Euan Cameron assembles a distinguished team of essayists in this crisp and valuable volume, managing to convey the complexity of its period beyond the necessary but often distorting ‘portmanteau terms’ such as ‘print revolution’ or ‘price revolution’, by which we seek to tidy a period into narrative shapes. Cameron's introduction reminds the reader that such simplifications will inevitably prioritise large and powerful entities and dynamic developments which can be interpreted as leading neatly to modernity. Tom Scott's essay on economies sets an admirable pattern for the rest of the book by being comprehensive and generous in its coverage of eastern Europe, whose distinctive modes of behaviour reinforce Cameron's strictures against generalisations. Mark Greengrass, on ‘politics and warfare’, emphasises against some influential recent commentators, notably John Bossy, that ‘nowhere could we find a “nation state” in the sixteenth century’ (p. 60); his essay overlaps with Christopher Black's treatment of the structures of society. Charles Nauert's interesting study of ‘The mind’ over-emphasises the contrast between northern ‘Christian’ humanism and the more secular humanism of the south (his editor gently critiques him for this in the introduction). As Nauert himself points out, the first northern humanists were not especially spiritual, and the development is as much a chronological as a geographical one, with Erasmus and his admirers in the north being paralleled by the circle of Michelangelo or the clients of Cardinal Ximénes (and admirers of Erasmus) in the south. Two references to humanism as ‘the new learning’ here rather grate: we should direct this phrase back to evangelical reformism where it belongs. The editor is (appropriately) the essayist on the Reformation itself, and David Brading is fascinating on Europe's first successful century of expansion beyond its own boundaries, both fleshing out and nuancing the editor's own characteristically trenchant observation that ‘It is hard to imagine a people worse prepared intellectually, culturally, or morally for the role of colonial overlords over the rest of the world than late medieval Europeans’ (p. 8). Cameron briefly concludes the volume with a look forward to the seventeenth century. Among his interesting observations is that England and the Protestant Netherlands were distinctive because they made similarly unusual political decisions: in neither country was government entrusted by constituents with arbitrary and permanent taxation. Governments there were consequently unable to issue bonds against future tax revenues, which elsewhere might divert investors' funds away from the possibilities of commence and manufacture: hence the special character of English and Dutch society, so crucial in shaping the European future and rescuing Protestantism from its late seventeenth-century crisis. Historians of religion do well to see how their concerns interweave with other branches of history.