The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640 by A. F. Allison, and D. M. Rogers

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 275 ignore it as a document appropriate to scholars who are having to readjust to visual persuasion. David M. Loades University College ofNorth Wales Bangor, Givynedd The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640. Volume II: Works in English with Addenda and Corrigenda to Volume I. By A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers. (Brookfield, Vermont: Scolar Press. 1994. Pp. xxxv, 250. S121.95) In 1956 Antony Allison and David Rogers published their Catalogue of Catholic Books in English printed abroad or secretly in England 1558— 1640. It soon became familiar to scholars of the period as "A&R" and had an enormous influence on historians and literary students of die Elizabethan and early Stuart periods of English history. In the years since, besides numerous other scholarly activities, they have been engaged in a revision of their masterpiece . The first volume devoted to books in languages other than English appeared in 1989 (see the review in this journal, ante, LXXVI [January, 1990], 134—135). Now this second volume of works in English, as well as a few in Welsh, Gaelic, and Scots, completes the revision. We have already seen the fruits of their researches in the second edition of the Short Title Catalogue ofEnglish Books 1475-1640 (STC) published in three volumes by the Bibliographical Society of London from 1986 to 1991. The editors ofthe volume in hand acknowledge the co-operation they received from the late Professor W. A. Jackson and Miss Katherine Panzer, who did the STC revision. Indeed, the notices ofCatholic books in STC are vastly improved. But there is still a need for the fuller entries we have in this volume together with the very useful indices of titles, dates of publication, publishersbooksellers , and proper names. They give up to fifteen locations for each item, and the notes accompanying each entry give authorities for authorship and reference to scholarly works. All bibliographies are imperfect, but it is difficult to imagine one closer to perfection than this one. It will be a standard work for decades to come. As one would expect in the age of the Counter-Reformation, a little under half of the items deal with theological controversy. But spirituality and works of religious devotion and popular piety are the next biggest block. There are twenty-nine editions of the Manual of Prayers and sixteen editions of the Primer or Office ofthe Virgin Mary. There are also spiritual treatises on prayer and asceticism by Alonso of Madrid, St. Augustine, St. Albert the Great, John of Avila, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, as well as two 276 BOOK REVIEWS editions of the Douay Old Testament and five editions of the Rheims New Testament to limit ourselves to the first two letters of the alphabet. In all I count about a hundred treatises of high spirituality, almost two hundred and fifty treatises of religious devotion, thirty-three catechisms, and seventy lives of saints or accounts of Catholic history, notably accounts of Catholic martyrs. That is almost half of the total corpus of 932 items. Some of these books were among the first imported by English-speaking Catholics of North America. Here we are at the headstream of American Catholic piety. Some readers will regret that the old "A&R" numbers have been changed, but there is a concordance for easy reference. I was disappointed that the authors/translators/editors were not identified as lay or clerical or religious. It is important to know such details in studying the Franciscan or Benedictine English spiritual tradition. There are some hints in the entries and the index of proper names, but often one has to go to another source to know the background of the author or translator. But these are small imperfections in a jewel of scholarship. Thomas H. Clancy, SJ. JesuitArchives, New Orleans Later Calvinism: International Perspectives. Edited by W. Fred Graham. [Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, Volume XXII.] (Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc. 1994. Pp. xii, 564. 845.00.) The twenty-six essays in this volume, though disparate in the subjects treated, do form a unity; all deal with some aspect of Calvinism during the years following Calvin's death. The...