This book makes an important contribution to the historiography of the English Reformation. Milner argues convincingly that historians must abandon the misleading contrast that is often drawn between a late medieval Christianity rich in the stimulation of multiple senses and a Protestant faith that allegedly privileged intellectual comprehension, thereby underplaying the role of broader sensory perception in the making of believers. Instead, the author argues that late medieval commentators were worried about the dangers of sensuality while later Protestants – though confused about the relationship between sensing and understanding – did not deny the value of ‘external sense experience’ (p. 232). On both sides of the Reformation divide religious leaders understood the dangers of sensory stimulation and the need to control carefully what was sensed. Underlying scientific theories about the operation of the senses did not change significantly during the sixteenth century, a fact that created problems for Protestants. It was difficult, for example, to redirect popular sensibilities towards sermon comprehension or scripture reading when it was all too easy for people simply to attach traditional significance to the mere acts of attending a sermon (without heeding it) or holding a Bible (without reading it). Milner reinforces recent work that tends to view the English Reformation ‘as a reorientation of traditional piety rather than as a break’ (p. 347). He deserves credit for bringing together the fields of Reformation history and sensory history, the one old and the other relatively new. The author is also rather more balanced than many Reformation historians in paying almost as much attention to the late medieval situation as to circumstances following the advent of Protestantism. Along the way, there are interesting discussions of numerous topics, including the sensory hierarchy, the use of acoustic jars in churches and the status of the Bible among Protestants as, in Cranmer's words, ‘the most holy relic that remaineth on earth’ (p. 265). Taken as a whole, this book considers the familiar story of sixteenth-century religious reform through the new lens provided by the history of the senses. It is a challenging and broadly successful endeavour. The work does, however, have some flaws. The focus is heavily upon printed sources and ecclesiastical orders with the result that the actual experiences of ordinary English parishioners are seriously neglected (though occasional examples are gleaned from the work of other historians). The concentration on prescription, ideals and theories renders the book rather dry and abstract. It also means that important topics of current interest to historians – congregational psalmody and bell ringing, for example – are dealt with very briefly, despite their obvious role in transforming the sensory experiences of churchgoers after the Reformation. Lastly, and most significantly, the style in which this book is written is often almost impenetrable as a result of poor sentence structure, feeble copy-editing and negligent proof-reading. At times, the reader feels a little like an Elizabethan labourer at a forbidding sermon and must cling to the hope that merely going through the process will somehow convey spiritual benefit. The senses and the English Reformation is thus fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.