What we now refer to as “Maine” was for several centuries a complex “borderland of faith” between French, English, and Indian territories (162) and not officially part of Massachusetts until 1820. Laura M. Chmielewski argues that historians have often overlooked this region's distinctive religious culture. Most significantly—as the book's title indicates—Maine was uniquely flavored with a “spice of popery” (in the words of Boston Congregationalist minister Increase Mather) in that it was the only New England region that “experienced the persistent influence of both Catholicism and Protestantism throughout its entire colonial history” (43). The the combination of geography, migration, and warfare, Chmielewski contends, produced a unique religious culture of “converging Christianities” that was “far more complex than straightforward associations of ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ suggest” (4, 43). Largely outside the cope of official colonial religious regulation, Maine was the site of a “religious eclecticism” that persisted well into the eighteenth century (5).

Drawing on letters, diaries, reports, newspapers, and material culture, Chmielewski narrates the religious history of this region in a way that is both chronological and thematic. The eastern borderlands of Massachusetts functioned much like Rhode Island and even New Hampshire in the opening decades of colonization—that is to say, it attracted some of the less “orthodox” settlers, some of whom had a “loosely practiced Christianity,” even if they were not exactly crypto-Catholics themselves (32). The transformation of the region began in the 1680s, when ongoing imperial warfare between the English, French, and Indians wracked English settlements up and down the coast through the 1720s. Imperial warfare both contributed to Maine's unique diverse Christian religious culture and led to its demise. Warfare and the experience of captivity increased the religious interactions between Protestants and Catholics; indeed, it created dozens of families with Catholic relatives, in-laws, and grandchildren when English men, women, and children converted to Catholicism in New France, married, and took up new jobs and residences. The existence, persistence, and sincerity of such converts to Catholicism (51 out of 201 between 1688 and 1727) illustrate the fluid identities of people living in Maine (72, 94). But such experiences also often increased the resolve of English magistrates and returned captives to create a more thoroughly Protestant religious culture in Maine over time (as in the case of Sylvanus Davis). By 1727, according to Chmielewski, the transformation was largely complete; after Dummer's War, Maine's settlements “came to be more predictably and recognizably Protestant” (211).

Chmielewski provides an impressively sweeping narrative of this time period, one that interweaves religious, political, and social history over a full century. Throughout, Chmielewski draws upon the numerous narrations of captivity in New France and contextualizes these individual stories within local and family histories. Her investigative work brings fresh and vivid detail to the experiences and inner turmoil of Mary Storer, Hannah Swarton, Mary Plaisted, Aaron Littlefield, and others who experienced captivity and the subsequent agonizing decision whether to remain in New France or return home. Another one of the strengths of the book is the focus on material culture in the last two chapters. Using objects like a biscuit, crosses, and church bells, Chmielewski shows how objects could be a source of shared religious meaning or confirmations of religious differences between Protestants and Catholics. Even more, both Protestants and Catholics imbued spaces and non-religious objects (like land) with religious meaning, particularly in the contexts of the larger imperial contests for power.

Throughout, Chmielewski wants her readers to rethink what they know, to look past the rhetoric of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, and to imagine a more diverse colonial world. She works hard to collapse the distance between Protestants and Catholics, English and French colonists, Europeans and Indians, by highlighting sharedness instead of difference. This is admirable, even if not always convincing. Overall, it is not clear that the religious diversity Chmielewski uncovers plays out in new or unexpected ways. It is helpful to highlight the way that Protestants and Catholics interacted on the religious borderlands of the Maine frontier, perhaps, but in the end these exchanges and encounters did not create a religiously tolerant and pluralistic society; the opposite was often true, in fact—direct interaction between Protestants and Catholics merely reinforced previously held beliefs and stereotypes, and Chmielewski admits as much in several places.

More broadly, however, one wonders if Maine only seems unique because Chmielewski's primary point of comparison is Massachusetts. When one considers other English borderland colonies (and which ones were not early on?), the religious diversity and cultural exchanges described in this volume seem more routine. And other colonies intentionally cultivated this religious diversity and liberty over time, like Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and even South Carolina. Finally, Chmielewski missed an opportunity to investigate an even richer source of Maine's religious diversity by omitting serious discussions of Native religious culture. Natives are present, but mostly as politicized objects of evangelization, as in the prolonged and violent contest between the Massachusetts Bay and the Jesuit missionary Sebastien Rale.

Nonetheless, Chmielewski has rightfully recovered the religious history of an important corner of North America, one that will undoubtedly prompt further discussion of and research into the varieties of Protestant-Catholic interactions and influences in other parts of North America in this time period.