This substantial and deeply learned work is a milestone publication which ought to be recommended reading for any historian working on the history of religious ideas, on the history of erudition and the nature of religious change in the long seventeenth century in the British Isles. Reflecting on its contribution to understandings of Christian orthodoxy and the contestation of authority and tradition will bring much food for thought to historians of the politics of religion and society in the period too. In exploring how theologians, scholars and ecclesiastics (between the 1560s and the 1700s) debated and disputed the meaning, significance and nature of the early church Fathers to the identity of contemporary confessional claims the book identifies a core area of cultural crisis. It is a modest work in tone – and indeed only the first part of a much broader study of patristic culture in the period (it is much to be hoped that the author is encouraged to publish the remainder which promises to be a study of the history of patristic scholarship and erudition) – but profoundly researched. In tracing the debates over the rule of faith from the post-Reformation apologia of Bishop Jewel to the university erudition of Henry Dodwell in the early decades of the eighteenth century, Quantin establishes how the appeal to the Fathers altered in both form and function. Initially a powerful tool in providing authority against Roman Catholic claims to innovation, in the later period patristic sources were being used to defend specific ‘Anglican’ episcopal conceptions. The book displays a powerful understanding of the way in which these debates contributed to the fashioning of different types of Protestant orthodoxy a century or so after the Elizabethan settlement. Fundamental disputes between Roman Catholicism and Protestants, and then within the reformed communion – whether about the nature of the eucharist, the theology of grace, ecclesiology or papal infallibility – were defined and confirmed by the deployment and debates about specific church Fathers. Quantin establishes how the reconstruction of Christian antiquity (and indeed the battle over precisely what chronology and figures this term covered) lay at the core of central controversies around the nature of revelation, the canon of Scripture and the authority of the Church. Was the prescriptive Christian past ante- or post- the Nicean Council – did Tertullian trump Augustine, was Cyprian more authoritative than papal tradition? While Augustine may have been the darling of the Calvinists, Ignatius became the star for Laudians. A great turning-point was the publication and reception (explored here) of Jean Daillé's hostile treatise on the use of the Fathers (1631) which challenged both the authenticity and integrity of patristic tradition. Although conceived as a means for anatomising papal claims Daillé's work became a powerful resource for those who wished to refute episcopal claims in Protestant England. As Quantin neatly puts it, Christian antiquity was a ‘Pandora's box’: even those thinkers not commonly associated with Christian erudition – Thomas Hobbes on the history of heresy, or Locke on Augustine's views on toleration – found themselves having to engage with patristic sources and clerical scholarship. By the early eighteenth century it was John Toland's brilliance to attempt to turn the complexity of patristic tradition and erudition against the received Christian scriptural canon. Quantin's book – beautifully composed and profoundly reflective – deserves a very broad readership.