The purpose of this collection of fourteen essays is not to explore the reception of Calvin's theology in different contexts, but ‘how Calvin himself served as a saint, icon, hero or villain in the imagination of later generations’. This, and the book's particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gives it coherence and sets it apart from the many other books published to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary in 2009 of Calvin's birth. As the editors indicate in their introductory essay, Sober, strict, and scriptural is a contribution to the contemporary interest in ‘memory studies’, insisting that the collective memory of Calvin in various contexts ensured the continuity of a Calvinist tradition in those places that gave communities their particular identity within their social and religious milieu. At the same time, especially during the second half of the twentieth century, the tradition, no longer sustained by ‘spontaneous memory’, has become a site of contestation centred on how Calvin has been remembered through the creation of ‘sites of memory’ in a wide range of cultural and geographical settings. These indicate the global reach of Calvin's legacy as well as the diversity of its reception and of the way in which Calvin himself is remembered and contested. Starting in Calvin's own homeland with a chapter on ‘Calvin's image in Catholic France during the nineteenth century’, the essays explore, inter alia, Dutch neo-Calvinism, Calvin's role in Hungarian nationalism and his marginalised position in Germany through to the way in which Calvin influenced Chinese Protestant identity, divided North American Calvinists and served as a boundary between them and Lutherans, and how his memory functioned amongst anti-apartheid Reformed Christians in South Africa. A chapter on ‘Servetus vs. Calvin’, which deals with the contest over monuments in France, highlights the radically different ways in which Calvin's image has been perceived. There are also fascinating studies that probe beyond the anticipated parameters of such a volume: Calvin's image within Mormonism, his influence on English travellers in Geneva, and his becoming a source of burlesque in Mark Twain. A chapter on the way in which the contemporary novelist Marilynne Robinson provides an alternative positive reading of Calvin to the prevailing negative view in North America brings the volume to a fitting conclusion. Whether Robinson's reconstruction will reshape cultural and religious memory remains to be seen. Sober, strict and scriptural is an important collection of essays which should be of interest to scholars across the spectrum of religious, cultural and historical studies.