The latest estimable volume to result from an international conference sponsored by the German Historical Institute brings together two subjects that possess, according to the current academic consensus, a natural affinity: monarchy and religion. Despite (and because of) the Enlightenment, confessional identities remained vigorous from one end of the eighteenth century to the other and it was a rare monarch, Frederick the Great perhaps, whose court was not primarily marked by its Christian character. But then Frederick, as Eckhart Hellmuth notes, eschewed court life and wanted a Masonic burial in his garden at Sanssouci. Without exception, the contributors draw attention not to the disappearance of religion as a public and private force at court but to its changing nature. Indeed, Schaich even claims in his introduction that ‘the gradual desacralisation of monarchy may be beyond dispute’ (p. 38), though a majority of other essayists might not go quite as far, among them J. C. D. Clark in his paper on ‘The re-enchantment of the world?’, discussing the convergence of studies in monarchy and religion since c. 1970. There are three parts to the book: the first five deal with the religious personnel of courts. Derek Beales assembles materials ex nihilo on the notoriously elusive subject of the Austrian court and its clergy while Paul Bushkovitch rescues the Russian court clergy from invisibility. He notes that preaching became the key to importance for them in new-style state services that usually included panegyrics on monarchs. Stephen Taylor, considering the courts of George i and George ii, argues that this process was at work in reverse, for the English court becoming less useful for career paths as the court sermon declined in political importance. There are also sparkling contributions from Nicole Reinhardt on the confessors of the Bourbon monarchs and Edward Gregg on ‘The exiled Stuarts: martyrs for the faith?’ In the second part, the subject is ‘Religion at court: everyday ceremonial’, and there are four papers. Simon Dixon, using the annual court calendar, insists that religious ritual remained central to Romanov court life with a convergence of saints' days and state memorialisation. Thus, from 1767, the feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist became an annual requiem for troops who had sacrificed themselves for the motherland. Ferdinand Kramer, looking at the Wittelsbach electors of Bavaria, is comparably pioneering in his scholarship, showing how baroque usages persisted at this most observant of courts alongside the implementation of many of the demands of the Catholic Enlightenment. Clarissa Campbell Orr places George iii and Queen Charlotte at the centre of an Anglo-Hanoverian ‘Christian Enlightenment’ and Gerard Sabatier provides a detailed overview of the palace-based religious rituals of the kings of France. Lastly, there are five essays on what are slightly misleadingly described as ‘state occasions’. In fact, Schaich has allowed four of his five contributors (himself on Britain, Eckhart Hellmuth on Prussia, Lindsey Hughes on Russia and Mark Hengerer on the Habsburgs) to write about royal funerals, with Chantal Grell as the one exception: she returns to the familiar subject of Louis xvi's coronation ceremonies to contend that the organisers of the ceremony actually had no ‘sense of the sacré’ (p. 357). That said, the four funeral essays are of exceptional quality. Hengerer finds the religious elements in Habsburg funerals less important as ‘state, dynasty, and religion drifted away from each other’ (p. 387); Hughes confirms that Peter i's funeral in 1727 set the pattern for the rest of the century; Hellmut argues that Frederick ii's funeral at the garrison church and not in his garden, points forward to the cult of great men, while Schaich charts the changing, more private and courtly character of the funerals of British sovereigns. Overall, the book is invaluable for its wealth of new scholarship and material that will be unfamiliar even to specialists. The absence of any illustrations is a weakness, as well as the tendency of too many of the authors to spend almost as much time and space on seventeenth-century matters. Editorial control appears to have failed in this respect and the absence of essays on any of the Italian principalities or the Iberian monarchies is unjustifiable.