Abstract
In her first book, Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence, Susan Cogan provides a multicounty study of interlocking kinship, cultural, patronage, and political networks among elite Catholics from the fifteenth through the early seventeenth century. Cogan navigates a middle ground between existing national and local studies of Catholic communities with her regional investigation of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire in the Midlands. Rather than proposing a unified Catholic community stretching across the diverse landscape of England or focusing tightly to tell the story of one county or one family, Cogan's regional study allows her to identify broader, detailed patterns of Catholic relationships, networks, and community that functioned on multiple levels over generations. Moreover, she investigates how men and women worked within their socially-constructed gender roles to create different and overlapping strategies that maximized opportunities and protection for those within their networks. Ultimately, Cogan aligns herself with scholars such as Muriel McClendon and William Sheils, contending that the majority of English Catholics valued harmony over conflict and sought to coexist as peacefully as possible in a Protestant nation, even if that coexistence meant overlooking divergent religious beliefs and practices.
No one understands the connections between noble and gentry Catholic families in the Midlands like Cogan. When teasing out the contours of elite kinship groups and social networks, she provides ample archival support from sources such as correspondence, contracts, parish records, wills, map, contracts, and account books. Cogan focuses on many powerful, well-known families, such as the Hastings and Dudleys, but also integrates less-influential families into her analysis. Particularly when introducing certain affinity groups and social networks, the sheer quantity of information and connections can become quite dense, which Cogan recognizes. As an aid, she provides a variety of genealogical tables in her Appendix for families such as the Brokesbys, Shirleys, Throckmortons, and Vauxs. She employs the “whole network” and “egocentric analysis” approaches of historical social network analysis to pull out only those relationships relevant to uncovering the strategies individuals and families used to build religious and social coexistence in a Protestant state (63).
Cogan furnishes a wealth and depth of information from the expected sources and occasionally exposes somewhat unexpected connections among Catholics and between Catholics and Protestants. In Chapter 4, for example, she highlights cultural networks that developed among Catholics and Protestants who shared a passion for architecture and horticulture. She illuminates the priorities of men such as the Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham and Protestant Bishop Wickham, who shared an interest in architectural and garden design. Catholic men, often restricted from demonstrating their manhood in traditional ways, used their building projects to advertise their masculine virtue and honor as well as their elite status. Men of high rank could navigate shared symbolic worlds, participation in which confirmed one's elite status. They forged connections, even patron-client relationships and friendships, overlooking their religious differences in their pursuit of shared interests.
The book is organized into six chapters, each of which layers additional networks onto the ones Cogan has already discussed. In an introductory Chapter 1, Cogan outlines three overarching approaches that elite Catholics used to ensure their survival across generations, successive sovereigns, and religious change and conflict. Catholics built, maintained, and used their networks to display their honor, loyalty to the state, and right to belong within the ranks of nobility or gentry (17). Although the majority of this book is situated between 1570–1630, Cogan provides a benchmark in Chapter 2, laying out how the foundations of later Catholic family networks in the Reformation era can be found in the fifteenth century, developing to meet challenges such as the Wars of the Roses. She proceeds county by county, demonstrating the overlapping kinship and social ties of families—such as the Hastings, Brokesbys, Beaumonts, and Shirleys of Leicestershire—that she argues would later sustain many (but not all) Catholic families in the next centuries, depending on their success at leveraging “multidimensional networks with varying levels of connection” (39). She also emphasizes the importance of gender and geography in forming and maintaining durable networks over the long-term. Chapter 3 brings the reader into the Reformation era, with Cogan again going county by county, delineating porous kinship and social networks cultivated by major and minor Catholic families, supported by her ample archival evidence. She pulls gender throughout her analysis, distinguishing between family networks and women's networks. She defines family networks as dominated by men strategizing to ensure the success of the patrilineal family line vertically, over generations. Women, in contrast, created and maintained their own networks that Cogan describes as more horizontal in structure, built through ties within households among multiple generations of women and working within women's traditional gendered roles. Women's networks shared the objective of family success and survival with family networks. Working together, these overlapping vertical and horizontal family and women's networks were intended to create and sustain deep ties among Catholics that might ensure good employment and officeholding opportunities, social position, marriages, wardships, and mitigation of punishments under the recusancy laws.
