This long volume is the product of papers given at a conference in 2011 and the preface acknowledges that the theme, for Sheridan Gilley's presidency of the Ecclesiastical History Society, is very broad. The introduction suggests that ‘there is a vast range of historical themes and problems which can be explored from literary material’ (p. xix): this criterion, to explore historical themes and problems, is not explicitly a literary one. Nevertheless the editors of the volume politely include essays by literary scholars. For example, Thomas Corns, who really does know everything about Milton, offers a chapter called ‘Milton's churches’ – this is not a literary essay but very welcome and very different from the huge Milton biography that Corns co-wrote, which is organised chronologically, although it clearly draws on the knowledge that went into compiling it. This chapter explores what we know of Milton's church contacts (of which, perhaps surprisingly, a Baptist was one) as well as the theological content of some of the most famous pamphlets. Likewise Andrew Sanders's chapter on ‘Christian Dickens’ is very useful for literary scholars, charting the religious reaction to and content of the novels and using other evidence such as letters. There appears to be a plenary address for each period of literature, and Crawford Gribben contributes one for the modern period, on really recent writing: ‘Piety and polemic in Evangelical prophecy fiction, 1995–2000'. This chapter investigates the substantial American publishing phenomenon of popular novels which owe their existence to a certain eschatological belief, in this case the Rapture associated in some dispensational theologies with the second coming of Christ. It questions the individualism expressed in such stories and the practice of ‘encoding evangelical spirituality in a fast-moving thriller’ (p. 489). This enquiry is a long way from a historicist analysis of a great author or even the exploration of historical themes in literature: perhaps this is a cultural analysis of the way in which literary structures in themselves encode or reflect a certain theology. One might conclude that to explore the theological implications of a choice of literary strategies is at the heart of any consideration of ‘the Church and literature’.

What one must certainly conclude is that the topic of this volume encompasses many types of enquiry. Some of the authors are doing what the introduction describes as the use of literature to the historian: exploring historical themes from literary material. Mark Smith, in ‘The pastor chief and other stories: Waldensian historical fiction in the nineteenth century’, explores a popular subgenre of the nineteenth-century novel which, as Smith represents it, offered less of an accurate representation of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century persecution which was part of Protestant history, than a bid ‘to win the developing Victorian novel-reading public to the cause of Waldensian relief’ (p. 307). Other chapters take the opportunity to publicise the work of a novelist hardly read nowadays, such as Judith Maltby's treatment of Rose Macaulay entitled, in Macaulay's words, ‘Oh dear, if only the Reformation had happened differently’. Maltby concludes that this Anglican intellectual's prose was ‘profoundly sacramental’, seeing theological truth as ‘poetic’. Benjamin L. Fischer, in ‘A novel resistance: mission narrative as the anti-novel in the Evangelical assault on British culture’, offers a ‘godly’ alternative to the novel in the hugely popular mission narratives of the nineteenth century, some of them by famous missionaries like David Livingstone and Hudson Taylor. The emphasis is on faraway locations and exciting events, which in the mission narratives were read as factually true and seen as less of a frivolous distraction than the novel.

At its most fundamental, this title encompasses classical works of Christian literature which are re-examined, or perhaps offered to those who have not read them, such as W. B. Patterson's exposition of that familiar but possibly not well read work of 1607, William Perkins's The arte of prophesying. He reminds us that ‘plainness’ and ‘clarity’ were not the invention of the scientific founders of the Royal Society later in the seventeenth century, as many literary historians seem to think. Eamon Duffy, in the chapter based on his early modern plenary, looks at the literary merit of Thomas More's The confutation of Tyndale's answer (1533): a target of this article is the ‘cod psychology’ that surrounds the reading of the character of Thomas More. In contrast Duffy offers a reading of The confutation in its literary context, explaining what has been seen as the author's obsession with sexuality in terms of the rhetorical conventions of the sixteenth-century form. This is an interesting study of how biography is often inferred from writing, and it would be at home in a literary as well as a historical volume. It is regrettable that the editing of this paper is inconsistent. In footnotes, Duffy seems to like the word ‘ibid’ – so much so that it is not always clear exactly to what work he is referring, despite the fact that in his first footnote he has carefully specified which editions he is using. Most confusing of all, there is sometimes no page number specified after the use of ‘ibid’. At the other extreme Patterson provides the full title of the volume being referred to, at each citation, even when it is the text under consideration and thus mentioned many times.

The eclecticism of the book is addressed in the flyleaf: ‘the understanding of literature invoked here is a catholic one, reflecting the universality of Christianity itself’. It is difficult to know exactly what this sentence means: perhaps it refers to the fact that some of the works covered are not canonical. It certainly makes little sense theologically or in literary critical terms. Often one feels that some of the academics concerned are simply taking the opportunity to write about their favourite if obscure author. And why not? To read the work of intelligent minds thinking about literature is very pleasurable and I am left wishing that I had been at this conference.