For three centuries after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the functioning and furnishing of parish churches in the Western Latin Church was remarkably uniform, continent-wide. The Reformation then propelled this built heritage on a variety of local trajectories, thanks to the different character of local Reformations and Counter-Reformations. The contrasts were not least among the lordships and kingdoms of the Stewarts and Tudors: Scotland underwent a thoroughgoing Reformed Protestant revolution, while in England and Wales a Reformed Protestant polity was sent off the rails by the idiosyncrasies of successive monarchs, and in Ireland there was an emphatic popular rejection of the government's attempt to impose an English-style monarchical Protestant Church. Now this excellent collection of well-targeted essays provides expert guidance on how to read the church buildings resulting from these sharply-differing local circumstances. 1689–90 makes a good terminal date throughout the Atlantic archipelago, given the expulsion of a Roman Catholic monarch, the downfall of episcopacy in Scotland, the final destruction of Catholic political power in Ireland and the failure of the established Church in England to include all varieties of English Protestantism. Not a single essay lets the side down. Kenneth Fincham's summary of the overall history is masterly, John Harper on the various musical traditions illuminating, and Ian Atherton's five case studies of cathedrals in England, Scotland and Ireland absorbing. Trevor Cooper draws on his unrivalled knowledge of English church furnishings to clarify that the crucial decision for the future was taken in the 1560s, by encouraging the preservation of chancels for permanent though occasional use, dedicated specifically to holy communion. This in turn encouraged the redefinition of rood screens as ‘partitions’, preserving them in situ to demarcate that eucharistic space from the area to the west devoted to sermons in the context of mattins and evensong. Because rood screens invariably had a central entrance, there was a compelling incentive to preserve a central nave path up to the repurposed ‘partition’, and a consequent rationale for preserving late medieval arrangements of pewing. In Scotland, Richard Oram presents a very different picture: the preservation of chancels for eucharistic use steeply declined, rood screens were almost universally demolished, and those medieval buildings still used were drastically recast around pulpits. New builds followed suit, apart from some significant episcopally-inspired outliers. William Roulston describes the energetic seventeenth-century new building provision for the Church of Ireland; ultimately this benefitted only the colonial settler population, but as P. S. Barnwell observes in his conclusion, it still constituted ‘the largest group of buildings constructed specifically for the worship of The Book of Common Prayer’ anywhere in the three kingdoms before the mid-century wars (p. 213). A case study from Anthony Geraghty and Mark Kirby throws light on the remarkably effective operation of rebuilding churches in London after the Great Fire; Christopher Wakeling introduces the buildings of English Nonconformity from as early as 1618. Sharman Kadish shows how London's splendid Sephardic synagogue in Bevis Marks is a stylistic conversation between the Amsterdam Esnoga and the City churches of Wren; he also provides a helpful nod to the scantily-surviving pre-1290 built heritage of English Judaism. This volume could safely be given to anyone wanting a comprehensive and readable introduction to its subject. Apart from a small sprinkling of minor misprints, it is also a further showcase for the proven virtues of Shaun Tyas publishing: footnotes at the bottom of the page, generous illustrations and all.