In a satirical pamphlet entitled, A Dialogue between the Pope and the Devil, about Owen and Baxter, published in London in 1681, the Pope's inquisitorial outburst directed at John Owen and Richard Baxter—the two towering figures in English Puritanism in the mid- to late seventeenth century—starts this way: “Shall we allow these Scribbling Fellows to write for ever? They feed the Press as Baxter feeds his Wolf, and it like their Desires, is as large as Hell; and, like the Horse-Leach, it sucks, and is never satisfied: They have a kind of Ambitious Itch to scribble!” Regardless of what the Pope or the Devil putatively dialogued about Owen and Baxter, it is clear that their reputation, as well as writings, were deemed in certain quarters as controversial, if not seditious. Since their death, much writing has been done to offer hagiographical portraitures, critical assessments of their theological, political, ecclesiastical careers and influence. Since 2016 marked the quatercentenary of the birth of Owen, there have been a steady bevy of monographs and edited volumes devoted to him.

Crawford Gribben's John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat follows the recent trend, while simultaneously departing from a good number of them in some substantial fashion: Gribben's shows more of the man and the quotidian reality of being John Owen, and thus offers a far more historicized and contextualized narrative of Owen's life. Much of the recent scholarship on Owen has focused on his theology—and that rightly so, since Owen was much more like Calvin in that he was not prone to autobiographical reflections peppered throughout his writings in the same way that Luther and Baxter might have been. Gribben has done the yeoman's work of looking at a number of archival materials, manuscripts that were both directly attributed to Owen as well as those whose perspectives help shed light on the times of Owen's indefatigable activity as a politician, pastor, University administrator, and one whose experiences of defeat at various of stages of life are eminently worth studying for their own sake, not to mention as reflective and refractive lens through which much of the seventeenth-century politics of English Protestantism can be better accessed and seen.

Offering a scintillating account of Owen's activities in nine chapters, often chockfull of vignettes that had hitherto eluded the gazes of other scholars, Gribben shows Owen the “Apprentice Puritan” (chap. 1); “Emerging Theologian” (chap. 2); “Frustrated Pastor” (chap. 3); “Army Preacher” (chap. 4); “Oxford Reformer” (chap. 5); “Cromwellian Courtier” (chap. 6); “Defeated Revolutionary” (chap. 7); “Restoration Politique” (chap. 8); and “Nonconformist Divine” (chap. 9). What is particularly noteworthy about Gribben's work is the painstaking detail he offers in his efforts to situate Owen's writings in the turbulent context of mid- to late seventeenth-century English controversies in politics and religion, thus the end result resembles what Andrew Marvell had said (as Gribben quotes him): “this J.O. . . . had a Head, and a Mouth with a Tongue and Teeth in it, and Hands with Fingers and Nails upon them,” rather than some etherealized version of his high Calvinistic theology (11).

Gribben shows the immediate historical backdrops and contexts that might help explain the changes in his theological views, as well his maneuverings while a “Cromwellian Courtier,” some of which might rankle the sensibilities of those for whom Owen represents the high-mark of English Calvinism, although I am not convinced that getting a portraiture from Gribben will by necessity change the theological perspectives of Owen that we have come to know. In this regard, Gribben's book is quite similar—and is, as Gribben admits as much, indebted—to Tim Cooper's John Owen, Richard Baxter, and the Formation of Nonconformity (Ashgate, 2012). Thus the picture of Owen is far more “complex, subtle, and this-worldly” thus “ultimately more compelling” (17).

As the title indicates, the undergirding theme of Gribben's portrayal of Owen is “experiences of defeat.” In that regard, this is influenced by Christopher Hill's tour de force book, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (Faber, 1984), yet unlike Hill, Gribben's focus is on Owen, whose perspectives on matters theo-political had an interesting array of overlap with John Milton. In a subtle and substantial way, Gribben shows that even in the zenith of Owen's career, shadows of defeat were never too far off the horizon. While charting Owen's meteoric—and carefully calibrated and planned by Owen himself—rise from a country parson to the darling of the Cromwellian regime, Gribben offers sentences that are as pithy as are poignant in showing the grand plans of Owen, as he attempted great things for his God: “Owen's grand if impolitic scheme reflected the art of the impossible” (154); or, regarding the waning of Owen's influence with Oliver Cromwell, “Oliver Cromwell was dying, and Owen was slipping back into the experience of defeat” (179).

If one is looking for a good book on Owen's theology, this book is bound to disappoint, yet to be fair to Gribben, such was never his authorial intent. Yet if one is looking for a book on Owen's career, simultaneously troubled and triumphant, marked by moments of glory as well as agony, and how a number of texts—especially his Parliamentary sermons—came to be published and what their immediate historical and intellectual contexts were, then it is hard to do better than Gribben's account. It might not be systematic, but hardly anyone lives one's life in a systematized fashion: certainly not the Calvin of England whose rise and fall could not have been charted by the most assiduous interpreters of divine providence.