Gary W. Jenkins has written an intriguing study of one of the leading figures in England's Reformation history. The book's title and subtitle alert readers to the line of thinking its author intends to pursue: that Jewel was as Erastian in his political commitments as he was evangelical in his faith. The result is a both a serious and engaging reading of Jewel that aims to illumine the ambiguities of both the times and places in which he was shaped and of the church he did so much to shape. Jenkins introduces his work in the following manner: “The real significance of Jewel then is not so much his impact upon the spread of the Protestant faith in his own day, however much he may have desired that and lent his energies toward it, but rather the legacy he bequeathed—an ambiguous one I shall argue—to the Church of England, an ecclesiastical entity he worked so hard to defend and did so much to define, how much this definition lacked specificity” (1). According to Jenkins, the dilemma is whether Jewel wished it this way. He claims, then, that his reading of Jewel's life and work will attempt to bring about an altering of an icon that has been “touched up and painted over many times” (2). The chapters that follow articulate the shape of this altering.

The first chapter, “Oxford and Exile, Jewel till 1558,” traces the early years of Jewel's life, his time at Oxford, his activities during the Henrician and Edwardian periods, and his exile among the Swiss after the accession of Mary Tudor. Jenkins identifies a common thread that runs through Jewel's early life, his humanist and rhetorical education, his theological training, and his involvement in England's ecclesial conflicts: the place granted the primacy of the prince in the life of the church and his attachment to the person, views, and ideas of Peter Martyr.

Chapter 2, “Jewel and the Struggle for the Elizabethan Church,” offers a fresh look at Jewel as an Elizabethan Protestant who emerged as a leader on Elizabeth's episcopal bench and as the leading apologist for the Elizabethan Settlement. Jenkins shows that Jewel's hope for rapid reform under Elizabeth turned quickly to the somber realization that religion in England was less a “golden mean and more a leaden mediocrity” (54). However, Jewel's greatest fear was not the slowing of reform but that there were those who would overthrow Elizabeth by stirring religious and political dissent at home and abroad. The Jewel who emerges is both a polemicist and apologist in service of the godly prince whose supremacy extended to effect ecclesiastical reform and to order the church, limited only by the word of God. Thus when viewed in light of these commitments, Jewel's considerable use of patristic authority was less dogmatic than rhetorical, a means of assaulting his Catholic opponents.

The third chapter, “The Catholic Reaction to Jewel,” sketches recusant reactions to Jewel and the rhetoric of his response. Jenkins argues that, apart from Harding, other Catholics who responded to Jewel's apologetic works have been largely forgotten, although they formed an integral part of the history of Elizabethan Catholicism, the Counter-Reformation, and the renewal of the late sixteenth-century Catholic Church. Jenkins argues that Jewel's rhetoric, which was dependent upon and in defense of the royal supremacy and the authority of the English bishops, prevented him from engaging his Catholic opponents with either logic or dialectic in debating the substance of theological matters.

Chapter 4, “A Prelate Public and Private: Jewel Caught between Puritans and Princes,” describes Jewel as a Janus figure who presented a public face to his English audience and a private face to his Oxford mentor, Peter Martyr, and other notable Reformation figures in Zurich. Jenkins argues that while Jewel set forth the apostolic Church as an ideal and defended the Church of England—Elizabethan Protestantism—as its exemplar in contrast to Rome, his correspondence with Zurich reveals his disaffection with Elizabeth, the godly prince who never attained the status of his Erastian rhetoric. Nevertheless, defining and defending the Christian commonwealth—church and crown—was the constant focus of Jewel's debate with Catholics, Anabaptists, and Presbyterians.

The fifth chapter describes “Life as a Bishop in Salisbury.” Of primary importance for Jenkins is that Jewel, despite his accomplishments in administering the diocese of Salisbury, remained the scholar among Elizabeth's bishops and her leading apologist. During this period, it was his literary discipline, ardor, and productivity that made him a picture of what others wished the Church of England to be.

The last chapter discusses “Jewel and the Identity of the English National Church.” Jenkins shows that in the aftermath of Jewel's death in 1571, at age forty-nine, he was remembered by his immediate biographer, Laurence Humphrey of Magdalen College (aided by John Parkhurst), as a defender of the faith and guardian of the church. Jenkins then surveys the writers and societies that have continued to sustain this memory of Jewel: Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud in the seventeenth century; the Tractarians of the Oxford Movement, the published responses of the Parker Society, and Charles Webb Le Bas (fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge) in the nineteenth century; and Wyndham Southgate, John Booty, and recent revisionist works during the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Jenkins notes that while each one of these interpretations has stressed a single element in Jewel, they have also consistently failed to use his Erastian ecclesiology as an interpretive prism, “not as some complex via media between Rome and Geneva but a means whereby a political necessity was wedded to an ecclesial virtue” (245).

For Jenkins, Jewel's works do not present a body of theological literature abundant with insight but instead represent a pedestrian reading of scriptural texts, a prosaic use of the early Church, and a banal approach to its theological topics. He was a “Puritan and a Prelate who affirmed the authority of Scripture and the primacy of the godly prince, an iconoclast in clerical vestments” (245–47). Jewel's church had no way, in theory, to resolve its conflicts since it had no recourse or court of appeal beyond the prince, “neither to tradition, a general council, nor a magisterium” (249). In the introduction, Jenkins suggests, but without taking sides in the conflict, that Jewel reaches beyond his time to speak to the present distress afflicting the worldwide Anglican Communion. According to this reading, it is Jewel's dilemmas that speak loudest.