Seventeenth-century Protestant denominations cannot be so cleanly separated as Charles I's head was from his body, and Jonathan Warren Pagán's intellectual biography of Giles Firmin (1614–1697) is a welcome guide through the density of the enmeshments. How do we categorize Bishop John Gauden, who had protested Charles's execution in Cromwell's Bloody Slaughter-House (published belatedly in 1660) but who in the early Restoration had far more irenic impulses? Do we count John Humfrey as sufficiently pledged to Nonconformity, given that his episcopal reordination was so agony inducing that he threw it off—the weight of it having become “like a double garment put on for the fashion” (72)? Across six chapters anchored in transatlantic ecclesial debates, Pagán charts the shifting identities of these and many other understudied Restoration figures with precision and mastery. In his impeccable portrayal, Gauden turns out to be far from the Laudian that Firmin believed he was, while Humfrey's ordeal provides—to this reader, at least—a high-drama gloss for understanding Firmin himself, a conciliator on the model of Richard Baxter who “tended to speak out of both sides of his mouth” (60).

Along the lines of recent works such as Crawford Gibben's John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2016), Pagán refracts ecclesiastical dynamism through an individual, for example by stressing that Firmin was unique in distinguishing between Independents and Congregationalists. Such parsing, however, should not be taken to mean that Pagán seeks to reprise old debates about whether there was, in fact, a group called Puritan. Pagán's text is instead a fine-boned inquiry into religion and politics. If his subtitle makes fitting reference to Peter White's Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992), it is because one of his guiding premises is that Christianity in post-Reformation England is the story of conflict and accommodation among factions. Pagán explores that history through the person and polemics of Giles Firmin, following him as he wrestled with issues pertaining to church order, authority, and points of doctrine. No one has made so careful or so comprehensive a study of Firmin until now.

Chapter 1 looks at Firmin's time in Massachusetts and its influence on his subsequent ecclesiology to 1651, homing in on Firmin's efforts to redeem New England Congregationalism from the charge of separatism, even as his own Presbyterianism adopted moderate episcopal strands. And yet, Pagán notes, Firmin's “‘bottom up’ form of Presbyterianism was blended with some Congregationalist themes” (13–14). This is, effectively, the takeaway of the book at large; subsequent chapters follow Firmin's equivocations and reconciliations in different contexts. Chapter 2, where both Gauden and Humfrey make their appearance, details the contest between both “broad” and “rigid” Presbyterians and “prelatical” and “primitive” Episcopalians regarding the office of the bishop and set forms, reading Firmin as making rhetorical rather than actual concessions to moderate episcopacy. Chapter 3 turns to explicit matters of soul, showing how Firmin's The Real Christian (1670) tempered—while it retained—orthodox ideas about the ordo salutis and the nature of faith by privileging “the duty to accept Christ over the duty to be prepared to accept Christ” (105). Chapter 4 uses the debate surrounding Edwards Stillingfleet's 1680 The Mischief of Separation to broadcast the impressive adaptability of the slur of popery, following Erastian and/or Latitudinarian divines and a cast of Dissenters as they disparaged each other for making “a fair Bridg laid to go over to Rome” (183). Pagán charts Firmin's shifting position in the feud: an advocate of Presbyterian comprehension in the 1660s, by the 1680s his emphasis on conscience tilted Firmin toward a “Duckling” party that could no longer countenance the possibility. Chapter 5 explores Firmin's place in paedobaptist/anti-paedobaptist debates during the 1670s–1680s that manifest the “fracturing of godly Dissent” (230), while chapter 6, in a way analogous to chapter 4, traces Firmin's efforts to “rise above” intra-Presbyterian disputes in the 1680s–1690s that mobilized the specter of antinomianism to make competing claims about the nature of justification.

Ecclesiastical, soteriological, or exegetical differences between parties or persons were often the width of a knife's edge—though accused of trafficking with antinomians, for example, “it is difficult to distinguish what [Richard] Davis was teaching from what any solifidian divine would have affirmed” (248)—and at times one might wonder if Pagán's splicing is not too fine. Perhaps the more interesting issue, though, is why such a meticulous distinction as naming Davis “an energetic Independent orthodox Calvinist” (251) should matter, given that, as Pagán notes, “the term Presbyterian was problematic as an identifier in the early Restoration and even beyond the Act of Uniformity in 1662” (58). As a literary scholar of American Puritanism, I find that chapters 2 and 4 come closer to answering the question by understanding Firmin's negotiations between Episcopalian and Presbyterian strands as contributing to disputes that were essentially polemical—to arguments about words and, thereby, about the Word itself. In doing so, he wonderfully begins to reconfigure discussion of religious and politics as a triangulation of religion, politics, and language.

My only quibble is that the text is not sufficiently transatlantic. New England really only appears in chapter 3, where Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard, whose harder views of preparationism serve as a foil to Firmin's calibration of the doctrine, strike me as too much like strawmen. To this objection, one could rightly say that Pagán is hardly seeking to provide anything so encyclopedic as David D. Hall's The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton University Press, 2019); this is, after all, a book about Firmin (and besides which, one cannot address the complexities of every figure one introduces). In this case, however, it is even less clear to me why Pagán does not engage episodes in New England history that might significantly illuminate Firmin's particularities. Reference to the Antinomian Controversy (1636–1638) could be far more robust in chapters 1 and 5, and the absence of any discussion of the Halfway Covenant is a badly missed opportunity, since New England's debate about who should be accepted for church membership (and so warrant the rite of baptism) inspired a pamphlet war between synodalists and anti-synodalists that the paedobaptists/anti-paedopbaptists dispute effectively mirrors. Overall, though, this is a book to be commended. It is a boon for our understanding of seventeenth-century theological politics, whose irreplaceable account of Giles Firmin is a model of biographical nuance, originality, and care.