Surveying a field come of age

Abstract

Catholicism and and Ireland: The publication of Brill ’ s Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland , edited by Robert E. Scully and Angela Ellis, is without doubt a major event in the historiography of British and Irish Catholicism. The ever-expanding field of Catholic history in Britain and Ireland has not hitherto been the subject of a summative companion authored by multiple scholars under the care of a major academic publisher, and Scully and Ellis ’ s volume provides a snapshot of the entire field at a time when Catholic history is not only a mainstream subject — as indeed it has been for at least twenty years — but also a mainstream subject in need of the conventional instruments of communicating its wider significance to other historians and other dis-ciplines. Such instruments include a well-known and highly-regarded journal (as British Catholic History has been since its rebirth under its present title in 2015), regular major conferences, textbooks intro-ducing students to the field, and summative companions authored by the major scholars of the subject. It is this latter need that Scully and Ellis ’ s Companion fulfils, and it is a volume that reveals both the tremendous potential of the study of early modern British and Irish Catholicism but also the creative tensions in the field ’ s self-under-standing and historiography.