The debate about the long echoes of the English Reformation has, if anything, gathered steam in the past decades. Whether it be arguments about when the Reformation ended, how English it was, or if the Reformation’s obvious seismic ruptures obscured more subtle continuities (and why they persisted), much recent historiography centers less on the events of the mid-sixteenth century and more on their broader reverberations. Emily Vine’s Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in Early Modern London is a thoughtful, well-researched addition to this discussion. Vine argues that domestic religion in London, across confessional divides, was neither private nor individual but instead public, permeable, and richly communal. The household was a “significant means by which religious communities operated and were sustained” in London during this period—and as such, it is a subject that we must take seriously and parse carefully (219).

Vine does this by focusing first on birth and then on death. The first two chapters analyze birth, both the moment of childbirth and the weeks that follow. Vine persuasively argues that the home became a center for devotional practice during this period: praying before and during birth, performing private baptism and circumcision, or preparing for churching. Women are the focus here, notable for a time when formal roles were largely circumscribed. From serving as midwives or birthing companions to leading prayer and devotional rites to leveraging aid in childbirth as a missionary means of conversion, women are active religious agents throughout. We have long known that domestic religion created new spaces for women to exercise religious agency and even authority. But what emerges from Vine’s work is the sense of the communal nature of the project: that women generated, sustained, and led corporate devotional practices in the semi-public spaces created by the lifecycle.

In the last three chapters, which focus on death, Vine again convincingly argues that the life cycle produced moments that demanded communal religious practices. This is made particularly clear in chapters five and six, which are the strongest in the book. Here, Vine not only outlines with characteristic sensitivity the rituals that surrounded dying and the days after death, but she also makes her most significant historiographical interventions. She challenges a narrative of the post-Reformation (or emerging modernity) as the site of the private, the individual, or the secular. Instead, Vine argues that the pre-Reformation practices of communal religion at death persisted for centuries (161-2); that formal death rites and rituals, both of the state church and of religious minorities, continued to actively require a communal presence (165, 209, 215); that the clergy remained active participants in domestic death practices well into the eighteenth century (181); and that death both rendered the household permeable and was deliberately and even provocatively public (191-7).

Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion has a tight geographical focus but a broad chronological and confessional reach. London is her subject, one that she paints as both an anomaly and a nerve center for confessional development and cross-confessional experience. Vine’s London is a vibrant space of conformist Anglicans, Huguenots and Strangers, Sephardic (and more briefly, Ashkenazi) Jews, Catholics, Quakers, and other non-conformist Protestants of all stripes. The breadth here is unusual and admirable. It allows, as Vine notes in her conclusion, the ability to see common patterns that would otherwise be obscured (225). Such scope also requires a thorough, meticulous, and perceptive archival practice, which is impressively displayed throughout the book.

Chronologically, the book covers the period from the Reformation through the end of the Gordon Riots, with a particular focus on the middle years of this period. This breadth allows Vine to find surprising continuities; on an archival basis, it also allows for the accumulation of sufficient material from smaller confessions that might have more scattered records. But it also creates a central tension in the book: the changing legality and state control of these practices. The arguments outlined above are persuasive and compelling. But this was, of course, a period in which the relationship between state and religion was fraught, violent, and changeable. The first chapter of the book, which outlines the rough shape of these changes, attempts to address these differences, but the implications are less fully explored throughout the rest of the book. For much of the period covered, many of the domestic religious practices Vine describes were illegal, dangerous, and secretive. And while London’s bustle and diversity gave access to a “marketplace of religion” (34), its many layers of administration and bureaucracy—not to mention its proximity to the center of state power—also meant that both oversight and enforcement of conformity were potent. Outside of the first chapter, all of these tensions are relatively lightly analyzed, which reduces the stakes of the practices themselves. For instance, the chapter on baptism touches quite briefly on the vehement attempts by the Stuart church to control private baptisms. How might the lifting of such prohibitions have changed the exercise, valence, and importance of these private rites? What does that mean for the practice of domestic religion? What is the difference between doing something out of necessity and choosing to do it voluntarily? Vine does at several points describe pre-Toleration communal domestic birth and death rites as necessary for the sustenance of illicit confessions (though how and why they did so are less explored after chapter one). Intriguingly, she also argues that post-1689, these rituals were no longer necessary for sustenance but nevertheless remained integral (41). But why? Was this a matter of habits ingrained during persecution persisting long after Toleration? Did they give people (the laity in general; women in particular) an agency that they were loath to relinquish once experienced? Or is there something special about the universality or existential nature of lifecycle events that encouraged continuity?

These are big, provocative questions. They are only rendered possible by the capacious, impressive, and thoughtful research and argument displayed in Vine’s book. It is a book that makes important interventions into the history of privacy, domesticity, individualism, modernity, and the long story of the Reformation. It is a book that takes seriously the lives of everyday people in creating and sustaining religious community across confessions, with a breadth of cross-confessional attention I have rarely seen in a monograph. And it is a book deeply vested in place, with an astonishing ear for the richness of London’s many religious communities. Our own understanding is rendered richer for it.