In this handsome volume Johannes Wallmann, the great Pietist scholar and editor of Spener, offers a second selection of his papers, twenty in all, all but one previously published, though often in Festschriften and other celebratory publications where they are not too easy to trace, and one previously published only in English. All these essays bear the Wallmann trademark of meticulous handling of texts, of systematic dismantling of his sources, and show less than his old polemic against views of Pietism from other than German and Lutheran angles. In short this collection could not be more welcome, and in one sense the most welcome of all is the previously unpublished piece on ‘Preussentum und Pietismus’. This essay is of course an attempt to keep alive the memory of the work of the late Carl Hinrichs. No man ever did more to make the point that there were other things in the Pietist movements than religious renewal or withdrawal, and he showed to a demonstration that though the range of Francke's interests was much wider than those of the kings of Prussia there was an absolutely vital area where they coincided; and no man was ever more unfortunate in the timing of his scholarly output. His life of Friedrich Wilhelm I was published at Hamburg in 1943, and stocks were destroyed in the blitz; it was reprinted by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in 1968, but I got what I believe was the very last copy of that at Tübingen twenty-five years ago. A collection of his unpublished material was produced by his widow in 1971 as Preussentum und Pietismus, and this happily had some resonance among political historians in America. Wallmann's little memorial here usefully stresses the way alliance with the Prussian monarchy caused a softening in Pietist attitudes to war between Spener and Francke. Where so much is so good it is invidious to pick favourites, but the two essays which gave me most pleasure were two I had not seen before, one on Arndt and the transition to Paracelsianism in the fourth book of the True Christianity, and a second resuming the discussion on the fear of comets and Spener's distance from Arndt's Paracelsianism. The first argues that what Arndt offered was a mysticism of healing rather than of salvation; the second shows how far the cagey Spener was ahead of many Pietists who came long after him.