In this tightly argued and densely researched monograph, Ronald Asch challenges the traditional notion that over the course of the seventeenth century European monarchy lost much of its sacral aura and religious legitimation in the face of a process of inexorable secularisation. He makes an important and effective case for recognising that the experience of the French and English monarchies had much in common. They shared a unique legacy of sacerdotal kingship in which the monarch enjoyed priestly powers, manifest for example, in his capacity to cure the King's Evil. They also faced similar challenges in matters relating to Church and State, and in the solutions that they adopted each influenced the other. James i and Henry iv confronted aggressive confessional movements in the shape of Scots Presbyterians and the Catholic League, both of which sought to subordinate the monarch to religious authority. James's preferred solution was to promote a religious via media and to distance himself from any obligation to embark on a holy war, but with mixed results, because his desire to present himself throughout as Defender of the Faith left him exposed to criticism by Puritans whose providential expectations had been disappointed. Henry iv pursued an ultimately more successful policy of promoting an image of himself as God's chosen instrument in bringing peace and greatness to a Catholic France. Louis xiii continued this approach and his defeat of the Huguenots in the 1620s largely removed any threat of religiously based opposition to the Crown. Charles i’s attempts to invest the monarchy with a new sacral aura by aligning himself with High Church Laudianism, by contrast, provoked the backlash which led to civil war and his eventual deposition and martyrdom. However, he was able to to turn this defeat into a partial victory by presenting himself (in Eikon Basilike) as a royal saint and martyr, and reconnecting with a particularly exalted view of the king as a Christ-like figure. Charles ii, invariably driven by more tactical considerations, attempted to accommodate himself to the French model of Church-State relations, particularly during the 1680s when he aligned himself with a state Church that stressed that allegiance to the monarch and the established Church were largely synonymous. However, his brother James ii abandoned this in trying to introduce a policy of limited toleration which relied on asserting the supreme authority of the monarch in both spiritual and temporal matters. Following his downfall, both William and Anne – and indeed the early Hanoverians – sought to reconnect themselves to the militantly Protestant themes of the start of the century. Meanwhile Louis xiv was promoting a thoroughgoing reconfessionalisation of the Bourbon monarchy which, whilst strengthening kingly authority in the short term, left it vulnerable to Jansenist critiques and the secularising forces of Enlightenment in the early eighteenth century. This short review cannot do justice to the complexity and subtlety with which Asch develops his thesis. What he demonstrates very effectively is the ways in which, throughout the century, monarchs engaged in a series of negotiations between secular and religious visions of royal authority, trying out different ways of combining their imperial and priestly roles, but recognising always that the sacerdotal aspects of kingship retained their potency.