This is an important and insightful book, dealing with an important topic in clear and compelling ways. It takes as its starting point a contradiction in our understanding of the Reformation. That is, from one perspective – looking back on the Reformation from after 1688 – Protestantism appears proto-liberal: tolerant, individualistic, rational and productive of personal freedoms and democratic government. However, from another perspective – looking forward to the Reformation as a break from the medieval past in 1517 – Protestantism appears illiberal: intolerant, fundamentalist, absolutist and denying human agency.

Unlike past scholars who have noticed this contradiction and chosen one perspective or the other, Simpson says both are true. His solution to this paradox is to describe Protestantism as a revolutionary ideology whose impossible goal of human regeneration could never be met; indeed the impossibility of success was at the core of Protestantism itself. Protestants thus suffered from a kinetic cultural logic of permanent revolution, a condition of continuous iconoclasm against idols which could never entirely be destroyed; hence each generation attempted to obliterate their predecessors in the name of further Reformation. So far, this sounds like a variation on relatively familiar Catholic criticism. But Simpson's powerful difference is to argue that one of these successive Protestant attempts to destroy what had come before was, in fact, a liberalising attack on the Reformation itself: a move from iconoclasm to the art gallery, the creation of spaces of aesthetics, politics and interiority that performed revolution by rejecting the revolution. As Simpson puts it, ‘the central argument of Permanent revolution is that the liberal tradition derives from Protestantism by repudiating it’ (p. 11). And because liberalism is a stabilising rather than destabilising force – a second-order belief system intended as a tool to manage first-order belief systems – it partially succeeded in taming the Reformation's psychic violence and rendering it recognisably the worldview on which Whig historians looked back with pride.

Simpson is a literary scholar, and his subtle readings of literary texts as artefacts of Protestant cultural revolution are among the best parts of the book. So, for instance, in his reading of Thomas Wyatt's poetry, a Protestant emphasis on divine voluntarism spills out from theology into politics: ‘Both evangelical God and Tudor monarch dispense reward without respect to deserving: between deserving and reward there is, in Wyatt's words, “no whit equivalence”’ (p. 80). Simpson brilliantly observes that ‘the evangelical ideally has no interior life separate from the exterior, and so cannot claim the soliloquy’: the saints cannot soliloquise, they cannot represent fragmented selves, except by becoming the hypocrites whom they despise (p. 141). His compelling discussion of the new antipathy to Latin, as a language dangerous because it claimed to do things (as in the mass) rather than represent things (p. 230), put me in mind of Rupert Giles's warning to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: ‘Don't speak Latin in front of the books!’ And in perhaps my favourite reading, he shows Shakespeare's unavoidable concessions to the Protestant worldview in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Snout performs the part of a wall with such blunt literalness that it becomes anti-theatrical, reflecting (while at the same time mocking) Protestant literalist hermeneutics and anti-theatricality (p. 249). The whole book overflows with mature and sage insights into texts from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century.

There are a number of issues on which I disagree with Simpson; and I mean it as sincere praise that this is a book worth disagreeing with, a book which forces the reader to grapple with its profound implications. On most issues I will remain silent here, since a book review is not the forum to conduct serious scholarly debate. I should also say that the main issue on which other scholars may disagree with Simpson – his treatment of Protestantism as so stark and revolutionary, incapable of compromise and constantly pushing its adherents towards the despair which produces the next round of iconoclastic purges – is one on which I largely agree with him. Admittedly, Simpson sometimes mistakes a tendency within Protestantism for Protestantism itself. Manifestly, many Protestants did stop short of the supposed implications of their faith that Simpson describes, and they seem to have had little psychological difficulty doing so, even if more radical coreligionists accused them of hypocrisy. This suggests that there were contrary tendencies within Protestantism, centripetal rather than centrifugal, counterbalancing Simpson's bleak picture. But none the less I agree with that picture in broad strokes, as a series of powerful cultural tendencies if not always lived realities, and it is important not to ignore them.

But the issue on which I would question Simpson here is his analysis of the ultimate liberalisation of English culture. Simpson insists that the forces that resisted Protestant revolutionary fervor were themselves culturally Protestant precisely because they were revolutionary: liberalism ‘derives from Protestantism by repudiating it’. Thus liberalism is an outgrowth of Reformation even when it rejects Reformation. There is a danger of tautology here, in which any resistance to Protestantism becomes culturally Protestant simply by virtue of its resistance, and we are left assuming what we are trying to prove. This tendency is reinforced by Simpson constantly turning to Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan as examples of emerging liberalism still stuck within Protestantism, rather than (for instance) the proto-Enlightenment tradition running through Isaac Barrow, John Locke, Anthony Collins and John Toland, or the (royalist) feminist tradition of Mary Astell and Aphra Behn. All these authors were in some sense Protestant (with the possible exception of Behn), but the resources with which they opposed domination and fundamentalism were surely far more diverse. In desiring to make opposition to Protestant culture itself culturally Protestant, Simpson even goes so far as to describe Arminians as ‘heterodox Calvinists’ (p. 99) or ‘a reflex of Calvinism’ (p. 102), which is surely a bridge too far.

So I cannot agree with everything in this book, but I can none the less praise it as erudite and fascinating. I learned from every page, not only about early modernity but about our own liberal predicament, and so will you.