In this book Emily Vine explores the significance of the home in the devotions of early modern Londoners, focusing particularly on occasions of birth and death. Births and deaths provided grounds not only for individual households to gather for worship, but for other members of the faith community to gather in the home to mark the event. Vine adopts an ambitious, comparative approach, considering the experiences of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews living in the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book draws from an impressive array of archival and printed materials, including parish registers, spiritual diaries and life writings, government papers, and the records of nonconformist and exiled Protestant churches in London.

The first chapter surveys the landscape of domestic religion in early modern London, with subsequent chapters split between assessments of practices surrounding and following childbirth and death in the home. In spite of magistrates’ and religious leaders’ concerns about the extent of religious worship taking place in domestic spaces and attempts to limit it at various points, Vine shows that the home remained a centre of communal religious activity at moments of life and death. Members of the same religious community gathered in the homes of their brethren during childbirth to provide spiritual comfort as well as practical assistance to the delivering mother. In Christian households, baptisms were performed in the home when it was feared the infant might not survive long after birth. Legal restrictions attempted to limit home baptism to such circumstances and stipulated that the infant must be formally presented to the congregation at a later date if they survived. Vine, however, shows that home baptisms also took place in less urgent circumstances and became increasingly common in the eighteenth century, with fellow congregants gathering in the home to celebrate. In Jewish households, circumcisions similarly took place either in the home of the child’s family or the mohel performing the circumcision, while naming ceremonies for infant girls were also conducted at home. Even where birth rites took place in the church or synagogue, congregants were invited to the family home for further celebrations afterwards.

Death and dying likewise provided a focus for communal devotional practices in the home. Here Vine challenges recent scholarship which has suggested that death became an increasingly individualised matter in the eighteenth century, arguing that it remained a communal religious concern across faiths. Vine points to the practice of visiting the sick and dying in their homes, common to all religious communities in London in this period, to contest this idea. Members of the same congregation travelled sometimes significant distances across the city to sit and pray with the dying, and were present when clergy attended the afflicted in their homes to guide them in prayer, or in the case of Catholics, perform extreme unction. The presence of visitors at the home of the dying individual in fact helped justify devotional practices such as the sacrament of communion, which in the Anglican service could only be performed in the home with a certain number of persons present. Regulations of the Sephardic community in London prevented groups of more than ten from gathering for prayer in private homes, except in times of mourning (or in the house of a bridegroom). Fellow congregants assembled at the home of the deceased to take part in processions to the church for the funeral, or returned to the home afterwards to share food and drink. Participating in such activities prompted those who visited the sick and dying and took part in funerary events to reflect upon their own mortality in their daily devotions.

Across religious communities, Vine’s book demonstrates the importance placed upon having members of one’s faith community present at moments of birth and death, perhaps more so than relatives. This extended even to those providing medical assistance: Vine cites evidence, for example, of Catholic and Jewish midwives attending births for families of each respective faith, and of midwives from the French Huguenot churches travelling across London to assist fellow church members in childbirth. During plague outbreaks, members of nonconformist churches sometimes broke quarantine to pray with the sick. The significance of the home as a site of birth and death also comes through in Vine’s accounts of those who had no home in which to give birth or die. London parishes paid certain households (often those of widows and spinsters) to take in women in or close to labour who had no place to go, or to provide temporary shelter for the dying poor. The Catholic Lady Anne Dacre appears in multiple chapters of this book, offering care in her home to both women in childbirth and the sick, whether or not the afflicted were themselves Catholic.

Vine’s book leaves the reader with as many questions as it does answers, a testament to the richness of the material that appears in it. The conclusion considers some of the archaeological evidence pertaining to the Blackfriars disaster in 1623, in which around ninety-five Catholics who had gathered at the French ambassador’s house to hear Mass died when the floor collapsed. Elsewhere in the book, however, less attention is paid to how the physical structures of homes might have governed or indeed been influenced by devotional practice. Accounts of infant baptism in Anne Dacre’s household and of arguments about which visitors to admit to the house of someone on their deathbed, for instance, point to how the home could become a site of confessional tensions and contests at moments of birth and death, and I did wish this aspect had been explored further. Vine’s arguments about the importance of the home as a devotional space echo those made by Mary Laven and others about domestic devotions elsewhere in early modern Europe. Given the book’s comparative approach, I would have liked to see more reflection on how domestic devotions in London compared with other multifaith and multicultural cities in this time period. These are minor points, however. Vine’s book offers a detailed, engaging portrait of how domestic devotions provide common ground for the study of London’s diverse religious communities.