This volume – the work of nineteen contributors and consisting of as many essays – is of value to the historian of historiography in several ways. It shows to what an extent, and how valuably, this subject has been pervaded – at least with regard to early modern England – by students and departments of English literature, and how far that branch of study has ceased to be simply a history of speech and thinking and become a social history of culture as well. Closer, perhaps, to its former character, this volume displays a continuing and critical concern with a question first asked a generation ago: whether there occurred a ‘historical revolution’ in Tudor-Stuart England, as proclaimed by F. Smith Fussner in a work with that title in 1962, and as Joseph M. Levine seems not unwilling to endorse in more recent writings. The debate here learnedly pursued follows familiar lines – what are and should be the uses of the word ‘revolution’? How far was the work of the early humanists rooted in that of the later chroniclers? – and is probably more interesting for the evidence it brings to light than for any conclusions it may reach; we find ourselves studying a rich early modern literature and culture. (The early modern, by the way, is carried about as far as 1714; but Levine and the present reviewer would apply the adjective to Gibbon, Robertson and Hume.) The readers of this Journal, however, will find most profit in David Womersley's contention (pp. 91–104) that this ‘revolution debate’ is misdirected because limited to secular history, and that the Protestant (plus or minus Church of England) rewriting of church history was more truly ‘revolutionary’. Felicity Heal (pp. 105–28), John King (pp. 129–46), Christopher Highley (pp. 147–68), John Spurr (pp. 307–28) and Andrew Starkie (pp. 329–46) contribute essays carrying English ecclesiastical historiography down to the period after 1688. Should not the ‘early modern’ be extended towards (not to) the ending of ‘the long eighteenth century’? Another ‘revolution debate,’ however, we might manage without.