This book's title gives only a hint of its wide-ranging contents. The author's declared purpose is to examine ‘how religious assumptions influenced contemporary perceptions of the physical environment, and how in turn that environment shaped the profound theological, liturgical, and cultural transformations that marked the era between c. 1500 and 1750’. What follows is a thoroughly well-argued and profoundly interesting demonstration of how religious beliefs and practices continued to impose fresh layers of meaning upon the landscape, without ever entirely extinguishing the influence of earlier spiritual systems. Despite the Protestant reformers’ determination to eradicate all trace of pagan, superstitious and popish practices, events in reality took a much more complex course, involving continuity and adaptation as well as destruction.

In a brief review only a few of the book's rich network of themes can be noted. The opening chapter assesses how early Christian evangelists reacted to the ‘sacred geography of paganism’, which is taken to be based, at least in part, upon an animistic awe of natural features. Whereas belligerent missionaries could terminate the worship of trees by chopping them down, sacred springs were indestructible, so were adopted by the Christian Church as holy wells. Settlements of hermits imposed new spiritual associations upon hilltops, caves, offshore islands and marshes. New churches alongside prehistoric menhirs or within henges conveyed an alternative, more acceptable sanctity. Hallowed places attracted pilgrims in search of divine intercession and miraculous healing.

The Protestant rejection of belief in the inherent sanctity of particular places discouraged popular pilgrimage. Assaults upon shrines, relics, wayside crosses and cult chapels followed, culminating in the Puritan iconoclasm of the Civil War and Interregnum. Yet regions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland experienced considerable variations in the extent to which iconoclasm was actively promoted or received popular support. Attitudes to the relics of medieval Christianity remained ambivalent. While some saw the ruin of monasteries, holy wells and crosses as a symbol of the Protestant triumph, for others this represented a sort of architectural martyrdom, the sites retaining much covert devotion. Counter-currents of regret and nostalgia for what had been lost are also reflected in later antiquarian writing, in the incorporation within private landscaped grounds of monastic ruins alongside re-created prehistoric monuments, classical temples and hermitages, and in the preservation and revival of customs such as Rogationtide processions and Ascensiontide well-dressing.

Periods of more extreme intolerance produced new attachments to sites associated with piety and persecution on all sides of the religious divides, including open-air venues used by Lollards and radical preachers, places of Catholic and Protestant martyrdoms, remotely located mass rocks and non-Anglican cemeteries. Many medieval sites were also rehabilitated in a different guise, some holy wells being reinvented as healing spas. It proved easier to accommodate, within contemporary advances in scientific thought, traditional beliefs that God conveyed moral and spiritual lessons through natural phenomena, than it was to suppress them. The overall effect of post-Reformation religious, intellectual and cultural movements was to redefine rather than remove the significance of the sacred in the material world.

The author's arguments are well supported by anecdotal evidence from an impressive range of contemporary texts, but explicit reference to manifestations of change or continuity in the architectural or archaeological record is limited. Although each chapter is well structured and generally very readable, some gaps were exposed in this reviewer's personal vocabulary, ‘thaumaturgic’ being the most memorable of several unfamiliar terms which drove him to the dictionary. The illustrations are austerely monochrome, mostly derived from early texts. There is an extensive and valuable bibliography of primary manuscript sources and printed editions of works compiled before 1800; less conveniently, more recent works are referred to only in numbered footnotes. A helpful general index of topics and personal names is followed by a separate index of places.

Among minor quibbles, the ‘retreat of the Roman legions in AD 410’ (p 23) is surely an obsolete concept; Robert Plot's account of the legendary origins of Osney Abbey, founded for regular canons in 1129, sits uneasily as an example of how ‘Anglo-Saxon monks … provided their religious houses with supernatural sanction’ (p 481); ‘Kildare and Leighlin’ (p 179) was never a joint diocese, nor was ‘Hereford and Worcester’ (p 235). Gorhambury is in Hertfordshire, not Norfolk (p 312); ‘Lentwardine’ (p 235) should be Leintwardine; and ‘Nutley Abbey, Berks.’ (p 634) should be Notley Abbey, Bucks. However, it would be churlish to end on a pedantic note. This is a welcome and important contribution to our understanding of the Reformation period, and contains much food for thought.