This is one of a pair of volumes (alongside Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie [eds] Worship and the parish church in early modern Britain) to come out of the AHRC-funded Early Modern Worship Network. This collection of essays has its genesis in a conference in Oxford in 2009, and explores ‘how people in early modern England and Scotland prayed when they weren't in church’ (p.1). The approach is multi-disciplinary: historical, theological, liturgical and literary perspectives are brought to bear to open up a hitherto under-considered area of the much-studied religious history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. In their excellent introduction the editors note the reason for this comparative neglect: ‘The conditions which allowed private devotion its eclectic and fluid forms are those which make record a slippery tool’ (p. 7). It is unsurprising that a volume exploring the subject should be wide-ranging in focus and approach. Across the range of essays, however, a number of common and unifying themes emerge, giving a sense of the concerns and emphases of non-public religion in early modern Britain.

An intriguing and obvious question, raised by the editors and explored variously by Ian Green, Jane Dawson and Erica Longfellow, is what precisely ‘private devotion’ was understood to be. Green considers the clear ideal but elusive practice of the household praying together at home, drawing a distinction between family devotions (the whole household) and private devotions (the individual or married couple). In her study of Eikon basilike, Longfellow observes that it is ‘not clear that personal devotion was the central pillar of ordinary faith’ (p. 54) in a period during which both the theory and the experience of prayer changed. She highlights a cultural suspicion of secrecy and a deep ambivalence about solitude and solitary prayer, concluding with an observation which indicates other recurrent themes of the volume: ‘across confessional divides [the English] continued to view their personal devotional lives as intimately connected to the public worship of the church’ (p. 72).

Several of the essays consider aspects of private devotion that crossed confessional divides, or the ways in which traditional devotion was reformed for the new religious context. Alison Shell's study of John Austin's Devotions in the ancient way of offices opens up one of the many devotional texts that were used by Catholic and Protestant alike. Through considering Austin's office hymns, Shell evokes the sense of ‘spiritual intimacy’ (p. 260) which gave rise to the book's catholic appeal. However, there is a further interesting dimension highlighting some of the ambiguities of the volume's subject: Austin was a liturgist, and his book draws closely on the monastic offices, provides hymns for these, and follows the liturgical calendar; as Shell observes, he held ‘the public and private faces of prayer in creative tension’ (p. 280). The question of how people prayed when they were not in church is inextricably linked with that of how they prayed when they were in church: the divisions between public, private, domestic, individual and solitary were not clear and fast. Beth Quitsland's discussion of psalm-singing, well-known as a key element of Protestant piety in England and Scotland from the mid-sixteenth century, highlights a movement the other way, as the ‘private’, popular recreational pastime of metrical psalm-singing moved into church, coming to occupy an established place on the edge of authorised worship in England.

A third recurrent theme of the book is the question of how individuals engaged with the Bible, and appropriated it for themselves. Micheline White examines the reform of Catholic primers, using Anne Lock's translation of Sermons of John Calvin upon the song that Ezechias made to consider how Reformers persuaded readers to use in new ways the biblical texts (such as Hezekiah's song in Isaiah xxxviii, and Psalm l/li) which had long formed staples of Catholic devotion. Psalm l/li features prominently also in Hannibal Hamlin's fascinating discussion of the penitential Psalms in domestic devotion. These, he argues, constituted ‘an essential piece of the furniture of domestic devotion’ (p. 235) in the early modern home, and did so across the confessional spectrum, articulating as they did the central religious preoccupations of sin and penitence. The tension between public and private again features in Kate Narveson's discussion of clerical anxieties concerning lay reading of Scripture. The sphere of private and domestic devotion caused concern because it was slippery, difficult to control and regulate. Nor could unlearned readers be relied upon to understand the text of Scripture ‘properly’. Two readers who did engage deeply with the Bible and apply it to their particular circumstances were Owen and Elianor Stockton, whom Jeremy Schildt uses as case studies for his consideration of Protestant Bible-reading across the long seventeenth century. Schildt situates their diligent practice within a broader theological framework of predestination and covenant. Theological ground is likewise beautifully covered by Jessica Martin who, reading sermons, devotional texts and poetry, traces the range and richness of English Reformed responses to the Passion. Her essay poses again the question of the relationship between public and private, and how public worship and preaching informed individual understanding, response and identity.

Whereas most of the contributors consider metaphorical devotional ‘furniture’, Tara Hamling explores the material props for household devotion and Protestant piety, characteristically undermining the notion that post-Reformation English Protestantism lacked a visual culture. Dawson also considers the geography of private devotion, and particularly the importance of outdoor ‘private’ space – as a matter of either choice or of necessity – in early modern Scotland.

Much of this volume is concerned with negotiating boundaries – between public and private, between confessional identities, between the old and the new – but nowhere is this clearer than in Alec Ryrie's contribution, focusing on sleeping, waking and dreaming in Protestant piety. Here, he explores how views of this daily human necessity indicate anxieties about the vulnerability and ambiguity of the individual soul's state before God.

This collection of essays opens up a wealth of perspectives on the religious lives and spiritual preoccupations of people across the confessional divides of early modern Britain. Most people spent most of their time not in church, and not engaged in theological debate or polemic; this volume greatly enriches our understanding of what daily religious life looked and felt like, adding depth, breadth and nuance to our picture of the theological and devotional landscape of early modern Britain.