This is a splendid first book. Engaging, combative and fascinating in its detailed exposition of the theological thought of churchmen such as John Pearson, Robert South, Thomas Barlow, Thomas Tully, William Beveridge, John Edwards and their antagonists, this study of the Reformed tradition (and Hampton rightly insists on ‘Reformed’ rather than ‘Calvinist’) is a most welcome addition to the literature. Sloppy formulations or generalisations by earlier historians – including this reviewer – provide Hampton with the opportunity to prise open the question of what it meant to be aligned to the diverse and evolving Reformed tradition in the post-Restoration Church of England. He writes of ‘key theological motifs’ in soteriology, Christology and the doctrine of God, which identify these writers ‘as contributors to a generously understood Reformed tradition’ as distinct from ‘an undifferentiated Anglicanism’ (p. 9). He points out that Reformed theology was no bar to High Church liturgical tastes or a commitment to the apostolic succession of the episcopate. The meat of the book is contained in chapters on solifidianism, the Trinity and the doctrine of God. These are judicious, lucid and well-informed essays in historical theology. In each case Hampton pays careful attention to the writers and writings that provoked a Reformed riposte. Thus in the case of justification by faith alone, one chapter is given over to a long account of George Bull's successful assault on the doctrine and another is then devoted to Tully and Barlow's ‘Reformed rejoinder’. William Sherlock's vindication of the Trinity is unpacked at length by Hampton so as to make sense of the Reformed replies by South, Wallis and Beveridge. A chapter on Samuel Clarke and the Arian controversy veers off into a discussion of the Remonstrant roots of subordinationism and only returns to the Reformed churchmen in a roundabout fashion. The final pair of chapters tackles the doctrine of God. Hampton expends many pages on Crellius, Vorstius, Episcopius and other forerunners of what he calls the avant-garde doctrine of God espoused by Tillotson, Whitby and Clarke. He then reconstructs the broadly Thomist doctrine that was advanced by a number of Reformed thinkers in the Church of England: he is struck by the willingness of Pearson, Barlow, Hopkins and others of their ilk to cite post-Tridentine Roman Catholic authorities rather than Reformed European theologians. Less is said about the glaring absence in these debates of many of the key motifs (election, sanctification, perseverance and so forth) of the Synod of Dort or the Westminster Assembly. These chapters are all more intriguing and perhaps more convincing than the attempt in the opening chapter and the conclusion to extrapolate a broader historical lesson about the seventeenth-century Church from these sophisticated theological exchanges. To show that intellectuals were deploying parts of their theological inheritance to develop new variants of the Reformed tradition is important, but it is not quite the same as showing that they were the tip of an iceberg (pp. 37, 127) and it is not, of course, the same as demonstrating that Reformed theology sustained a widespread style of lay piety as it had before 1640. Now Hampton makes no claims about popular religion, but he occasionally presses some historical evidence rather too hard to support his thesis of the strength and distinctiveness of a Reformed clerical tradition: patronage in the murky world of the Restoration needs more careful handling than he allows; he may be a little too quick to see Josiah Woodward or Peter Newcome as theologians; and the revisions to later editions of John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes tell a tale of changing theological emphasis. While Hampton's acknowledgement that academic theology was giving way to new genres of writing could be reinforced by Ian Green's work, his virtual silence on patristics is more than compensated for by Jean-Louis Quantin's recent magisterial study. Hampton has provided us with a rich account of an important series of arguments, some familiar, others less so, and has cast them in a new and sympathetic light. Not only does he show that we can legitimately identify a Reformed theological tradition within the post-1662 Church of England, he also teaches us how to take a generous and subtle view of that tradition.