The editor claims that this is a revisionist volume pointing not only to recent changes in the approach to the history of toleration or more precisely to the history of religious coexistence in the early modern period, but also to the route new research should travel. Apart from the wish to get rid of the term toleration with all its late nineteenth-century baggage and the introduction of the term “multiconfessionalism,” serious revisionism is difficult to spot. The volume, however, does reflect the change of emphasis which has taken place within this field over the last couple of decades, moving away from intellectual history and toward social and cultural history, particularly those concerned with religious coexistence and conflict in its local setting. The confessionalization paradigm, which considers religious pluriformity to have been a transient phase of the European Reformation, is not surprisingly challenged, while the inherent weakness of this top-down view of early modern society is emphasised.

The term confessionalism is one of many “isms” or terms which the late nineteenth century has bequeathed to us, but multiconfessionalism appears to be a more novel anachronism which would surely have made little sense in the period we are concerned with here. I assume it is inspired by that twentieth century, relativist term “multiculturalism”—so presumably what we are dealing with here is something similar with an added dose of religion. As terms go even the cumbersome terms religious pluralism or religious diversity would have been preferable.

However, this should not detract from the fact that a handbook or companion volume to the history of toleration in the reformation era—that is, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—is timely. Apart from a very useful chapter on confessions and their formation in the wake of the Reformation by Lee Palmer Wandel, which seems somewhat at odds with the rest of the content of this volume, the editor has divided the volume into five separate geographical sections, on the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, France, Britain, and Central Europe. A choice undoubtedly determined by the fact that we still live in a scholarly world dominated by national historiographies.

Overall it works well, but the result is that we hear nothing about the many emigrant communities of religious refugees, uninvited or invited by either local and central governments, who settled across northwestern Europe from the mid-sixteenth century onward and who more often than not served to add diversity to the religious landscape. Each section has been allocated three chapters, starting with a broader survey chapter followed by two more detailed studies. Of these general chapters Jesse Spohnholz's chapter on confessional coexistence in the Low Countries is particularly successful in introducing and evaluating the most recent literature on this subject. His contribution is supplemented by an excellent chapter by Guido Marnef on the important city of Antwerp, while the section is finished off by a chapter by Benjamin Kaplan on the areas of the outlying territories of the Dutch Republic where biconfessionalism took root.

The section on the Holy Roman Empire is more problematic. It starts with a clear introductory chapter by David Luebke on the multiconfessional Empire, but is supplemented by two chapters on the role of the protestant imperial knights and the example of the city of Colmar by Richard Ninness and Peter Wallace respectively. While interesting in their own right, these chapters seem somewhat misplaced in a handbook or companion volume where one would expect chapters of greater importance to the imperial perspective, such as on Augsburg, Frankfurt, or the Palatinate to mention a few.

The section on France offers interesting new perspectives with its emphasis on coexistence rather than conflict. Keith Luria's overview provides a good introduction. It is supplemented by a chapter on the peace commissioners sent out by central government at the beginning of the Wars of Religion by Jérémie Foa and another by Penny Roberts on unity and exclusion during the religious wars. Both are interesting contributions that add new perspectives, but they strike me as too similar in both approach and content.

Bernard Capp provides a solid introductory chapter for the section on Britain. Like the other two chapters in this part, on Ireland and England by Raimond Gillespie and John Coffrey respectively, it focuses on the seventeenth century, especially the middle decades. This is hardly surprising since this is the period that for decades more than any other has preoccupied British historians of toleration. As a result nothing is said about the treatment of English dissent in the Elizabethan period, which resulted in considerable emigration to the Netherlands in particular and the simultaneous establishment of many, often large, foreign Reformed communities in southeast England, creating separate Calvinist churches religiously at odds the Church of England.

Finally, the section on Central Europe starts with a chapter by Howard Louthan that is primarily concerned with sixteenth-century Poland. It is supplemented by an informative chapter on religious diversity in Transylvania by Graeme Murdock and a more detailed study of religious pluriformity in seventeenth-century Vilnius by David Frick.

The quality of most of the chapters is excellent, but the rationale for their inclusion in this volume is not always clear. Rather than a firm editorial plan for what to include I suspect that we have ended up with what the editor could get. Similarly, bearing in mind that this is a companion volume or handbook I would have expected a detailed bibliography with a guide to further reading, rather than just a list of works cited.