Historians of the early modern world are familiar with the recovery of classical antiquity, both Greek and Roman, by the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Scholarship on the use of the political and moral writings of pagan authors far outweighs that on the parallel revival of Christian patristic writings. Whilst the ways in which the freethinkers of the Enlightenment(s) subverted scriptural authority through textual criticism are noted, the energy expended on patristic editions passes undetected. Yet the Fathers were a fundamental part of religious debates in the Reformation era. Even those who wished to reject their authority had perforce to engage with them. Jean-Louis Quantin's The Church of England and Christian antiquity traces changing attitudes to the Fathers from mid-sixteenth- to late seventeenth-century England. As Quantin shows, patristic scholarship did not necessarily entail a reverence for patristic authority, still less a theory of ‘tradition’ authorizing belief. An ‘appeal to antiquity’ was not ipso facto ‘commitment to tradition’ (p. 312).

Both ‘tradition’ and ‘the Fathers’ were ambiguous terms. Quantin shows an essential continuity in that even the most patristically devout members of the church saw the Fathers as assisting the understanding and interpretation of scriptural injunctions on matters of faith. Some suggested that early Christian authority was needed to help explain or transmit Biblical teachings (and, for Restoration authors, to verify the Biblical canon). But they did not accede to a Catholic doctrine of unwritten verities or the authority of the present church – nor, indeed, much of the church after the sixth century. The preferred Fathers shifted backwards over time. In the sixteenth century, Augustine was vital because of his predestinarian theology. After 1600, there were two changes: first, to using Augustine himself rather than Calvin; secondly, to the ante-Nicene, especially Greek, Fathers. Despite the problems which their writings could pose (such as millenarianism and less staunch Trinitarianism than that of their successors), this crucially distinguished the Church of England's Fathers from those of post-Tridentine Catholics. Quantin richly demonstrates this argument for theological debates, although one suspects that he might have found more attention to fourth-century history had he examined the political models of passive obedience and church–state relations which Anglicans used.

Quantin's Church of England is never Catholic, but was it Reformed? In the sixteenth century it indubitably was; using the Fathers to refute Rome was a widespread Protestant practice. ‘Truth could be proved from the Fathers, it would not be discovered in them’ (p. 87). Two crucial shifts occurred in the seventeenth century. The first was initiated under James I, as first European, then English, scholars began to treat the Church of England as sui generis through her patristic style. Avant-garde conformists shifted from using the Fathers defensively (against Rome) to making their accounts of early church practice a platform for English worship. James's 1616 directions to the universities unintentionally encouraged this by ordering study of the Fathers, councils, and history in preference to ‘Compendiums and Abbreviators’. In the 1620s these were interpreted in an anti-Calvinist fashion (pp. 161–8). Nevertheless, Laudian ideology was not ubiquitous. Quantin depicts Caroline churchmen as more diverse than other scholars might: even in the 1630s, the Fathers could be questioned, and they could be used in conjunction with respect for Calvin.

The second, and perhaps greater, change was the way in which the Restoration church made respect for the Fathers a compulsory part of Anglican identity. Attacks on the integrity of patristic writings now had to be refuted. Jean Daillé's Use of the Fathers (1631), previously acceptable to Englishmen, was the patristic Anglican's whipping-boy. Extensive ante-Nicene scholarship countered Daillé both through its very existence and by disproving some of his criticisms: it was possible and valuable to establish what the church of the first three centuries believed. Although Quantin insists that those who argued for some sort of tradition (Herbert Thorndike and Henry Dodwell) were idiosyncratic, his account rightly implies that high church ideals were the norm after 1660. John Fell and John Pearson, not Thomas Barlow, represent the Restoration Church, which was neither Anglo-Catholic, nor even Gallican.

The Church of England and Christian antiquity is a much-needed addition to our understanding of the early modern Church of England. (Quantin admits he has omitted pastoral use of the Fathers, which one hopes other scholars will pursue.) It is built on extremely detailed research, and the author seems impressively comfortable discussing the whole period covered. Its riches may best be discovered only after several readings. Conversely, it is not for the uninitiated: Quantin does little to guide his readers through either the Fathers or even the early modern theologians whom he discusses. Some guidance outside the bibliography as to the editions being used, or the scholarly versus the polemical motivations behind their production, would be helpful. Whilst Quantin shows the use of the Fathers to have been embedded in polemic, these debates seem detached from government policy. The interplay of intellectual and political contexts could, therefore, be further emphasized, especially regarding the necessity or otherwise of episcopacy in the 1640s and 1650s, and the Catholic regime of 1685 to 1688.

An incomplete Reformation rather than a deliberate via media, the Church of England was unique in attempting to defend its medieval Catholic remnants, its Reformed doctrine, and its atypically close ties to the monarchy. Quantin's elegantly written account provides further evidence of the constant rewriting of the English church's history for polemical purposes: by seventeenth-century high churchmen, by nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholics, and even twentieth-century scholar-theologians. He is keen to deny that the Fathers were used in the same way in the seventeenth as the nineteenth century, and denies any notion of a homogeneous patristic mind. Yet, if Victorian churchmen mistook the ways in which their forebears used the Fathers, they at least recognized what modern scholars too often forget: the significance to early modern England of the recovery of ecclesiastical, not just secular, antiquity.