According to its dust jacket, this volume ‘provides a rich and authoritative history of religion in this pivotal period’ – mainly the years between about 1300 and the Reformation. However, any hopes or expectations that it will deliver a general overall history of ‘popular religion in late medieval England and western Europe’ will be thwarted. The book is a collection of reprinted essays, all published since 1986. They are a mixed bag. Some are fully scholarly pieces, well-known conference contributions with full academic apparatus. Many are much slighter: short contributions extracted from volumes of ‘companions to’ or ‘encyclopedias of’. Several approach journalism, with the five contributions to The Month falling into this category. Lacking footnotes, and originally addressed to a specifically Catholic and relatively popular audience, these pieces appropriate the Middle Ages to respond both to specifically Catholic agendas and debates about the modern Church, and to recent pastoral concerns. (That approach is especially striking in chapter xvii, ‘Sin in the Middle Ages’.) Two contributions (chapters xiv and xix) are extended reflections on books, but not exactly reviews. One essay – ‘Do the Americans understand the Middle Ages better than Europeans’ (p. 16) – can only be read as a curiosity. The volume's readership is likely to be as mixed as the contents. Academic medievalists will certainly appreciate the opportunity to (re)read the weightier contributions, revisiting claims and arguments which are still provocative, and whose challenges still call for answers.