The Cambridge History of Christianity tries to tell the whole story, from the beginnings to the present day, in nine volumes, divided chronologically and sometimes by church tradition. This volume covers Western Christianity, both in its European homelands and in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Eastern churches are the subject of a separate volume. The series intends to be not only global in scope, but broad in its conception of Christianity, giving due attention to popular religion as much as to theology or church politics, to “unorthodox” or “sectarian” movements as much as to popes and bishops. The editors of the volumes and most of the contributors are senior historians at universities in Great Britain and the United States, but the twenty-nine collaborators in this volume include authors from France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The quality of the contributions is consistently high. The first part focuses on “Church, State and Society in the European World”; the second on “Christian life” in Europe; the third on the Enlightenment, the Evangelical Awakenings, and Jansenism; the fourth on Africa, Asia, and the Americas; and the final part on the impact of the American and French Revolutions. Many readers will be most attracted to the second part, which includes “Popular Religion” (Willem Frijhoff), “Christianity and Gender” (Merry Wiesner Hanks), and “Architecture and Christianity” (Jean-Michel Léniaud), or to the fourth, where, for instance, R. G. Tiedemann shows that this was a period of crisis for Christianity in East Asia, as much as in Europe.

But the heart of the volume lies in the third and final parts. These were indeed momentous years in the history of European Christianity. After more than a thousand years of “Christendom,” criticism of Christianity became increasingly open and outspoken, culminating in the violent “dechristianization” of the 1790s in France. Meanwhile, the Evangelical Awakenings were reshaping the Protestant world, with consequences that remain with us to this day. In fields where scholarship is often highly partisan, the volume is notable for its balanced approach. This is reflected partly in the pairing of chapters that deal in contrasting ways with related issues. Thus Helena Rosenblatt's “The Christian Enlightenment” sits beside Margaret Jacob's “Enlightenment Critiques of Christianity.” But individual contributions are also notably nuanced. So, for instance, the concluding chapters by Suzanne Desan on the impact of the Revolution on religion in France and by Stewart J. Brown on “Movements of Christian Awakening in Revolutionary Europe” stress the dual legacy of the Revolution as both an agent of secularization and a stimulus to revival. And Brown shows that both revolution and counter-revolution were Janus-headed, with heroism, devotion, and high ideals going hand in hand with violence and cruelty. While the Enlightenment is often celebrated or condemned for its secularity, one of the most important achievements of the volume is to show that in reality it included a very wide spectrum of religious and anti-religious standpoints. Not only did the Enlightenment grow out of Protestantism; religion, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, remained an essential part of it. As Rosenblatt argues, even in France there was no simple polarization between traditional believers and enlightened doubters and, indeed, rational Christians were more numerous than outright skeptics.

At the same time, several contributors point to evidence that the later eighteenth century saw an increase not only of intellectual criticism of Christianity, but also of a more broadly secular mentality among sections of the middle and upper classes. Most research on this theme has focused on France, and Timothy Tackett draws on this work to contrast the continuing piety of the masses with the dechristianizing trend among the urban elites that became visible from about 1750. James Riley draws similar contrasts in respect to Brazil, where he sees the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759 as having a devastating effect on religious provision. Margaret Jacob argues that a practical secularism was also gaining ground in Britain, and she cites Birmingham-based Scottish industrialist and inventor James Watt. Joris van Eijnatten, in an overview of sermon notes, shows that many preachers of this period believed skepticism was increasing. This is one of the most important but also one of the most elusive fields for research on eighteenth-century religion. It is elusive because secularization cannot simply be measured by selecting formerly popular pious practices or ways of thinking and charting their decline: what appears as religious decline may sometimes be better defined as religious change. At the same time, the piety of the masses needs to be explored more fully. As Tackett shows in his chapter on the French Revolution, there were parts of France where dechristianization won popular support. British radicalism, which grew rapidly in the 1790s, also had a significant freethinking dimension. In the nineteenth century it would be the urban poor who were most detached from the church, and historians of urbanization have seen one of the roots of this alienation in the inadequate response of established churches to urban growth in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is one area where more extensive discussion would have been worthwhile. But all in all this is an impressive volume. It can be recommended to students, but it will also offer new insights to the specialist. And it is highly readable—a virtue seldom found in fat, team-written volumes.