Early Modern Catholicism. An Anthology of Primary Sources. Edited by Robert S. Miola.

Abstract

ONE would like to begin by endorsing all the endorsements that appear on the jacket of this seemingly magisterial anthology of Early Modern Catholic authors. Unfortunately, it is all too riddled with tendentious readings of what are presented as ‘primary sources’—sources that are never allowed to speak for themselves, but are ever subjected to biased authorial interpretation both in the general Introduction and in the particular introductions to each section, divided as they are into various literary genres. In them the editor is swayed not so much by the sources themselves as by such modern critical tendencies as may be gathered from the names and dates of the majority of entries in his excessively detailed bibliography. Thus the editor begins his Introduction with a minute scanning of such terms as ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’, ‘Renaissance’, ‘Reformation’, and ‘Counter-Reformation’, expressing his reservations over each of them, adding that ‘any assessment of Catholicism in the period has to be flexible enough to accommodate pluralities’ (29), but this is a caution that is suggested to him not by any of the sources he presents but by modern authors who make their appearance in his bibliography. Rather, it is Edmund Campion who, as he implicitly admits, draws the clear contrast in the course of his disputes in the Tower, ‘I do know you to be a Protestant, and you me to be a Catholic’ (67). It is also Campion's colleague Robert Persons who subsequently (in 1592) identifies three distinct religions in England as ‘Catholic, Protestant, and Puritan’.