Ffynnon Llandyfan is a natural spring in Carmarthenshire reputed to possess remarkable healing properties. Its associations date back to the legendary Dyfan and St. Teilo, who supposedly helped introduce Christianity into Wales in the second and sixth centuries, respectively. Even in post-Reformation times it retained a reputation for possessing healing qualities and continued to attract pilgrims seeking cures. In the early eighteenth century magistrates found it necessary to suppress unseemly dancing and game-playing on Sundays. By the 1740s Peter Williams and other Methodist preachers harangued the locals from the nearby chapel of ease, and Baptists later dunked their converts in the spring. After the site had reverted to Church of England aegis, those seeking health continued to drink the waters from a skull alleged to be that of St. Teilo (555–56).

The dense, lengthy, and convoluted history of Ffynnon LLandyfan is a paradigm of the complex argument here unfolded by Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Walsham has produced a massive and magisterial volume that explains, in her own words, “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” (2–3).

Walsham's historical arena is what she calls the “long Reformation,” less an event but rather a (partially reversible) process that extended over centuries. Although she does not entirely repudiate the theme of the “disenchantment of nature” propounded by Max Weber and Keith Thomas, she does reject any simple, linear narrative about the interaction of religion and science with the shaping and experiencing of the British landscape. She also takes as her geographical parameters Britain (as opposed to England alone), highlighting the interrelated yet nevertheless different impact of religious reformation on the topographic and architectural contours of England, Scotland, Wales, and northern and southern Ireland.

The story of the contestation of Britain's religious landscape, of course, had its origins long before the days of John Wycliffe and Henry VIII. The appropriation of the landmarks of the indigenous peoples of the islands first by the Roman and then by early and medieval Christian missionaries and bishops was itself a lengthy and convoluted process. The despoliation of the monasteries under Henry, the “beauty of holiness” movement of Archbishop Laud, and the iconoclastic campaigns of Cromwell all had their impact on the natural and built environment of British religion, as did the evolution of science and medicine, many of the practitioners of which were also clergy. Over these centuries, holy wells and sacred trees, ruined abbeys, outdoor rituals and preaching, healing pilgrimages, and relics of saints and martyrs both Catholic and Protestant, all became subject to contestation as religious and political factions battled for allegiance and supremacy and history became reinvented to suit contemporary purposes. Emergent science and medicine brought forth, for example, new appraisals of the healing properties of wells and springs first identified by “pagans,” appropriated by the medieval church in thaumaturgic hagiography, repudiated by Protestant reformers, rediscovered by folklorists, and all the while kept alive in popular practice. In charting this process, Walsham makes clear that the coming of Protestant reform did not simply put a definitive end to the sacralization of the landscape, but rather reinterpreted it as part of the divine providential scheme in somewhat but not entirely different ways from their Roman predecessors and opponents.

In crafting her narrative, Walsham draws extensively on manuscript sources as well as numerous published accounts of local history, travel, and topography, adducing rich layers of detail to the exposition of her themes. Although she claims to be attempting to bridge the gap between history and geography, she in fact employs a wide variety of scholarly methods and perspectives including social and religious history, cultural geography, folklore, and ritual studies. She tacitly assumes a working definition of “sacred space,” and does not explore its nuances and ambiguities in any sustained and explicit way. She also presupposes a general familiarity with the historical territory she covers and does not, for example, ever cite the 1646 Westminster Confession as the locus classicus of the British Reformed position on the presence of the sacred in the temporal sphere.

Overall, this is a remarkable book, rich in detail, elegant in style, and highly persuasive in its argument that religious history cannot be adequately understood without reference to its spatial and material dimensions.