David Steinmetz is one of our most distinguished Reformation historians, with an enviable track record of explaining the complexities of the period with elegant clarity. He is also a United Methodist minister who takes seriously his vocation to provide clergy and people with the tools to understand and profit from church history. This collection of essays, mostly lightly-footnoted, is directed to an American Protestant churchgoing audience, but will much profit many beyond that constituency, including undergraduates beginning to study the period. Highlights are the essay ‘The superiority of pre-critical exegesis’, which ruffled feathers among some liberal biblical scholars on its publication in 1980 by pointing out some of the virtues of pre-Enlightenment biblical criticism; Steinmetz's afterword pursues the theme, which does not seem so outrageous these days. There are excellent introductions to the changes wrought by the Reformation in the ordained ministry and to the varieties of eucharistic theology among the Reformers in the light of their differing Christologies. There is a shrewd assessment of the contrasting talents of Jaroslav Pelikan and Heiko Oberman, and a wonderful essay, ‘The necessity of the past’, on the value of history to the practice of Christianity, which contains the useful aphorism (p. 143) that ‘unexamined history operates as fate’. Some essays are more directly addressed to concerns of a modern American Church constituency, including a studiedly neutral account of current disputes in the Anglican Communion over sexuality. My one niggle is Steinmetz's assumption twice repeated (pp. 76, 152) that John Calvin spoke of having had a ‘sudden conversion’ to Evangelical faith. Other eminent scholars have said or implied the same, and it has long been a congenial thought for Evangelicals with eighteenth-century Pietist assumptions about conversion, but the famous Latin phrase ‘subita conversione’ in Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms does not necessarily imply any ‘suddenness’, which is not otherwise a feature of his account there. It can equally well mean ‘by experiencing a change of heart’, and that is how it was first translated into French.