This collaborative history has three main aims. It traces the history of the established Church in Wales. Necessarily this involves considering its relations with other confessional and denominational groups, and comparing Welsh developments with those in Britain and Ireland, and indeed in continental Europe. Also, it hopes to apply to Wales some of the conceptual insights and methodological innovations evident in recent studies of religion. In addition, the contributors use an abundance of unpublished sources, notably bishops' visitations, parish records, the observations of archdeacons, other clerics and travellers, occasional memoirs, the published (and now exhaustively analysed) enquiry into church attendance of 1851 and the 1910 statistical probe into the state of the Church in Wales. Many of these documents have become accessible only recently, and few had been exploited systematically. Behind these specific objectives lies a further hope: that simplistic dismissals of the established Church of Wales as corrupt, negligent and an agent of crude Anglicisation can be replaced with a more measured evaluation.

In the main, the authors' ambitions have been achieved, sometimes triumphantly. Inevitably, in a work of this scope and ambition, some topics can only be sketched and the voluminous evidence merely sampled. The opening chapters, covering 1603 to 1640, are among the last (and now posthumous) writings of the veteran scholar, Sir Glanmor Williams. They are marked by his customary clarity and mastery of the subject, and expertly relate Welsh events to those in England. Traditionally, the success of Protestantism in Wales has been linked with the permissive attitude of the reformers about the use of the vernacular. This attitude contrasts strikingly with the hostility towards the local language evident in Ireland. In Wales, Williams notes the resilience of Catholicism, especially in the south-east and north-east and the relative weakness and frequent unpopularity of dissenters before the 1660s. His account, always authoritative, does not always engage as closely as do his colleagues' chapters with the diocesan and parochial records or with the recent revisions in the writing of the religious history of the period outside Wales. Those who tackle the later centuries use the abundant sources to give unprecedented detail on the clergy and their parishes. Bishops bulk large. A recurrent question is how sympathetic they were towards, and well-equipped to function in, Wales. Until the later nineteenth century most were Englishmen, and many lacked facility in the Welsh language. Yet, almost all are rescued from the derision or dismissals that they have previously suffered. Only A. G. Edwards, chosen as archbishop of Wales after disestablishment, running his ecclesiastical equivalent of the Taffia – ‘the Llandovery clique’ or ‘St Asaph syndicate’ – finds no revisionist to admire him. Numerous clergy are plucked from their previous obscurity to be praised as conscientious deans, archdeacons, rural deans and parish incumbents or as scholars, poets and enthusiasts of the Welsh language.

Documented in hitherto unparalleled detail are the yields of the bishoprics and the parochial livings. Information about incomes, disputes arising from efforts to collect tithes, the building and repair of churches, parsonages and schools is tabulated most helpfully. From time to time the Welsh conditions are set alongside those elsewhere. It is argued that, in some respects, the provision of official religion in Wales was no worse than in remote parts of the north and west of England. It would be interesting to have had comparisons with the at least superficially similar conditions in Scotland and Ireland.

North Wales was more fortunate than the south, so much so that the bishopric of Bangor, with its generous emoluments, could attract bishops from Exeter and Gloucester. South Wales, beset in the eighteenth century with non-residence and pluralism, suffered further when, from the early nineteenth century, population grew rapidly. The established Church, although not unresponsive to the challenges, lost adherents to dissent. Yet, the authors, while alive to the vitality of nonconformity, revise earlier interpretations of the chronology and dynamics of Methodism and the later evangelical revivals.

Following a long-established tendency and reflecting the nature of much of the documentation, the authors tend to see the Church through its clergy. This imbalance is offset by revealing information, again summarised in tables, about the frequency of different services (notably communion), the languages in which worship was conducted and (on the basis of the 1851 enquiry) the proportions belonging to the several Christian confessions. It is clear that education was taken seriously, although commentators disagreed about the impact of catechesis, preaching, Psalm- and hymn-singing, the writing and distribution of devotional manuals, the establishment of libraries and the opening of schools. Only on the eve of disestablishment is there evidence of widespread use of the laity. Some of the initiatives, notably the licensing of men as readers, proved controversial. The feeling that the nonconformists had succeeded better in directing lay energies into the institutional life of their Churches is not altogether dispelled.

Detail is offered about the popularity during the eighteenth century of communal celebrations focused on the parish. By the late nineteenth century the importance of harvest festivals, the New Year and Epiphany is clear. Yet disappointingly little is said about the rites of passage, such as christening, marriage and funerals. Popular practices imperfectly controlled by the clergy persisted. The involvement of lay people as patrons, church-wardens, tithe-collectors, members of formal and informal religious and teetotal societies appears only intermittently. In some cases the divergence between clerical and lay aspirations created such tension that laypeople were attracted into alternative denominations or towards secularism. Issues of this kind are certainly not dodged by the four contributors, but deserve fuller examination. William Jacob and Nigel Yates deploy statistics derived from impressive analyses of the surviving documentation to show a Church keen to address material and spiritual shortcomings. Future studies of the behaviour and attitudes of the Welsh people towards religion will depend on this detailed and reliable account of the institutional Church and its personnel.