This edited volume originates from two workshops hosted by the University of Durham in the United Kingdom and by the University of Bergen in Norway. The volume is based on a conviction that “there are a number of noteworthy parallels (and also key differences) between the experience of the reformations in Denmark-Norway and Britain and Ireland” and that no comparative studies in English exist (7). The volume intends to fill this gap.

The editors also claim that there is a shortage of serious works in English about the Scandinavian reformations apart from a couple of “entry point” works (7), such as the recently published second volume of The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, edited by E. I Kouri and J. E. Olesen (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and my edited volume The Scandinavian Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1995). I am afraid that this is not the case. Apart from a number of articles in international journals, we have the works of Oskar Garstein (Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia, 1533-1622, [Brill, 1992]; and Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia, 1622-1656, [Brill, 1992]) and Paul Lockhart (Denmark, 1513-1660: The Rise and the Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy [Oxford University Press, 2007])—both cited by contributors to this volume—as well as Jason Lavery (Reforming Finland [Brill, 2018], the edited work of S. Katajala-Peltomaa and R. M. Toivo (Lived Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern Europe [Brill, 2016]), and Eva Österberg (“State Reformation and the People: The Swedish Model in Perspective,” in Gemeinde, Reformation und Widerstand: Festschrift für Peter Blickle, eds. H. R. Schmidt et al. [Biblioteca Academica, 1998]). To that can be added a number of more specialized but highly relevant works, such as Martin Kjellgren's Taming the Prophets. Astrology and the Word of God in early Modern Sweden (Sekel Bokförlag, 2011) and articles in my co-edited volumes with Andrew Cunningham, Medicine, Natural Philosophy and Religion in Post-Reformation Scandinavia (Routledge, 2017) and Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe 1500-1700 (Routledge, 1997), just to mention a few.

As far as Northern European reformations go, this volume has nothing to say about Finland and very little about Sweden, and then only in a brief comparative sense. Denmark fares somewhat better, but the volume is focused on Norway, Iceland, the Orkney Islands, Shetland, and the Celtic nations all arranged in a comparative context. In reformation terms, these places can only be described as remote and insignificant, but for fairly obvious reasons they offer good examples of transnational influences. The book's fifteen chapters are divided into five sections, which chronologically cover the period 1520 to 1750, dealing with both the Catholic and Protestant reformations. This wide topical, geographical, and chronological span has not made the editors’ task any easier, complicated as it is by a constant search for comparative angles. Bearing in mind that the editors emphasize that the volume is centered around six themes—some less than distinctive, I am afraid—the fact that the book is divided into only five sections seems odd.

That the introduction begins with a section on “lost connections,” pointing to the medieval English influences on Norwegian Catholicism, is telling. The editors clearly want to argue that the religious and cultural exchange and influence between the Anglo-Saxon world and the Nordic countries remained important throughout the reformation period. In that respect, the most convincing contribution is that of Morten Fink-Jensen, “Reformation across the North Sea,” pointing to the many Scottish-Danish connections in particular. This was, however, mainly one-way traffic, involving Scots settling in Denmark, having already become Protestants in Germany and, in the most important case, trained in Wittenberg by Luther and Melanchthon. The case remains, however, that the north-south connections between Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain were the dominant influences that shaped the reformations in Northern Europe well into the seventeenth century. The significance of Britain for religious development in Scandinavia became important again from the late seventeenth century onwards, as is in evidence in Gina Dahl's contribution to this volume. The editors claim that they are not “doing comparative history for the sake of it” (3), but in many of the chapters in this volume the comparative angle strikes me as unconvincing and contrived. Thus, the comparison with Ireland at the end of Jack Cunningham's otherwise excellent chapter on Iceland seems out of place, despite claiming that the situation of Iceland and Ireland appeared to be “ostensibly similar” (68). Some of the parallels drawn by some of the authors in this volume are occasionally problematic, if not wrong. In his chapter “Another Age Will Damage and Destroy,” Henrik von Achen claims that the radicalization in Denmark-Norway was religiously driven while in England under Elizabeth it was intertwined with major political issues. I am not convinced about the use of the word “radicalisation” in this context. “Uniformity” is the generally preferred term, and in both countries, this drive towards uniformity was both politically and religiously determined.

The rationale for a comparison of the counter-reformation in Wales with that of Norway in James January-McCann's chapter “Exiles and Activists” seems odd, especially since the author appears to acknowledge a host of major differences himself (162). That thirty-five Norwegians attended the Jesuit colleges in Germany between 1533 and 1622 might have had more to do with the low cost and high quality of the education available there rather than religious conviction at a time when the Lutheran government of Denmark-Norway had yet to ban its citizens from attending such institutions. Where Wales received plenty of missionaries from the Jesuit seminars on the continent, hardly any Norwegian—or for that matter Danish—Counter-Reformation missionaries can be found, apart from Laurentius Norvegus. Perhaps it is the significance of the total lack of Danish-Norwegian students at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, established for German and Scandinavian students, that explains why hardly any Counter-Reformation initiatives were directed at Norway. Rather than filling a gap, this volume underlines the dangers and difficulties in writing comparative history.