This weighty volume of eighteen essays, half of them in two linguistic versions, reproduces the proceedings of a conference held in Berlin in 2018, the third in the ‘Sister Reformations’ series of collaborations between historians of the German and English Reformations, and between historians of the Reformation trained in German and in Anglo-American academic traditions. On this occasion, a third sibling, Scotland, has been admitted to the family, with helpful overviews of the institutional and cultural aspects of the Scottish Reformation provided by John McCallum and Kristen Post Walton, as well as an illuminating discussion of Scottish and German adaptations and appropriations of liturgical space in a chapter by Andrew Spicer. The main focus, however, remains the bilateral axis of England and Germany, with most of the chapters making some attempt at evaluative as well as descriptive comparison.

Although little commented upon, either by the editors in their foreword, or in the chapters themselves, an abiding impression from the volume is of distinctive scholarly approaches to Reformation history, as much as of the distinctiveness of the Reformations themselves. A curiosity of scholarly demarcations of labour – the fact that ecclesiastical history in German universities is largely conducted within theology faculties, whereas Anglo-American Reformationists are often socio-cultural specialists based in ‘secular’ history departments – leaves a discernible mark on the various chapters. Several of the German contributions (such as Wolf-Friedrich Schäuffle on family and household, or Andreas Stegmann on typologies of the clergy) tend towards the programmatic and conspectual evaluation of a topic – in contrast to the more essayistic approach of some of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, worrying away at a particular historiographical problematic (for example, Ashley Null's thoughtful reflection on the late medieval origins of the ‘emotion script’ of English evangelicalism, or Alexandra Walsham's insightful assessment of everyday material culture, and an attendant ethos of mockery and laughter, which sheds new light on debates about the prevalence and virulence of anti-popery). An enduring imbalance of language competence in international academic culture is reflected in the fact that full English translations are supplied for the German chapters, though not vice-versa.

The most effective of the chapters deploy the comparative approach for explicitly diagnostic purposes. Thus, in her chapter on parish life, Amy Nelson Burnett suggests that an important precondition for the reception of Reformation may have been the high population density of late medieval German parishes, in contrast to the pattern of smaller English ones which allowed for greater contact between pastor and parishioners and more dependable provision of pastoral care. Geoffrey Dipple considers the contrasting historical and historiographical positioning of English and German radicals, suggesting that the comparative invisibility of the former is accounted for by a tendency in England, originating in the Reformation itself, to subsume radical critique into the Protestant mainstream, and consequently to fail to recognise its true radical character.

It is fair to say that most of the contributors to this collection stick to the material that they know best, though Thomas Kaufmann, current doyen of German Reformation historians, boldly attempts, on the basis of his reading of literary exchanges between Germany and England, a reassessment of the early English evangelical movement as largely undoctrinal and ‘aloof from intra-Reformation partisanship’. I am not sure this is wholly convincing – it underestimates the extent of divisions among English reformers in the 1520s, as well as the range of, often quite radical, imported religious texts in England. But the instinct to approach fresh material with new questions is a laudable and inspiring one. As with most volumes of conference proceedings, there is some unevenness and incongruity between the offerings here. Students of both the British and German Reformations will, however, find much to interest them, and will be reminded of how much they have to teach and learn from each other.