As editors and contributors themselves, Roger Sell and Anthony Johnson have brought readers an impressive collection of twenty essays which each speak to two related issues pertinent to scholars interested in the period between the so-called Elizabethan Settlement of Religion (1558/9) and the so-called Act of Toleration (1689). First there is the question of how and in what ways did religious writing help to create or consolidate communities. The approach to communication here, as the editors put it, is in the etymological sense, that is, as having to do with the formation of communities. As the essays demonstrate, religious writing could either reinforce a denominationally exclusive religious identity or cut across certain boundaries to function more inclusively. The second pertinent issue is the specific use of cultural memory in these writings in the pursuit of making community. The authors here are interested in how a shared past was employed to shape communal self-perception. Organized in four parts and proceeding chronologically, these essays succeed in offering a stimulating conversation about a variety of texts, authors, and communities spanning the accession of Elizabeth Tudor to the waning years of the seventeenth century.

The first section fleshes out the distinct polarity between Catholics and Protestants in terms of self-perception, the making of meaning, and the fashioning of community. Alan P. F. Sell, for instance, shows how religious writings among dissenters could shore up community identity, making formal persecution far more tolerable. His approach is to provide a grand tally of the ways Separatists and Dissenters sustained community through writing. Sell's measured recognition of the amphibious nature of religious identity is part of an overall a tone common to the essays in this volume and the pace is set early. The second of the four parts covers a variety of topics but ultimately bears out that polarity between Catholic and Protestant identities. However, the reality is that there was a good deal of interchange across a divide that proved quite permeable. Writers were able to call communities together—even religious communities—without referencing specific doctrinal issues. On the one hand, as Lars-Hakan Svensson writes, Edmund Spenser could stridently refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of Catholic belief and practice. Yet, on the other, his use of cultural memory to pull together a larger thematic backdrop may have provided a broad appeal for a more inclusive community. Thomas Rist, in his contribution, highlights the lack of a sharp division in early moderns like Shakespeare, a man who was neither Reformed nor willing to identify as a Catholic. Reformation and religion are negotiable phenomena, we may conclude, elements of corporate and personal identities that resist neat, clean hypostasizing. Thus while religious texts could separate people into antagonistic camps, they could also transcend divisions and draw together a community to consider common concerns, even religious concerns. The essays here show us that such common ground could take shape through the cultural memory valued by humanists. This could happen through a kind of progressive or possibly even modernist attitude which welcomed the future or through an irenicism which could see past religious divides, maybe even appropriately described as a certain ecumenism.

The third part of this collection does not drop the fundamental Protestant-Catholic divide, although the authors here offer even stronger cautions about neat divisions in religious identity and community making. Communities multiplied in complexity as sub-communities fomented a diversity of religious experiences and self-perceptions. Much appreciated here is the acknowledgement that conformism within the Church of England was hardly monolithic. This was markedly so with the rise of Laudianism during the Personal Rule of Charles I. Graham Parry's essay on high church devotion from 1620 to the outbreak of civil war is particularly helpful in fleshing out the ways devotional literature, even madrigals, could both separate and draw communities together. Notwithstanding the illuminating discussion of Lancelot Andrews, Nicholas Ferrar, and John Cosin among others, Parry's discussion of ascetical literature in post-reformation England implies that Protestants in England were bereft of spiritual meditations and forced to draw on Catholic writings, such as those by Ignatius of Loyola and Francis de Sales. The treatment here seems to bypass the great wealth of what is known as Puritan “practical divinity,” texts by Richard Greenham or John Eaton. Recognizing the presence of a large—and indeed Protestant—body of spiritual literature already on the English market would have made a more fruitful discussion of the ways high church devotional texts delineated communities. While this concern and Parry's anachronistic use of the term “Anglo-Catholic” detract from the piece, his essay is still very helpful in plotting out the ways a variety of communities within the established church jostled together claiming a normative identity. That discussion underscores the very search itself for a normative, legitimate community in the wake of the Reformation—or perhaps in the continuance of reformations—in the seventeenth century. A Catholic specter could of course galvanize a broad swath of English women and men, uniting a body against a common enemy. And it helps to remember also that while many in England were worried about Catholics among them, an equal worry was the number in their midst who, given the right conditions, might be tipped for “popery.” Several essays in part 3 focus on John Milton in this regard and are quite insightful. In an opposite vein, Reid Barbour's contribution describes Thomas Browne's sojourn in Padua and how the city's diverse (pluralistic?) culture fostered in him a degree of tolerance and charity. Could Browne therefore see beyond the ever-present divisions between communities and even within communities?

Part 4 concludes the book with two essays and the focus here is across generations. The conversations in this volume harmonize and even crescendo at various points. With so many voices considered and analyzed with theoretical acumen, these twenty essays cover a wide gamut of topics and texts. Anyone interested in the ways communities were legitimated or delegitimated, and specifically the ways religious writers could deploy memory, will find this collection an invaluable resource.