Andrew Ballitch's The Gloss and the Text fills an important gap in the market: its subject should be of interest to anyone working in the field of early modern puritanism. The book's subject, Elizabethan theologian and pastor William Perkins, despite often being described as one of the most important Protestant thinkers of his era, remains chronically under-researched. This is particularly curious in relation to his approach to scripture given both Perkins's influence and his own focus on sola scriptura. Perkins has often been stereotyped either as a cold logician or as a crude literalist, and we should be grateful to Ballitch for doing something to put the record straight in this clearly argued and deftly analyzed account.

The Gloss and the Text has many merits, not the least of which is its impressive clarity and concision—surveying a sizeable portion of Perkins's considerable corpus in a couple of hundred pages is an impressive achievement. Ballitch's central argument is that scripture rather than logical subdivision was central to the construction of Perkins's theology, and that he did this by following a highly consistent method. Perkins used three approaches to interpret challenging scriptural passages: “context” (using evidence presented in the surrounding text), “collation” (drawing on other biblical texts for comparison), and “the analogy of faith” (wider factors defined somewhat variously, but including logical principles such as non-contradiction, and the foundation of supposedly self-interpreting parts of the Bible, such as the Lord's Prayer and Decalogue). Using these three methods, Ballitch argues, Perkins was able fully to embrace the sola scriptura principle and to place the Bible at the heart of everything he wrote (66–68).

Ballitch's structure and approach are straightforward: he seeks to prove his thesis by analyzing a series of Perkins's writings, loosely grouped by genre. There are benefits and drawbacks to this. It is useful for the reader to be able to refer quickly to Ballitch's handling of any given publication by Perkins. His argument also benefits from being related specifically to particular texts, rather than being presented via a cherry-picked jumble of quotes from across Perkins's corpus. However, because Ballitch's argument is very simply that Perkins used all three hermeneutic methods in everything he wrote, the effect of his chosen structure is to present the argument in cyclical rather than cumulative terms. The conclusions at the end of each chapter are strikingly similar to each other, and Ballitch almost never compares a point in one chapter with something that has been discussed previously.

Ballitch's handling of wider contexts also has its pros and cons. Ballitch is a theologian and a pastor by training, not a historian, and there are some obvious gaps in his bibliography. Nevertheless—and far more than do many authors writing from similar perspectives about similar subjects—he sees the social, economic, and political contexts in which Perkins operated as important, and Ballitch begins each chapter with a helpful summary of the relevant background issues. One context conspicuously and surprisingly missing from The Gloss and the Text, though, is one that should have been central to the project itself. Ballitch quotes Perkins but does not pick up on his subject's anxieties: “To make many senses of Scripture is to overturne all sense, and to make nothing certaine” (65). A paradox of the Reformation was that the Bible simultaneously became more central to faith and an increasingly problematic foundation upon which to erect one's piety and identity. The meanings of scripture were contested like never before, and the reformers’ early optimism about the unifying potential of the sola scriptura principle soon proved woefully naïve. There is nothing in Ballitch's book about this. Indeed, it strikes me as remarkable that Ballitch never talks specifically about which version(s) of the Bible Perkins made use of, or to what extent he deployed his knowledge of ancient languages to compare translations. The most obvious result of this omission of context is that Ballitch's often excellent excavation of Perkins's hermeneutical maneuvers can feel somewhat inward-looking, and skewed toward the view that Bible is the font of solutions, not problematic in itself. The implication that the Bible was one thing rather than many is unhelpful to say the least.

Whether accidentally or otherwise, Ballitch seems so convinced by the efficacy of Perkins's three methods of interpretation that he never countenances the idea that alternative, conflicting readings would have been possible using exactly the same methods. After all, “context” and “collation” are broad categories, and much depends on which scriptural evidence one chooses to feed into them. Ballitch insists in his conclusion that what Perkins was up to was “not mere prooftexting” (226)—and he is certainly right that this was not merely what Perkins was up to. However, the “analogy of faith” method comes very close to this at times, and Ballitch seems curiously unwilling to allow that Perkins may sometimes have arrived at Reformed Protestant conclusions as a result of having Reformed Protestant premises. For instance, Ballitch gives no indication that anything other than a fair reading of scripture was involved in Perkins's judgment that the seven heads of the Whore of Babylon must refer to the seven hills that surround Rome. Ballitch may insist that this follows from Perkins's reading of the “context” (197), but I would argue that it also stems from his “analogy of faith.” Ballitch argues that the “analogy of faith” was “not a manmade paradigm” (223), but it seems to me perverse to exclude confessional identity from this category. However, his headline argument that Perkins was “interpreting scripture with scripture” may have been undermined had he conceded this point.

Ballitch was closer to the mark when he wisely, if briefly, noted that “historical context determined [Perkins's] emphases, his doctrinal topics, and his opponents” (225). But for the most part, Ballitch is a little too keen to imply that Perkins deployed something akin to a scientific method, rather than a much messier hodge-podge of methods, assumptions, and post facto justifications. The Gloss and the Text has a great deal to commend it, even if—rather like Perkins's Bible—it raises as many questions as it answers.