Smith, Frederick E. Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England: Mobility, Exile, and Counter-Reformation, 1530–1580

Exile has long been a topic of interest and investigation among students of early modern English Catholicism.As a result, scholars of late have re-emphasized the transnational circulations of people, treasure, ideas, images, and books, among other things, that so marked one slice of the English Catholic story.Liesbeth Corens, in her Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) was a pioneer in reviving studies along these lines, especially for the later part of the early modern story.Frederick Smith's excellent book under review here serves as something of a prequel, in which he aims to reorient how scholarship has portrayed exiles within the context of their new "homes" before the Elizabethan period.He finds in the story of exiles a kind of kinetic energy-far different from the narrative of victimhood and oppression promoted by a certain kind of Catholic scholar.Rather than advance narratives of the downtrodden tribe, Smith argues for the possibilities of agency available to some exiles as well as the complex interactions they experienced with host populations-the ways in which exiles were transformed as well as the ways in which they transformed their host countries.The implications of this are many, including an argument against the insularity once assumed in early to mid-Tudor Catholicism and an important reconsideration of what the Counter-Reformation looked like if one takes into account those who might be easily considered marginal figures in that phenomenon.Smith's book nuances a topic that has often been subjected to onedimensional readings.It is easy to assume-along with early modern commentators-that exiles were exemplary Catholics, leaving their homeland in light of heresy's spread.In doing so, however, we risk a certain whitewashing of the past because these principled exiles often had more complex relationships, sometimes of partial or full communication, with "heretical" regimes, which they themselves tried to bury within their new homes on the Continent.Such stories of unmitigated and principled loyalties were not only the myths proponed by Catholics but also caricatures created by their enemies as well.