‘The only church is the Episcopal! Music! Vestments! Stately prayers! Lovely architecture! Dignity! Authority! Believe me, as soon as I can make the break, I'm going to switch over to the Episcopalians’, proclaims a Protestant seminarian in Sinclair Lewis's novel Elmer Gantry. ‘And then I'll have a social position, and be able to marry a nice rich girl.’ Such a fictional conflation of aesthetic religion and social acceptance speaks to the arguments advanced in this engaging study of Gilded Age Anglican/Episcopal culture. In the aftermath of the Civil War, argues Peter Williams, the Protestant Episcopal Church increasingly provided ‘religious legitimization of the material realm, not only as not fatally contaminated by sinfulness but as an authentic means for the experience of divine grace’ (p. 17). In so doing it assumed the status of an upper-class religion that had previously been the preserve of Congregationalists and Presbyterians. From the reconfiguration of sacred space according to the principles of the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts movement, to the three ‘gospels’ of social reform, education and art, prominent Episcopalians increasingly demonstrated a denominational self-confidence that was informed by theological and cultural developments within the Church of England. Nothing so captures this era of growing Episcopal self-confidence as Williams's paean to the American cathedral movement, whose practitioners aspired to secure for their denomination the status of a quasi-established national Church; he documents in some detail the distinctiveness of the more prominent Episcopal cathedrals, whose extensive grounds, Gothic architecture, funerary monuments and facilities for administration, education and the visual arts collectively served to make them a ‘public ritual site’ (p. 110), A similar spirit of noblesse oblige informed the cultural elite's commitment to constructing such ‘institutional churches’ as St George's, New York (whose rector William Rainsford, an English émigré, enjoyed the backing of J. P. Morgan) and Calvary, Pittsburgh, or contributing to the establishment of the New England private boarding school system that educated the children of the elites and those who aspired to join them. Williams gives due attention to the contributions of women as well as men, evidenced by his compelling portraits of Ellen Gates, Vida Scudder and the highly idiosyncratic Isabella Gardner. Although the narrative is overwhelmingly shaped by the view from New York, Philadelphia and Boston (one in five Episcopalians were residents of New York in the early twentieth century), there are also Midwestern case-studies of William Procter (of Procter & Gamble fame) and George Booth, while the South is represented by William Goodwin, the Episcopal clergyman largely responsible for the establishment of Colonial Williamsburg. Consideration of Episcopal culture in Charleston, Atlanta or New Orleans might have rounded out the national picture, but his emphasis on the north-east is congruent with the Protestant Episcopal Church's centre of gravity in this period and illuminates well the conundrum of Anglican identity in a pluralistic religious setting shaped by the formal separation of Church and State.