This volume contains fifteen papers (nine in Italian, four in English and two in French) that were originally presented at a conference in Milan in 2006. It is intended to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the place of the Bible in early modern debate over the competing claims of religious obedience and political resistance. Where previous studies have often analysed only one religious or confessional context, this collection, as the editor's introduction explains, attempts to present a comparative perspective, considering ‘Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers’.

The essays do well to go beyond an approach to the subject that has frequently focused on how early modern Catholics and Protestants – especially the Calvinist ‘Monarchomachs’ – attempted to avoid the Pauline injunction to obey one's worldly authorities, demonstrating instead the whole gamut of ways in which early modern political action or passivity could be discussed in biblical terms. This is especially true of the essays that consider how the example of the Maccabees was used to defend biblically-sanctioned resistance, with Lea Campos Boralevi's study of their use in a Dutch context neatly complemented by Xavier Torres Sans's consideration of the Catholic redeployment of these arguments in the Catalan revolt. It is also a point well made in two of the essays devoted exclusively to Jewish thinkers. Abraham Melamed's study of political disobedience in Isaac Abravanel's biblical commentaries and Alessandro Guetta's survey of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Jewish works in Italy not only present informative surveys of their subjects, but also bring out how different the questions of resistance or obedience were when considered in a Jewish setting.

Other aspects of the volume are less satisfactory. Neither the editorial introduction nor the essays themselves examine in what sense the men studied in the collection should be considered ‘philosophers’ in an early modern sense and what this might mean for their political or theological views. This is particularly disappointing considering how much recent work on early modern intellectual history has increasingly focused on understanding the significance of given institutional settings and the precise context in which a scholar, natural philosopher or theologian operated. Pietro Adamo's study of John Knox and George Buchanan, Patricia Springborg's of Thomas Hobbes and Anthony McKenna's of Pierre Bayle and Pierre Jurieu are to be commended for being the essays that go furthest in this regard. The pieces by Diego Quaglioni, chiefly on Jean Bodin, Tristan Dagron, on Isaac and Yehuda Abravanel, Pina Totaro, on Spinoza, and Laurent Jaffro, on Spinoza, John Locke and John Toland, would have especially benefited from a deeper engagement with how their subjects' philosophical preoccupations were rooted in pressing contemporary concerns.

The collection does have some further, more notable, shortcomings. Despite the volume's presentation, for example, there are no papers dedicated to Islamic thinkers. Others, meanwhile, do not address themselves strictly to the volume's theme. Although this does not undermine their scholarly value in itself, it does hinder the collection's cohesiveness. Such pieces are rather uneven in quality. Luigi Della Monica's careful demonstration that Ralph Cudworth cannot be assimilated into the history of eighteenth-century deism is generally persuasive, but undermined by the unsophisticated claim that Cudworth's work instead represented a continuation of Renaissance Neo-Platonism. Martin Mulsow's ‘Socinianism, Islam, and the origins of radical Enlightenment’, in contrast, represents the volume's most thought-provoking essay. Those who justifiably question the value of the concept of the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ would still do well to consult Mulsow's piece, and consider in detail how late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century protagonists turned the findings of historical, critical and oriental scholarship to their own purposes. Mulsow's paper also highlights the disappointing failure of the vast majority of the pieces to consider the significance of how the contemporary understanding of the text and history of the Bible itself was undergoing a dramatic change in this period and how this could have extensive ramifications for their subject. Only Simonutti's paper, beside Mulsow's, addresses this; her suggestion that Bayle's differences with Jurieu were rooted in an alternative historical and critical approach to the Bible would have benefited from further development.

The standard of editing is not uniformly high and a number of the essays suffer from quite frequent grammatical and typographical mistakes. The essays by Guetta, Springborg, Totaro, McKenna and Mulsow have been published in different forms elsewhere and readers should also consider consulting those versions. The lack of a general bibliography is to some degree compensated for by a very thorough index that includes references to the work of modern scholars.