Besides papists and Providence, Walsham has published on angels, religious tolerance and intolerance, folklore, Jesuits, leisure, print culture, witches, and the myth of Elizabeth I. But her latest theme seems peculiarly suited to an antipodean (perhaps more strictly ex-antipodean) sensibility, given that in recent decades we have become increasingly sensitive to the cultural role of landscape and to the ‘tissue of topographical legend’ which, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, the original occupants of this continent wove around its distinctive landforms. And while Australia today may be a secular society in many respects, it is scarcely ‘stripped bare of all faith’, pace Manning Clark. Challenging and complicating all such simplistic generalisations, with particular reference to the religious history of Britain between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, is the keynote of Walsham’s intellectual agenda.

Her latest book brings an extraordinary breadth and depth of erudition, high literary gifts, and remarkable intellectual ambition to what its author modestly terms ‘a contribution to the task of writing a comparative history of religion in the British Isles’. Most historians are reluctant to venture beyond the conventional limits of their chosen chronological period. Walsham, however, displays no inhibitions about entering into extended discussions of, for example, the topographical implications of the conversion of Britain and Ireland from paganism to Christianity half a millennium before the sixteenth century Reformation, or the role of medieval pilgrimages and Georgian/Victorian antiquarianism in forming collective memory.

Walsham’s geographical range is equally formidable. Another antipodean expatriate, J.G.A. Pocock, has encouraged early modern historians to abandon their preoccupation with national boundaries, so as to take full account of the parallel and interconnected histories of the various regions of the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ (The Discovery of Islands, 2005). Indeed, the scope of Walsham’s enquiry and the implications of her findings would have been severely constrained had she confined herself to England, or even England and Scotland alone. Yet besides England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, we encounter illuminating references to pagan worship in the mountains of the Auvergne, the reputed footprint of the Archangel St Michael at Italy’s Monte Gargano, holy wells in Lutheran Denmark, Prague’s Charles Bridge, and other markers of Counter-Reformation identity in Rome, Vienna, Bavaria, and the Upper Palatinate, not to mention maypoles in Puritan New England and evangelical gatherings at mid-eighteenth-century New Brunswick. Add to all this numerous incisive interventions in current historiographical debate, and some fifty apposite illustrations, both photographs and contemporary images, strategically interspersed through a substantial body of text, and the overall effect may fairly be characterised as awe-inspiring.

After an introductory chapter which considers how first animist and nature-worshipping heathens, and then Christians, had marked the landscape (both built and natural) of Britain and Ireland in the centuries before the Reformation, Walsham proceeds by way of a series of thematic discussions. Protestant theology held that God was no respecter of place. Hence resort to wayside crosses or chapels, also wells, springs, hilltops, caves, rocks, and other natural features that had acquired spiritual and/or therapeutic significance before the Reformation was no more acceptable than pilgrimage to the shrines of saints. For reformed iconoclasm was not logically confined to the destruction of graven images or the expropriation of monastic buildings. Radicals such as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, sought to cast down all ‘steeple houses’ (aka churches) as irretrievably polluted. Meanwhile, the reformers’ assault upon other physical places and symbols of spiritual devotion tended to concentrate religious belief and practice upon the parish church. Walsham explores the resulting tensions, culminating in the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars and associated parliamentarian assault upon purported surviving papist relics. She also points to an ‘inner contradiction at the heart of iconoclasm: such acts of destruction unwittingly reproduce the awe they are designed to dispel’. Modern fundamentalists take note.

The Catholic (or Counter-) Reformation is presented as in part a response to the attempted Protestant desacralisation of landscape, while persecution of recusant populations fostered ‘a new geography of the sacred’. But Protestants of various complexions and tendencies themselves turned natural features to religious uses, while more positive attitudes developed to physical relics of earlier spirituality with the flowering of antiquarianism, archaeology, and landscape gardening. The impact of an emerging scientific world view on long-standing assumptions about the earth and all natural events as God’s handiwork is the subject of a further extensive chapter. This argues that Protestants did not simply abandon these fundamental beliefs in favour of more ‘enlightened’ attitudes, but found various ways to reconcile them with the findings of Newton, Boyle, and other natural philosophers. The two final chapters consider how and why resort to ‘Therapeutic Waters’, both ancient holy wells and more recently discovered ‘healing springs’ or spas, persisted throughout the early modern era, and the reshaping of collective or social memory relating to specific aspects of the British landscape by the invention (both deliberate and unconscious) of new customs, legends, and traditions.

