Those who engage with the Irish past have been beguiled by religion. Even a cursory reading of the surviving evidence for almost any period of the Irish past thrusts religion to the forefront of almost every area of human activity from politics to poetry. As elsewhere, most of that interest has manifested itself in studies of religious institutions rather than religion as a set of ideas or rational or irrational understandings of the supernatural. Thus, there is Emmet Larkin's massive studies of nineteenth-century Catholicism that can be joined with the more venerable studies of Alison Phillips, J. S. Reid and C. H. Crookshank on the Church of Ireland, Presbyterianism and Methodism respectively. Inevitably, there have been more synthetic surveys such as those by P. J. Corish on Catholicism and Finlay Holmes on Presbyterianism, but few have burst the bonds imposed by the institutional structures of religion in Ireland's past. Bravely, this book attempts just that. It claims to be an exercise in ‘one-handed history, refuses fence sitting … avoids extended discussion of historiography, and makes firm judgements’ (p. xv). It is certainly broad in scope, sweeping from the early medieval Church to the multi-faith world of the early twenty-first century. It approaches the problem of religion through the idea of belief and, as befits an author who is a historical geographer by training, uses as its evidence the physical landscape. This is hardly a radical departure. Alexandra Walsham's The reformation of the landscape (Oxford 2011) (alas not in the bibliography to this work) has effectively deployed the evidence of landscape in understanding religious change in the early modern British Isles yet her argument is grounded in a much more nuanced and rigorously interrogated body of evidence than is deployed here.

Reliance on the landscape only, as in this book, leads to a rather eclectic choice of subjects for discussion with the omission of some obvious ones. Firm judgements are certainly to be welcomed but they need to be balanced. For instance, in a book about religion in which ‘the focus is on lived experience of real people in real places rather than the abstractions of nationality, class and race’ (p. xv), one might have expected to see something of the experience of real people of worship, prayer or the sacraments; but these do not appear. There are opportunities to introduce such themes but these are not taken up, apparently because it would involve a different type of evidence and a different set of questions. The discussion of Church of Ireland church plans (pp. 146–9), for example, offers the possibility of an exploration of the significance of the internal ordering of churches and its meaning. The links between the great rebuilding of churches in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries offered opportunities for the raising up and reordering of the areas around communion tables that reflected a changing view of the sacraments and a new experience of worship by real people.

There is a tendency here to produce over-generalisation complete with even more sweeping footnotes. For example the statement on p. 4 that ‘Early Christianity disdained entanglement in earthly living circumstances’ is justified by a footnote that refers to Peter Browne's (sic) 792-page Through the eye of a needle without any further guidance as to where one might find enlightenment. Again, on p. 65, ‘Curating memories involved a complex collaboration with ordinary Irish people and their store of vernacular knowledge’ is justified by recourse to the Annals of the Four Masters and Bernadette Cunningham's study of that text of 2010 (without page reference) yet the point of Cunningham's book is that these annals were constructed within an elite literate culture, not a popular one. On other occasions one cries out for even basic guidance. For instance, on p. 116 there is a lyrical passage on pre-Famine Ireland that states that ‘The Irish popular mind cherished a clear vision of an ideal order based on egalitarianism, human decency and Christian charity, immersed in supportive networks of mutual dependence and reciprocity.’ Yet from where this insight is derived is not revealed nor is there any discussion of that highly problematic concept, the ‘popular mind’.

There is no doubt that this book is the product of a great deal of reading and thought and it brings an interesting and unique perspective to the problem of studying religion in Ireland. It suffers, however, from a lack of clarity as to its audience. On the one hand, it would appear to be offered to a scholarly readership as a new approach yet it also feels the need to explain terms such as syncretism and transubstantiation in footnotes that suggest that the author had a more general readership in mind. If the latter is the case then it needs a caveat emptor to warn the inexperienced. The book tries to cover a huge span using partial evidence that reveals one aspect of the picture of developments. This situation is compounded by a reluctance to engage in a dialogue with the existing literature on the subject. There is no doubt that there is much of interest in this book that will be quarried by specialists into the future but the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.