Kelsey Jackson Williams, The First Scottish Enlightenment. Rebels, Priests, and History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. xv + 351, £70, ISBN: 9780198809692

Abstract

knowledge of the Counter-Reformation, the early public sphere, and the use of the press in the reconsolidation of Habsburg rule in the Southern Netherlands. Soetaert’s understandable aim for comprehensiveness leaves room for more thorough literary criticism and questions about the cultural impact of transregional exchanges. A case in point is the discussion of the Netherlandish engraver Martin Baes, who provided dozens of illustrations for English martyrologies. The book minutely reconstructs the process by which Baes was commissioned, but leaves open the extent to which this resulted in the transfer of a Netherlandish print culture to the British Isles. Finally, while the book successfully advances the argument that the Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai transcended its regional significance, the choice to publish it in Dutch hardly supports this claim. One hopes an English translation will be commissioned soon. All in all, De Katholieke Drukpers in de Kerkprovincie Kamerijk makes a convincing case for the importance of regions in the European book trade and deserves a wide readership among students of the early modern Low Countries, English Catholicism, and the European book trade.