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For the majority of ordinary people in early modern England, the moral and the economic were closely aligned. Alongside material changes and a growing market ideology, traditional ideas about religion, duty, and community continued to influence economic relationships and practices well into the 18th century.

The clergymen who suffered during the 1640s and the 1650s for their loyalty to King Charles I have long awaited a full study. This is somewhat surprising, given that John Walker’s manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which form the basis of Fiona McCall’s new study, have now for a century been easily accessible to scholars. A calendar by G. B. Tatham was published in 1911, and A. G.

It is a rare thing for a reviewer to read a book which on its own terms, in its content and argument, leaves nothing open to serious criticism. Professor Diarmaid Ferriter’s Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s is one such book.

It may be hard to believe but there has been no single-author, book length study of the Levellers since H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution was published in 1961. Rachel Foxley has ended this interregnum in fine style, but before looking at her new work it is worth examining why its publication is such a rare occurrence.

This important work is long overdue. It identifies two gaps in the existing historiography.

‘This book presents an itinerary of English Catholicism in the early modern period’ (p. 3) claims the editor in the opening sentence of this volume, which originates in a symposium convened by Lowell Gallagher at UCLA in 2007, since when the field has flourished.

'There is no man or movement’, according to the late Emmet Larkin, ‘that can be intelligibly discussed apart from the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland’.

Paul Lim's study presents an erudite analysis of the Trinitarian controversies in 17th-century England. In addition to grappling with the large number of contemporary texts, the book also delves into the patristic texts employed to defend the various positions they set forth.