English Reformation studies of the past three decades have shifted from Whiggish narratives of an Anglican via media to revisionist orthodoxies of the strength of late medieval Catholicism and the top-down nature of the Henrician Reformation, to post-revisionist tales of the myriad and sometimes messy ways individuals and communities adapted to the religious transformations of Tudor England. Locality and particularity have become the watchwords of the day. In locating Karl Gunther's Reformation Unbound, readers will be well served to pay attention to the plural “Protestant visions” if the subtitle. In Gunther's telling, messiness was present from the outset. He argues “there were early English evangelicals who were envisioning the reformation in ways that were far more radical than we have hitherto recognized, and, further, that radical ideas and attitudes that typically have been viewed as later developments had been part of the English Reformation at its start” (9). Of course, much here hangs on “radical,” a term Gunther acknowledges as “notoriously slippery.” While allowing its common use in Reformation studies to refer to Anabaptists and their rejection of infant baptism and state churches, Gunther prefers to avoid essentialist definitions and looks instead to context, to “ideas, attitudes, or behaviors that fundamentally challenged the status quo in ways that were more extreme and/or extensive than those adopted by other reformers” (3).

To make his case, Gunther trolls mostly familiar waters with an eye toward uncovering and highlighting overlooked ideas, dreams expressed but not realized, and roads not taken. In this way, the work calls to mind Peter Iver Kaufman's exploration of proponents of greater lay participation in ecclesiastical governance in Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (2004). In his consideration of Henry's reign, Gunther finds William Tyndale and others advocating for sweeping changes to the church's hierarchy and discipline: preaching “bishops” in every parish whose authority extended no further, an end to ecclesiastical courts, and rejection of worldly occupations for clergy. Particularly notable here was Tyndale's insistence on distinguishing between governance of the church and of the realm—the two were fundamentally different and so called for different techniques, an idea that carried an implicit critique of royal supremacy.

Such attitudes inevitably brought dissension. To reformers like Tyndale, however, conflict was not only inevitable but welcome since “true preachinge is saltynge” and the “nature of salt is to byte, frete, and make smarte” (69). In his second chapter, Gunther finds it remarkable that evangelicals like Thomas Gibson called on the king in soaring and violent rhetoric to visit bloody retribution upon the papists for their crimes against the godly. Phrases such as “the time for payback had come,” “a royal campaign of terror,” and a “brutal call for the king to visit apocalyptic violence” (88–89) seem calculated to raise the stakes on evangelical claims to the disruptive nature of the gospel. Yet surely the godly had no monopoly on violent talk, or indeed action? Gunther acknowledges as much when he recognizes the “Tudor willingness to enforce their reformations at the point of a sword” but suggests that Henry's vision of a peaceful church on the far side of his burnings separate him from evangelicals who planned for perpetual war until “Christ returned in glory” (95).

In the second half of the book, Gunther shifts his attention away from Henrician and Edwardian radicals to consider Mary's and Elizabeth's reigns. Readers familiar with the standard historiography will be intrigued by his reinterpretations of the troubles at Frankfort and the vestments controversy of the 1560s. In the first instance, Gunther argues that disagreements among Marian exiles over the prayer book (the “Coxians” vs. the “Knoxians”) did not in fact presage later divisions in the Elizabeth church (puritan vs. conformist) as is commonly held. Instead, Gunther maintains a “distinctly ‘conformist’ position was absent among the exiles at Frankfurt and the view of the ceremonies adopted by both sides in the controversy would later by used by puritans to argue against the use of vestments” (160). Concerning that later controversy, Gunther makes the case for the underappreciated role of Catholic polemic in setting the terms of the debate and intensifying the hostilities between Protestants. Both of these chapters are meticulously argued and sure to provoke discussion, yet they stray somewhat from the book's general trajectory of demonstrating connections between early and later Tudor radicals. However, Gunther's final chapter returns to this theme as he documents how the later decades of Elizabeth's reign saw puritans and conformists in a fight over who could claim to represent the lineage of the early English evangelicals.

Reformation Unbound is a clearly argued and well documented book that deserves credit for challenging much conventional wisdom. Gunther's thesis fits neatly with the approach of those who argue for a “long Reformation”: to understand and describe the religious changes of the sixteenth century, one must look for roots in the fifteenth and fruits in the seventeenth. In like manner, what Gunther has produced here is a kind of “long history” of puritanism. Godly complaints of the 1560s, ’70s, and ’80s reprised grumblings that had been present from the very beginning. If he is right, then a question naturally follows: What, if anything, can be said to distinguish the “hotter sort of protestants” who surfaced during Elizabeth's reign? (It is telling that Gunther neatly co-opts this phrase made famous by Patrick Collinson as a description of Elizabethan puritans and applies it to earlier Tudor radicals.) The most obvious answer, of course, is Geneva. Elizabethan puritans self-consciously associated their reforms with Continental and specifically Genevan models, and more will need to be done if causal connections are to be demonstrated between early English evangelicals and the Elizabethan godly. What Gunther has shown, however, particularly in his earlier chapters, is a correlation of some key attitudes and inclinations. Puritans, who always sought biblical precedent for reform but were happy to claim historical ones where they could find them, would no doubt be pleased.