In this excellent German Habilitationsschrift, Kenneth G. Appold examines a hitherto almost entirely neglected group of sources, the theological disputations held at the University of Wittenberg in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Disputations, which were held regularly, in some years even weekly, had to be printed and more than 3,000 of them have survived from the time of Jakob Andreae's university ordinance in 1580 to the emergence of Pietism in the early eighteenth century. The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses upon general questions like the institutional framework of the disputations, their role within the cursus studiorum, their meaning for academic and pastoral training and the relationship between spoken word and printed disputation theses. The second part addresses the topics of the disputations and their development over time, the principles of discourse and the normative role of Scripture and confessional texts. In the third part, effectively more than half the book, Appold focuses upon a specific group of disputations, those on ecclesiology, mostly based on Article 7 of the Confessio Augustana. He traces theological developments in theses presented by theologians as diverse as Martin Chemnitz and Jakob Heerbrand, Polycarp Leyser and Aegidius Hunnius, Georg Mylius, Johann Georg Volckmar and Leonhard Hutter at the end of the sixteenth century and especially Balthasar Meisner and Jakob Martini in the seventeenth century. In his thorough analysis, the author highlights the role of university disputations as a means of establishing common consent among professors and students, of building up a collective identity among Lutheran pastors and stabilising a confessional system of orthodox theology. But, as the author emphasises, even though princely authorities tried to influence theological studies via censorship, regulating the disputations themselves and issuing general study ordinances, disputations did not simply function as instruments of confessionalisation, but opened up opportunities for a surprising variety and breadth of topics. This important study provides detailed information about an under-researched group of sources for the history of the early modern university in general and the development of Lutheran theology in particular, especially in the field of ecclesiology. Appold's results reveal a system of independent scholarly debate carried out in an atmosphere of academic freedom, thus contributing to the refinement of the rather too simple picture of orthodox theology as one-dimensional and rigid. His judgements are careful and subtle, though sometimes perhaps too benevolent in his evaluation of the tolerance of deviant opinions and other confessional positions. But this does not reduce the value of his book.