This is an erudite and lavishly-illustrated work which makes compelling claims for geographia sacra as a guide to (and a salve for) the uncertainties posed by both the Reformation and the discovery of the New World (p. 2). Shalev traces the phrase (in its literal meaning of a cartographical survey of the Holy Land) to the early modern period, but he uses it as an overarching term for all geographical studies of that time: ‘mentally conceived and materially produced within a religious framework’ (p. 8). The majority of the book is taken up with painstaking research into geographers and map-makers of the early modern period: Benito Montano (ch. ii), Bernardino Amico (ch. iii), Samuel Bochart (ch. iv) and Augustin Lubin (ch. v) – but Shalev is at his best when drawing conclusions from his formidable research: for example in the fascinating section about the Phoenicians as a ‘bridge’ between sacred and profane wisdom who enabled sacred geographers to negotiate the thorny issue of using pagan sources without impinging on the primacy of Scripture (pp. 180–203). Of particular interest to me was the section where Shalev (focusing on Bernardino Amico's Trattato de sacri edificii di Terra Santa (1609), an unprecedented architectural survey of the Holy Land) argues that a new emphasis on the ‘quantification and geometrization of space’ (p. 12) in the period was a mark of devout curiosity rather than secularisation (pp. 73–139). I have recently argued this point (purely from the perspective of English journeys to the Holy Land) and was delighted to read the weighty evidence that Shalev brings to bear against the consensus presumption of the secularisation of travel in the early modern period. Shalev resists the simplifications of traditional religious divides and he shows how the desire to measure and map more accurately that we find in the early modern period, might not indicate an emptying out of the sacred but be evidence for a state of mind in which ‘curiosity about the sacred also became a unique mark of devotion in itself’ (p. 103) and ‘quantification provided mnemonic signposts as well as structure and discipline to the imitator of Christ’ (p. 118; see also p. 209). Accurate maps, such as those found (famously) in the Geneva Bible, enable the reader to establish the literal sense of the text and as such have been accepted as a Protestant phenomenon. But Shalev adds nuance to this observation through studying the maps appended by Benito Montano to the Antwerp Polyglot and argues that maps can also function as devotional images and lead to reflection on the providential meaning of the landscape (pp. 23–71). Shalev's careful scholarship shows how – even in areas such as pilgrimage and biblical apparatus – the confessional divide between Catholic and Protestant is not always as distinct as we might have believed.