Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies, 1, no. 4. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. [vi] + 115. Pb, $84.00/€70.00. Available also in Open Access at https://brill.edhh.ma/view/journals/rpjs/1/4/rpjs.1.issue-4.xml.

Thomas McCoog’s survey of the history of the Society of Jesus in the British Isles from the very earliest days in the 1540s through to the suppression in 1773 and its immediate aftermath is one of the first fruits of a new Brill Research Perspectives series. It is a shrewd choice, given McCoog’s recent completion of three detailed volumes that take the same story up to 1606: The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588: “Our Way of Proceeding” (Leiden: Brill, 1996); The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589–1597: Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012); The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606: “Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished” (Leiden: Brill, 2017). As the author of numerous papers on the later periods and an authority on Jesuit archives, he is well placed to provide a magisterial overview and indicate potential for future research. The volume will be particularly helpful to scholars with expertise in other fields who need an entry point, and to specialists in Jesuit studies who may be shifting their attention from one period to another or simply need a wider perspective.

The formula adopted here is to cap a synoptic narrative of each significant period—the Elizabethan, the early Stuarts and the interregnum, the restoration, the eighteenth century, and the suppression itself—with a brief historiographical entry directing the reader to important sources and studies. The bulk of the work is taken up, then, not by a critique of extant research but by an assembly of the basic facts, told in a reliable and readable way so as to orient the reader. In the conclusion, we find an account of the main historiographical currents, with a particularly helpful exposition of the development of the “black legend” over the centuries. The value of the volume would be greatly enhanced by the addition of an index and a comprehensive bibliography: the reader must forage beyond the bibliography provided at the end, which omits many major sources and studies mentioned elsewhere.

It becomes clear that in Jesuit studies thus far the Elizabethan period and the panic over the “Popish plot” in the reign of Charles ii have enjoyed the lion’s share of research interest, while other areas have been thinly covered. With the turn to the seventeenth century in British Catholic studies, this uneven distribution is sure to be remedied. Interludes such as the controversy over the bishop of Chalcedon, the royalist and Jacobite allegiance of the Society during the civil war and after the Glorious Revolution, the depoliticizing of Jesuit activity in Ireland, the struggle to grow the numbers in Scotland, and the domestication of the Society during the eighteenth century, are made to seem very inviting.

Two leading questions emerge, both arising from the fact that in the early years there were more British Jesuits in exile on the continent than in the British Isles. One is the place of the British Jesuits within the Society itself: the gradual elevation of the English mission to a prefecture, then a vice-province, and finally a province, in 1623, was a response to the ambiguous and vulnerable status of the English fathers, especially those associated with the colleges in Flanders, France, Spain, and Rome. How were they to relate to the local Jesuit organization? The other issue is the place of the Jesuits within the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Britain. This is a vexed story that begins with the archpriest controversy, recently raised to greater prominence by Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier in All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). It becomes acute again with the Chalcedon tensions and the later appointment of the vicars apostolic. In all these conflicts, very few individual Jesuits stand out: will further research raise the profile of later Jesuits to compete with Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, William Weston, Robert Southwell, Henry Garnet, and John Gerard? McCoog pays tribute to Bernard Basset who enlivened our picture of Jesuit history with his inimitable series of portraits, The English Jesuits from Campion to Martindale (London: Burns & Oates, 1967), but none of the later Jesuits looms large in the story that is told here.

As a historian deeply immersed in the archival records and attuned to political history, McCoog pays limited attention to Jesuit polemical and devotional writing, or to poetry and drama, which played such an important part in fashioning Catholic identity and culture throughout this period. He observes that Jesuit writers progressively eschewed controversy as the persecution eased, but much more could have been made of Southwell and Persons as writers, of the Jesuit drama at St Omer, and the Jesuit musicians and composers in Rome. Again, the progress of Jesuit education itself and the place of Jesuits in British society more generally offer themselves as areas of focus that are only briefly touched on. But although these aspects of Jesuit activity are sidelined, the accessibility of this survey could assist in the integration of literary and historical studies promoted by such scholars as Alison Shell, Susannah Monta, and Earle Havens.

The title may have imposed some of the limitations I have noted; even so, a fascinating and slightly unexpected dimension is the inclusion of Jesuit activity in Maryland. It is a curious fact that the suppression of the Society coincided with the American war of independence, so that Maryland in the earlier years constituted an extension of the British Isles. If this book can reach out to scholars of American history as well as to literary historians and educationists, it will have achieved much.

doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-02