Although this review is going to make a number of criticisms, it must open with a strong endorsement of the value of Nicholas Orme's book, which is the fruit of a vast amount of detailed research, virtually flawless in its presentation, filled with colored illustrations that take so much trouble to include but add so much appreciation of the subject (a notable example being the fine photo of the ultimate Gothic façade of the town church of Launceston; 126), and thoroughly worth purchasing and reading. The book's subject, Christianity in Cornwall from the beginnings through the Reformation, is one of special interest because of the cultural complexity of the Cornish context, to which the book does less than justice. Lurking around the subject is the misleading notion of “the Celtic Church,” for which I have no more use than the author. In fact, he could do more in the cause by pointing out the attendant misconception, current in scholarly circles well into the twentieth century, that the early Church in Cornwall was entirely monastic in character. It is not helped by attacking the label “Celtic,” as the author does: “Historians nowadays dislike the word ‘Celtic’ because it was not a word that these people used themselves” (1). The same could be said of the traditional Dinka people of Africa, sharing a common culture of language and customs, without political unity, self-identifying with their cattle-compounds; but the generalized term “Dinka,” whose origins are as murky as “Keltoi,” is too useful to be abandoned by scholars or now by the Dinka themselves. The overlap between Celtic languages, La Tène art, and druidic religion was not exact, but it was very considerable, extending from the Continent to the British Isles. The evolution of that cultural complex can still be detected in Cornwall in the period of this book and beyond.

In a review by an early medievalist of a book by a later specialist, it is inevitable that shortcomings in the first chapter, “The Early Middle Ages (500–1100),” will be emphasized. First of all, the argument advanced by the most recent editor of the First Life of St Samson of Dol that its author knew the writings of Bede and thus must have himself written in the eighth century is unconvincing as quotation of the latter by the former is not demonstrated by that editor. And a date in the later seventh century is still most likely for this important source, which badly needs to be the subject of an international conference. Second, the link between the monastery called Docco in the First Life of St Samson and the tenth-century reendowment of Landochou in an Anglo-Saxon charter (preserved in an early fourteenth-century copy made in connection with a dispute involving the collegiate church of Lanow) is absolutely crucial for understanding the development of the Church in Cornwall. Its site is correctly identified in the book as St. Kew parish church (rather than Lanow farm), one made all the more interesting by the discovery of a Latin-and-ogam-inscribed stone nearby bearing the name of neither of the co–patron saints Docco or Kew, but rather Just. Third, more should be done with the tenth-century list of saints that is otherwise well presented on page 15. It provides the earliest evidence for some two dozen Cornish church dedications, and as such the saints should be named and the manuscript, unlovely as it is, illustrated. In some cases it can be quite illuminating. As my coauthor Oliver Padel wrote about the patron saint of Phillack church (Felec on the List, identified as St. Felicity or Felix in medieval documents), “The tenacity of the vernacular tradition of the name, continuing all through the Middle Ages despite official pressure, and only now vindicated in the second half of the twentieth century, is remarkable” (B. Lynette Olson and O. J. Padel, “A Tenth-Century List of Cornish Parochial Saints,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 12 [Winter 1986]: 48–49).

Such deliberate distinctiveness does not seem to me to be well served by this book, anxious as it is to show that Cornwall was part of the English, and Roman Catholic, Church, as indeed it was. Thus, my criticisms extend to the end of the Middle Ages, when popular culture in western Cornwall included the production of long religious plays in the Cornish language, of which six (not five, there are two Creation plays) survive. Again, these are well enough presented on page 125, but more needs to be done with them. Such persistent creativity in a low-status language and performance about which we are remarkably well informed (except where the audience sat or stood) are just plain interesting. So, too, is the resemblance of Cornish to Breton drama, both characterized by assonanced end-rhyming poetry in languages that were always mutually intelligible. In general, the book does not give enough attention to the Breton tie, although one of the most interesting pieces of information it offers is the shipload of pilgrims that sailed from Cornwall to Brittany in the teeth of the Reformation. Finally, those who appreciate the thicket of Cornish place names that covers the Christianized landscape of Cornwall, in lan, eglos, merther, and venton, will look in vain for these in the otherwise excellent “Guide to Technical Terms,” or indeed the index, at the end of the book. In the case of lan, defined as “cemetery” in the fourteenth-century Gotha MS Life of St Petroc (in a phrase that is not, as sometimes has been speculated, a marginal addition to the text), the omission is serious. This widespread element in Cornish ecclesiastical nomenclature does represent in its designation as well as its language something distinctive within the English Church.