Treacherous faith: the specter of heresy in early modern English literature and culture, by David Loewenstein, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, 512 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-920339-0This major work is designed as a contribution to both early modern studies and to twenty-first century debates over religious violence. Marked by moral seriousness and political urgency, it speaks to a world still plagued by religious phobias, suspicion and violence (26). The book is structured around three major figures - Thomas More, John Foxe, and John Milton - but interspersed between them are chapters containing shorter studies of writers like the Protestant martyr Anne Askew, Richard Bancroft, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, James VI and I, Thomas Edwards, John Goodwin, and the Levellers William Walwyn and Richard Overton. Loewenstein is to be commended for ranging boldly across the whole period from the 1520s to the 1660s, and being impressively surefooted in the process. Like Alex Walsham's Charitable Hatred, this book forces scholars to think outside their chronological boxes, and see the powerful continuities across the Reformation. In contrast to Walsham's work, however, Loewenstein's has a narrative arc bending towards tolerance, one that begins with a conflicted humanist and heresy-hunter (More), and ends with a writer who deconstructs conventional notions of heresy and valorises liberty of conscience (Milton).More is portrayed as a tragic figure, whose playful wit and dialogic openness were subverted by his fear of heresy (50). Given responsibility for homeland security (32), he is a familiar figure, a warning from the past. As a literary scholar, however, Loewenstein wants to do more than moralise, and he makes a strong case for paying greater attention to More's achievement in writing his Confutation, a work that levelled three quarters of a million words against Tyndale's ninety thousand, displaying ferocious creativity amidst gargantuan exertions (25). Here, as elsewhere in the book, tribute is paid to the rhetorical power of heresiography. Milton, however, is the book's hero. In previous work, Loewenstein has depicted the poet as apocalyptic, violent writer, one whose Samson Agonistes ends in what some liken to an act of terrorism. Here, Milton's Samson is mentioned just once in passing (in the chapter on Foxe, 131), and the focus is on the author of Areopagitica and Paradise Lost. Critics have observed that Milton's Satan turns the language of republicanism against the tyranny of heaven, but Loewenstein argues that Milton also invests Satan with the characteristics of heretics and blasphemers (as depicted by heresiographers like Thomas Edwards). The Apostate and schismatic Satan is cunning, duplicitous, seductive, calumnious, and incorrigible. As John Beale noted, Milton fills Satan's mouth with long & horrible Blasphemyes (329). In doing so, the poem prompts its readers to reconsider the nature of blasphemy, including its relationtoheresyandnonconformity (340). Presbyterian and Episcopal heresiographers had stigmatised godly minorities. Milton subverts conventional heresiography and sets the record straight. Conscientious dissent is personified in the noble figure of Abdiel, while heresy, schism, and blasphemy are fastened on Satan, a regal figure who longs to seize the throne of heaven.Treacherous Faith contains many other close and fruitful readings of key texts, but Loewenstein's relentless emphasis on inflamed rhetoric does come at a price, obscuring the rationality of his subjects. …