It is virtually axiomatic in early modern studies, particularly ecclesiastical ones, that the more trouble a particular interest group, clique or faction caused, the more records they are likely to have generated. Of course, some people say that too much attention is paid to troublemakers, and that it is only because of the disproportionate bulk of the archival material for these troublesome people that historians frequently ignore the conformist moderate middle and the contemporary via media which were, in ‘reality’, much more representative of contemporary opinions about controverted clerical and ecclesiological issues.

Whether this is true or not, it is undoubtedly the case that, however numerically limited, the institute created by Mary Ward in the early years of the seventeenth century, for all its professions of moderation and its concerns merely with the education of children and the pursuit of needlework, caused a quite incredible amount of strife in the Catholic community and beyond, and the difficulties they caused were recorded in some detail. What is also clear is that the recovery of the records generated by Mary Ward's women tells one a great deal about that community and the English national Church and, indeed, about the Counter-Reformation.

This magnificent, vast, carefully edited, annotated and indexed edition of the records associated with and produced by the Institute is, therefore, a massive and scholarly addition to the stock of material available to historians of this period. It was always the case that the extent of the Ward archive tended to outweigh the extent of the secondary literature narrating and analysing the organisation that she created. Up until this point, relatively little was known about it because of problems of accessibility and the number of repositories in which the relevant manuscript material was retained. At least, now, that archive has been made available in print to scholars. It will be quite indispensable not just for those who are beginning to work in some depth on English convents and other religious institutions in exile in the period after the Reformation but also for those who are concerned with the gender history of the period.

I fear that in a review of this length it is simply impossible to give any real idea of the scope of this vast and commendable undertaking, or how far it must have been a collaborative exercise over many years in the location and transcription of manuscripts from an extraordinary range of archives. But it is clear from the documents published here how wired into contemporary political ecclesiastical structures the Ward institute was, and how the disputes within the Catholic community were closely related to wider contemporary political issues. We get a sense of the size of Ward's family (conveyed in part by the reproduction of extant family wills and related documents in local records offices, from 1572 until 1606), her social milieu and her clerical contacts. Among these clerical friends was John Mush, who had previously served as a confessor-chaplain to Margaret Clitherow, an equally aggressive Yorkshire woman with a stake in separatist Catholicism.

The volumes then proceed chronologically through the documents which record the foundation and the early development of the institute, in fact from the date when Mary Ward went to Flanders. In particular there is a long series of sermons and spiritual advices delivered to Mary Ward's company by the Jesuit Roger Lee. In the correspondence to and from Flanders we can see, for example, the links between Ward and the extraordinary Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal, someone who displayed a very similar style of female aggressive passivity in the face of the statute law against recusant separatism.

Ward's institute was particularly controversial because it could be seen as a female version of the Society of Jesus. Ward had several prominent Jesuit supporters, although other Jesuits were less certain about the wisdom of the Society's association with her. The documents printed here cover very thoroughly the long-drawn-out duel in Rome between Mary Ward and her patrons and supporters on the one hand (whose petitions in her favour are liberally reproduced here) and those members of the English Catholic community who believed that her institute was a catalyst for many of the disorders and instances of indiscipline among English Catholics which it was the papacy's duty to correct by, inter alia, setting up a Catholic episcopal hierarchy in England for the first time since the Elizabethan settlement of religion in 1559. This battle between the institute and its critics, which moved to Rome in the early 1620s, coincided with the diplomatic battles over the proposed Anglo-Spanish dynastic union which would, had it succeeded, have seen Prince Charles wed the infanta Maria of Spain. Its failure, and the substitution of the Anglo-French dynastic marriage which brought Henrietta Maria to England, were a source of considerable disappointment to Ward. Ward's negotiations with the papacy for confirmation of her institute continued after the Anglo-Spanish project failed; indeed they dragged on until an order for the suppression of the institute was issued in 1630. The considerable weight of documentation provided here demonstrates the increasing mutual irritation between the members of the institute and the papal officials who dealt with them. The third volume deals with the proceedings of the Holy Office against the institute between 1631 and 1637, and then prints documents from 1637–45. The fourth volume prints Barbara Ward's life of Mary Ward, and the rest of this volume is taken up with a variety of indexes and appendices.

In other words, here we have, in the format of course of an institutional history of the foundation of a religious order, a really scholarly contribution to a range of intellectual and historical topics within the more general field of Reformation and Counter-Reformation studies.