This blockbuster is part of the prestigious series of the correspondence of Philipp Jakob Spener now in progess, but is constructed on different principles from the volumes which have appeared so far. Instead of containing Spener's correspondence arranged chronologically for part of one of the major periods of his life, for The Frankfurt years, for example, it contains the surviving parts of both sides of one major, indeed the major correspondence. Most of the letters survive in the great archive of the Franke foundations in Halle, which from the beginning have been difficult of access; many were printed in the nineteenth century by Gustav Kramer; but here the collection is complete, and the editorial standards are of the highest. Indeed it must be stressed that many scholars working in fields remote from that of early Pietism would be well advised to turn to the editorial apparatus in this of all the volumes in the series for the vast amount of biographical and other material which it contains. Much of what appears in this volume in day-to-day freshness is well-known, and especially Francke's desperate struggles with the town clergy of Halle. But the volume leaves no doubt about three things. Francke was exceedingly dependent on the advice and advocacy at court of Spener in Berlin. Without it a Francke who had already come one cropper in Leipzig and another in Erfurt, could hardly have survived to do the work he did. In spite of much mutual esteem, the cagey Spener and the aggressive Francke were so different that relations between them could not be easy. Some of the gaps in this correspondence testify not to the loss of manuscripts but to breaches in confidence. The sight of Spener putting his foot down and insisting that excluding exorcism from the baptismal liturgy was dangerous, shows a sharper edge to his diplomacy than usually appears. Equally Spener thought that Francke's advice about the endless train of ecstatic females which vexed his years was worth having, and one of the consequences of Spener's ‘hope of better times’ was to create space, not in this case for more energetic pastoral care and evangelism, but for Francke's utopia-designing. The later correspondence includes not only material relating to Spener's controversy with the Unitarians, but also the relations of both the correspondents with England. A great volume.