This is a bold and capacious book which explores Reformation English ecclesiological discourses to lay the foundations for claims about the contradictory nature of ‘modernity’. The core of its argument (expanding on the insights of J. G. A. Pocock's important article, ‘Authority and property: the question of liberal origins’, first published in 1980) is the insight that claims to ‘moderation’ were also assertions of authority – far from being moderate, such discourses more than often legitimate the application of state and local violence to communities and individuals. Irenic rhetoric hid a violent state. Bridling the immoderate, executing the heretic, whipping the disorderly, civilising the savage – were all rhetorically ‘moderate’. Shagan's clever and meticulous teasing apart of the commonplace historiographical deafness to this slippage between moderation and moderate is one of the powerful achievements of the study. The insistence that ecclesiological language, and in particular the erastian dimension of the post-Reformation English polity, is central to much of the political, religious and social contestation of the century and a half after the accession of Elizabeth i, is well made. The via media was, then, not the gentle and reasonable Anglicanism that it has been commonly painted, but a violent instrument of order, ‘written in blood’ (p. 109).

The set of discourses that Shagan describes as ‘Moderation’ were far from being calm, measured and reasoned, but were powerful (and presumably periodically effective) governmental projects aimed at the politics of restraint. The contradiction at the heart of ‘moderation’ (between liberty and coercion) persisted (largely unrecognised by modern historians according to Shagan) into what has been identified as ‘modernity’: ‘that the rule of moderation may be near the heart of a central paradox of English modernity’ (p. 186). Here Shagan makes some bold, and debatable, claims about the trajectory of ‘moderation’ into the eighteenth century and after. In some measure Shagan offers significant correctives (in his discussion of ‘how toleration became moderate’ he correctly identifies how much of the theorising around the limits and nature of tolerance was also a discussion of ‘a technique of government’ (pp. 288ff.). However the claim that the eighteenth century saw the latent violence of ‘the rule of moderation … displaced and refracted as commerce and politeness, rather than godliness and obedience’ rather paints a neutered and desacralised account of the ancien régime where religious violence, social disorder and rebellion and revolution were still powerfully in evidence. The one dimension missing from the work – and perhaps this is a reflection of the French theory which is on display in the admirable (if again contestable) conclusion – is the question of the nature and transformations of ‘pastoral power’ across the period that Shagan explores. He is acute in demanding more attention to the ecclesiological discourses of the post-Reformation world – but with those jurisdictional languages also came conceptions of the nature of the ecclesia and the ordo of churchmen. Both Michel Foucault and more recently Giorgio Agamben (The kingdom and the glory, 2011) have sketched out histories of both ‘pastoral power’ as the government of men over men, and its relationship to dominant theological conceptions – in particular the nature of the Trinity. Connecting Shagan's achievements with the transformations in the theological beliefs of English clerical elites and wider communities across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might provide the groundwork for a different account of the origins of modernity.