LAUSR

ple of issues in my appointed role as a scholarly reviewer. First, even though Ryrie’s title uses the words “unbelievers” and “doubt,” in the text readers will find other terms used more or less interchangeably: atheism, skepticism, deism, pantheism, and so forth. This sometimes gives the impression that there is no meaningful difference between doubting Christian orthodoxy and denying the existence of divinity. It often gives the impression that a wide array of historical actors can be lumped together as fellow-travelers on the atheist road. These are debatable propositions. And while I look forward to debating them, I do fear that Ryrie’s use of the term “atheism” in particular is going to make that debate less productive than it would have been otherwise. Part of Ryrie’s point is that “atheism” in its formal sense is not really that important alongside the emotional history of doubt; so using the word “atheism” may muddy the waters and give undue attention to the ultimately uninteresting question of “real” atheism. Second, I wish there had been more history of the emotions in this emotional history of doubt. The history of the emotions is a robust field devoted to historicizing the way people feel, both the contexts in which emotions occurred and the content of the emotions themselves. If, as Ryrie says, unbelief was primarily an emotional enterprise, then a serious account of emotional changes over time would be crucial to understanding the history of doubt. How did anger at the church evolve into triumphant selfrighteousness? When was it appropriate to laugh at the absurdity of religion, and when was it appropriate to cry? Might the well-attested vogue for outward displays of emotion in Europe’s eighteenth century have contributed to Enlightenment unbelief? Or, conversely, might the well-attested suppression of feeling in modern Britain have helped to sustain belief? A longer version of Unbelievers, less accessible to the general public, might have explored these issues. And while I cannot fault Ryrie for choosing to write a book that people actually read, I hope his choice does not prevent him or someone else from exploring these issues in the future. So there: I have fulfilled my duty to find fault. But every single person reading these words—anyone who reads academic reviews in Church History—should immediately go out and read Alec Ryrie’s Unbelievers. It will change your view of one of the central issues of modern European history.