There are some moments in early modern historical debate where Elisha makes a bid to assume Elijah's mantle. As the title to Michael Questier's book suggests, John Bossy's landmark study The English Catholic community, 1570–1850 (1975) is among his main inspirations, but the two are methodologically very different. Among the great strengths of Bossy's book is the longue durée account it gives of its subject, and its author's talent for generalisation. Questier, on the other hand, focuses on one family in particular, the Brownes of Cowdray and Battle Abbey in Sussex, over the relatively short time span of less than a century. The book is packaged in a way that occludes this focus, which may betray a continued sense that studies of aristocratic Catholic families are not quite academically respectable, produced more by the Lady Priestholes of this world than by serious historians. If so, this is a pity: it underestimates the contribution made to post-Reformation English Catholic history by such denominationally-inflected family historians as Julia Roundell, whose work on the Brownes underpins this study. Moreover, as Questier explains, focusing on one family is a good way of understanding the general circumstances within which early modern English Catholics found themselves: ‘kinship networks … were particularly important to Catholics, for whom they represented a means of investing in the social and political establishment from which in many senses they were excluded’. Focusing on the Brownes provides a way not only into the wider Catholic community, but the world beyond. Questier looks beyond family connections to examine the aristocratic household at its most inclusive and the patronage networks operated by the Browne family, coming up with – to employ his useful phrase – an ‘entourage-based’ model for shaping his book. The Brownes and their contacts figure prominently in stories played out at international, national and local levels. To give one example, the Appellant controversy of the late 1590s and early 1600s, when Jesuits and secular priests clashed over differing conceptions of clerical authority, tends to be discussed as if all its principal actors were clerics, but Questier argues convincingly that the controversy enabled the second Viscount Montague to be thought of as a future community leader among English Catholics. Back at the ranch, the Brownes' family seats could be seen by unsympathetic contemporaries as a hotbed of popery: under the chatelaineship of Magdalen Browne, Viscountess Montague, Battle Abbey became known as ‘Little Rome’. Lady Magdalen's biography, published by her chaplain Richard Smith in 1609, is one of the relatively few substantial primary sources that a historian of the family can draw upon. But Catholicism and community as a whole is a bravura demonstration of how to piece together a coherent and absorbing narrative from widely dispersed and often bitty sources – and its author's bracingly sardonic asides and flair for character study also make it something of a page-turner.