Between Lipany and White Mountain is a collection that seeks to expose Anglophone scholars to nearly sixty years of Czech historians' efforts to interpret their nation's early modern history. Its essays cover a period from the 1430s to the 1630s, and they comprise a startling variety of methodological approaches to the Czech lands' past. The individual chapters track the prosecution of sex crimes in urban courts, court patronage under the Habsburgs, patterns of artistic and architectural expenditure among the nobility, issues of women's property management and ownership, and the development of the nobility's libraries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The authors practice political, legal, gender, demographic, intellectual, and cultural history. This diversity represents a great strength of the collection, as it exposes the book's audience to the full range of Czech historical scholarship in terms of both subject and approach. Simultaneously, however, it represents a potential weakness, as the breadth of the topics necessarily limits the depth in which any one can be covered and demands that the reader shift her frame of reference both temporally and methodologically throughout the course of the collection. Overall, though, the benefits of this approach outweigh any limitations, as this book admirably exposes the work of more than a dozen leading Czech scholars to readers who might otherwise not become acquainted with their research or gain access to the intellectual and historical milieu that reared them.

On an organizational level, this book includes a dozen essays. The collection's contents reflect its title, as Palmitessa bookends this volume with essays that discuss the social and religious ramifications of two disastrous battles: one that ended the militant phase of the Hussite Revolution and another that effectively led to the re-Catholicization of the Czech lands during the Thirty Years' War. Between these two conventional points for structuring early modern Czech history, though, the essays in this book expand the historical narrative for this period (which is most often dominated by considerations of religious radicalism and war) by tackling subjects that were long marginalized in Czech historiography—most notably by addressing specifically Catholic religious topics and considering the impact of the Habsburg dynasty's rule as including more than the suppression of Czech national aspirations. As Palmitessa explains, these topics, long forbidden to Czech scholars, have increasingly come under the microscope in recent decades. Highlighting them in this collection, therefore, brings fundamental shifts in Czech historical scholarship to light, even as the specific essays address these seismic shifts via focused examinations of religious brotherhoods or architectural patronage.

Palmitessa is also deliberate in choosing scholars whose work represents multiple generations, as well as methodological approaches, for this book. As such, the collective footnotes in the essays and the carefully curated bibliography at the end of the book can serve as a detailed introduction to more than a century of historiographical evolution. Though the essays and translations are quite strong in general, several stand out as particularly important. The work of František Kavka and Anna Skýbová, for instance, on mid-sixteenth-century Czech religion, does well to contextualize the pressures that shaped it within the political conflicts of the wider European reformations, while Josef Válka's chapter on religious toleration and coexistence also signals the importance of Czech developments within a wider European sphere. These are the essays that most explicitly go beyond the borders of Czech history and historiography to demonstrate their wider relevance for early modern Europe, and they will therefore make a deeper impression on readers interested in the Czech lands' relation to other Central European lands. Václav Bůžek's essay on Habsburg patronage also speaks to recent investigations of how early modern monarchs created and sustained the loyalty of nobles, and Tomáš Knoz's use of libraries as a lens for viewing the development of intellectual and political networks demonstrates how fruitful the synthesis of cultural and intellectual approaches can be in assessing the formation of those nobles' worldviews.

Beyond these essays' specific contributions, though, the greatest strength of this collection lies in its framing. In both Palmitessa's extensive introductory essay and the short introductions to each chapter, the reader is introduced to the ways in which the vicissitudes of twentieth-century Czech history have influenced scholarship on the nation's history from five centuries earlier. The biographical sketches for each author, for instance, suggest how the isolation of Czech scholars under Communism limited the range of their work and shaped the questions they could ask of their sources. The reality of these limitations thus highlights the creativity and courage of scholars who tested those boundaries prior to 1989 and illuminates the sea change in Czech academic culture after that decisive year, as a generation of scholars was allowed to explore issues that had previously been denied to them. So, while it is true that this book incorporates more paratextual elements than most essay collections, these materials prove to be utterly essential, as they constitute a historiographical commentary that augments and expands the impact of the chapters themselves.

In sum, this book represents a consistent effort both to introduce Anglophone scholars to the leading practitioners of early modern Czech history and to demonstrate how those practitioners have sought to expand or burst through the boundaries of their historiographical tradition over time. In presenting the most expansive view of that tradition possible, Palmitessa includes some essays that are potentially too narrative or narrow to offer readers substantive purchase on their topics; it is also possible that the preponderance of Czech sources in the essays' footnotes will limit their utility to nonspecialists who are seeking an introduction to broader discussions of the Czech lands' political, cultural, legal, social, and religious history. Such concerns, though, are endemic to essay collections and should not detract from this book's signal accomplishment: it has opened up a window onto topics and approaches that have previously been inaccessible to many scholars while providing the historical and human contexts that have determined the historical landscape thus revealed.