More or less neglected for decades, historical work on crypto-Protestantism in the Habsburg monarchy now has new life. Some of the recently published research is even crossing the academic frontiers that have long separated the Austrian hereditary lands from Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary. See for example, Ondřej Macek, ed., Po vzoru berojských. Život i víra českých a moravských evangeliků v předtoleranční a toleranční době [Following the Beroean example. Life and faith of Bohemian and Moravian Protestants in the period of tolerance and before] (Prague, 2008) or Rudolf Leeb, Martin Scheutz, and Dietmar Weikl, eds., Geheimprotestantismus und evangelische Kirchen in der Habsburgermonarchie und im Erzstift Salzburg (17./18. Jahrhundert) (Vienna, 2009). This renewal may enable historians in the near future to rethink the many dimensions of this phenomenon for the Habsburg lands. But things have not yet reached that stage.

Stephan Steiner's book ranks among these new accomplishments. The book is excellently written and provides fascinating reading. It focuses mainly on a three-year period, concentrating on the Paternion Estate and its surrounding area in Carinthia. Paul Dedic provided a thorough study of crypto-Protestantism in Carinthia in Der Geheimprotestantismus in Kärnten während der Regierung Karls VI., 1711–1740 (Klagenfurt, 1940). Dedic's work notwithstanding, Steiner's microhistorical approach and his comprehensive use of local records provide a truly fresh look at the subject.

Steiner reconstructs the various dimensions and phases of the process that led to the transportation of several hundred peasant religious dissenters to Transylvania, from the moment when their crypto-Protestant faith was brought out in the open. He has gathered an impressive amount of material from Austrian, as well as German and Italian, archives (Paternion was situated just on the boundary between the Aquila and Salzburg Dioceses). Steiner examines the roles played by the tenant of the Paternion Estate, missionaries, and the parochial clergy at the local level. He also emphasizes the decisive role the highest officers of the Carinthian government played on the regional level, without convincing the reader of the relatively minor involvement of the Viennese Court.

This last issue is an important one, because it could perhaps clarify why transportation remained an exceptional sentence in the Habsburg monarchy in the early eighteenth century and did not occur other than in Carinthia, Salzkammergut, and later in Upper Austria. Not even in Bohemia and Moravia—where a strong repression of suspected heretics, involving all levels of authorities, took place from the 1720s onward—was transportation imposed. However, Steiner brilliantly succeeds in reconstituting all the intricate local ties, going back and forth between the regional capital of Klagenfurt and the Paternion Estate. He reveals the complicated function of individual relationships inside and outside Paternion and between Ainether, the tenant of Paternion Estate, and the Landeshauptmann and Religious Commissar's office, stressing too their ability to create and to play within norms.

Steiner's book is a far-ranging one. It suggests several working hypotheses: (1) the events in Salzburg were a point of no return for the estate of Paternion's “underground Protestants” and a break with the past, for events persuaded them that they had rights to freedom of conscience; (2) the Paternion crypto-Protestants did not identify themselves with Lutheranism without reservations and would rather invoke an “Old Catholic” or “Old Apostolic Catholic Faith,” even when all of them professed only two sacraments and founded their faith on the authority of the scriptures; (3) on the controversial question of the continuity of Protestantism in the Austrian hereditary lands since the Reformation, Steiner favors a transmission of (more of less) hidden family practices through the reading of inherited and newly purchased books, rather than the existence of an unbroken secret Lutheran Church.

If Steiner is clearly resorting to microhistory, he does not take account of all its founding principles. He at times discusses Carlo Ginzburg, either implicitly, entitling a subchapter “No Cheese, No Worms: A Shoemaker's World in about 1730” (131), a transparent allusion to Ginsburg's most famous story of Miller Menocchio (The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller [London, 1976]), or more explicitly, when rejecting the idea of an ineffable strangeness of the past, which can be approached and explained only through meticulous recontextualizing and assuming the thesis of long-lasting or even permanent human psychical structures (22–23). For Steiner, the story of the Paternion transportation contains the origins of the massive population expulsions of twentieth-century Europe. This is questionable and does not seem to shed light on the sufferings of Paternion's inhabitants, here masterly reconstituted with great empathy.