Sarah Tarlow, a historical archaeologist, seeks in this book to integrate archaeological evidence into a larger picture of the early modern development of beliefs and practices surrounding death. In this endeavour she joins a number of other scholars. A collection of twenty essays edited by Margaret Cox (Grave concerns: death and burial in England, 1700–1850, 1998) brought together work by historians, anthropologists, social scientists and archaeologists, including Sarah Tarlow. In Ritual, belief and the dead, Tarlow focuses on beliefs relating to the dead body. The distinctive features of her survey are its geographical scope and analytical structure. She draws on evidence from both Britain and Ireland, though the bulk of her material relates to England. Four chapters between the introduction and conclusion address different types of ‘belief’: religious, scientific, social and folk. A recurrent theme is the ability of a given society, community or individual to hold seemingly incompatible beliefs. In her closing chapter Tarlow asks (p. 199) what the dead body meant to people in early modern Britain: ‘What was left in the body when life had gone?’ According to Christian orthodoxy, she asserts, the answer was ‘nothing’. The body had been a container for the soul, but ‘came to be, especially for Protestants, the enemy of and opposite to the soul’. In social practice, however, the body ‘remained a locus of self: a place where love, grief and personal identity were enacted and constructed’, while also signifying social position and role. For natural philosophers the body was a resource for teaching and research that offered benefits to the living. ‘And for millions of ordinary people, the dead body was a source of occult or medicinal power – its physical matter possessed a force that could be used for the purposes of the living.’ As this summary suggests, Tarlow's accounts of Christian belief are sometimes unreliable: ‘For Protestants there was no interval between the moment of death and the general resurrection’ (p. 24), so that early modern opinion was divided ‘about the timing of the resurrection (immediately after death, or following a period spent in Purgatory)’ (p. 34); ‘new churches set up by dissenters who opposed “the crypto-Catholicism” of post-Laudian “high” Anglicanism … were known as the “low” churches’ (p. 55). The characterisation of Reformed churches abroad as ‘Low Churches’ (p. 47), creates further confusion. Such descriptions of religious beliefs and differences will perturb readers of this Journal. Tarlow's overview of a wide range of recent work by historians and archaeologists nevertheless raises important questions about the archaeological contribution to our understanding of the interaction of beliefs in the early modern period. She rightly points out that the material evidence retrieved by archaeologists is as heavily weighted towards ‘privileged groups’ as are written texts.