This book attempts an original explanation of the appeal of Caspar Schwenckfeld's theology to women in south German cities in the sixteenth century. Previous studies have explained it with reference to his personality or his shift in the locus of religious life from church to home, ignoring the gender implications of his theology. By contrast, Gouldbourne argues that the ideas of the socio-politically conservative but radically spiritualist Schwenckfeld, an unsystematic ‘theological pragmatist’ (p. 191) rather than a trained theologian, appealed to women because ‘By destabilizing the notions of gender and the links between gender and bodily meaning, Schwenckfeld created the possibility for new types of relationships, communal activities and roles’ (p. 222). Although the first chapter contains a valuable overview of scholarship on the social profile of Schwenckfeld's sixteenth-century followers, Gouldbourne's case rests primarily on her own elaborate reading of Schwenckfeld's thought in his considerable corpus of theological works and correspondence, which she develops in the book's remaining chapters. Schwenckfeld's theology, she argues, ‘contained within it a profound destabilization of the gender constructions of his day’, even though ‘He did not make this explicit, nor did those who adopted his teaching cite this as a reason for their commitment’ (p. 248). The book's argument falters, however, on grounds besides the lack of overt evidence from Schwenckfeld's female followers. That 53 per cent of Schwenckfeld's 630 collected letters were sent to women sounds impressive at first, less so when it becomes clear that 66 per cent of these 334 letters went to one of three women (p. 12). This suggests an intense relationship with a few women rather than that his theology was strongly attractive to women as such. Throughout the book Gouldbourne equivocates between Schwenckfeld's ostensible appeal to ‘so many women’ (for example pp. 33, 136, 158, 169) and to ‘some women’ (pp. 223, 224, 227). Many of the women presumably exposed to his ideas in South German cities such as Augsburg, Strasbourg, Ulm and Isny apparently rejected them; demographically speaking, only a miniscule fraction of sixteenth-century women became Schwenckfelders. Gouldbourne puts it most accurately when she says of Schwenckfeld's female followers that ‘these women at least found something of lasting worth in the teaching which was offered to them by this teaching’ (p. 13, my emphasis). The same point applies no less to self-consciously Catholic, Protestant and Anabaptist women, from Anna Bijns and Argula von Grumbach, to Teresa of Avila and the Discalced Carmelites, to the members of the Swiss Brethren and Hutterites, all of whom were exercising no less the female agency that Gouldbourne is keen to locate and laud among the handful of female Schwenckfelders. Gouldbourne shows not that there was something intrinsically agreeable to women in Schwenckfeld's theology, but simply that he proved appealing to the small number of women to whom he appealed. Besides the flaw in its central argument, this book is marred by literally hundreds of mistakes in punctuation and typographical errors, far more than is tolerable in any scholarly work.