Collected here in a developed form are eleven of the papers that were presented at a conference held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in October, 2002. Of the four editors and eleven contributors, eleven are specialists in English literature; of the other four, one, Caroline Hibbard is a historian; another, Peter Davidson, is a professor of Renaissance Studies; Jane Stevenson a professor of Latin; and Heather Wolfe a curator of manuscripts. Nevertheless, historians can learn much from most of these essays.

The introduction, written by the editors, presents an excellent overview of the historiography of the Catholic presence in early modern England. In the first essay, Davidson studies recusant Catholic spaces—that is, rooms, buildings, chapels, and even prison cells—not only in England but also in Scotland, Rome, and Valladolid that are identifiable in their carved and painted decorations, symbols, inscriptions, and architectural designs. He dwells on Sir Thomas Tresham's Triangular Lodge at Rushton, Northamptonshire, and Alexander Pope's grotto at Winchcombe. Stevenson, in “Women Catholics and Latin Culture,” considers both nuns in convents on the Continent and secular women in families—especially mothers teaching their children—and gives examples of women who demonstrated an ability to read and write Latin in prose and verse; the language identified them with their religious heritage. With nineteen photographs (unfortunately black and white) Sophie Holroyd scrutinizes the ornate vestments embroidered by Helena Wintour (d. 1670) for their design, concept, choice of colors and materials, symbolism, and iconography. Through a parallel reading of the Jesuit Henry Hawkins's emblem book, Partheneia Sacra, and the gentlewoman's images, especially flowers in the Marian garden, Holroyd sheds light on the latter's devotional practices, in which veneration of the Immaculate Conception was prominent. Under the title, “A Cosmopolitan Court in a Confessional Age: Henrietta Maria Revisited,” Hibbard offers a fresh view of the queen's life prior to the Scottish crisis and furnishes both a long introduction on the internationalism of royal courts and a broad survey of the literature on the reign of Charles I. The French queen's chapel at Somerset House was the center of her patronage of English Catholics for which she was demonized by Protestants and identified as the principal enemy of the public good.

In “Gender and Recusant Melancholia in Robert Southwell's Mary Magdalene's Funeral Tears” (of which only brief excerpts are given), Gary Kuchar contends that Mary Magdalene's experience at Christ's tomb is a prefiguring of the recusants' endurance “of social isolation and religious abandonment while providing a model example of how one should cope with such marginalization” (136). The author also detects Southwell's anxieties over female empowerment in the tension between the Augustinian epistemology represented by Mary's ardent love and the Aristotelian ethics of moderation required by the poem's homiletic purpose. Dame Barbara Constable, a Benedictine nun at Cambrai and a prolific writer, is the subject of the essay by Wolfe, who quotes copiously from Constable's reflections on idleness, learning, prayer, and reading to illustrate her spiritual difficulties. Dame Barbara was the primary transcriber in the 1640s and ‘50s, especially of the literary contributions of Father Augustine Baker to her convent, but she also gathered materials from many authors for the use of confessors and spiritual directors, priests, monks, nuns, and lay people. Molly Murray analyzes first the early modern autobiographical narratives that recount conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism taken from the responsa of students entering the English College in Rome and then the literary implications of this formalist conversion in the autobiography of William Alabaster and his relationship to St. Augustine.

Anne M. Myers uses Father John Gerard's Autobiography of a Hunted Priest to show the meaning of relics and rosaries for the life of the Catholic body in England and maintains that the existence of a valued relic proves the existence of a believing community. Mark Netzloff, in “The English Colleges and the English Nation: [William] Allen, [Robert] Persons, and [Richard] Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism,” ponders the multiple and competing narratives of English nationhood written by Catholics and spells out the distinct ways in which Catholic polemical texts composed on the Continent formulated English national identity.

In a rather dense and opaque essay Catherine Sanok examines The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England in order to investigate the intersection of gender and nationalism. Some early modern recusant writers constructed a distinctly Catholic nationalism through narratives of female saints such as these thirty-six legends. Lastly, in “Anthony Munday's Translations of Iberian Chivalric Romances: Palmerin of England, Part I as Exemplar,” Donna B. Hamilton, setting her subject in the context of contemporary European events, shows that such translations “helped create a public sphere in which the Catholic perspective remained a competing voice and offered a counternarrative that represented the larger Catholic world positively as advantageous to England's safety and identity,” and she asserts that such views “were thoroughly consonant with Catholic loyalism” (288).

Though most of these essays are highly specialized, they all add variegated tesserae to the mosaic of early modern English Catholic culture. Footnotes are abundant and filled with references to primary and secondary sources but are inconveniently placed on pages following the body of each essay. The carefully compiled index enables the reader to trace persons, places, and concepts throughout the essays. The book should appeal to scholars in a variety of disciplines.