German Protestant theology reached the apex of its prestige and influence during the nineteenth century – in the era bounded at one end by Friedrich Schleiermacher and at the other by Adolf von Harnack. The setting for the great achievements of these and other theologians was academic. Modern German Protestant theology was the product of German universities – the Protestant theological faculties that thrived under the aegis of Prussia and other German states. In his survey of these developments, Thomas Albert Howard situates the institutional evolution of nineteenth-century Protestant theology within the broader history of the German universities since the Middle Ages. The emphasis falls on Prussia, more specifically on the University of Berlin, which Howard portrays as the cynosure of an ‘erastian modernity’. The great achievement of the Protestant theological faculties in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany was to mould their discipline into a ‘Wissenschaft’, an intellectual field that could deploy the same tools of modern scholarship, particularly the methods of philological and historical analysis, that were modernising the other, secular humanistic disciplines. Turning theology into an academic discipline had its dangers, however, of which Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss were early harbingers. The project threatened to chain Protestantism to the state and rob it of its soul – its foundations in creedal and ecclesiastical commitments that transcended scholarship. The shadow of Karl Barth thus hangs over Howard's account, which culminates in the famous disputation between Barth and Harnack in 1923. Most of this story has been told before. The most original parts of Howard's book treat the ‘theological encyclopedias’ in which leading scholars sought to present comprehensive and systematic overviews of their discipline. The book does not do justice to the confrontations between Protestant and Catholic theologians in shaping Protestant thought during the nineteenth century, or to the religious aura that attached to academic scholarship in the eyes of Schleiermacher and the other great Protestant figures of the early century. Howard's is none the less an able and engaging introduction to an important problem.