This collection of eleven essays by an international team of scholars is the third volume in a series devoted to charting the changing shape and status of organized religion in northern Europe over the course of the “long nineteenth century.” It inevitably overlaps in focus to some extent with its two predecessors, which dealt with church-state relations and ecclesiastical reform. (A forthcoming volume will address material culture.) In general, however, contributors are concerned with piety in the broad sense of lived religious experience: the concrete practices and attitudes of ordinary folk in a world of increasing mobility, expanding mass communications, and growing individualism—“religious reform” in the extended sense of cultural transformations as well as the more obvious sense of programmatic renewal. Except for Hugh McLeod's brief discussion of religion and the regulation of sport in England, contributions all take a national and/or confessional rather than topical or comparative approach. There are separate chapters devoted to Catholics and Protestants in both Germany and the Netherlands; other contributions deal with Britain, Ireland, Belgium, and each of the three Scandinavian states. Editor Anders Jarlert (Lund University) contributes a useful introductory overview as well as chapters on Sweden and Protestant Germany.

The protean nature of relationships between piety and modernity, broadly construed, militates against any easy summary of authors' findings. As Jarlert notes in his introduction (23), the “map of piety” in Europe during the period in question “became both more differentiated and more complex,” and this complexity certainly receives its due throughout the book. Not surprisingly, all contributors either explicitly or implicitly reject reductionist accounts of secularization as a necessary default narrative of modernity. The tides of Matthew Arnold's Sea of Faith manifestly flowed in more than one direction, often at the same time. Modernity could exert constructive as well as corrosive influences on religious practice; secularization and rechristianization were frequently simultaneous and sometimes complementary processes. The apparent extrusion of the churches from the mental universes of urban proletariats and bourgeois elites notwithstanding, grassroots religious vitality remained a force to be reckoned with throughout northern Europe as late as World War I. Factors generally associated with secularization, such as de facto or de jure disestablishment or the erosion of pre-industrial social structures and traditional community relationships, often had the unexpected side effect of fostering more personal and self-conscious religious commitments, in the process fueling new expressions of piety and often opening up new fault lines both within and between existing confessional communities. What Mary Heimann, in her chapter on Britain, aptly describes as “an expressive and essentially demotic form of spirituality” (54), often colored by residues of Romanticism and the multiple socio-economic and political upheavals of mid-century, manifested itself in one form or another, from prayer meetings and organized pilgrimages to soup kitchens and Sunday schools, in most of the countries discussed here.

As virtually every contributor has occasion to observe, modern mass communications served as a particularly potent engine of identity formation through proliferating hymnals and Bible translations, vernacular prayer books, sermon collections, mission magazines and other devotional tools. Many of the new resources created constituencies that transcended particular confessional boundaries, a salient case in point being the perennially popular Moravian “Daily Watchwords,” still being published annually today (including, latterly, as a smart phone app). This expanding print culture helped promote a new internationalization of piety evident in, for example, the growing influence of Anglo-American revivalism, an upsurge of popular interest in mission endeavors, and the early stirrings of an organized ecumenical movement. In many cases it also served as a tool for organizing religious life around new networks of voluntary associations segmented by gender or age group. Church leaders who had once sought to discipline and regulate popular piety from above increasingly found ways to mobilize and instrumentalize these various evangelical energies—a selective appropriation of modernity pursued perhaps most intensively among Catholics, despite the official anti-modernism of the Vatican. The effects of religious mobilization could sometimes prove paradoxical. As Janice Holmes shows in a fascinating study of Ireland, patterns of evangelical enthusiasm that were broadly characteristic of Catholics and Protestants alike ultimately worked to increase the mutual differentiation and isolation of the two communities—a phenomenon parallel in some respects to the well-known “pillarization” of Dutch society addressed by Peter Jan Margry and Fred van Lieburg in their chapters on Catholics and Protestants in the Netherlands.

Many such points of comparison suggest themselves throughout the book. Unfortunately, the concentration on individual countries precludes systematic comparative analysis, although the editor's introduction calls attention to a variety of general themes. It is also a bit unfortunate that, with the exception of a short section in Johannes Enggaard Stidsen's chapter on Denmark, the Jewish communities of northern Europe go virtually unmentioned. While a decision to restrict the focus to Christian churches can hardly be faulted, consideration of Jewish piety and modernity in the era of emancipation would certainly have provided an illuminating complement to many of the themes explored here. For the most part these essays break no new ground, but they do a fine job of synthesizing main currents of recent research. They are unfailingly informative, though one or two convey something of a cut-and-paste quality, tending toward an encyclopedic recounting of trends and practices rather than sustained argumentation. Taken as a whole, the book provides a vivid picture of nineteenth-century religious life in all its diversity, and it attests to the continuing vigor of scholarly inquiry into what Olaf Blaschke has famously described as Europe's “second confessional age.”