Crawford Gribben and Scott Spurlock's edited collection reconsiders Puritans and Catholics by examining how the Atlantic context shaped these religious communities and their relationship to one another. The volume, which evolved out of a series of conferences and seminars on radical religion, includes twelve essays covering a variety of approaches and topics. These range in scope from Ema Vyroubalová’s close reading of Puritan minister Samuel Ward's The Double Deliverance (1621) to Philip Lockley's comparative exploration of radical Protestant communal groups and their Catholic connotations. At times, the essays seem to read individually rather than as a cohesive whole, given the variety of disciplinary approaches and the breadth of religious groups under consideration. But the contributors share a central approach to understanding how the Atlantic world fostered religious experience and confessional co-existence. This allows the volume to contribute to a number of historiographic debates connected to early modern religious identity and exchange, including the interplay between conformity and dissent, the reach of Atlantic religious networks, the power and complexity of rhetorical stance, and the nature and process of religious reform.

Gribben states in the volume's introduction that the Atlantic world made possible “new kinds of religious relationship” (1). These relationships—rather than the establishment of Protestantism and Catholicism as “binary and oppositional” (2)—are the focus of the collection. Francis Bremer's well-placed essay sets the tone for this emphasis with a survey of selected “odd couple[s]” (9), members of the same family who were raised in the Church of England but then chose paths that led in some cases to Puritanism and in others to Catholicism. Bremer's prosopography encourages the reader to think about conversion as a personal, complicated process influenced less by family pressure and more by factors such as expanding literacy.

Several of the essays employ an Atlantic framework to explore space and place. Spurlock's contribution locates British and Irish Catholics throughout the British Atlantic, bringing into question their relative absence in a historiography that has stressed British Protestant identity. Spurlock argues that Catholics occupied “a liminal, but integral, space” (38) on the edges of the emerging empire, and he contends that this occupation enabled Catholics to play a critical role in the expansion of the British Atlantic. Spurlock's categorization of Catholic migrants into proprietary colonists, voluntary migrants, and indentured servants is particularly effective in allowing for a consideration of regional variations. Edward Simon brings similar attention to the geography of religion in his essay on Cotton Mather's American Puritan identity, which gives close readings of India Christiana (1721) and Theopolis Americana (1710). Drawing on the spatial turn, Simon suggests that Mather and others reprioritized “space” as sacred, thus reasserting a concept that had been diminished in Protestantism since the Reformation. The essay, while ambitious in the number of arguments it lays out in a short chapter, demonstrates how Mather's American Puritanism came to differ from that of his English counterparts.

The book's introduction begins by noting that “a great deal of recent scholarship has focused on the emergence in early modernity of one or more Atlantic worlds” (1), but the perspective most frequently examined in these essays is limited to the British Atlantic. One notable exception is Andrew Crome's essay which successfully moves beyond the English Atlantic to consider the intellectual networks that allowed for Spanish Catholic influence on Protestant eschatology. Crome's examination of the Jewish Indian theory, which envisioned that Native Americans were the lost tribes of Israel, highlights the place of Judeo-centric eschatology in seventeenth-century radical religious thought. Drawing on David Armitage's terms, Crome proposes an approach to the study of “Atlantic eschatology” that is both circum-Atlantic in recognizing “the circulation of ideas which impact upon religious beliefs” (127) and cis-Atlantic in placing the reception of circulated ideas in localized settings. David Manning likewise takes both circum- and cis-Atlantic approaches in his essay. Manning situates his study in Reformation Jamaica during the years leading up to and including the 1692 earthquake. He probes how competing confessional groups framed Jamaica's “wickedness” in relation to their own respective (and metropolitan) piety. In his consideration of the 1690s, Manning adds to the growing body of scholarship that reexamines the complexity and vibrancy of late Stuart religiopolitical culture.

The larger series to which the book contributes, “Christianities in the Transatlantic World, 1500–1800,” shares the same editors and includes recent monographs and edited collections by several contributors to this volume. Due to the eclectic nature of the volume, as well as its broad chronological scope, readers will likely find certain essays more pertinent than others. Overall, the collection provides a nuanced reassessment of confessional relationships and lays out a number of promising directions for future scholarship on the process of religious reform in the Atlantic world.