This high-quality collection of thirty-two essays by leading scholars in the field of literature and Reformation studies is divided into nine roughly equal sections plus an editorial introduction: “Histories,” “Spatialities,” “Doctrines,” “Legalities,” “Outside the Law,” “Literature,” “Communities,” “Labour,” and “Selfhood.” The stated aim of the volume is to provide a diachronic approach to Reformation cultural history that can unsettle standard categories of periodization. In pursuit of this goal, the editors asked contributors to write on a theme of their own choosing that spans pre- and post-Reformation cultures. While some essays inevitably fulfill this agenda better than others, taken as a whole the book provides as rich a view of medieval and Renaissance cultural reformations as one is likely to find in a single volume.

Given the length of this book, most readers will almost certainly dip into individual sections according to particular interests. In doing so, however, they will miss some of the illuminating patterns that emerge across the book's nine categories. This is partly because a number of key figures recur throughout the volume, most notably Thomas More. Several essays in different sections revisit the question of More's legacy, including Stephen Greenblatt's “Utopian Pleasure,” David Loewenstein's “Heresy and Treason,” and James Simpson's “Place.” Refining and reworking some of the major themes of his career, Greenblatt examines how More's Utopia translates the subversive power of Epicurean ideas, especially those concerned with pleasure, into Christian humanist terms. From one perspective, Greenblatt argues, More appears to neuter this legacy, embracing it so as to render it unthreatening. But from a different, more radical, perspective More puts Epicurean ideas about pleasure to work on behalf of a completely new view of society, one rooted in the belief that “the pursuit of pleasure, rather than the threat of punishment, is the soundest basis of a just social order” (317). The result is a nuanced but bold vision of More in which his most important legacy lies not in his revivification of Catholicism but with his liberating release of Epicurean energies.

Greenblatt's More differs from the ideologically fraught and morally disturbing figure Loewenstein finds. Comparing discourses about heresy in the early English Reformation and the Civil War period, Loewenstein stresses the importance of disease and contamination to both moments. Of particular importance to his account is the way that heresy engenders a socially and psychologically unsettling sense of disorder in More's work, as it does in Thomas Edwards's Gangraena (1646). While Simpson also identifies the importance of disease and disgust in More's writings on heresy, he perceives greater spiritual acuity in More's thinking than Loewenstein. Asking why the place of the church is routinely bound up with questions of disease and disgust from Chaucer to Marvell, Simpson shows how More foresaw the extent to which the delocalization or placelessness of the church would result in the disenchantment of sacred space. In turn, Simpson also explains how competing views of the church as place shape the way that different communities cope with the revolting and the repugnant. Along with much else, these three essays provide an illuminating window onto More's beguilingly complex role in the European cultural reformations, as do many other essays in the volume, including Greg Walker's “Folly” and James Kearney's “Idleness.”

Simpson's focus on place is shared by essays not appearing under “Spatialities,” most notably Colin Burrow's “The Reformation of the Household,” which is grouped in “Communities” and is now essential reading for anyone interested in the topic. Another two essays in different sections of the book that are worth reading in relation to one another are Lorna Hutson's “Theatre” and John Parker's “Persona,” as both essays are concerned with how early modern drama developed its powers of characterization and storytelling. But where Hutson focuses on the synthesis of classical and penitential dramaturgy vis-à-vis legal developments in early modern England, Parker examines concepts and practices of masking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the essay that most clearly fulfills the collection's timely agenda to rethink periodization is Brian Cummings's “Autobiography and the History of Reading,” which concludes the volume. More than a historical overview of the different ways in which readers have received Augustine's Confessions, Cummings's essay grapples with the extent to which Augustine's book provides the philosophical terms in which such a history must inevitably be written. The result is a subtle tracing of Augustine's reception all the way to Bunyan, one in which patterns of continuity and difference clearly and consequentially emerge.

While it remains to be seen if this volume will succeed in provoking a rigorous rethinking of our categories of periodization, it certainly provides a stimulating and expansive view of the territory.