Christopher Haigh's study of the kinds of Christianity existing in England from 1570 to 1640 is based firmly on practices at parish level. The author eschews a model of religious change driven by central directives in favour of an investigation of how laymen and women of differing religious outlooks interacted with each other and with their pastors as the effects of the Elizabethan Settlement began to take hold. Haigh also deliberately avoids a direct engagement with current academic debates on pre-civil war religion whilst admitting that much of what follows is related to current disputes and will be regarded as contentious. This, he explains, is ‘a grown-up book, a book focussed firmly on the evidence, not on [the] interpretations’ that he wishes to contest. The book is organised around Arthur Dent's The plain man's pathway to heaven of 1601, supplemented by religious works by George Gifford and Robert Bolton amongst others. Dent created four religious archetypes and used the dialogue form to show how man should live in order to get to heaven. His characters are Theologus, the godly pastor, Philagathus, the godly layman, Asunetus, the ignorant man and Antilegon, the denyer or ‘caviller’. Haigh illustrates these types with great scholarly care based on his research into thousands of cases taken from more than 700 ecclesiastical court books from southern and central England. He also imports a fifth character, the Papist, to round off this enquiry. He is careful to flag up the familiar problems of interpreting such material, including the fact that church court records were prepared by officials and that the cases that came to court were ipso facto those in which social and religious relationships had broken down. Haigh concludes that the views expressed by Dent's literary characters were firmly entrenched amongst parishioners and were repeated in ‘streets, shops, and alehouses – and in churches’. He argues that religion was not simply a matter of Sunday observance, but also an issue of frequent discussion and concern amongst all groups in society, who held firmly expressed views on issues of salvation and the correct modes of religious observance. What then were these views and what was their significance between the middle of Elizabeth's reign and the eve of the civil wars? The godly pastor and the layman are depicted here as Calvinists, who find their religious views increasingly under fire from the church authorities in the 1630s. The ignorant man and the ‘caviller’ or sinner are none too bothered with theological niceties and do not want too much interference from authority. They believe that God is merciful and that salvation should not require constant religious observance. Some of them are even offended by the theology of predestination and the religious and social pretensions of the clergy. Haigh's methodology allows him to argue persuasively that at parish level Asunteus and Antilegon were potential allies for Laudianism and Arminianism, which explains why principled opposition to the religious changes of the 1630s were not more widespread. The apparent unpopularity of these changes belies the fact that a regime of godly observance was even more unpopular than Laudianism. One of the most striking of the author's findings is the amount of hostility and even violence that religious views generated throughout the period at parish level. In turn this helped to prepare the way for the religious divides within the warring parties of the 1640s. But this is not a book about the civil wars and so along the way Haigh throws much light on a range of religious issues in the pre-civil war period. At the start of this enquiry the godly were concerned to defeat popery, by the time that Dent was writing the perceived enemy was irreligion and by the late 1620s it was hostility to godliness itself that posed the greatest threat to the Calvinist godly. One strand of evidence for this conclusion concerns the efforts of Theologus to catechise his flock. Presentments of the laity for refusing to be catechised fell by the early seventeenth century and Haigh offers the fascinating insight that the majority of refusers called before the church courts were young females. This is a confirmation, as Haigh notes, of wider findings about female literacy, for women were less likely to be literate and less used to learning by memory. By the early seventeenth century the habit of learning the catechism had caught on, but godly Theologus was still concerned that rote learning did not impart true knowledge and belief amongst his flock. The divisions between the five characters extend to disputes over theology, the sacraments and church ceremonies, over Sabbath observance, correct behaviour in church and church attendance, over reverence to the clergy, and whether the clergy exercise too much social and religious interference in people's lives. They are illustrated here by a carnivalesque parade from church court cases of assault, invective, insult, blasphemy and bad, lewd behaviour. Women dress as pastors and lampoon the prayer book, men smear excrement over their enemies' seats in church, husbands hold mock funerals for wives rendered ‘speechless’ by their bad behaviour and pastors fall to blows with their congregations. The importance of religion to the laity is demonstrated in the inventive ways in which they mocked and attacked the varieties of religious belief with which they disagreed and the strict religious standards which they could not meet. Despite Haigh's reluctance to engage directly in academic debates, by showing how pervasive and divisive religion was at parish level The plain man's pathways to heaven will comfort those historians who regard religion as a prime factor in the outbreak of civil war. Yet the author does not agree with recent studies that have argued that the 1630s served to unite Puritans with those of more moderate views. He argues instead that the godly became increasingly isolated in their opposition to Arminianism, the Book of Sports and the Altar Policy in the 1630s, while these developments had an active appeal for the laity as represented by the characters of Asunetus and Antilegon. In studying these parish disputes in depth Haigh has widened our understanding of reactions both to the ‘innovations’ of the 1630s and to the longer term religious changes contingent upon the Elizabethan Settlement. Time will tell just how contentious his interpretation proves to be.