In writing this review I am in no small danger of running short of superlatives. To put it simply, this is a sublime scholarly achievement. Knowing the intense labour and demanding exactitude of a project like this, I am very impressed. It is difficult to conceive how Chad van Dixhoorn could have done a better job of putting these minutes and papers at the service of the scholarly community. He had help along the way, to be sure, and the skilful guidance of David F. Wright and John Morrill, but one quickly gets the sense that this is the fruit of his singular vision. If we count his years as a Cambridge PhD student, van Dixhoorn has worked full-time on the Westminster Assembly for longer than it existed in the first place. I recall being told that he had calculated (I think with tape measure in hand) that, yes, all the members of the assembly could squeeze into the smallish Jerusalem Chamber in which they met; he had even taken a shrewd guess, based on the voting records, as to which groups of divines sat next to whom, and where. He once had a dream, he tells us, in which one of the Scottish commissioners to the assembly, Samuel Rutherford, offered to help interpret the nearly impenetrable handwriting of the assembly's main scribe, Adoniram Byfield. It is as good an indication as any of the all-consuming nature of van Dixhoorn's task. Perhaps we should add here a note of thanks not just to him (and his assistants) but to his wife and children as well. For this set represents a generous gift to scholars of the seventeenth century and to all those interested in the development of Reformed Protestantism in the English–speaking world and beyond.

The assembly was summoned in June 1643 to advise Parliament on ‘a further and more perfecte Reformation then as yet has been attained’ (i.165). That meant, in particular, revising the Thirty-Nine Articles; advising parliament on a new form of church government and liturgy; and assessing the competence of individual ministers. In the foreword, John Morrill calls this ‘a pregnant moment in the history of Protestantism’ (i, p. x). The work of the assembly peaked in 1646 and 1647, when it produced the Larger and Shorter Catechisms and the Westminster Confession: ‘together more than 32,600 words with almost 4,500 scriptural proof texts’ (i. 34). Even then it continued to meet, if in increasingly depleted fashion, until 1653. The records of the first sessions and the final sessions of the assembly are not extant; apart from that, these volumes contain for the first time all the known records of the assembly, including some significant new discoveries. It easily supplants the earlier edition of Alexander Mitchell that contained only around a third of the assembly's records. So we now have a remarkably detailed account of the inner workings and behind-the-scenes manoeuvring of this important body. Again in the words of John Morrill, it gives us ‘not just innumerable glimpses of men struggling to maintain focus and to translate the lessons of scripture into actions and structures fit to their age and for the time to come, but also a sense of men under intolerable strain and striving to keep unity in the face of innumerable pressures, internal and external, temporal and geopolitical, personal and collective’ (i, p. ix). This edition opens up expansive new territory in which scholars can finally explore the complexity of a subject that has, until now, for all its importance, lain in relative neglect.

The substance of volume i is an illuminating introduction to the history, nature and workings of the assembly. One of its themes is the recurrent tension between parliament and the assembly: parliament always made sure that the assembly knew its place, even if to begin with it was not entirely sure what to do with it. Notwithstanding inherent ambiguities, the ‘summoning ordinance functioned as a one-sided pre-nuptial agreement that left parliament in complete control of the assembly’ (i. 11); and its membership of around 120 included twenty members of the House of Commons and ten members of the House of Lords. Further tensions existed within the assembly. Before long, and especially as the assembly came around to debating matters of church government, differing theological trajectories began to merge. It made only haphazard progress as discipline quickly became a problem – corralling so many learned, sensitive, principled, jostling divines was no easy matter. The minutes and papers offer detailed testimony to exactly these difficulties, and the achievements made in spite of them. The arrival of the Scottish commissioners added a further dynamic. They could not vote, but they did take part in debate in the work of the committees. Their contribution has been exaggerated almost to the point of myth; even so, ‘the energy, synodical experience, and optimism brought by the Scottish theologians significantly shaped the assembly’ (i. 26). Van Dixhoorn gives us a picture of these ecclesiological debates: not really ‘parties’ and ‘battle lines’, more ‘constantly shifting allegiances depending on the issue at stake’ (i. 31).

