Both a commemoration and updating of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg that divided Germany into Catholic and Evangelical (Lutheran) political enclaves, this stimulating collection speaks to students of the Reformation and the modern Federal Republic alike. The centrepiece of the work is Gerda Riedl's thirty-one-page essay ‘From theological conflict to the historical legal peace … and from there beyond?’ which, after a careful but critical review of the conflicted German scholarship on the arrangement, becomes a commentary on a question that concerns all her co-authors: the relevance, if any, of the Augsburg arrangement to contemporary religious and political matters in Germany and the European Union. With varying degrees of conviction all contributors agree that, if nothing else, the Augsburg arrangement, and the peace of Westphalia of 1648, prepared the way for the transformation of German government into a relatively secular, and therefore neutral, enforcer of religious peace. In such a position German polities of the modern era have found it far easier to live with religious self-determination and confessional pluralism than have states such as France where confessional absolutism prevailed until the end of the eighteenth century. Such a sunny view does not take account of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's efforts to repress Catholicism in Germany's eastern provinces following the unification of 1871–2 nor of today's upheavals over Scientology. But almost all the authors point to the value of Germany's traditions of confessional self-governance and religious public expression in bringing Islam into the fabric of contemporary German civil society.