The context of this book is the author's project, based at the University of Leicester, to compile a ‘Transnational atlas and database of saints’ cults'. Such an enterprise is of awesome proportions, and having myself attempted something similar for a single English county (Cornwall), the task of covering even medieval England strikes me as almost superhuman. It is understandable that the collection of material is incomplete at this stage, and that Graham Jones offers this book as a ‘signpost’ to the territory that he hopes to conquer. Equally, a good deal of the discussion must inevitably be provisional and conjectural in nature.

This book is a study of the dedication of places and objects (mainly parish churches) to saints, angels and aspects of the Trinity. The first of its four parts briefly surveys recent work on the subject, the sources for dedication history (here the papal registers should be added), and the problems and challenges that they involve. It also includes some broad observations about the diffusion and relative popularity of saint cults. The rest of the book discusses how the cults appropriated time in the Church's year; how some of them spread spatially; their involvement with pilgrimage, political power, regional identity and families; and their linkages with various types of terrain: farmland, forests, pastures and towns. The book is thus not as precisely a study of saints and the landscape as its title suggests. It is nearly all concerned with medieval England, but a four-page final chapter considers English church dedications since the Reformation and a few brief excursuses are made to other parts of Europe. Difficulties have arisen in matching the author's text to the resources of the publishers. The size of the text print is small, that of the index too small, maps and plates are unpaginated and hard to find, and there are very few references, the reader being referred to standard works and to the project, accessible via the internet.

The author covers a wide range of topics and makes some sensible points. He cautions against generalisations: most churches and chapels dedicated to Michael are on hills, but not all, and some hill sites belonged to other saints. Dedications to St James the Great should not be interpreted as marking pilgrim routes to Compostella; pilgrims used ordinary roads and their chief impact would have been at the ports from which they embarked. At the same time, writing this book at a relatively early stage of the project means that it often does not take us further than a good study of the kind that might have been written about a century ago in a series like Methuen's Antiquary's Books. The author's linkages between dedications and the landscape, for example, tend to be anecdotal and provisional. There is rarely yet enough evidence to say whether a chapel of St John the Baptist set out to cater for shepherds or commemorated a local lord named John. The tasks of dating (or narrowing down) the origins of institutions and probing the reasons for their dedications are immense, but they have to be undertaken before a meaningful understanding of saints and the landscape can be reached.

There are some disappointing features. The marriage of topics and chapters does not always work; thus the discussion of saints and secular power excludes Edmund, Edward the Confessor and George, who come in a later chapter about the nation. Some suggestions seem far-fetched: why should the concept of the Trinity appeal to the ‘hierarchical system’ of medieval Europe, given the Athanasian creed, or a Domesday landowner named Anna have influenced a church dedication to Anne, whose cult only developed significantly in the fourteenth century? The survey of previous work is short and lacks critical judgement. It does not sufficiently emphasise how vitiated are Frances Arnold-Forster's still much-used volumes by taking ‘medieval’ evidence not only from the Middle Ages but from the church dedications of her own day, despite many reinventions after the disuse of saint cults between 1550 and 1750. It mentions Kenneth Kirk's amateur work on Oxfordshire dedications but not Richard Clark's careful research on Derbyshire, although the latter is cited elsewhere in the book. And, like Arnold-Forster, the author takes his statistics of saint dedications from a mixture of medieval and later data (p. 34). The figures he gives, like hers, are still short of the truth and may mislead us. The reader also needs to be better instructed about the nature of chapels. ‘Dependent’ chapels are sometimes included in the author's figures and maps. Nearly all chapels, except for royal ones, were legally dependent on parish churches, and those mentioned here appear to be major chapels of ease. There were, of course, far more dependent chapels of other kinds.

I have further misgivings, prompted by the two counties that I have studied in detail: Cornwall and Devon. The author maps three Holy Cross sites in Devon as earlier than 1600; of these only Crediton is attested. Cruwys Morchard was All Saints in 1538, Cruwys being the name of a local family, and Tetcott was Trinity in 1428; Holy Cross there was a late eighteenth-century conjecture. His locations of St Bridget include the incorrect Bridgerule but not the admissible Morvah; those of Constantine the incorrect Dunsford, a mistake for Dunterton at the other end of the county; those of Edmund the doubtful Dolton but not the more certain Illogan; those of Edward exclude three sites in Devon; those of Swithin include the incorrect Launcells; and those of Thomas Becket misclassify Cowick and exclude Launceston, while including several attributions that are eighteenth-century conjectures from parish feast days on 7 July. All this material was available in two of my books which the author cites in his bibliography. Obviously mistakes will occur and sources be overlooked in such a large study, but such examples make one wish that it had been more securely, if more narrowly, based. As a medieval scholar might have observed, until you master your grammar, nobody will think much of your rhetoric.