The English Catholic Community: 1570–1850 by John Bossy (review)

706 BOOK REVIEWS man, and not the compositional union of natures or modes of being. In the Incarnation the Logos as divine is not changed, nor is what he becomes, man, attenuated. What is new is the mode of the Logos's existence. He comes to exist as man. He comes to be a man. Once this is grasped, what Crowe and J. Gervais have to say concerning the human mind of Jesus and his vision of God as man has an ontological backing. Jesus can have a true human mind, as Crowe wishes to maintain, and his vision of God is not incompatible with his human psychological development, as Gervais wishes to hold. This is so precisely because the incarnational act is that of the Logos taking on a new mode of existence and whatever pertains to that new mode of existence pertains to the Logos. He has a human mind and human psychological development because he exists as man. Since the majority of these essays are in French, a certain regret must be expressed. This book will not be read by many who might profit from them, especially English-language-bound students. Perhaps this difficulty might find remedy in a future translation. GeorgetO'Wn University Washington, D. C. THOMAS WEINANDY, O.F.M. Cap. The English Catholic Community: 1570-1850. By JoHN BossY. Oxford University Press, 1976. Pp. 365. Text with appendices and standard bibliography and indices. $24.95. This book, the first known to the reviewer to treat specially the problem of English Catholicism as an integrated phenomenon from the accession of Elizabeth until the Catholic Restoration in 1850, is important for three principal reasons. First, it advances a special hypothesis as to the peculiar nature of the English Catholic Community and the development of · Catholic mentality over three critical centuries. Second, it advances a general hypothesis regarding both Protestant and non-Protestant English Dissent and places English Roman Catholicism in the latter and, thereby, in the wider tradition of English Dissent. Third, it brings together important historical resources and a novel methodology to illumine the question of what English Roman Catholicism was, not merely as a religious body and tradition but also as a social, cultural, political, economic, and psychological phenomenon. The method, though fundamentally that of traditional scholarly history, leans strongly toward methodologies usually found in the social sciences; hypotheses are framed with much attention to form and with a clear under- BOOK REVIEWS 707 standing of how provisional is even the best hypothesis; and statistics are widely invoked, sometimes to overturn traditional prejudices, at other times to cast new light on received opinion. The special hypothesis regarding English Catholicism is this: that the Catholic Community in the period described must be looked on not as a continuation of late-Medieval-early-Tudor Catholicism but as a new creature rising from the ashes of the old religious establishment and more closely tied to its posterity than to its ancestry. Here the author goes against the usual analysis which, in his opinion, strains for too many connections between early Tudor Catholicism and Catholicism under Elizabeth , the Stuarts, and their successors. Of course some continuity is undeniable on pain of there being no such thing as history. The author believes, though, that too much has been made of the sparse indications of continuity and sets out to do more justice to the matter. He is realistic about his hypothesis but notes-the reviewer thinks correctly-that a new hypothesis is at least timely and healthy whether or not it proves to be as successful as the traditional ones. He discerns three periods of historical development and takes pains to tie them to. social, economic, and political trends of the times. The first period deals with the destruction of the old order and its gradual replacement by a missionary church. This runs roughly from 1570 to 1688. What brought about the death of old forms and attitudes once Anglicanism had become the favored denomination was, in the author's view, a shift in power and influence from clerical to lay institutions, largely as a result of the humanism of the times. Not only the great Catholic magnate families...