Perry's ambitious book traces the religious dimensions of the literary practice of imitation in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the literary implications of the religious imitation of Christ. Arguably the most popular devotional text of the late Middle Ages, the Imitatio Christi (usually attributed to Thomas a’ Kempis) remained popular through the Reformation, though often revised to suit particular pieties. Perry asks what the imitation of Christ, variously understood in the period, might have to do with humanist ideas about imitation. Her provocative answer is that practices of imitation in the period always have a religious dimension; embedded in debates about literary imitatio are larger theological questions about ‘the role of natural human signs in the supernatural processes of salvation and sanctification’ (p. 4). The book focuses its inquiry into the complex issues adduced in the introduction through the works and legacy of Sir Philip Sidney.

The book begins with Thomas Rogers, who translated the Imitatio Christi as part of a relatively conservative Protestant project to reform late medieval works of piety. Perry argues that Rogers's devotional translations and adaptations have much to teach us about moderate Protestant thought concerning practices of imitation. She claims that Rogers reframes his original by emphasising the devotee's interaction with the Word in Scripture. One might offer a minor caveat: Rogers's translation relies heavily on Sebastian Castellio's Protestantising Latin revision of the Imitatio Christi; some of Rogers's reorientations simply follow Castellio. The chapter then compares Rogers's work on pious imitation with Sidney's Defence of poesy and with Greville's literary work, especially Mustapha. Both writers, she argues, reimagine the body of Christ as a community sustained by good rhetoric and good practices of interpretation, but vulnerable – keenly so in Greville – to the perils of the flesh, self-love and sin.

The next chapter addresses Elizabeth Cary's closet drama Mariam and the Life of Elizabeth Cary, written by Cary's daughter. For Perry, both texts present the sacrifices required of one who would imitate Christ by putting eloquence in the service of charity or properly directed desire. Perry suggests that Mariam's trajectory -- from outspoken wife to passive martyr -- signifies a movement from a Foxean paradigm of fiery speech to a Catholic paradigm of comparative passivity; heroic self-subjugation in Mariam and the Life produce the Sidnean ideal of the speaking picture. The chapter's close puts the manuscript of the Life in the context of struggles among English exiles affiliated with the Cambray convent over appropriate devotional practices for the convent's women.

The third chapter focuses on Charles i's notorious use of Pamela's prayer from Sidney's revised Arcadia in the Eikon Basilike. Perry asks why a prayer from a well-known text, one popular in the Caroline court, would be included in Charles's book, and turns to a detailed study of the theological poetics implicit in another of the book's prayers, taken from Lewis Bayly's The practice of pietie. Perry suggests that Sidney's and Bayly's texts, and the prayers that they contain, invite the body to function as a site and sign of divine intervention even as they also work to chastise the flesh. They stake out a middle ground, she argues, between iconoclasm and iconophilia, one too easily obscured if we fail to take the Eikon Basilike on its own terms (rather than John Milton's).

The final chapter gives Milton his due. Perry contextualises Eikonoklastes with the writings of Puritans such as William Prynne and Henry Burton. Milton is for Perry both a part of the Sidnean legacy and its endpoint, as he seeks to free Protestant imitatio from the tyrannous desires of bodies political and natural. Turning to Paradise regained, Perry argues that Milton's imitatio Christi is finally a radically interiorised one.

If the goal of Protestant imitatio is, as Perry argues, ever closer approximation to the Word, there may be some slight tension with the goals of secular imitatio in which some distance between contemporary imitation and classical precedent often (if not always) drives literary creativity. The book occasionally posits the English Church as negotiating a via media between Rome and Geneva. Yet recent scholarship has challenged the notion of a via media in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean Churches, and historians like Ethan Shagan have argued that the rhetoric of moderation was itself a sharp polemical weapon. Still, these quibbles are minor. This is a mature book, and a richly suggestive one. It is about nothing less than post-Reformation signification practices, and as such has much to offer early modern studies.