This rich and substantial study argues that late medieval and early sixteenth‑century lay people in the Low Countries did not simply read devotional books but performed them. Drawing on a corpus of mostly printed vernacular, Passion‑centred booklets from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, van der Laan develops ‘performative reading’ as both an analytical lens and a historical practice. She shows how these guides trained readers to imagine themselves on the stage of salvation history, to mobilise body and emotions, and to internalise texts so thoroughly that devotional scripts could be enacted even without the book. In doing so, she reconstructs a distinctive culture of religious reading and intervenes in debates about print and religious change.

At the centre of the book lies a compact but carefully delimited corpus. Five devotional booklets – Berch van Calvarien, Devote meditacie, Fasciculus mirre, Geestelike boemgaert and Negen couden – form the core material, with Boecxken vander biechten, Kerstenspiegel and Kersteneewe drawn in at strategic moments. These largely post‑incunabula prints (c. 1501–40, with some excursions earlier and later) were widely disseminated in the Low Countries and explicitly structured as guides to meditation and affective exercise. Van der Laan is sceptical of a rigid manuscript/print divide, but her book is ultimately about print culture: the flourishing vernacular devotional market of the early sixteenth century, she argues, is best understood not as an ‘agent of change’ serving humanist or reformist agendas, but as an extension and intensification of long‑standing medieval affective piety among literate lay people. Her focus is not doctrinal content but function: how such booklets operated as scripts and stage directions for performances taking place in homes, streets and parish churches.

The conceptual frame is announced clearly. ‘Performance’ operates both metaphorically and literally. Devotional texts imagine the reader as spectator, witness or actor and instruct him how to inhabit those roles: where to stand, what to look at, how to move, when to weep, and what inner dispositions to cultivate. ‘Performative reading’ denotes immersion in textual and visual cues so complete that the narrative is mentally re‑enacted. Throughout, van der Laan stresses that she reconstructs what texts enable and encourage rather than the behaviour of individual historical readers. This methodological restraint is welcome and gives the argument a secure footing.

Instead of proceeding by genre or author, the book unfolds along three thematic axes: space, body and mind. This structure lends clarity and allows van der Laan to cut repeatedly across her corpus, showing how the same texts could perform different kinds of work, while keeping a potentially unwieldy archive within manageable bounds.

The chapter on space explores how devotional reading activates and transforms places. The booklets draw attention to readers’ immediate surroundings – bedroom, workshop, street or parish church – while inviting them to imagine themselves in biblical or heavenly settings. Texts do not merely describe sacred spaces; they teach readers how to make them. Layout, marginal cues and images turn the page into a threshold, a portable sacred environment, while domestic objects become props in a devotional drama. Particularly persuasive is the discussion of ‘liminal spaces’ for prayer in the home: the book functions as script and stage directions, suggesting where to sit or kneel, how to ‘dress’ the space with images or objects and how to move imaginatively from parlour to Calvary. Through such practices, lay people learned to view everyday life as a journey through spaces that could at any moment be sacralised.

The second axis, body, takes seriously what medieval prescriptive texts often assume: that devotion is enacted through posture, gesture and sensation. Van der Laan assembles a wide range of passages instructing readers to stand, kneel, prostrate themselves, beat their breasts, incline their heads, kiss the book and weep. Situating these cues within traditions of regulated bodily prayer, she shows that the printed booklets offer something close to choreography, arranging graduated sequences of movements and affects. Emotions are treated as performative states: compassion, contrition or ‘fieriness’ are to be cultivated and outwardly displayed, and are understood to have effects in the relationship between devotee and God. Especially strong is her linking of these instructions to broader histories of posture and affect. Medieval prayer manuals had long stressed propriety of bodily form, but these booklets translate that concern into detailed scripts staging when and how particular emotions should appear. Their insistence on repetition, until postures and meditations become habitual, allows van der Laan to connect bodily performance to habitus in a manner grounded in concrete textual evidence.

