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Reviewed by:
  • Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection, 1538-1850, Objects as a Meassure of Reflection on a Catholic Past and the Construction of Recusant Identity in England and America
  • Peter Davidson
Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection, 1538-1850, Objects as a Meassure of Reflection on a Catholic Past and the Construction of Recusant Identity in England and America. Catalogue of the exhibition edited by Virginia Chieffo Raguin. (Worcester, Massachusetts: College of the Holy Cross; distributed by the Catholic University of America Press. 2006. Pp. x, 214. $35.00.)

This is the catalogue of a loan exhibition mostly of material from England and mostly dating from English recusant Catholics' troubled times between the Henrican schism and the gradual restoration of their civil rights from the later eighteenth century onwards. The majority of the objects exhibited come from the stupendous collections of the Jesuit foundation in the Catholic heartlands of northwest England, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.

Stonyhurst is an extraordinary treasury, one of the most distinctive and extraordinary museums in England. Its collections contain medieval manuscripts [End Page 964] and objects conserved by Recusant piety, but their overwhelming focus is Jesuit and internationalist, a baroque museum complemented by a superb anthropological collection encompassing the world. The Stonyhurst collection also contains Jesuit high art from the Spanish Netherlands, particularly a sequence of flower paintings by Seegers. Its highlight to many modern sensibilities is the set of vestments made by the recusant gentlewoman Helena Wyntour, a life's work and an act of devotion to the Society of Jesus and its saints and martyrs which has also a real claim to be considered the most significant work in the visual arts of any early-modern Englishwoman.

This catalogue illustrates altar plate, alabasters, textiles, and manuscripts mostly from the Stonyhurst collection, but drawing also on other museum collections in England and North America. The result is a fine and moving bringing-together of many objects and works of art which furnished the underground Catholicism of post-Reformation England. There is also a quantity of material on the specifically Catholic Gothic Revival in nineteenth-century church building and church furnishing. Certainly this particular assemblage of works of art has never been brought together before in so convenient a form for North American readers.

It must be said, however, that in many respects this catalogue represents a tragic missed opportunity. The work as a whole is confused and confusing: there are some essays of real scholarly value, particularly the contributions by A. I. Doyle, Janet Graffius, Robert Scully, S.J., and Rory O'Donnell. But these are almost overwhelmed by a welter of indifferent exposition which seems essentially aimed at an undergraduate audience with little or no knowledge of the matters under discussion. There is, however, a strong central thread to the collection although that very unifying thread seems puzzlingly anachronistic. The central focus on medieval survival and mediaeval revival is presented as un-contextualized as it might have been at the enthusiastic height of the nineteenth-century Catholic "second spring." While baroque works—Antwerp paintings from the Shireburn chapel, devotional prints, and objects from the Jesuit Colleges—are indeed present, the whole emphasis is medieval and medievalist. As such it cannot possibly represent the realities of that internationalist Counter-Reformation Catholicism within which the English Catholics perforce operated. (Scottish and Irish Catholics appear, for the purposes of this work, simply not to have existed.) The emphasis and omissions are inexplicable in the light of the burgeoning recent scholarship on Recusant Catholic culture and literature in Ireland, Britain, and Europe, a corpus of scholarly work of which this collection makes perversely infrequent use.

Peter Davidson
University of Aberdeen
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