Ethan Shagan, an important voice in English Reformation history, here takes up an issue of definition that, he says, has caused considerable confusion in the scholarship on the English church and state. “Moderation,” a word much used by early modern divines, does not mean internal self-regulation as often thought by modern liberals. In early modern usage, it means that those unwilling to restrain their enthusiasm should be “moderated and restrained by power” (18). Thus, moderation has a hard edge and requires the force of government to restrain the erring. This licensing of governmental restraint is, he suggests, one of the foundations of developing royal power. It was this enforced toleration that made English government at once tolerant and persecuting. Historians, he says, need to realize this, since they have been duped for centuries into envisioning a Whiggish liberal moderation: “If moderation was a claim for power, then the very place where we have assumed early modern violence to end is where our search for that violence must instead begin” (329).

Shagan's study depends heavily on the theological and political writings from the time of Henry VIII to the late seventeenth century. He uses a series of case studies, arranged chronologically. Defining what moderation meant in early modern mouths, three chapters are given to Tudor debates over the “moderate church,” followed by chapters on “moderate rule,” in Stuart contexts of imperial expansion, local government, and the civil wars.

He begins with the Henrician “via media,” an invention that required that the church be “moderated” by the King. Happy to execute heretics of all stripes, sometimes in a sort of supremacist auto-da-fe, Henry sought to drive everyone to the royally defined moderate middle. There was nothing soft about his moderation. In Elizabeth's reign the great debate was not over adiaphora; it was over who defined the center and what should happen to those who strayed too far from the moderated center. The debates with the Presbyterians were much along the lines of whether individual conscience could be trusted, or if conformity had to be enforced for the peace of the state.

Puritans solved the problem of human appetites by positing the need of discipline. The state's demand for conformity without attention to discipline was the real problem for moderating Puritans. Of course, the source of discipline was as much disputed as the definition of discipline, but it was all about finding a defensible, moderate center.

By the end of Elizabeth's reign, the constitutional issues around moderation were well established, bounded by the middle way between deficient and excessive government, incivility and oppression. In the reigns that followed, the contradictory answers of the Elizabethans played critical roles in setting the parameters of Stuart thinking about religion and state.

Envisioning empire, the English justified it as the necessary spread of moderation, saving the world from the excesses of rulers such as the king of Spain. Of course, native peoples would benefit from civilizing English moderation as much as the ignorant Catholic Irish. This, he says, made “moderation the wellspring of imperial violence” (218).

The virtue of moderation gave rise to the political claims of the “middle sort,” who were seen to embody virtue and to represent a political class that asserted itself in the late seventeenth century in opposition to excesses of both aristocrats and religious enthusiasts. Middling people claimed a voice in defining moderation. In making this argument, Shagan lambasts those who see this group in purely economic and social terms, insisting that the description as used at the time was understood as a political identity.

Shagan takes up the “mean of liberty,” a discussion extremely pertinent to the Restoration when just how much toleration was possible was important to all political camps. The attack on dissenting clergy in 1662 ended toleration, but in the name of moderation, since it was clear that dissenters were a danger to the moderate, royal center. Logically, he situates the “toleration” of people like John Locke within a conversation about the intolerable. Moderation, he points out, still required bounds, and even the possibility of persecution, to be maintained. Atheists and Catholics need not apply.

This book is an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which early modern English thinkers constructed the limits of the state and of conscience. Its historiographic critique needs to be considered by anyone reading early modern history. Operating as it does on the high ground of theory, it provides arguments that need to be tested in the crucible of actual governance. I was, for instance, puzzled by the absence of political lessons learned by Elizabethan leaders about the dangers of enthusiasms and the effects of persecution in the 1550s. Those lessons, often voiced through Roman ideas about the collapse of the Roman republic, moderated the Elizabethan enthusiasm for imposed discipline. For many in Burghley's generation, moderation appeared to be a political necessity as well as an argument for repression. It will take another book, or several books, to untangle how these ideas were actually lived, but anyone attempting to untangle them will need to be aware of the effect of the ideal of “moderation.”