This wonderful book uses material culture to explore the practice of Anglicanism in eighteenth-century Virginia. It argues that religious practice and piety were structured within the living spaces, material life, and routines of the Virginian gentry. Seeking to uncover the lived faith of this group, Winner uses domestic objects as a lens through which to analyze a variety of topics, such as women's religious practices, Anglicans' defense against other sects, and disputes between clergy and Virginia elites. While focused on elites, the book is very attentive to the ways in which gender, race, and power affected the access to, as well as the practice of, lay Anglicanism.

Winner vividly, if humbly, describes her work as a “riff” or “an extended exegesis” on an undeveloped but captivating sentence in Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982; 1999): “‘Christian formulas were scattered throughout the daily routines of Anglo-Virginians’” (5). By examining the objects and texts in elite Virginians' homes, Winner uncovers those formulas, revealing a laity-based religiosity that was vibrant and sustaining to its adherents. Faith, she finds, was embedded in the daily and seasonal routines of the Anglican gentry and could be found on their walls, on their dining room tables, and even on their persons. Winner is able to identify a host of Christian formulas in these households by virtue of her sharp eye and broad definitions. For instance, in her chapter on recipe books (which contained directions for Lenten pea soup and cakes for Twelfth Night), Winner shows not only how the liturgical calendar shaped meals and domestic commemorations of faith, but also how feasts and fasts revealed contests of power between the gentry and clergy and within gentry families. Her inclusion of some of these elements may seem to some too sweeping or mundane to demonstrate a “vital” religion, but they fit her construct of a faith that was comfortable, lived, and strikingly domestic.

Beginning each chapter with a thoughtful examination into a particular object or set of objects (such as a baptismal bowl, recipe books, embroidery, and mourning ornaments), Winner then weaves in her readings of traditional and scholarly sources. Her exploration of religious education of girls, for instance, analyzes the nature of church education through silk embroidery. Noting that girls' education and training were less likely than boys' to occur through printed books, Winner argues that material objects such as needlework and jewelry inculcated religious lessons to elite girls. Marked with religious sayings and imbued with spiritual meanings, these objects intertwined lessons of femininity, elite comportment, and religious instructions and thereby functioned as a “domestic, embodied catechesis” (60).

But there are unresolved issues here. In tying her analysis of Anglicanism so closely to (surviving) material culture, Winner inadvertently revives arguments that the Anglican Church was more suited to the gentry than the larger population. Her fascinating exploration of baptism, for instance, highlights the ways in which Virginia elites demanded baptisms occur in their homes rather than in churches, and thereby reshaped its meaning and indeed the definition of Anglican Christian community. Baptism was intended to be a fundamentally communal experience in which the Anglican community welcomed its new member and sanctified an alternative family through the godparents; as Winner notes, parents were not participants in the ritual. And yet, Virginia elites frequently domesticated the ritual, insisting on holding baptisms in their own homes and having family members—and even parents—act as godparents. Thus, elite families erased the communal ties and undermined the concomitant spiritual bonds and duties of church membership.

What then of the larger Anglican population: those who could not afford their own baptismal fonts; those who had neither the time or the money to stitch religious sayings in silk; those who had no room on their property for graveyards; and those who could not persuade clergy to perform rites at their homes? To be sure, Winner fully acknowledges this book is a study of the elite. But what was the relationship between the religious practice of elites and the practice and experience of Anglicanism more broadly? Was eighteenth-century Anglicanism predominately suited to those who could afford to domesticate it? Or were there two (or more?) Anglicanisms: one elite in make-up and largely domestic in practice, which prioritized family over religious communities, and the other predominately church-based, more communal, and less material? Thus, questions of class and Anglican faith—so crucial to this study—sometimes become unclear and implicit when they should be clear and direct.

Finally, her methodology quite naturally raises questions of representativeness. Not only are these sources from elite homes, but few examples of each survived. Did these survive because they were distinctive or because they were common in gentry homes? Her efforts to compensate for this result in arguments that are insightful and innovative, but do not entirely eliminate the issue. She reads her sources alongside prescriptive Anglican texts and makes extensive use of the secondary literature (indeed, the book relies heavily on a number of scholars of Anglicanism in Virginia). But some conclusions are nonetheless predicated on few examples. Her chapter on prayer books for instance, relies primarily on two rather exceptional individuals, William Bryd and Elizabeth Foote Washington. Thus some parts of her work are more suggestive than conclusive.

Despite these issues, A Cheerful Comfortable Faith is bold, imaginative, and provocative (in the best sense of the word). The book is also eminently readable and well structured, in short, a wonderful book for the classroom. It should excite discussion among scholars as well as students.