This interesting collection of essays, written by an impressive line-up of contributors, examines the variety of ‘moral panics’ in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – rather than the modern period with which such panics are usually associated. In the second chapter of the book David Rowe sets out the sociological literature on moral panics and examines the 1970s ‘seminal work’ of Stanley Cohen on folk devils, moral panics and images of deviance, which stressed the role of the mass media in manipulating representations of groups that were demonised. Yet, as Claire Walker suggests, ‘just as scholars have revised Jurgen Habermas's emergence of the public sphere backwards … so it is possible to argue that moral panic theory should be revised to suit the technological, social and political circumstances in earlier historical periods’ (p. 118). The essays that follow, by Alex Walsham, Malcolm Gaskill, Anna Bayman and Tim Harris, show how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century panics about Jesuits, witches, cross-dressers and Puritans could be fitted into the ‘moral panic’ model since they were potent mixtures of media-drives and public opinion. Even so, there is a tension in the book about how far back the redating of moral panics might be drawn. In his introduction, and then in his own chapter, Dave Lemmings suggests that ‘one of the main purposes of the book is to test the broad hypothesis that the nexus between law, government and popular opinion changed decisively after 1700’ (p. 4) and that a chief reason for that shift was the acceleration in production and consumption of print in the eighteenth century. Seeing moral crises as ‘media-driven’ (p. 12), he thus proposes that after 1700 the growth of the press – working in an anti-Habermasian way to work on fear and emotion rather than reason – enhanced public anxieties. Chapters by Donna Andrew on eighteenth-century gaming, Cindy McCreery on the ‘monster’ that attacked women on London streets in 1790 and Michael Davis on British Jacobins provide excellent case studies and buttress Lemmings's post-1700 perspective. Lemmings has the last word in the conclusion. If we de-rationalise the public sphere, he argues, we can use moral panics to show the growth of that sphere from the late sixteenth century onwards; but he insists that the moral panics of the eighteenth century were different: a discourse of providence and piety is replaced by a secularised discourse of risk, social problems, family life and private economic wealth (pp. 255–7). Moreover, he concludes, earlier panics were generally government-inspired; later ones had their own press-driven momentum. It is possible that some of the participants involved in the conference from which this volume springs might have disagreed with this conclusion – it might have been interesting to hear a rejoinder from Walsham or Harris on Lemmings's conclusion. But any tensions within the book are creative ones and the discussions about the press, public opinion, stereotyping, anxiety and sympathy make for fruitful reading.