In their important edited collection, People and Piety: Protestant Devotional Identities in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Clarke and Robert Daniel succeed in their intention of demonstrating that “piety did not define people” in early modern England, for “it was people who defined their piety” (5). Responding to the recent devotional turn, and in particular, renewed calls to consider individuals’ lived religious practice, Clarke and Daniel bring together wide-ranging and interdisciplinary chapters that survey the breadth and vitality of Protestant devotional identities. The turn to lived religion, with its encouragement to focus on practice alongside belief, has recently been in the ascendancy, thanks in part to Manchester University Press's Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies series, founded by Anne Dunan-Page, of which this collection is part. Together, the essays in People and Piety convincingly demonstrate that lived religion, in particular its emphasis upon what people did, and “the creativity, inventiveness and agency of believers in ordinary places and domestic settings” (Anne Dunan-Page, Laurence Lux-Sterritt, and Tessa Whitehouse, “Reconstructing Early Modern Religious Lives: The Exemplary and the Mundane’, E-rea 18, no. 1 [2020]: 7), offers a valuable frame for understanding the diverse ways in which early modern Protestants conceived of and expressed their faith.

From the outset People and Piety establishes Protestant devotional identities as distinct from denominational identities, emphasizing the fluidity of partial Prayer Book adherence, and the fact that those who held outwardly distinct denominational identities regularly drew upon the same scripture for similar or competing ends. Significantly for studies of this ilk, and in a decision that permits the collection to fully delve into the intricate and often competing identities that emerged and developed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the chronological scope of the collection extends beyond 1640. This allows for an assessment of the changing nature of English Protestant identity that sweeps from the Reformation to the years following the Toleration Act, permitting a consideration of the confusing circumstances surrounding Richard Hunne's death in the Lollards’ Tower of St Paul's Cathedral in 1514 (Lynn Robson's chapter) to be situated alongside Catie Gill's examination of Quaker leader George Fox's prison writings, and Vera J Camden's exploration of the experiences of Presbyterian Mary Franklin under the Clarendon Code.

With fourteen relatively short chapters in addition to an introduction, a foreword, and an afterword, this collection avoids being merely a series of case studies in part through John Coffey's and Neil Keeble's essays, which bookend the collection, synthesizing the wide-ranging practices and texts on offer here and adding great meaning. A commendably interdisciplinary volume, it comprises essays by historians and literary scholars highly regarded within the field, but some of the collection's most insightful essays showcase the work of early career scholars. The volume's interdisciplinary focus is also apparent on a chapter level: most notably in Iman Sheeha's consideration of the influence of prescriptive mothers’ legacies upon the domestic tragedy A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and in Michael Durrant's analysis of the material and visual crafting of the title page and coda of Katherine Sutton's printed conversion narrative (1663).

The book is focused on the organizing themes of “sites” and “types,” but there are necessarily synergies and overlaps between the two. The “sites” strand offers a clear intervention in its focus on settings that occupied the space between the household, a site that has recently generated several productive studies, and the well-trodden ground of devotion in the church or meeting house. In addition to enlightening essays such as Ann Hughes's assessment of the domestic sermon notes of the Gell family, which as a created text in themselves integrated public worship with personal devotion in the home, this collection offers new perspectives upon how devotional identities were constructed in a range of alternate sites such as academies, theaters, and prisons.

The “types” strand takes the reader beyond the settings of devotional practice, offering a close reading of some of the texts that underpinned devotional identities, encompassing chapters on spiritual autobiography, religious poetry, and ars moriendi texts. As well as permitting in-depth discussion of these three influential genres, the essays in this strand are united by clear commonalities, notably the repurposing, reimagining, and multivalent uses of devotional texts. Within this strand, Jenna Townend offers a valuable reconsideration of the writings and influence of George Herbert, and Robert Daniel does much to develop existing studies of sickbed devotion by tracing the specific scriptural passages that were most frequently drawn upon.

From mothers’ legacies to deathbed devotion, People and Piety offers an important synthesis of English Protestantism in all its various lived and written forms. One slight qualm is the framing—the voices presented as “rarely discussed” and “recently discovered” (6) will be very familiar to those who work in this field. The volume as a whole is polished and skillfully edited, but an oversight is the misdating of its earliest case study, the death of Richard Hunne, as 1517 (rather than 1514) (135), a year that is presented as the starting point of the collection (8). This should not, however, detract from a collection that will be valued alike by those who work in this area and those seeking an introduction to the extent and intricacy of early modern Protestant practice. This volume serves as a snapshot of the state of a flourishing field, a comprehensive and enlightening overview of the construction of devotional identities, and deserves to be widely consulted as a key survey of English Protestantism.