As Herbert Butterfield observed many decades ago, a rigidly sectarian account of Catholicism as national bogeyman has long animated the historiography of England. Typed (depending on the chronological moment under study) as either Roman, or Spanish, or French, Catholicism was reliably portrayed as seditious, tyrannical, or superstitious. The recent historiography of English Catholicism has gone some distance toward rectifying this unsatisfactory state of affairs. Books by Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Steve Pincus, and others have successfully introduced some nuance into our understanding of the early modern Catholic world. If a parochial “little Protestant England” perspective on Europe’s majority Christian religion still persists in some quarters of the discipline, it no longer typifies the best work.

Stefania Tutino’s contribution to this development has been a series of studies examining the Catholic intellectuals grouped around the fascinating figure of Thomas White, alias “Blacklo” White (1593–1676). Descended from an old Catholic family and trained as a priest at various English colleges abroad, he became a controversial philosopher and theologian. His great cause was the reconciliation of the new mechanistic science with the philosophical synthesis attained by Aristotle. He also attached himself to Gallican ecclesiology and attempted to advance an English variant of the national Catholic model against the universalizing jurisdictional aspirations of the seventeenth-century papacy. Philosophically and politically, the Jesuits were his lifelong enemies.

Around White gathered a set of devotees drawn to his reforming program. The most notable of these were the Caroline courtier and natural philosopher-cum-alchemist Kenelm Digby, and the English priest Henry Holden, a divinity professor at the Sorbonne. These three figures formed the core of the Blackloist cohort. They moved in rarefied philosophical circles both at home and on the Continent, rubbing elbows with luminaries such as Marin Mersenne, Thomas Hobbes, and John Wallis. They also made political waves during the English Civil War, when they jettisoned their initial royalism in an effort to extract religious toleration from Oliver Cromwell. White’s main work of political theory—The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655)—defended these efforts on contractarian and quasi-Hobbesian grounds. The Stuarts never forgave this act of betrayal.

It is not entirely accurate to state, as Tutino does, that scholars have given the Blackloists “very little attention.” Older works on English Catholicism tended to brush past them, but they have been discussed by R. I. Bradley and Beverly Southgate, and their links to Thomas Hobbes have drawn considerable interest. Moreover, there are a number of good, unpublished dissertations on the Blackloists (by R. A. Jordan and A. J. Brown). It is true, however, that the scholarship has been somewhat scattered, and a synthetic treatment of their various philosophical and political projects has been needed. Tutino’s will not constitute the final word on the subject, but it has considerable merit.

The most impressive feature of her new book is its archival research. Most previous work on Blacklo has been based on the printed evidence, but Tutino has delved into both the Vatican archives and the Catholic Diocesan archives at Westminster. The trawl has produced some good results. White’s new-modeled philosophy proved deeply divisive, both at Rome and in the English Catholic chapter. Tutino has dug up some interesting and hitherto unknown correspondence about the machinations that eventually resulted in Blacklo’s condemnation before the Inquisition.

Interpretively, Tutino places Blackloism in various contexts, chief among them the long struggle over papal and royal allegiance within the English chapter, and the Gallican ecclesiology tradition. But her main contribution is a chapter on Thomas White’s philosophical connections to the scientific community at Interregnum Oxford. This latter group has been much studied as forerunner of the Royal Society. To those familiar with the revisionist historiography of early modern science (and Tutino might have done more with this literature), it will not surprise to learn that Oxford natural philosophers such as John Wallis, Seth Ward, and John Wilkins married an enthusiasm for new experimental knowledge with a persistent attachment to certain aspects of Aristotelianism. But Tutino has done a service by establishing the high regard in which Thomas White was held by these figures, whose heroic place in the history of modern science would until recently have disallowed such an association.

Tutino’s chapters on the Blackloist political maneuverings are informative, and add some detail to the known story, but are less original. An appendix offers a transcription of White’s The Grounds of Obedience and Government together with some useful explanatory notes.

A few words of criticism are required. Tutino’s prose is, at its best, workmanlike. At its worse it is marred by distracting errors of syntax and punctuation that either author or editor should have eradicated. As a narrative, the book meanders a bit too freely. One also wonders about its brevity. Tutino notes, on several occasions, that various aspects of her topic would repay further investigation. It is not clear why she did not offer us more than the present 140 pages pursuing some of these lines of inquiry. In short, Tutino is well positioned to write the definitive volume on the Blackloists, but this volume is perhaps too hasty to merit that designation. That said, it is a worthwhile study, which adds to our knowledge of English Catholicism’s complex intellectual and political history.