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Reviewed by:
  • Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England by Lucy Underwood
  • Amy Harris
Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England.
By Lucy Underwood.
Houndmills, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 275pp. Cloth $90.

Lucy Underwood’s lucid account of early modern English Catholicism values children and adolescents’ autonomy and agency, but also highlights the power dynamics between youthful religious convictions, family and adult expectations, and questions of state security at play in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Underwood addresses two strands of historical scholarship: the history of Catholicism, which she argues has paid insufficient attention to childhood history and the history of childhood, which has, in turn, paid minimal attention to English religious history.

Underwood thematically structures her argument around three lines of inquiry: religious identity, the tension between the Protestant state and Catholic young people (and their families), and the transition from adolescence to Catholic adulthood. Over the course of the three sections, she draws on literary representations of children and adolescents’ religious convictions (Catholic and Protestant), devotional and catechetical texts, legal records, and seminary records. That last set of records grounds much of the book’s analysis and provides a unique entry into young people’s religious experiences and beliefs. Comprising nearly one thousand responses from two Continental seminaries for English Catholics (the Responsa Scholarum from the English College in Rome and the Liber Primi Examinis from the English College, Valladolid, Spain), Underwood has first-hand accounts of young people’s religious experiences from 1592 to 1685. She puts both datasets to good use, pulling out evocative personal accounts and aggregating the data to reveal differences between childhood and adolescence and to reveal the various influences on young people’s religion. Additionally, an appendix provides a more detailed analysis of the two sources and their use in previous scholarship.

She includes people as old as twenty-four in her analysis (a typical marker for those who study early modern English young people), but makes careful [End Page 159] distinctions between childhood, adolescence, and youth. Similarly, she consistently interrogates the sources to trace the various ways children encountered and believed Catholicism. She highlights the printed word throughout the book, but is also aware of the places (prisons, schools, homes) and people (family members, priests, servants) that influenced young people’s beliefs. And she is careful to recognize the potential for youthful social rebellion alongside sincere religious conviction.

There are moments when Underwood suggests ramifications of her argument that extend beyond early modern England, but she does not always fully explore them. This was particularly noticeable in her discussion of conflicting ideas about whether families or the state had ultimate responsibility for children. Through a series of thoughtful questions she underscores that this is a constant tension within modern nation states, but does not offer potential answers with broader applications. For example, the English state flirted with notions of removing Catholic children from Catholic guardians in order to make them proper Protestants, but they never systematically pursued this, only using religious differences as a means to solving financial disputes over land. With that in mind, it would have been intriguing to see further analysis about when various categories (age, religion, social status) became the defining characteristic for how the state viewed and interacted with young people. In particular, engagement with Holly Brewer’s account of shifts in children’s legal status in early modern England and America would have been insightful (By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005]).

In general, Underwood has provided an excellent narrative and analysis of children and young people’s encounters with the changing religious landscape of Tudor-Stuart England. She succeeds in bringing English religious history and English childhood history into fruitful conversation. While she assumes the reader has familiarity with English religious history, her analysis has implications for religious and childhood/youth historiography more broadly. The effort she makes to grant children religious agency and autonomy is in constant tension with her recognition of the power the state, the church, and the family had over the young. Scholars of children and youth constantly wrestle with...

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