Sophisticated scholarship about tolerance, interaction and conflict among diverse religious groups during the period of European history before the Enlightenment has positively exploded during the last three decades or so. No longer is it possible for any intelligent person to subscribe to the simplistic myth that only with the triumphant ‘Reason’ that characterised full-blown modernity did forms of religious accommodation and mutual recognition (in practice as well as theory) supersede the violence and oppression (Protestant as well as Catholic) of earlier times. Instead, we now realise that even as early as the Latin Middle Ages people throughout Europe – orthodox intellectuals as well as common folk – found myriad ways to accept and even embrace divergent religious commitments. We also recognise that, in the wake of the Reformation, the tendency for denizens across Europe to develop attitudes that licensed ‘living together’ only accelerated. The present collection of essays provides further evidence for and confirmation of these scholarly trends. Its contributors uncover and examine how adherents to multiple religious rites and beliefs in early modern Europe managed to negotiate their differences – not always successfully, but often in surprising fashion. The discrete chapters represent micro-histories concentrating on disparate times and places. Although somewhat slanted toward the ‘Netherlandic’ region, the contributions address a range of national/territorial contexts: England, France, greater Germany, even Transylvania. A ‘bottom-up’ approach to history is clearly on display; the struggle for (and against) the coexistence of religiously diverse populations is regarded as mainly a matter of social interaction on the ground. There are a couple of notable exceptions to this guiding principle, however: namely, Keith Luria's discussion of conceptions of conscience in France and Peter Marshall's fascinating study of ‘fairies’ and other inhabitants of the ‘invisible world’ in England. But even their investigations attempt to tie intellectual pursuits to ordinary beliefs and practices. What unites the volume thematically, as the editors emphasise in their introduction and afterward, is a rejection of the common scholarly view that ‘confessions’ were fixed, exclusive and homogenous (the doctrine of so-called ‘confessionalism’). Numerous chapters contained here illustrate how supposedly rigid confessional distinctions were fluid and porous in reality and how their later objectification mainly constituted an artificial construct derived from theological disputes that only indirectly and often marginally touched the lived experiences of religion in early modern Europe. This theme, although loosely pursued in most of the individual chapters, affords a noteworthy corrective to conventional views about the impact and import of religion among competing versions of Christian faith during the immediate post-Reformation era.