'Sacred Waters: A cross-cultural compendium of hallowed springs and holy wells' by Celeste Ray (Routledge, 2020)

Sixteen years ago now, I was asked to write an article about the then-current state of holy well research, on the tenth anniversary of the publication of my own overall survey of the subject. I concluded it like this:

If we are to have a new overview of the history of holy wells, whether looking at England, the whole of Britain, or wider, perhaps the way forward is through a collaborative venture which draws on the skills and knowledge of researchers in different areas and allows contentious subjects to be assessed from different methodological angles. My own experience has been that the scholarly apparatus the subject demands is more than one person can ever hope to provide.

Sacred Waters, edited by Celeste Ray of the University of the South in the USA, isn’t a history of holy wells, just a collection of essays; but otherwise it fulfils that hope of mine so long ago rather triumphantly. It’s a stupendous achievement: no fewer than 36 separate chapters penned by scholars from across the globe, drawn from a kaleidoscope of disciplines – historians, geologists, anthropologists, linguists, students of religion, and environmental engineers. Together they comprise an overview of worldwide hydrolatry that we have simply never had before. We (in the English-speaking West) have never heard about the wandering springs and water sources of Aboriginal Australia, or the dragon wells of China and how they have been used, the waterfront shrines of Varanasi or the Inca well-sanctuaries of Chuquipalta and Chuspiyoq. What a cornucopia!

As a historian, of course, I find many of these essays beg as many questions as they answer, and the most satisfying, to me, are those that discuss how the meanings of holy water sites have changed and shifted in different contexts: we get most of that in the sections on ‘Medieval Europe’ and ‘Contested and Shared Sites’. Dr Ray has deliberately chosen to emphasise the shared and common aspects of well-worship across the world, where I would say that the very breadth her work encompasses demonstrates the differences between them, but that pales beside the sheer delight one feels in discovering so much that’s new and fresh. Packed into less than 400 pages, the chapters are all pretty short and easy to digest, and if you find the one you’re reading a bit thin you won’t have to put up with it for very long. There are some illustrations, and though one yearns for many, many more we also accept that they would have made the book unfeasibly pricey.

This work is easily the greatest contribution to holy well studies since Jeremy Harte’s English Holy Wells of 2008, and its grand scope makes it arguably even more important.