Henry Piers’s Continental Travels, 1595–1598 represents the first published edition of a little-known tract amongst the Rawlinson manuscripts (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 83). Entitled ‘A discourse of HP his travelles’ and written by the Irish gentleman Henry Piers in the early seventeenth century, this tract recounts a journey at once physical and spiritual. It describes Piers’s departure from Dublin in June 1595, his voyage to Rome via the Low Countries, Germany, Austria and northern Italy, and his subsequent return via Spain to Ireland in 1598. The account is replete with anecdotal details of European churches, monuments and cities, stand-offs with murderous villains and pirates, narrow escapes from storms, and the nature of daily life within the Jesuit-led English colleges in Rome, Madrid, Valladolid and Seville. However, the most remarkable aspect of the ‘Discourse’ is the way Piers’s travel account is woven together with a narrative of his parallel spiritual journey along ‘the pathewaye of true religion’ (p. 216)—his conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism.

Brian Mac Cuarta’s edition of the text is clear, readable and helpfully annotated with details of contemporary textual alterations, explanations of unusual lexicon, and biographical and historical glosses. In a concise introduction, Mac Cuarta supplies an overview of the ‘Discourse’ and the textual sources upon which its author drew in compiling it, as well as outlining the provenance of the manuscript itself. Using sources mined from Irish archives and a range of printed primary and secondary material, Mac Cuarta reconstructs the familial, social, and political background of the author. Born of English Protestant parents who settled in Ireland in the mid-sixteenth century, Henry Piers was exposed to Catholicism long before making his Continental voyage through a number of different channels: his relationship with the prominent ‘Old English’ magnate Christopher Nugent, his engagement with the Gaelic community through his role as seneschal in County Westmeath, and the marriage of his sister into a Catholic merchant family with strong links with English recusancy. As a result, Piers began to forge connections with a community of recusant Catholics that straddled the Irish Sea. These connections, together with his growing dissatisfaction with the divisions he discerned within the Church of England, encouraged Piers to make a trip to Rome—an opportunity both to explore his shifting religious beliefs freed from political and familial pressures towards Protestant conformity, and to witness the grandeur of Catholic worship first-hand. He finally made his formal conversion at the hands of a Jesuit of the English College in Rome.

Mac Cuarta provides a succinct overview of the religious and political context for each leg of Piers’s journey, thereby highlighting the potential of the ‘Discourse’ to speak to several different historiographical fields. Piers’s narrative will be of considerable interest for its unique, layperson’s perspective on late sixteenth-century intra-Catholic debates regarding the issue of political loyalty. In particular, it demonstrates the extent to which Catholics such as Piers who remained loyal to Elizabeth I faced opposition not only from Protestants, but also from many of their more militant co-religionists. Piers’s refusal to acknowledge the Nine Years War as an Irish Catholic crusade against the English Crown raised suspicions regarding the veracity of his conversion following his arrival in Rome, and led to him being denounced to the Inquisition. However, despite such difficulties, the ‘Discourse’ also bears testament to the vitality of English and Irish Catholicism. Piers encountered individuals throughout Europe with whom he had first made contact within the recusant community in Ireland, and several of these compatriots offered assistance during his difficult journey. In this respect, Henry Piers’s Continental Travels resonates with recent scholarship positing the existence of a remarkably connected transnational community of English and Irish Catholics spanning late sixteenth-century Europe.

Mac Cuarta’s edition of Piers’s ‘Discourse’ is also significant for what it reveals about the level of engagement by an Anglo-Irish Catholic layman with the broader European Counter-Reformation. Not only do his frequent tangents discussing controverted Catholic doctrines echo the arguments of contemporary Jesuit polemicists, but Piers explicitly references works by Counter-Reformation divines such as Robert Bellarmine and Cesare Baronio. Piers was also deeply acquainted with another iconic Counter-Reformation text—Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. He provides an extended description of the work and explains how, upon hearing of his father’s death whilst abroad, he found comfort in making the Exercises himself.

However, it is as an example of early modern lay conversion that Henry Piers’s Continental Travels will be of most interest to historians and literary scholars alike. Recent scholarship on this topic has been particularly concerned with the ways in which conversion experiences were recounted by contemporaries and the rhetorical, stylistic, and polemical strategies they employed in doing so. In this respect Piers’s ‘Discourse’, which blends travel writing with a conversion narrative, is especially notable.

More details of Piers’s experiences following his return home might have granted a deeper insight into the social, political, and economic repercussions of his conversion. Piers himself refers suggestively to the ‘troubles crosses or damadges wch I have sustained since I came into this land [i.e. Ireland]’ (p. 216), but Mac Cuarta offers only a brief allusion as to what these difficulties might have been. Further reflection upon Piers’s possible motivations for writing the ‘Discourse’ within the fraught religio-political situation in early seventeenth-century Ireland, and especially the extent to which this context may have shaped his narrative, might also have been helpful. Nevertheless, Brian Mac Quarta has provided a brilliantly edited resource for early modernists with considerable potential to enhance our understanding of a range of different topics.