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seen, miraculously, at Llannerchaeron), thus dating the house exactly, and confirming Nash definitely as the architect. PRYS MORGAN Swansea THE Nineteenth-Century CHURCH AND ENGUSH SOCIETY. By Frances Knight. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. Pp. xiii, 230. £ 32.50. This important and very readable volume investigates the experience of mainly rural clergy and laity in nineteenth-century England as the Church of England gradually evolved from national church to denomination. The author herself states that 'the aims of this study are broad and ambitious', and there is no doubt that the aims are amply fulfilled, while she also indicates areas for further research. Frances Knight's book developed from her PhD thesis on the work of the reforming Bishop Kaye of Lincoln between 1827 and 1853. She concentrates on rural eastern and central England, although there is also some useful material on the strongly Nonconformist city of Nottingham, which was within Lincoln diocese between 1837 and 1884. There is much of interest on every page, often challenging accepted viewpoints, and it is possible here only to indicate a few especially interesting observations. The first chapter contains a valuable historiographical essay on the nineteenth-century Church of England. The author distinguishes four approaches: a concentration on writing in party-Tractarian or Evangelical-terms, analysis in 'institutional' revival, studies of clerical revival, and investigations of the conflict between the Church of England and Protestant nonconformity. Knight's most fascinating contribution to an understanding of the nineteenth-century Church is her discussion of lay religion in chapter two. She acknowledges that there are limits to how far the thoughts of 'these forgotten participants in the Anglican history of the modern period' can be discovered-call that can be done is to strike a few matches in an otherwise dark landscape, and to peer briefly at what is illuminated' — but she does discover much about the double allegiance of Methodists, especially Wesleyans, to church and chapel until about 1870 and about the importance of private prayer at home. There are implications for clergymen today in the finding that stress on the Eucharist can have a negative effect on many 'fringe' parishioners. The fear of hell had been gradually replaced by more optimistic views by the 1 860s,