This book emerges out of a PhD thesis defended at the University of Naples in 2004 and explores the biblical criticism of British deists as a facet of their broader impact on the intellectual and cultural history of western civilisation. In fact, with just an occasional nod to David Hume, this is a study of English irreligious thought. More familiarity with the Scottish context, for instance the execution of the student Thomas Aikenhead in 1697 for blasphemy and the concern it caused many intellectuals in England, might have caused Lucci to think twice about asserting that after 1689 ‘those who elaborated and spread heterodox theories did not run into the same dangers that could have occurred in the age of the Puritan Revolution or during the reign of the Catholic King James ii’ (p. 18). More broadly, whether another study of English deists is necessary, given the breadth and depth of analysis in recent years, is an open question. However, another study that isolates ‘the usual suspects’ – Herbert of Cherbury, Blount, Toland, Collins, Chubb, Annet and Morgan – and discusses their works individually by chronology rather than thematically has little chance of significantly advancing our understanding beyond that achieved by Henning Graf Reventlow more than twenty years ago. Lucci has at least as many categories for irreligious thought – heterodox, radical, libertine and so on – as he has people to put in them, a criticism levelled at earlier studies of deism by S. J. Barnett. The nature of orthodoxy is never discussed, and astute discussions of this subject, for instance by Pocock, are, like Barnett's work, absent from the bibliography. Despite, or perhaps because of, an excessive degree of quotation from the secondary literature, there is no critical engagement with the historiography. For instance, Klaus Scholder's work is listed, but there is no discussion of his diametrically opposed opinion that the roots of modern biblical criticism had nothing to do with scepticism. Lucci, buying into the radical rhetoric, portrays his heroes battling to ‘assert freedom of thought and promote the free search for truth’ (p. 44) against (usually unnamed) conservative traditionalists but he does not attempt a definition of biblical criticism, seemingly happy to go along with the conventional misplaced view that sees it as an activity inherently hostile to scriptural authority. Lucci later quotes a perceptive comment from Justin Champion regarding criticism as a battle for cultural authority, a resource competed for by different interests rather than simply a discourse constructed by the heterodox (p. 208), but fails to appreciate how this reflects upon his own narrow focus. Dismissing ground-breaking works of biblical scholarship like the London Polyglot Bible as ‘restrained by the acknowledgement of the sacredness and authority of Scripture’ (p. 208) is fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of biblical criticism in Enlightenment England. Despite some perceptive textual analysis and some interesting sections, notably the engagement between Anthony Collins and William Whiston, ultimately this book cannot escape its conceptual and methodological flaws.