The ‘wilderness’ has been a staple both of theology (from the Desert Fathers onwards) and of American historiography (on which Frederick Jackson Turner and his successors continue to cast a long shadow). Russell Richey's Methodism in the American forest is a thought-provoking blending of the two in the context of that most influential of American Protestant denominations, the Methodist Episcopal Church (today the United Methodist Church). Positing the ‘forest’ as the forge in which the steel of Methodism was tempered, Richey explores how the motifs of wilderness, shady grove and garden entered into the theological discourse of preachers and circuit riders throughout the nineteenth century and how the forest served as a neutral space in which distinctions of caste, class, race and gender were subsumed within the experience of revival. By the 1850s, however, American Methodism was undergoing a period of adjustment, increasingly divided over such issues as slavery and the role of laypeople in the Church. Increasingly urban in its constituency and subdivided into a variety of Methodist denominations, the tradition lost touch with its sylvan roots to, in Richey's view, the ultimate impoverishment of its spiritual heritage. Central to Richey's analysis is the phenomenon of the camp meeting, which took on a singular importance in Methodism's ecclesiological development. Particularly significant is his discussion of the influence of the wilderness experience on American Methodism's ‘continental missional orientation’ (p. 91). This approach presumed an itinerant ministry (for much of the nineteenth century, the decision of a preacher to ‘locate’ to a particular community was considered a matter for lament) dedicated to a national mission that periodically brought together persons from all walks of life in what he terms ‘temporary sylvan cathedrals’ (p. 61). Here the covenantal nature of the Christian community could be reaffirmed in worship, testimony and ecstatic experience. In time, however, the camp meeting evolved beyond the pursuit of purely devotional ends and took on a variety of different forms that ultimately stripped it of its universalising character. Richey depicts these forms as a series of typologies, including the ‘programmatic’, devoted to such causes as abolition and temperance, the ‘perfectionist’, promoting the doctrines of the Holiness Movement (a forerunner of modern Pentecostalism), and the ‘progressive’, devoted to religious education and ultimately giving rise to the Chautauqua movement (discussed at some length in his final chapter). Though echoes of the older language of forest and wilderness were still discernible, such evolved forms of camp meeting testified to a modern urban denomination, whose missional focus had undergone a profound transformation. While Richey's contribution to the historiography of Methodism in general and American Methodism in particular is not in doubt, he himself admits that Methodist reflections on the environment remain ‘largely brief and occasional’ (p. 7). His subsequent efforts to tease out implicit meanings, though at times ingenious, do not always seem wholly convincing. As an account of the transformation of the camp meeting, however, this book is worthy of serious attention.