This volume contains no fewer than thirty-three papers written by scholars from a wide range of professional and disciplinary backgrounds. The contributions are arranged chronologically, and thus the reader undertakes an undulating journey (with views of religion high and low) from the churches of Visigothic Spain to those of England in the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wealth of stirring scenery along the way, though the absence of a detailed introduction may leave some readers feeling mildly nauseous from time to time. In a mere two prefatory pages, we are told by Eamon Duffy that the ‘imagined polarity between the sophisticated religion of the elite and the crude religion of the people at large’ has dominated scholarly thinking since the Enlightenment, but that most of the contributors to this volume have come to acknowledge – with Duffy himself – ‘the unhelpfulness of any simple bi-polar characterisation of the complexities of religious experience and religious institutions and practice’. This is, then, the connecting theme, though it is apparent that the contributors have been left to apply it at their discretion rather than being coaxed or cajoled into remaining permanently ‘on message’. Consequently, the elite/popular polarity (conventionally understood as a mode of analysis that supposes a close parallel between cultural affiliation and social status) tends to drift in and out of focus, depending on the instincts and intentions of each individual author. In some cases, different but related cultural distinctions – most often between clerics and laypeople – are left to stand in for the elite/popular dichotomy, and the additional questions raised by this habit are left to hang somewhat menacingly in the air.

It may be useful to begin with a bare summary of the book's contents. The first papers cover the medieval period, and we hear from the following authors: Jamie Wood on Spanish baptismal practices during the sixth and seventh centuries; Éamonn Ó Carragáin on the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses, erected in early eighth-century Northumbria; Claire Taylor on West Frankish heresy in the decades around ad 1000; William Purkis on the process by which early eleventh-century Cistercians abandoned the idea that crusaders deserved to be regarded as imitators of Christ; Simon Yarrow on English miracle narratives of the twelfth century; Catherine Rider on the Exempla of Stephen of Bourbon (a notably lucid and lively essay); A. K. McHardy on the divisions that existed within late fourteenth-century English orthodoxy; Kathryne Beebe on the experience of pilgrimage in the late Middle Ages; Elizabeth Freeman on the place of English Cistercian nunneries within the order as a whole; Salvador Ryan on the forms in which religious knowledge was disseminated in late-medieval Ireland (another highlight of the book); R. N. Swanson on prayer and participation in England during the same period; Eamon Duffy on the importance of the Book of Hours within lay piety; David d'Avray on feast days, preaching and ‘the power of the apostolic life ideal’; and Urszula Borkowska Osu on the pious priorities of the Jagiellian dynasty in Poland-Lithuania.

The early modern period is covered with equal variety: David Bagchi asks the precise question, ‘Who wrote and who read Reformation Flugschriften?’; Patrick Preston analyses three Italian religious works of the 1540s; Trevor Johnson provides a wide-ranging but concise essay on the Counter-Reformation, and his consideration of the popular/elite polarity is the most sophisticated in the book; Brian Cummings takes a fresh and entertaining look at the role played by ‘the popular voice’ in the Marprelate controversy; D. A. Brading considers the early-modern cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe; Peter Marshall examines the attempt made by John Quick, a Presbyterian minister, to bring two murdering women to godly repentance before their execution in 1676; Sally Jordan looks at the reasons for the Catholic gentry's impressive practice of paternalism during the long eighteenth century; Colin Haydon argues that, in the same period, the clergy of the Church of England came increasingly to align themselves with the ‘politeness’ of the social and cultural elite; W. M. Jacob presents a painstaking analysis of church-seating allocations in England during the long eighteenth century; and Linda Kirk explores the relationship between religion and culture in Geneva during a comparable period.

We approach the modern era with Andrew Holmes's excellent chapter on ‘Ulster Presbyterianism as popular religious culture, 1750–1860’, and the final group of essays bring us close to the present day: Timothy C. F. Stunt considers the early Plymouth Brethren; Sheridan Gilley and Dermot Fenlon present separate papers on nineteenth-century English religion, both drawing extensively on the work of John Henry Newman; in between, John Wolffe studies the religious census conducted on 30 March 1851; Clyde Binfield considers elite and popular religion in the cotton towns of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lancashire; M. C. H. Martin contributes an assessment of some of the well-heeled philanthropic women who carried religious knowledge into England's urban slums during the same period; David Morgan provides a thought-provoking study of Protestant attitudes to religious pictures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America; and Ian Jones and Peter Webster discuss the often heated debate over the value of ‘pop’ music in Church of England services during the second half of the twentieth century.

What general insights into the relationship between elite and popular religion might be gathered from this wide-ranging collection? Many contributors find that the two supposed categories are not clearly distinguishable, either because they share too much ground or because the interaction between them is so extensive and so complex. From this starting point, the authors tend to diverge. Some – led by Eamon Duffy – adopt a highly critical stance, denying outright the validity of the bi-polar cultural model for religious history. Catherine Rider and others, in contrast, shift the focus towards other cultural distinctions and polarities that have tended to be overshadowed by the popular/elite interpretative framework. These additional categories are rarely well developed in this volume (understandably, since the theme is properly the interaction of social status and religious sensibility), but we might note the importance of several problematic pairings: believers/unbelievers, lay/clerical, male/female, heretical/orthodox, educated/uneducated, abstract/concrete, official/unofficial, youth/age and even here/there (sometimes, religious affiliations were geographically influenced or space-based). Most of these distinctions bear some relationship to the popular/elite dichotomy, but none is identical to it and some may have been just as important. One or two contributors – Ó Carragáin and Johnson, for example – lead us helpfully in another direction by arguing (with Chartier) that the same religious concepts or artefacts were interpreted in different ways by people from different social backgrounds. From this perspective, ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ might be understood as differential appropriations of the same materials, rather than wholly distinct categories.

