Steven Reid's new account of Andrew Melville's role in the transformation of higher education in early modern Scotland, and its impact on intellectual life in the period, builds on the strengths of the recent revival of interest in the Scottish Reformation; and in its emphasis on the experience of St Andrews, where Melville served as principal of Scotland's only divinity college, it develops within a different context arguments recently set out in John McCallum's Reforming the Scottish parish: the Reformation in Fife, 1560–1640 (2010). Meticulously researched and persuasively written, Reid's first book pushes beyond the familiar elements of our knowledge of Melville's career to insist upon his significance in realms outside the immediately ecclesiastical, and to advance within a Scottish context a reconsideration of the growth of the Renaissance humanism and Protestant scholastic method that would allow the seventeenth-century flowering of Presbyterian thought to develop. Humanism and Calvinism represents a vital addition to our knowledge of the history of Scottish universities and to our appreciation of the complexity and importance of the intellectual culture that they encouraged.