The whitewashing of churches was one of the most striking and iconic visual changes of the Protestant Reformation and is often referred to in the literature. However, such a focused study as George's comprehensive volume has been missing and this book is in principle a welcome addition to the literature. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, it reaches far beyond merely examining the whitewashing of earlier churches as postulated by early modern Reformers: George offers a more wide-ranging examination of the general meaning and use of white throughout (European) cultural and religious history. Although focusing heavily on Zwingli and Calvin, it is notable that this study does not look merely at the main phases of the European Reformation but moves clearly beyond this by referring, for instance, to eighteenth-century American and twentieth-century European places of worship (pp. 36–45). The book opens with a foreword by Margaret Ashton, which is as much a summary as a (positive) review of what is to come. However, the following chapters do not fully live up to this fanfare. The author's research is frequently presented rather haphazardly. In this respect, the footnotes are especially to be criticised: they are often tediously long, not infrequently taking up more than half the page – if not stretching over two pages. Much of this is superfluous duplicate text, but quite a few footnotes present small parallel studies, many of which could, indeed should, have been incorporated into the main text: for instance, pp.13f. n. 31 mentions the intriguing idea of ‘iconoclasm as a holy deed’, which remains unexplored in the main text. Chapter v, ‘Coloured by the Bible’, sounds as though it would provide an interesting discussion of the meaning of colours in the Bible; but the text is rather convoluted by Reformers' and other scholarly interpretations which blurs the information unnecessarily. The amount and range of literature used is impressive, although somewhat outdated, with very little from after the mid-1990s: indeed, recent standard works such as Andrew Spicer's Calvinist churches in early modern Europe (2007), or Johann Michael Fritz's edited volume on the ‘Preserving power of Lutheranism’ (Die bewahrende Kraft des Luthertums, 1997) are conspicuously absent. One therefore has to wonder what the new findings or insights of this volume actually are. Most of all, however, the text would have benefited from more thorough copy-editing and proof-reading: there are some big issues such as the whole first paragraph of chapter vi (p. 283) being identical with the beginning of chapter iv (pp. 204f.); or on p. 243 a reference to ‘Appendix i’, which is nowhere to be found. The caption to Figure 1.11 should read ‘Chapel in Marburg Castle (Hesse/Germany)’ rather than ‘Hesse Castle Chapel’ which does not mean anything. The second quotation on p. 204, with n. 2, has been discussed in length on p. 3 – but the author seems not to have noticed that. Similarly, the long Palladio quotation on p. 344 n. 215, has already occurred in the main text at p. 103. Furthermore, there are many irritating little issues such as on p. 3, where the reference is doubled in nn. 12, 13. Equally, on p. 12 the text of n. 25 actually belongs in n. 24; and in n. 26 it is not at all clear why we are told in which book St Paul's letters are cited – their biblical references being perfectly sufficient. (Finally, n. 27 belongs to the quotation in the previous sentence – which now stands unreferenced.) The volume comes at a rather high price, even though it does include an impressive number of well-chosen, helpful, black-and-white illustrations. Overall, the text would need some major reorganisation and restructuring, cutting the textual duplications and straightening the arguments as well as highlighting the new findings and insights. The inclusion of more recent research might also be fruitful and would certainly help to realise the book's potential to be a wide-ranging interdisciplinary overview of this very important topic of Reformation history.