What does the doctrine of the fall of man have to do with the rise of science? Not much, many likely would conclude. More than that, a good number might reason that the Christian doctrine of the Fall, with its emphasis on the postlapsarian depravities and weaknesses of the human mind, would have been fundamentally antagonistic to the development of modern science – often viewed as a secular and rational, or at least a secularising and rationalising, enterprise. But this new book by Peter Harrison, Oxford's Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, claims otherwise. Harrison has already made his mark with ‘Religion’ and the religions in the English Enlightenment (1990) and The Bible, Protestantism and the rise of natural science (1998), along with many other contributions to the study of science and religion. In his second book, Harrison presents a compelling case for what some would see as extremely counter-intuitive (in part due to a present-centred vantage point): that the rise of literal-historical biblical hermeneutics in the Reformation helped to encourage the growth of experimentalism during the Scientific Revolution. Harrison develops another delightfully counter-intuitive argument in this new book. In his own words, ‘[t]he central concern of this book is to illustrate the ways in which the myth of the Fall informed discussions about the foundations of knowledge and influenced methodological developments in the nascent natural sciences’ (p. 3). In a sense, the third book comes out of the second, for Harrison's arguments in The fall of man rest on the literal view of the Fall and original sin that flourished in the seventeenth century (p. 15). In his new book Harrison admirably recovers the widespread rhetoric of postlapsarianism in the early modern period, using England as his primary but not his only example. Francis Bacon, for instance, was stimulated in his goal of reforming natural philosophy ‘by an attempt to determine whether the human mind “might by any means be restored to its perfect and original condition, or if that may not be, yet reduced to a better condition than that in which it now is”’ (p. 1). Thomas Sprat, the advocate of the early Royal Society, spoke of the new institutions's aims to recover the knowledge that Adam lost. The chief intellectual source of these ideas was Augustinian anthropology, which through its characterisation of humans as depraved and intellectually limited helped to shape an important strain of early modern thought that emphasised epistemic impairment. The Reformation reaffirmation of Augustinian anthropology helped to encourage, inter alia, the development of experimentalism as a route to knowledge. All of this is in stark contrast to the still common narrative of the victory of reason that began with the Enlightenment philosophes (p. 249), which is mapped onto the history of science as well as the history of western thought in general. In The fall of man, Harrison provides a compelling example of how religion interacted with the study of nature in the seventeenth century – a frequently fruitful relationship that helped lead to the development of modern science in often unexpected ways.