Hynes's work takes its place among a growing body of scholarly attention to the social and political significance of Marian apparitions in nineteenth-century Europe.

David Blackburn's Marpingen, Ruth Harris's Lourdes and Anne Bernet's fascinating and sceptical biography of Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary at Lourdes, all seek to contextualise the appearances of the Virgin Mary. They are anxious to relate them to peasant historical and folk memory, and to show that they are also a response to ‘modernisation’ and the impact that this had on rural and peasant life. Hynes argues that Knock, along with many other places in nineteenth-century Ireland, had a long history of informal supernatural interventions from fairies and changelings, some of which had Christian roots. This in itself was a product of a basic tension, which had long existed in the relationship between formal and clerically controlled Catholicism and ‘folk religion’. Hayes makes clear his conviction that the Virgin's silent appearance at Knock in August 1879, somewhat bizarre in that she was accompanied by, among others, the Lamb of God himself, was as a response to a crisis in clerical authority. This crisis had its roots in a number of factors including disputes between priests and people over heavy clerical financial exactions; priestly intervention in the problems associated with the Land League; and the activity of revolutionaries in the shape of the Fenians, whereby the priests refused to give the last rites to dying Fenians who would not relinquish their revolutionary propensities. All this takes place against the background of a threatened famine in the west of Ireland. These factors, together with the general upheaval in social mores in post-famine Knock, produced what Hayes, in Durkheimian terms, calls a state of ‘anomie’ from which the Blessed Virgin rescued local society by her silent vigil. In explaining the silence that the celestial visitors maintained throughout the vision, Hayes argues that the Virgin simply did not know which language to speak, Irish or English, to her mixed language seers. The gradual eclipsing of Irish by English was another dimension of the ‘crisis’ in identity and social structure in rural society. Conveniently the majority of the visionaries were from an extended family sympathetic to clerical authority. The ecclesiastical authorities who investigated and wrote up the visionaries' experiences seem to have manipulated the evidence to suit their own preconceived theological and social prejudices. The book is a fascinating investigation not just of the circumstances of the apparition in what was an insignificant village in Co. Mayo, but also of the role and function of religion in nineteenth-century rural Ireland. In particular Hayes refines the ‘devotional revolution’ thesis of Emmet Larkin, and shows that in one important detail with regard to the pre-famine practice of the ‘Stations of the Cross’ Larkin is wrong. Hynes is not completely accurate in every instance and he gives no really convincing account of why the devotion to the ‘Lourdes of Ireland’ died away only to be revived in the 1930s. Knock is a very solid scholarly achievement and will be of great use to historians and anthropologists alike.