Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, ed. James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

Abstract

This book is the outcome of the first international bi-annual symposium on early modern Catholicism that was jointly run by the University of Durham and the University of Notre Dame in 2013. The two editors, James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, state in the introduction that the purpose of the collection is to establish that early modern English Catholicism can be defined through three key themes—identity, memory and counter-reformation—and this aim is generally achieved throughout the volume. The first part of the book deals with how English Catholics sought to preserve their religious and national identity. Brad Gregory’s essay on situating early modern English Catholicism asserts that English Catholic identity was affected by chronology, geography and the sociological and theological aspects of Catholicism in the early decades after the Reformation, affirming that ‘English Catholicism’ included Welsh, Irish and Scottish Catholics. Gregory’s central claim is that English Catholicism can only be understood by seeing it as a part of European history, and he disputes John Bossy’s hypothesis that post-Reformation English Catholicism did not exist until 1570. Gabriel Glickman’s chapter examines how Catholics explored the concept of British identity in the long eighteenth century. Glickman convincingly demonstrates that, despite the complex relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland which pre-dated the Reformation, mutual cultural relations between these countries allowed networks, commerce and devotional ideas to be exchanged domestically and internationally. The other two chapters scrutinise the ways in which religious orders constructed English Catholic identity. James E. Kelly’s chapter describes English convents in Europe offering an avenue for nuns to preserve their English Catholic identity by acting as receptacles for the growing demand in relic collecting; he provides numerous examples of nuns rescuing relics from destruction, which they then used as aids to memorialise the Catholic Church’s history. Thomas M. McCoog’s chapter on the Society of Jesus and the vicars apostolic contends that the English secular clergy exploited the suppression of the Jesuits in Liège and St Omers for the benefit of their own seminaries, which showed how these fractious relationships had an impact on English Catholic identity.