The right of rulers to determine the religion of their subjects was little questioned in early modern Europe. Religion and politics were closely intertwined, and religious unity was commonly viewed as necessary for political stability. Early modern historians have as a consequence traditionally tended to focus on the demand for religious conformity, the persecution of dissidents, and the development of confessional states, with scant attention to the fact that multiple confessions coexisted relatively peacefully for long periods in a great many places. This volume joins other recent works which aim to repair this oversight. Its particular value lies in its geographic range, the diverse approaches taken in the essays, and the generally high quality of the contributions. Three chapters each on the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, France, Britain (and Ireland) and Central Europe follow the editor's introduction and a chapter on ‘Confessions’ by Lee Palmer Wandel. Several contributors take a top-down approach, focusing on legislation (Bernard Capp for Britain) or the influence of foreign practices on toleration debates (John Coffey for Britain). Most, however, look beyond laws and theories to ask how multiconfessionalism functioned in practice and how people experienced religious diversity in their lives. Guido Marnef, Peter Wallace and David Frick offer insightful case studies of multi-confessional cities (Antwerp, Colmar and Wilno, respectively); Richard Ninness examines the distinctive role of the Imperial Knights, many of whom served Catholic polities despite their own Lutheran faith. The most ambitious essays – and potentially the most useful for comparative purposes – tackle big questions of how coexistence operated at the level of both community and state. Keith Luria's overview for France is a model in this regard. Chapters by Jesse Spohnholz for the Netherlands, Raymond Gillespie for Ireland, Graeme Murdock for Transylvania and Howard Louthan for Central Europe also show how official policies of conformity or limited toleration were modified in practice by the pragmatic compromises necessary to maintain order. The contrasts are instructive. In multi-confessional Transylvania, for example, ‘detailed regulations about the rights that were being extended to religious communities were thought necessary precisely in order to prevent social disturbances’ (p. 415). By contrast, in Ireland, a confessional state in which the vast majority of the population did not subscribe to the state religion, lax enforcement of conformity laws proved the most useful tool for maintaining the peace. The difficulties of making bi- (or multi-) confessional arrangements work are fruitfully explored by Benjamin Kaplan for the Netherlands and Jérémie Foa and Penny Roberts for France. David Luebke offers a schema for classifying different modes of coexistence, although, as Wallace's essay on Colmar shows, fixed typologies cannot capture the complexity of changing religious landscapes. The essays have implications that extend beyond the religious sphere. Underscoring the pervasive tension between the belief in religious unity and the need to accommodate dissent, they support revisionist efforts to understand early modern state-building as, in the words of editor Thomas Max Safley, ‘a discursive process, involving rulers and subjects, capitals and provinces’ (p. 19).