Lest We Be Damned. Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642 (review)

For a long time the historiography of Catholics in early modern England was dominated by debates about whether they were old-style, traditional Catholics, or the product of post-Tridentine missionaries. Lisa McClain has very usefully sidestepped that argument by asking what the Church meant to English Catholics in a world in which access to priests, sacraments, altars, pilgrimage sites, and all the other means of worship was banned, abolished, dismantled, and forbidden.

Her question is in keeping with current historiographical trends in English religious history, which see English Protestants creating their own new forms of personal faith in the post-Reformation period. McClain shows us that English Catholics were doing exactly the same thing. All English people were involved in the same process with similar roots. English Catholics saw themselves as the heirs and defenders of the true historical faith, linking themselves to the early Church in ways reminiscent of the way their Protestant neighbors were insisting that they were restoring the primitive Church. Moreover, Protestant separatists had an analog in English Catholics, whose Catholicism varied radically from that of their Continental co-religionists. They, too, were feeling their way toward new expressions of spirituality and worship that did not depend on the presence of ordained clergy or legal worship spaces.

McClain's book establishes a number of ways in which Catholics did this, and then explores Catholicism in Cornwall, London, and Northern England to illustrate how these new forms of Catholicism functioned in different settings. In doing this, she defines "Catholic" as anyone who believed in the sacraments and rituals of Catholicism. This sidesteps the definitions imposed by Protestant authorities and by Catholic purists, leaving a group with widely varying practices that helped them resolve some basic conundra: How does a Catholic worship without a priest to provide the sacraments? How does one function without sacred spaces? How does one maintain a spiritual life in the community of the saints when there is no visible community? Can one be a good subject of the English monarch or must one be obedient to the Pope in all things?

Using a wide range of sources, she reaches some stimulating conclusions. There were, she finds, several ways of being Catholic. The English Catholics maintained an historical identity with the martyrs and persecuted faithful of the past, drawing their strength from historical models of triumphant resistance. As the number of their martyrs grew, so did their identity with martyrdom as proof of their faithfulness. This way of thinking allowed them to see themselves as part of the whole communion of the saints. But what they did to stay in that communion varied. There were those who practiced a form of rosary-based mystical union, even, in some cases, arguing that the Mass was not necessary for communion with Christ. There were communities in which membership was maintained through prayer, and communities that shared Catholic books and catechisms. Prayers for the dead kept up their identity with the larger Catholic world, past and present. These communities, however, were English, and McClain demonstrates that the popes' refusals to understand the peculiar problems of English Catholics led the English faithful to distance themselves from obedience to Rome, relying on their own indigenous understanding of what it meant to be a faithful Catholic.

This is an important book that moves the study of English Catholicism into a new realm by insisting that its subjects be studied as they lived, not as an ideological subset. However, it prompts a desire for further work on the nature of Catholic communities. I suspect that the origins of English Catholicism are probably to be found in the intellectual and political confusion of the reign of Henry VIII and the compromises of the 1550's, rather than in the period after 1559.

Additionally, some of her players, like William Alabaster, moved between Protestant...