For many years historians of the Paul's Cross sermons have been largely dependent on Millar MacLure's survey of 1958. Mary Morrissey's new book shows how much the landscape has changed. Extensive archival work has uncovered many more records of sermons preached; the burgeoning history of the book has helped us to understand the process by which the oral performance became a printed book; and the influence of literary scholars has made us more sensitive to the issues of genre which shaped the form and content of argument. Morrissey significantly revises MacLure's account of a pulpit in which political and religious controversy was effectively nullified through tight control after 1559. Although the pulpit was technically controlled by the bishop of London, there was interference from the privy council and the city corporation, and these groups did not necessarily share the same priorities. Hence Paul's Cross was not a simple tool of government policy, but was actively engaged in the political and religious controversies of the day. These interventions form the substance of Morrissey's book, and she leaves aside the perhaps more typical catechetical and exhortatory sermons, including the jeremiads or national warning sermons, for treatment elsewhere. This does beg the question about what exactly determines that something is ‘political’: an exhortation to do something about the theatres in the midst of a jeremiad might be decidedly political in the context of a particular configuration of political power at the Guildhall. Nevertheless the book is profoundly rich in insight. The discussion of the generic conventions governing sermons is particularly fruitful. Morrissey stresses the degree to which sermons were structured around the explication of a biblical text and the application of the doctrines found therein. Political anniversary sermons ran the risk of confusing explication and application by making parallels between Old Testament patriarchs and monarchs too explicit and slipping into unacceptable panegyric; it was one indication of the degradation of the anniversary sermon under Charles i that preachers fell into this trap. Understanding the nature of the confutational sermon, associating one's opponents with agreed errors and blackening the reputation of one's opponents as unreliable authorities, makes it clear just what a radical departure Richard Bancroft made in his sermon of 1589. Whereas previously anti-Puritan sermons had adopted the doctrinal mode, stressing what is to be taught and presenting Puritans as disturbers of the Church but not beyond the pale, Bancroft moved to associate them with heresy and schism, showing them to be duplicitous and treasonous. This diffusion of the confutational mode, applied to Puritans as much as to Catholics, was to be a feature of avant-garde conformity, and may have contributed to the declining popularity of the sermons. Perhaps less convincing are the remarks on the audience and their responses; it is argued that we can assume the disposition of the auditory from the message of the sermons. It is plausible to argue that whereas in the 1560s the preachers were seeking to persuade people away from the mass, in the following decade they were addressing an audience that was broadly Protestant in its sympathies; hence the decline in anti-Catholic confutational sermons, and a shift to a broader anti-popish discourse which was essentially about solidifying Protestant identity. But it seems less likely that because digressions on the dangers of schism were more common, Puritan sympathies were absent from the pulpit and auditory in the 1630s: Calvinism was surely too embedded, with plenty of adherents on the court of aldermen (they were not all Laudian stooges). More generally, there is a risk of assuming too much about audience responses from the internal textual signals. Do the shifts in tone and argument of Richard Gardiner's 1642 Accession Day sermon prove that the more propagandistic form was a failure?