Based on a conference held at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2007, this collection of eight essays (including an introduction and bibliography) contributes valuably to scholarship on the relation of heresy to orthodoxy from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. One advantage of this book is its wide chronological range, which eschews rigid period boundaries: the book begins with a discussion of the Lollards in the late fourteenth century and concludes with an account of Milton and “the scandal” of divorce during the 1640s. One disadvantage of this wide range—perhaps inevitable in a collection that includes only eight essays—is that the volume does not include sustained discussion of a number of writers central to the creation of “heresy” in earlier English literature and culture: for example, Thomas More, the great scourge of evangelical heretics in the 1520s and 1530s, or Thomas Edwards, the most significant and popular heresiographer of the English Revolution. In addition, some significant heresies and heretical groups (as the editors acknowledge) do not receive attention: for example, Socianism and its impact in early modern England or the Family of Love, which had established roots in England by the 1570s.

In a concise introduction, the editors discuss the challenges of defining “heresy” and evidence for it in England (including before Lollardy). With regard to the complications of classifying heretics, the editors might have mentioned and engaged with the volume I edited with John Marshall (Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture [Cambridge, 2006]) since that book highlights the unstable and changing definitions of “heresy.” The four essays after the introduction examine heresy in the literary culture of the later Middle Ages. In the opening essay, John Flood discusses some of the challenges in categorizing the Lollards and their works and helpfully elucidates the complications and subtleties of later fourteenth-century religious affiliations. In the following essay, Frances McCormack illuminates the contrast between Chaucer’s Parson and Pardoner by examining the rich Judeo-Christian motif of the false prophet as it was employed in fourteenth-century heresy accusations. John Scattergood expands John Flood’s discussion of Lollardy by examining the literary responses to the Lollard revolt of January 1414; this essay, drawing on manuscript sources and examples from Hoccleve and Lydgate, is especially illuminating on the textual accounts of Sir John Oldcastle and their social and religious implications. The last essay in this group, by Felicity Cable, perceptively discusses cultural anxieties about the irregular and obstinate behavior of single women and considers female misogamy as heresy in medieval romance.

The final four essays focus on issues of heresy and orthodoxy in a selection of works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the one essay that treats early modern drama, Amanda Piesse examines the ways orthodox doctrine is tested in the mid-sixteenth-century reformist play Jacke Jugeler based upon Plautus (and attributed by some scholars to Nicholas Udall). As she shows, drama by its very nature, and this Tudor drama in particular, allows for some open-ended questioning and negotiation with regard to religious doctrine. In the following essay, Kate Roddy has some acute points to make about Anne Askew and sixteenth-century martyrdom, although her discussion of the body/text analogy of persecution at times seems strained, such as when she asserts that Askew turns “her own body into a Bible” (111). In the next piece, Mark S. Sweetnam takes us, chronologically, well beyond Askew’s fraught religious world of the 1540s as he examines Donne’s use of heresy as a powerful and creative concept to stress accommodation, moderation, and toleration within the Church of England. This excellent essay acutely illuminates Donne’s use of the notion of heresy in his sermons; it could have probed a bit more carefully and critically the notion of “religious toleration” in Donne by drawing on valuable recent studies of toleration by Perez Zagorin or Alexandra Walsham. The final essay, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, considers Milton’s divorce tracts in the context of New Testament, medieval, and Reformation theological notions of scandal. This is a fresh context in which to consider these controversial works; this learned, well-researched essay yields valuable insights into Milton’s divorce tracts and their emphasis on charity as a response to the polemical culture of scandal in mid-seventeenth-century England.

Overall, this is a strong and rewarding collection of essays, although the end date of 1680 given in its title seems inappropriate given that the last essay discusses Milton and scandal in the context of the 1640s. Despite its inevitable gaps, the volume includes valuable discussions of the changing concept and literary uses of heresy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. As such, it makes a notable contribution to work on writing and religion in late medieval and early modern England.