This volume presents the Litterae annuae of the Society of Jesus in the original Latin and in a German translation. These annual reports come from two small north German Jesuit houses, Stade where the Jesuit establishment only lasted two years during the Thirty Years' War and Otterndorf, with reports from the early eighteenth century. The volume is carefully put together with thorough footnotes and appendix and an extensive bibliography, albeit only of German secondary sources.

The volume includes an excellent introduction that explains the format and purpose of the Litterae annuae, as well as the historical context of these two houses. We are reminded that these reports not only went to the head of the Jesuit Lower German Province and to the headquarters of the Society in Rome, they also circulated to other Jesuit houses, where they were read out loud at meals. As a result, the reports were written in a dramatic Latin that presented exciting and detailed narratives of the experience of the Jesuits in these Protestant regions. The heroic traditions of the Society, established in its earliest years, lived on in these out of the way and isolated little houses.

It is not surprising that the reports from Stade, written during the peak of the war, contain many stories of conflict between the Jesuit missionaries and the Lutheran population. But, even in Otterndorf in the 1710s and 1720s, the Jesuit reports are full of stories of the terrible behaviour of their Lutheran neighbours, the ministers in particular. The Jesuits, as they had since the sixteenth century, pointed to, even bragged about, conversions to Catholicism, often describing those conversions in considerable detail. The Jesuits were also savvy about political conditions in the towns and regions where they lived and this is reflected in the Litterae annuae. They discuss the generosity of their donors and the sometimes tolerant relations that they developed with local elites, Protestant as well as Catholic. Finally, the precariousness of the Jesuit position in these communities on the North Sea is apparent throughout as the Fathers were in constant fear that they would have to leave their houses and leave their Catholic converts behind.