The introduction to this excellent collection makes some bold claims about both Puritans and early modern women. Puritan beliefs were ‘highly supportive of women's direct and influential involvement in their intellectual surroundings’ (p. 2). The Puritan way ‘fostered artistic endeavour and intellectual curiosity’ (p. 4). Puritan women ‘played a lively and often indispensable part in the production and reception of what scholars now investigate as the public sphere of early modern intellectual culture’ (p. 2). I must admit that I am predisposed to accept such claims. The Puritans have been subject to stereotype from the beginning; those caricatures have a lingering effect, inclining us to accept negative projections of the Puritans almost without question. This is neither fair nor helpful. Claims that run so counter to those assumptions therefore present a welcome corrective. And they are fully justified by the essays themselves. Susan M. Felch presents us with Anne Vaughan Lock, the epitome of the Protestant reading woman whose books were specifically designed to advance the Puritan cause within Elizabethan politics. Danielle Clark cogently argues that Mary Sidney's textual work, particularly in the Psalms, reflects the practice of Puritan piety as well as of poetics. Women's literacy was a Puritan concern, genuinely fostered. Lynne Magnusson gives us Anne Cooke Bacon, whose Calvinist theology gave her as a strong sense of vocation as she advocated right reformation in persuasive, published speech acts that also reflected the intellectual and political culture of humanism. And so it goes on, into the seventeenth century, through Anne Southwell, Lucy Russell, Mary Vere, Elizabeth Melville, Brilliana Harley, Elizabeth Isham, Anne Broadstreet, Katherine Jones, Anna Trapnel, Lucy Hutchinson and Jane Lead. These women run households, provide patronage, write letters, publish books and challenge England's political leaders. I like the way in which the editors have allowed each contributor to frame what ‘Puritan’ may have meant for each of these women, which avoids a clumsy kind of definitional conformity that will always falter across such a broad timespan. Sometimes this approach threatens to run aground, especially when being Puritan seems to equate merely with holding Calvinist beliefs or maintaining a providentialist world view. The essays are strongest when they show these women taking an active part in Puritan networks, nurturing godly concerns, and facilitating godly activities. As David Norbrook says in the ‘afterword’, this book ‘certainly does bring forward so many striking case studies that we might question whether there was ever really a problem about women and Puritanism’ (p. 204). ‘Puritanism may not have been unequivocally enabling, but these essays show that it was neither a monolithic entity nor an external force against which learned women had to struggle’ (p. 211). In such an achievement the various authors in this collection have done us, and Puritan women, a great favour.