The shift in the interests of historians from a focus on what was believed to how beliefs were practised – from orthodoxy to orthopraxy – has brought with it not only a move away from considering rival confessions of belief in post-Reformation Europe in terms of homogenous and sharply differentiated blocks of believers, but also a new understanding of the degree to which the period saw continuity as well as change in religious praxis. This latter theme was of course one which very much preoccupied polemicists at the time, such as Flacius Illyricus for the Protestants and Cesare Baronio for the Roman Catholics, who both claimed to identify discontinuities between contemporary and early Christian practice in order to impugn the legitimacy of their opponent's Church. However, in our own time the influence of anthropology and, more recently, interest in visual and material culture has helped historians to get beyond such confessionalised narratives and appreciate just how good rituals were to think with. In the case of the book under review, the subject is that ultimate ritual of differentiation (Unterscheidungsritus) between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism: the cult of the Virgin Mary and the place – or rather places – under detailed examination are the cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg and Cologne, which each form the focus of a chapter in this very well-planned book. In Nuremberg (ch. ii), which was the first imperial free city to adopt Lutheranism (in 1525), the theme of continuity can be illustrated by the striking fact that as late as the mid-nineteenth century there were still some forty late medieval sculpted house signs depicting the Virgin Mary (Hausmadonnen) visible on the streets of the old town. Moreover, the Lorenzkirche – site of Andreas Osiander's Lutheran sermons (1522–48) – preserved almost all its late medieval furnishings, including the stunning limewood sculpture of the Angelic Salutation set within a rosary by Veit Stoss (1517–18) which continued to hang in the centre of the choir (p. 74 and fig. 16). Elsewhere in areas where Lutheranism held sway and was not under immediate threat from neighbouring Catholic territories, Lutherans were quite happy not only to assimilate old Marian images but also to commission new ones. In addition, most Lutheran churches retained at least three out of the seven traditional feast days: Annunciation, Visitation and the Purification (p. 84). However, this is not to say that the actual cult of the Virgin was simply practised as before since Heal makes a strong case for the argument that it was only ‘the transformation of meaning [that] sanctioned the survival of pre-Reformation liturgy and imagery’ (p. 89). Statues to the Virgin were now stripped of their ceremonial clothes and jewellery on feast days and no longer were candles allowed to be burned before them. For the statues now represented exemplary faith as opposed to intercessory power (p. 102). In this way the Virgin Mary was transformed into a humble Hausmutter. In bi-confessional Augsburg (ch. iii), which was heavily influenced by Zwinglianism, the Virgin Mary more or less disappeared from the visual culture of the city's Protestant churches and ‘the private ownership of images of the Virgin appears to have been largely confined to Catholics’ (p. 122). Moreover, the only Marian feast to survive the council's purging of the ritual calendar was that of the Annunciation (which was recast as a festival of Christ) and the ever-present threat of re-Catholicisation ensured that attitudes towards the cult of the Virgin Mary remained highly polarised. ‘In this religiously divided city Mary was so closely identified with the Catholic cause [ably orchestrated by the Jesuit, Peter Canisius and bankrolled by such families as the Fugger who enjoyed close, mutually advantageous links with the Wittelsbach dynasty in nearby Munich] that there was no space left for Nuremberg's type of revalued Lutheran Virgin’ (p. 147). Heal's final case study, Cologne, is the most complex. It demands (and gets) from the author the most nuanced and careful treatment. Here, owing to the pre-existing role of the city as a ‘sacred capital’, where the cult of the Virgin enjoyed long-standing civic and episcopal support, Counter-Reformation innovations such as baroque visual propaganda, new pilgrimage cults and Jesuit Marian sodalities ‘were merely part of a larger landscape of Marian devotion’, which embraced not only the emblematic cult of the Assumption of the Virgin (Maria Himmelfahrt) but also that of the Immaculate Conception vigorously championed by the Franciscans (p. 261). Of the 123 confraternities active in seventeenth-century Cologne, only nine were Jesuit-run Marian sodalities (and three of them were aimed at children). Heal draws the important conclusion from these three case studies that we not only need to be aware of the heterogeneity of Marian practice in early modern Catholicism but also must not overestimate ‘the unifying power of the post-Tridentine Church’ (p. 208). The final chapter of this important and carefully argued study is devoted to Marian devotion and gender. Amongst its several sensible observations is that to regard ‘Mary as an instrument of misogynist repression is only, however, a very small part of the story’ (p. 302). Again and again Heal insists that attention be paid to place and circumstance: ‘the specific matrices of politics, religion and society with which Marian piety developed’ (p. 303). The text is accompanied by well-chosen, mostly unfamiliar images and concludes with an excellent index with plenty of thematic entries which makes this important study highly user friendly.