Laqua-O'Donnell's well-researched and engagingly written book contributes to Reformation studies in several significant ways. She investigates the experiences of different groups of women in the city of Münster which, after the notorious attempt to establish an Anabaptist kingdom, was returned rigorously to Catholicism. The rich material analysed in the book, so far under-explored, supports Laqua-O'Donnell's argument for the sustained study of the multifaceted influence of ‘gender’ in how religious reforms were actually received and experienced by ‘common’ people in different sectors of sixteenth-century society. Her focus, in particular, is the impact of the so-called ‘Counter-Reformation’ on women's religion. The evidence comes from an intriguing pool of women who may occasionally have been erroneously stereotyped in previous research: the confident and learned convent women who resisted the cloistering of nuns; the vulnerable concubines of clergymen and the maidservants who paid the price for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy; the widows contributing in their community with acts of charity; the sorceresses with their forbidden rituals; the wives with their many tasks at home, in the church and in society at large; and last, but not least, the Lichtmutter in charge of the provision of candles in church. On the complexity of the significance of Catholic reform for women, Laqua-O'Donnell concludes that ‘while some women had their freedoms severely curtailed, others found new ways to participate’. As evidence, several individual women are encountered, without an in-depth treatment of anyone in particular. The reader gets an authentic sense of the ways in which religion was lived at a communal level in the early modern period, and how women were essentially involved in the transformations – or preservation - of religious practices and imaginations. The women of Münster speak in particular to the power of theology that feeds on and draws from the personal and that allows secular and sacred concerns to intertwine. This book is to be recommended for readers interested in women's roles and experiences in ‘real life’ during the sixteenth century and in the aftermath of the Council of Trent.