Barbara Brumbaugh's pathbreaking study should provoke considerable response. It plunges boldly into great debates, contending that the Arcadia's literary mode is allegorical, as does Kenneth Borris, and contra Robert Stillman and Jeff Dolven; that it was meant to be read in a radical Puritan framework, as Andrew Weiner has argued, contra the Philippist framework developed by Stillman and Roger Kuin; and that the 1590 Arcadia that ends mid-sentence is complete, contra Clarendon Press New Arcadia editor Victor Skretkowicz. Brumbaugh's thesis is that, as Sidney revised the pastoral Old Arcadia into an epic, his vision of epic included an allegory for the history of the church from its primitive beginnings to the Reformation, that he chose as the key for this allegory a specifically Puritan interpretation of the Book of Revelation as proleptic church history, and that, in keeping with the conventions of Protestant apocalyptic tragedy, the lack of an ending to the fiction suggests the providential fulfillment of history.

Making this argument requires a complex structure, made easier to follow by Brumbaugh's lucid prose. Brumbaugh traces the fictional chronology of events that readers reconstruct as the plot unfolds. Thus, she starts with the Asian adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus told retrospectively in Book 2 before addressing material in Books 1 and 3 roughly in plot order. This is also the order in which she supposes Sidney undertook his major revisions to the Arcadia, following Regina Schneider's Sidney's (Re)Writing of the Arcadia (2008).

A simpler explanation for Book 2 and the dramatic in medias res opening of Book 1 is that Sidney borrowed his structure from Heliodorus's Aethiopica. Sidney explicitly praises the Aethiopica as “an absolute heroical poem” in his Apology for Poetry. Brumbaugh anticipates this objection and mentions the seminal work in that vein, Samuel Wolff's The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (1912), but she does not mention the best current account of Heliodorus's influence, Steven Mentz's Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2008), in which Sidney frames Heliodoran providence in Philippist terms, thus blending pagan and Christian thought syncretically. Nevertheless, Brumbaugh claims, aspects of the Aethiopica in the 1569 English translation “would have prepared Renaissance Protestant readers to consider parallels to contemporary conflicts between the Roman Church . . . and Reformed churches” as presented in Protestant polemics (413). This speculation is offered as evidence that Sidney intended his overt imitation of Heliodorus as another part of an allegorical history of the church. The Protestants to whom Brumbaugh refers most frequently are his friend Philip Mornay, his deathbed confessor George Gifford, and William Fulke, once chaplain to Sidney's uncle Robert Dudley. The evidence she presents is sometimes anachronistic (for example, Mornay's Mysterie of Iniquitie, first published twenty-five years after Sidney's death). In the face of considerable direct evidence that moderate Phillipists were primary influences on Sidney's religious and political thought, and despite recent scholarship detailing many strands of Renaissance English Protestantism, Brumbaugh paints the Arcadia as Puritan allegory.

Brumbaugh's ten chapters divide into five sections. The introduction and first chapter show that radical Protestant commentators often read Revelation as prophesying church history and saw the Reformation as the sixth blast of the trumpet portending Armageddon. Chapters 2 and 3 interpret events in Book 2 of the Arcadia as precisely mirroring the sequence of events in Revelations that Protestant commentators thought prophesied early church history. Chapters 4 and 5 draw connections between emblematic descriptions in the Arcadia with descriptions in Revelation 8–11 thought to signify the Protestant struggle against the Catholic “Church of the Antichrist.” The key figure is Urania as she departs Arcadia, whose stance with one foot on shore and one on the boat “dividing her heavenly beauty between the earth and the sea” reflects that of the angel in Revelation 10:2, which “likewise stands with one foot upon the earth and the other upon the sea” (178). Shepherds Strephon and Claius “feed upon” Urania's “honey-flowing speech” as John describes the book given him to eat as “sweet as honey” in Revelation 10:10 (211). Brumbaugh's case that Urania's edificatory speech is analogous to the Word so important to Reformers is convincing. Other inferences are less well supported, such as the suggestion that Pyrocles and Philoclea represent the New Testament and Musidorus and Pamela the Old. Chapters 6 through 9 mostly interpret the Arcadia as commenting on the state of the Church of England.

Chapter 10 offers a powerful account of Pyrocles’ spiritual journey during the Book 3 captivity episode, from despair toward hope and redemption. Brumbaugh situates Pyrocles's character development in a web of motifs drawn from the Aeneid, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and Erasmus's Enchiridion to demonstrate what Sidney wanted readers to learn from Pyrocles's story. Brumbaugh's ingenious interpretation of Pyrocles's final combats with Anaxius and his brothers deploys the textual evidence, iconography, and the apocalyptic drama framework artfully. However, the brilliant culmination of the book lies in her interpretation of a moment earlier in Book 3, when, at dawn, sunk in despair because he believes he has seen Philoclea beheaded, Pyrocles encounters a veiled figure who chides him—who turns out to be Philoclea, alive after all. Brumbaugh identifies textual and iconographic echoes between Pyrocles's revelation, Erasmus's advice in the Enchiridion, The Song of Solomon, and George Gifford's commentaries thereupon to argue convincingly that Pyrocles has begun his spiritual regeneration by the end of Book 3, somewhat like Redcrosse in the Orgoglio episode in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene.

Brumbaugh's rich account of Pyrocles's spiritual development only highlights how complex, layered, and fully circumstantiated Sidney's narrative is, especially compared to Spenser's episode. Sidney's intensive, intricate ornamentation in the allegorical mode built a narrative world too fully realized to convey allegorical meaning efficiently. Something similar might be said of Brumbaugh's book. Some of her finer points (and even an important one or two) dissolve under close inspection. But step back a bit, and the bigger picture is impressive, like Georges Seurat's pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The Arcadia needed a large-scale, closely argued, biblical exegesis. Now that Brumbaugh has provided a fine one, we can argue over it productively for decades to come.