The portrait of John Knox that decorates the cover of Jane Dawson's new biography is a recently cleaned and restored oil from the later sixteenth century that gives us a clearer, brighter, and much more engaging image of the man than either its darker earlier incarnation or the familiar, rather grim woodcut in Beza's Icones. It is, therefore, the perfect foretaste of Dawson's remarkable illumination of the man himself. The personality she sets forth is nuanced, anxious, passionate, his language as much celebratory as vituperative, and his relationships ranging from warm and devoted to toxic. The previously received version of Knox is one-sided—angry, driven, self-vaunting, overweeningly confident, and not a little misogynistic—the thoroughly distasteful character of popular imagination (and not altogether without foundation). It is quite true that negotiation “was a skill that eluded Knox” (221). He caricatured and castigated his enemies, and placed himself high among the heroes of his History of the Reformation in Scotland. But Dawson has drawn on new archival discoveries and new insights of her own to give us a much more complex, and in many ways compelling, figure. He was “a man to whom tears came easily” (1), a loving friend and affectionate husband and father, a writer who loved words and used them well, and a man whose depression at times nearly overwhelmed him.

Granting that the “rosy-tinted spectacles of hindsight” (51) colored Knox's History, Dawson is constrained to rely heavily on it (only one of his sermons survives), and she does so critically. But her sources extend far beyond his account of events. With her important discovery of correspondence between Knox and Christopher Goodman, she is able to display the Scot more prominently on an international stage, central to religious developments in France (where the reality of religious violence struck fear into his heart), England (where he worked for Edward VI, served parishes in Berwick and Newcastle, and was offered a bishopric), and Geneva (the site of his third exile, where he developed his close friendship with Goodman and worked out his “Anglo-Scottish strategy” [184]). He and Goodman even devised an evangelistic agenda for Ireland in the later 1560s; had they followed through on it, it might have changed the course of Irish and English history. The letters enable Dawson to tell “for the first time the full story” of the “troubles” in Frankfurt with a more incisive and profound dissection of the discord than was possible for earlier scholars (90). They shed important new light on Knox's British perspective and apocalyptic, unionist hope. And they illumine the intellectual evolution of his resistance theory, which owed so much to Goodman.

Throughout the biography, the author's perceptive analysis of Knox's rhetoric underpins her altogether convincing argument that his prose helped to establish the concept of covenanting that would come to define Scottish and presbyterian identity for centuries after his own time, and far beyond Scotland. His language was extreme: “If a nail needed driving home, the Scot reached for a sledgehammer; if salt were needed to cleanse & scour, then he picked up a shovel,” as Dawson so emphatically puts it (79). But the language of the Covenant was just as extreme, its identification of the enemies of true religion just as stark and vengeful. A “holy hatred” (125) pervades both. So do other fundamental features of Scots culture, like the centrality of kinship, bonding, and the vengeance of the feud. Whatever his hope for a British Reform, Knox as Reformer remained thoroughly Scottish.

Of course, he also spoke in distinctively biblical language. In a nearly buried analytical gem, Dawson's discussion of the tension within Knox's Order of the General Fast shows in microcosm the paradox of a national church identified with the elect people of God, but disobedient apart from a tiny remnant of those “affectually moved” by real religious zeal (people the English would call “puritans”). In obvious parallel between Scotland and the Israelites of the Old Testament, this “double personality . . . became embedded within the consciousness of the Reformed Kirk in Scotland for many centuries and more widely influenced how the Scots have understood themselves” (245). At a more mundane level, Knox's regulative principle of correct worship—that Christians may do only what the scriptures prescribe—likewise “forged theological badges of identity for Scottish Protestantism, for the English Puritan tradition, and . . . for Irish Presbyterianism” (316). He provided both theory and practice to bind the Reformed community together.

Some readers may balk at Dawson's diagnosis of Knox's depression and even paranoia, psychohistory having long since fallen into disrepute. But she has drawn his personality from his own words, and his own fears; she writes as someone very nearly as familiar with Knox's use of language as her own, with an awareness of nuance that only one who truly knows sixteenth-century Scots linguistic conventions can have. And she writes with a real sensitivity to the effects of his personal experiences and of how he saw God acting in the world: his paranoia appeared after a real betrayal by Lever at Frankfurt, his depression after his beloved first wife's death. If near the end of his life he “saw enemies wherever he looked,” and “his sense of proportion diminished,” she insists that we understand these developments in the context of his stroke and declining health, as well as of the assassination of Moray, the intensifying civil war in Scotland, and the apparently imminent threat that a “grand Catholic conspiracy to exterminate all Protestants” was succeeding in France in the 1570s (304). Being fearful and “oppressed with melancholie” was not unreasonable in the circumstances (261).

Clearly this volume will be the new classic biography of Knox for the foreseeable future. The man lives again in Jane Dawson's prose, and his passion will draw even readers repelled by holy hatred.