This thoroughly insightful book brings a fresh approach to the question of what the Revolt of the Netherlands meant for Catholics in that land, especially for those in the southern provinces that ultimately remained loyal to Spain and Catholicism. Judith Pollmann looks for answers to that question especially in an impressive number of little-used diaries and memoirs written by a wide assortment of Catholics, from small traders to nuns to lawyers to nobles – enough to develop an unprecedentedly wide-ranging Catholic perspective on the Revolt. Her answers emerge in six chronologically-organised chapters, starting with the appearance of Lutheran-style reforms in the Low Countries and ending around 1635, when the border between northern and southern Netherlanders, and the Catholic identity of the south, were both firmly in place. This ending date means excluding from the story the fate of those many Catholics in north Brabant who became part of the new Dutch Republic, but as she points out that story has been told a lot more often than the story of why the south became so resolutely Catholic. Pollmann is interested in two contradictory themes there: the lack of response by Catholics to vigorous Calvinism in the 1560s and 1570s (even though Catholics outnumbered Calvinists), and then the huge Catholic revival after 1585, in the form of new churches, devotions, publications and more. The revival was what made the division of the Netherlands ‘irreversible’, argues Pollmann. By the time of the truce of 1609–21, it was far enough along to make northerners who visited the south realise how large the cultural gap – especially the religious gap – had grown during the long war, and how much Catholicism had come to define the southern provinces. Catholic fervour increased in the south not only because of the policies of the devout Philip ii, or even of their own Albert and Isabella, but because of the willing participation of the local Catholic laity and clergy. As Pollmann points out, believers had to feel a stake in the faith for it to have become so vital, for its rituals and devotions to have become so popular. The key, she argues further, and the difference between the passivity before 1585 and the vitality afterwards, was the improved dynamic between clergy and laypeople: once the clergy admitted that laypeople mattered in the revival, and once the laity felt that they belonged to a Church that respected and involved them, then they bought in. There are many virtues to this book, but I especially liked the flesh-and-blood quality of the events evoked through the use of so many journals, the anger of Catholics at all the Protestant hedge-preaching and rioting and the lack of Catholic response, the importance of exile for Catholics (and not just Protestants) in shaping their faith, and the palpable quality of the shock that northerners felt after 1609 when they realised that they were no longer one, and that people in the south actually preferred ‘idolatry’. This is a book well worth reading.