The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541-1588. "Our Way of Proceeding?" by Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS805 The Society ofJesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541-1588. "Our Way ofProceeding?" By Thomas M. McCoog, SJ. [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, Volume LX.] (Leiden: E. J. BriU. 1996. Pp. xin, 316; 7 plates.) This highly significant book may mark the beginning of a profound shift in the way that Jesuits write the history of their order and in the way they approach the history of EngUsh CathoUcism. A good bit of the credit for compelling the Jesuit historians to so modify theU views must go to recent scholars of early modern EngUsh Catholic politics such as Peter Holmes and Arnold Pritchard. Like Holmes and Pritchard before him, McCoog documents m this book what all parties must finally accept as indisputable fact: that English Jesuits like Robert Parsons worked actively and tirelessly throughout the 1580's to overthrow the poUtical and religious estabUshment of Elizabethan England. According to McCoog, such political activities began no later than mid-1581, or immediately after the coUapse of the Ul-fated 1580-81 mission that resulted in Edmund Campion's execution and Parsons' permanent exile on the Continent. McCoog contends that most of the political activity of the early 1580's, moreover , was focused on Scotland as a means of forcibly reconverting England. Parsons in particular was convinced that James VI might yet be won over to the true faith. Here McCoog is, I think, drawing upon the thesis advanced in my 1994 article on the 1580-81 debacle.' He agrees that this "Scottish strategy," as I called it, lay at the heart of Parsons' plans in the years preceding the Spanish Armada. Yet McCoog is at great pains to say that the original intention of the 1580-81 mission was pastoral. He cites the instructions given to Campion and Parsons by the Jesuit General Everard Mercurian that the missionaries were to limit their actions and conversations to reUgious matters. It was Campion's demise that served as a poUtical epiphany for Parsons, and it marked "a new phase Ui the history of EngUsh Catholics," as weU (p. 184). It also coincided with the demise of the ultra-Protestant earl of Morton and the ascendance of the Catholic duke of Lennox in Scotland, the first ofJames's three great "favorites." But qualification is in order, for Mercurian's instructions granted exceptions in cases of the Jesuits'"most faithful and trusted friends," and so poUtical conversations were permitted with those of"proven faithfulness and trustworthiness" (pp. 138-139)· Nonetheless, McCoog purports to have found no documentary evidence for any poUtical scheming on the part ofParsons prior to the dramatic events of mid-1581. He need have looked no further than Parsons' own memoirs to find it, however. Parsons recaUed many times in the years foUowing the 1580-81 disaster (e.g., in his "political retrospect") that one of the primary reasons that he and Campion had gone to England was to seek a conversion of James VI as a means of restoring CathoUc government and society in England. This goal is evident in Parsons' writings from the late-1570's onward. In short, '"English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580-1581," The HistoricalJournal 37 (1994), 761-774. 806BOOK REVIEWS McCoog is not as yet comfortable with the ultimate implication of his work: that Jesuits like Parsons would not and could not sacrifice reUgious ends to a false modesty regarding the use of poUtical means. But McCoog's ambivalence wUl not minimize the startling importance of his contribution as a Jesuit historian to the history of this period. He has shattered a major taboo and has begun to bring EngUsh Jesuit historians into the mainstream ofTudor-Stuart historiography . Michael L. Carrafiello East Carolina University Apologia del Beneficio di Christo e altri scritti inediti. By Marcantonio FIaminio . Edited by Dario Marcatto. [Fondazione Luigi Firpo, Centro di Studi sul Pensiero Poütico, Studi e Testi 5.] (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore. 1996. Pp. 225. Lire 50.000 paperback.) The early 1540's in sixteenth-century Italy have long been identified as a crucible for the religious crisis experienced by the spirituali, especiaUy those who foUowed the teachings of the Spaniard, Juan de Vald...