Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ed. by Lowell Gallagher (review)

This reviewer groaned as he began to read the barely comprehensible editorial introduction to this volume: more pretentious, jargon-ridden, English-lit. theorizing seemed in prospect, with little that is useful to historians of religion. It is striking how much of the work on early-modern English Catholicism is now being done in English departments in the United States, probably because so many of the easily available sources are literary texts of one sort or another, and archival resources of the kind historians often use are limited (and on the other side of the Atlantic). For all its achievements, this scholarly effort has unbalanced our understanding of post-Reformation Catholicism, with its concentration on poetry, hagiography, heroic piety, priests, and the nobility and gentry—at the expense of conventional practice, social relations, and the lower social orders. But this groaning reviewer fretted too much—although ten of the twelve contributors to this collection work in English departments, most of them can, unusually, write comprehensible English, and some make serious contributions to historical understanding.

Eleven essays are organized in three sections: three in “Signposts” (on “signature topics”), four in “Poetics” (on Catholic poetry) and four in “Communities” (on confessional identity). Arthur Marotti looks carefully at Catholic responses to Protestant attacks on Catholic worship as idolatry, but finds there is more to say about John Donne and John Milton than Nicholas Sander and Thomas Harding. It looks as if Catholics gave up trying. Frances Dolan cleverly analyzes a ponderous official text exposing the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and a murder pamphlet from 1681, although it is not clear that they go together in any helpful way. Holly Crawford Pickett tells the stories of three “serial converts” (William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and William Chillingworth) and suggests that they were irenic and ecumenical rather than hypocrites or shallow time-servers: in these three cases, it looks as if she is right, although others are more problematical. Alison Shell sensitively examines Alabaster’s poetry and prose of conversion in more detail, and Richard Rambuss defends Richard Crashaw’s style as devotional, intellectual, and both Anglican and Catholic. Gary Kuchar convincingly characterizes St. Robert Southwell’s poem on St. Peter’s repentance as an alchemical allegory of transmutation, and Jennifer Rust presents a canto of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) as a response to Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares (1591).The “Communities” section is more obviously historical. Phebe Jensen shows neatly how traditional and Counter-Reformation Catholicism interacted in Catholic celebrations of Christmas, using manuscript collections of carols. Susannah Monta offers a thoughtful assessment of Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and other Catholic texts on holy living, as patterns of domestic piety that fostered communal identity and were copied by Protestants. Anne Dillon reconstructs in meticulous detail the piety and practice of the Confraternity of the Rosary that flourished at Cardigan House in London between c.1650 and 1678, and Stefania Tutino emphasizes the Catholic elements of Thomas White’s The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655). The editor’s introduction is probably best ignored, but the eleven other essays all have something useful to say and those by Pickett, Jensen, and Dillon in particular have real significance for historians of English Catholicism. It is, therefore, a worthwhile collection. But how can we convince editors in search of a title that “Remapping” and “Redrawing the Map” have been done to death?