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John Owen and English Puritanism. Experiences of defeat. By Crawford Gribben. (Studies in Historical Theology.) Pp. xvi + 401. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. £47.99. 978 0 19 979815 5

Milton’s major poems, in their original contexts as well in those of their later interpretation and uses, of Thomson’s The seasons, whose ‘discursive plurality’ (p. ) morphed over the course of its several editions, and of Pope’s Dunciad in its successive and expanding versions are fine examples of how poets and those who made contemporary or later uses of their work responded adroitly to changing religio-political realities – especially so in the case of Pope, whose low-profile Catholicism made him especially cautious. The fine-grained analysis that Connell offers of the connections of theological and ecclesiastical conflicts and the political order is masterful, but sometimes the historical account that he presents goes against the grain of the main argument of the book – or seems to lose sight of it. For example, the transformation of Newtonian physico-theological thought (with its ecclesiastical repercussions) into a more general deism starts to look like a movement away from organised religion into a ‘free-thinking’ perceived by contemporaries as ‘irreligion’. So too the Shaftesburian conversion of religious enthusiasm into secular aesthetic experience drained the experience of its primary religious meaning. The literary canonisation of both Milton and Pope suggests the escape of their writings from their local religious contexts. Connell is right to highlight the period’s ecclesiastical and religio-political dynamics, which the usual model of progressive secularisation plays down or ignores, but it is useful to have both cultural narratives in circulation.