Cara Delay takes on an ambitious topic in this book, questioning how Irish lay women participated in, maintained and were formed by Catholicism across a century. As Delay points out, Catholicism was omnipresent in the lives of generations of Irish women. The Catholic Church and its beliefs touched everything in the female domestic sphere from birth to death, eventually extending its oversight into public spaces we now consider secular. To cover such a wide array of experiences, Delay has organised her book into themes encompassing childhood, motherhood, the domestic and public spheres and spaces, and female engagement with, support of and resistance to the patriarchal Church and Catholic gender norms. The thematic scope of the book is as broad as the research that Delay has undertaken in private and institutional archives. Without a timeline or clear chronology within each theme, however, there is no clear sense of the trajectory of female agency in Irish Catholicism. How Delay defines what modern Catholicism is also remains elusive, a fact which complicates analysis both of the agency of Catholic women and their impact on a ‘modern’ Catholic ethos or society during the century under study. In places the work is so broad that it loses a sense of nuance – as, for example, its critique of an eighteenth-century Italian priest, Alphonsus de’ Liguori, to discuss the Irish Church's negative opinion of the romantic novel in 1910 (pp. 29–30). By overlooking Liguori's influence on Catholicism as a whole, Delay misses the fact that his thought informed much of the Irish Church's emphasis on female sexual purity during this period – an emphasis that she raises often – and in particular its handing of pre-marital sexuality. The lack of engagement with such details and with the broader international theological and intellectual contexts of Catholicism is in some ways a simple victim of how much information has been poured into this book. Without such wider contexts, however, it is not entirely evident where, when or how Irish Catholicism modernised, nor indeed why in many Catholic corners of the world women still invest in, perpetuate and engage with cultures of modesty, purity and other behaviours under study in this book. Where Delay particularly shines is in examining the period's increasingly blurred boundaries between the public and private spheres, as well as in her discussions of that fine line between Irish women's belief in the mystical and devotional practices sanctioned by the Church and those that were relegated to the categories of magic and folklore. The introduction of lay Catholic women into modern Irish history is long overdue, and Delay's work prompts its readers to question how we view women's engagement with religion and society during such a consequential period in modern Irish history.