This book has an ambitious goal: to describe the process of reform, in both its political and religious sense, over the course of three centuries in Upper Franconia, the part of east-central Germany that lies along the Main River. The fragmented territorial development of this area means that the author must consider two types of government—a group of princely territories ruled by a cadet branch of the Hohenzollern family, and the prince-bishopric (Hochstift) of Bamberg—and, after 1517, two confessions, since the Hohenzollern territories became Lutheran. Because this area is unfamiliar to most English-speaking readers, he must also include an overview of its political history, and so he takes a narrative rather than an analytical approach to his topic.

The book's fundamental premise is that although political and religious reform may be distinguished, they cannot be separated in the later medieval and early modern period. Smith acknowledges criticisms of the confessionalization thesis but still considers it to be useful, especially when it is extended to the period before the Reformation and when developments at the territorial level are placed within the larger context of the Holy Roman Empire. He argues that the political structure of the Empire, with authority delegated from the Emperor at the top to the princes, the estates, and finally to local officials, made reformation in a broad sense possible, with those at the lower levels using their delegated authority to consolidate their own status and power. The result was constant tension between “delegators” and “delegatees” through every level of the hierarchy, as each side struggled to extend or maintain its power. In the final analysis, political and religious reforms were most effectively carried out at the local level by land-owning nobles, citizens of the territorial cities, village officials, and eventually the parish clergy.

Smith tells his story with side-by-side accounts of developments in the secular territories of the Hohenzollerns and in the Hochstift of Bamberg. In the later Middle Ages, efforts to eliminate ecclesiastical abuses and promote religious devotion went along with the consolidation of political power in the villages and cities of the Hohenzollern territories, and the margraves used their rights as parish patrons and protectors of monastic institutions to extend their own authority. Within the Hochstift, the bishops found that ecclesiastical reform was the most effective means of countering the opposition of the cathedral chapter and the citizens of Bamberg to their secular authority.

The early Reformation joined princely consolidation of authority over the church with intellectual criticism of institutional abuses and communal efforts to assert responsibility for religious practices within the parish. The Peasants' War ended this alliance of interests, and from the later 1520s the margraves assumed increasing responsibility for the church in their territories. Continued conflicts with the cathedral chapter weakened the authority of the bishops, but by the 1580s the impact of Trent was felt in the Hochstift. In both secular principality and prince-bishopric, the focus of reforms shifted from improving the clergy to shaping the beliefs and behavior of laity. Religious reforms imposed from above were helped or hindered by the lesser nobility who maintained the right to appoint parish clergy and, in the Hochstift, protected Lutheran churches on their lands. Smith links the Bamberg witch hunts of the 1610s and 1620s, among the worst within the Empire, with the weakening of older legal and judicial procedures that accompanied the centralization of state power and with the militant Tridentine Catholicism advocated especially by the senior diocesan administrator Friedrich Förner. Förner was also a key figure in attempts to impose the Edict of Restitution on Nuremberg and the Hohenzollern territories. The Swedish conquest of the Hochstift in 1632 ended the witch hunts and brought the Thirty Years' War to Franconia; it therefore serves as an appropriate ending point for the study.

Smith deftly interweaves primary and secondary sources, using anecdotes and accounts of conflict found in archival material to illustrate the broader developments drawn from more detailed studies of Franconian history by German historians. The book could profitably be read by graduate students and even advanced undergraduates as an in-depth study of the process of state-building within the Holy Roman Empire before and after the Reformation. Smith clearly explains relatively complicated but fundamental concepts, such as the importance of patronage rights and of the conflicts between bishop and chapter, finding a way between the Scylla of becoming bogged down with too much detail and the Charybdis of summarizing so quickly that the account confuses its readers. The maps and Hohenzollern family tree in the front are extremely helpful to readers unfamiliar with the region and its rulers; a list of the Bamberg bishops might also have been useful as a quick chronological reference.

This is not a book that will revise or challenge existing scholarship, but that is not its goal. Rather, it elegantly synthesizes existing scholarship, most of it in German, and convincingly demonstrates how closely intertwined religion and politics were in the early modern period. Smith's clear presentation of developments in Upper Franconia draws attention to an area that has tended to be neglected by Anglophone scholars in favor of the Imperial cities and the more powerful territorial states within the Empire. In his acknowledgements, Smith notes that he has been working on the subject for nearly twenty years, and the maturity of that reflection is apparent in the depth of the narrative. In a “publish or perish” climate, his book is proof of the value of letting individuals take the time they need to produce a significant work of scholarship.