Margret Turnham's basic thesis is that Catholics and Evangelicals have more in common that either religious group cares to acknowledge. In particular, she seeks to construct a coherent intellectual history of Catholicism in England from the perspective of revivalism and renewal, themes dear to the hearts of Evangelicals. Her chosen interpretative model is to trace the history of Catholicism in Yorkshire in a two-hundred-year period in an area that would ultimately emerge in 1878 as the diocese of Middlesbrough. The diocese contains such important cities as York, Hull, and Middlesbrough itself.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, contemporary printed and newspaper material, the work is also dependent on the labors of other recognized scholars in the field: John Bossy, Edward Norman, Mary Heimann, and Sheridan Gilly, among others.

Turnham outlines with some panache the case for her conviction that Catholicism in Yorkshire, and perhaps in England as a whole, is a mixture of traditional English piety, Irish folk religion, and Ultramontane exuberance. She gives cogent and clear analysis of the various stages of English Catholic life and spirituality beginning with Catholic experience in the eighteenth century which was marked by what she, along with others, terms the dissenting tradition. The restoration of the hierarchy in 1850 is an essential staging post for the development of Catholicism, as was migration from Ireland throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. This became a flood as a result of the famine, 1845–1850, forcing English Catholicism to develop a pattern of piety which could no longer be sustained by the devotional horizons of Bishop Richard Challoner's The Garden of the Soul, first published in 1720.

Turnham is at her best in outlining the details of Catholic expansion in the nineteenth century in the context of the Industrial Revolution. She performs a similar task for the twentieth century where church progress in Middlesbrough was marked by growth and then decline. There are very good treatments of how the hierarchical church met, or failed to meet, the spiritual needs of its adherent by way of parish missions, pilgrimages, religious processions and such “Italianate” devotions as the Quaranotore. The last was as a result of the revivalist work of Luigi Gentili who arrived as a missioner in England in 1835. Her discussion of the importance of religious orders and the church's involvement in education repays careful attention.

Although the idea of Catholic renewal is a concept that can be pointed to throughout the period, I am less convinced that revivalism, at least in its evangelical hue, can be located within Catholicism much before the nineteenth century. While we can detect notions of conversion and an emphasis on personal piety long before this in Catholicism, does it make sense to say of figures such as Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola that they were “Catholic revivalists” (4)? The author makes an especially convincing case for her assertion that the Jesuits were the televangelists of the sixteenth century. Turnham is on surer grounds when she argues that the nineteenth-century Evangelical Revival had its Catholic equivalent in the activity of missionary preachers in Britain and Ireland who sought to produce in their auditors the same sense of sin, repentance, and conversion that marked the activities of their Evangelical counterparts. Furthermore the author gives insufficient examples to demonstrate the means by which revivalism and renewal are a real link between Evangelicals and Catholics.

The book has a surprising number of minor errors of fact and interpretation. Space does not permit for a complete enumeration, but as a sample: the Jesuits were founded in 1540 not 1534 (36), her assertion that the public culture of Ireland was still overwhelmingly Protestant in the 1870s (61) fails to take account of Gladstone's disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869, she confuses the Irish Free State with the Irish Republic (118), the Irish Civil War did not “precede” independence (126), and Michael Logue was archbishop of Armagh not Dublin (126). The Catholic Church in Ireland did not seek to become the Established Church under the terms of the 1937 Constitution (127), but simply sought to be recognized as the church founded by Christ. The Irish political leader Éamon de Valera rightly rejected the request since the claim would be offensive to Irish Protestants. Furthermore, Benedict XV was not the first pope to abdicate since “the 13^th century” (191). That dubious distinction goes to Gregory XII, who abdicated in 1415 in the context of the Council of Constance. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the work is Turnham's attempt to apply the “Devotional Revolution” thesis which Emmet Larkin developed in the Irish rural context, in the aftermath of the famine (which wiped out the cottier agricultural class) to the circumstances of the largely industrialized and urban setting of mid-century English Catholicism. For the twentieth century—although the author had interesting things to say about Catholic participation in the ecumenical revival “Call to the North” in the early 1970s, the importance of Pope John Paul II's visit to Britain in 1982, and the decade of evangelization—she fails to mention the National Pastoral Congress of 1990.

It would be wrong to end on a negative note. Turnham has real insight into the nature and scope of Catholic devotion in Yorkshire over two centuries. Her work is thoroughly grounded in commendable research. At times the book is quite moving, for example when she discusses the response of Catholics in Middlesbrough to World War I. Father William Finn, a priest of the diocese and an Irishman, was the first army chaplain to be killed. At Gallipoli in 1915, he refused to remain safely onboard ship as troops were landing and gave his life administering the last rites to his men.