This excellent volume justly honors the model scholar-priest, W.B. Patterson, and the assemblage of luminaries that make up its contributors testifies to his influence and impact. The collection is split into four sections – two on historiography (early modern and modern), one entitled ‘Within and beyond Early Modern England’ (which would seem to encompass everything, everywhere, ever), and one on ‘Negotiating Monarchy’. These track Patterson’s own interests, corresponding to his books on Thomas Fuller (historiography), William Perkins (Early Modern England and beyond), and James VI and I (monarchy).

The essays of the central sections begin with an interesting micro-study by Scott N. Kindred-Barnes of an exchange of letters between Roger Williams and Anne Sadlier (the former a Puritan and the latter a staunch Laudian) in 1652, showing the extent and manner of the use of authorities such as Andrewes, Laud, and Taylor in their exchange. There is also a useful study by John Wall of the practical challenges to the rolling out of the Book of Common Prayer, and to teaching the laity those Cranmerian cadences that to generations of their descendants were to become so very familiar. This is followed by a trio of essays (strangely split into different sections) on intellectual history and Richard Hooker.

One, by David Neelands, further refines the by now widespread view of Richard Hooker as a Platonist who employed two forms of Platonic logic (as argued by, e.g., Torrance Kirby), by adding a third, which he argues is rooted in Porphry’s notion of theurgy, as ‘baptised’ by Augustine in De Civitate Dei X. The Platonic logic of mediation, Neeland argues, is insufficient to support the central role played in Hooker’s thought by public worship, which required instead a ‘Platonism of mediated immediacy’ (148). Another is a masterful survey by Paul Dominiak of the reception by Reformed and Catholic theologians in the early modern period of Aquinas’ notion of the natural desire to see God, which also incorporates a learned discussion of Thomas himself, and a review of the twentieth-century debates kicked off by Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel (1946), and sustained in the modern period by the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement. In fitting tribute to Patterson, Dominiak seeks to inform and resource contemporary theological debate with a richer reading of the past, in this case placing Richard Hooker as the ultimate mediator of seemingly irreconcilable commitments regarding the relationship of nature and grace; ‘Hooker balances the intrinsic integrity and value of nature with the utterly free and gratuitous love and action of God. Accordingly, Hooker offers a useful corrective to de Lubac’s modern criticism […] that baroque and Reformed theologies necessarily create the metaphysical conditions for atheistic secularism. The converse is true’ (115). Readers may decide for themselves whether to follow this most Episcopalian of impulses in placing Hooker at the center of all theology, but anyone seeking an analysis of the early modern reception of the concept of the natural desire to see God will find in this essay a superlative guide. In the third essay on Hooker, Torrance Kirby argues that Hooker developed and defended his notion of the two societies of church and commonwealth being united in a personal union under the monarch by means of ‘an extraordinary and highly original appeal to the authority of the Christological formula of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (CE 451), namely the Chalcedonian Definition’ (176). In this understanding, the ‘church and commonwealth can be united as “accidents” within a single “subject” – two natures, as it were, bound together in a single hypostasis’ and ‘civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction may coincide in the person of the Prince as the Act of Supremacy proclaims’ (180).

Any reader left dizzy by the heights of Thomism and Chalcedonian Christology will find firmer ground in the following essay by Margo Todd, on James VI, whom she labels ‘a canny king of Scots’ (191), and his efforts effectively to bribe Perth into supporting ‘the most distasteful elements of his religious programme’ (192). Perth was ‘infested with presbyterian fervour’ (193) and, therefore, inclined to oppose James’ religious reforms; it was also broke and subjected to frequent natural disasters. Todd skillfully unfolds how, across floods and earthquakes ‘the king […] proved himself an irregular but vitally important source of aid in times of natural disaster for the burgh’ (196), earning (or rather, buying) their tacit acceptance of his religious changes. ‘Altogether James bestowed upon the unrepentantly presbyterian burgh during his lifetime more than £283,000 […] The resultant good will in which he invested kept the peace despite ongoing religious tensions. Unfortunately for that peace, his son would prove neither so generous, nor so canny’ (206). This section concludes with an essay by Nicholas Tyacke, which uses the evidence of printed obituaries, funeral sermons, and poems concerning the death of William III in 1702 to argue that, in contrast to narratives of secularization during William’s reign, the religio-political idiom remained firmly alive, as these works fused the concepts of English liberty with a Protestant appeal to divine providence. ‘Clearly this way of thinking’, Tyacke argues, ‘still remained very much alive and invocations, which combined the sacred with the secular, had not lost their potency’ (231–232) by the dawn of the eighteenth century.

