This book is a much-needed new study of the Dutch Hebraist and Collegiant Adam Boreel (1602–65). We are taken through the life of this fascinating person (part i ‘The Life of Adam Boreel’) and receive a thorough introduction to and analysis of his extant works (part ii ‘The Thought of Adam Boreel’). The myriad of captivating individuals that receive attention – Menassah ben Israel, Galenus Abrahamsz and Passchier de Fijne to mention a few – showcase a period in which innovative minds and personalities engaged with each other, creating transnational and interdisciplinary networks of knowledge. Quatrini leads us gently through the subtle streams of thought that influenced Boreel and his contemporaries, and consequently introduces a great variety of denominations – from Spiritualists, Millenarians and Mennonites, to Collegiants and Anabaptists. In differentiating and connecting these groups Boreel is an impressive and valuable guide. There is a notable Anglo-Dutch dimension to Boreel's life and work that ‘places him at the cutting edge of the Dutch and English intellectual world of the seventeenth century’ (p. 383). Within this tumult of exchange, the book is filled with intriguing nods to religious aspects of the period that give the life and work of Boreel further colour and depth, such as the Rosicrucians or Judah Leon's model of Salomon's temple, famous throughout Europe but now sadly lost (pp. 69–70). There is much reading pleasure to be found here.

Boreel is a complex character: a Hebraist educated at Leiden, founder of the non-confessional Amsterdam College, and spokesperson for the Amsterdam Collegiants in the 1640s and early 1650s, involved with the Whitehall Conference on the readmission of the Jews into England in the mid-1650s, and an irenic missionary. His vision of a non-confessional and non-institutionalised community, in the Cultum conniventiae, where lay readings and discussions of the Scripture were the only worship (chapter viii) nicely captures his key tenets. His most important, albeit anonymously published, work Ad legem et ad testimonium (1645), argues against ecclesiastical authority, promoting instead freedom to prophecy and religious toleration. The tract prompted two published critiques, by Samuel Desmarets and Johannes Hoornbeeck, and Boreel clearly relished the debate, publishing four further pamphlets (1647–8), encouraging all to respond to his work. This call for open discourse stands, however, in stark contrast to his disinclination to publish many of his other works.

Overall, Quatrini gives the impression of a man driven by powerful convictions of toleration, in which the state was not allowed to meddle in spiritual affairs, where Christians are united in religious peace, thereby paving the way for union with God (chapter x). Occasionally, these tensions within Boreel's thought and life could have been further elaborated on; for example, the position between rationalism and religion that Boreel occupied was precarious, both intellectually and politically.

Though Boreel is the lens through which we view the period, and the milieu of Nonconformity in the Netherlands (and to a lesser extent in England), the book also makes several other significant contributions. For example, an updated account of the Amsterdam College is provided, as well as short biographical sketches of fellow Collegiant and Middelburger Galenus Abrahamszoon de Haan (pp. 108–20, 163–8), the relationship between the Quakers and the Collegiants in Amsterdam (pp. 178–83) and engagement with the works and thought of early Spiritualists, such as David Joris, Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Caspar Schwenckfeld (pp. 224–9, 248–57). As a result, the work is contextually very rich; perhaps for the same reason the text is occasionally prone to repetition of its guiding ideas and information, though the line of argument is never lost.

More widely, Quatrini adds some precise and telling observations on the intellectual history of the mid- and later seventeenth century. Jonathan Israel's three monumental studies – Radical Enlightenment (Oxford 2001), Enlightenment contested (Oxford 2008) and Democratic Enlightenment (Oxford 2011) – argue for a revisiting of the traditional narrative that the Enlightenment started in France, and proposes instead that its foundations lay in Holland and foremost with the rationalism of the philosophers Spinoza and Bayle; religious thinking is to be distrusted as a locus of state power. Quatrini offers us an alternative, though not mutually exclusive view, where ‘religious’ and ‘thinker’ need not be so separated: ‘against Israel's interpretation of the early and “radical” Enlightenment, I suggest that the question of how and if religious thinkers – be they Spinoza's friends or members of other religious dissenting groups – contributed to the shaping of Enlightenment concepts and practices prior to and during the 1660s is still open’ (p. 4). Quatrini says from the outset that settling this particular question is not the main aim of the monograph, but it remains an additional ambition, and highlighting the works and thought of the Collegiants certainly is a vital contribution to the conversation surrounding the origins and nature of the early Enlightenment.

The book is a large and satisfying addition to current scholarship. The most obvious contribution is as an updated study of Adam Boreel's standing as an important thinker, religious organiser and member of intriguing and widespread networks. Boreel is a key figure for the study of (radical) thinkers in England and the Netherlands, their exchange of thought and their importance for later writers. Further examination of his group of acquaintances, and its importance to the early Enlightenment, is clearly worthwhile. The impressive footnote apparatus throughout gives a wealth of information on the figures, events and religious denominations surrounding Boreel, as well as quotations from the primary sources in the original languages. This is an impressive body of work. In a similar vein, the correction of several misconceptions about the Collegiants, Boreel and his texts (including the revised bibliography, pp. 194–215), is valuable and instructive. Perhaps most exciting, Quatrini has set in motion future work of equal depth; in his introduction other Collegiants are noted as still awaiting their moment – Daniel de Breen, Cornelis Moorman, Jan Knol and Frans Kuyper (p. 8). It is to be hoped that they will receive equally scholarly and dedicated attention in their turn.