Like many other books published by Ashgate, this recent addition to the St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History is based on meticulous scholarly research in primary sources and recent secondary sources. However, it observes traditional demarcations of periodicity, focusing heavily on the sixteenth century and, in effect, defining the English Reformation as concluding about 1600.

For those accustomed to studies of Puritanism that are generated by political, literary, and economic history, this book will at first seem out of touch with what have been the major concerns for scholars of the Reformation. What it seeks to do, however, is to reconceive these issues by foregrounding a different kind of intellectual history, the epistemology of the senses, particularly as that received expression in liturgical ritual. Put another way, it takes the priorities of philosophy as its primary subject of investigation, and it focuses strongly on liturgical ritual practices as they provide evidence of cultural assumptions about the senses. He contends that much of the Reformation in early modern Europe was not about the corruption of the will, but about the corruption of the senses. This thesis is very intriguing and the book pursues its implications through a wide range of contemporaneous sources.

Milner argues that religious controversy was driven by beliefs about “the sensory powers of the soul” (18–19). Far from rejecting medieval assumptions about sensory experience, Milner demonstrates that the Tudor Reformation “was shaped by the persistence of medieval sensory culture, its ethics and physiological contours” (8). Milner's lengthy study intertwines an analysis of religious beliefs about sentient experience in and through liturgical practice. Philosophical discourse and ritual practice are not generally compatible topics, and Milner's complicated prose style sometimes struggles to bring the two areas together. Nonetheless, for those readers willing to persevere, this book offers a new way of thinking about Tudor England, one that is perhaps reflective of the increasing interest in religious practice in our own time. Like it or not, we are living in a religious age more than a political one, and Milner sees Tudor England as reflecting these priorities, too.

The book is divided into two sections, the first exploring the pre-Reformation era from 1400 to 1530 as an age of late medieval thought and practice, and the second investigating the Reformation as it unfolded from 1520 to 1600. The methodology is the same for both sections, beginning with a discussion of theory that frames the analysis of religious practices. My own view is that this approach ultimately tries to make religious practice more rational, more logical in its assumptions than it really was—at least for those Protestants who were the forebears of seventeenth-century Puritanism. The ways in which Calvinism was infused with Christian mysticism, with situating the heart and soul of religion in a belief in the mystical body of Christ, indeed the way in which Protestant preachers flaunted the inexplicability of salvation from a rationalist's point of view—these elements of the Reformation are muted in Milner's analysis. By focusing on liturgical practice, Milner shifts his analysis away from what was for many the most telling and central experience of Puritanism, the preaching of the word that occurred outside liturgical practice but nonetheless reflected the privileged sensory experience of Puritan converts, the hearing of the word of God. Milner's own emphasis is primarily reflective of medieval and Anglican religious categories that privileged liturgical ritual, downplaying the practices of Puritan preachers in the fields who were barred from churches and the liturgy within their walls. Outside, in the ordinary sensory world, is where much of Puritanism gained its popularity. Many of its controversial positions were hatched in the coffee houses of London, a very different sensory realm than the sacred spaces of the Anglican Church.

This book is certainly engaging in its discussions of the beliefs and practices of taste, touch, and smell, reminding us of the importance then (and maybe now, too) of such ritual practices as the laying on of hands, rituals that were continued rather than repudiated by the Protestant reformers. However, the analysis often lacks of sense of irony. The most paradoxical moments of reform are acknowledged, but not pursued. For example, the visual sense was both repudiated by iconoclasts, and embraced by them in their insistence that religious practice be visually as well as theologically correct.

Americanists interested in the formative years of Anglo-American Puritanism will be disappointed to see their own work largely omitted from the scope of this study. This is especially unfortunate because the significance of the senses and what knowledge might be acquired through them became a hugely important issue in seventeenth-century New England. From the repudiation of women's epistemologies to the attacks on Native Americans as inferior beings, to the evidentiary issues of the infamous Salem trials at the end of the century, the epistemology of the senses was an issue that was often at the crux of religious-political controversies. The significance of Milner's study would have benefited from a more expansive concept of the scope of historical sources relevant to his work, but the parameters of his work do make sense. Hopefully they will inspire new inquiries into the sensory world of early New England Puritanism. This topic need not avoid the political dimensions. Perhaps the ability to turn sensory religious experiences into political ones will turn out to be the defining characteristic of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Milner interprets the period of Tudor England as lying at the threshold of early modern culture. Perhaps that threshold was crossed by the integration of sensory experience into political experience, with all its residual liturgical significance that Milner so carefully documents in this book.