Abstract
On 11–13 July 2023, the fourth biennial Early Modern British and Irish Catholicism conference, jointly organized by Durham University and the University of Notre Dame, convened to discuss the theme ‘Popery, Politics and Prayer.’ Cognisant that 2020 (when it could not meet on account of COVID) marked the 450th anniversary of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I, the conference set out to consider ‘the relationships between politics and Catholicism in the widest possible framework, including through political debates and differences between English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh Catholics, as well as the global Church.’ The timing of the conference, its opening and closing bookending the historically significant date of 12 July, cannot have been lost on its participants. Popery, politics, and prayer, indeed.
Major conferences on early modern Catholicism, such as this very fine example at Durham, are a welcome indication of the vitality of the field, not only of early modern Catholicism in general, but of early modern Catholicism in the Atlantic Archipelago in particular. A recent roundtable discussion on the History of British and Irish Catholicism: Past, Present and Future, which recently featured in the Cambridge journal British Catholic History, 36:3 (2023), outlined the considerable progress that has been made in recent scholarship, as well as the many avenues yet to be explored. The first two volumes of the forthcoming five-volume Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, to be published in late 2023, offer a further invaluable resource to scholars of early modern Catholicism in these islands.
Meanwhile, the two volumes reviewed here, both published in 2022, comprise substantial contributions to the already burgeoning field. The first, edited by Robert E. Scully SJ, with Angela Ellis, and published by Brill, can be considered a landmark publication, drawing together the fruits of research on early modern British and Irish Catholicism, and ensures that the experience of Welsh Catholics, say, can be considered side-by-side with their Scottish and Irish counterparts. This marks a move away from the more atomized methodology of earlier studies, what John Morrill calls the ‘siloed histories’ of England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland, and it is an approach that is also found in the forthcoming Oxford History.
The volume of 19 essays is divided into three (albeit unequal) parts, namely The Community and its Place in the National and International Scene (11 essays); Opposition Within and Without (two essays); and Catholic Recusant Culture (six essays). Contributors include Thomas McCoog SJ, who writes on the Jesuits and other Male Religious Orders in Britain and Ireland; Colleen M. Seguin, whose topic is Catholic Laywomen: Activist Piety, Agency and Strategic Resistance; Anne Dillon, who writes on Martyrdom and the Catholic Community; and Lisa McClain, who explores Underground Devotions and the challenges of practising an illegal faith. There are essays on Scottish and English Catholic material culture by Peter Davidson and David W. Walker, and Janet Graffius respectively (although these are, curiously, to be found in different sections), an essay on Recusant Literary Culture in England and Wales by Victor Houliston, and a chapter on the Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland by Jonathan Wright. Meanwhile overviews of Catholicism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales respectively are provided by John McCafferty, Jane Stevenson, and Hannah Thomas. Caroline Bowden’s chapter on Recusant Women Religious in a National and International Context is also an indication of the flowering of this area of study in recent years, exemplified by other important scholarly contributions such as that of Bronagh Ann McShane, who isn’t a contributor to this volume, but whose 2022 study Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration, published by Boydell and Brewer, was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society 2023 Whitfield Book Prize. Opening with an historical overview, c. 1530–1829 by William J. Sheils, Brill’s Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland will be essential reading for historians of early modern Catholicism.
Narrower in focus, but no less groundbreaking, is the Four Courts Press volume The Jesuit Mission in Early Modern Ireland, 1560–1760, edited by Mary Ann Lyons and Brian Mac Cuarta SJ. Building on the work of scholars such as Thomas McCoog SJ, whose The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589–1597 appeared in 2017, and his Pre-suppression Jesuit Activity in the British Isles and Ireland, published in 2019, and utilizing recently published significant scholarly resources such as The Jesuit Irish Mission: A Calendar of Correspondence, 1566–1752, edited by Vera Moynes and published in 2017, this volume of 11 essays on various aspects of the Jesuit Mission in Ireland is likewise testament to the scholarly advances that have been achieved in recent years. Each essay is a treasure trove of detail on Irish Jesuit history. Thomas McCoog co-authors (with Alexander G. DeWitt SJ) the opening essay on the correspondence of William Good; Colm Lennon explores the mission of the Jesuits in urban Ireland, c. 1598–1650; Bernadette Cunningham writes on popular preaching and the Jesuit Mission; Brian Jackson on the Jesuits and religious controversy, and Brian MacCuarta on the Jesuits and conversions. Some essays are particularly welcome owing to the freshness of their topics; for instance, Raymond Gillespie writes on the insufficiently studied history of the Jesuits and music in early modern Ireland, and Alma O’Donnell contributes a fascinating essay on Jesuit involvement in exorcisms in 17th-century Ireland. There are also contributions by Jason Harris (on the Latin style of the Irish Litterae Annuae), Mary Ann Lyons (on women and Jesuit ministry), Martin Foerster (on Jesuit schooling in Ireland, 1660–1690), and Liam Chambers (on the Irish Jesuit College in Poitiers, 1674–1782).
These volumes, among other recent studies, are further testament to the renaissance in the study of early modern Catholicism which is evident for some years now. They deserve a place on the shelves of all institutional libraries, and in the personal libraries of all serious scholars in this field of study.