Rupert Klieber's book seeks to apply to the religious sphere the principles of the developing ‘history of the everyday’. In place of the statistical emphases of older forms of social history he relies on a host of individual examples from specific situations, hoping despite the ‘undeniably fragmentary character’ of the resulting picture (p. 19), to recapture the experience of the ‘little people’ in all its variety, with a view to discovering how intensely religion determined their lives, and in what forms. The project and its methodology are explicitly pioneering: sources are (auto)biographical either directly or through reportage, rather than archival. The chapter progression, from Judaism, Eastern Christianity (including the Uniates), Roman Catholicism and Islam to Protestantism, is explained in terms of the antiquity of the communities concerned. The result is a book full of interesting information and the occasional wider perspective. Examples of the latter posit an embattled Catholicism developing from religious precept to ideological Weltanschauung and an Austrian Protestantism moving from older gratitude for Josephinian toleration towards a ‘diaspora mentality’; Klieber plausibly notes that clerical attitudes in the Great War qualify previous professions of Habsburg loyalty and that attempts to win Orthodox communities through supporting their Churches had limited success. But the case for a new kind of history is not wholly made. The resolve not to submerge concrete experience in statistics inclines to a tentativeness about generalisation overall, leaving an impression somewhat less than the sum of the parts. Some quantification in fact appears, like the proportion of people attending Easter communion, or the density of Catholic religious relative to population; it seems difficult to gauge the impact of religion on people's lives on any but a micro-scale without recourse to it. Clifford Geertz's ‘thick description’ is invoked in the introduction, but seems easier to attain by local case studies than brief details adduced from different places, which here often lack suggestive force or cumulative impact. The attention paid to groups such as the Lippovans, Armenians and Unitarians is understandably programmatic, but reduces space for treatment of larger bodies, like the Hungarian Calvinists. The Catholic chapter, understandably the longest, is the most successful. Systematic comparisons may be felt to violate the emphasis on the particular, but they could be further developed in topics like clerical-lay relationships, touched on at various points; the impact of art, music and liturgy in religious experience, neglected; and the role of folk tradition, the question most widely raised. The book concludes with a short and rather bland assessment of the negative and positive aspects of religion's role, in which the difficulties of women and the contribution of community solidarity and social engagement figure respectively. That Catholics were more successful in maintaining solidarity than the more loosely organised Protestants (with the exception of the Lutheran Saxons of Transylvania) might be inferred, but in keeping with its exploratory character the book eschews overt propositions. Its width of coverage is to be admired, and it is to be hoped that the lead given will spur more work in this intriguing field.