The question at the heart of this volume is one to which there is probably no definite answer but, equally, it is one which simply refuses to go away: what is the connection between religion and politics in the period of the Reformation? How far and why do people actually believe the things they say about the reform of the Church? How did contemporaries demarcate and describe the temporal and the spiritual? The author's starting point is the essentially politique nature of the late Tudor and early Stuart monarchies. One way of looking again at the questions is the little-studied topic of the relationship between Catholics and the State during the post-Reformation period. As far as Catholics under Elizabeth and James i were concerned, the character of the national Church was not set in stone. As often as not, those who would have liked to see it become immovably fixed and defined were not exactly in the good graces of the sovereign. This is not the same as saying that those Catholics who prayed or planned for some kind of reversal of the Reformation were necessarily living in the real world. But it did mean that Catholics had a voice in contemporary polemical and political debates, and their collective voice could not be written off as simply marginal or insane. With these thoughts in mind, the book then moves through a series of debates and topics: on the one hand, intellectual controversies such as the Feckenham-Horne dispute, the reactions to Nicholas Sander's De visibili monarchia, and the European debate over the 1606 oath of allegiance, and, on the other, specific political events such as the Jesuit agitation of 1580–1 and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Catholics could, very broadly speaking, subscribe to a model of Church–State relations in which temporal power was subsumed into and guided by spiritual power. Or they could allow that temporal authority should be exercised without hindrance from the realm of grace. Of course, in between these two basic positions there was a range of other standpoints. Catholics, like other contemporaries, could move between these points as the fit took them and as circumstances dictated. The author concentrates, rightly, on several crucial episodes in the period during which it appeared that established orthodoxies might be overturned, for example, during the Anjou marriage negotiations of 1579–81, and the accession of James vi in 1603. This book, therefore, looks at a crucial set of topics in early modern English and British history, ones which, if taken seriously, might be thought capable of shifting the debate about the course of the later English Reformation away from several of its current preconceptions and assumptions. This book's chapters are a guided tour of the potential and actual intellectual turning-points of the period which I, for one, would identify as crucial markers for the writing of a new intellectual, polemical and political history of the period. All through the book there are fascinating insights into the factors which led to the publication of particular tracts. I have to say, though, that the copy-editing process appears to have been distinctly perfunctory. Did the series editor at any point look at the text? One wonders whether the considerable cost of monographs can be justified when the publisher and those responsible for series such as the one in which this volume appeared evidently cannot be bothered to look at the final typescript before it goes to press.