This volume is the second to be produced by the fine Insular Christianities project run by the two editors and funded by the Irish Research Council. One of the key issues raised by that project and addressed directly by many of the essays in this book, and implicitly by all of them, is the consideration of whether or not it is possible to regard the Christianities of the early modern Celtic world as distinctive. The editors are quick to acknowledge that the term ‘Celtic’ carries considerable baggage, especially when associated with ‘Christianity’ and the manner in which that double name has been employed in recent years. In his introduction Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin is at pains to distance the enterprise from the modern, romantic vision of Celtic Christianity. He concentrates instead upon those factors that might link communities in Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Gaelic-speaking Scotland and highlights the experiences that they shared as well as linguistic and geographical similarities and connections. He has placed the Christianities of the title firmly within an understanding of negotiated and permeable religious identities that were not confined to the early modern Celtic world. The changes during the three centuries prior to 1800 are examined because that period witnessed substantial upheavals in religion and politics. The Celtic world and its Anglophone neighbours moved from the position in 1500 when they shared a common Church located within multiple kingdoms and political units to the existence at the start of the nineteenth century of the centralised political unit of the United Kingdom that was host to a variety of Churches and religious allegiances. As the centre of gravity had shifted away from language zones, the Anglicisation of constitutional, administrative and legal institutions had been completed. Within these early modern centuries, rather than being a restricted study of the ‘Church’, the volume's examination of the diversity of the religious landscape has a wide-reaching significance for many aspects of British, Irish and European history.

The book modifies many of the easy assumptions that have been made about this complex period, often arising from particular national histories and perspectives. The entire project has challenged a Westminster perspective that reflected an underlying imperial and Anglocentric narrative of progress towards a unified and uniform British state. Less dramatically, when comparing the Irish experience with that of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, it has also moved away from the stress upon the similarities generated by their shared language of Gaelic. Sìm Innes discusses the religious poetry of the early sixteenth-century Book of the dean of Lismore and finds a one-direction transfer, with thirteenth-century Irish religious verse retaining its popularity in Scotland but a striking absence of Scottish material in Ireland. Spanning the divide of the Scottish Protestant Reformation, Martin Macgregor discusses what the label ‘Gaelic Christianity’ might mean in a Scottish context. Staying on the pre-Reformation side of that divide, Iain Macdonald's essay documents the way in which the diocese of Argyll conducted its affairs and was embedded within its local society. It can be placed on the spectrum found throughout Christendom, though it did not necessarily conform to practices found in Lowland sees.

In a similar fashion traditional religion in Ireland was engaged with European-wide trends and the papacy. As Raymond Gillespie demonstrates, it possessed a distinctive Irish flavour when it utilised those quintessential medieval figures, the priest and the saint. This meant that when other members of Christendom witnessed Irish practices, they experienced a sense both of familiarity and of strangeness. By the seventeenth century and the post-Tridentine Catholic world, both parties within that relationship had changed. Irish links to fellow Roman Catholics were strong and deep; the interaction is explored in Salvador Ryan's study of the religious verse found in The book of the O'Conor Don of 1631. Bernadette Cunningham, in her magisterial sweep of Catholic intellectual culture, charts the emergence of a new scholarly community in Ireland that succeeded in rooting a Catholic confessional allegiance deep within the country's soil.

That appreciation of major themes sitting alongside micro-history is equally present in Alexandra Walsham's study of language, memory and landscape in Cornwall. Here are revealed the complexities of the ‘negotiations’ and the immense resilience of religious belief and practice within a distinctive locality. There is also a timely reminder of the importance of oral transmission, especially within Cornish that did not in this period make the transition into a printed language. A parallel stress upon the spoken words and the ‘performance’ of books has been highlighted in Wales, where the Welsh Bible was heard and accessed primarily through the Church. The story of Welsh reception and adaptation to various streams of religious change is charted in Madeleine Gray's careful examination of the pre-Reformation Church as the dog that did not bark and Katherine Olson's revealing discussion of popular beliefs. At the literary level Lloyd Bowen documents the fascinating ‘Battle of Britain’ in early modern Wales over history with competing groups occupying the past in an attempt to capture the present. In the only essay to concentrate primarily upon the eighteenth century, David Ceri Jones takes the reader into the world of Calvinistic Methodism. He reveals that in Wales there had been a creative and dynamic engagement over several centuries with the European Reformed or Calvinist tradition.

These twin foci, the importance of the European dimension and the examination of the particular experiences of the micro-Christianities found within the early modern Celtic world, are entwined within Robert Armstrong's conclusion which helps to draw the collection together and makes the volume more than the sum of its individual parts. This book is a fine addition to wider Reformation studies and will be welcomed by those who seek to teach and research many different facets of the early modern experience within the Atlantic archipelago.