At first glance the title of Joel Van Amberg's book appears deceptively simple. But this is much more than a focused rehashing of the theological debates over the eucharist which rent the early reforming movement. Rather, Van Amberg offers us a social history of the eucharistic conflicts which has significant implications for how we understand the communal Reformation and the beginnings of Reformation sectarianism. The choice of this topic as a window into the social dynamics of the early Reformation is hardly fortuitous. Drawing upon the work of John Bossy and others, Van Amberg describes the eucharistic host as ‘an organizing, multivalent symbol on which laity and clergy alike inscribed overlapping meanings from different realms of experience – religious social, and political’ (pp. 2–3). In Augsburg, where the city council maintained a distance from questions of religious reform throughout the 1520s, lay attitudes to the eucharist come more clearly into focus than they do elsewhere. The bulk of the book concentrates on activities at the Augsburg Franciscan church, a de facto parish church for the poorer citizens of the Vorstadt and at the same time a quasi-official counterpart to the cathedral as the city church representing the autonomous commune. There, under the tutelage of the radical Franciscan preacher Hans Schilling, eucharistic theology and symbolism became the language through which not only religious, but also political and economic concerns were voiced. Momentous change came in the fall of 1524 with the forced departure of Schilling and the beginnings of a lay sacramentarian movement with sectarian leanings. Schilling's replacement, Michael Keller, continued his predecessor's populist approach to reform, but tempered the socially radical component of his message. In Keller's hands, denial of Christ's physical presence in the eucharist continued to undermine the privileged status of the clergy and to stress the communal aspects of the sacrament, but no longer challenged economic and political elites. As a result, in the eyes of some the community remained a mixed congregation of the regenerate and unregenerate, which insufficiently addressed the issue of the moral improvement of its members. For this group sacramentarian teaching on the eucharist no longer sufficed as a symbol of dissent, and by 1527 they moved to believer's baptism as a means to articulate their religious and social vision. All of this played out against a background of increasing social, economic and political polarisation in the city. On the basis of the Augsburg experience, Van Amberg revisits models of the communal Reformation developed by Bernd Moeller and Peter Blickle. He accepts Moeller's thesis of an affinity between Reformed theology and notions of community in the south German cities, but posits a new, dynamic definition of the commune. This is a daring and imaginative book; its impact should be felt for some time.