Scandal, especially when it involved women and the loss of life, was always a destabilising factor in early modern local communities but rarely did it attract attention further afield unless, as in the case of Anne Gunter, it aroused the curiosity of the establishment and, in her case, the king. The scandal examined in this volume was not as celebrated as that, but it acquired a more than local dimension. At the execution in Northampton, on 14 July 1637, an observer remarked that ‘three or four thousand ears stood ready’ to hear the scaffold speeches of the condemned, and noted that he ‘had never seen the town so full before’. The crowds were no doubt drawn by the sight of the mighty fallen; for the condemned were a godly minister, John Barker, his wife's niece, Beatrice, and a female servant, Ursula, convicted of the infanticide of a child of the minister and his young relative. Under the political stresses of the Personal Rule and the increasing power of the Laudians in the ecclesiastical institutions of the diocese the godly clergy, who had long enjoyed powerful support among the gentry and had been a dominant force in the county, were being challenged, and Barker's indiscretions threatened collapse. Two days before the execution a sermon preached before the bishop referred to the poisonous atmosphere of the times and the threat to the peace of the Church. In such circumstances the execution process was an exercise in damage limitation by the godly: Barker was attended on the scaffold by two of his fellow ministers and, in his address to the crowd, he denied responsibility for the crime of infanticide but admitted to the sin of adultery, accepting his fate as just punishment for that sin. A manuscript account of Barker's performance was circulated among the godly in the aftermath of the event to counter an anti-Puritan pamphlet, intended for print but not published until the 1650s. Alongside these accounts the wider background of religious divisions in the county at the time is supplied on the godly side by the published sermons of the lecturers at Kettering and for the Arminians by the letters of Robert Sibthorpe. How these divisions influenced individual piety is explored through the diary of a godly lawyer, Robert Woodford, and the ‘Book of Remembrance’ of a godly gentlewoman, Elizabeth Isham, each compiled in the years 1637–41.

This rich combination of public and private – personal seems a better word here to describe the Woodford and Isham documents, which the authors themselves have problems with as entirely private sources – provides scope for a deep analysis of ‘religious identity’ in these critical years on what turned out to be the eve of Civil War. And the analysis is indeed deep, as were the divisions which the sources uncovered. The anti-Puritan pamphlet focuses its attack on lecturing as the chief pollutant of the Church, identifying it as the source of lay influence over religion and as the likely destination of those godly young men-of-parts without connections who, achieving some status thereby, were apt to become, like Barker, ‘too saucy’. It was both spiritually pernicious to the Church and morally depraving to the individual. Following up details in the diary of Robert Woodford the authors are led to the works of a local Laudian Peter Hausted, curate of Uppingham and a not very well favoured client of Sir Christopher Hatton, whose local knowledge and anger at the influence of the godly make him a plausible candidate for authorship. Against this account the printed Puritan lectures, in the view of Lake and Stephens, provided a virtual commentary on the Barker affair and the mental world that he and his unfortunate accomplices inhabited. This was not a construct of anti-polemic, but a pious world in which the problems of election and predestination were a constant source of unease, often manifesting itself in a ‘preciseness’ hovering on the boundary of hypocrisy. Thus the crude caricature of this world represented in Hausted's tract was not only plausible to its opponents but also recognisable to its target as having some basis in fact. The argument here is both clever at one level, and convoluted at another, as the heading of one section, ‘Mirror images: watching the godly watch the ungodly hate the godly’, suggests. At times it is almost as if the writers composed their texts deliberately to test the forensic skills of Peter Lake and his students in their ‘reading against the grain’.

Those forensic skills are superbly demonstrated, however, in the obviously less polemical ‘private’ texts discussed in the second half of the book, in which their engagement with public affairs is used to challenge the ‘interiority’ of this form of godly expression, which is often used to locate such texts in a specifically devotional category. Lake and Stephens convincingly argue that the division between devotional and polemical is anachronistic and that the texts produced by Woodford and Isham cannot be taken out of the public polemical context in which they were written and, further, that their authors were consciously responding to public affairs as well as working out their personal religious destiny. This boundary is the historiographical target of the book, arguing that those historians who stress the shared experience of post-Reformation Protestants, emphasising a largely consensual devotional continuum, not only downplay the intensities of religious differences in this period but also obscure some fundamental theological disagreements. I find myself mostly in agreement with Lake and his students here, for, while Protestants of all colours shared much, they were also acutely aware of those points on which they differed, and spent much ink and time in elaborating on them. Those differences periodically brought crisis, leading eventually to Civil War. One might ask why Northamptonshire was so often the location of such provincial crises? From Marprelate, the Classes trials, the separatist activity around Oundle and the drama of the alleged Hackett Conspiracy in the late 1580s and 1590s, to the Puritan scares centred on the county town in the 1600s, and the events under discussion in the volume being reviewed. Behind all these crises lay the shadow of popery raised by the significant Catholic presence among the landowners of the county; it was this shadow which sharpened the differences between the godly and the non-godly, if it is possible for shadows to sharpen perceptions.