This collection of seventeen essays is to be welcomed as a fresh historical approach to the religious profile, the tensions and conflict, given ‘pluralisation’, in established and popular religion in Lutheran Saxony between the spectacular return of its Wettin house to Roman obedience in 1697, and pre-1848 Saxon constitutional readjustment after the remapping of political boundary between 1803 and 1815. 57.5% of its territory, with Wittenberg, and 42% of its population were ceded to Prussia. Roman Catholics were emancipated in 1807 and the Reformed in 1818 before full religious equality under the 1831 constitution. In 1837 a royal Regulativ installed an Apostolic Vicar in Dresden (the court chaplain) with a prefecture in Bautzen over ‘territorium separatum; diocesis nullius’. These essays are the outcome of a major 2009 research project, ‘Transzendenz und Gemeinsinn (public spirit)’, uniting workshops, and here presents the papers from the March 2010 plenary session organised by Dresden's technical university and Dresden-Meissen's Catholic Academy. Project 804, funded by Germany's research council and co-ordinated by professors Hans Vorländer (politics), Winfried Müller (Saxon history), author of a standard historiographic survey of the German Enlightenment (2002), and the current director of the Catholic academy, Clemens Maass, author of the handy paperback Die Jesuiten heute (2000), look critically at the religious dimension of the Saxon Enlightenment in the light of previous allegedly secular-minded and ‘Whig’ interpretation; in particular, how we might re-label the so-called ‘late Enlightenment’ (c. 1770–1848) bracketed with ‘modernisation’. Was it merely, as Müller suggests (p. 225), an ‘interface period’ before ‘a second stage of confessionalization’? Benjamin Kaplan's bold revisionist interpretation, Divided by faith (2007), suggesting that religious toleration in Europe actually declined between 1550 and 1750 resulting in a quirky boundary re-ordering sanctioning a live and let live of rival beliefs, and very recent heated Germans debates over the last decade about concepts of secularisation/confessionalisation (Olaf Blaschke et al), inform all these essays. Selective examples are Freist (pp. 35ff.) on a Lutheran need for religious reassurance after 1697, and Leibetseder (p. 55) on Lutheran identity fears amongst Dresden citizens; for the court at Dresden there is Poppe (pp. 127ff.) on worship; Magvas (pp. 141ff.) on music; Matzerath (pp. 233ff.) on religion's place therein; and Marburg (pp. 303ff.) on King Johann (1854–73) and the ‘image’ that he designed to move with the times. Two enlightening comparative essays are Metasch (pp. 167ff.) on the complex religious topography of neighbouring Silesia, and Schmid (pp. 205ff.) on Munich's Wittelsbach court and church: ‘das Teutsche Rom’ (1784). There are inevitable questions. Gerd Schwerhoff, who co-ordinated Dresden's 2006 project 537 ‘Social Space and Religious Culture, 1300–1800’ with the universities of Paris I and Warwick, asserts (pp. 17, 21) in his introduction to conflict c. 1700, that there is ‘a historiographic no man's land’ in cultural and religious perspective between ‘confessionalisation’ (1517–1648) and the Enlightenment. That raises an eyebrow or two. There is no table, or across the page chronology, which gives statistics on denominational balance or shows examples of conflict and constitutional change, and no analytical index. These might have helped to orientate conceptual complexities such as ‘pluralisation’. The first rudimentary ‘Protestant’ German religious census (1862) listed 2,170,036 Lutherans, and 1,112 Reformed (Roman Catholics were not included). Winfried Müller's introduction and the five essays in the nineteenth-century section are weaker on public spirit, and seem to leave as read the consequences for the Saxon religious profile – the division of the diocese of Dresden into Dresden i (city) and Dresden ii (Radeberg) in 1855, and Leipzig in 1856 – of Saxony's significant population increase and its bearing upon urbanisation, ‘proto-industrialisation’ and modern industrial manufacture (textiles and metals) charted by economic historians like Knut Borchardt and Sidney Pollard. This reviewer misses any mention of two classics, Christian Gerber's Historie der Kirchen-Ceremonien in Sachsen (Dresden 1732), and Charles Burney's two-volume Musical tours in Europe (1772/3). Both authors chart the very significant innovations made by eighteenth-century Dresden and Leipzig in congregational church architecture and church music.