The image of Germany's Roman Catholics as a marginalised minority of intellectual outsiders, blindly submissive to the immense moral authority of their Church, lies at the centre of a protracted debate regarding the reasons why disproportionately fewer members of that faith achieved power and prosperity in nineteenth-century German society. A notable and important challenge to that interpretation, however, is Jeffrey T. Zalar's new book. Drawing on a wide range of archival and printed materials, Zalar not only describes the Catholic accommodation to modern, secular culture among the inhabitants of the Rhineland and Westphalia during the so-called long nineteenth century, but at the same time he assesses the implication of this transformation for the relationships between clergy and laity on the one hand and between dogma and subjective conscience on the other. According to Zalar, that Catholics had a reputation for backwardness or ‘intellectual inferiority’ was in part the legacy of revolutionary France's material depredations during its occupation of German territories, and in part the result of governmental interference and discrimination following Prussia's acquisition of those areas after 1815. What lies at the heart of this volume, however, is the argument that in addition to the legacy of past injustices, Catholic progress was impeded by a rigid censorship wielded by Catholic clergy that closed off access to secular knowledge. Efforts by church officials to compel lay Catholics to square their reading choices with their professed faith, Zalar claims, met widespread defiance within the Catholic community. Spearheaded by lay Catholics themselves, much of this dissent was driven by the obvious need to address an ‘intellectual deficit’ within their community that thwarted economic advancement, the growth of literacy, even the lure of literary entertainment itself. If Catholic reading habits, together with their emphasis on devotional literature and the pursuit of spiritual edification, were once derided as pious philistinism, Zalar argues, those narrow, morally-strict choices once dictated by the clergy were replaced in the decades after 1850 by a lay Catholic literary accommodation with modern secular culture. That accommodation was facilitated by divisions among the clergy themselves, the growth of the book publishing industry between 1850 and 1880, and the emergence of an institutional framework of new associations, institutions and libraries. With diversified book collections more attuned to Catholic reading habits and needs, Zalar concludes, these new lending libraries and book clubs had by 1914 broadened the reading experiences of Catholics to a level not dissimilar to ‘all other Germans, regardless of class position or gender’ (p. 358).  Although Zalar has much to say about the nature and character of this reading rebellion, how it was made and sustained, his persuasive analysis tells us more about the form of that revolt than the impact that it had on the Catholic pursuit of success and power. Zalar's willingness, however, to explore issues too often overlooked – popular religion, reading habits, book culture – make this volume an impressive discussion of cultural response to those socio-economic and political changes that accompanied Catholic Germany's transition to modernity.