Camden Fifth Series, 54, Royal Historical Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 238, Hb, $79.99.

Based on a sole manuscript in the Bodleian library, Brian Mac Cuarta’s scholarly annotated edition of “A Discourse of HP his Travelles” explains the narrative in relation to its social, religious, political, and intellectual contexts. The author’s journey is both geographical and spiritual, including his round trip from Dublin to Rome and a detailed list of distances between the stops along the way, as well as the progress of his soul. Mac Cuarta’s informative introduction covers Henry Piers’s Irish context, recusant networks, extended study at the Jesuit-run English College, Rome, and shorter visits at the English colleges at Valladolid and Seville, both founded by the Jesuit Robert Persons. There are also notes on the text’s sources, and the physical properties and provenance of the manuscript. The author’s network of English and Irish recusants in the Pale helped him pursue this journey and its ultimate goal, conversion in Rome. He lived first in Carrickfergus, and then at Tristernagh, Co. West Meath in the estate he inherited from his English-born parents who followed the established church, as did his wife. Living just outside the Pale, Piers came into contact with the Dublin Catholic community through his sister’s brother-in-law, James Jans, an English-born recusant who moved to Dublin where he later served as mayor. Through Jans’s circle, Piers met the English priest Richard Haddock, the dedicatee of the text and nephew of Cardinal William Allen, founder of the English colleges at Douai and Rome, as well as Philip Draycott, the English recusant who would disguise himself as a servant in order to become his travelling companion and fellow student in Rome. This text offers a fascinating window onto the cultural hybridity of early modern Ireland: Piers’s religious and political allegiances, which do not always easily line up, demonstrate the complexities of the world he lived in.

These complexities are part of what makes Piers’s account original and so call for the focus on his English Irish Catholic experience in his years at the English College, Rome. While his English descent allowed him admission to the college, his Irish background and marital status, made him the object of attacks from English students, which he stood down, managing to study at the college for two years as a boarder. The college at the time was the site of a number of controversies, not over matters of “faith” but “government,” as Piers points out. He was part of a strong minority at the college that favored the Jesuits’ control. Mac Cuarta draws on Thomas M. McCoog’s The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England 1589–1597 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) as well as on Henry Foley’s Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 in 8 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1882–83) to corroborate Piers’s account. Piers’s story of the complaints over and ultimate resolution in favor of the Jesuit administration of the English College highlights the proposal to take away the government of the college from the Jesuits by Cardinal Tollett (the Jesuit Francisco de Toledo Herrera), who ended up donating his library to the Society, and the successful maintenance of Jesuit control effected in part by Doctor Haddock, who “did labor muche in quiettinge this contention.” This English priest also gave Piers crucial advice about how to handle the complaints against him coming from Irish seminarians from Ulster who sided with the opposition to English rule by that Hugh O’Neill, then waging war back at home in Ireland. In order to defend himself from the accusations that they had made about Piers’s lack of loyalty to the church, Haddock recommended that Piers voluntarily submit himself before the tribunal of the Roman Inquisition, where he abjured his Protestant faith.

Early on in the text, Piers confesses that it was the disputes among the different sects of Protestants that led him to think about conversion to Catholicism. This concern with theological unity is mirrored in a political concern with pan-European resistance to Islam. This in part explains his long digression on the battle of Lepanto, based upon Richard Knolles’s The generall historie of the Turkes (London, 1603). While his memoir seems to have been written largely for himself and others in his circle who might have been considering travelling to Rome in order to convert, his emphasis on unity might be seen as an attempt to convince a sympathetic Protestant audience for political unity with Catholics to fight against the Ottoman empire. For an audience of his recusant circle in Ireland, he attempts to persuade readers that union within Catholicism is more important than political resistance to the English crown. These views make sense in relation to his confirmed loyalty to the English crown, and his writing the text in the aftermath of the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) in which Hugh O’Neill was defeated.

As we can see from his use of Knolles’s work, Piers’s memoir tells us something about the circulation of books in Ireland as well, since the text was written when he was back in Ireland from 1603 to 1605. His sources include the Latin Vulgate, and such popular works as Girolamo Francini’s Le cose maravigliose dell’alma citta di Roma (Venice, 1588) for the description of the churches of Rome, and Orazio Torsellino’s Lauretanae historiae libri quinque (Rome, 1597), for an account of his visit to Loreto, the most important site of pilgrimage in early modern Europe. While this might at first make it seem as if much of the work is derivative, what he adds to these sources sets in relief what was especially memorable or meaningful to him. So, when writing about visiting churches in Rome such as S. Maria della Pace, he notes that Saint Patrick stayed there when in Rome. Or again when in Loreto, Piers mentions not only the Jesuit management of the Santa Casa but also his own practice of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. Mac Cuarta is to be commended for a meticulously prepared scholarly edition of a text that sheds new light on the conversion to Catholicism in early modern Ireland and the place of Rome and the Jesuit order in that process.

doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-04