While Pietism began in the late seventeenth century as a movement for renewal within the German Lutheran community, it also attracted followers among Reformed Protestants, especially in the German-speaking lands of the Swiss Confederation. In this book, Armin Sierszyn explores the history of Pietism in Zurich. This is a largely narrative account that highlights Pietism's travails and eventual triumphs in the city and in the surrounding countryside (Zürich-Land). Initially, he stresses, Pietism was above all an urban and middle-class movement; by the 1730s close connections were established between Zurich and the Moravian Brethren (the Herrnhuter). However, the official Church remained decidedly hostile to Pietism and with the banishment of the influential publisher Heinrich Bodmer in 1721, it was forced to go underground. The spread of Enlightenment ideas gradually weakened orthodox positions in Zurich's Reformed Church, but their encouragement of religious rationalism (and biblical criticism) created fresh obstacles for the city's Pietists.

The ‘pious Zurich’ referred to in the book's title is thus essentially a nineteenth-century creation. Sierszyn credits the Bible-centred faith of Johann Caspar Lavater and Johann Jakob Hess as laying the foundations for the Pietist revival. As head (Antistes) of Zurich's Reformed Church between 1795 and 1828, Hess not only offered Pietism ecclesiastical legitimacy, but in the years following the Congress of Vienna, he actively promoted a Pietist-inspired awakening. In 1812, he cofounded Zurich's Bibelgesellschaft, the first of many associations that would mobilise the city's talent and resources on behalf of Pietist religious and social causes. For Sierszyn, the veritable founder of this pious Zurich was Hess's successor as Antistes, Georg Gessner. A close associate of both Lavater and Hess, Gessner helped found the Bibelgesellschaft and the city's Missionary Society, while maintaining an active ministry at the Fraumünster and Grossmünster parishes. If Sierszyn paints a generally glowing portrait of Pietism's successes, especially with the founding of the Evangelische Gesellschaft in 1837 and its promotion of the home (Innere) mission, he reminds readers that liberal intellectual, political and theological currents continued to challenge the Pietists’ faith and their social engagements. In 1839, for example, the city appointed the controversial David Friedrich Strauss to a theology chair at its university, but the resulting furor caused Strauss to be pensioned even before he gave his first lecture. Similarly, at the turn of the century, Pietists fought tooth and nail to maintain the Apostles' Creed as an essential article of faith, which all their organisations were pledged to defend.

In the book's final third, Sierszyn reflects on developments during the twentieth century. Much of this discussion is devoted to the organisational history of Zurich's Pietist institutions, notably the Evangelische Gesellschaft and the Positiv-Evangelische Vereinigung, which continued to thrive despite financial crises and war. But, in a story that was repeated across Europe, the year 1945 marked the beginning of the end of ‘pious Zurich’. In addition to the turning away from institutional religion, above all during the 1960s, the blossoming of the secular welfare state increasingly made most Pietist-based social services irrelevant.

There is much in this volume that will interest students of Pietism and European Protestantism, and not just with respect to Zurich and Switzerland. Sierszyn packs a wealth of information into this text, drawing on a wide array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents to that end. His often-insightful discussions of the evolution of Protestant theology also highlight the regular, and bidirectional, passage of ideas and individuals across the political border separating ‘Germany’ from Switzerland. As a work of scholarship, however, the book has two notable weaknesses. First, while clearly learned, it neither engages with nor explicitly contributes to the scholarly literature. Second, and arguably more problematic, large sections of this work take the form of a scarcely disguised polemic against all those who opposed or disagreed with Zurich's Pietists and their views on faith, ministry and mission. As a result, certain of the author's assertions (for example, that the Pietists uniquely concerned themselves with the plight of Zurich's poor and disadvantaged in the nineteenth century) prove less than convincing.