This collection of thirty essays, reaching from the early Church to the present day, results from the 2007–8 meetings of the Ecclesiastical Historical Society on the topic of ‘The Church and the afterlife’. In the introduction, R. N. Swanson describes the central theme of the book in the following words: ‘The impact of belief in the afterlife on the Church's history and evolution, and the manifold ways in which it has impacted on and been reflected in the lives, expectations, and aspirations of Christians across the centuries’ (p. xviii). Swanson's introduction points out several themes that give the book some coherence: afterlife as a ‘theological construct’ (p. xix), being constantly re-invented; the concerns about ‘the practicality of the afterlife’ (p. xx), the fate of both the soul and the body; and the constant negotiation with other, non-Christian, afterlives (p. xxii). However, although the individual contributions are valuable, the whole is not more than the sum of its parts. A subject index might have helped a little.

The early Church is covered by three papers: Frances Young analyses the impact of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo on the formation of the arguments on bodily resurrection; Josephine Laffin attempts to explain why the theme of judgement is scarce in early Christian imagery; Elena Martin describes how Augustine emphasises the positive aspects of the afterlife in order to help his listeners overcome fear of death. Six papers then deal with the sixth to eighth centuries: Matthew J. Dal Santo looks at the origins of the notion of a post mortem purgation; Phil Booth shows how miracle narratives, in particular the Miracles of Cyrus and John by Sophronius of Jerusalem (634–9), can be read as analogies for redemption; Alexander O'Hara shows that miraculous deaths and visions of the afterlife in the Life of Columban by Jonas of Bobbio reflect the institutional concerns of contemporary monastic communities; Jamie Wood deals with the Prognosticum of Julian of Toledo and its relevance in the social context of late Visigothic Spain; Sarah Foot considers visions of the afterlife in seventh- and eighth-century Anglo-Saxon England; Leslie Brubaker surveys representations of the other world in Byzantine painting up to the eleventh century. Ten papers are dedicated to the Middle Ages and the period up to the aftermath of the Reformations: Conor Kostick studies Adhémar of Le Puy's experience of the afterlife as it is narrated in the First Crusade (1096–9) chronicle by Raymond of Aguilers; Yannis Papadogiannakis considers the Questions and Answers (Kephalaia) of the twelfth-century Byzantine theologian Michael Glykas; R. N. Swanson surveys ghost stories in sources from 1100 to the Reformation; Catherine Rider focuses on stories from four thirteenth-century exemplum-collections ‘in which two people agree that whichever of them dies first will come back and tell the other about the afterlife’ (p. 174); Salvador Ryan examines how the judgement of the soul was portrayed in the devotional verse of Gaelic Irish poets (late medieval and early modern period); Clive Burgess studies the commemorative activity in the exceptionally well-documented parish of All Saints', Bristol, in the fifteenth century; Cordelia Warr focuses on the holy woman Stefana Quinzani (d. 1530) and her self-inflicted sufferings, in the context of Catholic beliefs about the alleviation of purgatorial suffering; David Bagchi looks at the controversies on Christ's descent to hell and sheds light on the blurring of confessional lines on this topic; Laura Sangha examines beliefs about angels and in particular their articulation with the doctrine of predestination in vernacular commentaries on Revelation, written in England c. 1559–1625; by focusing on elegies written by laypeople and ministers for recently deceased persons, Adrian Chastain Weimer suggests that for New England Puritans the boundaries between heaven and earth had more porosity than predicted by historians. Finally, eleven papers deal with the modern and contemporary world: Andrew Cambers studies how scientific theories about the plurality of worlds and religious ideas on the afterlife are combined in the thoughts and writings of John Rastrick (1650–1727); Paul Rule surveys the role played by views on the afterlife in the Chinese rites controversy; according to Frans Ciappara's study, eighteenth-century Malta strategies for the afterlife still reflected traditional concern for the state of souls after death; through a detailed account of how the vicar of Harbury (Warwickshire) preached about an apparition tale in 1755, Sasha Handley shows how the exigencies of lay spirituality and the demands of theology can be negotiated; Rowan Strong studies the views of the afterlife exposed in the anniversary sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which provided Anglican ministers to the crown territories, between 1701 and 1721; Andrew J. Finch compares beliefs about the afterlife among the different religious traditions present in Korea at the time of the introduction of the Catholic Church in 1784; Martin Spence analyses the doctrine of the ‘restitution of all things’ as it developed among Evangelical Protestants in nineteenth-century Britain; Georgina Byrne shows that the teachings of spiritualism partly shaped the ideas of the afterlife of the Anglican clergy (1852–1939); Michael Snape revisits the idea that the scale of mortality in Britain during the First World War favoured the growth of spiritualism; David Goodhew considers the teachings in congregations founded in York between 1982 and 2007, which, though the bulk of them are ‘evangelical-charismatic’ in theology, are not particularly innovative in their discourse of heaven and hell; and Paul Gifford argues that there is not much room for the afterlife in contemporary African Christianity, both mainline and Pentecostal.