Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth by Brian C. Lockey (review)

The category of “the nation” has exerted a major influence over scholarship of early modern England in recent decades. While this category has seemed appropriate to the study of England, religiously and geographically isolated from the rest of Europe, Brian C. Lockey offers a major intervention in Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth. In this wide-ranging and learned book, Lockey finds evidence of “cosmopolitanism” as an alternative to nation-centered notions of authority and identity. Cosmopolitanism is a world view that reaches back beyond the effects of the Reformation into the “universal” Catholic past and imagines a transnational authority that supersedes the claim of temporal monarchs. Lockey’s scholarly method parallels the cosmopolitan point of view: by drawing on poetry, prose, and drama from not only English but continental sources, Lockey powerfully disputes the nationalist bias that shapes not only some English texts of the period, but much of the contemporary scholarship about those texts.

Lockey begins by introducing and exploring the idea of the “Christian commonwealth” as articulated in Catholic propaganda, Protestant responses, proto-imperialist writing and, in a test case that Lockey explores at some length, the continental correspondence of Philip Sidney. The term “Christian commonwealth,” which derives from the Latin term respublica christiana, was used traditionally by Catholic theologians to distinguish the church from Europe’s secular governments and to convey the church’s sovereignty over the secular realms. The authors under study here, writing in the wake of the Reformation, secularize the term, make use of it in their literary writings, and in doing so, Lockey argues, anticipate the secularist, transnationalist ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Cosmopolitanism matters because it highlights the enduring connection that English authors—writing from the perspective of a politically, religiously, and geographically isolated island—shared with the texts and traditions of the largely Catholic continent and demonstrates the persistence of a universalist ideal in the face of the English monarch’s new role as spiritual and temporal authority; by describing how this ideal manifests across English texts, Lockey aims to “reintegrate England into the Christian commonwealth, according to the traditional Catholic conception of that term” (6). By closely examining the writings of subjects who were deeply rooted in the English nation yet remained “antithetical to the prevailing trajectory of English national identity” (5), Lockey intervenes in the arguments of critics who have sought to reconstruct “the Elizabethan writing of England” (to use Richard Helgerson’s term) as an indicator of the shape that English national identity began to take post-Reformation.

The remaining chapters are divided into two parts, the first devoted to sixteenth-century recusants and the second treating seventeenth-century royalist exiles. The first chapter of part 1 focuses on the cosmopolitan perspective of the English Jesuits, whose writings impart a global outlook also reflected in their institutional structure. Here Lockey casts English Jesuits not as stubborn oppositionalists, but as writers who reject the insularity of conformist political thought; the writings of Jeronimo Osorio de Fonseca, Edmund Campion, and Robert Persons display a thoughtful attempt to work out the relationship between the ecclesiastical and the temporal and even, in Campion’s case, advise Elizabeth against her own claim to supremacy, a claim which Jesuit writers regarded as a step in the direction of tyranny. Lockey makes the compelling point that these texts, written by men deemed heretics in England, share many ideas about authority and legitimacy with English conformists such as Anthony Munday (known for his service to the crown as a “pursuivant” of Jesuit priests) and Sir John Harington; thus distinctions between Catholic and Protestant thought become more complicated as we see, for example, when Campion’s language echoes that of John Dee, who famously envisioned a transnationalist English realm in his General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577). Lockey extends these observations further into an examination of the...