The Church of England continues to share in the renewed attention now given to the Restoration period, and this collection brings together essays from nine authors. Grant Tapsell emphasises three themes in the collection: ‘the conflicting sources of authority for the Church of England; the relations between clergy and laymen; and the question of how successfully the church exercised its pastoral function’. On the first theme, Jacqueline Rose explores the tensions between the Church's status as established by law and as claiming a divine authority, concluding that perhaps the problem could not be solved. Nicholas Tyacke explains the Restoration Church as a continuation of that Church from what he sees as its ‘emergence’ in the sixteenth century, being ‘a coalition of more or less disparate interests’. Its history between 1660 and 1714 was a conflict between Laudians and Latitudinarians, with Calvinists merging into Protestant Dissent; that Church found its ‘new centre of gravity’ in Archbishop Tillotson. On the second theme, Grant Tapsell's chapter examines contemporary laments that the Church had been too materially weakened at the Reformation to ‘pursue its work effectively’, but comes to a generally optimistic verdict on its pastoral effectiveness. John Spurr examines lay support for the ideal of a national Church, and argues for more study of potentially important lay involvement. On the third theme, which might better be identified as geopolitical, Clare Jackson explores the ideal of a national Church in the yet more fraught settings of Scotland and Ireland, and finds the ideal ‘not wholly illusory’ even there. Jeremy Gregory similarly looks to North America and finds the Church's position there strengthening over the period despite colonial diversities. Tony Claydon argues that conventional accounts of internal denominational conflict within England ignore the wider European dimension, and that European events and conflicts were influential in the self-images of Church parties in England. Returning home, in a fourth section, George Southcombe argues against Patrick Collinson's claim that the emergence of separated Dissent in the 1660s meant the end of ‘the birth pangs of Protestant England’; heated and mutually defining interactions between Church and Dissent continued. Finally, Gabriel Glickman examines the relations of the Church of England and the Catholic Church and emphasises the lasting nature of the challenge that the second posed to the first. The Revolution of 1688 affected Anglicans as well as Catholics, sidelining (but not permanently) a hitherto-important High Church strand within Restoration Anglicanism: recusant Catholicism was not subsequently quietist. Tapsell concludes that this period was ‘less a prologue to an “age of negligence” than the roots of an “eighteenth-century Reformation” in England’. Scholars will do well to weigh the evidence and the up-to-date scholarship on this general scenario that is well presented in this useful and timely volume.