This online publication is part of the Dissenting Academies Project, based at Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies and a partnership between the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London and Dr Williams's Library. Free to download as a pdf from the project's website, the Dictionary supplements two databases: Dissenting academies online: database and encyclopedia, and Dissenting academies online: virtual library system. It also complements online editions by former doctoral students associated with the project, namely Tessa Whitehouse (Dissenting education and the legacy of John Jennings, c.1720–c.1729) and Stephen Burley (New College Hackney [1786–96]: a selection of printed and archival sources). Finally, the Dictionary will eventually serve alongside a forthcoming multi-authored volume, A history of the dissenting academies in the British Isles, 1660–1860. The dissenting academies were established at the Restoration by Puritan tutors, within ‘a culture of teaching and private preaching’ (p. 14), to provide an academic training that was at first intended for lay students but was soon offered to future ministers barred from Oxford and Cambridge. Burden defines the academies as follows: ‘their tutors were Protestant dissenters, as were most of their students; they convened in the tutors’ houses, not in the houses of their students; they taught university-level subjects' (p. 48). Burden has an unrivalled knowledge of manuscript sources and offers a remarkable synthesis of nearly three centuries of scholarship on dissenting education; this allows him to eschew his predecessors' misconceptions and methodological failings. Older studies tended to concentrate on the history of each ‘institution’, a term that Burden rejects; he convincingly argues that a biographical approach is best suited to the study of academies which were small, peripapetic, sometimes short-lived and often difficult to distinguish from other forms of schooling. Burden also offers a more conservative interpretation of the curriculum, often imported from the universities. ‘The defining characteristic of learning at the dissenters’ earliest academies was not innovation but eclecticism’ (p. 29). The Dictionary, totalling ninety-one entries, provides the most thorough source of information to date concerning tutors at the earliest Dissenting academies (1660–1729), or rather ‘private academies’, to adopt Burden's preferred terminology, among whom there are sixteen individuals that Burden identifies as private tutors. Each entry is complemented by a bibliography, a list of archival sources and a reference section. The range of information, as well as the richness of some little-studied primary sources (notebooks, diaries, memoirs, treatises, correspondence, funeral sermons, court records…), is outstanding. The Dictionary is thus an invaluable new resource, while its challenging introduction offers fresh perspectives. The book gives life to an extensive network of individuals and therefore has something to offer scholars interested in dissenting history and literature together with those concerned more broadly with the history of education. A remarkable achievement.