Edward Vallance and David Weir revisit covenantal concepts and texts through civil and ecclesiastical allegiances. The authors span an impressive chronological scope in exploring covenants in England and New England. They both find a range of covenantal interpretations, as well as diversity, in their appropriations and forms. The interface between civil and ecclesiastical covenants is also central to both studies. Vallance and Weir illustrate how the politicization of covenantal thought contributed to fractures within covenantal ideology during the seventeenth century. Scholars of both early modern religion and politics will thus find these studies of particular interest.

Vallance's Revolutionary England and the national covenant is concerned with covenantal ideology in England as expressed in oath taking and associations during the mid-seventeenth century. This study also covers a much broader context by examining the continued currency of national covenant ideology from the reign of Mary I to the Restoration. Marian exiles, most notably John Knox and Christopher Goodman, introduced the notion that the English nation was under contract, or covenant, with God. Vallance demonstrates how the ideology of national covenant did not die out with the Marian exiles, but persisted in the political discourse of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Puritan clergy were a vociferous minority and the foremost exponents of the national covenantal ideology. They expounded covenantal themes in their fast sermons, jeremiads, and commentary on the confessional conflict of the Thirty Years War. Here Vallance draws attention to how the concept of a national covenant extended to a much wider audience outside of a minority of puritan clergy.

Covenantal ideology also entered into English consciousness as it became attached to oaths of allegiance and loyalty during the mid-seventeenth century, including the Protestation of May 1641, the Oaths of Association of 1641–43, the Vow and Covenant, and the Solemn League and Covenant. By incorporating national covenantal ideology into state oaths, exponents broadened the boundaries of political participation and sacralized the grounds for national allegiance. This provided religious conditions for political obligation and theological justification for resistance. Some writers even began to reinterpret the coronation oath along conditional covenantal lines, although not as explicitly as Scottish exponents of resistance. Here the work might have benefited from engaging with the confessional–political context in central Europe. Vallance's narrative generally confirms the confessionalization thesis by discussing the politicization of obligation through the sacralization of society. However, the author draws attention to how covenants extended beyond confessional allegiances through wider networks of association, including the Levellers and Diggers.

Vallance also elucidates how religious covenants not only served to extend oaths of loyalty to a national context, but could also be used to reinterpret existing political obligation and contracts. Covenant supporters tended to be united in their view that the covenant would prompt all subjects to personal reformation and thus result in moral purification throughout the nation. However, different interpretations of the precise form of reformation ‘raised misgivings even before the Solemn League and Covenant’ binding and uniting the nation and also dividing it. By 1647, the Solemn League and Covenant and its implications for the execution of Charles I divided Presbyterians and Independents. Whereas the Independents saw the Covenant as no longer binding, Presbyterians insisted on their continued allegiance to the Covenant. Vallance affirms the ‘broad agreement’ of all groups who appealed to national covenant and divine punishment. Yet, shared covenantal ideology did not necessarily mean a shared vision and commitment to a particular polity. There is neither discussion of divisions that existed before the mid-seventeenth century, nor how William Bridge, for instance, instituted church covenants within individual congregations in addition to appealing to covenant in a wider national context.

Whereas Vallance's work focuses on the covenant motif in English national context, David Weir's Early New England: a covenanted society surveys covenantal ideology through local documents in the New England colonies. His work provides a comprehensive guide to these documents, exploring both church and civil covenantal texts from the early seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. It also sheds light on the development of covenantal ideas by focusing on local variation and diversification in the formulation of covenantal documents over time.

Weir first contextualizes New England covenantal concepts within European and English ecclesiastical traditions. Covenantal ideas appeared in early modern literature and defined diverse relationships from the divine and human, to the institutional organization of civil and ecclesiastical communities. The author begins his examination of colonial covenantal documents with charters, which were granted by the English to the New England colonists. He examines the legal relationship between Old and New England through these documents and identifies the changing nature of their relationship against the backdrop of England's shifting political contexts through the course of the seventeenth century. Whilst Weir traces the increase in royal authority through charters and patents in the later seventeenth century, he also stresses that royal policy was never uniformly imposed: ‘the fact that there were variations in terms, particularly in the areas of religion, church, and state, indicates that the subordinate parties negotiated with the superior parties over these issues’ (p. 68). Early charters, such as the First Charter of Virginia in 1606 and the 1620 Charter of England, set the terms of civil government, but made no specific provision for local ecclesiastical jurisdiction. No mention of religious conformity appeared in successive documents, such as the 1629 Massachusetts Bay charter, which elaborated on civil government and extended leadership to include ‘freemen’ or those who were not directly recipients of charters, patents, or land grants. However, by 1639, Charles I explicitly asserted the Church of England's authority over the territory between the Merrimack and Piscataqua Rivers in his charter to Ferdinando Gorges. Parliamentary patents reversed this drive toward religious uniformity during the Interregnum and allowed the colonies the right to self-government. Yet, this brief period of self-government was followed by an increase in royal prerogative from the Restoration to the Glorious Revolution.

Weir not only finds diversity in charters, but also among other civil covenants including combinations and compacts, which were composed by the colonists to govern themselves. The Providence plantation drew the most rigid distinction between civil and ecclesiastical governance. The Mayflower Compact, responding to immediate circumstances of colonial settlement, stressed its political allegiance to the English crown, while nonetheless undermining ecclesiastical Royal Supremacy. By contrast, the Massachusetts Bay Colony envisioned ‘an established state church’ in which the state aided the church in realizing a godly society. This co-operation between civil and ecclesiastical officers was taken further by New Haven puritans, who envisioned a closer relationship between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions according to the patterns of the Old Testament civil laws. However, despite the diversity among civil covenants in the early seventeenth century, Weir finds the drift toward collective and interdependent civil governance among the colonies beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. A chief example of this is ‘The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England’ of 1643, which was primarily composed for the purposes of military defence.

Whilst the author draws attention to diversity of forms in civil covenants, he is concerned to stress uniformity in the theology and structure of colonial church covenants. These texts, surviving in numerous forms, provide insight into the initial organization of congregations in the New England colonies. Despite variation in style and form, Weir identifies a ‘covenant formulary’, or a common theological thread and structure shared by these documents by the 1630s. Beginning with a stated purpose and institution of the church, church covenants also outlined the heavenly and earthly witnesses to the covenant, the consummation of covenantal relationship with God, and the fellowship and government of the church membership, with a concluding plea for grace. One variation in the church covenant can be found in the Wells, Maine covenant, which demonstrated a heightened concern for posterity and in covenanting for children. Despite the covenant formulary shared by diverse congregations in the early seventeenth century, by the later seventeenth century Baptists remained committed to the use of church covenants whilst other dissenters and Anglican divines largely discontinued their use. The author could have drawn more attention to the diversity within puritan theology before the later seventeenth century. This is particularly important in the discussion of church covenants, where those inclined toward varying forms of church government had long held competing views concerning church covenants. As demonstrated in Edward Vallance's study, covenantal texts and theology had been contested at least by the mid-seventeenth century, not only by advocates of Episcopacy, but also by Presbyterians and Independents. If neither Vallance's nor Weir's study investigates the earliest divisions over covenantal theology, both reveal that covenants were severely fractured and divided by diverse interpretations by the end of the seventeenth century.