Robert Lutton's monograph is an extensively researched study that suffers primarily from an over-ambitious title. It is, as Lutton states, an ‘unashamedly local’ account of testamentary piety in the heresy-prone Kentish parish of Tenterden between 1449 and 1535 (p. 2). Lutton's primary sources are more than two hundred wills, and he reads them in conjunction with heresy trials, visitation records and property and taxation accounts. Acknowledging the dangers of too uncritically using wills as evidence for piety, Lutton articulates in chapter i a welcome statement of methodological principles. His interest in wills is less for preambles than for the substance of bequests which, compared across generations, can disclose patterns in families' testamentary strategies. Lutton's book demonstrates what a family-centered reading of wills and associated documents can produce: an impressive body of detail on the testamentary practices of individual families. He shows in chapter ii that Tenterden families tended to provide for funerals and obsequies more often than chantries; that, apart from the Jesus Mass, new devotions were generally not embraced; and that gifts to religious houses and saints' cults were rarer in Tenterden than elsewhere. Trends like these point to the emergence of a distinctively Christocentric piety, focused on Jesus as supreme mediator, around the year 1500. In chapter iii Lutton considers the settlement of Small Hythe. In chapter iv he addresses the ‘parsimonious piety’ of testators, usually the socially upwardly mobile, who skimped on devotions in order better to provide for their families. Finally, in chapter v, Lutton returns to the other half of his title, describing Lollards in Tenterden as neither ostracised by neighbours nor withdrawn from everyday life. He provides a host of details about the families of Kentish heresy suspects, suggesting that heresy had a particularly strong appeal to ‘relatively wealthy middle-ranking families with some influence in local politics and parish life’ (p. 172): many of those who were also parsimonious. Insofar as some of the residents of Tenterden, with their Christocentrism and their lack of interest in saints and religious orders, embraced a version of what would later be called evangelicalism, Lutton's most important contribution is to show that late medieval piety was not uniform and also that, in some ways, it anticipated the changes of the Reformation. Nevertheless, it is unclear to what extent developments in Tenterden (or, more precisely, among the upper- and middle-class will-making inhabitants of Tenterden) were paralleled elsewhere and, by focusing almost exclusively on wills, Lutton may be neglecting other sources that could shed light on the pious practices of the living. His treatment of Lollardy also seems to draw too hard a distinction: though he acknowledges that ‘there may have been a substantial proportion of parishioners who held more ambiguous views’, his analysis tends to pigeonhole individuals as either Lollard or orthodox (p. 195). In the end, however, Lutton's study has much to add to our understanding of piety in one region of late medieval England, and his intelligent use of testamentary evidence is refreshing.