The status of language has become a key issue for English literature scholars working on the English Reformation. Brian Cummings's The literary culture of the Reformation: grace and grammar argued that, ‘the Reformation is as much about literary truth as it is about literal truth’ (p. 5). James Simpson's Burning to read focuses upon what he argues was the literalism of Reformation textual culture. The volume opens by discussing sixteenth-century debates over the translation and interpretation of Scripture. It then moves to focus in particular upon William Tyndale whom Simpson deploys as a representative of evangelical. Burning to read then moves on to examine the historiography of writers like John Foxe before concluding with a discussion of the work of Thomas More. Simpson ends by arguing that ‘Tyndale and More were both victims of a new, immensely demanding, and punishing textual culture marked by literalist impersonality’ (p. 282). Burning to read is a sophisticated, and in places passionately argued, work. Simpson is clearly appalled by what he sees as the ‘textual hatred’ at the heart of evangelical textual culture. Indeed there is a sense that the target of this volume is as much current religious fundamentalism as the evangelicalism of men like Tyndale. There is, however, a historiographic problem with Simpson's work. Burning to read consistently argues that evangelical approaches to textual interpretation emerged in the sixteenth century and in the process replaced other more pluralist or ‘liberal’ hermeneutic models. Simpson's use of the term evangelical is a key aspect of this argument since it works, as indeed it is designed to, to create the illusion that men like Erasmus and Tyndale were not Catholics working within recognisably medieval, if not mainstream, traditions of textual interpretation. Simpson, however, has himself argued in his masterly study Reform and cultural revolution (Oxford 2002), that the kind of hermeneutic models that he argues in Burning to read produced a literary culture marked by a violent all-encompassing literalism already existed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The ‘textual hatred’ that Simpson's careful diagnosis finds in the work of writers like Tyndale has its roots in the ‘pluralist’ soil of medieval Catholicism, and this raises a question over one of Burning to read's central arguments. This is a fascinating study and will undoubtedly act as a provocation to future work on early sixteenth-century models of textual interpretation. It is a witty, engaging and powerful book that will probably bring pleasure and annoyance to its readers in equal measure.