Francis Turretin was one of the preeminent seventeenth-century Reformed theologians, primarily due to his magnum opus, the three-volume Institutio theologiæ elencticae. Nicholas Cumming's book is therefore bound to grab the attention of anyone interested in early modern Reformed theology.

This book is divided into three parts: Turretin's life, his published works and their reception. It provides an account of Turretin's life and historical-intellectual milieu, highlighting his Italian Reformed family heritage, his education, his peregrinatio academica to various Reformed academies, his personal networks and his pastorate and professorship in Geneva. Cumming's discussion of Turretin's eucharistic theology and of the structure and method of his sermons stands out as a highlight.

Despite these and other positive elements, however, the book's frequency of errors render it an underwhelming and frustrating read. Firstly, Cumming's chronological disorganisation makes it cumbersome to follow the timeline of Turretin's story. For example, in Cumming's account Turretin's diplomatic mission to the Netherlands (1661) precedes Turretin's appointment as professor at Geneva in 1652 (pp. 53–5). Elsewhere (pp. 67–8) he hops from the first volume of Turretin's Institutio (1679) back to his wedding (1669), then suddenly forward again to his death (1687). Clearer chronological order would certainly have improved the biographical aspect of the book.

Cumming's section on the theology of Turretin's Institutio focuses exclusively on what he calls ‘the most problematic locus of theology’ (p. 101), namely predestination, and amounts to a rehashing of old debates about the nature of Reformed scholasticism and a ‘central dogma’, followed by an analysis of Turretin's doctrine of predestination compared to Calvin's. Along with earlier commentary on Turretin's prolegomena, this is effectually the sum of Cumming's treatment of the theology of Turretin's Institutio, which is quite disappointing, given that this book was the primary reason for Turretin's renown. Mark Beach gives a clearer taste of Turretin's Institutio in the new Oxford handbook of Reformed theology.

Cumming misunderstands how scholastic disputations worked. He mistakes the ‘respondents’ in Turretin's disputations for ‘theological opponents’ within the Geneva Academy with whom Turretin disputed (pp. 122, 126), whereas, of course, these were simply Turretin's students responding to specific quaestiones under his supervision (‘sub præsidio D. Francisci Turretini’). The fact that several disputations targeted Roman Catholicism should have raised some flags for Cumming, since his understanding of ‘respondents’ would imply that the Geneva Academy accommodated openly Roman Catholic members, which seems implausible to say the least. Unfortunately this misunderstanding blights Cumming's discussion of Turretin's disputations.

Cumming cites the absence of Turretin's works in Gisbertus Voetius’ library catalogue as ‘most indicative’ of Turretin's initial ‘lack of audience’ (p. 137), but, given that Voetius died before Turretin's best-selling book was published (as Cumming acknowledges), this seems a counterproductive, rather than ‘most indicative’, way of estimating Turretin's early reception. Furthermore, despite warning against ‘making Turretin the sole and exhaustive influence upon later Reformed theologians’ (p. 148), Cumming concludes the book with the claim that ‘when a person says she is “Reformed”, implicitly she may really mean she is “Turretinian”’ (pp. 193–4). Cumming offers scant evidence to warrant such an outlandish claim. It would require a much longer review to adequately address methodological problems in Cumming's account of Turretin's reception.

The book contains various other errors or contradictions. For example, there is no ‘Christ Church College’ in Cambridge (p. 34); Cumming's own footnote contradicts his claim that ‘Melanchthon was firmly against the use of Aristotelianism in theology’ (p. 75); he claims that Turretin did ‘not share an appreciation for Aristotelian concepts’ but shortly afterwards states that ‘Calvin never utilized Aristotle to the degree that Turretin did’ (pp. 75–6); and he calls Beza ‘the first defender of the Reformed tradition’ (p. 77), which leaves one wondering what earlier reformers were doing. Furthermore, the controversy around Cocceius was not that he was a ‘covenant theologian’ (p. 66), which Turretin himself was, but that Cocceius had a particular understanding of covenant theology involving his disputed doctrine of abrogations and Christ's suretyship in relation to Old Testament believers, as Willem van Asselt explains in articles not cited by Cumming. Nor did Cocceius ‘reject the law’ (p. 66); he merely considered the Sabbath to have been abrogated in the New Testament. Theology of union (‘theologia unionis’) refers not to ‘God's revelation in Christ’ (p. 80), but to Christ's knowledge of God according to his human nature by virtue of the hypostatic union. Bénédict Pictet studied under Turretin up to (not ‘from’) the age of twenty (p. 151). Many more such examples could be given.

Cumming states (p. 77) that the three Genevan professors Beza, Diodati and Spanheim ‘emphatically argued that, beginning with Theodore Beza, Reformed theology took on a decidedly rigid, predestinarian theology, dominated by the primacy of reason’. He points to his first chapter for evidence of this, but none is found. Cumming adds that ‘unfortunately for the historian of early seventeenth-century theology, Diodati's work primarily deals with bible translation’ (p. 78), but fails to note that Diodati also produced biblical annotations, disputations and theses on various theological topics, which, one might think, is rather ‘fortunate’ for the historian. Limited space prevents commentary on Cumming's classification of Amyraldianism as a ‘heterodox ideology’ (p. 44), but suffice it to note that Richard Muller concluded otherwise.

The book is also riddled with erratic spelling: we are introduced to John Henry (i.e. Johann Heinrich) Heidegger (p. 1), who soon becomes ‘Johann Henry Heidegger’ (p. 3), before morphing into ‘John Henry Heideggar’ (pp. 53, 58, 89), and finally reverting to ‘Heidegger’ (p. 129). Girolamo Zanchi is styled ‘Zanchias’ (p. 16) and only later correctly Latinised as ‘Zanchius’ (p. 84). Joshua Rodda is consistently misspelt as ‘Roddan’. Moreover, in several cases the page numbers in the index are incorrect, making referencing difficult. The caption of Figure 8 reads ‘The title page to the 1696 Leiden and Utrecht edition of the Institutes’ (p. 139), despite displaying the 1688 Geneva edition.

Ultimately, despite some valuable elements, Cumming's book is plagued by an inordinate accumulation of flaws. That it will draw scholarly interest (purely because of its focus on Turretin) is unquestionable. What is questionable, however, is whether such interest will generate critical acclaim.