Arnold’s study begins with the question (for the period from the year 1000 to the Black Death) “How did the fundamental experience of ‘being Christian’ unfold for the vast majority of ordinary people?” It shows considerable familiarity with surviving church buildings and new churches built to replace older ones as populations moved (usually) downhill.

Chapter 4, “Towns and the Holy,” considers the growth of new types of charitable institutions, hospitals, hospices for strangers or the indigent, particularly in the towns of the late twelfth century, but also in such rural locations as Aubrac, where a hospital is attested from the 1160s.

Chapter 9, “Negotiations of the Faith,” is a particularly succinct chapter about how villagers needed to negotiate with local priests and bishops about the tithes owed in return for parochial services with some good statistics.

I take issue particularly with chapter 3, “A Re-formed Landscape,” which takes as its centerpiece the life of Pons de Leras, eventually founder of what became a Cistercian monastery at Silvanes. However, this is not quite the same Life of Pons de Leras as mine. Arnold takes it quite literally. My view is that we cannot do so, that many of pilgrimage sites listed were not actually visited and that stories about sending off for advice about which reform group to follow are replicated elsewhere, and that links for transhumant pastoralism tell other stories.