Quentin Skinner once called upon intellectual historians ‘to see things their way’, that is, to take seriously the ideas of people in the past. Although his work has been extremely influential, intellectual historians – chief among them Skinner himself – have been reluctant to engage with religious and theological concepts, privileging instead a resolutely secular history of political thought. Seeing things their way was written to redress this balance, to demonstrate the importance of religion to intellectual history, even to political thought – and to do so using some of Skinner's own principles. The editors also commend the methods of intellectual history to all those involved in writing the history of religion more broadly, warning them of the pitfalls that await them if they import definitions of religion, orthodoxy, even of genuine spirituality, from outside the period that they are studying. Individually, each of the articles shows the importance of theological concepts to a particular issue in the history of ideas, revealing the advantages of the recommended approach. Most of the articles also discuss the rationale behind previous rejections of religion or theology and seek to engage with the potential objections to their own approach. The subjects covered are broad, although they cluster in the early modern and modern periods, and tend to focus on the Protestant world. (Anna Abulafia's fascinating essay on medieval Jewish-Christian disputations is the exception.) Perhaps the most successful are those by John Coffey and Howard Hotson, discussing Parliamentarian ideas and millenarianism respectively, for both are able to explain in some detail why historians have tended to neglect the religious or theological dimension to these sets of ideas, and how much can be gained from restoring that dimension. Others are more methodological in their focus, such as Brad Gregory's essay setting out the advantages, and possible drawbacks, of any analysis of religious ideas, or Richard Muller's call for historians to reject teleologies (political or religious), a call which will be familiar to those aware of his work. Overall they provide a series of compelling case studies, worthy of attention by specialists and non-specialists alike. As the editors recognise in their introduction, their volume is not quite so novel an enterprise as it may once have been, for the tide is turning in their favour and the collection forms part of a broader appreciation of the importance of religion to the history of ideas. Taken together, the essays in this volume reveal, eloquently and persuasively, the unacceptably high cost of ignoring both theology and religious experience; they will help to ensure that future intellectual historians will be unable to sidestep religion, as too many of their predecessors have done.