This is a useful account of the career of an Anglican cleric in the early eighteenth century. It is likely to achieve a wider readership than might otherwise have been the case because of the first word in its title, although it is ironic that the relevant section of the book is the least satisfactory one. Its subject, Francis Hutchinson, best known for his Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London, 1718; 2nd ed., 1720), began his career as an active cleric in Suffolk and ended it as bishop of Down and Connor. Andrew Sneddon uses him as a “case study” concerning both the effectiveness of pastoral care in the English dioceses in the first decades of the eighteenth century and the improving ideology of the Irish intelligentsia in the 1720s and 1730s. We also hear a great deal about Hutchinson's role as a political activist in support of the Whig establishment of which he was a committed devotee throughout his life; it was to this that he owed the patronage that led to his various preferments. All this is based on careful scrutiny of all the extant documentation, including a manuscript commonplace book and relevant administrative records, as well as Hutchinson's sermons and other published writings.

The opening chapters consider Hutchinson's early career. His activity as perpetual curate at Bury St. Edmunds is the subject of telling scrutiny, in which attention is given to his accommodating attitude toward dissenters and to his educational initiatives linked to his active membership of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Equally significant was his political role: he was elected to Convocation in 1701 and was highly active in it, taking a strongly Whig line not least in its committees, although his local High Church opponents ensured that he failed to be reelected. He also used sermons to promote the Whig cause in politics.

The latter part of the book gives an equally painstaking account of his activity in Ireland in his later years. His appointment as bishop there was a party political appointment that ensured the enmity of those of opposing principles, which he seems to have done little to mitigate. Early in his episcopate, he devoted much effort to trying to convert the local population to Protestantism through the use of the vernacular, although the method he used, of trying to introduce a simplified, phonetic form of Irish, proved rather quixotic. In fact, from the time when he built a mansion so that he could actually live among his flock in Ulster, he seems to have come to feel that Catholicism presented less of a threat than he had felt earlier. Equally significant was his interest in improvement, defending an Irish bank that failed to materialize and championing fisheries and bog drainage.

In addition, a significant section of Sneddon's work is devoted to Hutchinson's treatise on witchcraft, although this is flawed by the fact that a key aspect of the context to the Historical Essay is ignored. By way of background, Sneddon gives a helpful account of Hutchinson's reaction to the French prophets, whom he saw as fraudulent and potentially subversive, and he gives a workmanlike account of Hutchinson's work on witchcraft. In particular, he does justice to various aspects of its relationship to earlier skeptical arguments, emphasizing Hutchinson's hostility to witch beliefs on the grounds that they were superstitious and “enthusiastic.” But what Sneddon ignores is the extent to which, in his book, Hutchinson saw himself as negotiating a route between Scylla and Charybdis, between superstition, on the one hand, and a dangerous degree of skepticism, on the other.

The background to this is illustrated in chapter 14 of my Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy (Woodbridge, 1995), in which Hutchinson's Historical Essay is briefly considered (although Sneddon's background reading has not extended to this). As I there point out, Hutchinson was aware of more radically skeptical attitudes toward witchcraft than his, but the fact that these were associated with free thinkers meant that establishment figures like him had hitherto been rather wary of them. At one point in Hutchinson's book, this point is explicitly made, and the work throughout is salted with allusions to more extreme stances than that which he adopted and to the extent to which even as moderate a position as his had in the past been inhibited by “fear of loose People carrying the Notion too far the other way” (1720 ed., sig. A6; cf. 190, 286–88, 322, and passim). What is revealing about Hutchinson's case is that it represents the point at which skepticism about witchcraft came to be acceptable because outright belief in the phenomenon seemed more dangerous than outright disbelief in it. Hutchinson was content to go part of the way down the skeptical route of the free thinkers because the alternative was the disruptive enthusiasm represented by the popular uproar over the Jane Wenham case or that associated with the French prophets.

Although this might seem a minor oversight on Sneddon's part, it is in fact symptomatic of a broader lacuna in his expertise. Thus, his characterization of John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (1696) is taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography rather than from the extensive secondary literature on the text in question. Is there a danger of a gap opening up in eighteenth-century studies between the worlds of Jeremy Gregory and of Justin Champion, with the likes of Sneddon being disappointingly delimited to the former?