The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Vol. 1: Endings and Beginnings ed. by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty (review)

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Vol. 1: Endings and Beginnings ed. by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty Henry A. Jefferies The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Vol. 1: Endings and Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2023. Pp. 352, illus. 165. ISBN 978-0-198-84380-1. ) This is the first in a series of volumes intended to analyze the history of Catholicism across Britain and Ireland together, transcending insularity through a "three kingdoms approach" in the case of this volume (xx). However, the editors of this volume acknowledge that it does not give "the component politics of both islands equal or even weighted attention" (7). They claim that the imbalance is partly a reflection of the state of the existing research but it is clear that some End Page 420 authors made greater efforts than others to adhere to their brief. Peter Marshall ably opens this volume with his consideration of the early Reformation across England, Wales, and Ireland. Inevitably the chapter is far stronger in its discussion of England than Ireland. Use could have been made of comparative work published on Lancashire and the English Pale around Dublin to show how the Tudors' official Reformation programs were implemented to considerable effect on both sides of the Irish Sea, but with the crucial difference that they coincided with a catastrophic erosion of popular Catholicism in England but not in Ireland. John Edwards fails entirely to consider Ireland in his chapter on the Marian Counter-Reformation. That is surprising because work has already been published on the Marian restoration of Catholicism in Ireland outlining the key roles of Catholic religious exiles in spearheading the restoration, how its implementation compared with that in England, and how it proved to be more enduring. Major publications focused on Ireland are also conspicuously missing from Katy Gibbons's chapter on Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland. There is no engagement with work published on the remarkable survival of Catholicism in Ireland: contemporaries estimated the number of Irish Protestants at between forty and 120 individuals in a country of perhaps one million people at the end of the sixteenth century. There is no reference made to work published on the roles of Irish women in helping to maintain Catholic priests after the Reformation, in persuading their family, friends and neighbors to remain Catholics, and in ensuring that their children were, almost always, reared as Catholics. Nor is there an explanation offered as to why the overwhelming majority of Catholics in England and Wales, by contrast with the Irish, became Protestants. Scott Spurlock's chapter on Scotland highlights traces of Catholic survival in that kingdom, and the roles played by women, but it does not explain why the vast majority of Scottish Catholics became Protestants either. That is a major lacuna. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin's survey of Catholicism in the three kingdoms under the early Stuarts is exemplary. The same is true of Clodagh Tait's insightful study of martyrdom and Thomas O'Connor's excellent study of British and Irish religious institutions for men on mainland Europe. The chapter on English and Irish women religious is the fruit of successful collaboration by Caroline Bowden, who led the English "Who were the nuns? " project, and Bronagh McShane, whose work has focused on Ireland. The chapter on English and Irish Catholic written cultures by Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan is an impressive collaborative endeavor that shows what a comparative approach can offer in terms of new knowledge and understanding. It is strongly complemented by Jaime Goodrich's chapter on printed translations and the Catholic Reformation. Andrew Cichy presents an interesting consideration of Catholic liturgical music, a subject that is very poorly documented, not least of all because Catholic liturgies were outlawed in all three kingdoms. Alexandra Walsham presents a marvelous evocation of Catholic material culture in Britain and Ireland as tangible reminders of a religious inheritance that the Protestant Reformation set out to eradicate, as emblems of theological orthodoxy and as potent instruments of resistance to the religious revolution that surrounded Catholics. Thomas McCoog's chapter on the Jesuits and. . .