Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642.

Gilpin, W. Clark

Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642. By Lisa McClain. Religion in History, Society, and Culture 6. New York: Routledge, 2004. xvi + 395 pp. $100.00 cloth.

During the past two decades, scholars have produced a remarkable body of work that effectively rewrites the history of English Catholicism in the early modern period. Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, and Alexandra Walsham have demonstrated that traditional religion exerted vigorous influence on the imagination and loyalty of the English people well into the English Reformation and displayed remarkable flexibility and resilience thereafter. Others, including Anne Dillon, Peter Lake, Michael Questier, and Alison Shell, have explored the ways in which polemic, ideology, state violence, and martyrdom shaped both Protestant and Catholic identities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lisa McClain combines these two scholarly trajectories in her new book, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642. She focuses on the "practical innovation" of her title, in order to investigate how Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholics created a distinctive communal practice within an increasingly hostile English Protestant cultural environment.

When the first Parliament of Elizabeth I passed the Act of Uniformity in 1559, it aimed not only to establish a Protestant Church of England but also "to drive Catholicism out of England by cutting off access to Catholic clergy, holy sites, sacraments and symbols" (19). Both internal and international events soon challenged the government's purposes. In the 1570s and 1580s a Catholic missionary effort educated English seminary priests and Jesuits on the Continent and sent them back to England. Mary Queen of Scots posed a threatening claim to the English crown, and Pope Pius V exacerbated the situation in 1570 with his papal bull, Regnans in excelsis, excommunicating Elizabeth. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, English popular culture had thoroughly appropriated the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 as indisputable evidence of Catholic aggression and treason. Throughout the decades that McClain studies, therefore, penal legislation was directed against Catholics, especially the clergy, although its actual enforcement fluctuated according to the perceived level of threat.

Rome, meanwhile, officially prohibited any type of concession to conformity, and English Catholic emigrants frequently supported this prohibition. Indeed, many emigrants exhorted Catholics in England to suffer and die for their faith and, in McClain's view, displayed "a striking naivete regarding the day-to-day realities of trying to remain a practicing Catholic in England" (29). Within England itself, as McClain demonstrates, "a practicing Catholic" could refer to a wide range of religious behavior. Some refused to attend Protestant services, but there were also "church papists" who occasionally attended in order to avoid penalties and a more nebulous group who publicly attended Protestant services but privately observed Catholic practice.

All three types of practicing English Catholics made remarkable adaptations in their religious life. Without access to rituals performed in a physical church, they fabricated their own sacred spaces out of orchards, fields, roadways, and homes. The poet and Jesuit missionary Robert Southwell, for instance, advised a devotional transformation of the home by dedicating a "whole room to some saint, that whensoever I enter into it I enter as it were into a Chapel or Church" (quoted on 58). Similarly, despite penal laws banning its possession, the rosary played a key devotional role, and the Dominican-led confraternity, the Society of the Rosary, was advocated in England by Jesuits such as Henry Garnet and secular priests such as William Allen, who modified the society's admission requirements, such as signing one's name to an official registry, in order to accommodate the society to the dangerous realities of Catholic life in England. The rosary was traditionally "intended to offer access through Mary to Christ," but McClain argues that English authors began to shift the emphasis and "glorified Mary as a powerful warrior, capable of protecting the souls of those who venerated her through the rosary" (96).

Catholic piety and community displayed local variations, and McClain provides three intriguing case studies of distinctive Catholic options in the city of London, in Cornwall, and in the northern shires. In London, for example, alternative locations of Catholic community arose at the Inns of Court, which were the centers of legal training and social converse, and in the jails, where imprisoned priests offered pastoral counsel and even secretly celebrated mass. In Cornwall, loyalty to an ancient Celtic heritage prompted "a distinctive, traditional Celtic-Cornish brand of religious identity and community to evolve both inside and outside the nominal boundaries of the Protestant church" (174). In the northern shires the flow of English and Scots Catholics back and forth across the border, the relative paucity of Protestant clergy, and powerful Catholics in the political and judicial systems all contributed to "a distinctive evolution of northern Catholic rituals, identity, and community" (204).

By 1600, innovative responses to changing circumstances had irrevocably altered the forms of Catholic piety and community. This was no longer the traditional religion that had permeated all aspects of English life at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Neither, however, was it simply an English version of the devotional renewal that was occurring in the Catholic nations of Europe. McClain has opened several windows into "lived experience" among Catholics in Protestant England, bringing into view a beleaguered community sustaining its life through adaptations of piety and practical accommodations of institutional form. She has surely not said the last word on the subject, but she has effectively invited other scholars to join her in the investigation of a fascinating process of religious transformation.

W. Clark Gilpin

The University of Chicago