In this volume, edited by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo from the University of Tampere in Finland, the authors aim at placing the Reformation in a daily life context, using ‘lived religion’ as a conceptual and methodological tool. The reason for this, as the editors explain, is ‘the wish to explore how religion worked as a medium between various levels of society. Furthermore, we see religion essentially as an element of daily life, a way to live, interact and participate in one's community’. The more specific interests of the different contributors are, according to the introduction, the interaction with saints, the negotiation of religious inclusion and exclusion, ideas of gift exchange as religious strategies, and the various forms of resistance, cooperation or enforcement of religious ideas and practices both before but particularly after the Reformation.

The volume consists of ten contributions, in addition to the introduction, divided into three sections. The first, ‘Lived Religion in Daily Life’, consists of four contributions, which in different ways all explore questions concerning religion in different facets of everyday life. In her contribution Sari Katajala-Peltomaa studies the changes in the laity's interaction with saints in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Sweden through a close study of the canonisation documents of St Bridget of Sweden and her daughter St Katarina of Vadstena. Jenni Kuuliala's chapter also looks at the laity's interaction with saints, but in relation to physical illness and healing. This case study takes us to Prussia and like the previous contribution, is also a close study of a canonisation process, that of the fifteenth-century saint Dorothea of Montau. In the next contribution we enter the post-Reformation world in Raisa Maria Toivo's chapter on the ‘survival’ of saints’ feast days and other Catholic practices in seventeenth-century Finland. Her argument is that these ‘survivals’ are not necessary tokens of the failure of the reform, but rather an expression of limited toleration and religious pluralism in the period. The next chapter, by Päivi Räisänen-Schröder, follows up on the topic of religious pluralism and tolerance, at least on a local level such as the village, in her contribution on Anabaptists in the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in south-west Germany, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She too argues for more fluid and blurred confessional boundaries in the period, not necessarily because of lack of understanding of religious doctrine on the part of the laity, but because everyday lived religion was less clear-cut.

The second section, ‘Religious Economics: Charity and Community’, focuses on the consequences that the new Protestant teachings on economy, work and charity had for daily religious life. In his contribution Jussi Hanska takes a closer look at how the reformers accommodated late medieval Catholic ideals and literary topologies on poor relief to the new religious situation. In this strands of both continuity and change are visible. This dialectic is also central to Maija Ojala's study of post-Reformation funerary practices in the Baltics. Marko Lamberg returns to changes in the understanding and practices of charity in his study of donations to charitable and religious institutions in Stockholm from the late Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century. He too shows how there is both continuity and change on different levels.

The third and last section, ‘Religion, Politics and Contested Identities’, turns to the questions of the relation between religious change and political and ethnic or local identity. Jason Lavery's contribution is a close study of the Finnish bishop and reformer Mikael Agricola (c. 1510–57). Agricola made the first translation of the New Testament into Finnish and thereby contributed to the establishment of a specific Finnish identity, but at the same time he supported the Swedish king Gustav Vasa's state-building as a means of religious reform. According to Lavery this exemplifies the possibilities for complex loyalties in early modern society. The chapter by Miia Ijäs investigates the identity-building of the nobles through the politics of the Polish-Lithuanian elections in the 1570s. Here again the argument is that loyalties were complex and defined by both religious, political and economic motivations and interests, and that differing denominational adherences were no absolute political or identity marker. Not surprisingly perhaps, more practical interests such as the security of the state and preservation of privileges seem to have been the main concern in these elections. In the final contribution Kaarlo Arffman provides an overview of what the sources can tell us about outright resistance to the Reformation in sixteenth-century Finland, showing that there was active opposition in all parts of the Swedish kingdom, but that due to lack of political strength and organisation in Finland it never resulted in open rebellion.

This volume consists of well researched and interesting ‘case studies’, opening up interesting parts of European history, which perhaps are not all too well known to an English-speaking academic audience. Today it is generally accepted that the Reformation was a long and complex process (or processes) hardly understandable as one significant event. All of the studies presented here argue convincingly for this understanding, and there is no doubt that the authors have a firm grip on their empirical material. I do however miss illustrations. We know that objects and images were important elements and there are references to ‘surviving’ cult-images here and there in some of the contributions. On the cover there is a wall-painting of St George slaying the dragon from the chapel of Pyhämaa, Finland, painted in 1667. A discussion of this and other parts of the visual and material culture would have been interesting. Maps would also have been helpful.

There is also a general tendency to functionalism in the approach of the contributors. Religion is here always seen as a function of something else, or an expression of something other than religion, negotiating identities and social status and suchlike, and the religiousness of religion slip away. This is a bit paradoxical when the topic is lived religion. But despite these, rather small, reservations, I find the volume highly interesting and to be recommended.