The introduction contains many interesting practical details regarding the work of the assembly, beginning with the architecture and layout of the Westminster precinct (including several plates and a conjectural seating plan of the Jerusalem Chamber) and the rules by which assembly members agreed to abide. On average, somewhere between seventy and eighty members were present on any given day. Parliament agreed to pay each member 4s. for each day of attendance, though in the end the assembly received only around half of the payment due. Their schedule was a gruelling one. Each day began with prayer and a lecture by one of the seven abbey lecturers, from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., followed by a sermon from a probationary minister. The day's plenary session convened at 9 a.m., breaking for lunch any time between noon and 2pm. The afternoon involved committee work until 5 p.m. and sometimes even later. For most of its life the same scribe recorded the debates and resolutions of the assembly in what John Morrill describes as ‘the worst handwriting I have yet encountered from the seventeenth century’ (i, p. ix). The record includes small portions of shorthand that have been deciphered and transcribed. To give some sense of the scale of the manuscript original, the assembly held around 1,385 plenary sessions in its eleven-year existence. ‘Approximately 2,400 people appearing in 11,300 separate occurrences are mentioned in the minutes of the assembly’ (i. 91).

All of this gives rise to one question seemingly not recognised: was the assembly simply too big, too unwieldy, for the task that was set before it? It is perhaps illustrative that in 1654, when the first protectorate parliament came around to summon divines to advise on the fundamentals of religion, it decided to call only ‘twelve or twenty’ ministers to do so. They, too, met in the Jerusalem Chamber, which the assembly had vacated just one year earlier; and they met for only a matter of weeks. Perhaps that was the lesson of the assembly. It should have been ‘the hour of glory for the puritan experiment’; instead, ‘hopes for a speedy reformation, then hopes for a full reformation, and then even hopes for an adequate reformation, slowly came unravelled’ (i. 81). For all its achievements, the assembly's legacy was mixed and, oddly, far more pronounced in Scotland and in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland than in England itself. Though if the size of the assembly was a problem, it was not the only one. Even that smaller, shorter gathering in 1654 faced similar internal divisions; and their efforts came to nothing when Cromwell dissolved parliament. The same internal and external relational dynamics stymied the effectiveness of the assembly.

The introductory volume contains three further elements. First, a reader's guide provides the procedures that governed the editorial work along with some advice on how to read the minutes and papers – ‘with a Bible in one hand and the journals of the House of Lords and House of Commons in the other’ (i. 95). Second, a very helpful biographical dictionary supplies entries of varying length on the principal personalities in the life of the assembly. Third, a series of seventeen appendices provides essential background documentation, including the summoning ordinance; a list of members (a total of 204 over the years); officers, scribes and servants; rules, routines and practices; stipends; seating patterns; and a detailed summary of the processes for examining ministers. Volumes ii–iv contain the minutes of the assembly – they are beautifully presented with concurrent series of footnotes (one textual, the other commentary) on every page. Volume v comprises a collection of 141 incidental assembly papers along with several indexes.

So, what is it like to use? The record of each plenary session begins with a headnote summarising the day's proceedings. This is exceedingly helpful. One would gain a good sense of the assembly's work by reading only those explanatory headnotes. One then enters the minutes themselves. They are a cursory summary of sometimes long and complex speeches, so it is frustrating when a member's speech is simply left blank or, worse, when the summary of a speech is abruptly truncated just as it starts to get interesting. It is occasionally difficult to work out exactly what a member is meaning, or even what side of the debate he is arguing. All this is true, but I have been surprised at the wealth of meaning that still comes through, though it requires great patience. This may be my weakness, but as I read a debate for the first time the precise nature of the issues and the relative positions of the speakers are not always apparent. If I read it a second time, it becomes a lot clearer. If I read it again in light of the following day's debate, it becomes clearer again. And the more debates I read, the more naturally I understand the material when I first read it. The result is that a great deal can be gleaned from these minutes, more than might be apparent at first glance. The fruit of this can be seen in some earlier work of van Dixhoorn himself and in a recent Cambridge PhD thesis that uses the minutes extensively.Footnote ¹ All of this suggests that these volumes really are capable of advancing our understanding dramatically. They are a timely arrival. They are, indeed, a great gift.