In British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800, editors Cormac Begadon and James E. Kelly bring together a collection of essays that “seeks to reorientate the recent direction of scholarship” on early modern British and Irish Catholicism by “focusing on the activities of the conventual and monastic religious orders” between 1560 and 1800 (1).
British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe is the first volume in the interdisciplinary Catholicisms, c.1450–c.1800 series (Durham University) that intends to explore the varied ways that Catholicism developed throughout the world during the early modern period. In order to “recapture the roles played by conventuals and religious, and recover their place in a historiography that is in danger of overlooking them” (2) the editors compiled contributions from prominent scholars in the field, as well as from upcoming researchers, who together address four different elements of the conventual and monastic experience: “Creating and Maintaining Identities,” “The Relationship between Home and Exile,” “Space and Place,” and “Intellectual Movements.” The volume wisely makes no claim to comprehensiveness but succeeds in its desire to start important historiographical conversations.
The editors wisely provided the volume with a four-part structure. In part 1, the first three authors, Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, and John McCafferty, discuss different aspects of the identity tensions that English and Irish conventuals and monastics experienced between 1600 and 1800. Their topics range from exiled English nuns and how they successfully retained their Englishness abroad, to Irish secular and regular clergy managing to coexist in relative harmony in the only non-Catholic state to have a resident episcopate, to Irish Franciscan friars helping Ireland become a player on the global stage of Catholicism. Part 2, with contributions from Caroline Boden, James E. Kelly, and Jaime Goodrich, explores how conventuals and monastics living in exile established important relationships abroad and at home, enabling the communities to financially survive as well as to influence larger political and intellectual movements.
Part 3 addresses space and place with Jessica McCandless, Geoffrey Scott, and Liam Chambers discussing the different ways that conventuals and monastics created, or attempted to create, sacred, safe, beautiful, or permanent places abroad and how those efforts often had larger cultural ramifications. And finally, in part 4, Thomas McInally, Shaun Blanchard, and Cormac Begadon show how exiled monastics participated in and responded to the seismic intellectual and political movements of their day, often by publishing influential contributions of their own.
British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800 seeks to showcase some of the many roles played by conventuals and monastics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to recover their place in the historiography. Though it is evident that much more work needs to be done, this volume certainly gets the research ball rolling in a wide variety of directions. Readers will gain greater understanding of the valuable and varied contributions that conventuals and monastics made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they will come away from the book with a greater appreciation for the “conventual and monastic movement as a collective whole” (6).
Even though this book largely achieves its aims, it is not always the easiest or most enjoyable read. Parts 1 and 3, “Creating and Maintaining Identities” and “Space and Place” are quite rough because the chapters in each of these sections cover such widely different topics—some quite specialized and specific, others less so—that it is hard to maintain a sense of continuity from one chapter to the next. Readers may need to keep reminding themselves of the theme of each section so that they can more easily appreciate the specific arguments made in each chapter and identify the way each contributes to the overall purpose of the volume. But since this is the first in the Catholicisms, c.1450–c.1800 series, this type of roughness is to be expected; as more research is done, it will be easier to create volumes like this that have smoother historical and topical continuity within them.
