Christoph Nebgen's work explores the experience of confessional difference recorded by travellers to the Rhine region between 1648 and 1815. The majority of authors of Rhine travel literature were Protestant and therefore at the centre of Nebgen's study is an exploration of the construction of a Catholic ‘other’ that reinforced the social and cultural values of a Protestant elite. The Rhine region provides an interesting case study not only because of its varying confessional allegiances, but also because of its significance as a borderland. Nebgen's research falls into three sections. The first considers the diversification of travel literature from the medieval period until the early nineteenth century, charting its move from didactic guide to subjective record of ‘authentic’ experience, as well as an historiographical overview of approaches to travel literature. The second section considers the common themes that travellers highlighted when describing the Catholic communities that they encountered. It was frequently the material and performative aspects of Catholic piety upon which travellers focused – the pilgrimages, shrines, relics and architecture. Authors regularly associated Catholics with uncleanliness, depravity, tyranny and economic poverty. Nebgen emphasises that these authors made connection between confession and economy before Weber famously did. But Catholic stereotypes were not straightforward. Some Protestant travellers found in their Catholic surroundings religious sustenance and education. Finally, Nebgen analyses these themes in regard to specific locations. He highlights contemporaries’ beliefs that Cologne and Mainz represented the two extremes of Catholicism. The former represented an anti-Utopia, while the latter offered the possibility of ecumenical rapprochement. Travel literature, Nebgen argues, was important for the construction of the Catholic ‘other’, but what is unclear is how much it was simply reflecting already established stereotypes. Criticisms of Catholics as unclean, superstitious and depraved can be traced back to early Reformation pamphlets. Without a clearer understanding of the audience for these texts it is difficult to trace their effect on Protestant group identity and the mechanisms behind this process of ‘othering’. A strength of Nebgen's study is his analysis of the changes within his sources. For instance, before the Glorious Revolution British travel literature on the Rhine was predominantly instructive, but afterwards this tone of religious toleration was replaced with one of triumphant Protestantism that satirised Catholic customs. From the later eighteenth century, English and German travel writing increasingly romanticised the Catholic culture of the Rhine. Crucifixes and piety columns no longer represented superstition, but captured a past practice that was being eroded due to secularisation. Secondly, travel literature in the later eighteenth century increasingly became an important medium through which Germans could familiarise themselves with an unfamiliar region like the Rhine, a requirement for national unification. This was even more important in the case of the Rhine once its banks became a border between Germany and France in 1795. This work places confession at the centre of individual experience in the early modern world. The contemporary resonances of a community depicted as ‘other’ because of its religion are not lost on Nebgen and it is on this note that he concludes his study.