The expansive title of this book notwithstanding, Hugh Willmott touches only briefly upon the political or theological aspects of monastic dissolution, though he does illustrate again (as did Dom David Knowles) the spectacular efficiency of the early Tudor state in closing monastic houses and dispersing their properties in a few short years. This book, instead, is the first to attempt to draw together comprehensively what one can know about the material aftereffects of that dispersal: the lands, but especially the buildings, that were formerly conventual but met very different fates in different hands after the 1530s.

Willmott's is an archaeologist's perspective upon the afterlives of formerly monastic sites, drawing upon a great deal of site and excavation studies that have been otherwise scattered in specialist publications. Much of the book consists of close discussion of particular sites, accompanied by site plans (one small quibble is that these are inconsistent in including north arrows or scalebars, and the dialogue between text and plan may sometimes demand especial effort for the non-archaeologist). The cumulative picture portrayed by those many case studies and its implications are exceptionally valuable.

In the early 1500s, there were about 825 monastic houses in England and Wales (and perhaps 2,000 chantries and 6,00 hospitals, most of which were also suppressed). The crown moved quickly to strip assets—for instance, melting down lead from roofs and pipes—and to appropriate valuables and sell off detachable fixtures before selling on the properties themselves. There has been considerable research on this: who bought how much, and so on. One particularly intriguing part of Willmott's analysis illustrates spatial patterns of these acquisitions: specifically, how peers and gentry acquired property in ways that helped to cement their local spheres of influence within particular counties (59–69).

But while it is possible to trace initial sales or leases, many properties changed hands, sometimes repeatedly, in the following decades, so the longer-term shape of their dispersal is less easy to summarize. Willmott emphasizes that there was no simple before/after to the end of monastic properties: their ownership, their integrity (or otherwise) as units of tenure, their geography, and above all the uses that new owners made of their acquisitions were fluid over decades. This is a fundamental shift in perspective away from imagining a “monastic site” as frozen in time and waiting to be reimagined, whether by archeologists and architectural historians interested in the sites of dissolved monasteries as (literally) the foundation for envisioning late medieval monastic life or by government or other heritage organizations’ traditional urge to strip back later accretions to an “original” late medieval state. This also has the effect of emphasizing that the agency for what happened to these sites lay in many hundreds of pairs of later owners’ hands: the physical reformation, where former abbeys were concerned, lay in those hands, not in Henry's, Cromwell's, or otherwise top-down agents.

At least one-quarter (perhaps more) of the churches formerly belonging to monasteries continued in liturgical use in part or full. Reinstituted cathedrals and the creation of new episcopal sees from former abbeys account for part of this, but a remarkable number of formerly conventual churches (or parts of them) continued as parochial churches because of preexisting arrangements between parishes and convents or due to agreements made as part of the site sale.

Most sites were repurposed. Purchasers converted churches and cloister ranges to a wide array of new uses: as town halls, schools, guild quarters, almshouses, and prisons. More than half of the former monastic building complexes in England and Wales, however, became domestic spaces: the resulting houses, from the near palatial (the archetypal Tudor courtyard house of the gentry) to the fairly humble, were each a product of particular choices made in selectively reusing existing walls and adding new ones. Particularly intriguing is a penultimate chapter on the construction of “new landscapes of leisure,” converting monastic green open space to decorative gardens, including belvederes or viewing stages and picturesque fragments of otherwise destroyed abbey fabric (135–158), precociously anticipating a later age's romanticization of follies.

Concentrating upon the physical transformation of formerly sacred space, Willmott is understandably hesitant to conjecture as to what meaning the transformers may have attached to conventual buildings. Did asset-strippers position a lead melting furnace at the former site of a high altar as an intentional, visible act of desecration (26)? Did some who converted cloister complexes into dwellings retain part or all of the former church because of Catholic convictions; conversely, did others demolish churches as emphatic acts underscoring the end of an old order or because of a more generalized unease at living in what had been a nave; or were such choices mostly based on pragmatic decisions about repurposing ecclesiastical interiors as domestic quarters (107–115)?

There are some important connections between what Willmott presents here and recent work on sacred space and material culture after the English Reformations—for instance, by Alexandra Walsham (“Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation,” Church History 86, no. 4 [December 2017]: 1121–1154) and Eamon Duffy (“Bare ruin'd choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare's England,” in Eamon Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege, and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations [Bloomsbury Continuum, 2012], 233–254). Shakespeare's poignant allusion to “Bare ruin'd choirs” (Sonnet 73) postdated the dissolution by about sixty years; this book makes clear how small a minority of those choirs survived even as ruins by the 1590s. But already by that time, formerly sacred spaces and movable artifacts extracted from them had become vested with disparate meanings: regret and loss for Catholics, symbols of triumph coupled with a wistful sense of the past by Protestants, and the beginning of a sense of antiquarian nostalgia for the passing of the ancient into memory. What Willmott presents in this book will be invaluable to further work on this interdisciplinary frontier.