There was a time when historians of Wales spilt more ink on their principality's religious history than any other subject—testimony to the strength of nonconformist religion in the late Victorian era and to the role which such expressions of protestantism played in creating and then sustaining a distinctive Welsh national identity. The lack of such historians among contemporary practitioners of the craft is exemplified by the sad recent ending of the publication of an academic Welsh religious history journal. The appearance of this volume on the early modern and modern diocese of St. Davids, the ancient home of Wales' patron saint, is therefore especially to be welcomed.

St. Davids covers the three counties of Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion, a large though sparsely populated area from the university town of Aberystwyth in the north to the tiny cathedral city of St. Davids in the far west, the ancient capital of Wales, Carmarthen in its centre, and the post-industrial town of Llanelli at its eastern extremity. It has been the location of many of the main religious developments in the history of Wales; as such its ecclesiastical history can be seen as a microcosm of the history of the rest of Wales as well.

Over forty years in the making, this is the first history of the diocese of St. Davids since 1888, a time when the fortunes of the churches, both Anglican and nonconformist, were very different. Although published by an academic press and bearing a hefty price tag, this book is not inaccessible to non-specialist readers. Containing eight chapters, an introductory essay and a commendatory preface by the present bishop of St. Davids, it is the combined effort of seven different authors, each specialists in their chosen fields. Although broadly chronological, most of the essays also have a specific thematic focus. At this point a caveat is necessary; the volume is a history of religion in St. Davids, not a history of Anglicanism in the diocese as perhaps the title suggests. Although some chapters deal exclusively with the church, others focus only on the fortunes of the nonconformist denominations. The result is an inevitable unevenness of coverage in some areas.

The opening two chapters by John Morgan-Guy focus on the Reformation and its outworking in the diocese during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Morgan-Guy the introduction of protestantism was “ill-fated, if not disastrous” (36), being forced on a people who retained their love for all things Roman Catholic. These chapters present an overly pessimistic account; Morgan-Guy echoes Glanmor Williams's low estimation of the pioneering efforts of Wales' most ambitious early protestant William Barlow as “outspoken” and “singularly lacking in tact and subtlety” (32), although Williams did at least admit that Barlow was a courageous and sincere innovator. Some of the other key achievements of the first generations of Welsh protestants, the publication of William Morgan's translation of the Bible into Welsh in 1588, for example, are damned with faint praise.

A more positive, at times sharply contrasting picture, can be found in Robert Pope's chapter on theological writing, in which he argues that an essentially Calvinist theological tradition, shaped by an illustrious body of both puritans and nonconformists, has characterized the diocese. Glanmor Williams, the doyen of Welsh ecclesiastical historians, once wrote that it was not until the eighteenth century that the Protestant Reformation finally came of age in Wales. The chapter on the religious revivals of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly points in that direction. What this chapter fails to do though is to set these revivals in wider context; the major revivals to affect the diocese—the evangelical revival of the mid eighteenth century, the 1859 awakening, and even the 1904–1905 revival—were part of wider international movements. Religious revivals in the diocese did not take place in splendid isolation from wider currents.

Although many of these revivals had their origins in the Anglican church, the main beneficiaries of them were the nonconformist denominations. Religious developments in the nineteenth century are inevitably dominated by a vigorous nonconformity which in its mobilization of vast swaths of the population in a Welsh-speaking mass movement became synonymous with Wales itself. However, in this volume nonconformity is somewhat glossed over. The nineteenth century is approached only via an essay on the increasing popularity of the celebration of St. Davids Day on March 1. There is little sense here of the internecine war between Anglicans and nonconformists that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond, dominated of course by the battle over the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales, an issue which absorbed enormous energies from the mid nineteenth century onwards. Indeed, the growth of nonconformity in the later chapters of book resembles the proverbial elephant in the room.

On the twentieth century Harri Williams writes on Bishop John Owen who, despite opposing disestablishment in the early part of the century effectively became the forefather of the Church in Wales. The book concludes with a chapter by William Price containing a series of mini-biographies of the bishops who served the diocese since 1926. These final two chapters are the most Anglican focused, but fail to take notice of the wider context. Little attempt is made to reflect in either of them on the very different fortunes of religion in the diocese in the twentieth century.

So as is almost always the case in edited collections of this kind there is much to stimulate and enjoy, but also a sense of a missed opportunity. Its strengths are the middle chapters, perhaps the areas where there has been most historical research in recent times. Despite the relative lack of historians and theologians working on the nation's religious history today, one of the things that the volume shows most clearly is that there are many fruitful avenues for further research on Wales' religious history, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at one extreme and the twentieth century at the other. One hopes that this volume will go some way to stimulate such endeavor.