This collection of fifteen essays contains a wide variety of interesting local and regional studies that explore the dynamics and parameters of community life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The editors, Michael Halvorson and Karen Spierling, whose research interests reside in the German and French Reformations respectively, focused the contributions primarily around religious themes, with Protestant groups receiving the most attention. The essays are grouped by geographic region: France, Germany, northern Europe and Italy. Halvorson and Spierling introduce the volume by discussing theoretical work related to community experience that has resonated in Reformation scholarship: Ferdinand Tonnies's distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Arthur van Gennep's notion of liminality and Bernd Moeller's analysis of urban reformation. Defining community does not, however, attempt to construct or test any overarching definition of community. Rather, the volume offers a loose and fascinating mix of studies that provide useful insights into the ways in which people constructed, contained and contested communal norms.

Five essays highlight the significance of rituals, signs, liturgical practices and internal commitments in maintaining confessional solidarity in an age of religious conflict. Raymond Mentzer discusses a range of activities among Calvinists, including sermon-driven services, Psalm-singing, de-Romanised marriage and burial patterns, and a programme of moral discipline. These measures inculcated communal solidarity, yet marked Calvinists as alien from their Catholic neighbours. Similarly, Amanda Eurich's study of burial customs among French Reformed congregations reveals that internment in and around churches, along with fees and bequests, connected the dead to subsequent generations. Yet when Protestants sought to bury their dead in ancestral or parish churchyards alongside Catholics, bitter struggles ensued. Susan Boettcher delineates how evangelicals in Germany used memoria (visual commemorations such as altarpieces and monuments) to forge a communal identity during a critical transition in the Lutheran Reformation. In his study of Lutheran attempts to grapple with the conversion of adult Jews, Halvorson points to the difficulty of discerning the signs of true conversion. Across the confessional divide, John Frymire examines conflicts of conscience among Protestant magistrates in Catholic Straubing (Bavaria) over participation in Catholic processions and the mass. Ultimately, the magistrates refused to take part and underwent exile because they believed that partaking in external rituals reflected an internal spiritual allegiance. In a treatment of the two distinct, though conjoined, orders (the Ladies and Daughters of Charity), Susan Dinan contends that ‘internalized values of charitable work’ created communal bonds among the religious women, not spatial immediacy.

If rituals and values marked the boundaries of religious communities, interactions with civil society often challenged those borders, a theme taken up in five other essays. With her eye on the Lullin family in Geneva, Spierling calls attention to conflicting views of Christian community and individual appropriation of Reformed values. Francois Lullin served as an elder, but his brother Jean and other family members ran afoul of the consistory for neglecting church attendance, interacting with Catholics, dancing and fornicating. Michael Driedger also examines competing perspectives of religious community, but he concentrates on Mennonites in Krefeld, a town on the Lower Rhine. Using Pieter Kriedte's recent work as a foil, Driedger argues that Mennonites were a diverse lot; many communities, such as the one in Krefeld, interacted rather openly with non-Mennonites. From her research in Tuscany, Kathleen Comerford shows how political power formed a crucial component of religious reform, as Medici and Jesuits collaborated in the 1500s to extend the Society's influence in Siena and Montepulciano. As a counterpoint, Lucca's resistance to external forces left the Lucchese little opportunity to develop an independent communal identity. Focusing on political and religious conflict, Kirsten Post Walton's survey of the early Scottish Reformation underscores the obstacles that a Catholic queen (Mary Stewart) could pose for Protestant community-building. Standing outside Christian civil society, Jews in central Europe, according to Dean Phillip Bell, identified themselves in overlapping communities, local, regional, national and universal.

Four essays address a third theme that considers spatial conceptions of civil society that encased early modern men and women. Taking a tour of the English parish, Steve Hindle unpacks the import of Rogationtide perambulations before and after the Reformation. He shows that the processions, held at key moments in the liturgical year, affirmed parish borders, as well as fortifying the cultural solidarity of parishioners. In his study of child adoption in Nuremberg, Joel Harrington maintains that conventional assumptions about civic insularity from the outside world, inherent in the Gemeinschaft typology, need revision. Orphans, even those without citizenship privileges, circulated quite freely among Nurembergers, giving evidence of porous and flexible social networks. Claire Schen probes understandings of national identity by elucidating two cases of repatriation of Englishmen captured on the high seas and one instance of a Greek refugee fleeing Ottoman expansion. Schen concludes that resettlement and reintegration proved possible, as long as one had not joined in enemy assaults against English ships and had not converted to Islam. Cultural responses to volcanic eruption, according to Sean Cocco, point to the changing political meanings for the ‘disaster stricken community’ of Naples in the early 1600s. After eruptions of Vesuvius in 1631 and 1649 published accounts and manuscript pamphlets attributed differing causes to the disaster. In the former disaster, the absence of obedience to Spanish authority prevailed, whereas in the latter the presence of Spanish rule carried the day.

This volume, therefore, provides a wide-ranging exposé of how various peoples across Europe understood and experienced community. While range is a strength of the collection, a few of the essays strain almost any definition of community. Because a certain group shares common interests, encounters or spaces does not mean it possesses communal cohesion. None the less, Halvorson and Spierling manage the daunting editorial task of imposing coherence with skill and elegance. Defining community offers rich observation and analysis of community life, which will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars.