The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain is a collection of essays that broadly examines the symbiotic relationship between the European and British reformations from around Luther to the middle of the seventeenth century. As such there is no central thesis, but there is at least one common assumption—that reform was a “continual process” (xvi). These essays were first presented at the British Academy in 2007.

There are no weak essays here: all deserve their place. The two introductory essays—one each by the two editors—are valuable analyses of methodology and historiography, respectively. Polly Ha addresses the problematic term “reception” (problematic at least to the reviewer) in regards to the relationship between the two reformations. Patrick Collinson, Regius Professor Emeritus as well as Elton's successor at Cambridge, provides many examples of geographic tunnel vision that have appeared throughout the history of historical writing on the Reformation in Britain. His chapter would serve as particularly good background reading for graduate or seminary students, so they too will avoid the Anglo insularity that guided the landmark contributions of Aubrey Moore, Owen Chadwick, Father Philip Hughes, and others.

As for the rest, Torrance Kirby's essay “Peter Martyr Vermigli's Political Theology and the Elizabethan Church” fills a sizeable gap in the subject, as he provides detailed evidence to support his claim that the Italian reformer Vermigli played a “pivotal role in the formation of the protestant religious settlement under Edward VI and consolidation under Elizabeth” (83). John Craig's piece on the politics of book purchases by parishes reveals that not all required texts were indeed really required after all. Some of which was required was readily purchased, but some other supposedly required texts were not. The requirement that Erasmus's Paraphrases and John Jewel's writings be purchased was generally heeded; but Foxe's Acts and Monuments, at least according to archival data, was not as frequently acquired, displayed, and maintained as much as many Reformation scholars had previously thought. Neither was Henry Bullinger's Decades, and other texts, for that matter. Other essays in The Reception address such variant topics as the Latin Bibles of the 1530s and 1540s, holdings in private and university libraries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the reception of Martin Luther's writings in Britain, the ways by which John Knox and Christopher Goodman implemented Genevan elements in their churches in Scotland, the religious—and not political—aspects of Anglo-Palantine relations, the Scottish application of Martin Bucer's ecumenical ideas, and seventeenth-century Moravian reformer Jan Amos Comenicus.

Certainly this book needs to purchased or at least read by anyone with a keen interest in the European Reformation (after reading the Craig article, one is certainly less eager to label a book as “required reading”), not only because many of these essays build on previously published work, but also because the book itself is thought-provoking.

One is left with questions. First, the word “reception” is much more precise than the simplistic models of “influence” that used to permeate scholarship on the subject—as if reformers from England and Scotland read material from their continental friends and simply processed and reproduced it, with modifications. But one has to wonder about the soundness of even the more in vogue “reception.” The problem is that when two entities are mixed, they often lose their individuality. That is true with raindrops, and also, sometimes, with ideas, including those on religious reform. It is obvious that the events, ideas, and people involved with many continental reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, helped shape the world around them, including England and Scotland, and indeed Ireland, too. But how can one prove that definitively, with any degree of certainty? That task is fraught with epistemological pitfalls. Not only that, the continental reformations, even when they did take root in England and Scotland, did not do so in entirely fallow soil. Especially when one deals with the 1520s and 1530s, one has to consider the role of John Wycliff's descendents, the Lollards.

Perhaps the question as to the reception of the continent across the Channel has been the wrong one all along—and not only because of the demise of the so-called exceptionalism of the Reformation in England (thanks in part to this book). It may be more useful to look at the Protestant Reformation instead as a cosmopolitan movement, a religious component in early globalization, whose goals regardless of location were largely the same: to teach and preach the gospel through spoken and printed word, and through godly leaders, and also to break down the authority of Rome.