It is a compelling picture, but then there is so much that is fascinating in this book — it is worth having for the transcriptions of Harington’s epigrams, Walpole’s ‘Paper, Ynke and Pen’ and Campion’s Virgilian epic on the early church alone — that it seems a pity that it is not more ambitious in its scope. In his opening chapter Kilroy tries to distance himself from the charge of Catholic bias that he knows is coming, but there are still moments when his view seems as inward- looking as his sources, his critical focus as narrow, his scholarship — in the debate over Campion’s prison ‘confessions’ for instance — as much at the service of his sympathies as it is in any of the rival historical texts he examines.
He is also endlessly repetitive, but the problem there is one of form rather than content, because this is not really a book, but a collection of highly specialised papers previously printed elsewhere. In her study of Shakespeare, Shadowplay, published last year, Clare Asquith showed that it is possible to engage a wider audience with the arguments of recusant scholarship, and it seems a waste that the meticulous readings and historical inwardness that distinguish this book are spent reworking material that an academic audience will already know and with which the general reader is never going to engage. This is not just a case of wanting a different book than that which the author has written. It is more a case of wanting the book that seems crying to get out. Gerard Kilroy’s argument deserves a wider currency than contemporary academia’s answer to the ‘usual suspects’ a Walsingham might have rounded up.
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