Kirsi Stjerna provides an excellent introduction to, as she describes it, ‘women as receivers, agents, and implementers of the Protestant faith in sixteenth-century Europe’ (p. 7). Designed for students, the book begins with several chapters that discuss the options that the Protestant Reformation both opened and closed for women, including the struggles over the closure of convents, the valorisation of marriage and the possibilities for women's education. The body of the book is a series of biographical sketches of important women: wives of reformers such as Katharina von Bora and Katharina Schutz Zell; reforming noblewomen such as Elisabeth of Brandenburg and Marguerite de Navarre; pamphleteers and authors such as Argula von Grumbach, Marie Dentière and Olympia Fulvia Morata. Stjerna includes extensive translated quotations from their works, so that readers get a good sense of what these women thought and how they expressed themselves. Stjerna is herself a pastor and church historian (and also the Director of the Institute for Luther Studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, the oldest continuing Lutheran seminary in the Americas) and her discussion of each woman includes thoughtful consideration of their religious ideas as well as the events of their lives. Stjerna writes from the perspective of mainstream Protestant theological training, and explicitly draws on the last thirty years of feminist scholarship as well as on earlier, more confessionally-oriented studies. Many of the chapters provide a discussion of the ways in which scholars and church leaders have viewed each woman, giving readers a sense not only of the role these women played in the sixteenth century, but also of the contours of scholarship on women and the Reformation. The book ends with a conclusion discussing the debate about the impact of the Reformation on women's lives and opportunities, and an extensive bibliography of primary sources and secondary studies in many languages. Stjerna writes in a style that will be accessible to undergraduate students, and her sophisticated analyses draw on her extensive theological training and wide reading, so that the book will be useful for more advanced students and non-specialist scholars as well. Even specialists who have not paid much attention to the huge outpouring of articles, collections and monographs on women and gender and the Refomation published over the last thirty years would find this a good place to begin.