There is an unfortunate tendency amongst historians of Reformation Germany to focus on Wittenberg and the South German imperial cities, downplaying – or sometimes entirely ignoring – the extraordinary complexity of religious reform across the fragmented territories of the German empire, each with its specific local balance of authority and interests between ecclesiastical jurisdiction, territorial government and local concerns. Local studies, by contrast, are often so specific as to make comparisons difficult. Werner Freitag's exploration of the Reformation in Westfalen offers a synthesis of local studies to consider the multiplicity of responses to Luther's teachings and the factors that influenced them. Westfalen – roughly the north-eastern half of today's state of North Rhine-Westphalia – was not united, but was made up of duchies, territorial bishoprics and smaller civil territories.

After an introduction assessing the relevance of the Reformation Jubilee for Westfalen and warning against seeing the Reformation as a caesura, Freitag begins by considering the situation of the late medieval Church, in particular popular piety, conflicts around the provision of the ‘cure of souls’ and the structural weakness of episcopal structures, which were increasingly being held in check by local rulers. Despite the linguistic differences – works written by Luther and others in early modern high German had to be rendered into low German if they were to be properly understood in Westfalen – Reformation ideas did spread in Westfalen, and the beginnings of this process are described in chapter iii. Freitag then considers ’successful city Reformations’ (including Herford, Höxter, Lemgo, Lippstadt, Minden, Münster, Soest) and ‘failed city Reformations’ (including Münster again, Paderborn, Osnabrück and smaller towns in the territorial bishoprics of Münster and Paderborn), arguing that key factors for the introduction of the Reformation included a political interest, often, but not always, amongst members of the city council, and the existence of a preacher or preachers who could generate a wider basis of support for the new theology. That Münster appears in both these chapters indicates the shifting nature of ecclesial identity during this highly charged period. Freitag does a fine job of tracing the destabilising of the city's initially Lutheran Reformation by the Anabaptists, identifying the city council's decision to allow tolerance as a fatal move when one of the three groups to be ‘tolerated’ was intent on the annihilation of the civic and ecclesiastical order, and with it the other two groups.

Chapter vi explores the Reformation in territories. Here the key factor was the support of the local ruler, whether that was a duke or sometimes even a bishop. Hermann von Wied's support for the Reformation is well known, and influenced the initially positive response to Lutheranism in parts of the Münster territory. Similarly, Franz von Waldeck, simultaneously bishop of Münster and Osnabrück and diocesan Administrator of Minden, although he suppressed the Anabaptists in Münster, supported the toleration of Luther's followers and of Lutheran forms of worship in the city and the introduction of the Reformation in both Osnabrück and Minden. His aim may well have been the secularisation of the three dioceses to form a hereditary territory that could be bequeathed to one of his four sons.

Not all impulses towards Reform are easily categorised according to confession. Freitag argues that a ‘Reform-Catholic’ approach was taken by the dukes of Jülich-Kleve-Berg who also ruled the County of Mark. More evidence of the specific forms that this took would have been useful to differentiate these reforms from the bi-confessional forms described later; for the English reader, an assessment of Thomas Cromwell's reasons for proposing the duke's daughter, Anne of Cleves, as a suitable wife for Henry viii would also have been enlightening. The factors influencing rural reform were often as complex as those which shaped urban reform. Freitag shows that whilst in some areas the local nobility took a leading role in implementing change, elsewhere local pastors, or even local communities, were key. In all of this, the importance of patrons and their rights emerges as key: this is a factor in Reformation history which deserves much greater attention.

Freitag concludes by considering practical developments in the decades after the Reformation: the payment of pastors, liturgical forms, expectations on pastors and the ordering and decoration of churches. Indications of changes in popular piety are discussed, in particularly attitudes to the word of God and to life after death, although Freitag acknowledges the lack of evidence. There could be conflict amongst Reformers, around money or the interpretation of Luther's teachings, and these heightened as the influence of Reformed theology began to emerge. Finally, Freitag discusses forms of bi-confessional and mixed-confessional coexistence.

This is a fascinating study, which gives a real insight into the variety of forms taken by the Reformation in this one area of Germany, a variety which was replicated across the whole multiplicity of German territories. Freitag offers a very useful corrective to any suggestion that the German Reformation was some kind of unified movement, and yet he shows that these multifarious forms of Reform and Reformation were deeply connected to one another.