The essays in Sin and Salvation in Reformation England emerged from a 2013 conference on the Ten Commandments and they examine “the shifting definitions of sin and salvation in reformation and post-reformation England, as well as the reality of the ways in which these beliefs were modified and negotiated in practice” (15). Beginning with a framing introduction by the Jonathan Willis, the volume's editor, and concluding with an afterword by Alexandra Walsham, the essays, which cover a broad range of topics, are organized into four groups.

Part one, “Defining Sin and Salvation,” treats doctrinal themes. Ralph S. Werrell argues that William Tyndale was “a theological genius” (24) whose soteriology was focused on the “Blood of Christ,” but he surprisingly does not mention or engage Carl Trueman's important analysis of Tyndale's soteriology in Luther's Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (1994). The two following essays focus on the Elizabethan bishop John Jewel. André A. Gazal argues that Jewel's soteriology was influenced by the doctrine of his friend Peter Martyr Vermigli and suggests that while Jewel affirmed forensic justification, his soteriology also emphasized “spiritual union with Christ as the prime source, and indeed the essence of salvation” (51). Angela Ransom finds Jewel rejecting Roman claims to catholicity in his debate with Thomas Harding and instead articulating a vision of “spiritual catholicity” in which the Church of England participated and “could direct its members in the way of salvation” (64). In the section's concluding essay, one of the volume's finest, Willis offers a fascinating analysis that shows how the well-known Reformation-era shift from the Seven Deadly Sins to the Ten Commandments was far more complicated than is often realized, highlighting ways in which the Decalogue required “some quite creative accounting” (74) to make it work as a master moral code.

Part two loosely coheres around the theme “Contesting Sin and Salvation” and begins with an essay by Lucy Nicholas arguing that Roger Ascham deserves to be treated as a theologian—not just a humanist pedagogue—and that Ascham's critique of the mass was deeply influenced by Martin Luther's writings. Sheilagh Ilona O'Brien's essay offers a careful analysis of the contrasting ways in which an individual could describe their own sin by examining how Elizabeth Clarke altered an earlier confession of witchcraft when appearing before magistrates in 1645, not in order to deny her sin, but to render it more excusable and pitiable in their eyes. Historians of martyrdom will find the section's middle chapter—a Foucauldian analysis by Margarita Leonti, “Sin, Salvation, and Female Sexuality in John Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’”—deeply problematic, not least in its interpretation of the pregnant martyr Perotine Massey's giving birth amidst the flames as the “outcome of an incestuous relationship within the familial boundaries of the martyr's matrimonial alliance with God” (115).

Far more persuasive is the first essay in part three, “Reforming Sin and Salvation,” in which Stephen Bates stresses continuities between the Protestant rejection of the Virgin Mary's soteriological power and late medieval Catholic disputes on the subject, concluding that “Protestantism largely appropriated criticisms that had long characterised the reforming wing of the Catholic Church” (156). The remaining essays in this part focus on soteriological tensions created by the English Reformation, especially concerning the doctrine of predestination. Anna French's chapter argues that the Church of England's reformed baptismal rite created a great deal of ambiguity and debate regarding the necessity of baptism, its role in salvation, and predestination. Maria Devlin's chapter makes valuable points about the importance of attending to rhetorical form when assessing the doctrine of predestination's effects on early modern people. While Protestant systematic theologies might lead a reader to “debilitating” despair through their relentlessly logical format, Devlin argues, most people would have encountered Protestant doctrine through sermons, dialogues, catechisms, plays, and liturgies whose rhetorical forms emphasized “temporality, indeterminacy, and human agency” and more likely inspired “not despair, but hope” (174–75). The section concludes with an essay by Elizabeth Clarke about Lucy Hutchinson's “wavering” (206) over the doctrine of Preparationism and her attempts to wrestle with human and divine agency in the process of salvation.

The volume's fourth and final part, “Living with Sin and Salvation,” begins with an essay by Sarah Bastow that examines these themes in the sermons of Edwin Sandys, which varied according to his audience and consistently stressed themes of good order. While one would expect to find these topics addressed in sermons, Tara Hamling's essay shows that people literally lived in the midst of these themes, focusing specifically on the presence of salvific imagery in and around the domestic hearths of post-Reformation England. Analyzing mantle pieces and cast-iron firebacks that depicted Marian martyrs and the Old Testament narrative of angelic deliverance from Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace, Hamling not only shows how salvific imagery was a part of Protestant everyday life but also raises interesting points about how the material context of these images shaped people's engagement with their content. In the section's final essay, Robert Warren Daniel considers puritan life writing in the first half of the seventeenth century. Starting with the puritan conception of the conscience as a book, Daniel shows how puritans “regarded the writing of their ‘book of conscience’ as a record of God's work within their lives and their lives as a record of work towards God” (258).

As this brief summary reveals, the essays in this volume cover an extremely wide range of ground. While readers will note the uneven quality of the collection—an unfortunately reality that bedevils such volumes—it provides a revealing window into the sort of work being done at the moment on sin and salvation, subjects that it rightly describes as “the two central religious preoccupations of men and women in sixteenth-century England” (1).