Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625

A burgeoning area of study for the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for the British Isles has been the re-examination of the historical trope of early modern Protestantism being an automatic response to the abuses and excess of Roman Catholicism. Recent historical enquiry has charted a less clear-cut division between Catholicism and Protestantism, and questioned whether the Reformation can really be understood as a break that signified a Catholic past and heralded a Protestant future. Gradually the narrative of polar opposition has been challenged and replaced by more subtle and sophisticated critiques of contemporary discourses concerning power, religion (both Protestantism and Catholicism), and politics. Complex and conflicting polemical debates flourished in the religious upheaval of post-Reformation society.

Stefania Tutino's study 'aims to analyse and interpret the relationship between religion and politics in English Catholic thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries' (p. 1), from the decade after the Elizabethan Church Settlement until the death of James VI & I. This 'temporal arc', as Tutino calls it, 'allows us to discern and isolate a parenthesis in English religioushistory that is necessary for grasping the outcomes, uncertainties, and gainsof post-Reformation Catholicism (p. 7). Tutino is primarily concerned withthe evolving Catholic theological debates that enabled Catholics to cut their spiritual cloth in accordance with their duty of obedience to their sovereign.

Tutino attempts 'to consider and analyse the way in which the Catholics tried to interpret and resolve the problem of reconciling political loyalty and religious beliefs' (p. 4). The issue for individual Catholics was twofold: they must recognize their sovereign's right to govern them (setting aside the perplexing issue of their monarch as an heretical Protestant); and also respond to the Catholic Church's authority to regulate their individual conscience. Catholicism between c.1570 and 1625 generated divergent views on the relationship between temporal authority and secular power. The evolution of these Catholic theological views in turn forced the Church of England to re-evaluate its own position on some of these theological issues.

Tutino's book comprises an introduction, eight chapters, and conclusion, and is driven by its thematic focus. Polemical debates include those within the Society of Jesus, during the First Mission to England in 1580, as well as the consequences of the succession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603. After the Elizabethan Church Settlement, the frictions created by James' politico-theological views fundamentally shifted debates in new directions. The wedge between loyal Catholics and treacherous ones was further polarized. James' reign ended with debates about Catholicism being far from reconciled and it was one of the many sparks that ignited the repeated outbreaks of civil war throughout the British Isles during a large part of the seventeenth century.

A small criticism is that Tutino relies upon a discussion of Latin texts, and in doing so, needed to include English translations. I mention this, not because the book lacks any English translations, but because translations have been provided for only some of the Latin quotations. This would have been easy to fix, and would have ensured the broadest of readerships.

The success of this books lies in its capacity to focus on the 'theologians and intellectuals who theorized on the question of the relation between law and conscience' (p. 5) as demonstrated in the discussion of specific debates. Tutino's critical examination of the evolution and adaptation of Catholic ideology through a series of texts demonstrates the emergence of 'a complex set of different "Catholicisms", rather than a monolithic entity' that, in turn, was then juxtaposed with divergent views within Protestantism. For as Tutino concludes: Cardinal Robert Bellarmine reused Nicholas Sander, but Richard Montague [bishop of Norwich] reused some of the arguments that we identified in the [John] Feckenham–[Richard] Horne controversy. And while they were doing so, they were taking positions that were profoundly controversial within their own churches' (p. 224).

This book offers a Catholic prequel to the standard religious history of the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Tutino demonstrates that the remnants of Catholicism (theology and practice) in its many forms evolved from the Elizabethan Church Settlement onwards, and proved both significant and influential. The topic remains worthy of analysis in order to gain an integrated understanding of the early modern religious history of England.