This is a magnificent work of scholarship. Milton's thesis is established in the book's title and subtitle. He presents the mid-seventeenth century as a period of immensely varied approaches to reforming the Church of England. These are positioned both within a wider context of contemporary political upheavals and – crucially – the history of the established Church. Time and again he emphasises the extent to which arguments and schemes during this period grew out of earlier debates. On this reading, the upheavals of the revolutionary 1640s and 1650s need not be separated out as a uniquely traumatic deviation from the Church's ‘normal’ periods of existence: ‘This was the climax of the Church of England's early history, rather than a strange lacuna in it’ (p. 4). That past history had not created a uniform and easily defined Church. Before 1625 successive settlements of the Church had produced ‘an incoherent and haphazard jumble of different elements’ (p. 33). From the accession of Charles i to the 1662 Act of Uniformity under his son, England was wracked with numerous and fiercely competing visions of how to reform that ‘hotchpotch’ into a more perfect Church. Milton analyses in turn the Laudian Reformation, the ‘Abortive’ Reformation of 1640–2, the Westminster Reformation and the Parliamentarian Church of England, the Royalist Church of England, 1642–9, ‘Alternative’ Reformations, 1649–53, the Cromwellian Church, Episcopalian Royalism in the 1650s, ‘Failed’ Reformations, 1659–61, and the Caroline Settlement of 1661–2.

Readers of Milton's previous books will not be surprised by the depth of research on display in this one, nor the overall approach. A dazzling – and sometimes dizzying – range of published and unpublished works are interrogated and summarised, juxtaposed with competing texts, and used to illustrate clusters of thought and rival arguments. In essence, Milton offers us a series of biopsies of the intellectual body of the Church over the course of a fascinating period. We are repeatedly reminded of the complexity and nuance of different positions, and that past historiographical orthodoxies are too simplistic: ‘matters were less straightforward than this model implies’ (p. 101) is a typical locution. Historians as varied as David Como, Ian Green, Christopher Haigh, William Lamont, Isabel Rivers, John Walter and George Yule are duly rebuked. Complex summaries of complex debates yield extremely nuanced statements. When discussing attacks in the early 1650s on impropriated tithes, for instance, Milton points to the way in which radical authors could sing from the same hymn-sheet as earlier Laudian firebrands: ‘In many cases these were purely rhetorical manoeuvres, but framing “radical” ideas with reference to the past also in part reflected the fact that to an extent their radicalism involved the application of conventional ideas in new and different contexts’ (p. 302; my italics).

Overall we are given an immensely rich discussion of a crowded intellectual battlefield. And as might be expected from the author of Catholic and Reformed and Laudian and Royalist polemic this yields a consistently subtle and sophisticated analysis of language and rhetoric. Milton is insistent that negotiating positions and published interventions should not be dismissed as insincere gambits to gain temporary advantage. They might very well be that in part, but he also sees them as revealing underlying frameworks of thought, and as giving crucial clues to how their authors understood and defined the Church of England and what they valued within it. Pretty much everyone discussed in England's Second Reformation was prepared to countenance change in the Church; it is just – just! – that they could not agree on which features of past settlements deserved to be emphasised and which should have been reformed out of existence. Pretty much every group imaginable is shown both to have been internally divided and to have followed similar polemical strategies to their opponents. This yields particular fruit in an especially strong chapter which anatomises intra-royalist disputes in the 1650s and argues that no one should be seen as a representative figure: ‘The episcopalian thought of the 1650s is better characterized as a swirling cauldron of unregulated new and old ideas and forms, being collected, blended and discarded by a wide range of different people as they responded to unprecedented circumstances and pressures’ (p. 436). Importantly, Milton also reminds his readers that it is too easy to fixate on points of disagreement at the expense of recognising the prodigious time and energy that contemporaries put into trying to agree: ‘the danger is that we produce ideological straitjackets for the protagonists and make principled conflict the norm, rather than the messier and more nuanced reality of compromise and change’ (p. 512).

This is a work of profound learning and industry which inevitably places considerable demands on its readers. In a not untypical aside, Milton casually notes that James Ussher's work on the Ignatian epistles was ‘obviously’ of great value for the episcopalian cause (p. 413). Knowing why Calybute Downing ‘of all people’ wrote something with unintended irony in 1632 requires us to remember that he had been described 159 pages earlier as a ‘Presbyterian firebrand’. An excellent index undoubtedly helps the reader keep track of the multitude of names that come and go through the 513 pages of main text. But this is not, unfortunately, complemented with a bibliography. The ‘select’ bibliography in Catholic and Reformed ran to more than thirty-three pages and was a profoundly useful research tool in its own right. Here, alas, there is not even a selection from the myriad works listed in the 2,206 footnotes. The sheer luxuriant profusion of knowledge on display sometimes undermines the – generally very powerful – structure of argument. Fewer examples in some places would have left more room at the end of the book to round out the discussion of the consequences and legacies of 1662. As it is, this huge book ends rather abruptly.

But these are carping criticisms of a monumental achievement. England's second Reformation consolidates Anthony Milton's standing as one of the most brilliant historians working in any part of the whole early modern field. Everyone concerned with the history of the Church of England, the revolutionary decades that lie at the heart of the seventeenth century and cultures of religious writing and polemic will repeatedly return to this book for insight and inspiration.