This is a welcome addition to the rapidly developing fields of both migration studies and early modern exile. Published in Brill's excellent (if expensive) Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions series, it joins such recent studies as Jasper van der Steen's Memory wars in the Low Countries, 1566–1700 (published in the same series) and Geert Janssen's The Dutch Revolt and Catholic exile in Reformation Europe (Cambridge 2014) in foregrounding the immensely complex legacies of exile not only in the Dutch Republic, but Europe generally. While Netherlandish migration is naturally the focus here, given the patterns of movement and their subsequent resonances, Müller's book is admirably wide-ranging in its scope and intelligently informed by a broad range of regional historiographies and sociological approaches. The result is an incisive and intriguing study which will be of interest to scholars of early modern religion and migration at large.

As Müller sets out in his introduction, this is a study fundamentally shaped by those sources which have survived to tell (or re-tell) the story of these migrations; as such, the many themes which Müller develops are predominantly founded upon literate, often elite records. Men dominate the narratives, though the elevated position and literacy of groups such as the Pietists afford fascinating insights when they appear in chapters iv and vi. Correspondence, poetry and printed works figure prominently here, the bibliography testifying to the range of Müller's researches not only in the Netherlands, but also in London and Frankfurt. Visual and material culture are briefly incorporated into the analysis – particularly in chapters iv and v when Müller ventures into family history and the sustaining of networks over time – and supported by colour images. Müller maintains a sharp critical framework around these sources throughout the book, treating them as part of the creative mechanisms through which memory could sustain, dissolve and integrate these communities as the diaspora took its various forms.

Müller's central argument throughout the six chapters that follow rests upon the notion that these migrant ‘Southern Netherlandish’ communities developed distinctive and contingent ‘memory cultures’ of their own during the course of these diasporas. While maintaining that a certain measure of memory ‘ghettoisation’ did occur, it is the capacity of many of these families and communities not only to accommodate, but also to incorporate the ‘memory canons’ of their new hosts which concerns Müller here. Thus, while chapters i and ii set out the intellectual and theological frameworks through which contemporaries might have understood their circumstances, necessity and pragmatism often forced re-evaluations and rewrites. Figures such as the Antwerp merchant Johan Thijs could evince a fiery vision of a resurgent Protestantism triumphing ‘back home’ when tides appeared to turn, then reconcile themselves to their circumstances when hopes dissipated (and especially when economic incentives helped to mitigate) through new forms of (dis)engagement with these memories. Traditional tropes of exiled communities are evident here: like other early modern exiles and refugees, these tribulations could mark out God's elect, or provide a sort of purgation of sin. The more interesting fluidity and transitional processes which Müller highlights rest, however, in what he terms (drawing from Charles S. Maier) ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ memory. Here, as Thijs's example suggests, memory cultures could transition from serving calls for the renewal of ‘the old cause’ into a means of acculturation, providing the roots for more permanent settlement once the prospect of repatriation had faded.

Chapters iii through vi are certainly the most rewarding of the book. Here, Müller's interest in the multivalent roles played by memory over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries gains greater depth and specificity, employing the languages set out in the first two chapters in order to chart the memory networks across the diaspora. Chapter iii, for instance, emphasises the role of emergent civic identities in tempering exile memories. Individuals such as the Flemish artist and author Karel van Mander are placed within a wider discourse amongst South Netherlandish ‘Haarlemmers by choice’, whereby a professed love of the city helped to ease the ‘hotter’ religious identities. Elsewhere, however, discourses of exclusion persisted, with ‘strangers’ and ‘degenerates’ from the Southern Netherlands populating the works of such eminent theologians as the Calvinist Gisbert Voetius. Families, as chapter iv points out, were also subject to these sorts of fluxes, with generational tensions and reproduction of memories at the centre of contested identities. Here, again, readers of this Journal will read with interest the capacity of families like the Van der Muelens and La Mottes to elide or intertwine elements of religious, familial and local identity for the sake of survival or prosperity. Chapters v and vi expand these geographies further by looking at the diasporic churches in London and Frankfurt, where the confessional ties of these migrants were again made to work around variant ideas of what, where and when their community now rooted itself.

The standard of research across these chapters is impressive, alternating between close readings of particular texts (poems in particular) through Müller's literary scholarship and more extensive reconstruction of correspondence networks and material goods. On occasion Müller's research leans heavily on the scholarship of others: sections on the London Calvinist churches, in particular, work around the very high bar set by Ole Peter Grell and Patrick Collinson and, while making interesting specific points, do not quite reach the heights of other chapters. More generally, the book's thematic structure tends to blur the two-hundred-year chronology without signalling specific departure points or breaks in these memory cultures. Closer consideration of, for instance, the available mechanisms of remembrance (for example, developments in the print trade) or the consequences of specific events (for example, the Anglo-Dutch Wars) would have helped to situate these themes within the broad chronological scope of the book.

Nevertheless, Exile memories and the Dutch Revolt provides much that is new and refreshing for historians of memory, migration and early modern religious culture. It should encourage historians to take more seriously the role of these communities in shaping and challenging the contours of early modern society in general.