This lively collection of essays was edited by Anna French, general secretary of the European Reformation Research Group (ERRG) to mark the thirtieth anniversary of that network’s creation. During those thirty years, ERRG has played a crucial role in the academic landscape of Reformation studies. An offshoot of the prestigious Reformation Colloquium, ERRG has a history of providing a broader range of perspectives than its older sibling. These come from contributors – ERRG has a history of supporting ECRs and PhD students – as well as from ERRG’s focus on European experiences of Reformation. In his foreword to this volume, Andrew Pettegree recalled that ERRG was established both to counter the Anglocentric focus of many Reformation historians, and to develop a new approach that moved beyond confessional silos. Another important part of the ERRG legacy is the support that this network offers to researchers early on in their career. The ERRG conference, often held alongside the Reformation Colloquium, has offered many a nervous PhD student an opportunity to share their findings in a supportive atmosphere. This rich legacy is apparent in this volume which includes contributions from PhD students, ECRs and established academics. It is broad too in both its geographical focus (Scotland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, England) and its time frame: a chapter on the fifteenth-century pope, Pius iii (Susan May), is followed by one exploring the supernatural in Restoration England (Laura Sangha). Reading Reformations also demonstrates the diversity of approaches in current Reformation studies, bringing together essays on political thought (Steven M. Forster), material culture (Susan Orlik, Andrew Spicer), gender (Anna French, Heather Cowan) and hermeneutics (Alec Ryrie), to mention just some of the chapters. Altogether, this collection speaks to the strengths of ERRG as a forum for scholars to explore the broader social and cultural manifestations of religious change in the early modern period.

The collection is divided into four, complementary, parts. Anna French has chosen to arrange the chapters thematically, rather than chronologically, highlighting the value of historians communicating across the geographical and confessional boundaries. One recurring theme throughout this collection is the value of doing detailed, localised studies, whose significance can often only be understood as part of a broader analysis of pan-European religious change.

Part i, ‘Reading the Instructive’, explores the efforts of clerics (and sometimes governments) to instruct and reform their populations. Ruth Atherton’s nuanced discussion of religious instruction in sixteenth-century Germany shows how teachings about the sacraments differed in different cities, depending on local circumstances. Statements about infant baptism or the eucharist, for example, combined theological concerns with realpolitik. So, the Heidelburg Confession, published by Reformed Elector Frederick iii in 1563, was not a complete statement of either Lutheran or Calvinist ideas because it was intended to bridge the gap between the two. Through close reading of contemporary sources, Atherton shows that a similar attempt at co-operation was evident in the catechisms and religious teachings of Lutherans in the bi-confessional city of Augsburg. The ‘German Reformation’ emerges as a series of diverse conversations between different parties, lay and clerical: a process, not an event.

Anna French’s article on female spirituality and household manuals includes a stirring plea to include women front and centre in histories of the Reformations. She notes that ‘Christian piety … began at home’, arguing that household manuals, for or by women, allow us to recentre histories of religious experience to focus on female agents. Furthermore, she shows that through this lens we can see the influence of ideas – like the inheritance of sin – which might not be part of orthodox Protestant thought but were felt by women as they prepared for marriage and/or childbirth. Steven M. Forster also shows some of the different ways in which texts were interpreted in his discussion of Romans xiii – a text which was used at various points in the sixteenth century to incite rebellion or to demand obedience to the state. Forster demonstrates how Henry viii came to this text, namely through the lens of William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian man, and then used it to fashion his own vision of royal rule.

The second part, ‘Reading the Communal’, examines how different communities engaged with, and adapted to, religious change. All three chapters in this section rely on close reading of archival sources to produce a nuanced reading of the Reformation experience in different localities: all demonstrate the importance of that approach in adding light and shade to broader accounts of the Reformations. David Nicholls used records and decrees from Protestant assemblies established in Languedoc, Montélimar and Valence in 1562–3, during the first War of Religion in France. He shows that as well as financial and military concerns, the assemblies considered social reform and attempted to overhaul royal and judicial administrative systems. As Nicholls notes, while these assemblies were set up to wage war, this system gave Protestants the chance to ‘mould society to their design’. In her discussion of Perth’s kirk session in the sixteenth century, Helen Gair also shows the diverse influences – social as well as spiritual – behind the operation of kirk discipline. Using a range of different sources, she shows the influence of the local community on the process of discipline arguing that the kirk cooperated closely with the local parish to implement reform. Joe Chick shows a similarly complicated picture in his account of the English town of Reading in the sixteenth century, using wills to show that bequest practices changed much more quickly than religious attitudes. He argues that parishioners were particularly responsive to government edicts on saint worship and chantries in their bequests.

Part iii, ‘Reading the Material’, explores the significance of material culture in accessing the experience of religious change. Andrew Spicer argues for the importance of epigraphy for early modern studies, arguing that descriptive epigraphy can offer insights into the inscriptions that survive in parish churches and cathedrals across Europe. His discussion of inscriptions in a church in Hesdin, in the southern Netherlands, shows the ways in which these texts can enrich our historical analysis. Susan Orlik provides a rich and thoroughly engaging discussion of material culture in English parish churches, focusing particularly on the early seventeenth century to show that renovations were not always, or not only, a Laudian innovation. Analysing a range of surviving church furniture Orlik argues that ‘godly’ parishes also wanted to beautify their churches, and makes the point that parish records often do not distinguish between expenditure on routine maintenance and on forced replacement. Like so many chapters in this collection, Orlik demonstrates the importance of local factors in determining people’s experiences of the Reformations. Particularly enjoyable are the coloured images that accompany her chapter. Heather Cowan then encourages us to think about how the female body, particularly the maternal body, became a ‘site of suspicion’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She argues that Protestant attacks on clerical celibacy affected perceptions of women, particularly their ability or otherwise to conceive. Cowan’s chapter includes a particularly interesting discussion of ‘abortment’ in this period.

The final section, ‘Reading the Long Reformation’ exemplifies the diversity of ERRG, and the benefits of this for our understanding of religious practices and beliefs. Susan May offers an interesting insight into Pope Pius iii. Pius was the shortest-lived pope (with a papal reign of only ten days); he is also a great proposition for counterfactual history: had he lived longer, would the Reformation in Germany have followed a different path? Although dogged by criticisms of his political and familial connections, Pius iii was also interested in reform of clerical abuses. Laura Sangha provides a fascinating account of the late seventeenth-century Leeds antiquarian, Ralph Thoresby, asking how – in an age widely described by contemporaries as ‘atheistic’ – networks of men and women shared their stories of the supernatural. As Sangha points out, these beliefs were closely connected to conceptions of the divine, and so Thoresby and his friends were selective about how, and to whom, they distributed their findings. The penultimate chapter, by Alec Ryrie, is a witty and engaging discussion of a tension within Protestant Christianity (in all its colours), between ‘lovers’ – those who find inspiration within the Bible and ‘brawlers’ – who use biblical texts as a polemical weapon. Exploring how different people read, understand and use the Bible illuminates some of the different manifestations of Protestantism, from Luther’s cry of ‘sola scriptura’ in response to Catholic criticism, to the English Quakers who saw the Bible as channelling the Holy Spirit. Demonstrating contemporary manifestations of this tension, Ryrie argues that these twin approaches have been at the heart of Protestantism since the sixteenth century.

The volume closes with an afterword by Elizabeth Tingle outlining the challenges and opportunities facing ERRG as it enters its fourth decade. As any reader of this volume will be aware, ERRG has a history – and hopefully a future – of setting the research agenda for decades to come, with an inclusive, generous and expansive view of religious change and Reformation in the early modern world. Long may it continue.