Shortly after John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, died in 1571, his friend, and sometime sparring partner, Lawrence Humphrey, wrote his biography. Published in 1573, Ioannis Iuellis […] Vita et Mors […]. (The life and death of John Jewel) presented Jewel as a model of godly episcopacy to be emulated. He was, Humphrey wrote, “the exemplar of a faithful minister,” and as leading figures in the Reformation at home and abroad agreed, Jewel's legacy should be celebrated as much as his life.

Although John Jewel was an influential figure in the English church, relatively little else has been written about him. Gary W. Jenkins's 2006 biography provided an important update of J. E. Booty's 1963 work, but otherwise John Jewel's significance in the post-Reformation church has been largely ignored. This collection of essays, which grew out of a conference in 2014 marking the 450th anniversary of the publication of Jewel's Apology for the Church of England, provides a remedy to that. The essays explore different elements of Jewel's life and legacy, from his pastoral work in Salisbury (co-editor Sarah Bastow) to the multiple ways in which his writing affected the polemical disputes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean church. Two of the co-editors, Angela Ranson and André A. Gazal, provide several chapters each, and their contributions illustrate the strength of this collection: while Ranson focuses on the historical Jewel, Gazal provides an insight into Jewel's theology.

An excellent introduction by Lucy Wooding and a biography by Ranson address the complexities of John Jewel's life and career. At Henrician Oxford with Thomas Harding—his future Catholic opponent—Jewel later acted as an amanuensis for Peter Martyr in Edwardian Oxford. Jewel absorbed Martyr's brand of Protestantism, and this connection was strengthened during Jewel's subsequent exile under Mary I. Jewel's importance, however, stems from the Challenge Sermon that he preached after returning to England in 1559. Initially delivered at Paul's Cross, this famous sermon challenged Catholics to prove the antiquity of their faith. It was, as Lucy Wooding writes, produced at “a crucial psychological moment” of Elizabeth's reign, and the ramifications of this sermon and Jewel's written polemics helped to shape the character of the Church of England over the next fifty years (5).

The volume explores the importance of the Challenge Sermon and Jewel's Apology in carving out a unique identity for the English church. Although Jewel's European connections are touched on, how far his work situated the Elizabethan church in European Calvinism is not really explored in any detail. In part this reflects the authors’ focus on English texts (the Vita et Mors, for example, is not examined), but this may also reflect a contemporary sense that Jewel's work was not international enough. Aislinn Muller raises this issue in her discussion of Jewel's response to the papal bull of 1570, reminding us that Heinrich Bullinger—not Jewel—was tasked with defending Elizabeth to an international audience (146).

Otherwise, this is a strong collection whose wide variety of chapters illustrates the far-reaching influence of Jewel in the English church. Jewel's ministry is explored in a couple of essays that situate his writings in his pastoral life. Torrance Kirby provides a thoroughly engaging account of the Challenge Sermon and its afterlives, while Gazal demonstrates that Jewel's polemic writing was shaped by his homiletic thought and practice. Ian Atherton's chapter on Jewel and cathedrals is also stimulating, asking how men like Jewel recast cathedrals in the Protestant church. The answer, as Atherton shows, was to promote cathedrals as places of hospitality, learning, and preaching, and Jewel's efforts at Salisbury were copied throughout England, most notably at Ripon Cathedral.

Jewel's legacy is most apparent in the polemics and apologies produced in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. He was critical in establishing the parameters of Protestant-Catholic debate, and several authors (including Gazal, Ranson, Muller, Paul Hartog, and Joshua Rodda) explore ways in which Jewel's work fed into polemical disputes. In part, this was because his use of church history and of patristic texts provided a historical context for the Church of England, which was developed in different ways by John Foxe and Richard Hooker and which prompted Catholics like Robert Persons to produce their own histories of the English church.

Jewel's legacy sometimes seemed ambiguous, and he was claimed by different elements in the English church, including Richard Hooker, moderate Puritans, and Presbyterians. This shows Jewel's power as a symbol of English Christianity. Several of the authors here trace his influence in different debates, of which most interesting were Jacobean disputes about the Oath of Allegiance (Ranson), Jewel's influence on Richard Hooker's thought (essays by W. Bradford Littlejohn and Paul Dominiak) and the response to the excommunication of Elizabeth I (Muller). Andrew Atherstone also provides a fascinating insight into Jewel's influence in the twentieth-century Church of England with his account of the Bishop Jewel Society at Oxford University.

One of the most engaging essays in this collection examines the role played by Anne Bacon in translating Jewel's most influential work, the Apology. Alice Ferron explores Bacon's “authorial voice” in the Apology, raising some interesting questions about female authorship and unauthorized publication. As such, she situates Jewel in his wider social context, demonstrating the many ways in which Jewel's work was adapted, mediated, and adopted by others. This, of course, was behind the strength of John Jewel's legacy, and it explains why more studies like this collection of essays would be most welcome and invaluable for an understanding of the Elizabethan and Jacobean church.