Storied Places explores the development of pilgrimage shrines in the Catholic tradition in France after the disruptions of the sixteenth century. Reinburg describes how the proponents of shrine-based pilgrimage “struggled to reckon with doubt and iconoclasm by creating pilgrim shrines as natural, legendary, and historic places whose authority might provide a new foundation for Catholic life” (1). Natural landscapes, claims to the ancient origins of religious activity in those landscapes, and wondrous tales of apparitions and miracles were the building blocks out of which these shrines’ reputations were constructed.

Part 1, “Legendary Locations,” recounts the development of three shrines. The Burgundian shrine of Sainte-Reine, focused on a miraculous spring that was first associated in the sixteenth century with an early Christian virgin martyr, is the subject of chapter 1. The antique ruins and the wells and springs that dotted the landscape of Auxois enhanced the appeal of a visit to that location. Other watery attractions in the region, meanwhile, boasted thermal spas whose promises of healing paralleled that of the Sainte-Reine shrine. Chapter 2 moves farther south, to Notre-Dame de Garaison and Notre-Dame de Betharram, which drew pilgrims to a frontier of Catholic-Huguenot conflict in the visually striking, mountainous setting of the Pyrenees. According to their promoters, each of these shrines was built on a location indicated to a local resident by an apparition of the Virgin Mary herself. Finally, chapter 3 discusses the cathedral shrine of Notre-Dame du Puy, which differs significantly from the others in both its larger urban setting and its continuity as a pilgrimage site. The miraculous image of the Virgin at the hilltop cathedral had been an object of pilgrimage since its arrival in the city, in the tenth century. Though the cult was threatened by Huguenot iconoclasm during the sixteenth century, the image was preserved and the pilgrimage invigorated amid the legally mandated postwar oubliance, or forgetting, of conflict (151).

Part 2, “Text, Territory, and Truth,” explores the shrine-book genre that promoted early modern shrines. Between 1600 and 1730, about forty shrine books were produced (161). In chapter 4, “Histories and Archives of Faith,” Reinburg notes that appeals to shrines’ antiquity were particularly common, even though the majority of the shrines themselves (with the notable exception of Notre-Dame du Puy) were all founded after the Reforms. Despite this inclination to invent or create continuity with ancient practice, Reinburg argues deftly that the authors of shrine books also sought to substantiate their claims to contemporary miracles—and in much the same way that early modern historians sought to substantiate the truth of their narratives: by appealing to written documents they had searched out and assembled, and, failing the existence or availability of documents, by turning to trustworthy oral testimony. Chapter 5, “In the Beginning: Origins, Legends, and Fables,” examines more closely the foundation narratives of three shrines, describing the manner in which authors framed oral traditions about long-past apparitions of the Virgin that were not traceable in documents or supported by living witnesses.

The shrine books are fascinating and rich, and worthy of this close attention to their origins and structures. And indeed, Reinburg's descriptions of locations and landscapes in part 1 carry forward something of the spirit of the shrine books, in that her vivid prose evokes the experience of a landscape and kindles in the reader a desire for travel. Meanwhile, Reinburg's thoughtful explorations of communities and visitors within particular natural landscapes are a welcome addition to the growing literature in environmental history. However, there are moments when these analyses of shrines shaped by the religious ruptures of the Reforms would also benefit from an interrogation of religious and textual continuities. The shrines’ foundation legends have much in common with medieval Marian shrines, such as Our Lady of Walsingham, and also with medieval collections of miracles of the Virgin, and the intellectual structures that defend miracles in the shrine books carry forward much from the pre-Reform practices of miracle collecting and legal inquiry in support of canonization. A clearer sense of these continuities would perhaps allow the book to grapple more effectively with the shrine books’ fluid conceptualization of antiquity, and would throw the religious changes wrought by the Reforms and their aftermath into yet sharper relief.