This is a remarkable and tantalising book about a strange and complicated man. Thomas Totney was born in Lincolnshire in 1608, but trained as a goldsmith in London from 1626. In the parish of St Katherine, Creechurch, he sat under the fiery Puritan ministry of Stephen Denison and, after moving to East Anglia in 1640, threw his support behind the Parliamentary cause, volunteering for Cromwell's troop of horse before working as a tax official. He returned to London in 1648. Up to this point he was a fairly conventional participant in the subculture of the godly. But after weeks of fasting in 1649 he fell into a trance and experienced a mystical vision that transformed him beyond recognition. He now felt himself to be a prophet, called by God to regather the Israelites like Moses before him. Over the next eight years, his eccentric pamphlets and symbolic gestures would cause bewilderment, consternation and amusement. He changed his name to TheaurauJohn Tany, dwelled in a tent modelled on the Jewish tabernacle, got arrested for blasphemy, consigned his Bible to a public burning, went on the rampage in the lobby of the House of Commons, displayed his gift of tongues to a sceptical Menasseh ben Israel and sailed to the Netherlands ‘to call the Jews there’. He seems to have drowned three years later in 1659 as he crossed the North Sea on his way back home. In a marvel of archival research, Ariel Hessayon has tracked down numerous references to Tany in contemporary sources. There remain many known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Tany was some kind of Puritan in 1648, but was he a Presbyterian, an Independent, a Separatist, a Baptist or a Seeker? And what was he up to during his hidden years in the Netherlands? Despite such unanswered questions, the book is a powerful testament to what historians can achieve when they exploit their sources to the full. Moreover, Hessayon is a sure and meticulous guide into the arcane thicket of Tany's texts and the intellectual traditions he mined. The book provides an education in early modern esoterica, introducing us to hermeticism, Behmenism, angelology, Pythagorean mysticism, alchemy, astrology, heraldry, genealogy and apocryphal scriptures. It shows that Tany's interest in these matters places him in some distinguished company, even if his use of them was idiosyncratic. Tany calls to mind Ginzburg's Mennochio, another magpie mind. But Gold tried in the fire lacks the brevity and elegance of The cheese and the worms. Tany himself disappears from view for long stretches. Whereas Paul Seaver's book on Nehemiah Wallington managed to digest the man and his fifty notebooks in two hundred pages, Hessayon takes much longer with an author who published a few broadsheets and some pamphlets but left no manuscript writings. That is partly down to the sheer difficulty of Tany's texts. Yet for all its thoroughness, the book leaves the reader with plenty of work to do. The introduction surveys scholarship on radical religion, but thereafter there is little or no direct engagement with historiographical debates. The full implications of this bravura case study remain to be worked out. But few books have captured the intensity and extremity of the Puritan Revolution quite like this one.