Two books have been published by Cambridge University Press at exactly the same time and on fairly similar, in many passages even overlapping, issues. While Nicholas Jackson's monograph analyses the famous and prolonged debate between the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the Anglican bishop John Bramhall on questions concerning political and religious authority, Jon Parkin's book examines and describes how Hobbes's political ideas were first received and discussed, then rejected or carefully modified by a great variety of Anglican divines and clergymen (among them Bramhall) in seventeenth-century England. As it is not the reviewer's task to comment on the wisdom of the publisher's marketing strategy, I choose rather to concentrate on the discussion of the analytical and rhetorical virtues of the two books – of which there are many.

Nicholas Jackson's book is a thoroughly researched and well-written study of the notorious and heated dispute between Hobbes and one of his most prominent Anglican adversaries, John Bramhall, bishop of Derry, on theological problems pertaining to free will, predestination, liberty and free choice, but also on political matters such as the rights and duties of the civil magistrate or the role of the Anglican episcopacy within the constitutional framework of the English body politic. Although Hobbes's and Bramhall's long-lasting quarrel has been repeatedly discussed in a number of scholarly articles, it has never been dealt with in such painstaking detail. Jackson paints a very colourful picture of the two antagonists and emphasises that they were as oddly matched physically as intellectually. Apparently, the bishop was of middle stature, his complexion highly sanguine, pretty deeply tinctured with choler; Hobbes, on the other hand, had yellowish-reddish whiskers, lively and hazel eyes and he was six foot high – quite tall by contemporary standards, which is why a German visitor exclaimed in 1675 in amazement that the philosopher was a truly, ‘ein langer Mann‘ (p. 87). Jackson also relishes telling anecdotes about the rather nasty aspects of the two men's conflict. Thus he points out that the irascible bishop on one particular occasion even ‘successfully deprived Hobbes of money’ (p. 177) only to do him harm. Apart from offering a vivid portrayal of the two combatants' personal animosities, the main aim of the book is, of course, to highlight the general importance of their public dispute – a dispute that started in 1645 and only ended with the bishop's death in 1663 – by connecting it to the broader conflict, disorder and violence that characterised this era of the Civil Wars (1638–49) and Interregnum (1649–60). In a period of political unrest and turmoil, when England was in an entirely unsettled condition, Hobbes and Bramhall needed each other not only to sharpen their wits, but to reciprocally re-examine the validity of their divergent doctrines on Christianity, law and government. Whereas the bishop laid claim to a unique apostolic-divine and independent authority of ecclesiastics, pretending that churchmen wielded power for which they were indebted to no earthly ruler, Hobbes denied the Anglican bishops and clergy any special status or gifts that would make them independent of the civil sovereign. Especially in his Leviathan of 1651, the philosopher hoped to demonstrate that England's political troubles could only be healed if everyone agreed that only the civil magistrate, as the country's sole legitimate sovereign, was entitled to decide in all contested matters ecclesiastical or political – in order eventually to end feuding and fanaticism.

While Jackson describes with admirable accuracy how much the formation of Hobbes's mature political thought between 1640 and 1660 owed to his continuous debate with Bramhall, John Parkin is predominantly interested in the fortunes of Hobbesian political philosophy after the Restoration and up to the year 1700. On the one hand, Parkin agrees with Jackson that Bramhall and other leading Anglican theologians such as Henry Hammond and John Cosin, bishop of Durham, remained fiercely hostile to Hobbes's resolute erastianism; yet other divines found his political theory in many respects too useful to ignore. Obviously, the reception of Hobbes played more of a role among Anglican clerics in the second half of the seventeenth century than is commonly supposed. Parkin, who has consulted and examined a wide variety of manuscript sources – sermons, poems and even plays – presents his elegantly written account of ‘Anglican Hobbism’ (p. 239) with great expertise and skill and with an always entertaining portion of laconic humour. Thus he tells us that the Anglican propagandist Samuel Parker, chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury, and author of the Discourse of ecclesiastical polity (1669), tried to refute Protestant dissenters and advocates of toleration by having recourse to theoretical tools offered by Hobbes. Although Parker did not want to become associated with Hobbism, he nevertheless shared the philosopher's opinion that no one but the sovereign – now Charles ii, head of the re-established Church of England – should exercise the supreme religious authority and hold dissenters at bay. Claims of conscience, as Parker pointed out, could not take precedence over the requirements of a generally binding social and religious order. No wonder that one of his dissenter critics observed that Parker had argued like ‘a young Leviathan himself’ (p. 256). However, many prominent Anglicans shared with Parker – and, as it were, with Hobbes – a sense of the danger posed by unregulated religious enthusiasm and the role of the magistrate in restraining such forces. The royal chaplain Edward Stillingfleet and Richard Cumberland, bishop of Peterborough, generously allowed the sovereign to have an extensive jurisdiction in Church and State, legitimated only by his responsibility to act for the common good. Ironically, their Hobbesian propagation of the sovereign's supreme religious authority was later turned against them and the interests of the Latitudinarian Church of England, when, during the Glorious Revolution – called by Parkin the ‘most Hobbesian of moments’ (p. 414) – the new monarch William iii employed his religious authority in an extraordinary move to grant dissenters for the first time exemption from penalties with the Toleration Act of 1689.

Together these monographs help us to appreciate how important the debates between Hobbes and his Anglican contemporaries (and their reception of his political ideas) actually were, as these intellectual pursuits ensured that England eventually became laicised – or secularised, for that matter – and, up to this very day, secure against theocracies of any kind.