The third axis, mind, brings cognitive and imaginative dimensions to the fore. Engaging both medieval memory theory and modern scholarship on reading, van der Laan illuminates practices abundantly attested in her sources. Imaginative visualisation is central: readers are urged to ‘see’ the Passion, hear the hammer blows, attend to small details and insert themselves into the scene as bystanders or helpers. Memory techniques – division of texts across the week, rhymed verses, associations between gestures and episodes, spatial organisation of text and image – aid retention. Over time, the devotee is meant to internalise the script so thoroughly that the book can be ‘left behind’ while the performance continues. Allegory and metaphor serve similar ends: by presenting virtues or sins as moving bodies or manipulable objects, the texts make abstract knowledge available for embodied practice. The notion that successful performative reading renders the book itself redundant is one of the study’s most suggestive threads.

These thematic chapters are underpinned by a substantial introductory discussion of sources, methods and historiography. For readers of this Journal, this repositioning is among the book’s major achievements. Van der Laan nuances the role of the devotio moderna in the rise of vernacular devotional print, aligning with scholars who have argued that its influence, though significant, has been overstated. More ambitiously, she challenges accounts of printing that privilege humanist or Protestant literature. Drawing also on the research programme ‘Cities of Readers: Religious Literacies in the Long Fifteenth Century’, she shows that demand for affective devotional literature remained strong into the early sixteenth century and that printed Passion booklets served a large lay readership that did not see itself as proto‑Protestant. The Reformation thus appears less as a sharp break in reading culture than as a reconfiguration of practices already disseminated through print.

Here the book offers a powerful corrective to ‘liberation of the Bible’ narratives and to the idea that lay engagement with written religious culture is essentially Protestant. It dovetails with recent scholarship emphasising continuities across the late medieval/early modern divide and the agency of lay people in shaping their religious lives. By anchoring such claims in close analysis of a small but representative corpus, van der Laan gives them unusual solidity.

There are, however, some costs to the book’s ambition. Its engagement with performance studies, theatre studies, memory theory and cognitive approaches is stimulating, but at times the conceptual repertoire feels over‑rich: some theoretical notions appear briefly and then recede, and a leaner set of tools applied more consistently might have sharpened the argument. The length likewise reflects a determination to do justice to both corpus and interdisciplinarity, but makes for demanding reading; future scholarship will likely distil particular strands of its analysis.

A more substantive question concerns the relation between prescription and practice. Van der Laan is admirably careful to speak of the ‘potential’ of performative reading and acknowledges that we cannot assume every printed cue translated into bodily or imaginative action in a Bruges parlour. Her evidence consists primarily of prescriptive texts rather than diaries or visitation records. Yet the vividness of her reconstructions can sometimes blur, for the modern reader, the line between the ‘ideal reader’ imagined by authors and historical lay people. This is less a flaw than a reminder of the limits of the evidence and a foundation for future work with marginalia, ego‑documents and institutional sources that might confirm or complicate the picture.

Finally, the geographical focus on the urban Low Countries is both strength and limitation. It allows close engagement with Dutch and Flemish scholarship on ‘cities of readers’, but raises comparative questions only intermittently addressed: how distinctive were these practices in German, French or English contexts? Occasional glances beyond the region suggest broader applicability, but the argument rests squarely on the Netherlandish corpus. Again, this points more to the book’s generative potential than to a shortcoming.

These caveats do not detract from the book’s achievement. Performative religious reading in the Low Countries offers a nuanced, empirically grounded and imaginative account of how vernacular devotional books shaped lay religious life in the long fifteenth century. It demonstrates how space, body and mind were implicated in everyday reading practices, complicates Protestant‑centred narratives of textual engagement and models an interdisciplinary approach deeply rooted in the sources. Scholars of late medieval and early modern religion, book history and devotion will find here not only rich material but a set of questions and methods likely to inform the field for years to come.