The fifteen essays in Milton and toleration are all written by scholars working in English departments in England, America, and Canada. In a brief ‘afterword’ Ann Hughes (who might have been better employed in contributing a formal essay) observes that historians like herself are less likely than English critics ‘to be disappointed by Milton, or, on the other hand, less prone to want to approve, and thus driven to justify or explain’. Actually an insistence on historical and cultural difference is presented as the organising principle of the collection. The editors set out to ‘resist the liberal paradigms of a chronological progression from a persecuting past to modern-day tolerationism’ and to examine sceptically the idea of Milton as torch-bearer for liberalism. The first group of essays are gathered under the title ‘Revising Whig histories’. Milton and other seventeenth-century people, we are frequently reminded, are not like us. Yet the editors at the same time like to make claims for the twenty-first-century relevance of their topic: ‘[Milton's] calls for tolerance are all the more engaging at a time when we see the resurgence of various fundamentalisms around the globe.’ There is not necessarily a contradiction in this; but there are moments when editors and contributors fall back into the sort of Whiggish teleology that they explicitly set out to interrogate. We are told in the brief historiographical overview of ‘England's history of tolerance’ in the introduction that ‘[e]merging in the 1640s and 1650s into organized groups, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Diggers and Ranters were among the radicals who possessed fervent beliefs in the universality of grace and human rights that underwrote their defences of popular liberty and of popular representation’. This is the kind of misleading sectarian ‘lumping’ which is characteristic of the Marxist historiography of Christopher Hill, in particular his Milton and the English Revolution (1977). The claim might be true of the Levellers, but the Fifth Monarchists sought to establish through violent revolution a theocratic republic which would oversee the restoration of Mosaic Law, including the death penalty for adultery. If we wanted to make contemporary connections with the Fifth Monarchists, we would be better off looking to Islamic fundamentalism than western liberal democracy. Notoriously something similar was suggested of Milton's own Samson Agonistes (1671) in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Only Paul Stevens deals in any detail with Milton's portrayal of suicidal religious violence, in a thoughtful essay which is in fact mostly concerned with the intolerant rhetoric of Milton's prose. Stevens's essay is the most successful of the five in the section on ‘Poetry and rhetoric’: as Sharon Achinstein acknowledges, ‘there is, in fact, little imagining of what a tolerant society might look like’ in the great poems. The most rounded essays explore the limitations of Miltonic tolerance and stick in the main to the firmer ground of the prose and the life: Nigel Smith, Thomas Corns and Nicholas Von Maltzahn show Milton to have been less radical, less flexible and less influential in his tolerationist principles than, respectively, many other early modern Europeans, the founder of Rhode Island Roger Williams, and even his friend Andrew Marvell. Andrew Hadfield offers a succinct explanation of Milton's unwavering refusal of tolerance to Catholicism, while Martin Dzelzainis shows how Milton probably thought that he was working within the terms of the 1650 Blasphemy Act by licensing the Racovian catechism. Yet, as Nigel Smith and Elizabeth Sauer remind us, we should not underestimate the radical implications of Milton's etymology of heresy in Of true religion (1673) – the Greek root means to take for oneself, to choose. And, as Areopagitica (1644) famously puts it, reason is but choosing: heresy, properly defined, is God-given reason in action. If Milton and toleration does not quite maintain throughout the intellectual energy and precision of argument that characterised the similar volume Milton and republicanism (1995), its best essays do deliver on the promise to offer a less idealised and more historicised reading of Miltonic and early modern ideas of religious toleration.