The city of Magdeburg occupies much the same place in the history of German Lutheranism as the Alamo does in the history of the United States. After their defeat at the hands of the emperor's Spanish troops, the territories of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League were forced to accept the religious settlement known as the Interim of Augsburg. In Wittenberg, the Interim was accepted on the grounds that it touched only matters indifferent (adiaphora), not matters of faith. But Magdeburg resisted both the Interim and the siege which followed. Magdeburg's tradition of municipal independence, combined with sheer theological bloody-mindedness, encouraged a brief but heroic stand, while its resident theologians (Nikolas von Amsdorf, Matthias Flacius, Erasmus Alberus and Nikolas Gallus) used the city's presses to conduct a prolific literary campaign against both Catholic and Lutheran opponents. Anja Moritz's book, derived from her Frankfurt dissertation, focuses on this campaign. It therefore covers much the same ground as Nathan Rein's 2008 The chancery of God (rev. this Journal lxi [2010], 188–9), and indeed Thomas Kaufmann's earlier Das Ende der Reformation (rev. this Journal lvi [2005], 606), but Moritz's approach differs in several ways. First, she sets the campaign of Flacius and others in the context not just of the Interim but also of the religious colloquies of the 1530s and '40s, seeing Charles v's Schmalkaldic War as the continuation of his ecclesiastical diplomacy by other means. Secondly, she emphasises the interplay of religion and politics as factors in Magdeburg's resistance, unlike Rein whose concern was the relationship of religion and society. Thirdly, Moritz concentrates on the extent to which the Interim was seen by Magdeburg's publicity machine in the light of apocalyptic texts (the four kingdoms in Daniel, the synoptic apocalypses, and 2 Thessalonians, but not the Book of Revelation itself) as the AntiChrist's attempt to overthrow the order of God's universe. In these dualistic terms, there was no such thing as an adiaphoron, and armed resistance to the emperor was the only true obedience – an almost literal Interimsethik. Though lacking both the focus of Rein's work and the comprehensiveness of Kaufmann's, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of the motivations, political as well as religious, behind Magdeburg's famous stand.