This enjoyable essay collection is a sequel to The archaeology of Reformation, 1480–1580 (rev. this Journal lvi [2005], 154–6), and likewise results from a major conference which must have been great fun. The Reformation provides a period of overlap between the two volumes: otherwise, the second moves forward from the 1560s to the nineteenth century, while its final contribution, on memorial ‘maidens' garlands’ in English parish churches, provides a terminal date as recent as 1973 at Abbots Ann in Hampshire, a modern stronghold of this curious and now extremely counter-cultural custom. The main emphasis of the essays is English, almost exclusively so in parts ii and iii dealing with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the most interesting and important contributions stray further.Andrew Spicer has an absorbing microstudy of the Church of Scotland's careful rearrangement of church building provision in a single Berwickshire parish, which highlights the way in which Scotland's religious revolution demanded new buildings and a reorganisation far more radical than in England (Spicer provides a useful handlist of Scots legislation for other parish rationalisations from 1592 to 1649). Philippa Woodcock is thoughtful on Catholic efforts to reequip the cathedral and other churches in the diocese of Le Mans after Huguenot destruction, telling us much about the balance between past and Counter-Reformation; Matthias Range has an invaluable case study of the building of confessionals in Lutheran Schleswig (we tend to forget this aspect of Lutheran parallelism with the Counter-Reformation); and Peter Benes is interesting in pointing out how, after 1700, Protestant Anglican stylistic modes subverted Puritan New England's initial architectural revolt against the Church of England. Two contributors, Chris King and Greig Parker, track down the material culture of refugee Protestant congregations in Norwich and London (particularly important in Norwich, refugees forming a staggering one-third of its population in the 1570s and 1580s, and with strategic centrally-placed ‘Stranger’ church buildings to match). Three essays on the distribution of Georgian and Victorian chapels in the landscape leave the feeling that archaeology and topography inevitably play second fiddle to written primary sources in so well-documented a field, but four essays arising out of archaeological investigation of cemeteries thoroughly vindicate the role of archaeology in modern social and ecclesiastical history, opening up a rich seam in which social groupings, burial customs and even dental health are matched to denominational allegiance. There is much more to do there which will unite church historians and archaeologists in a fruitful alliance.