Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, is an excellent collection of essays in honor of Mark Goldie, celebrating his recent retirement. Goldie taught at Churchill College and Cambridge University for forty years, and he directed twenty-eight doctoral dissertations (another is still in progress). His many publications have established him as his generation's foremost scholar of British political thought in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A list of his publications (so far) is included at the end of this volume, and runs to more than fifteen pages. He has written a great deal on topics, including John Locke, Tory and Whig thought, royalism, puritanism, and toleration. One much-cited piece is about the quasi-republican nature of early modern English administration. Goldie's work has notably stressed the links between the ideas of great thinkers and the more mundane thought of practical politicians and pamphleteers. His writings have also influentially emphasized the importance to scholarship on past political ideas of the history of religion, and of printing. Moreover, he has worked extensively on manuscripts and especially on Roger Morrice's vast Entring Book, which was published under his general editorship in seven volumes (1996–2007).

The essays in the collection are by students and friends of Goldie, and many concern topics on which he has written. They often bear witness to his impact not only directly, by discussing subjects that have interested him, but indirectly, by adopting an approach similar to his. Locke features in a number of the essays. S.-J. Savonius-Wroth discusses Locke's changing attitudes towards European civilization, and contends that he saw “success in cleansing England of Stuart absolutism as crucial to Europe's future” (145). Geoff Kemp notes that Locke was a censor at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1664, and later an opponent of press censorship, arguing that there is no incompatibility here, since as a censor he was concerned with students’ moral improvement and not with banning books. John Marshall persuasively documents how Locke and the Board of Trade reacted to economic difficulties of the later 1690s by trying to extend slavery in the colonies and the regimentation of the poor at home. Delphine Soulard discusses the reception in France and elsewhere of Locke's ideas, especially on toleration.

Goldie has portrayed Sir George Mackenzie of Rosenhaugh (d. 1691) as a typical Scots royalist of the late seventeenth century. “Bluidy Mackenzie” (as Sir Walter Scott styled him) is the subject of Clare Jackson's entertaining contribution. He supported divine right kingship and Episcopalianism, but opposed further union with England. His tomb in Edinburgh is famously haunted. John Coffey's chapter is about the assassination in 1679 of James Sharp, archbishop of St. Andrews, and includes an informative discussion of Scottish Presbyterian resistance theory in the later seventeenth century. Gabriel Glickman deals illuminatingly with a pamphlet of 1800 by the Scottish Catholic priest Alexander Geddes, and more generally with Scottish Catholics after 1688, and with the spread among them of ideas characteristic of the Enlightenment.

In a fine essay, Tim Harris discusses whether English constitutional royalism of years after 1642 was a myth or a reality. Locke, he observes, regarded as supporters of absolute monarchy thinkers who are today sometimes treated as “constitutional royalists” (34). He stimulatingly concludes that Locke was right. Though some royalist writers circumspectly toned down their views in the 1640s, he argues, their basic theory remained unchanged, and it denied that kings were “accountable to the law” (34). It was only in 1688 that they definitively abandoned their earlier stance. Dmitri Levitin draws attention to a highly important but almost wholly neglected type of source material, namely texts that tell us what trainee clerics of the Church of England were taught in the universities about political thought. To shed light on this, he makes splendid use of the manuscript record of theological disputations presided over by Joseph Beaumont as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge between 1674 and 1699. He convincingly argues that the students were taught the two compatible doctrines of divine right episcopacy and the Royal Supremacy.

Justin Champion provides an engaging case study of case study of the political and literary response to a London riot of 1670; the responders included Andrew Marvell. Jacqueline Rose discusses puritan thought in Restoration England, touching on the thinking of Roger Morrice, but dealing especially with Bulstrode Whitelocke and drawing extensively on his manuscript as well as his printed writings. Hannah Smith's lively and entertaining contribution concerns “how the court's cultural productions were used to promote a variety of interests” (236) and focuses on Henry Purcell and Sir Charles Sedley's 1692 Birthday Ode for Mary II. Warren Johnston shows that apocalyptic ideas circulated long after their supposed demise at the Restoration, and flourished through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker writes on the lineage of the idea of useful knowledge, its Baconian heritage, and religious and secular connotations. The volume's final essay is a wide-ranging account by Conal Condren of changing early modern English attitudes towards the idea of innovation, which (he shows) was predominantly “condemned in confessional politics” but “increasingly lauded in natural philosophy and poetry” (293).

These are well-written and well-researched essays, which together provide an excellent overview of recent scholarship on British political and religious ideas in the age which Goldie made his own. The opening chapter is an appreciation of him by the editors and contains much on his outstanding record as a teacher and researcher. It includes amusing examples of his ready and sometimes acerbic wit. It begins with a youthful-looking portrait of him, suitably undated (as he never seemed to age). His extraordinary attentiveness and perceptiveness as a reader of undergraduate essays is recorded. He displayed similar qualities as a referee of dissertations submitted by applicants for Cambridge college research fellowships. And for years he co-organized a Cambridge graduate seminar on the early modern period that was of major importance in promoting British studies not just in Cambridge but in Britain.