This is a welcome reinterpretation of the life of Edmund Campion. To some English Catholics, Campion is mainly known for his status as martyr. Previous accounts of his life strengthened that image by focusing primarily on his arrest, trial and execution in England. Yet to a wider European audience Campion was a gifted orator and disputant, whose international career was cut short by the political and religious turbulence in England. It is that much broader impact which Gerard Kilroy manages to bring to bear. He does not write a biography with the final, gruesome end in sight or even dominating; of the twelve chronological chapters, only five deal with the usual martyrological material. Instead, Kilroy sketches the life of a promising scholar who, from his early days among the London stationers, rose to stellar international fame as a court preacher at the imperial court of Rudolph ii, before he was called to England to devote his talent in preaching and debating to the English mission.

Kilroy wanted to ‘show Campion as a human being’ (p. xvi), not as a one-dimensional martyr or one reduced to only literary analysis of his written output. He succeeds in this exercise through the inclusion of previously undiscovered sources. He brings to life Campion's early years among the reformist stationers of London through material about his father. His fame in Oxford is further explored through careful analysis of rediscovered material which describes his role in the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1566. Campion's life in Prague is given more substance through student notes of his lectures. Kilroy's minutely detailed account of all this material can at times be a bit overwhelming and hard to keep track of. For a figure of such renown, the sheer volume of new material is impressive in and of itself. But Kilroy uses this material to cast a very different light on the scholar and his world. For instance, Kilroy's reconstruction of Campion's years in Bohemia adds a crucial dimension to understanding Campion and the Jesuit mission of 1580. At the imperial court and Jesuit college, Campion witnessed a very aggressive Jesuit mission, but one that took place in a mixed confessional environment. It is not unlikely that he expected a similar competitive but constructive situation back home.

This intertwining of Prague and the mission highlights one of the greatest assets of the book: through the prism of this one figure, Kilroy has managed to capture an entanglement to which historians of ‘transnationalism’ often only aspire. He delivers very charming pen sketches of the locations in which Campion resided – either in England, Ireland or Bohemia – bringing them to life and teasing out how his rooting into those places shaped him. Yet Kilroy also adroitly shows how the significance of the local does not preclude international interconnections. Looking beyond the situation in England and incorporating a clear understanding of the international context helps to make sense of events. For instance, Kilroy convincingly shows that Campion's international fame had previously been underestimated by historians and by the Elizabethan regime – to its peril, as the backlash against the execution proved. Moreover, he teases out the significance of Nicholas Sander's rebellion in Ireland in Elizabeth's clamp-down on Campion and Persons's mission in England. The importance of that timing is perhaps most telling in Persons's obscuring of it in his account of the events. Not every reader will accept Kilroy's insistence that Sander's expedition was the sole political one, and that Campion tried to steer away from all politics in the mission. In the light of the carefully considered interpretations by scholars like Michael Questier and Sandeep Kaushik of the very broad spectrum that political resistance could adopt, Campion does not look purely innocent. Yet together with our better understanding of Campion's experiences in Prague, Kilroy's careful exploration of the Irish context modifies the light in which we can study the Jesuit mission in general.

An important strand which Kilroy traced throughout his account of Campion's life is the power of words. Building on his expertise as a literary scholar, Kilroy explores it in all its forms: from Campion's first prizes as a schoolboy to his ability to reduce an execution crowd to silence; from his printed output, cherished across Europe, to the manuscript notes that enraptured students took during his lectures; from his triumphs as preacher at the imperial court to the decision to use the printing press to continue the mission once it was too dangerous to travel much more. Perhaps most evocatively, Kilroy describes how, in his last moments, Campion started to pray in Latin and was joined by the execution audience. As Kilroy remarks, Campion had been prevented from preaching (government was all too aware of his mastery of the word), so he ‘chose Latin prayers that effectively united him with the early church of the Apostles and martyrs’: the Credo and Pater Noster. Through this comment, Kilroy captures one of the poignant ways in which words were transformative to Campion. Throughout his account, Kilroy never allows the word to be reduced to mere rhetoric. Words are part of the fabric of the world that Kilroy is describing and clearly shape Campion's path.

Kilroy's ‘book is intended to reach the many admirers of Campion who are outside the academic community’ (p. xvi), a stated purpose which might have prevented him from drawing out more explicitly the wider implications of his research beyond English Catholicism. Yet it is to be hoped that others will be inspired to build on the richly detailed material provided here. The new insights into the relation between politics and religion in the sixteenth century, the meticulous attention to instrumentality of the word, and the impressive grasp of the local and international offer much food for thought.