Largely hidden in a corner of the south transept of the parish church of St Mary the Virgin in Buckland, Oxfordshire is a marble stone carved with the names and dates of death of the generations of the Holcot family dating back to the 13th century. The English words at the top of the stone read: “Nereby queatly Resteth to Ryse againe the bodies of” followed by a list of names and dates commencing with “John Holcott” in 1292. Wives’ names are included from 1317. The Holcots were lords of the nearby manor of Barcote and the initiative for this memorial stone and the choice of Latin biblical texts running along the edges and proclaiming the bodily resurrection of the dead lay with William Holcot, the last direct descendant of this distinguished family. Holcot was a gentleman and an Oxford graduate who embraced the evangelical doctrines of the Edwardian church. He was 21 years old when the Act of Supremacy was passed in 1534 and served for several years as an eccentric lay reader in the Elizabethan church until his death in 1575. Significantly, the monument he created in 1560 carries no appeal for intercessory prayer, an intentional act discussed by Holcot in his surviving will. Holcot’s memorial stone is a supreme example of the kind of evidence collected and analyzed by Alexandra Walsham in her latest monograph in which she teases apart and weaves back together discussions about age, ancestry, and memory during the decades of English religious change. Generations is an outstanding achievement. Formally, it is a revised and much expanded version of the Ford Lectures delivered in 2018, but in truth, Walsham has been delving into the archives and reading and reflecting on these subjects for much longer. The result is an enormously instructive, richly illustrated, and deeply stimulating scholarly contribution that asks and examines key questions about age, ancestry, and memory amid the fundamental religious, political, and cultural changes that we now call England’s Reformations. How, for example, did the young, middle-aged and old respond to such religious upheavals as the liturgical switch in 1549 from Latin to English? Or, what is the evidence that those who “witnessed, embraced, and resisted” the different phases of England’s Reformations came to “consider themselves members of a distinct generation?” (p. 2) These are but two of the myriad questions and mini-debates found in this superb book. Walsham describes her work as “a social history of a cluster of potent ideas and their practical ramifications in culture and behavior” (p. 15). An admirably concise Introduction sets out her stall and is followed by six substantive chapters. The first two chapters (1:Youth and Age; 2: Kith and Kin) are largely focused on the family. In the first chapter, she dissects the perceived tensions in the narrative of religious change between youthful rebels and staid elders and in the second chapter, she examines domestic religion and households that were both united and divided along theological lines as well as the surrogate family ties that might be found in religious and spiritual communities. Chapters 3 and 4 (3: Blood and Trees; 4: Generations and Seed) delve into genealogy and are related to each other around the biblical, spiritual, and sexual concepts of belonging to and raising up a godly generation. The final two chapters (5: History and Time; 6: Memory and Archive) take a much wider view, surveying histories of reformation and the variety of ways in which individuals and families created the texts and objects that provide us with our knowledge of the religious past. Lucien Febvre famously dismissed the concept of generations with the curt dismissal: “better forget it.” Walsham persuasively demonstrates how much can be gained when this allusive and elusive concept is embraced and what follows when the historian tries to think generationally, to reflect deliberately on groups of coevals and the variety of ways in which they experienced religious change as well as the “settled” rhythms of devotional practices and parish worship. However, her work is much more than a discussion of social cohorts. As she points out, “generation” is a term with multiple meanings and she deliberately eschews a prosopographical approach in favor of “acknowledging the fruitful ambiguities and porous boundaries that surrounded this conceptual category in the period.” (p. 13). Although the concept has been invoked and used primarily by modern historians, she is not the first to attempt to apply the concept of generations to early modern English history. Earlier works by Susan Brigden, Norman Jones, and Anthony Esler, among others, are all acknowledged, but Generations stands out as the first sustained attempt to apply a generational lens to England’s Reformations. These decades of religious change, she argues, both “shaped the generations”, severing the bonds between the living and the dead and fracturing families and friends along differing doctrinal lines. However, these decades also “created generations” “in and through the medium of memory” and for some, “through the act of sexual reproduction” (p. 513). The depth of learning is evident on every page. All those wishing to read an outstanding “social and cultural history of religion with the theology put back” (p. 15) should start with this book.