This book bears a deceptively laconic title, the significance of which must not be overlooked. On the one hand, this is the first attempt to wed Pocockian “British history” to the study of religious reform. On the other, it is a study of reformation with a small “r,” as process not reified thing (be it “the” Reformation of A. G. Dickens or the “Reformations” of Christopher Haigh). The product is thus as novel as it is important: a Herculean synthetic treatment of the dynamics of Protestant reform throughout sixteenth-century Britain and Ireland.

This is a massive subject, covering a vast secondary literature in numerous languages. To it Felicity Heal brings the social historian's careful taxonimizing eye, addressing everything from abstract theological treatises to material culture, from high politics to life in the pews. She divides the text into four roughly chronological parts: “The Traditional Order,” “The Coming of Reformation,” “Word and Doctrine,” and “Reformations Established and Contested.” And while she draws upon the latest research, she is not beholden to it, and her judicious critiques of historiographical trends alone make it worth owning. She is at her best on the English material. Of particular interest is her ongoing engagement with revisionist accounts of the late-medieval church, most notably the work of Eamon Duffy. While frequently in agreement with Duffy, she nevertheless offers important cautions meant to temper “historical enthusiasm for late medieval piety” (105), suggesting, for instance, that the “weaning of the population from a belief in purgatory did not, perhaps, create such a traumatic divide between the present and hereafter as Duffy's argument suggests” (457). Equally salutary is her skepticism toward arguments (à la Keith Thomas) that posit a demystification of the world before the rationalizing-modernizing power of a logocentric religion (276, 483).

If there is a unifying theme here, it is the “transactional” nature of reform as played out among church, state, and people. This does not, however, equal an argument for consensus, but rather a description of reform and tradition as things to be fought over in societies where power was diffused and people were “capable of inhabiting multiple, even contradictory, mental worlds simultaneously” (483).

The real novelty is the book's “British” element, which provides some of its most fascinating insights. Heal's exploration of the fraught history of efforts to produce Celtic-language Bibles reveals some telling limits to the Protestant passion for vernacular scriptures (269–86). Elsewhere, she uses Ireland to demonstrate that while reformation was very much a political “event,” royal will was insufficient for carrying off religious change where there were too few sympathetic gentry and magistrates to enforce it adequately. (226) It is her facility with sociocultural matters, however, which elicits the most dramatic comparisons, the Scottish-English discussions in part 4 being particularly striking. The argument that English and Scottish attitudes to church discipline—typically taken to be worlds apart—blur significantly when viewed from the parish level is but one excellent example (459).

But it is also in the telling of a “British” history where one might quibble. The treatment of the non-English material is generally excellent and sympathetic, yet it is somewhat unnerving to read of “racial divisions” in Ireland, which “prevented a close identity with English dominated forms of rule” (56–57). Was “race”—whatever that might mean for the sixteenth century—really at issue? And there are moments when the complexity of religious and cultural practice in the “Celtic fringe” flattens to monolithic sameness. Here the exclusion of Catholic reform from this study becomes a real limiting factor, and one which risks leaving the impression of the Irish as hopeless traditionalists. Heal is aware of this and cautions against seeing Irish (and Welsh) Catholics mired in some sort of Celtic twilight with no knowledge of Rome (108). Nevertheless, it is worrisome to read that Irish learned elites were “deeply content with traditional Catholicism and saw any challenge to it as alien imposition” (284). The subtle and enlightening discussion of what “traditional” religion meant in Marian England (218–26) could be replicated for Ireland.

Moreover, England dominates the text. In a way, it has to since the study attempts to balance “both cultural pluralism and partial domination in the history of the British Isles” (11), and there is no escaping who did the dominating. But it also results from methodological choice, for this is a comparative, rather than integrative, study. What we get, then, is discussion of “national” phenomena juxtaposed, rather than exploration of the back-and-forth of reform between nations. Consequently, it is a narrative in which England does things, and Ireland and Wales have things done to them (Scotland operating somewhere in between). And while the author is surely right in stating that “national autonomy is enshrined in the very fabric of the Reformation” (7), given the focus on negotiated and transactional aspects of reform, it would have been nice to see more of how those dynamics worked across borders, not just within them.

There is perhaps a more pressing reason why this is a strongly English-inflected text: the availability of sources. Heal rightly notes that the surviving raw material for England dwarfs that for the other nations (9–10). What goes unmentioned, but becomes clear from the footnotes and bibliography, is that that disparity applies to the secondary literature too, the quantity and quality of which are equally as important for a synthetic work such as this. And secondary works on integrative aspects of “British” reform simply do not exist in the numbers necessary to serve as its foundation. (It is no surprise that some of the most interesting works she consults are dissertations.) One of the book's greatest contributions, then, will be its highlighting of those areas in which transactional studies of reform in Britain and Ireland are sorely lacking. For those wishing to take up that research, Heal's erudite and elegant text, and comprehensive bibliography, will provide the essential starting point for years to come.