This University of Virginia dissertation, published in the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History series, examines censorship in the imperial cities of the German south-west during the ‘Empire's tumultuous long Reformation’, from Luther's Ninety-Five Theses through to the end of the Thirty Years’ War. It aims to reassess the Reformation's spread by examining how censorship impacted upon public understanding of reform. Criminal court records, trial transcripts and journals of this very long period are the main sources of the research; we know that there was no Index in the free and imperial cities of Germany (p. 25). Creasman dares to challenge our traditional understanding of the urban Reformation by exploring how the Germans appropriated and adapted the printed message to their own purposes, assuming that texts and ideas enjoyed a relatively free circulation during those 130 years, which one could discuss after 1560–70. However, the five chapters mainly discuss the city that gave the Peace of Augsburg its name. The first two chapters analyse censorship laws within the Holy Roman Empire and the evolution of urban censorship policies – which mainly aimed at the preservation of communal consensus and public order. After 1555 the Augsburg authorities were eager to suppress prints against the papacy, but it was not easy to police confessional conflicts, and Creasman gives us good examples in chapter iii. Chapter iv deals with the the ‘Calendar Conflict’, mainly in Augsburg, with the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar, which for Lutherans violated the Peace of Augsburg and ‘highlights the way in which rumour, song, and print combined to feed dissent and frustrate official control’ (p. 148). Individuals were even arrested or exiled. However, was what was true for biconfessional Augsburg the same for the rest of Germany? Before brief conclusions, the last chapter analyses censorship during the Thirty Years War. The war demonstrated that the efforts of Catholics and Protestants in Augsburg to police conformity were ultimately unsuccessful. Starting in 1629, the civic ideal of communal cooperation collapsed. It would be interesting to draw some comparisons with Reformed cities like Emden and Heidelberg, or even Geneva. We would see that at times there were no significant differences. Finally, it is regrettable that all sources and quotations are translated into English without the original Latin or German in the footnotes. Responsibility for this rests not with the author but with the publisher who wanted to shorten the book: O tempora o libri!