Far from a one-way ticket from benighted superstition to consensual faith and sceptical secular modernity, Walsham views the Reformation as ‘immensely complex and somewhat contradictory’. There is no hint of teleological triumphalism. On the contrary, references to tales about the medieval landscape that ‘Protestantism was hell-bent on effacing’ and ‘the scurrilous legend that early evangelicals had constructed about their catholic [monastic] forebears’ suggest that the author’s sympathies lie more with the latter than the former. She seems wholly in accord with recent revisionist emphasis on the strength of late medieval piety, and on the haltingly uneven diffusion of reformed belief and practice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially across what the hotter sort termed the ‘dark corners of the land’. Rather than confessional divergence, parallels and similarities are stressed: as, for example, that Protestants developed their own sacred sites, often at or near pre-Reformation hallowed places, all within what the late Bob Scribner – another hugely influential Australian early modernist – has termed ‘a moralised universe’. In short, religion continued to matter much more and much longer than was commonly assumed by historians of a previous generation.

Although towns and the English countryside are by no means neglected, Walsham tends to linger longer on the Celtic fringes of the British Isles (not least her county of birth), where popular perceptions and practices of the kind that interest her are best documented. At the same time, she is disarmingly frank about the evidential problems posed by some of her sources, especially local histories and folklore collections. The dubious provenance and amorphous vagueness of many surviving accounts of beliefs, customs, and rituals associated with particular places may be no reason to discard them altogether. Even so, nagging questions remain. Thus we are told that ‘[i]n nineteenth-century England people supposed’ that the outline of a boot worn by a Jesuit martyred two centuries before could be discerned in the church wall at Brindle, Lancashire. Fine; but one really does want to know how many people of what sorts shared that particular supposition, and how seriously they took it. Perhaps there is no way of telling.

A further possible problem is posed by the citation in such contexts of works composed by Anglican clergymen, who might be thought professionally predisposed to a broadly religious view of things, even while they were discounting popular ‘superstitions’. That would certainly apply to the eighteenth-century Cornish antiquary William Borlase and his later Stuart predecessor Joshua Childrey, both of whom are quoted extensively here. It must also be mentioned in passing that the editions of Childrey’s Britannia Baconica (1661) to which I have access make no mention of Saint Richard of Chichester in connection with the Droitwich salt springs, and refer to St Wilfrid (not -fred) of Ripon, although these latter quibbles hardly affect Walsham’s use of Childrey to exemplify the contemporary ‘spirit of empirical enquiry’. Nor was Borlase a wholly unenlightened reactionary; in 1752 he welcomed the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, despite its popish antecedents. But he effectively spent his adult life in Cornwall, documenting that isolated county’s antiquities and natural history. One may question how far his compilations, published some years after the appearance of David Hume’s ‘Essay on Miracles’, are representative of  ‘the extent to which natural philosophy accommodated itself to Protestant providentialism’ throughout the British Isles.

Colourful, complex, subtle, sophisticated, argumentative, and wide-ranging, Walsham’s book forces us to look anew at many familiar themes, besides pointing towards a host of unfamiliar places. It must have been fun to research and is (perhaps surprisingly) enjoyable to read. I particularly liked the notion that the world came into being to serve as the Creator’s teaching aid: ‘A strong Antidote against all Atheisticall thoughts’, according to the Sussex divine John Maynard, to which Walsham helpfully adds that ‘it revealed the essential traits of God in technicolour’. But I looked in vain for any reference to St George’s Hill, Surrey, where in 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers famously attempted to establish an agrarian colony, in accord with their belief that ‘In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason, made the earth to be a common treasury ...’ Perhaps they had the wrong sort of religion.