In 1660 Charles ii intended the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion ‘to bury all seeds of future discords and remembrance of the former as well in his own breast as in the breasts of his subjects'. Enforced amnesia is of course a paradox (to tell somebody not to remember something is to remind them of it), and bitter memories of the mid-seventeenth century could not be suppressed. It is the achievement of Matthew Neufeld, in this his first book, to show how far the public memory of the civil wars in the Restoration was shaped in relation to the present. He emphasises the ways in which narratives concerning the causes, course and outcomes of the civil wars were used to legitimate the exclusive political and religious settlements of the Restoration, and, in particular, the proscription of what he calls the ‘puritan impulse’. The argument is made through three key chronological chapters on historical writing from c. 1660 to 1673, 1680 to 1685 and 1696 to 1714, and three chapters which make at times innovatory use of different kinds of source material (the petitions of injured servicemen and memoirs of veterans; the collections of Anglican sufferings made by John Walker; and sermons preached on 29 May). Neufeld's case is strongly supported, and the reader is forcefully reminded of how interpretations of the role of Puritanism in the 1640s and 1650s were used to denigrate Restoration nonconformists and collapse distinctions between them. Thus John Nalson sought to remove ‘the Fig-leaves which these guilty sinners have so Artificially patched together’ and to demonstrate that it ‘was the very real Presbyterians, Independents, and other Sectaries, their Associates, and no other, who were actually guilty of the whole Scene of this horrible Murder of the King’ (pp. 107–8). Neufeld does at a number of points discuss the writings of those who did not accept this interpretation. The different approaches taken by Thomas Fairfax, John Rushworth and John Toland are among those examined. However, as Neufeld himself recognises, there is more to be said about ‘how the dominant narratives of puritan culpability and the providence of 1660 were contested in sub-cultures of public and semi-public remembering’ (pp. 247–8). In the satire A dialogue between the two horses, for example, Charles i is represented as a ‘priest-ridden King turn'd desperate fighter / For the surplice, lawn sleeves, the cross, and the mitre, / Till at last on a scaffold he was left in the lurch / By knaves that cri'd up themselves for the Church’. Such words are a reminder that attempts to prescribe what should be remembered do not equate with what was remembered, and how startlingly different explanations of what had happened in the civil wars could be circulated in manuscript or muttered between friends in coffee houses and taverns. Listening further for those voices will allow us to understand why, for all of the power of the tory interpretation of the civil wars, the story of the late seventeenth century remains one of conflict.