Bryan W. Ball, whose career has included academic posts in England and Australia and authorship of books in the field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church history, has written a fascinating study of a neglected minority theological position and the controversy surrounding it. The doctrine at stake was, in the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, ‘the state of Men after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead’ (art. xxxii). Specifically, is the human soul – apart from the body – immortal and thus destined for ongoing life during the interim between a person's physical death and the general resurrection of the dead and God's judgement at the last day? The majority answer of Protestants and Catholics was, of course, yes. But from the earliest days of the Reformation there were always some who rejected the notion of an inherently immortal soul as a separate entity on the grounds that it represented the persistence of pagan philosophy, spirit-flesh dualism and theologically corrupt medieval Catholicism, with its doctrine of purgatory. These ‘mortalists’ understood the soul as well as the body to ‘sleep’ in death until Christ's return, insisting that their view was truer to the Bible's wholistic anthropology and the Gospel's promise of eternal life solely by virtue of the work of Jesus Christ. Ball traces this alternative understanding from Tyndale and Latimer through Hobbes, Milton, Locke and, finally, William Priestly – with discussion of many lesser-known figures along the way. While a surprising number of English Protestants toyed with variations of ‘psychopannychism’ (the soul separating from the body at death but resting in an unconscious state until being reunited with its body at the Resurrection), by the end of the period under study two significant developments had occurred. First, as Ball demonstrates in a chapter titled ‘The ascendancy of thnetopsychism’, earlier, more tentative, compromise psychopannycist positions virtually died out, giving way to fully-developed, ‘more cohesive and internally consistent’, Christian mortalism (p. 150). Second, while earlier ‘soul sleepers’ were overwhelmingly from the ranks of the laity and Nonconformity, by the mid-1700s Anglican clergy increasingly embraced this position. Mortalists judged prevailing Protestant belief harshly (and, at least until the mid-1700s, were harshly judged in return), arguing that ‘the doctrine of the immortal soul undermined truth at the point of its ultimate realisation in human experience, by proposing a way to eternal life which was contrary to that promised in Scripture’ (p. 176). And they offered positive eschatological hope that Christ would return, raise the dead and consummate human history – in a fully restored new earth, purged of evil, under the reign of Christ, as promised in Revelation xxi. This, not some nebulous, disembodied eternal spiritual state, would be the eternal home of the redeemed. Ball is to be commended for bringing this movement more fully to light, as its witness influenced mainstream Christian thought in significant ways that we may not have previously understood.