The twelve essays which make up this collection are published as a well-deserved tribute to Professor M. A. Stewart, in recognition of his distinguished contribution to early modern intellectual history. Reflecting Stewart's own interests, the geographical range of the volume includes the British Isles and, to some extent, Western Europe. Each contribution rightly seeks to place key texts and debates in their broader context. Giovanni Tarantino rescues the ultra-rationalist Martin Clifford's Treatise of human reason (1674) from neglect, while Isabel Rivers performs a similar service for the Scottish Episcopalian Henry Scougal's Life of God in the soul of man, showing that it was much admired in late seventeenth-century Anglican Latitudinarian circles, and providing a useful list of its successive editions. Victor Nuovo takes further his researches into John Locke's insistence on the fundamental consistency between Scripture and reason, and acknowledges his subject's debt to the methods, if not the doctrine, of Faustus Socinus. Laurent Jaffo analyses John Toland's emphatically non-scriptural theories of morality and, interestingly, detects therein a trace of proto-utilitarianism. In a densely-argued but none the less lucid survey, Udo Thiel explores the nuances of the (mainly British) debate on the resurrection, and the difficulties faced by Joseph Priestley and his disciple (and fellow-emigrant) Thomas Cooper in reconciling the traditional account with their materialistic interpretations of the basis of human understanding. One of the most substantial essays is that of A. D. G. Steers. Drawing upon a wide range of evidence to illuminate the career of Samuel Haliday, Steers shows how Haliday's theological liberalism, derived in part from sojourns at Leyden, Basle and Geneva, led him to assert the primacy of conscience and to take the non-subscribing side during the internal divisions among early eighteenth-century Irish Presbyterians. The themes of conscience and private judgement receive further consideration from James Moore in an elegant and perceptive study of early eighteenth-century Presbyterian church government in Ireland and Scotland. The thought of David Hume receives no fewer than four separate treatments. Aaron Garrett comments on Hume's respect for Joseph Butler's moral theorising and has interesting things to say about the latter's Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726) to a congregation principally of equity lawyers. John P. Wright re-assesses Hume's manuscript ‘Essay on chivalry’, while James A. Harris challenges a number of preconceptions about Hume's intellectual affinities with Adam Smith through a careful exposition of the early responses in Scotland, articulated by Lord Kames and Thomas Reid, as well as by Smith himself, to Hume's theory of justice. Moritz Baumstark, in what is essentially an exercise in political history as well as the history of ideas, neatly explains Hume's combination of strong disapproval of Wilkite popular politics in the 1760s and 1770s with advocacy of complete abandonment of British sovereignty over America – an unusual juxtaposition at that time. Finally, Knud Haakonssen sites the Scottish natural law tradition, so characteristic of the Scottish enlightenment, within its wider Protestant European context.

These essays are all of high academic quality and are well-organised around the closely-interlocking issues of epistemology, conscience, morality and ecclesiastical and civil government. Two general observations may conclude this review. The heterodox and the sceptical receive significantly more attention than the orthodox; and, while the editor in her succinct introduction locates the themes of the volume in ‘the period known as the “long eighteenth century” ’, the essays published here offer rather more plausible testimony to a long seventeenth century.