In this, the second volume of the Irish Research Council's Insular Christianities Project, the editors, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin and Robert Armstrong, have drawn together a team of eleven scholars to assess the development of Christianities in the early modern Celtic world. The use of the plural form rather than the singular in the title, Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World, emphasizes diversity rather than uniformity, with the Celtic world encompassing Ireland and Scotland (especially Gaelic Scotland), with a nod towards the Isle of Man, Wales, and Cornwall, though excluding Brittany. Early modernity covers the immediate pre-Reformation period to the eighteenth century. Buttressing either end of this excellent collection—three chapters on Scotland, three on Ireland, four on Wales, and one on Cornwall—are an introduction by Ó hAnnracháin that sets the scene and explains the historical complexities, and a concluding chapter by Armstrong that summarizes the preceding essays; lists continuities and comparabilities, as well as variations and divergences; and charts ways in which the discipline can move on. The editors especially are eager to distance themselves from a romanticized (and notorious) “Celtic Christianity,” and although linkages and similarities between the Celtic realms are recognized, it is the complexities of relationships between these different Christianities with what was becoming a radically changing and often fractious if “united” kingdom, that comes particularly to the fore.

The Scottish contribution includes an assessment of the church in Gaelic Scotland before the Reformation by Iain G. MacDonald; the question, by Martin MacGregor, as to whether there was “a Gaelic Christianity” in the Western Highlands and Islands during the Reformation, by Martin MacGregor; and an analysis by Sim Innes of Gaelic religious poetry, especially that found in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Some parallel themes are treated in the chapters on the Irish experience: Raymond Gillespie on sixteenth-century Gaelic Ireland, Salvador Ryan's study of the concept of sin in the verse of the Book of the O'Conor Don, and Bernadette Cunningham on the island's Catholic intellectual culture during the period. Moving from Gaeldom to Wales and Cornwall, the regions where P-Celtic, or Brythonic, rather than the Q-version, or Goidelic, was spoken, Alexandra Walsham provides an enlightening chapter on the state of Christianity in early modern Cornwall. Madeleine Gray, Katherine K. Olsen, Lloyd Bowen and David Ceri Jones take us from the pre-Reformation Welsh church, through popular beliefs during the Reformation and the way in which the history of Christianity was commandeered by the Welsh Reformers for evangelistic ends during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the advent and impact of the Evangelical Revival during the eighteenth. In all, a vast amount of information is marshalled in each of these rich chapters, new insights from fresh research are patent throughout while the standard of scholarly analysis is uniformly high.

A twin dynamic underlies the study. Whereas 1500 saw a considerable, if diminishing, ecclesiastical unity throughout the Celtic world, manifested in an acknowledgment of papal authority, a shared sacramental piety and doctrinal consensus along with similar patterns of parochial ministry and episcopal administration, an increasingly rigid political unity centered on the English state (conjoined after 1707 with the northern kingdom) had facilitated, however unwillingly (or unwittingly), religious diversity of a surprisingly broad kind. Moreover, by 1800 the by-then solidified domains of Irish Catholicism, Ulster Protestantism, Scottish Presbyterianism, Welsh Anglicanism—now wholly ensconced and comfortable in its Welsh cultural milieu—along with an incipient popular Welsh evangelical nonconformity (reinforced massively after 1811 by the secession from the Established Church of the Calvinistic Methodist movement), constituted a remarkable patchwork of ecclesial bodies strikingly at odds with the older concept of cuius regio, eius religio and the prevailing European norm. The transformation was neither uniform nor straightforward, nor did it follow identical timelines in the different lands. Linguistically, too, there remained variances, with the balance between the diverse vernaculars and the use of English (or Scots) functioning in different ways, the latter becoming the medium of higher education, chancelleries, and the legal system. Prejudice against the vernacular languages, often (though not invariably) regarded as barbarous by those most enamored of centralized power, was counterbalanced by the high status retained by a sophisticated bardic elite aided by some, at least, within a politically powerful gentry class. Armstrong's point is pivotal: “However important language might be as a marker it was no impassable barrier to the flow of ideas or of expression, theological or musical or visual, no more than changing belief ever fully blocked off access to the riches of past tradition” (195). In other words, continuity and change cohered fruitfully and creatively throughout the Celtic domains.

The great virtue of this volume that it provides a means of understanding how this extraordinary situation came about, of mapping its ambiguities and paradoxes—not least of which was the almost total (though not inevitable) schism within Gaeldom, with Ireland remaining Catholic and Scotland embracing the Reformation—and of reminding Anglo-centric scholarship that the English experience was indeed an English experience, and not one which characterized the history of religion in other parts of the realm.