Interestingly, several contributors set themselves apart by arguing that the concepts of popular and elite religion can in certain circumstances be valuable, despite the muddy middle ground that both separates and connects them. ‘Wide gaps’, concludes Purkis, ‘could exist between elite and popular beliefs’. On occasion, suggests Beebe, the experience of medieval pilgrimage was significantly conditioned by social status. For Ryan, there were real and significant differences in the packaging of religious concepts for dissemination to those on different levels of society. D'Avray finds some evidence of meaningful distinctions in medieval attitudes to martyrdom and Preston makes a comparable point in relation to religious debates in sixteenth-century Italy. Haydon, Kirk and Stunt all note the apparent withdrawal of elites from popular religion at various times and places. And Johnson argues, more purposefully than most, that ‘the retention of a loosely-defined elite/popular distinction can have some analytical value, as a marker or reminder of tensions within any sacred system’. Duffy's introductory assertion that the contributors deny the validity of the popular/elite model ‘again and again’ is, therefore, mildly misleading, since a significant minority of authors seem reluctant to do without it.

Should the key polarity therefore be further refined, rather than unceremoniously dumped? It is worth remarking in passing that cultural historians have been criticising it for decades: the crude ‘conventional understanding’ referred to in the introduction has not, in reality, been conventional for some time. We all know its weaknesses, but something seems to prevent us from contemplating scholarly life without it. It is as if we depend on the elite/popular polarity, even if we do not particularly enjoy using it. Eamon Duffy would like to see the model deleted from our minds once and for all, yet it occasionally comes close to influencing his thinking. His conclusion – that the Book of Hours was certainly not an ‘instrument for upper-class devotional exclusivity and isolation’ – is to some degree undermined by his earlier acknowledgement of its role as a ‘devotional fashion accessory’ that drew attention to wealth and expressed ‘social elitism’. Indeed, evidence that the people of the past needed to believe in some version of the elite/popular polarity is plentiful, despite the sceptical stance of many contributors. When Sir Thomas Armstrong described the deployment of pop music in twentieth-century Anglican churches as part of ‘a rebellion of the inarticulate, uninformed and illiterate – a deliberate deification of bad taste’, he clearly believed that elite and popular culture were, or should be, different. Even the philanthropic English ladies of the decades around 1900 who ‘perceived no difference between elite and popular religion’ could appear somewhat patronising in their comments and activities. One wonders if Flora Lucy Freeman's sense of religious unity across social boundaries was universally shared by the ‘rough’ young men and women whom she approached in a Brighton street, issued with picture cards and invited to attend a Lantern service. Indeed, the decision of such doughty do-gooders to make the journey from their normal cultural milieu into that of the mass of slum-dwellers was meaningful only because popular and elite culture were, in some sense, distinct. Cardinal Newman too could sound both sympathetic to popular religion and deeply condescending (‘the religion of the multitude is ever vulgar and abnormal’).

The fact that the same individuals have sometimes both underlined and undermined the popular/elite polarity is interesting. At one level, we should all be contemplating the ways in which culture unites and binds those of divergent interests and backgrounds – but at another, we must realise that people often wish to feel distinct and different. So they respond to culture's melting-pot by attempting to clamber out of it, distancing themselves from their fellow humans and standing apart. They present themselves as different almost because they fear that they are not. The seventeenth-century Englishman William Cornwallis purchased common ballads on the streets and – after reading them – used them as toilet paper. He was attracted to common culture, but he also felt the need to place it beneath him in an all too literal sense. It seems, then, that the popular/elite distinction is simultaneously useful and useless. Cultural history is all about cycles of attraction and repulsion – human beings are continuously drawn together and driven apart. Popular and elite religion, if they exist at all, do so in a permanent condition of dialogue, sometimes fierce and sometimes friendly. Moreover, this applies not only to religion but to all other key cultural distinctions (male/female, lay/clerical, old/young and so on). The polarities are available when needed, but are temporarily buried when they do not serve an individual's purpose. They are not permanently in play, but they are permanently available to those who wish to play with them. Moreover, people on the same social level may call upon them in very different ways. Indeed, one of messages of this volume is that neither elite nor popular culture has ever been homogeneous. We may be justified in blaming the popular/elite model not only for tending to obscure this fact, but also for luring scholarship down only one of many possible analytical roads and for focusing our attention on the opposite ends of a spectrum rather than on its entire and varied length. Ultimately, however, it is probably inappropriate to deny its validity outright. The late-medieval gentleman, sitting in his grand pew with illuminated Book of Hours in hand, was – whether we like it or not – expressing some desire for a measure of cultural distinction/separation. He was saying ‘I am different and my culture is not your culture’ even while he was participating in the unifying rituals of the mass. He, like many others, drew on a common cultural stock but then worked to make it meaningfully his own. Perhaps he knew that his culture was not ‘elite’ in the eyes of God, but he did not always wish his earthly neighbours to share this divine insight.