As one of the smaller Dissenting groups, General Baptists are rarely the subject of scholarly biographies; and so it is encouraging to have this account of Thomas Grantham, who was a significant author and leader among General Baptists in the later seventeenth century. What emerges from this study is a man in a movement that was still evolving. Free to gather and worship legally for fewer than twenty years, the General Baptists, like the larger Particular Baptist community, found the Restoration period a time of intermittent harrying. They were numerically stronger in some areas – notably London and the counties of Kent, Sussex, Northampton, Buckinghamshire and Lincoln – but had no presence in others. They produced Confessions of Faith that primarily reflected regional gatherings but were never definitive of all General Baptists. This regional diversity helped to shape an identity that was not dominated by a central authoritative body but, as Clint Bass shows, the emerging community maintained a discussion on key features relating to church order, worship and doctrine and to this audience Grantham spoke. After piecing together something of Grantham's story from fragmentary evidence and references in tracts, Bass explores Grantham's views through published works and manuscript sources on issues of the nature of the Church. He argued for a gathered church with believer’s baptism as a key rite. He championed as a seal of the spirit the laying on of hands on those baptised. He tried to set issues of salvation and Trinitarian discussion within the stream of historic Christian witness (although this latter issue would divide the General Baptist churches). In the foreword, Diarmaid MacCulloch intriguingly describes Grantham as ‘one of the most interesting theologians for whom the Episcopal Church of England failed to find a niche’. More precisely, Grantham was an eirenic figure at a time when religious beliefs were often bitterly contested and in a period when Dissenting security was precarious. He both defined General Baptist distinctiveness against other streams of Christian belief and also sought to build bridges with other Christians. Unusually for a General Baptist, Grantham wrote twenty-five books on a variety of topics and his influence among his contemporaries was considerable. And for a man without formal education, his writings show signs of influence by Grotius and some Church Fathers. For more than a quarter-century after its publication Grantham's work Christianismus primitivus (1678) was a common point of reference in General Baptist thinking, even for those who disagreed with him, and a generation after his death he was still held in high regard. Grantham was a creative thinker in a time of ecclesiological exploration and this volume brings out well the richness of his thought.