Throughout the 1630s the controversial churchman John Cosin lived down the remark, allegedly made at an ecclesiastical dinner, that ‘King Charles is not supreme head of the Church of England next under Christ, nor hath he any more power of excommunication than my man that rubs my horse heels.’ This regrettable statement cut to the core of ecclesiological concern in post-Reformation England, but its author gets no mention in A confusion of tongues. Charles Prior provides a closely argued and densely documented history of ecclesiological politics in the decades preceding England's wars of religion. His scope is British, encompassing the Kirk and covenants of Scotland as well as episcopacy and its critics in England. His sources are mostly printed, primarily writings on the constitutional history and legal claims of authority of the Church. The principal protagonists include the bishops Richard Bancroft, Joseph Hall, William Laud and John Williams, the lay episcopalian Thomas Aston, and the Puritan-Presbyterian-Independent agitators Alexander Leighton, Henry Burton, William Prynne and Henry Parker. Though the meaning and direction of the Reformation was contested from local churchyards to the halls of Westminster, the textual controversies treated here were conducted mostly in libraries. The jacket displays a splendidly armed Bishop Williams, but the combat is intellectual, not martial (despite Oxford University Press marketing it as military history). Attending throughout to questions of governance, legitimacy, sovereignty and authority, and setting aside soteriology and the stirs of parish dissension, Prior succeeds in his narrowly focused pursuit of ecclesiological debate among religious polemicists and constitutional theorists during the reign of Charles i. He shows that such matters as regal and religious sovereignty, the relationship of secular and religious courts, and the relationship of crown, Church and kingdom were complex, unresolved, and perhaps worth fighting for.