Stephen Chavura begins his study of Tudor political thought by invoking Carl Schmitt's Political theology and its claim that all modern political theories are ‘secularized theological concepts’ (p. xi). In Chavura's account of Tudor politics, the most important ideas are royal supremacy and emergent concepts of the liberty and consent of the governed. He suggests that the religious convictions of sixteenth-century political thinkers have received less attention than their seventeenth-century successors. He adds that ‘positivist history’ has not only ‘been more popular than idealist history’ (p. 7) but that it also tends to neglect religious and ethical thought. Chavura aims to correct that alleged oversight, yet he does so by citing recent secondary scholarly works on Reformation politics by S. J. Gunn, Peter Lake, David Loades, Steven Ozment, Charles Taylor and many others as well as older classics by Schmitt and Kantorowicz, indicating that the topic has hardly been neglected. Chavura's analyses are erudite and informed, and he displays a solid knowledge of many lesser-known contemporary theologians like Thomas Bilson and John Aylmer; he is particularly interesting on the latter's arguments with John Knox over divine will and natural law. By contrast, figures who are deemed more influential and important are given scant and sketchy attention: Richard Hooker is repeatedly invoked as ‘a golden mean’ (p. 86) between Puritan providentialism and scholastic hierarchies, yet substantive discussion of Hooker's work is limited to a single page and cryptic footnotes with only numerical references to passages from Ecclesiastical polity (p. 148). Chavura also challenges revisionist histories of the English Reformation that treat it as a top-down ‘act of state’ (p. 26) by contending ‘that it does not fit with all the evidence’ (p. 27), but then immediately reverses direction by asserting with no evidence at all that ‘English parishioners took the new religion hard’ (p. 29). This tendency towards vague generalisation and fence-straddling weakens his larger argument by leading to such unremarkable conclusions as the ‘ambiguity and ambivalence of political ideas reflected an age of material, political, and religious transition and uncertainty’ (p. 1) and ‘the Tudor worldview was neither wholly medieval nor completely un-medieval’ (p. 14). Tudor Protestant political thought is a learned work, but its arguments are neither particularly illuminating nor original.