Catholic Culture in Early Modern England

The editors of this collection, who are leading figures in early-modern Catholic studies, have brought together a superb and wide-ranging group of essays. "Culture" for this collection means writing, but also relics, interior decoration, and embroidery; "England" is more a category up for analysis than a firm demarcation—geographic, linguistic, or otherwise—as evinced in the book's reach into Latin literatures, international religious politics, and European Catholicisms. The result is a book that moves in a number of promising directions for research in the burgeoning field of early-modern Catholicism.

In the collection's lead essay, Peter Davidson focuses on what he calls "symbolically articulated spaces," buildings whose space or structure bear a "demonstrable relation to the kinds of mental or interior space articulated in contemporary books of devotion" (20). In doing so, he shifts the study of the spaces of English Catholicism beyond priest holes or domestic chapels to consider other forms of devout spatiality. In "Women Catholics and Latin Culture," Jane Stevenson demonstrates the importance of Latin literacy not only for future nuns but also for educated Catholic households and offers a useful comparison of Latin literacy in Catholic households with more familiar paradigms of Protestant gentlewomen's education. Sophie Holroyd's innovative and richly illustrated essay focuses on the embroidered vestments produced by Helena Wintour and argues that the texts and emblems of Wintour's embroidery express her devotional choices (emphasizing especially her devotion to the Blessed Virgin). Caroline Hibbard's study of Queen Henrietta Maria's court, a cosmopolitan one by any standard, emphasizes the international character of early-modern Catholicism and outlines the considerable tension between Henrietta Maria's international religious and political connections and England's post-Reformation political climate in which an insular antipopery played such an important role.

In a lucid and rich essay, Gary Kuchar proposes Mary Magdalene as an important model for the recusant subject, arguing that Robert Southwell's popular Mary Magdalene's Funeral Tears uses the shift from Mary's longing for Christ's body at his tomb to her spiritual relationship to Christ after the resurrection to comment on "the recusant experience of social isolation and religious abandonment, while providing a model example of how one should cope with such marginalization" (136). Mary's melancholy is ultimately restrained within the terms of classical moderation, suggesting, Kuchar argues, some unease with the powerful feminine spiritual model she represents. Heather Wolfe provides a detailed and fascinating study of the work of Dame Barbara Constable, who "wrote and compiled at least eleven original works and collections . . . transcribed twenty-five spiritual works, maintained her community's register of letters and instructions, and emended scribal copies of contemplative treatises" (158). Her translating and transcribing labors were crucial for ensuring the continuity of traditions of medieval English contemplative writing, and her original works suggest a similar interest in aiding Catholic devotional practice both in exile communities (lay and religious) and in England. An appendix provides a list of Constable's transcriptions and original works.

Molly Murray's essay argues for the importance of formal conventions and patterns in Catholic conversion narratives, and especially for the importance of the Augustinian model in William Alabaster's narrative of his conversion. She thereby contests the notion that early-modern life-writing became more expressive as Protestant and especially Puritan writers broke free of old constraints and expectations. An appendix provides the formal questions that those admitted to the English College in Rome had to answer, questions prompting some of the life-writing Murray examines. Anne B. Myers studies relics as discussed in John Gerard's Autobiography of a Hunted Priest; for Gerard, to document the survival, preservation, and veneration of relics is to record the ongoing and defiant vitality of the English Catholic community. Mark Netzloff analyzes English Catholic writing for its role in the early-modern conceptualization of English nationhood "as a locus of identification ('Englishness'), one that was open to contestation and reimagining, rather than as a stable or monolithic entity ('the English nation') that could be dominated by any particular community" (237; emphasis in original). He turns to the English Catholic diaspora to locate Catholic constructions of nationhood, especially in attempts to preserve "English" traditions in Catholic colleges on the continent and in Richard Verstegan's antiquarianism.

Sanok pushes the generic and temporal boundaries of self-conscious national mythologizing to include Catholic hagiographies, focusing on The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England, in which gender may have been deployed to shame masculine readers into imitations of female saints' staunch faith, even as the collection marked a difference between a feminized past and the more masculinized present. In the collection's final essay, Donna B. Hamilton studies Anthony Munday's translations of Iberian chivalric romances, in which an emphasis on an international, unified, and Catholic Christendom would seem to conflict with English Protestant fears of Catholic foreignness and contamination, whether or not particular details of Catholic worship and practice are maintained or excised in translation.

This book may legitimately claim to be the most important current essay collection on its subject. It is strongly recommended reading for any scholar interested in pursuing research in the area.