The nineteenth-century legacy and reception history of the Reformation has lately attracted much scholarly debate. The publication of Miriam Burstein's Victorian reformations has coincided with that of Reinventing the Reformation in the nineteenth century: a cultural history, a special themed issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (xc/1 [2014]) (see pp. 217–18 above). The latter publication complements Burstein's persuasive examination of how Victorian Protestants not only reaffirmed and reclaimed but re-imagined and reinvented the Reformation in order to confront and combat their own various religious anxieties about ‘popery’, sectarianism, unbelief and secularisation. Burstein's literary critical approach, with its detailed textual analysis of non-canonical Victorian fiction, sheds new light on questions more typically viewed through the lens of controversial pamphlet and periodical literature or in cultural artefacts such as memorials. Burstein's third chapter, on ‘Reading the Reformation Bible in the nineteenth century’, supports the view of Richard Rex and Vivienne Westbrook (in her chapter ‘The Victorian Reformation Bible’) in the John Rylands volume, that ‘the Bible was safer ground than history on which to defend the principles of the Reformation’. Relevant here is Burstein's citing of John Henry Newman's famous comment: ‘To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant’ (p. 143). However, it was the achievement of an English Bible that eclipsed most other aspects of the English Reformation in the eyes of Victorian Protestants and it was this fact which could unite them even when they were increasingly divided over its interpretation; divisions which Burstein notes. Burstein's Victorian Protestant novelists, however, interestingly ‘paper over the divisions among sixteenth-century and Victorian Protestant denominations’ (p. 81) and prefer to dwell on the ‘shock’ value of Bible reading as an instantly transformative conversion experience. She also emphasises the Victorian Protestant strategic reclamation of the figure of John Wycliffe as hero and ‘Morning star of the Reformation’ (ch. ii, esp. pp. 58–62), complementing Richard Rex's argument in his introduction to the John Rylands volume. Moreover, Burstein's discussion of Agnes Strickland's attempted rehabilitation of Mary Tudor (pp. 120–3) complements Judith Richard's chapter (‘Defaming and defining “Bloody Mary”’) in the same Bulletin volume. While Burstein's work is not free from modish literary jargon and speculative theorising (‘Strickland genders persecution as an essentially masculine practice’: p. 120) her use of literary theory mainly supports rather than obscures the historical and theological contextual dimensions of the subject. The general reader may find her snapshot analysis of more than three dozen texts rather bewildering but she always relates the intricacies of plot to her main theme. Her verdict on the Reformation novels of Sir Walter Scott as imbued with an Enlightenment-based model of historical relativism and as ‘post-Catholic’, making it impossible for a nineteenth-century reader ‘to think or even fantasize in an early modern Catholic mode’, may be open to question. For one thing, they had a notoriously ‘Catholicising’ impact on the Tractarian generation, notably John Keble (as expressed in Keble's 1838 British Critic review of John Gibson Lockhart's seven-volume Life of Sir Walter Scott, a classic in the biographical genre). For Burstein, while Scott's novels insist that the Catholic past cannot be successfully retrieved or imaginatively re-imagined in a post-Reformation Protestant world, it was precisely their imaginative recreation of the Middle Ages which enchanted and enraptured Newman, Keble and a whole Tractarian generation. For Newman, Scott's novels stimulated ‘their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles’ (Apologia, 185). In fact, later in the book she notes (p. 142) that Catholics ‘would invoke and rework Scott's representations of violated, degraded Catholic spaces, especially Catholic churches’ (p. 142). Moreover, her chapter on ‘Unnoticed persecutions’ illuminates, through its analysis of how both Catholics and Anglo-Catholics overturned the historical narrative of Victorian Protestant novelists, highlighting the damaging rupture represented by the Reformation. She shows that Victorian Catholic writers insisted that it was Protestantism that was an unnatural religion due to its separation of the English from their historic and organic past and true national identity (p. 179). Burstein even finds space for brief consideration of Victorian Catholic martyr fiction with its message that miracles and modernity were inseparable. Furthermore, her chapter on the canonical Dickens's Barnaby Rudge and what she regards as its rejection of the anti-Catholic and pro-Catholic binary in the nineteenth-century historical novel is enlightening. While most of the novelists discussed, with in her view the exception of Scott, seemed bent on reaffirming or recovering a one-sided polemical version of the Reformation, Burstein regards the message of Barnaby Rudge to be that the only hope for a stable future lies in forgetting about that contested legacy, consigning it to the past. Finally, her ‘Coda’ is devoted to Protestant attempts to utilise the Risorgimento in nineteenth-century Italy to overcome historic resistance to the Reformation in that country. It is accompanied by anachronistic and unintentionally comical efforts to turn Savonarola into a proto- or nascent Protestant (‘Savonarola morphs into Martin Luther’) and even a nineteenth-century Wesleyan-type revivalist, but it reveals an abiding strength of this book: a creative use of historical fiction matched by sensitivity and understanding of theological and political contexts. This original, learned, well-argued, highly stimulating, pacey and readable study deserves close attention. It represents a significant contribution to the Victorian historiography and legacy of the English Reformation as well as to literary and cultural studies more generally.