Although this monograph is a sequel, and a ‘companion volume’ to Religion and society in a Cotswold vale, published twenty-five years earlier, it generally stands on its own. The author uses sophisticated quantitative methods to address the question of the correlation, which he interprets as a causal relationship, between ‘religious feeling’ and procreation. He also raises the wider issue of the link between religion and demography, which he initially discussed in an article published in 1991 that is incorporated as a chapter in this latter book. The author's new approach is comparative. This leads him to use two separate datasets, both of which illustrate the well-known adage that in the digital humanities the data is never given but always constructed. From the records of the Shortwood Baptist Church, Urdank combined information contained in the marriage register, compiled retrospectively in about 1837 about 192 families over a period ranging from 1797 to 1836, with the corresponding burial register and church membership roll. As a result, he created a representative ‘sample’ of seventy-eight families. The second dataset, derived from Church of England parish registers, covers almost the whole of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, and consequently contains a much larger number of cases. Urdank claims that the ‘strong evangelical tendency’ that prevailed among Anglicans in that Gloucestershire valley makes the two ‘parallel’ datasets comparable. The assumption that a probabilistic model could therefore be used to construct an artificial ‘conversion’ variable for Anglicans, to be compared with the date of Nonconformist adult baptism, is questionable. Urdank does acknowledge that the timing of conversion remains ‘more elusive’ for Evangelicals, for whom no ‘independent’ record was available, than for Particular Baptists. Throughout the book, he seems to hesitate between the interpretation of conversion as a ‘process’ and as ‘the frisson’ – a recurrent word – of religious experience. He concludes that there were only marginal differences in the impact of ‘spirituality’ on procreation in the two communities under review. According to him, the formal conversion of either or both of the spouses increased the likelihood of couples producing another birth. ‘Religious enthusiasm’ may thus be considered to have induced ‘procreative activity’. The final bibliography refers the reader to the former volume for references to manuscript sources, and only lists secondary sources. One may wonder whether John Caffyn's Sussex believers: Baptist marriage in the 17th and 18th centuries (1988) would have provided interesting comparisons. Eight appendices in table form complement the thirty figures containing many precise numerical details. In this honest and well-documented study – with lengthy endnotes that would have been better incorporated into the body of the text – the author thus makes the outcome of his meticulous computations available.