That a study of mathematics and religion may appear an unpromising topic for a book is a rather curious note on which to begin a volume. In so doing, Snezana Lawrence and Mark McCartney anticipate that a reader might approach their volume with the view that science and religion are antagonistic, if not warring, paradigms for the explanation of nature. This was not always the case, they write, and together the essays curated by Lawrence and McCartney historicize the transformations of science and religion that culminated in this picture of the paradigms as rivalrous. Lawrence and McCartney's volume captures the various ways in which mathematics and religion have represented commensurable, even interconnected, systems of knowledge and belief.

What emerges in the first ten essays of Lawrence and McCartney's edited collection is that until roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, God was firmly embedded in the culture and practices of western Europe. Just how mathematics was pursued in the context of this theistic world view forms the background to the essays encompassing such figures as Pythagoras, Roger Bacon, Ramon Lull, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and Maria Gaetana Agnesi. In his chapter on Kepler, Owen Gingrich demonstrates just how crucial were Kepler's theological commitments for the particular cosmology he embraced in his scientific work. Kepler, Gingrich argues in this essay, understood his work in astronomy as a means to celebrate God. Rather than limiting scientific enquiry, the theistic world view was a spur to knowledge of the natural world. The Franciscans, writes Allan Chapman in Chapter 3, combined vows of poverty, chastity and Christian service with an active programme of scientific research. Investigating the natural world constituted an attempt to understand the mind of God. Just as it had motivated the Franciscans three hundred years earlier, Rob Iliffe shows that Newton believed that God was the author of a mathematically precise and well-ordered system, an investigation into which would reveal the mind of God. Mathematics, then, could express the foundations of a divinely created world. Unlike these figures, writes Massimo Mazzotti in his excellent chapter, Maria Gaetana Agnesi believed that the boundaries between physics and metaphysics were unbridgeable, ensuring that God's mind was not discoverable through his creation. Instead, Agnesi thought devotion to God should assume the form of intellectual discipline and intense meditation. The surest path to such discipline, thought Agnesi, was through the study of geometry.

Number could also reveal the hidden harmonies of a divinely created world. Andrew Gregory's chapter on the Pythagoreans, Robin Wilson and John Fauvel's chapter on Ramon Lull and Renaissance combinatorics and Jean-Pierre Brach's chapter titled ‘Mystical arithmetic in the Renaissance’ each explore the art of interpreting number, which, for mathematicians and mystics since antiquity, had qualitative and symbolic value. The concluding remarks of Brach's conceptually rich chapter contextualize not just the declining relevance of arithmology but also the pursuit of mathematics for morally or spiritually edifying ends. Brach writes,

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, mathematics was transformed into a descriptive and explanatory tool severed from the Christian world view with which it had been so intimately connected for centuries.

The remaining essays in Lawrence and McCartney's volume explore what severing the religious and scientific paradigms meant for mathematicians and theists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Elizabeth F. Lewis's contribution to the collection explores Balfour Stewart and P.G. Tait's intention in The Unseen Universe (1875) ‘to show that the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist’ (p. 213) in a climate that was increasingly hostile to the commensuration of science and religion. In her fascinating chapter, Melanie Bayley writes that the author of Flatland (1884) was motivated by the fear that the Christian faith faced impoverishment in the face of great advances in science. His intention was to show, through his curious tale about geometrical figures living in a flat world, how religion and science were commensurable. The inclusion of the final chapter detailing Gödel's logical proof for the existence of God represents a strange editorial decision. Though the essay competently executes a discussion of Gödel's proof, the chapter offers none of the rich contextualization in evidence throughout the rest of the collection. Failing to do so is hardly damning. As Lawrence and McCartney state in their preface, the essays in the collection may be read independently of each other. Those interested in a more contextualized reflection on the mathematical interventions of the twentieth century are advised to return to McCartney's introduction to the volume.

The contributors to the volume are drawn from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, history of science, mathematics and theology, resulting in a highly interdisciplinary work. The sophistication of the articles varies, however, owing perhaps to Lawrence and McCartney's desire to appeal to general readers and non-specialists. The collection will serve these readers well and could also benefit historians of science or theology unfamiliar with the ground covered in these essays.