The central thesis of this book is that we currently possess an incomplete picture of Spinoza's contribution to hermeneutics and biblical scholarship because of the inadequate attention paid by historians to the emergence of historical-critical investigations of the Bible by heterodox Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Frampton's argument, that historical criticism ‘should be regarded as a product of post-Reformation religious controversies over the authority of the Bible’, and ‘was not solely the invention of modern rationalism of the early Enlightenment’ (p. 235) is an important one that has been largely drowned out by the overwhelming historiographical preoccupation with the Radical Enlightenment. Unfortunately, Frampton never makes this case. Following the introduction, in chapter ii Frampton identifies a key stress within sixteenth-century Protestant biblical exegesis, the locus of religious authority. For the early Reformers, the Bible functioned not only as the primary source of authority for individual consciences, but also served as ‘the arbitrator and mediator of its own meaning by presenting itself in a manner plain to human understanding’ (pp. 29–30). Yet if Scripture interpreted itself, why could Protestants not agree on its meaning? Some of Frampton's terminology here is rather vague – I am not sure exactly what ‘quasi religio-rational opinions’ (p. 41) are. Chapter iii discusses the theological-political climate of the Netherlands, and will be familiar material to anyone who has read Geoffrey Parker, Jonathan Israel and Andrew Fix. In chapter iv Frampton re-examines La Vie de Monsieur Benoit de Spinosa, arguing for a greater appreciation of the text's literary and rhetorical qualities. In chapter v Frampton revisits Spinoza's family background and education, and suggests that his excommunication had less to do with heretical opinions and more to do with irritating Amsterdam's Jewish leaders by involving the city authorities in absolving him of his business debts. Then Frampton seeks to locate Spinoza outside the Sephardic community in heterodox Christian company, ‘as a freethinker among freethinkers’, by talking us through prominent Collegiants one by one. Finally, in chapter vii, Frampton attempts a re-evaluation of the context for the rise of historical criticism. A superficial outline of the importance of the seventeenth century in the history of biblical scholarship is followed by an equally cursory discussion of nature and Scripture as the two books of God, before Frampton returns to the heterodox context with a discussion of Isaac La Peyrère's Prae-Adamitae and Samuel Fisher's Rusticus ad academicos. Discussion here includes the Old Testament canon and the role of Ezra, though Frampton seems unaware of Noel Malcolm's perceptive analysis of this aspect of biblical criticism with regard to the work of Hobbes, La Peyrère and Spinoza. Popkin's notion that Spinoza and Fisher may have been acquainted – an hypothesis that has always rested more on Popkin's authority than any inherent plausibility – is rolled out once again. Regrettably, there is no engagement with any of the orthodox post-Reformation biblical criticism being practised by a host of scholars across western Europe, an opportunity missed in a frequently engaging work that fails to deliver all that it might.