Students of both the Restoration Church and later Stuart nonconformity will welcome this lively and stimulating account of the ministry of Oliver Heywood, curate of the chapelry of Coley in the huge and unwieldy parish of Halifax in the West Riding of Yorkshire, an account which pays close attention to his activities as a clergyman either side of his ejection from the curacy in 1662. Heywood's extensive diaries and notebooks are well known (there is a printed nineteenth-century edition), but despite foundational work by Bill Sheils, John Smail and others, he has hitherto not garnered the kind of attention that has been lavished on other seventeenth-century godly diarists, such as Ralph Josselin or Nehemiah Wallington. Thomas is not offering a conventional biography, but rather a perspective on ‘the complex and shifting religious terrain of Restoration Halifax’ (p. 32), and, by extension, Restoration England. The principal concern is to rehabilitate the much-debated concept of ‘community’ by emphasising the relative integration of Heywood and his ‘society’ of nonconformists into the social, and indeed ecclesiastical, life of the locality. Here, Thomas is swimming with the prevailing historiographical tide, though he takes pointed issue with scholars, such as Dan Beaver, who emphasise the depth of the social and ritual divide between Anglicans and dissenters. Despite the hostility of the High Church vicar of Halifax (Richard Hooke), and the difficulties created for him by the Five Mile Act, Heywood continued to minister to members of his former congregation at Coley, sometimes even (with the connivance of his successors as curate) preaching in the pulpit there. In all of this Thomas paints a largely convincing picture of the fluid and porous nature of denominational identities in the region, and of the extent to which Heywood personally confounds the stereotype of the inflexible and sectarian Puritan minister. In places, the hand seems over-played. A key piece of evidence for Heywood's commitment to the ideal of ‘inclusive religious community’ (p. 95) is his attendance at a funeral wake in 1676. But in the relevant diary entry, Heywood emphasises that ‘I did not drink’ with the mourners – itself a socially divisive act – and he reproaches himself for not having protested more ‘against their vain way’. Arguably, Thomas ties himself in too many conceptual and terminological knots over definitions of community, which at times seem to equate to sociability and at times to something more, and which modulate between a unitary notion and one of multiple ‘overlapping communities’. None the less, this is a sensitive portrait of the paradoxes of a fifty-year pastorate, and a valuable contribution to debates over the local character of religious life in the late Stuart era.