This is a landmark, the first VCH religious history volume to be published for two decades – most are considerably older – and only the second ‘red book’ for Cornwall since Volume I appeared in 1906. Since the project was revived in 1998, two paperbacks have appeared in the ‘England's Past for Everyone’ (EPE) series, one a ‘popular’ version of the volume under review (Orme 2007), and groups of volunteers are preparing topographical volumes III and IV.

Knowledge of Cornish religious history has progressed significantly in the last century. For the later medieval period, Joanna Mattingley's work on guilds and other aspects of popular devotion stands out, as does the scholarship of this volume's principal author, Nicholas Orme. Sam Turner has illuminated Christianity's impact on the historic landscape. Understanding of the cultural background is richer for Oliver Padel's work on Cornish place-names. Others who have advanced the frontier include Charles Thomas, most recently with his interpretations of post-Roman inscriptions (1994), Lynette Olson, Ann Preston-Jones and Susan Pearce.

Understanding of Cornwall's distinctive veneration of local saints still rests heavily on the achievements of an earlier scholar, Gilbert Doble. Having built on Doble's monumental ‘Cornish Saints’ series with a survey that borrowed its compendium title, The Saints of Cornwall, as well as authoring a number of other key regional texts, Orme was an obvious candidate to write this volume. It is weighty and erudite, but with some important shortcomings.

Sometimes it is not clear what audience is being addressed. Orme lengthily describes the Mass (more appropriate for the EPE paperback?), and explains ‘dean’ but not ‘goliardic’ verse (p 141) – bibulous, satirical poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly by clerical students and typified by the Carmina Burana. In six chronological chapters, followed by a gazetteer of religious houses (pp 126ff), isolated images of worldly monks sporting thigh boots, caps and pointy shoes enliven an otherwise largely monochrome landscape dominated by governance and disputation.

The account of religious houses is in two sections – before and after 1066, the first much shorter than the second. The result is much repetition, and frequent truncation of otherwise seamless narratives. Furthermore, the gazetteer's alphabetical order breaks the established pattern of categorizing by monastic order, mode of governance and function. The result makes it difficult to compare like with like. Hospitals, abbeys and colleges are intermixed, grades of importance obscured, and one needs a detailed knowledge of the county to know where to begin.

The building plans of churches are excellent but show nothing of their yards or settings, particularly their location in the historic landscape. For a county characterized by its deeply indented coastline, complex land forms, irregular enclosures and dispersed settlement, the geography of religious sites can be key to understanding their origins. Moreover, ‘Churches acted as foci for new patterns of life in the countryside’ (Turner 2006, p 30).

The oddest feature is that ecclesiastical history is dealt with by Orme in eleven pages up to the tenth century, and then, 100 pages further on, at the close of the chronological section, comes another contribution (pp 110–25) by Oliver Padel, on ‘Christianity in medieval Cornwall: Celtic aspects’. This looks like an afterthought and reads in places like an interim statement. The reader is left wanting more, and feeling intuitively that there is more to be said.

In fact Padel's contribution is the gem of the volume, lively and full of innovative ideas: ‘The profusion of local saints in Cornwall arose from its indigenous culture, as in Wales and Brittany, not from overseas influence’ (p 113); a mysterious group of mainly coastal churches lie inconveniently at one end of parishes up to seven miles long (p 116); many parish churches [often in lanns] ‘had rather different origins from those in most of England. They were neither former minsters nor manorial churches, but originated perhaps as small early Christian communities endowed with small plots of land for their chapels, dwellings, burials, and presumably subsistence’ (p 119). Citing by analogy the seven bishoprics in the Welsh kingdom of Dyfed with its seven cantrefi, Padel envisages the possibility of the same number of bishops in Cornwall, which had seven hundreds (p 121).

Also drawing attention to the long-lasting veneration of corporal relics (pp 112, 125) and unusually extensive sanctuary privileges (pp 124–5), Padel offers the thought that, in some important respects, early Christians here and in other Celtic-speaking lands may have been more in step with much of continental practice than the English. For example, while acknowledging that the phenomenon of dedications that recur between the different regions of the Celtic-speaking lands ‘is still not understood’, he points out similarities in the cult of saints ‘with what is found in some areas of the Continent, especially the Mediterranean’ (p 125). He cites Ian Wood's (2002) study of cult construction in Burgundy and the Auvergne (p 125, fn 4) and one could also point to southern Italy, including Sicily.

The introduction of this exciting ‘work in progress’ is a further badge of this volume's landmark status.

Orme, N 2007. Cornwall and the Cross: Christianity, 500–1560, London: Phillimore with the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London

Thomas, C 1994. And Shall these Mute Stones Speak: post-Roman inscriptions in western Britain, Cardiff: University of Wales Press

Turner, S 2006. ‘The Christian landscape: churches, chapels and crosses’, in Medieval Devon and Cornwall: shaping an ancient countryside (ed S Turner), 24–43, Macclesfield: Windgather Press

Wood, I 2002. ‘Constructing cults in early medieval France: local saints and churches in Burgundy and the Auvergne 400–1000’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (eds A Thacker and R Sharpe), 155–87, Oxford: Oxford University Press