Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton. By Rob Iliffe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 522. $34.95 hardcover.

The roots of this book go back to the time that the author spent in the 1980s in the Microfilm Reading Room of the University Library in Cambridge where he worked his way through the numerous reels of Newton's theological writings, a laborious task due to the poor quality of the microfilm copies. Modern technology has changed that, and all of the primary texts are now available online as part of the Newton Project that was overseen by Iliffe between 1998 and 201 5. It is now possible to search through, read, and annotate digitally in just one hour what took him nearly three years to sift through and record in his own handwriting.

Priests of Nature is the first extended examination of Newton's early research on religious topics, and it takes into account all the millions of his words on religious topics that have recently been published online. It is a towering achievement inasmuch as Iliffe tells us more than any other scholar about what fascinated Newton when he was not working on natural science as we know it. This was not chemical and alchemical investigation, as has sometimes been suggested, but religion. He worshipped regularly and publicly at the chapel of Trinity College and the church of...