The day of the county community as a useful historical category is long gone, but the fact of topography and the survival of the administrative record make the county a continuing focus for historical study. The problems with this are clearly set out by the editors in the introduction to this book, skilfully using contemporary cartography to demonstrate the ‘unwieldy, complicated and often obscure’ nature of the county, compounded by ‘notoriously parlous’ inland communications, despite John Speed's attempt to portray Sussex as a loyal and God-fearing county. The individual chapters reinforce the sense of unwieldiness and complexity; the first, tellingly entitled ‘Progresses into Sussex’, shows that, when visited by the queen, it was not the county that was the purpose, but that when Elizabeth visited east Sussex in 1573 it formed a small excursion from a much greater visitation of Kent, whilst her visit to west Sussex in 1591, though rather more substantial than the earlier progress, was shared with Hampshire. Thus the two parts of the county were just as likely to have had contacts with their neighbouring counties as with each other. Culture, therefore, was far from uniform, as revealed in Dimmock and Hadfield's study of two ‘Sussex’ poets, the Protestant preacher Thomas Drant, a Lincolnshire graduate brought into the county to help to enforce the Elizabethan Settlement, and Anthony Copley, a well-connected Sussex Catholic whose religion meant that he spent a lot of time abroad. The poetic output of each was both challenging and confrontational and reflected the fractured religious climate of the county. Protestantism appeared early in Sussex, and the burning of nine martyrs at Lewes in 1557 became a cause célèbre, seized upon by John Foxe to produce a vision of a uniform orthodox Protestantism, rather as Speed attempted in his map. As Paul Quinn shows, the martyrs had a wider range of belief than Foxe allowed, and the powerful effect of his narrative distorted understanding of the later history of Protestantism, which could be just as divided as Catholicism, in the county. One institution whose purpose was to overcome those divisions was the Church, and in Sussex, most specifically, the cathedral at Chichester. Andrew Foster's chapter demonstrates how important the cathedral, or rather its dignitaries, were in establishing a scholarly presence in the county and in disseminating a literary and religious culture, but the extent to which this was ‘Sussex’ remains uncertain: most of the figures mentioned were outsiders, and their intellectual networks tended to focus on their university connections rather than on the cathedral where they worked. In that sense the cathedral was important in linking the county to wider national cultural and literary trends, rather than in establishing a ‘county’ network though, as Foster suggests, the cathedral, like its counterparts elsewhere, may have fostered a provincial cultural renaissance in the provinces through its educational institutions. This is as yet unproven, but opens an intriguing line of research. That renaissance, insofar as it existed, was abruptly halted by the ransacking of Bishop King's Library by Parliamentary forces in 1642, and the chapter by Daniel Starza Smith shows how painstaking and piecemeal were the attempts to recover such losses. Literary output was not confined to the clergy, and Elizabeth McCutcheon has produced a moving and an elegant analysis of the ‘sententiae’ of the teenage Mary Arundel, wife of Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, who died aged sixteen shortly after the birth of her only child. Mary was, of course, a Catholic and in Sussex Catholics were very divided about how to deal with the Elizabethan and early Stuart regimes. The central figure in this was Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon, who enjoyed the support of the Brownes, Lords Montague, and was an implacable opponent of the Jesuits. Occasionally other Sussex landholding families, such as the Ropers, became entangled in these disputes, but the arguments were really addressed to London and Rome, bringing Sussex into international politics. Finally, two essays cover the visual arts: that by Karen Coke carefully uncovers the work of the painter Lambert Bernard, who worked for Bishop Sherborne in the late 1520s and 30s, revealing how his work was influenced by a variety of European works which either he, or his patron, had encountered while working abroad, demonstrating a ‘dynamic involvement with continental culture’. The chapter by Nigel Llewellyn convincingly traces the shift in funerary art from monumental text to sculptural figure, finishing with the monument to Thomas Sackville (d.1675) at Withyham, where the private chapel became the site of ‘the public display of private grief', in Llewellyn's words a ‘transformative moment not only for Sussex but in the history of British art’. All these essays suggest that the county is not so much the focus of cultural and religious consensus and conflict, but a site on which those features play out national and international concerns. Just as no man is an island, so no county is, not even Sussex with its extensive seaboard.