This stout volume marks the centenary year of the Oxfordshire Record Society and makes a firm claim on the attention of ecclesiastical historians at large. Everything here is to the highest standards: Mark Smith's admirable introduction is a model of its kind; he observes significant details with a sharp eye, placing the overall patterns nicely within the wider pictures which historical scholarship has come to acknowledge. If William Wake was evidently the father of the Visitation, at Lincoln in 1706, Oxford caught on as early as 1738, when Thomas Secker was bishop there. Yet the visitations of the twentieth century have – so far – rarely been examined. This book may well suggest that this neglect is a mistake. Oxford was a predominantly rural diocese and this sense of an agricultural world does much to define the substance of the study. Then there is Bishop Gore himself. Gore, like other bishops, devised his own questions (eleven in 1914 and six in 1918). While both visitations emphasised questions of public worship, and will attract scholars of liturgical history, the first visitation also enquired about educational provision (with specific reference to the children of Nonconformist families) and the development of parochial church councils, while the second sought to understand the effects of the National Mission of Repentance and Hope, an enterprise much criticised as a failure by historians, often in rather shallow terms. Predictably, the replies vary a great deal: some are expansive and even intricate; some express personal feelings of confidence or pessimism; many are blandly taciturn. When the 1914 visitation asks hopefully about organised study for adults the vicar of Stanton St John replies benignly, ‘We have not any material here for such study.’ At large, we catch glimpses of the changing forms and times of public worship, sung when there were enough present to sing it, sometimes moving from Sunday afternoons to evenings (in sharper competition with the chapels); the local consequences of what had been a turbulent national reform of public education; the growth of lay participation, particularly that of women, either in the parish church itself or in the growing ranks of the voluntary societies. The clergy themselves, often mature in years, come quietly to life before us. Anglo-Catholic priests settled in Oxford in some abundance, but they were not always very much at home or even very much in company. ‘Does Oxford not contain one son’, laments one, ‘ – who would for the love of God – come and join me in teaching the Catholic faith in this hamlet?’ The book confirms that although the Great War certainly affected the comings and goings of parish life in an age in which domestic migration was already altering much, shifting patterns are not easy to detect. Much simply went on as before, though perhaps with more disorderly behaviour, not least among young men and women. Here or there came a change of accent or rhythm, caught within a steady, ongoing adaptation to circumstances. What was arguably distinctive in these years was what one vicar found to be a growing ‘an independence of spirit’ and a deepening piety amongst the already devout. This, remarks the editor, suggests that the national Church was already moving, and ‘increasingly swiftly’, towards being not an integral part of a wider social order but a gathered Church. It is an important argument and only such a volume as this could make it.