This book collects the proceedings of a joint conference of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology and the Society for Church Archaeology held in Norwich in 2008. Over a long period of time and on a broad range of subjects, the fifteen essays (excluding the editors' introduction) use the archaeological record to explore aspects of religious continuity and change after the Reformation, nominally in Europe though most of the essays focus on Britain. The collection is divided into three loosely related sections: the first (six essays) considers the relationship between church and society from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; the second (four essays) focuses on British religious buildings (plus one essay on puritan meetinghouses in New England), which were associated with the various nonconformist groups that formed outside of the established church during the period; and the third (five essays) is devoted to English cemeteries and burial practices. As is often the case with collections of conference papers on large subjects, the sections individually and the book as a whole do not offer coherent, or even easily summarized, views of their general subjects, and both of these perspectives are best approached through the individual essays.

One problem in such a collection is that conference papers seldom consider problems of method to the extent necessary to pull together a book intending to establish the common concerns of archaeologists and historians. In his forward, David Gaimster observes in a general way that the archaeological focus on the material record of objects affords a distinctive, challenging view of “sacred economy” during a period of sometimes rapid change (xvi). This is fine as far as it goes, but how often does the material record speak with any precision on such personal religious matters as belief or identity, relative to its expression of the culture of groups, in the form of devotional buildings, for example? This problem might have imparted a particular archaeological significance to graveyards and cemeteries, the subject of the book's third section, because the functioning of these sites created a unique interrelationship in the material record between group religious culture and a variety of individual religious expressions in mortuary practices. Unfortunately, the editors of the volume do not seize this methodological opportunity. In their view of archaeological method, Chris King and Duncan Sayer stress not the “sacred economy” of objects and material remains but rather a particular perspective: “Archaeology as a discipline is well placed to identify the experience of religious change in different regions and communities from the ground up, as a counter to traditional narratives focusing on the top-down imposition of doctrinal and liturgical change” (1). As it fails to demonstrate why the many historical interpretations of early modern religious change based on local documents should not be considered studies of change from the ground up, this view of archaeological method also leaves unresolved the more interesting problem of how to identify the experience of individuals in the material remains of groups.

A related question concerns how the new archaeological work in this volume will engage with the vast and constantly growing historical literature on early modern religion. Rather than identifying specific archaeological problems, and using thick historiographical description to bring a distinctive archaeological angle into sharper relief, the approach in this volume is limited to selecting a few (more or less) recent historical texts to constitute the narrative that historical archaeology will then amplify, reifying and arguably diminishing the vitality of both disciplines (2–6). Here the challenge of interdisciplinary communication is often compounded by problems of terminology, particularly the determination, as a matter of unexplained principle, to subsume the entire temporal span from mid-sixteenth to late nineteenth century in the term “post-medieval,” which blunts the discussion of change by explicitly understating the significance of discontinuity in the experience of religious culture over more than three centuries. This usage becomes especially confusing when an essay opens with an epigram from Vanessa Harding's work on “early modern [especially urban] societies” (199) and proceeds to discuss its implications for “post-medieval burial practices” (199–200). If this is a difference between how archaeologists and historians understand the past, it is part of the work of an “interdisciplinary collection” to address the implications of such differences in dialect.

In a short review, it is impossible to do justice to a book whose virtues lie in its individual essays. These address interesting problems and evidence but generally leave readers to determine their contribution to broader views of “post-medieval” or “early modern” religious history. Andrew Spicer's fine essay on seventeenth-century Bassendean parish, Berwickshire, demonstrates the interrelationship among local vested interests and the components of the Reformed state and kirk in Scotland in the (very) gradual reforming of parish boundaries and church buildings. As in most of the essays, Spicer combines both archaeological and documentary evidence to create a local narrative of gradual change that, while not challenging the familiar view of Reformed Scotland as an institutional patchwork, brings the political interrelations among its various elements into sharper focus. Spicer's essay is followed by Philippa Woodcock's subtle analysis of the meanings of Protestant iconoclasm and Catholic restoration in the diocese of Le Mans from the 1560s to the early 1590s. Both essays contribute to their particular national histories, but readers are left to ponder the nature of the relationship among reformed parish boundaries, iconoclasm, and church restoration in a coherent view of the relationship between the early modern church and society, the nominal subject of this first section.

Three of the four essays in the second section focus on the meanings of nonconformist chapels in Cornwall, south Wales, Isle of Man, and in the areas of southwestern England associated with the woolen industry, especially as these meanings related to the social, economic, and demographic changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Developing the collection's theme of post-Reformation pluralism, these essays offer variants of the argument that the “flexibility” of British Dissent allowed it to compete successfully against the Anglican Church both in traditional parishes and in adaptation to new social, economic, and political environments. This emphasis on differentiation, competition, and conflict obviously reflects the material record of separate religious buildings, though it generally overlooks the interpretive challenge posed by the documentary record of diverse projects in which Anglicans and Dissenters participated jointly, ranging in nature from public health initiatives to literacy campaigns in a broad movement for the “reformation of manners” across much of the eighteenth century in particular. Jeremy Lake mentions the importance of such “interdenominational work” (125) in the building of Methodism's power in Cornwall's “devotional landscape,” but “the visible dispersal of devotional focus away from the parish church” (133), a striking characteristic of the material record and a familiar concept, remains the dominant theme.

The final section's five essays on English burial sites and funerary practices continue to develop the themes of pluralism and individuation, though their evidence, usually the excavated remains of graveyards, is often difficult to connect to religious changes, or to religious culture at all, and even harder to identify precisely with any individual or collective expression of purpose, whether on the part of the deceased, of his or her family or friends, or of the religious group responsible for the burial site. On the whole, the essays confirm the multiplication of burial sites during the “post-medieval” period, the importance of the Burial Act (1855) in shifting interments from churches and chapels to the margins of settlements, and the growing frequency of such “grave goods” as metal grips and grip plates, depositum plates identifying the deceased, and glass beads, among other artifacts, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time of increasing scale and standardization of production in the objects related to burial as in many other types of consumer goods. Among the interesting findings of these essays, often described as the “preliminary” conclusions of ongoing analyses and excavations, it seems that early nineteenth-century London Catholic men smoked more than their Baptist counterparts (241), though the populations suffered more or less equally from rickets (240), that nineteenth-century London Baptists may have preferred a plain style in their burial equipment that was related to their religious worldview (243) and that differed from the slightly more ornate preferences of Sheffield Anglicans and Methodists (226–227), and that poor Baptists in Norwich suffered from the same problems of health and nutrition as the working population generally during the early nineteenth century (264). Understandably, given the nature of the 2008 conference, these essays focus on the description and cataloging of the material record more than on its interpretation. For example, the changing relationship of funerary practices to the many other religious rituals embedded in the life cycle is not considered here. It is to be hoped that these preliminary findings, when considered in light of the documentary record, will begin to yield a more coherent interpretation of the varied meanings of death, religious and otherwise, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Rosie Morris's brief essay on funeral garlanding offers an outstanding example of how the material and documentary records may be brought together creatively, in ethnographic style, to establish an object's range of meanings across several contexts of ritual use and over time (271–280).