This book is an important contribution to the study of both religious history and the development of Protestant church architecture between the mid-sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. It is well illustrated with both colour and, in the text, black-and-white illustrations, though with relatively few plans of church interiors. Another slight weakness in the book is that Spicer interprets the term ‘Calvinist’ rather narrowly to include only the reformed Churches of France, Geneva, Hungary, the Netherlands and Scotland. He thus omits, even for comparative purposes, the buildings of the Reformed Churches in Switzerland and southern Germany, those of English Protestants before the 1620s, English separatists in the seventeenth century and Irish Presbyterians. Since part of Spicer's argument is that there were clear liturgical and pastoral principles involved in the design of Calvinist church buildings, it might have been helpful, if only in a short chapter, to examine whether there really were any significant differences between Calvinist churches and those of other basically ‘reformed’ traditions, as opposed to those of Lutherans or post-1620 Anglicans which clearly were significantly different. Nevertheless in what he does offer Spicer does an excellent job. Though his section on Geneva is a little thin compared with that on Hungary in the first chapter, his detailed chapters on Scotland, the Netherlands and France are exceptionally well-documented. They do not just look at questions of internal arrangement – indeed this topic is in most cases not the primary focus of the discussion – but rather at the whole process of creating buildings for Calvinist worship and the economics of church building. There were thus significant differences between countries like Scotland and the Netherlands, where the majority of the new Calvinist churches were those that had been taken over from the pre-Reformation Catholics, and France, where Catholic churches taken over by Huguenots eventually had to be returned to the Catholics and the Huguenots had to build new ones. This certainly led to the design of some of the most radically reordered Protestant churches in Europe, whereas in both Scotland and the Netherlands, as well as Geneva and Hungary, there was much greater tension between radical new designs and the continuation of more traditional types of church design even when this made them less easy to order for Calvinist worship. One particularly interesting section in the chapter on Scotland is Spicer's suggestion that attempts to impose High Church Anglican ideas on the established Church after the implementation of the Articles of Perth may have had more impact on Scottish church buildings than has previously been realised. This is a matter which clearly requires, despite the paucity of sources, further detailed investigation.