Based on a conference that took place in Zurich in 2005, this volume begins with a helpful overview by Anthony Grafton, and offers a number of studies on the use of textbooks in early modern educational settings, from collections of Latin dialogues intended for schoolboys (Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer) to works used in teaching the humanities, law or theology, to an end-piece that orients readers to eighteenth-century pedagogical ideas. Although the volume is divided into two broad categories (liberal arts and philosophy on the one hand and medicine, jurisprudence and theology on the other), the contributors' interests range widely. Four of them do focus on textbooks used in instruction in Zurich, among them Hildegard Keller and Hubert Steinke's fascinating study of Jakob Ruf's two textbooks on conception and childbirth (one in German, the other in Latin), intended for a dual audience of midwives and physicians. Ruf, who worked as municipal surgeon in Zurich from 1532, was also responsible for examining and licensing midwives, and wrote in German to provide aspiring and current midwives with the expert knowledge that they needed to practise their craft effectively. Other contributions, including those by Ann Blair and Jürgen Leonhardt, highlight the important role played by students in both creating and adapting textbooks, whether by taking down lectures verbatim and then having these copies circulate, or by using the margins and interlinear spaces to take down the professor's commentary on a given text, so that a student would have both the text and the commentary in one handy volume. Many of the contributions were translated into English from other languages, with at times some loss of meaning, as in the contribution by Daniel Tröhler on the Heidelberg Catechism. Overall, this work will be of particular interest to colleagues and graduate students focusing on early modern education and on the transmission of ideas in the early modern setting.