This timely study joins other recent books in its criticism of what has been called ‘the secularisation thesis’, emphasising the continuing cultural centrality of religious and ecclesiastical issues in the period from the Cromwellian Protectorate through the first half of the eighteenth century. Closely examining ‘the relationship between poetry and religious controversy in the age of Milton and Pope’ (p. 4), Philip Connell argues that ‘[d]isputes concerning the sources and limits of religious authority … retain their place at the heart of English political and intellectual life until well into the eighteenth century’ (p. 3). Focusing on poetry, rather than on polemic or other forms of discursive argument in prose, Connell is able not only to demonstrate the attuning of works in verse to immediate and succeeding religio-political circumstances, but also to locate literature and literary artists as active agents at the centre of their culture. Connell tries to keep ecclesiastical issues in the mix in his analysis of some of the religious and intellectual cross-currents of an early modern England coping with religious and philosophical as well as Whig-Tory political conflict (High- and Low-Church Anglicanism, continuing religious dissent, physico-theological proto-Romanticism, ‘free-thinking’ deism, etc). His discussions of Milton's major poems, in their original contexts as well in those of their later interpretation and uses, of Thomson's The seasons, whose ‘discursive plurality’ (p. 209) morphed over the course of its several editions, and of Pope's Dunciad in its successive and expanding versions are fine examples of how poets and those who made contemporary or later uses of their work responded adroitly to changing religio-political realities – especially so in the case of Pope, whose low-profile Catholicism made him especially cautious. The fine-grained analysis that Connell offers of the connections of theological and ecclesiastical conflicts and the political order is masterful, but sometimes the historical account that he presents goes against the grain of the main argument of the book – or seems to lose sight of it. For example, the transformation of Newtonian physico-theological thought (with its ecclesiastical repercussions) into a more general deism starts to look like a movement away from organised religion into a ‘free-thinking’ perceived by contemporaries as ‘irreligion’. So too the Shaftesburian conversion of religious enthusiasm into secular aesthetic experience drained the experience of its primary religious meaning. The literary canonisation of both Milton and Pope suggests the escape of their writings from their local religious contexts. Connell is right to highlight the period's ecclesiastical and religio-political dynamics, which the usual model of progressive secularisation plays down or ignores, but it is useful to have both cultural narratives in circulation.