This rich and fertile collection of essays, written by Mark Goldie's friends and former students to mark his retirement, is a fitting tribute to his intellectual contribution, range and influence over the last forty years. Taken together, they remind us of the significance of Goldie's research and make a powerful statement about the interconnections between politics, religion and ideas which Goldie has explored throughout his career. At first sight, the title of the book could be read as a rather bland portmanteau catch-all, but in truth the complex associations between the three co-ordinates of politics, religion and ideas accurately sum up the core of Goldie's interests. While the introduction – containing individual appreciations by the editorial quartet – references the subtle and nuanced ways in which Goldie has connected the histories of politics, religion and ideas, it may be that even more could have been done to emphasise the multifarious respects in which he sees those connections, and in particular how he understands ideas, both as formal statements of thought and as expressed through attitudes and assumptions. More too might have been made of his interest in the production, transmission and consumption of ideas and his concern to investigate how ideas both shaped, and were shaped by, the political and religious contexts in which they operated.

But in many ways the essays that follow (arranged in chronological order) do just that, show-casing a mixture of approaches to the inter-relations of politics, religion and ideas, and shedding often fascinating light on a whole spate of topics over the two centuries covered by the volume. The variety is in itself testimony to the fact that Goldie in his own research has explored the connections from a diversity of standpoints, paying as much serious attention to Church of England, as to Puritan and nonconformist, and to Tory as well as to Whig. Thus Tim Harris explores the topic of ‘constitutional royalism’, which has recently been viewed as emerging in 1642, instead locating its rise after 1688–9. Dmitri Levitin offers a fascinating exploration of the teaching of political thought in Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity during the Restoration based on a unique collection of primary sources, the 376 ‘disputed questions’ presided over by Joseph Beaumont, Regius Professor of Divinity, which, however increasingly marked in views of jure divino episcopacy, saw no break with magisterial Reformation views of Church and State. Justin Champion's analysis of Marvell's experience of dissent after 1670 argues that it was this that led him to formulate a vocabulary of opposition to the forces of coercion rather than being something he set out to do, and for Champion this is an example of Goldie's understanding of how ideas were created, emerging from intellectual interests but also from lived experience. Jacqueline Rose's examination of Bulstrode Whitelocke's politics is both an elegant analysis of Whitelocke's position, shaped as it was by the experience of persecution, but also indicates the boundaries of ‘Puritan’ politics in the late seventeenth century given the fact that Goldie excluded him from the category of ‘Puritan Whig’ since he favoured ‘toleration’ rather than ‘comprehension’. John Coffey provides a wide-ranging interpretation of the assassination of Archbishop Sharp of St Andrews in 1671, offering both a detailed account of what we know of the murder itself and its afterlife in Scottish memory during subsequent centuries. It is surprising that this hasn't been done before and Coffey offers a gripping narrative which reads at times like a murder story (in a good way), and the irony being that it was Sharp's assassins who received a more secure place in Scottish memory than the martyred cleric. Clare Jackson's fine piece on Sir George Mackenzie and Restoration Scottish Royalism advances a nuanced variant of the Toryism Goldie has examined in England, showing how Mackenzie used the Stuart dynasty and views of Scottish origins to counter English efforts to give Scotland a subordinate place in the three kingdoms.

As befits a collection in honour of Goldie, four essays deal with John Locke. S. J. Savonius-Wroth emphasises Locke's interest in the last years of his life in inner morality which he came to see as the only secure way of establishing a truly enlightened European polity. Geoff Kemp neatly looks at Locke's role as Censor at Christ Church in the early 1660s and his criticism of censorship three decades later when he wanted people to have access to texts to help them think about how to live rightly. John Marshall scrutinises Locke's role as a member of the Board of Trade and shows his support for slavery in the colonies and also for forced labour at home as a way out of poverty. Delphine Soulard explores the ways in which Locke's works were translated and received in the European republic of letters and argues this was crucial in creating his reputation as an icon of toleration.

The final four essays begin with Hannah Smith's excellent study of Purcell and Sedley's 1692 Birthday Ode for Queen Mary which highlights the position of godly monarchy after 1689 as a refutation of the libertinism of the Restoration Court. Warren Johnston turns to Thanksgiving sermons from 1689 to 1816 and draws out the prominence given to apocalyptic thought in demarcating Britain from its enemies. Gabriel Glickman unearths the origins of the Scottish Catholic Enlightenment which in the context of Jacobitism and the need to reform the Church drew on wider tendencies in European Catholic thought to critique the papacy. Sarah Irving Stonebraker considers how the idea of useful knowledge was at first underpinned in the seventeenth century by Protestant theology but during the eighteenth century became divorced from this religious enterprise (and could be turned against religion). Finally, Conal Condren examines how ‘innovation’, once something associated with negative connotations, became more positively understood.

For readers of this Journal, Goldie's own deep interest in the diversity of theological, ecclesiological and religious ideas in this period stand out, and, to a greater or lesser extent, all the essays collected here shed light on these matters. Perhaps, above all, Goldie has been concerned to understand the ideas, beliefs and habits of mind of a variety of people in the past on their own terms and to appreciate their worldviews. The essays in this volume amply reflect that endeavour.