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In the years after his return to Herborn, Johann Heinrich Alsted's commitment to Ramon Lull and the art of memory sustained a series of assaults from near and far. Five years and ten publications later, his commitment seems if anything to have grown and to be extending itself from logic and mnemonics into cosmology and physics, from the ‘alchemical logic’ of Lull to alchemy itself. Of the four systems of physics which the work proposes to harmonize, chemical physics is declared to be ‘by far the most ancient of all except the Mosaic’. The origins of the Rosicrucian uproar have long been shrouded in mystery. The authorship of the first of the Rosicrucian manifestos, the Fama fraternitatis, was attributed to Tobias Hess. The publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos was not an isolated event. No other centre in the Reformed world seems to have matched either the intense preoccupation with occultism or the immediate participation in the clamour surrounding the Rosicrucians.

Chapter 3 analyzes the Synod of Dort and the British delegation’s participation in that famous international conference of Reformed churches. It investigates the delegation’s Collegiat Suffrage and their response to the draft canons to see how they handled the insistence of other Reformed churches to codify perseverance of the saints as a nonnegotiable Reformed distinctive. This chapter uncovers a consistent English strategy of conciliatory confessionalism, even when it was painfully inconvenient. Even though the delegates agreed theologically with the rest of the Synod on perseverance, their sensitivity to readings of Augustine prepared them to advocate unity among the Reformed churches in a way that would avoid unnecessary offense to those rejecting the prevailing view on the doctrine. And while the British delegation’s request was not granted, this episode demonstrates yet another attempt by Englishmen to use readings of Augustine to shape doctrinal standards within a Reformed context.

Calvin was practically absent from Dutch theology of the eighteenth century. Even those Reformed theologians who defended old orthodoxies tended to define their thought in relation to the Synod of Dort while scarcely invoking Calvin. Those who embraced toleration or a Protestant Enlightenment moved yet farther away from his ideas while often condemning him for the intolerance he showed Michael Servetus. The shift from polite indifference to the reformer to the active appropriation of Calvin for the theological ends of Dutch neo-Calvinism came between 1830 and 1900.

Chapter 4 examines the torrent of pamphlets that accompanied the fall from power of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Most of the pamphlets produced immediately before and after the Prince of Orange’s coup d’état and the execution of Oldenbarnevelt show an intensification of the earlier political and religious debate, as both parties (Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants) now regarded Holland’s liberties and privileges, as well as the nature of its Reformed Church, as being under direct threat. Examining the writings of the Remonstrant minister Hendrik Slatius, whose role in the attempt on the life of Prince of Orange would eventually bring him to the scaffold, it analyses how the political pressures of Maurits’s coup d’état led to the first articulation of an anti-Orangist argument, thus challenging the dominant consensus which views the development of a republican argument as a phenomenon of the 1650s.

Ussher was drawn into debate on the extent of the atonement on the eve of the Synod of Dort, and his hypothetical universalism — the belief that Christ died for all humanity with salvation made possible upon the condition of faith — was not well received by many Puritan clergy. One recent study of Ussher’s doctrine of the atonement gives the impression that hypothetical universalism sprang from Ussher’s mind like a spring from the rocks. In reality, Ussher stood a considerable distance downstream, a recipient and shaper of a tradition dating back a millennium. Ussher’s notebooks contain his interaction with patristic, medieval, and early modern sources on this question, material which has been ignored by previous scholars. This chapter examines the continuity of Ussher’s views with an important stream of the Western Christian tradition. It also considers the relationship of incarnation and covenant to Christ’s work of satisfaction on the cross.

Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, and Johann Amos Comenius step from central Europe's Reformed world into the pages of English intellectual history as if from out of a void. The places where they studied — Elbing, Brieg, Herborn — are towns which few Anglo-Saxon scholars could even locate unassisted on the map of central Europe. Historians have considered Johann Heinrich Alsted as the culmination of Herborn's accomplishments. German scholars often portray Alsted as a pillar of Calvinist orthodoxy, a pioneer of Reformed scholasticism, a participant at the Synod of Dort. In English scholarship, his primary association is with millenarianism. In Spain, he is a disciple of the medieval Catalan mystic, Ramon Lull. To students of his encyclopedism, Alsted is characterized especially by his tendency to combine Aristotelianism, Ramism, Lullism, and the arts of memory in a pursuit of universal knowledge similar to that of yet another of his favorite authors, Giordano Bruno. Thus, every main phase and aspect of Alsted's intellectual career can be illuminated by examining it in the context of the movement for further reformation.

This chapter tackles changing English Protestant perceptions of the Church of Rome and foreign Protestant Churches. It argues that the notion that the Church of England occupied a via media between the two is unsustainable. Plentiful evidence demonstrates the Church’s sense of identity with the foreign Reformed Churches and antipathy towards Roman Catholicism in this period. Significant adjustments to this view are noted among the Laudians in the 1630s and thereafter, but despite the complexities of the situation in the 1640s and 1650s, the overall Reformed identity of the Church (while significantly modified in some eyes) was not seriously rethought.

This chapter traces the history of Anglican confessional statements until 1662. It argues that the Thirty-Nine Articles were almost universally accepted as the authoritative statement of the Church of England’s faith, even if some desired to revise or amplify them. On the controversial issues of predestination and the eucharistic presence, the Articles placed the Church of England within the fold of Reformed Protestantism. And, as Conformists often argued, the Church’s eccentric liturgy, disciplinary structure, and hierarchy did not mitigate this identity. Only an inadequate grasp of the diversity of the Reformed tradition has prevented this from being more widely acknowledged.