“All politics is local.” In Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England, Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens demonstrate that all religion is local, too. Readers of Lake will expect to be challenged and rewarded by a bracingly rich, fast-paced, and—in equal parts—erudite and slangy unlocking of the personal, ecclesiastical, and national stakes of early modern English religious identity. In their introduction, Lake and Stephens explain how independent work on different aspects of the religious scene in Northamptonshire, circa 1620s and 1630s, brought them to a renewed exploration of a unique confluence of source materials. These materials bridge public and private, clerical and lay, print and manuscript, and cross many genres. By correlating them, Lake and Stephens aim “to put experiential flesh on the bones of puritan theory” (7).

The titular scandal is an infanticide in which a puritan clergyman was implicated. John Barker allegedly impregnated his wife's niece, Beatrice. Later, both of them, together with the household maid, Ursula, were tried for murder at the Northampton assizes, and all three were hung on the gallows. Barker was an easy mark for his ideological antagonists in the church. He could be, and he was, painted as the quintessential puritan hypocrite, one whose sense of predestinarian election was exposed as the foundation of antireligion.

Lake and Stephens demonstrate that there is no disagreement about the basic facts of the minister's actions on the gallows. Accompanied by a phalanx of godly ministers, Barker enacts a kind of death-bed conversion, presenting himself to the crowd as a sincere repentant (though not a murderer). But how close can any of these textual witnesses come to an understanding of individual culpability, let alone anyone's private thoughts? And how did this scandal reverberate locally in terms of religious identities and social affiliations?

Lake and Stephens reject the segregation of categories of texts, just as they reject the claim that polemical and other more public texts can yield no real insight into the “nature of political and social reality or the real affective core” of early modern English religion (7). In part one, “Public Sources,” Lake and Stephens present back-to-back readings in chapters 2 and 3: “The (Laudian) View, from the Outside Looking In” (52) and “The (Puritan) View, from the Inside Looking Out” (97). The relationship is caught in the subheading “Mirror Images: Watching the Godly Watch the Ungodly Hate the Godly” (113). Lake and Stephens show how polemical positions are locked into intractable antagonisms, each side turning terminology, doctrine, and stereotypes against the other in highly choreographed steps.

How personal was it? Barker and Peter Haustead, their candidate for authorship of the Laudian manuscript, The Northamptonshire High Constable, were both local boys of humble origin, each receiving an MA from Cambridge and returning to service as a county vicar. How galling it must have been for Haustead, if indeed he authored the excoriating manuscript, that Barker, “the young scholarship boy … instead of following the path of scholarship and true religion, of virtue and loyalty, had gone to the bad, and been rewarded for it into the bargain” (95).

Part two, “Private Sources” turns to the cases of three ordinary people who left extraordinary caches of self-revelatory written material. Robert Woodford, a lawyer, kept a diary beginning shortly after Barker's hanging; Robert Sibthorpe corresponded with his fellow Laudian, Sir John Lambe; and the gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham began composing “My Booke of Rememberance,” one of the earliest English spiritual autobiographies. Woodford and Isham get most of the attention, Woodford, for bringing into one text the disparate interests of account keeping, domestic anxieties (about his often pregnant wife and sick children), and prayerful meditations; Isham for illustrating the domestic sphere as a powerful place of religious instruction and community. In both texts, we can watch the struggles of people to find—and hold onto—providential meaning in the ordinary routines of their lives. It is abundantly clear that their private devotions are informed by and responsive to ideological positions. But Isham is an anomaly. For she was well schooled in the dynamics of predestinarian despair from an early age, by the example of her mother and the ministrations of the puritan preacher, John Dod. Still, hers was an idiosyncratic admixture of Puritan mindset and church book piety.

Footnotes remind readers of the longue durée of scholarly work in the field. On page 119, note 85, for instance, posits the observation that the clerical antagonisms were not class based as a confirmation and development of a point made in Patrick Collinson's Religion of Protestants (1982). On page 59, note 20 anchors a section headed “The Seed Beds of Schism: The Ratsbane of Lecturing” in a debate about the role of lecturing between Christopher Hill and Collinson. An ongoing refutation of Alec Ryrie's Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013) becomes strident in the conclusion. As Lake and Stephens regularly pull themselves up to ask, what is at stake? For this reader, it is an understanding of the ways oppositional religious identities (and histories, and historiographies) become both “mutually exclusive” (355) and “mutually reinforcing” (159).

Different readers will wish different allusions were developed. Implications that the domestic sphere is somehow less fully engaged with the political nation needs to be defended. The subheading, “A Country Parson? Or George Herbert Goes Rogue” (77) marks a lost opportunity. Herbert was university orator at Cambridge while Barker and Haustead were there, and he gave the dilemma of the country parson a literary expression, one that also mined the field of the “character” study. Lake and Stephens bring many textual genres into the same analytical space. If they do not always fully engage with cognate studies in literary criticism, they have made a substantial case for the inflections of personal and polemical, and they have given us a new answer to the question where autobiographical narrative came from: Northamptonshire.