This well-written volume takes an approach to the study of the Reformation Era that seems quite obvious—and yet that has been neglected. Scholars of the early modern period are certainly aware that language and communication were at the heart of the Reformations—translations and retranslations of the Bible; preaching; the writing of confessions; and so on—but have tended to focus on certain literary genres, for entirely defensible reasons. Alison Shell offers an analysis of other forms of communication, for example ballads, oral tradition, and recorded memories, and fresh readings of the more traditional forms in her monograph, displaying a thorough grounding in literature, history, cultural anthropology, and oral history. As she observes in chapter 2, “literates' suspicion of illiterates is one of the great underexamined prejudices of the early modern period,” thus pointing out that oral culture could be quite different from written culture and bears its own investigation. The bulk of the book is concerned with England, but she also discusses Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

Chapter 1 includes a fascinating treatment of “sacrilege narrative” as found in ghost and mystery stories, including the much later Gothic novels, that use ruins of former church property as settings and plot devices. This, Shell explains, reflects a continued concern for the violence against monasteries and abbeys that was such a memorable part of the English Reformation: reusing the buildings, or even materials from them, meant facing the wanton destruction in one way or another, often cohabiting with ghosts. Chapter 2 continues the theme of the supernatural, tying it in with anti-papal sentiments and incorporating folklore studies. Shell's argument here is careful and nuanced, referencing both anti-Catholic and anti-superstition polemic but not conflating the two. Indeed, Catholic clergy were officially as anti-superstition as Protestant, but accusations of spell-making, prayer without understanding, and acceptance of miraculous solutions stuck to the Catholic population. Although a failure to understand Latin did not guarantee that one was unchristian, occult practices did rely on distorted prayer language, which could sound comical—or like witchcraft; and these dangers were not associated with Protestant worship. Prophecies, too, could be problematic as they could be seen as spells or other attempted manipulations of the future. This chapter sensitively treats the questions it raises of acceptance of certain practices and/or beliefs by illiterate Catholics in the face of official policies that were certainly opposed to them.

Chapters 3 and 4 rely more explicitly on printed material, first explaining the relationship between oral transmission and the printed and manuscript word, and next engaging in a study of both martyrs and their confessors. Shell contends that previous scholars researching ballads and pamphlet literature have not given Catholic polemic the same attention that they devoted to Protestant polemic because they have concentrated only on printed text, and she is correcting that omission. She also reads between the lines in conservative poetry and ballads to find Catholic sympathies; she finds roots of Catholic polemic in manuscript and printed texts, which she convincingly argues are a representation of long tradition. Finally, by examining both Catholic and Protestant martyrdom, in their contemporary texts and in the oral and literary traditions that developed from devotion to these saints, she returns to the notion of secrecy and ghost stories. The definitions and examples in chapter 3 are so fundamental to the issues she raised in the introduction that I wondered why it was not used as chapter 1 instead. Indeed, the one significant weakness of the book is that it reads almost like a series of related, but not fully connected, studies.

In the main, though, the book succeeds in its aims of bringing to light information either ignored or treated only superficially in the past; of reminding its audience that oral culture is not illiterate culture, nor is it necessarily less authoritative than forms of written culture; that oral tradition, as much as written tradition, shaped the self-definition of religious groups; and that this same oral tradition is continued as part of popular oral and written cultural mores long after it is consciously transmitted.