Scandal and Religious Identity, based in large part on recently discovered sources, is ingenious, fascinating, far-ranging, and persuasive. Lake and Stephens describe their project as an effort “to bring to wider notice the internalized religious identities of the godly and their enemies in Northamptonshire on the eve of the Civil War” (355). Their book is a crucially important and valuable contribution to early Stuart religious, political, and social history that has many implications for the nation as a whole. They begin with a vivid account of a sensational, shocking trial in Northampton which resulted in the hanging on July 14, 1637 of John Barker, the puritan vicar of Pytchley, Beatrice (his wife's niece), and Ursula (his maidservant). Pytchley is a few miles southwest of Kettering and a similar distance northeast of Northampton. The assize court concluded that Barker had seduced Beatrice, and when she gave birth to his child, she and Ursula murdered the infant. Thus, the infanticide sought to cover up his illicit liaison with Beatrice. Barker denied involvement in the murder but admitted his adultery on the scaffold in the gripping speech he made before several thousand people alongside the two women who also spoke before the sentences were carried out.

The book is in two parts, and the first is based on “public” sources about which the authors provide close readings of the “dying words” of the three felons from a widely circulated separate containing a shorthand writer's record of their statements. Lake and Stephens also draw upon the sermons of Robert Bolton and Joseph Bentham, puritan leaders of the combination lecture at Kettering. Barker had himself been a member of this group. Several of them, including Thomas Ball and Daniel Cawdrey, attended him during and after the trial. In addition, the authors analyze The Northamptonshire High-Constable, a dialogue between “Markwell,” a parish priest, and his lay ally, constable “Shrewdpate.” It was almost certainly written by a Laudian curate named Peter Hausted. Neither Barker's speech nor the dialogue appeared in print, although the latter was composed with printing in mind. Both circulated in manuscript and present starkly opposed interpretations of the Barker scandal. Since the facts of the case were well-known in the region, neither Barker nor Hausted had the luxury of playing fast and loose with them. Rather, the puritan scaffold sermon and the anti-puritan dialogue stipulated nearly all the facts and concentrated their efforts on polemical spin. From the Laudian perspective, Barker's fall proved that puritan preachers, heavily dependent on financial and political support from factious members of the local gentry, were greedy hypocrites and schismatics determined to overthrow the established church and the entire social order. They made an idol of preaching by placing it above prayer and thanksgiving, and their predestinarian soteriology led to antinomian conclusions that resulted in notorious sins (such as those of Barker and Beatrice). The puritans, by contrast, presented Barker's story as one of the necessity of sincere repentance and the certainty of God's mercy for his chosen saints. Like Lot and David, Barker's sins were heinous indeed, but on the scaffold, after having wrestled mightily since the trial against the devil with the help of his spiritual guides, Barker confessed his guilt wholeheartedly, used his plight to edify others about “the path to true belief and salvation” (23), regained his belief in God's forgiveness of himself, and went to his bodily death convinced of his place in heaven. These frequently polemical public sources reveal the presence of two parties claiming to embody the essence of Protestantism in England; the puritans and Laudians saw themselves as “the true practitioners of mere Christianity, good neighborhood and good fellowship” (173) and their opponents as enemies of the same.

The second part of the book is built on three “private” sources from Northamptonshire. Two are by puritans—Robert Woodford's diary (1637–1641) and Elizabeth Isham's spiritual autobiography (her “Book of Remembrance,” written circa 1639). Woodford was a busy attorney struggling to keep his family from being overwhelmed by debt and the illnesses of his wife and children. Isham was a gentlewoman and spinster who spent most of her time in the private and intensely female setting of her family home, Lamport Hall. Both assiduously pursued assurance of salvation and anxiously interpreted God's providential interventions in their concerns. Neither showed any interest in sectarian departure from the national church. The third source is the vigorously anti-puritan correspondence of Robert Sibthorpe, a “Laudian attack dog” who held the benefices of Brackley and Burton Latimer (175). Sibthorpe's correspondence with Sir John Lambe, the Laudian dean of the Court of Arches, shows that he agreed fully with the ideology Peter Hausted upheld in The Northamptonshire High-Constable. Sibthorpe struggled to bring the authority of the central government into action against the local puritans, both clerical and lay. For him the puritans were not only schismatic but also seditious due to their resistance to the royal ship-money levy. This assertion exemplifies the way that political and religious agendas became tightly intertwined and impacted social relations in Northamptonshire. Lake and Stephens interrogate these texts in order to discover “the extent to which at least some individuals really did walk the walk as well as talk the highly polarized and symmetrically inversionary polemical talk” of part one (176). Throughout, the authors make a powerful case against the arguments of Alec Ryrie, Peter White, Ian Green, and others who endeavor “to collapse puritanism into some sort of evangelical Protestant mainstream” or “to collapse Laudianism into a structurally similar conformist or Anglican via media” (359). They convincingly demonstrate that “the history of English Protestantism” in this period was “a dialogic, even dialectical process of challenge and response” rather than “a largely changeless continuum of consensual Protestantism” (375).