The religious reformations in England, as Julie Chappell argues in the introduction to this volume, ‘required individual and collective renegotiation of both gender and religious identities for women’. As women's options were ‘dissolving’ (like the monasteries), women sought to ‘erase, rewrite, or reimagine their religious and gender identity [sic]’ (p. 4). Thus, Chappell positions this collection as contributing to scholarship exploring the ways by which early-modern women sought to do this. Most of the volume's essays seek, with varying success, to do this: Janice Liedl's piece on Margaret Pole considers the relationship between women's traditional ability to claim to distance themselves from public life and the Henrician redefinition of treason; Rebecca Giselbrech's discussion of correspondence between English women and Heinrich Bullinger provides insight into both their and his attitudes towards women as ‘partners in reshaping a “true” Christian community’ (p. 60); contributing to scholarship regarding post-Reformation female recusancy, Lisa McClain's essay provides an interesting view of Elizabeth Cary's movement from prioritising ‘gendered concerns’ to ‘openly privileg[ing] Catholicism over gender’ (p. 73); in a fascinating discussion, Amanda Capern establishes the apocalyptic, Puritan author Eleanor Davies as an early, revolutionary example of a woman's assertion of her religio-political voice; and Sharon Arnoult's sensitive study considers the Protestant Elizabeth Delaval's conflation of her lost potential for happiness as a woman and her failure to honour her religious obligation to (women's) submission and obedience. Other pieces in the volume are, however, less directed towards the volume's purpose: for example, Valerie Schutte makes an interesting argument for the value of considering royal women's influence through book dedications, but it is unclear whether this contributes to the problem set by Chappell; while excellent, William Robison's historical look at film portrayals of Tudor royal women (in which he argues that they fail to engage with those women's religious priorities) does not address this volume's purpose; and finally, the context-heavy chapter by Kramer, which seeks to position Sophia Lee's The recess (1783–5) as an Enlightenment-period reminder to English of its Catholic past – a ‘nexus’ between historiography and hagiography – is difficult to comprehend, particularly as a part of this collection. As a whole, the volume's ambitious purpose serves to undermine essays that rarely fully realise it. This inherent instability (a collision between content and purpose) is evident from the volume's introduction, in which, while ironically seeking to provide a view into what should be read as early modern women's agency – their own self-refashioning – Chappell robs some important early modern women of exactly that agency through a terrible oversimplification of their particular histories: for example, according to Chappell, both Lady Jane Grey (whose execution is also misdated in ch. iii) and Mary Queen of Scots were killed because of their faiths and bloodlines (p. 6), and Margaret Clitherow was executed for recusancy (p. 3). Women during the English reformations, therefore, while containing some fascinating insights piece-to-piece, could have benefited from both a stronger editorial eye and a more modestly-stated purpose, in better conformity to the volume's actual substance.