The subject of this book is the history of the shrines of Christian saints in medieval England, from the arrival of Roman missionaries in Kent in the late sixth century to the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1540s during the reforms of Henry VIII. While there is a vast literature on the cults of English saints in the Middle Ages, this volume stands apart due to its particular focus on the monuments built to house their holy remains. The book begins with two chapters on the cult of relics and the physical setting of their commemoration in the late antique world before turning to the evidence from medieval England. There follow eight chapters that trace the development of this specialized kind of ecclesiastical architecture over the course of a millennium. The author's approach is strictly chronological, and the geographical scope of the book is limited to England, with occasional comparisons to evidence from the Continent and a digression on the cult of Saint David in Wales.

Crook begins the book with the thankless task of summarizing more than a century's worth of scholarship on the cult of relics in late antique and early medieval Christianity in order to provide the context for his discussion of England. These first two chapters offer a serviceable introduction to the origins of saints' cults in the Christian tradition, definitions of important concepts like “contact relics” and “burial ad sanctos,” and descriptions of the earliest physical settings of the commemoration of relics. Crook often favors modern analogies to illustrate his point: the bones of the saints provide “a holy hot-line between heaven and earth” (5), while contact relics are likened to “holy comfort objects” (18). While these chapters may be useful for someone completely new to the topic, scholars of premodern Christianity will chafe at the obvious omissions. There is no mention here of the work of Patrick Geary on the theft of relics (furta sacra), Glen Bowersock on Roman martyrs, Yvette Duval on burial ad sanctos, Eric Rebillard on funerary customs in late antiquity, or Julia M. H. Smith's many articles on the cult of the saints in Carolingian Europe. These oversights, coupled with Crook's tendency to cite primary source texts in their Latin or Greek editions without any reference to modern translations, limit the utility of these introductory chapters to the students who would have found them most useful.

Crook is on firmer footing in chapter 3, where he begins to focus on evidence from England, starting with the cult of St. Albans, best known from Bede's account of his martyrdom in the Ecclesiastical History. From here on, each chapter follows a clear pattern: Crook introduces us to a variety of English saints and their cult sites, describes the setting of their shrines in minute detail, and traces the influences on their form and decoration. It is not surprising to discover that Roman models exerted a powerful influence on the earliest saints' shrines in England, given the allure of pilgrimage to Rome in this period and the strong links between Anglo-Saxon prelates and the papacy, but the ambitious programs of church building undertaken by the Normans in the late eleventh century eventually overshadowed the faux catacombs and Roman-style ring-crypts of the early Middle Ages. After some initial reticence, Norman churchmen in Canterbury, Winchester, Worchester, and elsewhere embraced the saints of their new homeland and constructed towering cathedrals to house newly renovated shrines distinct from the modest tombs that preceded them. These new shrines took a variety of forms. Some were “table-shrines” raised up on small pillars; others were “tomb-shrines,” resembling sarcophagi with little round windows (foramina) cut into the sides. Many of them were lavishly decorated with precious metals and gems. The construction and confection of relic shrines proceeded unabated throughout the late Middle Ages and was only brought to an end by the ruinous decrees of Henry VIII in 1536 and 1538. The fact that Crook almost always has to rely on documentary evidence to describe these shrines is a testament to the thoroughness of the agents of Henry's reform.

On the whole, Crook delivers what he promises. There is a veritable flood of information in this book, so it may be best for novices, particularly students, to approach it with a specific saint in mind. Using the index, one can trace the development of the most important and tenacious cults over the course of the Middle Ages. I did this with three very different kinds of saints (Albans, Bede, and Swithun), and the results were rewarding. Although English Medieval Shrines is a useful introduction to its subject, I came away with a few questions and quibbles. First and foremost, Crook never fully clarifies the distinction between a reliquary and a shrine. Did medieval people understand there to be a difference between these two terms? If so, did this influence the way that they interacted with holy remains? Second, while the book often treats at length the evidence for the decoration of shrines, it shies away from any discussion of iconography, except when medieval images happen to depict the shrines themselves. It would have been useful to explain how pictorial representations of the saints enhanced the veneration of their relics. Third, there is no consideration given to the development of canonization as a formal process overseen by the papacy and its influence on the relic shrines of England. None of these unanswered questions detracts from the strengths of the book, however, which painstakingly catalogs the fragmentary evidence for the architectural settings in which the people of medieval England venerated their “very special dead.”