This painstakingly detailed intellectual and theological biography of Johannes Reuchlin joins recent books by Erika Rummel, Charles Zika, Stefan Rhein, and Markus Akkermann, but focuses more closely than any of those on Reuchlin's changing attitude toward Jews and, especially, toward Judaism and Jewish scholarship. Although he started out reading the classic anti-Jewish polemics of the later Middle Ages, Reuchlin came to read and appreciate Jewish religious scholarship, grammar, and exegesis in its own right, leading the author to claim that he was probably the first Christian scholar to do so (228–229). Reuchlin's high regard for such Jewish scholars as David Kimhi, Rashi, and Maimondides in particular, as well as his well-known defense of Jews’ rights to own, print, and circulate religious works, form the core of Price's evidence.

This book is, among other things, a close reading of Reuchlin's writings about Judaism, and will appeal therefore to specialists in Christian-Jewish relations, advanced students of humanism, and to historians of the later Middle Ages and Reformation in general. The author uses terms appropriate to the era, such as “toleration.” However, students of that topic will want to consult the most recent theoretical work by Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006]) to ensure a more adequate parsing of toleration (versus, say, “acceptance” or “freedom,” neither of which were to be expected in Reuchlin's time) as a power strategy. This is all the more critical in that the author acknowledges that Reuchlin never abandoned the orthodox and, for that time, thoroughly normative view that Christianity is the only true religion; at best, Reuchlin saw some truth in Judaism, though more in his own tradition. That stance calls out for an analysis based on Brown's conceptualization of tolerance, as it would help to bring Reuchlin's engagements, investments, and priorities into even sharper focus. The author repeats the older position, standard before the work of Michael Toch on small-town German Jewry and its absorption of many Jews expelled from larger cities, that German Jewry had all but disappeared by the beginning of the sixteenth century, and indeed Toch's work on the concrete socio-geographical history of the early modern Jewish population in Germany is not cited. The format of the intellectual/religious biography explains the books shortcomings—the tight focus on a few texts and the rather narrow intellectual-history method—but also its great strengths, including erudite close readings and thorough scholarship.