Ideally, comparative history can illuminate familiar historical problems by casting them in a new light and can raise fresh questions for investigation. Alternatively, comparative history can offer new examples of familiar models. The essays collected by James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow conform more to the second paradigm than to the first. Each of the essays is excellent, and the brief, insightful introduction integrates them well with an effective overview of the dominant trends in the historiography on religion and state in early modern Europe, from the traditional view that religion was a matter of state policy, imposed from above, to more recent approaches that envision religious reform as a reciprocal process, involving give-and-take from above and below.

The volume is divided into three overlapping thematic sections, each of which includes one essay on England and several on other parts of Eurasia. “Part I: Lived Religion and Official Religion” starts off with one of the most provocative pieces, Richard Shek's “The Alternative Moral Universe of Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China.” Shek argues that the authorities were absolutely correct when they identified religious dissenters as endangering the entire social and political system. Chinese sectarians advocated profoundly subversive inversion of all social hierarchies. Moreover, with their glorification of this-worldly suffering in pursuit of otherworldly goals, dissenters placed themselves beyond the disciplinary power of the authorities. Robert O. Crummey's article on “Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia” conveys the nature and complexity of religious policy and practice at a time when the official church joined forces with the state to enforce a standard, uniform Orthodoxy in a manner strikingly similar to the “confessionalization” taking place in western Europe at the time. Crummey then complicates the picture by describing the serious threat to this church-state Orthodoxy posed by the growing Old Belief movement, provoked into action by official persecution of popular practices and dedicated to resisting the new religious order even to the point of self-immolation. In a short but ambitious essay on “The State, the Churches, Sociability, and Folk Belief in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic,” Willem Frijhoff peels apart layers of differences within the Dutch Republic, demonstrating the meaningful distinctions among various groups involved in negotiating the fine line between religious and civic values, Calvinism and Catholicism, reform and continuity, religious tolerance and a more precarious confessional coexistence. Caroline J. Litzenberger's article is the first of several in the collection to examine the practical, on-the-ground accommodations and resistance of particular communities to the successive rounds of religious reform undertaken by the English church and state. Based on two diocesan visitation reports, one from 1551, the other from 1576, the article reveals the layers of accommodation, persistence, and concealment that characterized local religious practice through these decades of religious reform. This essay is particularly affecting in its description of the painstaking and costly efforts of the Gloucester community to keep up with the architectural changes mandated from above. Altars were lowered, raised, and lowered, moved forward and back, stripped and embellished as Tudor policy veered from one extreme to another. Ultimately, the process apparently ran out of steam, not always because of an absence of goodwill but because funds ran dry.

“Part II: Forms of Religious Identity” opens with Romeyn Taylor's essay on “Spirits of the Penumbra: Deities Worshiped in More than One Chinese Pantheon.” Taylor establishes a taxonomy of Chinese religions and evaluates the flexible meanings attributed to those deities that functioned in more than one of these religious spheres. Flexibility is also key to Frank E. Sysyn's discussion of “Orthodoxy and Revolt: The Role of Religion in the Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.” He provides a lucid description of the religious, political, and diplomatic currents that shaped this international crossroads and then demonstrates the ways in which religion acted as just one of a number of sources of identity and affiliation for the Ukrainian churchmen and Cossacks who rebelled against Polish domination in the mid-seventeenth century. Raymond A. Mentzer's study of the Huguenot minority in early modern France focuses on the lures of Catholic festivals and the problems associated with marriage to demonstrate both the strengthening effects on the Huguenot community and the hindrances posed by its status as persecuted minority. Paul S. Seaver's article on “State Religion and Puritan Resistance in Early Seventeenth-Century England” chronicles how Puritan (as opposed to Litzenberger's Catholic) practices survived official proscription and persecution. Instead of fostering religious uniformity, Seaver argues, official policy created the “Puritan personality, prepared to respond not to command but to conscience, a people disciplined not for conformity, but for the coming revolution” (249).

“Part III: The Social Articulation of Belief” continues the investigation of the ways various communities expressed religious belief and commitment. Eve Levin's colorful piece on “False Miracles and Unattested Dead Bodies: Investigations into Popular Cults in Early Modern Russia” describes the inquiries conducted by the governing institution of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early eighteenth century. Sharing with its Western counterparts a growing suspicion of unregulated local practices and superstitions, the church attempted to enforce clear, rigorous standards and to impose uniformity onto popular belief. Investigations focused particularly on the cults of saints whose sole or primary claim to sanctity rested on the miraculous incorruptibility of their relics, an Orthodox tradition with enduring resonance. In her study of liturgical rites in the Protestant German lands, Susan C. Karant-Nunn employs an anthropological approach to ritual. She offers a sophisticated formulation according to which ritual itself carries transformative meaning while participants are also capable of maintaining or imputing their own meanings within the parameters available to them. The stable hierarchies of place in Protestant churches and the elimination of visual affirmations of female or affective spirituality worked internalized changes in belief systems and order, but believers were nonetheless able to sustain their own certainty that supernatural forces remained accessible to the human world and to maintain the communal social and economic aspects of ritual life that Protestant reformers wished to eliminate. In a welcome inclusion on the Catholic side of things, Sara T. Nalle's “Self-Correction and Social Change in the Spanish Counter-Reformation” identifies reformist currents parallel to those occurring in Protestant regions and finds quantifiable indicators of compliance with new reformist norms in matters as intimate as funerary rites and patterns of marital and premarital sex. Eamon Duffy's delightful contribution, “The Disenchantment of Space: Salle Church and the Reformation,” traces the currents of the Reformation in the patronage, configuration, and uses of a single church through several centuries of religious change. Finally, Nicholas Orme examines the persistence of pre-Reformation folk practices in Cornwall long after the Reformation had stripped them of their religious meaning. Returning to a theme raised by Frijhoff, he demonstrates that the survival of rituals does not necessary connote continuity of meaning.

Any reader can be confident of learning a great deal from this collection, which covers so many, varied situations in which church and state interacted with popular belief and practice. Readers are less certain to find new questions or new ways of posing old ones. That, of course, is a tall order, and the volume makes a significant contribution as is.