This book, hosting twenty-one authors including the editor, complements Brill’s previous Companion to the eucharist in the Middle Ages. Fifteen authors are based in North America, five in Europe (Germany, England, France) and one in New Zealand. The Companion to the eucharist in the Reformation also echoes a previous work by the editor: The eucharist in the Reformation (2006), embracing theology and eucharistic rites. There is also a structural resemblance: among the Companion's six parts, Parts i and ii (engaging fourteen authors, one twice) are devoted to ‘Theology’ and to ‘Liturgical Practices’. ‘Theology’ here involves a complex tapestry. It includes medieval scholastic understandings of a real presence that magnified priestly power, as well as the sacramental views focused on Scripture (and increasingly the patristic testimony) advanced by Luther, Zwingli and Bullinger, Bucer, Calvin (a distinctive analysis), Anabaptists, Anglican (i.e. English Reformed) writers, and statements issued by the Council of Trent along with post-Tridentine Catholic debates on the mass as sacrifice due to conceptual confusion. Particularly noteworthy are the essential pieces on Bullinger and Bucer, both highly influential, which incorporate the fruits of modern research and add to it. Generally, ‘theologies’ rather than ‘theology’ is the keynote.

In part ii, the chapter on Roman Catholic eucharistic liturgies does look at the mass, but there is more (usefully) on what most non-Catholics know little about. These are the eucharistic ‘paraliturgies’ (pp. 185, 203) of Corpus Christi, the perpetual adoration, the Forty Hours' Devotion, and the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament – some of which provoked intra-Catholic controversies. There is a culture shock for readers in the northern hemisphere in a remarkable chapter about the transplanting of European, Catholic, eucharistic practice and piety into the ‘Spanish new world’. This highlights the exciting interaction with Aztec culture leading also to problems of syncretism. Other chapters treat of orders of service for communion in German Lutheranism (‘tremendous local variety’, p. 224), Reformed churches, Anabaptism (authentic ‘communal event’, p. 271) and the Church of England (from austerity to ultimate ceremonialism). The chapter on Reformed procedures zooms in largely on Genevan and French practices plus interesting discussion of ground-breaking modern studies from various angles. Towards the end there is some acknowledgement of Dutch, Hungarian and especially Scottish traditions whose communion feasts of three to five days were also linked to public and private fasting. The order for the Lord's supper in the Scottish Kirk's Book of Common Order could have merited a mention in view of its significance and long-term impact, including its influence beyond Scotland.

In the Companion the conventional boxes of theology and liturgy have been broken out of, so that the span is imaginatively wider, revealing a ‘protean heterogeneity’ (p. 11), involving four more parts. Two consist of a single contribution, an impressive one being on liturgical locations or spaces (‘sites’), the other being on music and singing (‘sound’) associated with the celebration and display of the sacrament. Display and procession relate to Catholic (public) environments. However, in the domain of normal worship, nods are also given (pp. 448–9) to the more restrained musical practices in Lutheran, Reformed (congregational psalmody) and Church of England contexts.

The other two parts consist of three and two chapters respectively. ‘The Art of the Liturgy’ consists of three contributions which consider the visual, aesthetic components of contrasting styles of public worship: Catholic (German, pre-1530), Lutheran (German) and Reformed (Dutch). This part constitutes some of the most compelling material in the entire book. The final part, ‘The Import of the Eucharist’, addresses the export of sacramental concepts into literary high culture and their mutations there. The chapter on ‘sacramental poetics’, examines such germination chiefly in the works of the ‘English Reformed poets’ (p. 487), Milton, Donne and Herbert, all theologically literate, while the chapter on ‘Enlightenment aesthetics and the eucharistic sign’ examines specifically G. E. Lessing's influential essay on the bounds of painting and poetry – Laocoön, and its religious reference points. A fascinating introduction affirms that Enlightenment aesthetics in Germany emerged paradoxically from Pietist environments (as in Lessing's case) with its mystical impulses; Pietist Lutheran and Reformed shunning of autonomous and adjunctive arts as corrupting had stunted cultural developments. Yet the rediscovery by Pietists like Lessing and others of the early Lutheran affirmation of the intrinsic neutrality and so legitimacy of artistic media engendered a re-evaluation, starting with creative reflection on the sacramental signs, themselves visual media accompanying the Word.

I have no major reservations about anything in this book, which is neither an encyclopaedia nor a fully authoritative guide. It has much of high value as well as some jewels. Anyone familiar with editing a collective work will know well the obstacles that frustrate an editor's vision, but enough here has been implemented to merit saluting. I do have a few minor grumbles. The criteria for inclusion in the ‘List of key names’ are not always self-evident, since one wonders what the contribution of some was to eucharistic matters. The index is fine as far as it goes, and the exclusion of place names is understandable – but the inclusion of some key place names might have helped. And the ‘bibliography’ at the end would be better entitled ‘select bibliography’.

A few substantive queries spring to mind. First, there is occasionaly an erroneous use of ‘Calvinist’ instead of ‘Reformed’ or general Protestant (pp. 39, 185). Secondly, the tumultuous, post-Luther developments in German Protestantism around the sacrament were momentous enough to qualify for some discussion, and with respect to the Formula of Concord (1577) and the Book of Concord (1580), constitutive of subsequent German Lutheranism. Thirdly, at the head of the introduction there is an assertion by J. A. Jungmann, a historian of the mass, that has an indubitable tone: ‘The first Holy Mass was said on “same night in which he was betrayed”’, that is, at the Last Supper. Yet while the Reformers held that the first eucharist was the Last Supper, not all sixteenth-century Catholic theologians (for example Fisher and Ceneau) could see that occasion as the first mass (involving sacrificial offering and transubstantiation), but rather as an anticipation of it. Hence lack of consensus on the matter led to ambiguity in the Tridentine decrees. Fourthly, I would like to have seen more recognition of Catholic sacramental apologists from 1520 to the Council of Trent, although Cajetan is mentioned (p. 162) and Latomus appears in the Bucer article. One thinks of other controversialists like Henry viii, Fisher, Eck, Clichtove, Emser, Béda and so on. Lastly, the chapter on ‘The medieval inheritance’ makes the familiar point that the scholastic metaphysics of a transubstantiated real presence was nothing that a puzzled laity should be troubled with, providing that they obediently believed it. Yet the leading member of the learned Christian Humanist elite, Erasmus (often suspected of spiritualising, crypto-Protestant sympathies on the sacraments), made a similar point for himself, a theologian and cleric: in his correspondence with people like Bucer, Tunstall, Amerbach and Pirckheimer, he admitted scepticism and hesitations about the Church's definition, but ‘on the authority of Scripture and the Church, I believe it’. Erasmus' impact on the eucharistic controversy, if mostly indirect, is not given much attention in this book, although there are allusions to it (pp. 58, 76) – but not enough to gain a place in the index. None of these points detract from the overall worth of this well-crafted book.