Arguably the most conspicuous pillar of early Stuart Oxonian “Calvinism” to lack a posthumous scholarly life, John Prideaux has at last received worthy and even-handed treatment. While two near-contemporaneous lives—in Anthony Wood's Athenæ Oxoniensis and John Prince's The Worthies of Devon—provide valuable details on Prideaux's labors at Exeter College, Oxford, no modern study has offered a narrative account of Prideaux's life and role in ecclesiastical and university politics, despite his status as the doyen of Oxford Reformed divinity at the time of Laud's ascendancy to the Chancellorship and thereafter to the see of Canterbury. Partly, this neglect owes to Prideaux's poor literary reception: after the Caroline settlement, Prideaux's technical Latin writings seemed out of place in a literary milieu that privileged limpid English prose. Later, hindered by a lack of publishable correspondence, and by a chronological inconvenience for editors constructing rival historiographies on either side of the Tractarian movement, Prideaux's reputation further languished.

Things have, indeed, improved of late: modern studies by Anthony Milton and Stephen Hampton have analyzed Prideaux's theological ideas and emphasized his profound contemporary influence. However, as Maddicott demonstrates, to consider Prideaux only as a Reformed academic theologian and bishop is to relate only one of the “lives” that need to be considered. It is Prideaux's other and mutually informative life, as thirty-year rector of Exeter College, Oxford—the post that “until his promotion to a bishopric in 1641 . . . was the stabilizing background to all that he did” (viii–ix)—that Maddicott's study chiefly illuminates.

The study falls in three parts. The first, encompassing chapters 1 and 2, covers events from Prideaux's youth in Devon to an initial academic season of almost unmitigated personal and professional success at the Devonian-associated Exeter. The second part, chapters 3 to 6, makes admirable use of college archives to demonstrate Prideaux's success in elevating Exeter to the foremost of Oxford's colleges, as well through building construction (funded partly by John Peryam, with whom Prideaux maintained a warm relationship), as through the disproportionate attraction of pupils from both the wider European Reformed community and England's aristocratic families.

The third part, chapters 7 to 12, returns to narrate the events of Prideaux's life from 1624, at which time more complex and trying circumstances began to compound against him. These were partly of his own doing, as with his unaccountable behavior in the 1626 election fracas over Frances Stuart, or his browbeating style in academic exercises. But they were also partly due to external circumstances, whether the ascent of Laud (Prideaux's theological and university-political foil) or Prideaux's own eventual impoverishment and disenfranchisement as a royalist under parliamentary rule. Maddicott writes that Prideaux “never digressed” (205), but gold is often to be found in Maddicott's digressions, whether in his humorous account of Ashley Anthony Cooper's revolt over diluted beer, his tantalizing notes about the most well-represented authors in what remains of Prideaux's library (Reformed authors both—the Steinfurt philosopher Otto Casmann and the Herrborn divine Johann Heinrich Alsted), or in cases of unnerving detective work (most notably, Maddicott's explanation for Prideaux's imprimatur on William Chillingworth's The Religion of Protestants). Carefully conceived and expertly written, the work is also simply a fine read.

What might be Maddicott's main achievement here? Certainly, the study adds to the institutional history of Exeter College, while providing a parallel analysis of early Stuart Arminianism from the standpoint of one of its most articulate enemies. But insofar as these lives of Prideaux layer upon the more commonly known figure the life of a long-tenured academic and tutor, Maddicott has sculpted a sympathetic yet even-handed character study in educational leadership. It is not entirely free of indisputable remarks—fine points of doctrine are occasionally veiled or elided through phrasing, as for example in the implied attribution to all Reformed divinity of a supralapsarian understanding of reprobation on page 9—but Maddicott would no doubt have directed readers to Stephen Hampton's Grace and Conformity (2021) had publication schedules allowed. Most valuable, for a broad readership, will be a new appreciation of Prideaux the pedagogue: of a man, that is, about whom there was as much of Ascham as of Alsted.