This volume represents the final form of the papers presented at which was clearly a very useful conference at Emory in 2004, a usefulness enhanced by the fact that many of the footnotes have been updated to take account of the flood of material that has been published in the interim. As always happens with collections of this kind, the editors have had a struggle to impose a shape on the private ambitions of the contributors, but the final outcome is roughly tripartite: at the beginning and end are programmatic chapters in which contributors tell their colleagues what needs to be done next; these pieces were on the whole not very interesting. The second group of papers, mostly by well-established German scholars, gives excellent accounts (in English) of what is known, mostly about radical sectarian Pietism in Europe; these chapters will be invaluable to those who find difficulty in reading the basic work in the original, and warrant their place here in that for obvious reasons the radicals were among the first to extend their normal peregrinations to the New World. Prominent among these, however, is an excellent piece on the communication networks among Philadelphians, the Ephrata Society and other separatists by the American, the late Donald Durnbaugh. Having worked this area so capably for so many years, he did not live to see his paper in print. Scholarship will be the poorer for his passing, but it is good to see that his last contribution is a worthy one. The third group of papers is mostly by American scholars, though it includes a good piece by Hermann Wellenreuther on Henrich Melchior Mühlenberg and the organisation of a Lutheran Church in America. It is this group of papers which contains the most new material, and it is very good to see transatlantic scholars illuminating a transatlantic theme from material in their own backyard. In this group are two rather hair-raising studies of the Moravian settlement at Bethlehem by Beverly Prior Smaby and Katherine Carté Engel. Clearly not all the mistakes that the Moravians made after the middle of the eighteenth century were those of Zinzendorf himself, and as a missionary force the Moravians were capable of frittering away much good zeal and courage on confusion of purpose. Conflict looms large in this section; Jon Sensbach shows how the Black Protestant church arose from the resistance of Caribbean slave-holders to Pietist missions among their slaves. Here ‘do-it-yourself’ religion proved more potent than missions from the outside. The theme of conflict is also that of Helen M. Kastinger Riley, who discusses the Salzburger settlement at Ebenezer (and eventually New Ebenezer) in Georgia. This paper also includes new material from both sides of the Atlantic, and, happily, one can record that the Salzburgers' ultimate legacy, the settlement at New Ebenezer, is now one of the quietest and most picturesque corners of the entire state of Georgia.

Books about Pietism are plagued by problems of definition. Hartmut Lehmann has the world ‘revival’ in his title, but hardly discusses it, and wishes to incorporate the entire history of revival into a German-based concept of Pietism. In fact revival is a distinct phenomenon from Pietism though often very close to it. Lehmann complains that this reviewer's book on revivalism contains nothing about Spener (no revivalist he) and that I had reduced Pietism to a role in modern religious awakenings which originated in England, in a book designed to show that they did not originate in England. There are two papers in the book which on any strict interpretation of the title ought not to be there, but they are two of the best and it would be a shame not to have them. Christopher Clark has a very interesting chapter on Spener's interest in the conversion of the Jews and the way his doctrine developed later in Germany; no transatlantic reference here, not even the seventeenth-century fantasy that the Indians were really Jews, gets in. The other chapter, on the Salzburg Protestants, is by one of the editors, James Van Horn Melton. His evidence, which includes new material from the Salzburg archives, confirms what has always been known, that they were Lutheran Orthodox, which did not stop them finding their way into revivalism; and of course their cause was adopted and their migrations assisted by Pietists. Melton has a lively theme and treats it in an appropriately lively way.

The future of Pietist studies is perhaps best left to the ingenuity of their practitioners; the general significance of this book is that it strikes a powerful blow against the German school which wishes to understand Pietism as a German phenomenon, in favour of a broader but less tidy concept.