Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain by Alexandra Walsham (review)

Alexandra Walsham has collected together under this title a series of articles that have previously appeared in different journals and collections. Although they do not form a single, fully articulated argument, they all relate in one way or another to her earlier book on Church papists. The collected articles develop her argument that Catholic historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – those who took the historiographical viewpoint that between the established form of Protestantism and persecuted Catholicism in Britain there was always a sharp opposition – were suffering from tunnel vision. Walsham asserts, however, that the interpretation of this history has now been ‘decisively reconfigured’, with the new interpretation adopting a wider and more international approach. The nature of this collection – the articles have not been much altered from the form they originally took for different purposes – results in some rather abstract presentations that would, in this context, have benefitted from reworking to introduce some more specific illustrations.

Her first chapter provides a historiographical introduction to the recent English work in this area and predominantly in England, from John Bossy onwards, which has revised attitudes to Catholicism in Britain since the Reformation. Her critique downplays Eamon Duffy’s work and, although she touches on research into other places in the world where different approaches came into conflict, her concentration is on England and Wales. Other parts of Britain are not discussed in any detail. Her survey of research on Scotland is limited and omits a number of scholars like Patrick Conlon and John Watts who have made significant recent contributions. This is perhaps a pity as the Scottish experience, which differed in many respects from the English, would have enriched some of her presentations.

Walsham’s argument depends very much on her preference for certain types of evidence and a heavy reliance on Jesuit records; underlying this is her conviction that the laity played an active part in the creation and maintenance of a recusant attitude and community. Since undercover practices were almost by necessity domestic this is something that has long been recognised but rarely stressed.

In Walsham’s view, English society was pluralist from the start of the Reformation period, leading her to dismiss as ‘deeply misleading’ dichotomies between resistance and compromise. Instead, she prefers to examine the problems of conscience and conformity as the same for Catholics and Protestants as they faced the moral dilemmas of reconciling secular and religious commitments when the two diverged. While the evidence is patchy, Walsham is convinced that people remained friends and allies across the theological divide.

Walsham also seeks to reconcile the research into the Catholic post-Tridentine renewal that emphasises its intolerance and coercive nature with that of those who have preferred, as she does, to stress the continuing place that miracles and traditional devotion played in the local maintenance of the faith. Paradoxically, her doubts about the success of the Counter-Reformation movement in purging the Roman Church of its superstitious weaknesses, goes back to much earlier common elements of historical accounts. It leads her to restore miracles to a more prominent place in her description of how Catholic belief was maintained and to explore how St Winifred’s well remained a place of pilgrimage when so many other wells were obliterated. Sacred space has been the focus of attention since Mircea Eliade brought it to academic attention; Walsham does not address issues related to the transformation of sacred space here, although elsewhere they are well known.

Questions of conversion that inevitably involved the problems of available forms of communication are addressed in three chapters. These touch on the difficulties of translation but curiously not on what is currently an unsolved issue. Recent scholarship has expanded on Beryl Smalley’s work on medieval sermons – we can now appreciate how they were used – so that students of later sermon practices ought to consider more closely whether or not there was more continuity in this form...