While this is not quite a history of blasphemy in the ‘Christian world’, for Nash deals only very briefly with the Orthodox tradition and not at all with what is now one of the most dynamic sectors of the Christian world, the so-called ‘global south’, it does cover a remarkable range. While the English example is the most prominent, the book also makes substantial reference to the English-speaking world more broadly (especially to Canada, the United States and Australia) as well as continental Europe. It also ranges widely in other ways, from blasphemies uttered in drunken tavern brawls in the 1500s to Jerry Springer: the opera, broadcast by the BBC amidst much controversy in 2005. According to Nash, concern with blasphemy emerged in the late medieval and early modern periods, linked to concerns about public order and the recognition of the challenge it posed to both secular and religious authority. By the time of the revolution in France ‘Blasphemers had ceased to be confused and occasionally wilful outcasts, and had now become rational, ideologically committed individuals’ (p. 71) and blasphemy gained new status as a political offence, such that by the early twentieth century blasphemy laws were a way of combating political as much as religious radicalism (p. 88). At the same time Nash traces a shift in the perceived impact of blasphemy: ‘a distinct chronological shift from conceptions of the damaged community of believers, to the damaged social and political peace, arriving finally at the wounded feelings and convictions of modern individuals’ (p. 10). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerge as a brief liberal interlude during which religion was seen as a more-or-less appropriate context for unconstrained discussion. With the publication of Salman Rushdie's The satanic verses (1988) the issue of blasphemy intersected with the world of multiculturalism and an emphasis on freedom of religion and the protection of minority religious rights (pp. 104–5) bringing us to a ‘post-tolerant’ society in which the ‘concept of incitement to religious hatred’ creates the possibility of ‘significant growth’ for the ‘blasphemy industry’ (pp. 247–8). Throughout the book Nash emphasises the diversity of experience and the non-linearity of the historical trajectory. The result is that it is sometimes difficult to follow the overall argument of the book, a problem that is compounded by the decision to organise the account into two vast chronological chapters (1500–1800 and 1800–2000) followed by a number of thematic chapters which retrace the material from a variety of different perspectives. That said, Nash's conclusion – that the history of blasphemy reveals that the master narratives of western European history (such as the growth of religious toleration and the process of secularisation) ‘were episodic and conditional episodes rather than sustained changes’ (pp. 242) is of substantial significance, and makes a real and far-reaching contribution to the ‘cultural history of the West’ (p. 11) that Nash sets out to uncover through this history of blasphemy.