The theme of Religion in the age of reason ticks two boxes for topicality. Its scope is fashionably transatlantic, with essays devoted to the American colonies as well as the British Isles. Secondly, the volume forms part of a recent turn to religion in eighteenth-century studies, rejecting any attempt to locate the seeds of secularisation in this period. There are, however, limits to the intellectual coherence of the collection and therefore to its capacity to address these agendas with real penetration. Just two of the twelve essays are concerned with American subjects, and while these prove to be valuable in their own right, they do not self-consciously illuminate transatlantic cultural interactions. Although the editor's introduction offers a wide-ranging historiographical and historical overview, it refrains from situating the volume in relation to the approaches and problems it delineates. This disengagement leaves the reader feeling moorless, a sensation amplified by the collection's disciplinary diversity. However, the book is not without its rewards, and it is perhaps best reviewed in its individual parts rather than as a whole. In the first essay Anne Barbeau Gardiner offers some perceptive readings of symbols of transubstantiation in Donne, Milton and Dryden, though it is not entirely clear why these three are juxtaposed, except for their ‘greatness’. Kevin Cope's essay on the meaning of ‘experience’ in the Enlightened imagination ambitiously ranges from Spinozan empiricism to the metaphysical poets and Romanticism. The result is sometimes disjointed, but it presents an important argument about the capaciousness of Enlightenment ‘orders of experience’. The fascinating Catholic intellectual Serenus Cressy is the subject of Patricia Brückmann's chapter, which combines biography with some helpful notes about his networks and publications, though there is not as much analysis of his ‘Enlightened and peaceful Catholicism’ as the title promises. Gary Kuchar examines the status of the body in the poetry of Cressy's contemporary, Thomas Traherne. This is a philosophically rich and historically subtle exploration of subjectivity in Traherne. Michael Austin outlines John Bunyan's contribution to the debate over separate women's meetings, and sensitively interprets his female typologies in The pilgrim's progress. Bob Tennant moves to the heart of the establishment. He considers the evolving political and rhetorical role of sermons in the late seventeenth century, before turning to a closer reading of Archbishop Tillotson's homiletic style in four works. Harry Clark Maddux's chapter is a rather dense discussion of Ramist rhetoric in Edward Taylor's poetry, full of powerful-sounding insights which are sometimes difficult to access for cross-disciplinary readers unfamiliar with ‘Systematic and Philippo-Ramist techniques’. In her comparative study of Pope's Essay on man and Dunciad, Katherine Quinsey suggests that the contrast between the more ‘serious’ former work and ‘its unholy relative’ reveals a duality in Pope's religious thought, a tension between his rationalising and visionary instincts. Likewise taking Pope and his circle as his central focus, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz expounds clearly the paradoxical ‘holiness’ of violence in Augustan literature. Brett McInelly examines the discourse of enthusiasm in Methodist and anti-Methodist writing, and shows that madness and spiritual experience were disturbingly proximate in Wesley's thought. The final chapter, by Peter Nockles, draws to the very close of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, tracing the reception of Foxe's so-called ‘Book of Martyrs’ in different traditions up to the rise of the Oxford Movement.