RONALD CORTHELL, FRANCES E. DOLAN, CHRISTOPHER HIGHLEY, and ARTHUR F. MAROTTI (eds). Catholic Culture in Early Modern England.

Abstract

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England is a capacious title for an appropriately diverse collection of essays. Originating in a conference at Chicago's Newberry Library in 2002, this anthology discusses: a ‘range of Catholics—laymen and laywomen, a queen, a Benedictine nun, Jesuit missionaries, and Catholic exiles; recusants, church papists, and loyalists’ (p. 15). Catholic experience is accordingly shown to be multifarious and multifaceted, with essays exploring issues as varied as architecture, Latin literacy, court politics, antiquarianism, conversion, the role of the English colleges, relics, hagiography, and romance. This breadth in and of itself tells us something about the progress being made by revisionist work: the Catholics under consideration are not simplistically or exclusively defined as ‘victims’, but rather they are recognised as a heterogeneous group whose experiences are important in their own right and also significant for a larger understanding of early modern culture. The editors of the volume (themselves veteran revisionists whose work has been instrumental in redrawing the critical paradigms of Catholicism) firmly locate its contents in a project that is ‘questioning the assumption that the Reformation was a decisive and wholly positive change and reimagining Catholics as participants in, rather than obstacles to or exiles from, post-Reformation English history’ (p. 2). Their introduction provides a pithy overview of recent research in the field (and is an excellent bibliography for interested readers). The miscellaneous selection of essays that follows does much to augment and nuance such scholarship.