In recent years there has been much discussion of that rather gelatinous concept Erasmianism. Did it really exist? And if there was an Erasmian legacy, was it a matter of doctrine or of style? While Erasmus' name did surface in various contexts throughout the early modern period, was it there simply to be dropped? Gregory Dodds's businesslike study of his legacy in England is a major step towards a better understanding of the ways in which Erasmus' reputation was exploited by later generations. His survey covers the period from the Henrician break with Rome in the 1530s down to the legalisation of dissent in 1689, a period during which the ideal of a single, inclusive national Church hovered in the wings. For the most part Dodds shies away from ‘influence’, preferring the more passive connotations of ‘legacy’. The essential thrust of Erasmus' spiritual writings was to assert the role of subjectivity in the reception of grace: public acts are made valid by a movement of the heart. But his apparent radicalism always assumed the containing structures of Catholicism. Once the Reformers attacked these structures Erasmus' initial hint of sympathy withered, and yet his exposure of contemporary abuses had its value as a means of disengaging the devout from traditional piety – at ‘plucking awaye erronyous opynyons’, in John Olde's words. Erasmus might not lead the faithful into new pastures, but he got them on the move. This no doubt explains the inclusion of his Paraphrases of the New Testament among those books ordered by Edward vi's Injunctions of 1547 to be placed in parish churches, a requirement endorsed by Elizabeth in 1559. To Dodds this is crucial: direct interest might wane, especially after the 1570s, but Erasmus remained available as a ‘counterpoint’ within the legacy of the English Church, a reassurance for those who resisted the domination of predestinarian theology or regarded it as an indifferent issue, an adiaphoron. Church unity, conceived in terms of the mystical body of Christ, was a paramount concern for Erasmus, and underlay his attempts to foster reconciliation. Indeed, adherence to such unity overrode all but the most fundamental doctrines of the faith: as he sourly observed to Jan Šlechta, ‘as far as concerns divisions in the faith, it would be a more tolerable calamity … if all shared the same error’. Repeatedly he identifies heresy not with intellectual error but with disruptive malice, hence his desire to restrict definition to ‘such things as are clearly laid down in Holy Writ or without which the system of our salvation cannot stand’. All other issues are therefore adiaphora, open to debate but without threatening inclusivity. Such an ‘indifferent’ approach would be anathema to the advocates of absolute predestination, but to those who sought to salvage some role for human responsibility it provided legitimacy. Even more important, in Dodds's argument, is the way in which Erasmus' rhetoric of inclusivity, with its emphasis on unity and consensus, became in its turn a powerful resource for opposing nonconformity. While the low point in English printings of Erasmus' works can be placed between 1580 and 1606, matching the surge in Calvinism, the seventeenth century saw a marked revival of interest, most memorably in the writings of the Tew circle. In any case, as Dodds observes, Erasmus' methodology of theological uncertainty ‘remains the most complete antecedent to Hooker's thought’, and as such it played a significant part in the disputes about church discipline which led towards the Civil War: ‘the rhetoric of peace, love and unity now sanctified royalist violence’. It is no surprise to find that after the Restoration there is a dramatic increase in Erasmus' popularity, thanks to Stillingfleet and other ‘men of latitude’. Not the least virtue of the book is the range of reading that Dodds deploys, and he uses it to construct a persuasive argument. One or two slips occur (Stephen Gardiner was never Mary Tudor's archbishop) but this study brings a new precision to discussion of Erasmus' legacy.