This is a logically arranged and meticulously signposted presentation of the origins and details of Kierkegaard's association with Pietism. It identifies the key sources of Kierkegaard's conversancy with Pietism's seminal literature and highlights its themes as they recur throughout his writings. The first of its two parts (‘Kierkegaard and Pietism’) starts with an overview of Pietism's own origins before it directs attention to the Danish context. Aspects of Pietism influential in Kierkegaard's life and thought are then isolated: his father's early exposure to the Moravian Brethren in west Jutland, then later support of it in Copenhagen, and Kierkegaard's own early preoccupation with the imitatio Christi motif and his fascination for (indeed, according to the author, ‘veneration’ of) the Erbauungsliteratur. Pietist themes, both pre- and post-Reformation, are shown to be visible throughout his works and to surface clearly in the late publications and journals. Seminal figures such as Thomas à Kempis and Johannes Tauler are linked by stages to Socrates and Hamann, the latter Socrates's ‘true successor’ by virtue of his humour that, unlike Socrates' irony, embraced the whole of existence. Part ii (‘Holiness in the “present age”’) begins with Climacus' critique of monasticism in Postscript, Kierkegaard's deep doubts about the separatism that Romanticism and Pietism both inherited from it being noted. If monasticism cultivated a kind of holiness, it was immunised against the risks and demands of a true religious existence and, being conspicuous, its holiness was the less for receiving merit, something that Postscript's ‘suffering in hidden inwardness’ avoids. However, in order to reckon with a now hostile society that sees no merit in holiness, hidden inwardness is ‘overcome’ in a shift to the manifest suffering of one who serves God in confrontation with the ordinary world (A literary review). Taking issue with those commentators who see Kierkegaard's later portrayal of a truly religious existence as a world-denying dualism with martyrdom its iconic act, the author casts Kierkegaard's late return to the imitatio Christi motif in the light of Christ's embodiment of a life of receptivity to God's gifts in the here and now. Inhabiting a post-lapsarian world, actual holiness is beyond us, but accepting our ‘nullity’ before God offers the possibility of receiving God's grace. A conclusion suggests that we find ‘mystical’ virtues in Kierkegaard, and remarks on the ‘spirituality’ that Kierkegaard traced to Catholic sources. It notes his characterisation of his own work as a ‘corrective’ to a prevailing drift away from spirituality. There is little to criticise in this richly informative book whose dissertational origins are evident but not obtrusive. It will be welcomed by Kierkegaard scholars and those yet to be introduced to Pietism and its history. Few typos were noted, among them a ‘wrecked’ that should perhaps be ‘wracked’. To complain about the unabashed use of ‘impact’ as a verb would be merely to betray one's age.