Though the early English reformer Robert Barnes ran in the circles of Cranmer, Cromwell and Luther, was central to the Anglo-Lutheran negotiations of the 1530s, wrote what may be considered the closest the early English reformation came to a ‘systematic’ theology and eventually became one of the most celebrated evangelical martyrs of Henry viii's reign, no authoritative account of his life and thought yet exists. Instead, from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, most treatments of Barnes have been decidedly uncritical and hagiographical in nature. Though by no means intending to provide a thorough analysis of his life and theology, what analysis does appear in Douglas H. Parker's new edition of Barnes's most famous work – the first critical edition of any treatise by Barnes – certainly cannot be faulted for being hagiographical or, in the colloquial sense of the term, uncritical. Here one will find not a trace of the ‘St Robert’ who regularly appears in Protestant portraits beginning with Luther. Instead, the Barnes introduced in this volume ‘regularly indulges in special pleading’ (p. 20), argues ‘disingenuously’ (p. 21), is guilty of ‘grating paternalism and presumption’ (p. 28) and mounts attacks ‘unmeasured and bilious’ (p. 33) – the result finally being that ‘there is not much left of Barnes to respect’ (p. 77).

To be sure, one's apparent distaste for a subject need not prevent a measured and objective treatment of that individual's thought. Unhappily, however, it seems to have done so in the work at hand. Commenting, for example, on Barnes's insistence that he had never disparaged fasting, prayer, almsgiving or contrition, Parker writes that the reader is left somewhat breathless at the disingenuousness of this claim. For in the final section of [the Supplicatyon of] 1531, Barnes attacks the honouring of images and the invocation to saints and refers to ‘damnable pardons’ and ‘whysling absolucyons’. One wonders what Barnes is thinking here (p. 30). Rather more likely, however, one will wonder what Parker is thinking here, since Barnes's own logic – hardly unique to him – is quite obviously that there is a categorical difference between praying, for example, and praying to saints.

Similarly but more subtly misleading is Parker's account of Thomas More ‘eviscerating’ Barnes for his erroneous citation of patristic sources in the 1531 edition of the Supplicatyon (pp. 74–7). More accuses Barnes, for instance, of deliberately providing a faulty citation for an Augustine sermon, in order to prevent readers from locating it and discovering that the fuller content in fact argues against Barnes. Parker's introductory essay leaves one with the clear impression that More's charge is entirely justified, and no reference is provided here to his own later commentary on the 1534 Supplicacion, in which edition Barnes again made use of the quotation, providing the same citation. In his appended notes Parker acknowledges that the words – which had been accurately quoted and translated – are indeed Augustine's, but that in ‘modern’ editions they are found in a sermon other than that cited by Barnes (p. 434). Left unaddressed, however, is the question of whether the further contents of this sermon do indeed undermine Barnes' argument. (They do not.) Also unmentioned is whether, in contrast to modern editions, numbering sometimes varied in pre-modern collections of Augustine's works. (It did.) In any event, that honest error is best assumed is unintentionally demonstrated by Parker himself; at this very point he mis-cites the quotation in question as appearing at lines 2042–7 in his own edition, while in fact it appears some twenty pages later at lines 2848–54.

Perhaps more disappointing in a critical edition, however, is the editor's often uncritical acceptance and repetition of assertions which remain either unproved or disproved. Two such include the matters of Barnes studying under Erasmus (p. 3) and his role in negotiating his king's unhappy marriage to Anne of Cleves (p. 8). Given Parker's admission that his brief biographical essay simply summarises a selection of the (not always reliable) secondary literature on Barnes's life (p. 101), such shortcomings are partially understandable. Far more difficult to comprehend, however, are at least two separate references (pp. 27, 30) to Barnes questioning the canonical status of ‘the second epistle of St James’. (At the second mention of this hitherto unknown epistle, the reader is directed to a passage in Barnes's text where ‘Iaco.2’ is cited, i.e. the second chapter of James's epistle.) Less substantial, but none the less awkward, are minor inconsistencies such as the mention of Barnes making the case for the bondage of the will ‘in the second edition’ of his work (p. 14), followed only a few pages later by the note that this discussion actually appears in ‘both editions’ (p. 17), and then the eventual acknowledgement that the articles in each edition ‘are almost identical’ (p. 37).

It is only fair to note at this point that criticisms such as these touch mostly on Parker's introductory essays, which comprise only 130 of the volume's more than 700 pages. The edited and annotated text of Barnes's 1534 Supplicacion, which makes up the bulk of the work, is happily of the same quality as Parker's previous editions of early Reformation tracts. Barnes's work is reproduced in a clear Roman font with original spelling, punctuation and foliation, while the critical apparatus helpfully defines archaic terms, provides fuller references to Barnes's patristic and medieval sources, and flags similarities between the arguments presented by Barnes and other English evangelicals. Further compliments are deserved for the decision to include as an appendix the full text of the substantially different 1531 edition, thereby facilitating further comparative analysis.

There can be no question that Parker's volume will become the starting point for any future examination of Barnes's thought. But it is precisely for this reason that the many distortions and inaccuracies marring the introductory material must be so lamented. This is a valuable critical edition, but one to be read only with a critical eye.