The starting point of this cross-disciplinary book is the observation that, in the seventeenth century, Dutch Protestant devotional texts contained few illustrations. Compared to their counterparts in surrounding countries, Dutch Protestant authors, engravers and publishers proved very reluctant to adopt Catholic visual practices and adapt them to their own religious culture. Why? For the most part, Els Stronks does not attempt here to answer this difficult question; rather she performs the extremely valuable task of description, providing a large body of new knowledge about the use of images in religious works by Dutch Calvinists, Remonstrants, Anabaptists, and Catholics. Focusing on illustrated Bibles and religious emblem books, Negotiating differences covers the period from the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Dividing the period into five phases, Stronks tells a story of change over time. At the beginning, Stronks finds, almost no Catholic literature was published in the republic; Protestants left most Bibles and other religious books unillustrated; and in their use of images Protestants did not draw on Catholic visual motifs. Stronks identifies the last quarter of the seventeenth century as a turning point: Dutch Protestants began to appropriate many elements of Catholic iconography, such as the heart as an emblem for the soul of the believer. By the late eighteenth century Dutch Protestants had completely ‘annexed’ Catholic visual traditions from the southern Netherlands, using them to develop an ‘idiosyncratic’ and ‘hybrid’ religious imagery of their own. Ironically, though, Dutch Catholics began in the late seventeenth century to move away from the imitation of southern models and to develop new types of illustrated devotional literature, a trend that continued throughout the eighteenth century. Stronks tells this narrative of change convincingly, offering careful analyses of a multitude of texts and images; the book is richly illustrated, enabling readers to follow the analysis, though the illustrations should have been referenced more consistently in Stronks's text. However, by restricting her coverage to works published in the Republic, Stronks gives the impression that those works defined the literary-visual culture of Dutch Catholics. This is misleading, since Dutch Catholics read tons of material printed in the southern Netherlands and were particularly reliant on such in the early years. Stronks also fails to examine with sufficient care what mechanisms of restraint limited the uses made of religious imagery in the Republic. Offering only one in-depth look at a concrete case (pp. 221–7), she relies for the most part on Deborah Shuger's concept of ‘cultural sensibility’ (p. 17). She does so in the conviction that the visual practices that she examines in the literary realm reveal something much more general about the religious groups in question and their interactions. She claims that their visual practices were ‘indicative’ of the ‘identities’ (a term that is overused and not problematised here) of the religious groups – that the practices must be interpreted as ‘corrollaries of their behavior in other realms of life’ (p. 9). On this basis, Stronks claims for example that Protestant appropriation in the 1680s of a Catholic visual vocabulary proves that a rise in anti-Catholicism could not have occurred at the same time, though the latter is well documented from other types of evidence. Stronks thus extrapolates from her literary-visual evidence to make very broad, unsubstantiated claims. For the most part, she does not attempt to place literary-visual developments in their social, cultural and political contexts, and she does not acknowledge that different rules of engagement between the religious groups may have applied in different spheres.