This well-written and engaging monograph uses new archival evidence to reexamines the emergence and reception of the Sabbatian movement. Whilst the story of Sabbatai Sevi is well known, the author's transnational approach deserves credit for breaking the traditional divides between East/West, North/South, Islam/Christianity by weaving together correspondence, familial, religious, mercantile and diplomatic networks.

The book opens and closes with Petrus Serrarius, the Protestant scholar who died in 1669 on his way to Adrianople to meet Sevi despite the latter's conversion to Islam. To understand the appeal of Jewish messianism to Protestant millenarians, Marriott places this transnational religious episode in a wider, Atlantic context, that of the alleged discovery, by the Jewish converso Antonio de Montezinos, of one of the lost tribes of Israel in Peru in 1641 (pp. 22–4). This story rapidly found an echo among the Sephardic community in Amsterdam as well as among Puritans in England and North America (ch. i). Similar reports from Scotland, Africa and Asia (p. 91) eventually fuelled the rumour that the reunited tribes of Israel were behind the sack of Mecca in 1665 (ch. iii). News of a Jewish messiah in Jerusalem therefore spread rapidly, yet unevenly; it reached North American Puritans one whole year before the Muslim authorities in Yemen (p. 97), and even impacted European economy along the way (p. 106).

Central to Marriott's examination of parallel and overlapping networks is the theory put forward by Richard Popkin and David Katz that James Nayler's impersonation of Christ in Bristol in 1656 influenced Sevi's messianism ten years later (pp. 39–40). If Marriott reveals that Nayler's trial was reported abroad in the Netherlands and Italy (pp. 41–3), he persuasively debunks the presence of Quaker merchants in Smyrna and consequently their influence in the rise of Sabbatianism (pp. 48–57). This concurs with Cengiz Sisman, whose work on Ottoman sources suggests wider religious, political, economic and social reasons for the emergence of Sabbatianism and its resonance among Christian millenarians.

Perhaps historians have looked in the wrong place by focusing on Quaker messianism instead of on a wider philosemitism among Protestant millenarians. Whilst Marriott also excludes a Fifth-Monarchist connection (p. 58), he does not engage, however, with the spread of Behmenism, the Christian Kabbalah and messianism prior to the Quakers. The prophet Theaurau John Tany, self-proclaimed ‘king of the Jews’, embodied this reality when he famously circumcised himself in 1649, proclaimed the Quakers to be ‘the Children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ in 1654, and moved among the Amsterdam Sephardim (1656–9) hoping to restore Jews to Jerusalem. Ariel Hessayon has shown how Tany's messianism drew from both Jacob Boehme and Menasseh Ben Israel. Marriott's main protagonists – Calvert, Hartlib, Serrarius, Sparrow, Oldenburg – had all been involved in the circulation and reception of Behmenist and spiritualist literature in the 1630s and 1640s. This degree of millenarian cross-fertilisation may explain the two-messiah theories of Serrarius and La Peyrère (pp. 116–17) and the former's belief in the universal redemption of Jews and Turks (p. 129). Marriott's engaging book adds another valuable piece to a fascinating and expanding puzzle.