The final three chapters overlay three additional types of networks—cultural, political, and patron-client networks—onto this foundation of kinship and social networks grown over centuries. As discussed above, Chapter 4 discusses how shared interests in building or gardening could create cultural networks through which Catholic men in particular could perform their masculinity and elite values, even finding common ground with Protestant enthusiasts. In Chapter 5, “Catholics, Political Life, and Citizenship,” Cogan explores how Catholic men and women of the nobility and gentry actively asserted their positions and status to integrate themselves into the political life of the Protestant nation. Men served their sovereign and state through holding political offices at local, regional, and national levels, much as they had done before Protestant reforms. Both men and women demonstrated their loyalty to their sovereign through participation in England's military efforts. Men served as soldiers, often abroad, and women delivered messages and leveraged women's networks among military families or with Protestant political figures. Finally, both men and women furthered family interests through their astute and gendered use of petitioning. Women, for example, employed both feminine and masculine gendered practices in their petitioning, whatever best suited their particular situation (186). Through officeholding, military service and petitioning, Catholics were able to reassure the government of their loyalties, mitigate the impacts of recusancy laws on their own families and those under their patronage, and remain a part of the national political conversation (249). Finally, in Chapter 6, Cogan agglomerates all her earlier efforts to define various networks into a discussion of patron-client networks, arguing that all these previously-discussed relationships made the establishment and continuation of patron-client relationships possible, even across religious difference. Patronage mattered for any noble or gentry family, but as Cogan points out, was of particular importance to Catholics who ran the risk of being socially or politically marginalized as members of an illegal faith. Elite Catholics claimed they experienced no conflict of interest and touted their loyalty to their monarch as separate from loyalty to their faith. The state gave many Catholics the benefit of the doubt because the state benefitted from continuing its patronage of elite Catholics since patronage bound Catholics more closely to the sovereign and state and helped ensure elite influence over Catholics of lesser ranks. Cogan concludes with a claim that networks of elite Catholics—whose Catholicism could be both expressed within, and channeled by, the Protestant state—helped ensure England's political and social stability, avoiding the types of overtly religious warfare experienced by France in this era, a contention which would be strengthened by additional evidence and analysis (249–50).
Overall, Cogan adds to the work of earlier scholars of Catholic communities, from John Bossy's pioneering national study to more recent microhistories of particular counties or elite Catholic families such as those by James Kelly and Michael Questier. She also adds her voice to narratives of interconfessional conflict told with greater focus on Protestant experience by scholars such as John Coffey. Cogan's approach allows her to chronicle the ties established among many families networking over generations and across contiguous counties both before and during the changes and challenges of the Reformation era, so she is able to nuance these scholars’ earlier findings, such as when she complicates Questier's conclusions about “entourages” developing among Catholics in Sussex who were part of the Browne kinship and social network (22). Also, whereas many previous scholars have explored only one or two types of networks, such as Catholics’ participation in kinship or political networks, Cogan goes deeper, contending that the kinship and social networks and the cultural and political networks in her early chapters were what made Catholic participation in the patronage-clientage networks that are the subject of her final chapter possible.
One of Cogan's most significant contributions to scholarship, however, is her analysis at the intersections of gender and religion in early modern England, specifically Catholicism, which has been understudied. She incorporates the insights of historians such as Alexandra Shepard on masculinities and Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson on women to better contextualize Catholic choices. Cogan highlights elite men's pursuit of alternative ways to demonstrate masculine status and citizenship (174) and illuminates elite women's activities, such as those of women's participation in military conflicts, that push the boundaries of feminine norms (183, 189). The latest scholarship, my own included, places men's and women's activities in conversation with one another, and Cogan analyzes how men's and women's networks, though different, worked together to advance family interests over generations at the level of lived experience.
The obvious limitation of Cogan's study is its emphasis on only the Catholic nobility and gentry. Elite Catholics, of course, played important roles in the evolution of Catholic community and experience during the Reformation era, but we ought to be careful of allowing their agendas to characterize the experiences and priorities of all Catholics. For example, Cogan asserts that Catholic gentry privileged their identity as gentry over that of being Catholic and that her evidence suggests England was moving toward social acceptance of religious plurality, possibly as early as the late sixteenth century, with many people preferring social harmony to chaos precipitated by religious conflict (251–2). Her evidence reasonably supports this for elite Catholics, but her more sweeping conclusion for broader society requires further support and nuanced evaluation. As Cogan acknowledges, Catholics of rank and status enjoyed privileges they wanted to protect and from which they benefitted that likely provided them with different outlooks than Catholics of lesser ranks (157–8). And Cogan's assertion that her evidence “helps explain why the [English Civil] wars were not religious wars between Catholics and Protestants” (35) still appears to draw predominantly from the elite perspective, without any discussion of popular perceptions of either Catholics or Protestants.
Even with that critique, Cogan's regionally focused, multicounty, and gendered analysis illuminates how cooperation and co-existence across confessional lines functioned, in ways that haven't always been clear in national, single-family, or single-county studies. Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence is a valuable addition to scholarship on Catholicism and gender in early modern England.