This is a deeply learned collection of twelve essays that sets out to place English biblical scholarship from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries within the European tradition of individuals such as Joseph Scaliger and Jean Morin. Many of the names are familiar and weave themselves in and out of essays – Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Robert Hooke, Baruch Spinoza and Isaac Newton – but on occasion astonishingly new aspects of their intellectual interests are revealed. ‘There are’, as John Morrill puts it in his ‘Afterword’, ‘many startling images conjured up in this book’, even if the rather short and idiosyncratic index does not necessarily lead the reader to them. (Scott Mandelbrote, for example, gives us a tantalising view of Richard Bentley abandoning the Cotton Genesis to the flames at Ashburnham House in 1731 in order to save the Codex Alexandrinus, but Bentley's name does not appear in the index.) Much of the material debated may seem whimsical or even outlandish to us – a baboon not a serpent tempting Eve, ‘Very Sportiue’ (William Poole's chapter); Og, the last of the pre-Flood giants astride the Ark (Ariel Hessayon); Jephthah's daughter as an exemplum of the social consequences of disobedience to authority (Nicholas Cranfield); divine inspiration among radical sects as an excess of melancholy humour (Sarah Hutton); David's character as inferior to that of Charles ii (Alex Barber); prophecy as a foreign language whose rules can be learned like those of any other (Sarah Hutton) – but the exegetes took it seriously. Several themes run through the essays: continuing fear of enthusiasm at either end of the religious spectrum; debates over the Trinity and the Johannine comma; textual criticism and the status of different biblical books, Erasmus and Lorenzo Valla hovering in the background (the latter unindexed). In every case the Bible was the key witness, but first it had to be determined what actually constituted the Bible, how reliable the translation, when individual books entered the canon, what was the relationship between the Gospels and the Epistles. How, in other words, does one deal with a potential destabilisation of the text? The theologian Richard Simon argued that because there had never had been original copies of the New Testament authenticity depended on tradition as transmitted by the Roman Catholic Church (Rob Iliffe). Newton, as textual scholar, held that the insertion of the Johannine comma was part of a nefarious scheme by the papists. (Do we see the potential for a sequel to The Da Vinci code here?) For Locke even layout mattered and he pointed out the risks of reading Scripture, as we all do, ‘crumbled into verses’ (Justin Champion). At times one can be amused by what is described, such as Thomas Beverley's chagrin when the world did not end in 1697 as he predicted – ‘great Events, I hoped this last year, have not had their Complement’ (Warren Johnston) – but each essay, and there are no weak ones, increases our understanding of the period and throws new light on the scholars of the age, even if sometimes this is not an entirely flattering light. In his dealings with Locke, for example, we learn that ‘Friendship with Newton was no bed of roses’: after all Newton did remark about the mortally ill philosopher that it would be better if he were dead. This is, in sum, an old-fashioned book: learned, intellectually wide-ranging, elucidating, challenging and worth reading. It restores one's faith in scholarship. How satisfying to know that there are still people in the academic world, most in the early stages of their careers, able to consider in the original languages, amongst so much else, ‘English scholarship and the Greek text of the Old Testament, 1620–1720’ (I might add, by the way, that in 1660 Bulstrode Whitelocke claimed that he could have had sold the Codex Alexandrinus abroad during the Commonwealth for £4,000 but had instead saved it for Charles ii), or ‘Extra-canonical texts and the interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4’.