This thoroughly researched work is a welcome contribution to English religious, and more specifically, Reformation history, but also to the history of the English Civil Wars. Using Norwich as its focus, it presents a detailed analysis of the relationships between religious beliefs, identities, and affiliations, on the one hand, and political policies and actions, on the other, over the period from the accession of Elizabeth through the outbreak of hostilities in the first Civil War. During that time, according to Reynolds, “puritanism”—a term he uses synonymously with godly Calvinism—shifted “from a radical left to a reactionary right,” that is, from leading the struggle for further reform to becoming the established religion which Laud and others would seek, in turn, to reform (4).

In his introduction, Matthew Reynolds states that “this book charts the fortunes of ‘puritanism’ within Norwich, alongside the rise of groups opposed to the godly, whose anti-puritanism was channeled into something approaching civic Laudianism by the mid-1630s” (19). However, this work is more evenhanded than that statement implies. It explores the development and evolution of religious beliefs and practices of various sorts in that city, beginning in the last decades of the sixteenth century and using a wide range of primary sources to identify public declarations of faith and knit together affiliative networks. That being said, this is the story of the establishment of godly Protestantism in Norwich told from the perspective of 1636, the year of the “stirs” prompted by Bishop Matthew Wren's visitation, which harshly enforced Archbishop Laud's altar policy. Nonetheless, this perspective contributes positively to the depiction of the struggles between factions in Norwich for control of religion that in one form or another spanned a period of seventy years, by positively influencing the questions Reynolds asks of his sources. Similarly, Reynolds's careful analysis of these sources, including institutional records of the Merchant Adventurers, the church, state, and town, as well as personal records such as wills, creates a series of complex webs of relationships, defined at least in part by shared religious identities, which add layers of understanding to the nature of these religious and political struggles.

The first three substantive chapters of this work, following the two-chapter introduction, provide a multidimensional view of the creation of the godly city of Norwich through the collaboration of a godly magistracy and “a veritable team of committed pastors” (63). This included not only the development of a vigorous evangelical preaching ministry within the town, but also the curtailing of the pious practice of indiscriminate almsgiving by “Catholics and crypto-Catholics” (57), through the magistracy's creation in 1570 of the innovative Poor Relief Scheme (for which Norwich became famous). As a result of these innovations, godly Calvinism was firmly established in the city. As Reynolds puts it, “The Calvinist tradition planted from [sic] the 1560s proved a redoubtable force against novel forms of divinity and worship introduced during the 1620s and 1630s” (85). However, religious “planting” was not confined to the establishment of Calvinism. Elizabethan Norwich was also “the cradle” of the separatist Brownist movement (107). In fact, a range of religious beliefs and practices was represented within the city at that time.

Reynolds then builds a chronological bridge of sorts between Elizabethan and Caroline Norwich—between the establishment of Calvinism and even Puritanism, and the attempts to reform or replace that set of beliefs and practices with a more elaborate religiosity. Most of the remainder of the book traces this shift, focusing with increasing detail on the episcopates of Samuel Harsnett (1619–29), and Matthew Wren (1635–38), the bishops who, according to Reynolds, most energetically attempted to limit godly Calvinism and promote both Arminianism and more elaborate worship in more highly decorated churches. In fact, his uncritical inclusion of Arminianism here is a bit puzzling, since the question of whether that particularly anti-predestinarian theology ever actually gained a foothold in England has been hotly debated among historians.

Ultimately, this work may be most important for two contributions to the scholarship of English religious history and the history of the antecedents of the Civil Wars: first, for the ways in which it links the struggle for reform in the sixteenth century with that in the seventeenth century, providing a clear and convincing example of the “Long Reformation”; and second, for the ways in which it uses a wide variety of documents to construct affinity networks and analyze the many ways in which those networks influenced religious beliefs and practices in early modern Norwich. The result is a sophisticated, complex depiction of religion in an early modern urban setting that is multifaceted and multilayered. This is an image of a civic, religious continuum, ranging from recusant Catholics to separatist Brownists, but also including a shifting collection of factions with religious preferences that fell somewhere between those two extremes, depending on both the nature of official, monarchical policy, and the talents and particular convictions of leading clergy and laymen within the city. Furthermore, despite his focus on just one such city, in his conclusion Reynolds points to a number of other English cities that he suggests may have experienced a similar degree of increasingly complex factionalism in the years leading to the outbreak of the first Civil War. This will then be an important resource for scholars and students of early modern English history.