number of levels” (57). Kelly's best chapters foreground the many fascinations of convent archives, exploring material culture in the convents (chapter 3) and analyzing the finances supporting the communities in exile (chapter 4). The former effectively supports Kelly's central claim for a significant “European Catholic Reformation influence on English women religious,” and the latter offers an important update of Walker's work (80). Kelly's longer timeline enables him to draw on detailed materials surviving from the eighteenth century and provides a fuller picture of the convents’ practices across two centuries. Chapter 5, on relics and martyrdom, is similarly expansive in its exploration of convent records, but Kelly also cites Thomas Robinson's seventeenth-century The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon—designed to attack the English Bridgettines—as if it were an authoritative source. While he calls the pamphlet “scurrilous,” he nonetheless treats its descriptions of relics as evidence equivalent to the Lierre Carmelites’ and Bruges Augustinians’ own records, which raises important questions about how scholars might best evaluate claims that appear in polemical materials (148, 154).

In his engagements with other scholars, Kelly is most often generously, and admirably, citational. As a result, moments when he frames his arguments against other scholars seem a bit out of place. For example, when Kelly critiques a “gender-conflict” approach to the convents, it is not entirely clear why he uses terminology drawn from sociology to characterize other historians or to differentiate his own work (166). When he quotes an example of what he sees as this approach—when another scholar suggests that one nun's “patronage of the secular clergy offers one of the clearest examples of nuns’ capacity to exert influence over those generally perceived to be in charge of them”—it sounds quite similar to his own claim that “the convents were not meek victims of male superiority but could and did hold their own when they thought they were being shortchanged” (166, 171). In both cases, exploring the operations and perceptions of gender is an essential piece of a larger project that seeks to understand life and religious practice in convents, and Kelly does not need to accuse others of reductive analysis in order to make the case for his own valuable contributions.

In a scholarly ecosystem marked by competitive standards of assessment, the pressures to make an intervention—and to do so by opposing other scholars—can overshadow the significant merits of work that provides a deeply knowledgeable exploration of the field. By describing the rich archival materials of the early modern English convents and drawing upon decades of scholarly work in doing so, Kelly offers a meaningful contribution to the study of the early modern English convents and their relationship to the Catholic Reformation—one that will guide and sustain future research into these communities and the nuns who entered them.