The postil, as John Frymire rightly points out, originated in the Middle Ages and not with Martin Luther. Typically, a postil was a cycle of sermons based on the biblical passages, known as pericopes, appointed for Sundays and feast days throughout the liturgical year. Frymire characterises the value of postils for pastoral ministry: they ‘were nothing less than the applied distillation of Christianity delivered on a regular basis by the clergy to the laity’ (p. 443). His book is nothing less than a thorough bibliographical study of postils in the first century of Reformation Germany. A substantial series of appendices and tables furnishes such vital bibliographical data as authorship, confessional allegiance, year of publication and the number of printed editions for individual publications by 1620. Ample demonstration upholds the book's emphatic argument. Scholarship has woefully underappreciated postils when one considers the numerically staggering printed output and the service to preaching. German Lutherans commanded no monopoly of the genre and its market. Catholics responded quickly, constantly, and en masse. Consequently, ‘the data certainly explodes the common scholarly notion, explicitly stated or suggested through silence, that the Catholic response to the German Reformation in the pulpits amounted to a non-response’ (p. 154). Frymire admirably supplies salient features of a complex bibliographical story. A few examples will suffice. Lutheran postillators wanted to supply simple pastors with model sermons and yet complained of pastors who merely read out the sermons without devising something on their own. German Calvinists managed temporarily to put aside their preference for preaching continuously through a biblical book and concentrated on pericopes to compete with their Lutheran rivals. In the early seventeenth century Catholic Germany saw a resurgence in the publication of Latin postils and developed a taste for medieval postils and postils produced by foreigners, particularly the English controversialist Thomas Stapleton (d. 1598). Stylistic purists will find irritating the many (and sometimes anachronistic) colloquialisms in Frymire's prose as well as the substitution of relative clauses for complete sentences. The major deficiency of the book, however, is Frymire's professed decision not to explore the themes of the sermons, a decision that he satisfyingly contravenes on a few occasions. By considerably reducing the excessive understory (to borrow William Slights's term) of footnotes, he could have provided space to answer questions that emerge from his narrative. When Lutherans produced postils de sanctis, how did they preach on the feast days of saints? What constituted a ‘counter-reformation sermon’ in the first half of the sixteenth century? What did it mean to preach on Tridentine doctrine in the second half of the century? Had Frymire investigated Peter Canisius' Notae evangelicae (1591–3) more carefully, he would have noticed that the voluminous work is not a standard postil. It does not contain sermons but meditations for clergy often expressed in the first person singular. Although or perhaps because Frymire has tantalised readers with the desire to know more, we may hope that his monograph will arouse the sustained scholarly attention that early modern postils deserve.