As ‘the most Protestant town in France’, the small city of Nîmes played a role of extraordinary prominence in the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion, but has until now never been the subject of a full-length published study. Although several theses have concentrated on this city, only Allan Tulchin's has been transformed into a book; as the subtitle indicates, his study focuses on the rise of Protestantism in Nîmes from the 1550s, and its consolidation through the 1560s when Protestants and Catholics vied for political and religious control of the city, which resulted in the famous Michelade of 1567 when Protestants murdered prominent rival Catholics. In favouring this chronology, Tulchin devotes greatest attention to the late 1550s and early 1560s, when Protestantism underwent its most pronounced growth in Nîmes, as elsewhere in France. Thus, his analysis provides a case study of the process of expansion of the movement, in which Tulchin seeks to emphasise the how rather than the why of such increases in conversion. Of course, it is difficult to separate the two, and still provide a coherent explanation of either, but Tulchin's explanation that Protestantism succeeded in attracting support because its leaders exploited arguments that resonated with the urban elites offers an argument for both. However, while it is generally plausible to suggest that the co-option of social elites through the presentation of arguments with which they could sympathise was essential to the emergence of the Protestant Church's dominance in Nîmes, Tulchin's argument is less convincing in its detail. Most problematically, he proposes that the cahier de doléances that the new Protestants composed in the hope of presenting it to the provincial Estates and the Estate General in 1561 was a compendium of religious reforms and political and economic proposals to reform the royal finances and judicial order, and acted as an organising tool locally for the Protestant community. In evidence, he suggests that it was similar to a memorandum drafted by local Protestants to assist other local communities to develop similar provisions for suggested reforms, and therefore a common expression of objectives. However, without a detailed analysis of the stated similarities (p. 102) between the cahier and memorandum, it is difficult to prove this claim, nor does Tulchin provide sufficient additional evidence to do so. Overall, he aims to utilise the cahier to demonstrate the multiple causes of conversion to Protestantism, which is a laudable if not quite realised ambition, but it is based on a misrepresentation of current scholarship and a misplaced effort to rectify it: Tulchin contends that historians who have ‘stressed the religious origins of the Wars of Religion’ have developed a trend that is ‘naive in its simplicity,’ but this is itself a simplistic evaluation of their work (p. 182). In any case, given the stated argumentative ambition of his book, it may best be seen as an enhancement rather than a correction of the dominant interpretation of the causes of religious change in this period.