My review of Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe by Liesbeth Corens has just been published in Reviews in History. The book is an important contribution to the historiography of English Catholicism (and, more generally, the historiography of early modern migration) because it lays out a new paradigm for dealing with expatriate English Catholics. Dr Corens eschews the old idea of ‘Catholic exiles’ in favour of a much more nuanced understanding of the multiple reasons why English Catholics chose to live abroad. This is important because, as ongoing research continues to show, expatriates were central to the English Catholic community and much of what we know about that community comes from records and archives created and curated abroad. This book is a must-read for anyone studying the early modern English Catholic community.
Francis Young 