This is an important book with a significant thesis to present. It argues that if we wish to trace the origins of the radical sectarianism of mid-seventeenth-century England—the explosive appearance of Baptists, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, and others—we need to explore the social and thought world of pre–Civil War antinomians (those who believed that true Christians were in some sense liberated from the Moral Law) and to understand the “antinomian controversy” that convulsed English puritanism in the 1620s and early 1630s. Some of this territory has been sketched before, most notably by David Como's former supervisor Peter Lake, in a study of the travails of the London familist-cum-antinomian, John Etherington. But where Lake employed the technique of the miniaturist, Como paints on an extremely broad canvas. His starting point is a sharply articulated dissatisfaction with the prevailing historiography of the topic, and in particular with the interpretations of two virtuosos of puritan studies, Christopher Hill and Patrick Collinson. Hill identified the source of later radicalism in a marginalized tradition of plebian heresy, with sixteenth-century roots among Lollards and Anabaptists. Collinson meanwhile had convinced the scholarly world of the fundamentally conservative, hierarchical, and nonsubversive nature of early Stuart Puritanism, thereby (argues Como) leaving “the roiling, sectarian enthusiasms of the 1640s mysterious and virtually unintelligible” (20). Como, by contrast, insists throughout on the close relationship between “mainstream” puritanism and its antinomian fringe, drawing on the classical historian J. Gager's insight that in religious culture, the closer the parties are to each other, the greater the potential for conflict. He demonstrates that the social composition of the “antinomian underground” did not significantly differ from that of the wider godly community and that, with a few exceptions, its leading spokesmen were university-trained divines, not rude mechanicals. Central to his argument is the contention that “godly” puritanism was always susceptible to an internally generated antinomian or antilegal critique, the result of a deep structural instability within puritan thought itself. On the one hand, puritans invariably exalted the concept of free grace; on the other, they evinced an intense concern with the regulation of moral conduct, a consequence of their preoccupation with issues of sanctification and assurance.

The book opens with a broad survey of the “sinews” of the antinomian underground, portrayed as a small and densely interwoven subculture, lacking a single founder or point of origin. The diversity of antinomian thought is to be a recurrent theme, and the opening chapter helpfully introduces a distinction between “imputative” antinomians, who believed that while true Christians (thanks to Christ's sacrifice) appeared before God as sinless, they remained sinners in this life, and “perfectionist” antinomians, for whom the faithful could in various senses be “made” divine. It goes on to survey “London's antinomian controversy,” a series of acrimonious disputes with puritan opponents, beginning in 1625 and largely suppressed by 1633, conducted though a series of semivisible channels: rumor, sermons, and informal conference. These are then placed in a broader intellectual context of Christian thinking about law and grace, going back to the gospels and Pauline epistles themselves. The later chapters present a series of case studies, illustrating different strands and influences. We learn about the itinerant evangelist John Traske (originally an ultralegal Judaizer); the imputative antinomian, John Eaton; and the perfectionist John Everarde, influenced by late medieval sources such as Tauler and the Theologia Germanica, who came to the startling insight that Christ's every action needed to be replayed in the soul of the believer and that “Heaven” was simply an allegory for God's permeation of creation. Preventing this from being an overwhelmingly metropolitan account is the remarkable story of the ideas emanating from Grindleton, a parish on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, whose curate Roger Brearely developed a distinctive, and elusive, form of quasi-familist perfectionism. Here, Como is able to document direct links between old Grindletonians and the first generation of Quakers, whom he regards as ideological heirs to the earlier movement. Such connections are the heart of the case Como is seeking to make, yet they are frustratingly elusive. The contention that sustained polemical engagement with godly opponents drove antilegalists further and further from mainstream puritan piety does, however, receive support from an analysis of two anonymous tracts of the early 1620s, which exhibit an “ultra-Antinomianism” prefiguring the later style of Seekers and Ranters. There is another intriguing connection: in an epilogue John Winthrop Junior is shown to have sought out the company of John Everarde in London in 1635, shortly before the Massachusetts Bay Colony was to be wracked by its own Antinomian Controversy.

Much of this subculture of puritan “heresy” has remained invisible before because its controversial and pastoral writings are to be found, not in print, but scattered through manuscript collections and the various mechanisms of “scribal publication.” Como has performed an extraordinary feat in establishing the workings of these networks, and in suggesting so many intellectual and personal connections among people who had an interest in keeping their heads below the parapet. (Their puritan opponents did not always shout either, sensitive to the fact that Laudians were waiting to tar them with the same brush.) The detail provided is exhaustive, and just occasionally exhausting, and the layered structure of the book does produce some elements of circularity and repetition. Arguably, some of the book's wider reappraisal of the nature of puritanism is not as original as it thinks it is. The notion (172) that “puritanism was not a single monolithic entity bearing a unitary ideology” has seemed uncontentious for some years now, and the “Collinsonian” model has been undergoing revision from a number of recent scholars, prominent among them Collinson himself. Nonetheless, this is undoubtedly a major achievement. It supplies both a rigorous intellectual history and a sensitive social history: it is unlikely to be challenged as the standard account of early English antinomianism for many years to come.