This lengthy book is a very detailed study of Prussian church government at a crucial stage of late eighteenth-century Protestant German ecclesiastical reform. Manten focuses in particular on Frederick William ii's notion of his sovereign rights as Protestant summus episcopus during a brief reign (1786–97) notable for the different versions of ‘Enlightenment’ presented both in Wöllner's Edict of Religion of 9 August 1788, and in the Prussian law code of 1794. This said, Manten could have benefited from some sound editorial advice before rushing his 2006 Trier University legal history thesis into print. His long part i on Brandenburg-Prussian church government between the Reformation and the 1850 constitution (337 pp.) needed a pruning of the large number of chapter subdivisions, and have could have been written in summary form. There are too many, often repetitive, footnotes: part i, ch. ii has 1,131. Many over-long footnotes, some an entire page or more, should have been incorporated into the text: for example, the fascinating discussion by Wöllner's contemporaries on the gestation of the religious edict (pp. 342–50) which opens part ii. Manten's revision of negative judgements by jurists and historians so far on both the king and Wöllner needs much fuller treatment. This is compounded by a failure to divide primary and secondary sources, legal and historical, and to provide a commentary thereon: for example, the ongoing debate amongst canon lawyers between the times of Justus Henning Boehmer who fashioned modern Protestant German canon law, and Aemilius Ludwig Richter who went further in trying to give this a modern constitutional and consistorial shape. This reviewer attempted such a brief overview for this Journal a while ago now (xli [1990], 606–21). A useful index of subjects is provided, but a names index is lacking. There is a curiously old-fashioned feel to this book: as if Manten has been solely guided by the environment of his particular law faculty. There are curious omissions, like the important standard constitutional histories and document collections on Church and State in Germany by the historians, both well-versed in law and theology, Ernst Rudolf Huber and his son Wolfgang Huber, or Carl Hinrichs's posthumous seminal essay collection, Preussentum und Pietismus (1971), though Manten cites Hinrichs's unfinished biography (vol. i, 1941) of Frederick William i. Neither Brandenburg-Prussia within the broader picture of enlightened ecclesiastical reform in Europe, nor the great contribution thereon made by Anglo-American scholarship since 1945 receives any mention. The strength of this book lies, however, in the detail given by the legal sources: in the emphasis on the composite nature of the modern Prussian state, on caprice, on the hold of customary arrangements on change which no amount of royal edicts seemed to alter, and the resultant resort to royal ad hoc episcopacy. Frederick William ii did what he could under these conditions. The famous saying coined in 1745, ‘Ein jeder Fürst ist Pabst, Kayser und Teutschmeister in seinem Lande’ was more of a pious wish ventilated by contemporary jurists than reality in this particular state.