James Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600−1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. viii + 226, £75, ISBN: 9781108479967

In this, the authors capture the turmoil as Elizabeth’s reign drew to a close without any official heir, when all parties saw the chance to publicly lobby for their position, not only Catholic but also Protestant. The questions at play touched on religious pluralism, relations between the state and religion, the authority of the monarch and from where it is drawn. On the Catholic side, it was not simply a question of survivalists versus new missionary zeal, but different visions of what the Catholic Reformation might look like in England. It became a tussle between episcopal authority, state power and papal jurisdiction. Inevitably, the cast of players and the discussion could be headspinning for those not at least a little familiar with the period. At the book’s start, the authors provide a very helpful list of the main players, as well as a timeline that puts the controversy against wider national matters, such as treaty negotiations. The authors cleverly cover a lot of different angles on the controversy, though it might have been worth considering how the fanatical appellant William Watson and his more extreme colleagues tapped into wider European antiJesuit polemic. There is also one unexplained element of the book: why do the authors refer to Robert Parsons, rather than Persons? The former spelling has generally been discarded, including by the Persons correspondence project. These, though, are minor quibbles. More important is that Lake and Questier convince with their thesis that the Archpriest Controversy offers a neglected window into the workings of the early modern public sphere. It is an attempt to recover what mattered to the protagonists, not just about the clerical matters at play or questions of the succession, but also wider ambitions and philosophies. Written in the authors’ typically punchy style, All Hail to the Archpriest should be required corrective reading for those who still believe the story of postReformation England can be told as if Catholics had disappeared from the scene, only to emerge whenever a handy scapegoat was required.