Books investigating the relation between the Continental Reformation and England are always welcome additions to studies of early modern intellectual history. This work concentrating on the influence of the Lutheran theologian and Wittenberg professor, Philip Melanchthon, brings to light an important but oft neglected aspect of the development of early Protestantism in England. Unfortunately, as praiseworthy as the topic may be, the author fails fully to deliver an essay worthy of it.

The author investigates Philip Melanchthon's relation to the English Reformation, starting with the Henrician reforms and Thomas Cranmer and ending with the reign of Elizabeth I, whose private religious practices and beliefs, he argues, were shaped by Melanchthonian sensibilities. It is this final chapter that is most cogent and compelling. The “English Deborah” had deeper commitments to Lutheran theology (especially the Augsburg Confession and Melanchthon's theological textbook, the Loci communes) than many have realized. Rather than reduce her contacts with the Saxon elector, August I, to diplomacy, Schofield shows how Melanchthon's thought influenced Elizabeth.

By contrast, the first chapter, sketching the life and thought of Melanchthon, Wittenberg's other reformer, is sadly inadequate to the task. The author seems completely unaware of the most recent work on Melanchthon (in English or German), especially the stellar biography by the dean of twentieth-century Melanchthon studies, Heinz Scheible. To base this chapter on two outdated sources—a German biography from the 1950s and an American one from 1898—is simply poor scholarship. It is hard to imagine how the editors of this series failed to notice this poor use of secondary sources.

The result is that on the first few pages alone there are a host of half-truths and mistakes. There is no clear proof, for example, that Melanchthon's father died from drinking poisoned water from a well (it was merely the family's assumption). Melanchthon's father was not simply a craftsman (armorer) but a very important part of the Palatine court in Heidelberg in charge of its ordnance. Melanchthon was only related to Johannes Reuchlin by marriage. He received his earliest education not from the town school in Bretten but from a tutor. Reuchlin's sister did not “bring” Melanchthon to Pforzheim for further education. These all on the first page alone. None damages the overall argument; however, when a scholar handles the basic facts of his subject's life (all of which could have been straightened out by reading Scheible's biography) so clumsily, it is hard to trust him on weightier matters.

Thus, in line with older, outmoded scholarship, he imagines that Melanchthon acted as an independent agent during the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 (87) and that he stubbornly refused to yield on the question of distributing the cup to the laity (despite the fact that communion in one kind was still allowed in Saxony up until 1538). He is ignorant (140 n. 13) of the well-documented various editions of Melanchthon's Apology of the Augsburg Confession and thus cannot understand what he terms a “variant reading” of the text, when in fact the second Latin edition and its German translation were the standard texts until 1584. He does not even adequately distinguish (163–64) between the Augsburg Interim of 1548 and the so-called Leipzig Interim (Melanchthon's proposal presented to a provincial Saxon diet meeting in Leipzig in December 1548 but never approved). He then paints Melanchthon's commentary on the Nicene Creed as intent on compromise, interested in evangelical unity, but sadly impractical, not realizing that it was part of the regular lectures at the University of Wittenberg. (He also is unaware of the new edition of Melanchthon's work on the Nicene Creed published by Hans-Peter Hasse in 1996, of the critical edition of the 1555 Loci communes edited by Ralf Jenett and Johannes Schilling, and of any work by Sachiko Kusukawa from Oxford University.)

Underneath such factual errors and ignorance of the most up-to-date sources lurks an even more serious problem. The author does not always distinguish clearly between historical probabilities and speculation. Thus, he suggests, without any proof and despite the recent work of the University of Toronto scholar James Estes, that Melanchthon's 1539 tract on the office of magistrate (De officio principum) seemed addressed to Henry VIII and Francis I. Worse yet, he does not understand the import of the tract itself since Melanchthon there is arguing for more princely authority in religious matters, not less, something with which Henry might well have agreed.

A century ago, it was still a popular English (and American) pastime to write what might be called fireside histories—delightful narratives of past events designed to be read in the paneled study, accompanied by a fine bottle of port. The historical details might not be accurate, but the author could be complimented for having produced a “rattling good yarn.” This book is sadly of that genre, where its cheery prose cannot hide the lack of good historiography—not surprising given that one of its most trusted sources is a one-hundred-year-old biography of Melanchthon. Despite these severe limitations, the book still makes an important contribution by posing a long-neglected question (the relation between the English Reformation and Lutheranism) and by providing some hints at possible answers, ones that break with the narrow but dominant, Reformed view of the sixteenth-century English church.