In the two decades since John Hedley Brooke's Science and religion: some historical perspectives (1991), a thriving industry has grown up among historians of science debunking the idea of an inevitable and timeless conflict between science and religion. Ronald L. Numbers, a leading authority on the history of anti-Darwinian creationist movements, has long been a captain of that industry. His latest edited volume offers an ideal introduction to the revisionist literature for the uninitiated and a handy companion and teaching aid for those already in the know. Each contributor to the book takes on one historical myth about science and religion. There are twenty-five myths in total, some concerning particular individuals (Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley, Einstein), others about whole historical epochs, traditions or places (medieval Islam, the Catholic Church, modern western culture, the United States), others on particular areas of science and medicine (astronomy, anatomy, anaesthesia, geography, evolution, quantum physics). The contributors are all historians of science of the first rank, and each has contributed about ten pages of succinct, scholarly and stimulating prose, encouraging the reader to look beyond received ideas about science and religion. Among the studies of famous individuals, highlights include Jole Shackelford denying ‘That Giordano Bruno was the first martyr of modern science’; Maurice Finocchiaro disproving the claim ‘That Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for advocating Copernicanism’ (while showing how people could quite reasonably have drawn the conclusion that he had been, based on the evidence available before the nineteenth century); Peter Harrison debunking the idea ‘That René Descartes originated the mind-body distinction’; Robert Richards's bracing take on the myth ‘That Darwin and Haeckel were complicit in Nazi biology’; and James Moore's elegant demolition of two myths for the price of one: ‘That evolution destroyed Darwin's faith in Christianity – until he reconverted on his deathbed.’ The collective thrust of the book, as with the wider literature with which it connects, is very much directed against the infamous late nineteenth-century ‘conflict narrative’, and so it is particularly welcome to see a slightly different tack taken by Noah Efron in his attack on the myth ‘That Christianity gave birth to modern science’. Old evolutionary chestnuts are given their due: Huxley and Wilberforce, the Scopes trial and ‘intelligent design’ are all here. But for those already more than familiar with such material, there is some less obvious fare on offer too. Two myths on medical topics prove particularly intriguing. Katharine Park looks into the origins of the myth ‘That the medieval Church prohibited human dissection’, while Rennie Schoepflin explores the erroneous notion that Genesis iii. 16 was widely invoked by nineteenth-century clergy as an argument against anaesthesia in childbirth. The last word fittingly goes to John Hedley Brooke, who explains why we should reject myth 25: ‘That modern science has secularised western culture’. This is a treasure-trove of received ideas, their histories and refutations.