Benjamin Esswein's topic is the printing enterprise founded by three Protestant exiles from the Alpine Habsburg territories in Württemberg in the late 1550s: Hans Ungnad, a Carinthian nobleman, Primus Truber, a Slovene theologian from Carniola, and Peter Paul Vergerio, an Istrian renegate bishop who usually wrote in Italian. He rightly draws attention to the curious fact that their efforts to spread the Gospel were actually supported by Maximilian ii, the son of the emperor who had driven them into exile. However, Maximilian's irenic approach to the religious cleavages of his time has long been the subject of scholarly debates. (In fact, Esswein seems to have overlooked the latest study on the subject by Jürgen Birkenmeier: Via regia.) Esswein argues that Maximilian's support was perhaps motivated in part by a desire to bolster Christian culture in the southern provinces that after all were borderlands of the Ottoman Empire.

The book may be useful for English-speaking readers unwilling to delve into the many editions of sixteenth-century texts written in rather complicated German that are Esswein's main sources but it does not add anything that is substantially new. The narrative tends to jump from one topic to the next in a rather bewildering fashion, with many issues left unresolved. Esswein also tends to fall into the trap of overstating the case for the historical impact of his heroes’ actions. It is certainly worth recalling Truber's efforts to promote Protestantism in his native Slovene, but his legacy hardly ‘made long lasting impacts on languages, ethnicities and culture in the Balkans’ (p. 172). Also, a list of correspondents does not yet necessarily count as ‘a network of patronage’. Finally, the term ‘territorial churches’ used in the title is misleading: the Habsburg lands were home to a vibrant Lutheran culture in the late sixteenth century, but organised ‘territorial churches’ is exactly what they did not have.