According to its editors, this collection is intended principally to ‘complicate and refine an oppositional conception of “self” and “other” that is too easily applied to earlier periods’ (p. 15) The ‘self’ here first refers to the late medieval Christian of Europe and England; the ‘other’, its crudely-conceived Jewish and Muslim enemies, provenance most often the stuff of fantasy. Dimmock and Hadfield present essays that attempt to bypass the binary simplicities of the outmoded 1980s and '90s style of post-colonial analysis, with fair success. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century the boundaries between ‘peoples of the Book’ became more permeable with every contact, whether friendly or no. These contacts did not always lead to conversion, but they could encourage strange syncretisms. In an age of trade, exploration and expansion we should not be surprised to find such religious and cultural interloping – one necessary precursor to the tolerations of a later era. The methodological subtheme of this book, then, is how the notions of ‘heresy’ so readily attached to other belief systems in the late medieval era functioned not only to set religions apart but also and eventually to provide inadvertent delivery systems for, if not cultural understanding (which would simply be too much to ask of the times), at least cultural exchange. The eight essayists (historians, scholars of religion and literary critics whose expertise range from medieval to Turkish studies) have provided persuasively researched and clearly argued pieces: Matthew Bale on the ignorantly vacant imagery of the Jew in late medieval worship and its effect on Margery Kempe; Colin Imber on the how the idea of ‘crusading’ itself may well have superseded any specific religious motive; Dimmock on the perceived masculinities of the Turk (aggressive) and the Jew (conniving); Raphael Hallett on Luther's deliberately simplistic exegesis of Jewish writings; Palmira Brummett on the religious messages conveyed in European cartography. The intent and purview of this collection is international, but the emphasis remains English and Protestant. This is, perhaps, unavoidable, given the persistent historiographical contention that, while Catholics had the Book, only Protestants actually read it, but the skew is due more to the editors' decision to conclude the collection with three essays which concentrate on what they term the ‘English Revolution’: pieces by Matthew Birchwood on the Polyglot Bible as an expression of revolutionary debate; Eliane Glaser on the way the collapse of the institutional Church in the 1640s forced a new kind of debate about Christian-Jewish relations; and Gerald MacLean on how Milton parlayed his skimpy knowledge of Islam into a larger, threatening apprehension of Christian heresy. Civil wars and interregnum government had pulled England onto a new international stage, forcing it to rethink, if not repeal, its once-bedrock sense that it had always professed a uniquely national religion. By 1660 Britain had to return to the ‘world it had lost’ when it left the circuit of Rome. But this new world of religious engagement was more complex, more diverse and increasingly less well-served by the crude descriptors designed by dominant culture: ‘self’ no longer so readily distinguishable from ‘other’. This is the conclusion that the editors intended the reader to reach all along. They are to be commended for producing a rarity: a collection of essays that actually hew to one well-defined thesis. The effect is close to monographic.