The Reformation has been described as the world's ‘first major media event’ (Andrew Pettegree). Although other media (preaching, song, visual images) played their part, the reformers’ success in building a grassroots movement owed most to the new technology of print, which they helped to transform into a vehicle for mass communication. The evangelical message became inseparable from the printed word, nowhere more so than in the Reformed Protestant tradition. This Reformed ‘culture of the book’ is the focus of the work under review, which brings together papers first presented at the 2013 Calvin Studies Colloquium. As Karen Spierling explains in her introduction, the title of the volume is deliberately open-ended, both because of the complexity of the topic and to accommodate a variety of disciplinary approaches. In the first chapter, Andrew Pettegree offers us a fascinating comparative study of Luther and Calvin as ‘men of the book’. Both reformers, Pettegree argues, had an instinctive grasp of how to make the new medium work to their advantage – underscored, in Calvin's case, by years of collaboration with printers in Basle and Strasbourg. Despite their academic backgrounds, Luther and Calvin were adept at distilling their teachings into short, punchy vernacular texts accessible to a wider public. They also possessed considerable commercial acumen, using their connections with local printers to build up flourishing publishing industries in their home cities – and, in Calvin's case, timing the appearance of key works to coincide with the twice-yearly Frankfurt book fair. The next two essays address the impact of the book on Reformed society more generally. In their First book of discipline (1560), Calvin's Scottish followers attempted to apply the Genevan template for reform to an entire European kingdom, but how successful was this endeavour? Margo Todd seeks an answer in the rulings of one important ecclesiastical court, the Perth kirk session, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Her findings reveal a mixed picture. Statistically, it would appear that the disciplinary standards laid down by the First book of discipline were adhered to, for the most part, but Todd's detailed case studies reveal that pre-existing societal attitudes, in the form of a gender ‘double standard’ and preferential treatment for those enjoying high social status, continued to influence how offenders were dealt with. In her contribution, Jennifer Powell McNutt looks at the role played by another Reformed text, Calvin's Catechism, in religious education in eighteenth-century Geneva. She concludes that the city's pastors were conflicted in their attitude to the work. While wishing to remain faithful to Calvin's legacy, they were aware that the catechism had become outdated, in both language and content, and did not always reflect contemporary theological priorities. At a time of rapprochement with Lutheranism, some proposed excising ‘useless’ passages on the sacraments and replacing them with new, more pietistic sections on ‘moral works’ (p. 71). If Calvin's works could be subject to adaptation and revision, the same was true of an even more hallowed text, as Bruce Gordon shows in his essay on the Reformed Latin Bible. Gordon follows the evolution of this project across more than half a century, from Sebastian Münster's Biblia Hebraica (1534/35) through to the monumental 1590 edition of the Latin Old Testament by Immanuel Tremellius and Franciscus Junius. While stripping the Latin Bible of any liturgical function, Reformed scholars refashioned it as a new kind of text, the critically annotated ‘study Bible’. Both the scholarly apparatus and the biblical translations in such works were explicitly provisional, to be modified and improved in the light of future knowledge. Critical rigour and attention to historical context were important strands in Calvin's own thought. In his essay on Calvin's use of history, Euan Cameron notes the reformer's willingness to challenge (some) traditional Christological readings of Old Testament passages that he considered historically dubious. The fact that Calvin read biblical prophecy ‘in a praeterist fashion’ (p. 93), with no direct application to his own day, also insulated him against the millenarianism prevalent among his contemporaries. The volume ends with two contributions from theologians. Both explore what one might term Calvin's biblical poetics: his application of rhetorical categories to Scripture. William Dyrness highlights Calvin's conception of the Bible as a divine drama that, much like Renaissance theatre, is designed to engage and transform the spectator. From his close reading of a passage in book ii of the Institutes, Matthew Myer Boulton draws some wider conclusions about Calvin's understanding of Scripture and doctrine. For Calvin, Myer Boulton argues, the Holy Spirit operates essentially as a rhetorician; the primary purpose of biblical language (here, the reference to God as our ‘enemy’) is not to describe an objective doctrinal reality but to form and move us towards pietas. Although no one volume can hope to do justice to such an extensive topic, this is a wide-ranging, well-researched and stimulating collection of essays. It serves as a useful addition to the field of Calvin studies, illustrating some of ways in which the Reformed tradition influenced and was, in its turn, shaped by early modern print culture.