This book is a dense read which, after all, any Oxford University Press book likely will be. If you have ever puzzled over the motives behind seemingly random stories of strange events, births of animals and people with impossible disfigurements, you will find answers in this book. Dr. Walsham has, perhaps accidentally, explained much of the sociology of today's tabloid press by reference to its earliest beginnings in English.

Although I agree essentially with one of her conclusions, namely, that the Reformation is not the "grandsire of the Enlightenment" nor a "kind of halfway house on the road to the 'age of reason,'" I would recommend caution. I also recommend reading the final chapter of Sameuel Eliot Morison's remarkable, "The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England," in which he summarizes connections between people there and Newton, Kepler and other acknowledged players in the Scientific Revolution. Reason and scientific experimentalism have not always been in the same intellectual camp. Morison's book may be old (first published in 1936)but it is still valuable.