“And Touching Our Society”: Fashioning Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England. By Thomas M. McCoog S.J. Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods 3. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013. xiv + 480 pp. $95.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)And Touching Our Society: Fashioning Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England . By Thomas M. McCoog , S.J. Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods 3. Toronto : Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies , 2013. xiv + 480 pp. $95.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesTudor history in general and Elizabethan history in particular have generated a considerable degree of attention in recent years, both at the scholarly and popular levels. Jesuit history, especially pertaining to the early Society of Jesus, has also been a very fertile field in terms of both religious and cultural studies. The objective of Thomas McCoog's book is to examine multiple facets of the Jesuit mission in the Elizabethan era, focusing on various Jesuit strategies and activities in England as well as abroad. This is a collection of thirteen essays which, while in some ways interconnected, focus on specific individuals, strategies, developments, and conflicts. As such, this approach is not a comprehensive study of the Elizabethan Jesuit mission, but rather a combination of specialized topics that collectively broaden our understanding of this significant enterprise. In the preface the author states that eleven of these articles have been previously published in various venues, but he makes clear that these have been re-worked and updated, including the deletion of repetitive background information (although a certain amount of repetition does remain and is perhaps unavoidable). In the introduction the author discusses some of the general historical background and historiography, especially as related to the specific essay topics. While this provides a certain foundation, a bit more might have been said in order to place this mission in its broader late sixteenth-century, Renaissance, and Reformation contexts.Even so, one of the real strengths of this collection is the breadth and depth of its scholarship on the Elizabethan Jesuits. As is clear from the extensive bibliography as well as from the fulsome and detailed footnotes, McCoog is a very gifted archivist and historian. The archival and published primary sources are particularly impressive in both their quality and quantity. The collection of secondary sources is also quite extensive. The articles, as is clear from the footnotes, are heavily grounded in primary sources. While the author might have given a bit more background and context in some of the footnotes with regard to various secondary sources and historiographical debates, the overall scholarship here is well grounded and gives the reader a fair degree of confidence that, whether or not one agrees with some of the author's particular judgments or conclusions, they are based on extensive scholarly evidence. …