On 24 August, 1662 – ‘Black Bartholomew's Day’ in dissenting historiography – the Restoration Act of Uniformity came into full effect, with the result that all those clergy who could not prove that they had been ordained by a bishop or give unfeigned consent to the liturgy of the new Prayer Book were ejected from their livings. The consequence was not only the removal of nearly a thousand ministers, but the publication over the next few years of a large number of ‘farewell sermons’. Many of the ejected had spoken to their congregations from the pulpit in the weeks before they were removed. When printed, these works provided both a fascinating window onto the culture of early nonconformity, and the hitherto neglected subject for this excellent study by David Appleby. What Appleby provides here is a multi-faceted, almost ‘total’ history of the sermons. He provides a rich context for their first delivery by describing the social networks and political circumstances of their authors; he analyses their rhetoric and use of scriptural texts and tropes; he details their print history – revealing how they may have changed between first delivery and print version, and why the production seemed to stop around 1664 (more the result of the Great Fire of London than a loss of audience appetite); he argues for their popularity (both in spoken performance and on paper later) and he considers the vigour of conformist replies to the sermons from such propagandists as Roger L'Estrange and John Berkenhead. Among the many important points in this important book, two stand out for this reviewer. The first is stressed by Appleby himself. It is that the farewell sermons question the popular ‘quietist’ interpretation of early nonconformity. Certainly the ejection proceeded without any great trouble, there was almost no call for disloyalty by those who suffered, and – as Appleby shows – the ejected were not a united movement, even if there were some quite tightly knit networks among them. Yet the sheer number of (illegally printed) sermons was a challenge to the ecclesiastical regime; careful analysis of their rhetoric, as provided here, reveals radical subversion within the parallels drawn between authors and the Apostles of the New Testament's Acts and Epistles; and the violence of the conformist reaction suggests what a gauntlet they believed had been thrown down. The second point is made by Appleby in passing, but reveals something important about English Protestant assumptions. He suggests that conformists attacked the sermons so vigorously because they needed to defend their own image of martyrdom (built around Charles i's execution and the banning of Prayer-Book worship under Cromwell), from dissent's alternative claims to victimhood. The two sides were therefore competing to be persecuted. An emerging interpretation of toleration in the later seventeenth century suggests that it gained strength from the growing conviction that persecution (not popery) was AntiChrist, and that true Christians were marked more by their suffering than by their correct doctrine. This is a fruitful line of thought, and Appleby does much to encourage it.