This engaging book examines attitudes towards miracles in England from 1650 to 1750. As its title suggests, Shaw's account is part of a larger debate about the origins and nature of ‘that broad intellectual and cultural movement known as the Enlightenment’. Indeed, she sees her book as fitting into ‘a more recent body of work which argues that there was an English Enlightenment and that it … happened earlier rather than later’ (pp. 11, 16). Shaw's contribution should therefore be read within the context of older literature on the subject – which emphasised the French and secular characteristics of an eighteenth-century Enlightenment – as well as Jonathan Israel's suggestion that Spinoza and his followers were the intellectual backbone of the European Radical Enlightenment. Challenging the idea of an irreversible growth in secularisation, she links her study to those that have focused on the ‘religious roots’ of Enlightenment ideas, asserting that ‘religious belief and practice were made anew in this period’ (pp. 17, 18). Her analysis stretches back to the English Revolution, though Shaw does not explain the link with the first impulses of the English Enlightenment that she dates to the ‘latter part of the seventeenth century’ and the emergence of the Royal Society (p. 96). She is, however, clearer about what is excluded from her discussion – namely the staple of a number of cheap printed pamphlets; sudden deaths, calamities, monstrous births, apparitions, prodigies, portents and the like. Locating an interest in miracles within this ‘larger appetite for wonders’, Shaw subsequently notes the theological distinction between ‘miranda (wonder) and miracula or mirabilia (that is, an event caused by the direct intervention of God in the natural world)’ (pp. 5, 31). Her book is thus concerned not with providential events – territory marvellously covered by Alexandra Walsham for an earlier period – but with what she terms Protestant miracles. Spread by a ‘shared print culture’ with which ‘almost everyone had contact’ (pp. 7, 9), these invariably involved alleged cases concerning extraordinary (often female) human bodies: notably diabolic possession, survival of organs after fiery martyrdom, miraculous healings, resurrection from the dead and lengthy fasting (sometimes supposedly sustained by angelic or fairy food).

Beginning with the doctrine expounded by several sixteenth-century Protestant reformers that the age of miracles had ceased with Jesus and his Apostles (contrary to Catholic assertions that miracles were the sign of a true faith), Shaw traces ‘three major attitudes’ within Protestantism towards miracles in seventeenth-century England. These ranged from a belief in the cessation of miracles because they were no longer considered necessary to convince people of the truth of the Gospel, to claims of divine healing and prolonged fasting made by members of ‘radical Protestant sects’. Between them lay a middle way which, unlike ‘atheism (no miracles at all) and enthusiasm (too many miracles)’, accepted the plausibility of miracles – but ‘only with very great evidence’. According to Shaw, this ‘became the orthodox position’ held by many ‘reasonable Anglicans’ (pp. 2–4). None the less, as she acknowledges, the picture was extremely complex, indicating a range of ‘sometimes paradoxical’ beliefs about miracles (p. 44). These contrasts are effectively brought out in her early chapters on ‘Protestantism and miracles’ and ‘Miracle workers and healers’. Here she observes that Baptists ‘tended not to speak or write explicitly of the cures wrought in their circles as miracles’, unlike the heresiographer who reported these incidents. Quakers, on the other hand, ‘did not hesitate to proclaim’ their cures as miraculous (pp. 40, 52). Similarly, she highlights the tensions between Charles ii touching for the King's Evil – about 90,000 were touched during his reign – and the cures performed by the ‘Irish stroker’ Valentine Greatrakes, which some commentators perceived as a challenge to royal authority. The fasting women that Shaw describes also provoked a variety of conflicting responses. Hence some studied Anna Trapnel's prophecies intently, while others accused her of witchcraft, whoredom and madness. Again, in the case of Martha Taylor several observers understood it as a providential wonder while others suspected imposture. Indeed, as Shaw recognises, purported miracles together with claims of divine inspiration were challenges to traditional religious authority, and their public and private performance did win over converts – especially among nonconformists – despite doubts cast on their authenticity.

This need to validate or debunk miracles through the reputation of the healers and healed, as well as the testimony of creditable witnesses, forms another significant feature of Shaw's book. The ‘key turning point’ for her ‘in the intellectual path that forged the English Enlightenment approach to miracle claims’ was the use of the experimental method to investigate Greatrakes's cures (p. 78). Consequently, the great eighteenth-century philosophical debate about miracles is seen not as the ‘opening of a discussion’ but as the culmination of a fifty-year long process (p. 144). Among the sceptical participants that she touches on were John Toland, David Hume and Thomas Woolston. Spinoza's readers are also mentioned (p. 146), though more could have been said about continental influences on English scepticism towards miracles. So too about the impact of Newtonian physics (pp. 172–3). Overall, however, this remains a worthy addition to the literature and furthers our understanding of how miracles were perceived in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.