Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580–1603 (review)

Robert E. Scully’s Into the Lion’s Den is the first in-depth inquiry into the early years of the Jesuit Mission in both England and Wales, placing it in context of the development of the Society of Jesus and its worldwide missionary efforts in the sixteenth century. What was, Scully asks, the impact of this relatively small, underfinanced, and understaffed mission to the history of the English Reformation and the history of the Catholic Church more broadly?

To address this question, Scully draws heavily from traditional sources such as Henry Foley’s Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, the writings and correspondence of organizational leaders such as William Allen and Robert Persons, and autobiographies penned by Jesuit missionaries such as William Weston and John Gerard. He describes and contextualizes the origins of the mission; the creation of the English colleges; English Jesuit writings; the clandestine nature of the mission based in the manor houses of the gentry; women’s recusancy and support of the mission; the dangers to Catholic laypersons and clergy; and the conflicts arising among Jesuits, the Elizabethan government, and Catholic secular clergy. Of particular interest are plates from the Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (1584), a series of thirty-five engravings detailing English Catholic history and martyrology.

When discussing these familiar sources, Scully uses a broader interpretive framework than did earlier scholars such as Philip Caraman and William Bangert who published on the English Jesuits. In particular, he focuses special attention on Wales and the Marches. Such attention is justified, Scully argues, since Allen and Persons identified Wales early on as key mission territory. Scully contrasts English recusancy patterns with those in Welsh and Marcher lands and highlights divisions among the English and Welsh students at the English colleges based on perceptions of cultural and perhaps racial difference. Scully’s analysis differentiates between the religious worldviews of Catholics residing in different regions of England and Wales and also addresses issues such as sacred space and material culture. With a lesser degree of success, Scully attempts to weave the contributions of women and lower ranking Catholics into his narrative of the Jesuit missionary endeavors. Scully includes much that is valuable about women and the poor but little that is new.

When evaluating the success or failure of the Jesuit Mission, Scully enters existing debates begun by historians such as John Bossy and Christopher Haigh by asking scholars to assess the mission not as one monolithic effort but in terms of the different groups involved. Jesuit missionary efforts, Scully argues, succeeded better than those of other groups because of the Society of Jesus’s more developed organizational and financial structures and the unique spiritual mission of the society. Moreover, adding to recent scholarship that distinguishes English Catholicism from continental post-Tridentine Catholicism, Scully highlights how innovative and flexible Jesuit missionary strategies in the officially hostile regions of England and Wales look different from Jesuit evangelization approaches in more welcoming environs worldwide. Scully ultimately credits Jesuit efforts as instrumental in making a modest success of the Elizabethan Mission, encouraging the “unexpected tenacity and even resilience” of a minority Catholic community that had staying power in an increasingly Protestant Northern Europe (p. 435).

Overall, Scully uses a generally balanced approach that does not shy away from addressing the challenges and conflicts as well as the accomplishments of the Jesuits. Although not groundbreaking, Into the Lion’s Den is a solid text that draws together a wealth of information useful to scholars of English Catholicism or who want to compare and contrast the Elizabethan mission with other Jesuit efforts worldwide.