This substantial new study of early English Baptists is full of fresh insights and perspectives. In a contextually sensitive fashion, and with thorough attention to detail, the book traces the complex trajectory of early English Baptist history and thought in its formative phase during the religiously and politically disruptive period from the accession of James i to the end of the Civil War. According to Wright's substantial and sophisticated exploration of a wide range of pertinent sources, the Baptist narrative of those early decades rarely unfolded along the predictable, well-worn lines of ‘Particular’ and ‘General’ Baptists which denominational histories have typically followed for the purpose of orderly and neat classification. From its origins within the radical Puritan and separatist setting through the disruptive years of the Revolution, Wright argues that Baptist identity emerged in far more complicated and evolving patterns that reveal disparate tendencies at work within developing Baptist paradigms. Wright notes, for example, that the first ‘General Baptists’ who emerged in 1609 from the Ancient separatist church in Amsterdam were themselves quickly divided into, on the one hand, a more clericalist and pacifist-orientated ecclesiology favoured by John Smyth, and on the other, the more patriotic and congregationally directed views of Thomas Helwys and John Murton who, with a small offshoot of Smyth's congregation, had returned to England in 1611/12. In a similar fashion, the emergence of an English Baptist immersionist party in London of the 1630s was not limited only to ‘Particular Baptists’ who self-consciously embraced strict Calvinist doctrines on predestination and the atonement. Prior to the publication of the London Confession of 1644, Wright concludes, ‘there is little evidence that there existed any group of churches self-defined or definable as a Particular Baptist “denomination” or “proto-denomination”’ (p. 110). In this way, Wright raises numerous questions about the details as well as commonly accepted interpretations surrounding the evolving story of a Baptist tradition in early Stuart England, and in turn offers a carefully nuanced and highly engaging tour of early English Baptist life and thought.