This theme of history read through the lens of theology, present throughout the collection, is most clearly discussed in the historiographical sections with which the volume begins and ends, which unfold the many ways in which the story of the English Reformation has been mined for ammunition to be used in later battles over English and Anglican identity.

The opening essay, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, takes as its theme forgery, starting with a delightful survey of the escapades of James Billingford who ‘decided to escape the massive boredom of being a Suffolk country parson by embarking on a spree of deception and extortion’ (16) that fooled historians well into the modern period. Yet even in such non-ideological cases, the preferences and prejudices of later historians determine how much use and how much scrutiny such forgeries receive: ‘The mark of such productions is that they appeal to prejudices that crave feeding’ (19). After dissecting the forgeries of Edward Bowles, Robert Ware, and John Payne Collier, MacCulloch widens his lens to observe that modern prejudices do not only incline us to accept forgeries; they also distract us from the ‘oxbow-lakes’ (23) of Reformation thought, such as soul-sleep, and push us to craft neat stories, so that Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn, being both evangelicals, must also have been allies. ‘It is time’, MacCulloch insists, ‘to think for ourselves’ (34).

That is, however, easier said than done, as the roots of ideological retellings of this history run deep, as shown in Anthony Milton’s excellent essay on a single sheet of paper: Lambeth Palace Library MS 943. Dated 20 November 1620. It is a list of names of those ‘lately by his Majestie appointed to write the ecclesiasticall historie of England’, namely Archbishop Abbot, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, Dr James Ussher, Sir Robert Cotton, William Camden, John Selden, Patrick Young, Mr (Adam) Newton, Mr (William) Lisle, and Mr (Richard) Montagu of Eton (38). Though there is ‘no real evidence that James’s plan ever got off the ground’ (48), it provides a fascinating insight into the use of history in seventeenth-century England, and Milton proves a sure guide to the differing approaches taken by contemporaneous historians attempting similar projects, from Foxe to Fuller, showing how this abortive plan is ‘just one manifestation of this period’s obsession with generating an ecclesiastical history that could justify the Reformation’ (53). Yet, as James Ross Macdonald shows in his essay on Fuller’s methodology (a central concern of Patterson’s work), the means by which this was done changed over time. Rather than ‘seeking to trace a golden thread of true Christianity from the apostles to the Reformation in Foxe’s manner’ Fuller instead ‘reposed confidence in the institutional church’; taking this stance allowed Fuller to employ a strategic ambiguity, crucial in 1655, which ‘seems calculated to ward of further conflict within the church over inessential matters’ (68).

Such agendas had not been laid aside by the nineteenth century, as Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter Nockles observe in their rightly paired essays on rival uses of Reformation history in that period. Ferrell’s shrewd (though speculative) essay on the Parker Society and their decision not to include the works of William Perkins in their series show how the society, competitive with Anglo-Catholic rivals, was embroiled in ‘not merely a battle of books but a war for the legitimacy of the English episcopate’ (246). In such a context, the Parker Society sought ‘to portray a single and singular Reformation’; Perkins ‘could not have fit into the […] overarching bibliographic narrative: one that began with bishops and clergy who went to the stake for defying ecclesiastical authority and ended in the establishment of a stable ecclesiastical authority’ (249). Nockles’ covers the same phenomenon from the other side through a detailed study of John Henry Newman’s use of history, particularly the ‘Laudian phase in the history of the Church of England’ which ‘was to be crucial for Newman’s construction in the 1830s of the Oxford Movement’s claim for historical legitimation as the true and authentic exponent of what can only anachronistically be called “Anglicanism”’ (253). In the seventeenth century, history was weaponized by those claiming to be authentic heirs to the Christian tradition; by the nineteenth century, it was weaponized by those claiming to be authentic heirs to the Anglican tradition. Such reflection would be beyond the scope of this stimulating volume, but given W.B. Patterson’s own career spanning history and ministry as an Episcopalian priest, one cannot help but wonder what lessons this narrowing trajectory holds for the church today.