This book sets out to explore a surprisingly underresearched area: “The penitentiary's obvious relationship to penitence” (9). Despite the plethora of work on crime and punishment more broadly (and imprisonment in other contexts), there has been, Throness claims, relatively little “sustained discussion of the religious basis of penality” among the major scholarly studies of the eighteenth-century English prison. In particular, Laurie Throness is concerned with redressing the “Marxist or neo-Marxist perspective that questioned the motives of humanitarians,” reconstituting once canonical figures such as John Howard as “narrow-minded” “fanatic[s],” and which “rejected the prison as an agent of reform” (4), portraying it rather as a function of the darker hegemonic designs of a “carceral state.”

Throness makes a vigorous case for not throwing out the baby with the bathwater—that is, rejecting the importance of genuine religious and even humanitarian impulses behind the penitential regime. He labors to illustrate the ways in which contemporaries conflated “the governments of heaven and earth” (53) not only by means of analogy or metaphor but by “typology;” that is, the conviction that events on earth could, and should, fulfill scriptural prophecies and injunctions (101–2). Some of Throness's conclusions may, however, strain credulity; for instance, the suggestion that authorities may have condoned the “horrific conditions in eighteenth-century prisons … simply because a prison was supposed to be a ‘hellish’ place” (111), and that the master's and common sides of jails (for better-off and poorer inmates, respectively) “corresponded to Paradise and Gehenna” (84). Throness goes so far as to equate the impulses that led crowds to flock to prisons and executions with the “abominable fancy” (the pleasure derived by the saved, in paradise, from witnessing the torments of the damned). One “telling incident” cited as an example of “a final benefit those in a state of bliss receive from the damned” was that of a young girl brought to the gallows to touch the corpse of the Catholic Jacobite Richard Gascoigne, hanged at Tyburn in May 1716. Throness explains that “it was hoped to teach a valuable lesson to the young one … to better appreciate the virtues of being law-abiding by seeing the fate of the wicked, and to determine never to be in his place” (91). Here Throness overlooks a more obvious explanation regarding popular beliefs in the curative, even miraculous, properties of the touch of a executed felon, perhaps especially those who could be viewed—as Gascoigne's coreligionists and fellow Jacobites doubtless saw him—as a martyr.

In this instance, and arguably in others too, A Protestant Purgatory is limited by its unapologetic focus on “England's leaders” (45), the “better sort” who administered the criminal law—what “the common people” thought, in contrast, “hardly matters” in terms of “understanding and explaining that system” (19). However, if Throness's focus is in one sense too narrow, neglecting the ways in which penal policy and practice was perceived or applied in practice, the emphasis on “Christianity's causal influence” is at times too broadly defined. For instance, while Throness's characterization of Henry Fielding as “a strongly Christian magistrate” and “an intensely religious man who went so far as to write a book describing Providential apprehensions of murderers” offers, perhaps, a refreshingly unique perspective on the famous novelist, it is difficult to read Fielding's engagement with popular notions of providential discoveries as evidence of extraordinary piety—except insofar as he, like the vast majority of eighteenth-century Englishmen and women, subscribed to a larger religious belief system prescribing punishment and reward.

A Protestant Purgatory is at its most effective in its rich fleshing out of religious practices and beliefs—from coronation ceremonies, ordeals and prognostication, to attitudes towards work, solitude, and Sabbatarianism—within the context of contemporary sermons and pamphlet literature. Yet Throness's privileging of primary sources sometimes has the effect of glossing over or minimizing important contributions in the secondary literature, most notably Randall McGowen's study of the eighteenth-century dialectic between human and divine justice (nor does McGowen base his arguments on a misreading of secondary work on the fringe Protestant belief in the existence of a “reformative hell,” as Throness suggests (40–41), but rather on the ways in which contemporary legal and religious discourses mirrored the reconfiguration of God from a vengeful to a charitable judge).

Finally, Throness's argument that the graduated prison sentences made possible under the auspices of the Convict and Penitientiary Acts (1776 and 1779) represented an unprecedented “intent … to cultivate the genuine repentance that would bear both temporal and eternal fruit” (248)—in contrast to a “past” in which “the state had simply poured out its anger and frustration upon wrongdoers with little regard for their welfare” (247)—overstates the departure from previous penal strategies, including not only transportation and houses of correction but even execution itself. Capital punishment was never, as Throness claims, “purely retributive” (288), but rather justified not only with reference to its supposed exemplary but even salvific ends (in that the condemned, by preparing for a fixed and certain “first death” could escape the “second death” of the soul). While Throness may be right in asserting that the study of the theological origins of the penitentiary has been neglected in favor of that of capital punishment, it does not necessarily follow that the two can be viewed in isolation from each other.