This is a labour of love, designed to provide the educated public (and one hopes, even English clergy) with a clear and balanced account of how the English Reformation created in stages a peculiar sort of established Protestant Church which grafted sacramentalism and principled episcopalianism onto a Reformed Protestant stem. In the end, the Church of England's structural and theological contradictions did not succeed in giving it a monopoly of Protestantism in the kingdom. So out of the pre-1640 institution came a story of Protestant Dissent, making English religion very different and much more varied than the Protestantisms of Scotland or Scandinavia; and simultaneously with the disruption of 1660–2 came also the emergence of that now world-encircling religious identity, Anglicanism. Of course there is also the parallel story of English Christians who refused to renounce their obedience to the pope, and were forced to create their own institutional structures in order to reframe their devotional life in relation to Counter-Reformation Europe. Antonia Southern's account is avowedly a synthesis, based on admirably up-to-date reading, and readers are likely to profit from her sensible narrative, which takes as one of its chief tasks to answer the puzzle of why people who might otherwise engage our sympathy and admiration were prepared to be so unpleasant to each other in the name of religion, even unto torture and violent death. It is pleasing to see Southern do justice to James ii's generous and genuine efforts at toleration (vitiated by his astonishing political ineptitude); that insight could usefully have been paired with some notice of Oliver Cromwell's greatest lasting achievement, the readmission of the Jews, who do not get a look-in during this religious survey. Perhaps the book might better have ended in 1714, as its account of the eighteenth century is a little scrappy, while the glimpse forwards from 1829 is rather unexpectedly full of storm-clouds.