This is a fascinating series of essays pinpointing formative influences on the lives of religious individuals and communities from the beginning of the Christian era up to around 1600. Though the religious education of children is mentioned in some of the essays, the primary focus is the instruction and development of adult believers. A wide range of communities is represented, including Jewish as well as Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox traditions. The essays are varied in other respects as well. Some take a wide-angled perspective; others have a more narrow focus. For example, an essay on Christian formation through the early church period is followed by an analysis of how Augustine made even his most difficult theological themes accessible to his congregation in Hippo through his preaching.

The fifteen authors contributors are all professional historians who write specifically to sharpen our historical understanding of religious practices. They exhibit the strengths of historiars at their best. Eschewing premature dogmatism, they allow the evidence to determine the picture they present. If, for instance, you thought the Middle Ages were was a time when some ecclesiastical, scholarly or political élite regulated the practices of the docile masses, there is much here to make you revise that view. The results, no doubt, will be too complex and untidy for those who like to plunder history to demonstrate some ecclesiastical or sociological thesis; but they will expand the horizons of Christian leaders and educators, opening their eyes to the variety of factors that may be at work among those for whom they have a spiritual responsibility.

With the exception of the last essay (on ‘spiritual direction’), which departs in several ways departs from the format of the other essays, the writers do not attempt to assess the worth of the practices they describe or to evaluate either their legacy or their significance for the present day. The onus to do this will fall on the reader. Nor will this be a straightforward task, because of the great diversity and incompability of the traditions, all of which are represented sympathetically in the book. Certainly, those who write on the Reformers (in particular, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin) highlight the fact that they had the unusual responsibility to get their congregations to unclearn ‘Christian practices’ of which they disaproved, as well as adapt new and more biblical patterns of worship and behaviour. At the very least readers will have their eyes opened to the challenges based by some of the greatest teachers in the church and the strategies they used to meet the challenges.

As a British reviewer, I am struck by how little writing there has been in recent years in Britain on these important themes outside the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, we have seen a legion of books on revival as though that was an answer to all our problems or indeed a pattern throughout the whole of church history. This over emphasis surely needs to be complemented by the sort of concerns for the nurturing of Christian faith and practice as evidenced in this collection of essays.