John Colet has long occupied a central place in the story of the Catholic reform movement. A friend of William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, Erasmus and Thomas More since 1499, the Victorians, following in the footsteps of Gilbert Burnet's History of the Reformation, regarded him as a moderate, meek, liberal church reformer, even a Protestant avant la lettre, one of those Catholics who lacked the ‘opportunities of declaring themselves more openly for a Reformation’. The fact that Colet's diocesan bishop, the reactionary Richard Fitzjames, scented in him a whiff of heresy, only served to enhance his credentials. Jonathan Arnold, building on mould-breaking studies by J. B. Gleason and J. B. Trapp, contends that, as a cleric, Colet was neither successful nor a reformer. Neither a proto-Protestant nor an anticlerical, his mindset was dominated by a mystical vision of church perfection, a struggle to pass from darkness to light. At St Paul's he sought, stridently and uncompromisingly, to achieve church reform using disciplinary procedure, cathedral administration, attempted statute revision, preaching, education and by use of his political connections, chiefly to Wolsey. A lightly revised version of Arnold's PhD thesis, this book depicts Colet as a passionate, if misguided, idealist, who expressed his hierarchical and perfectionist vision bluntly: to the minor clergy in 1506, to Convocation in 1511–12, to Henry viii in 1513, towards Fitzjames in 1513–14 (Colet is alleged to have criticised the veneration of images, the giving of hospitality and the practice of preaching from pre-written texts), and towards the canons residentiary in 1518. Arnold is most useful to mainstream historians when he explains Colet's beliefs on the sacraments and hierarchy, showing that the late-classical Pseudo-Dionysius, as Erasmus had noted, shaped Colet's elevated view of the priesthood, coining the concept of ‘hierarchy’ and making sense of Colet's sermon at Wolsey's installation as a cardinal in 1515, which linked the ecclesiastical role of cardinal to the celestial role of the angelic seraphim. Colet's exalted opinions of priesthood and hierarchy made him, as an individual, almost impossible to deal with, and Arnold achieves a fundamental reassessment (downwards) of Colet's influence. If anything, he was an irritating distraction. Apart from his educational reforms at St Paul's School (which owed nothing in particular to his priestly office), his life was a failure. Arnold concludes that Colet failed because he had overly unrealistic expectations of what it was possible to achieve. His weakness – according to Arnold, although some readers will find this astonishing – was ‘spiritual pride’. Colet genuinely believed himself to be superior to others in the spiritual life. Given this book's ambitious subtitle, Arnold should have provided readers with a conclusion that sets Colet into the context of his humanist friends. Other interesting points, for instance Colet's anti-litigiousness, might profitably have been developed in relation to More's Utopia. Overall, however, the book is useful, perhaps indispensable, to anyone revisiting the circle around Thomas More between 1499 and 1519.