It was, famously, a riot in Perth that ignited the Scottish Reformation. Mary Verschuur's new book provides a context for that event in a confident account of parish and political life before and after the beginnings of reformation. Politics or religion? is a valuable addition to the literature on mid sixteenth-century urban religious change. The book is based on the author's doctoral research (Glasgow 1985), subsequently revised in the light of recent work on the reformation of urban communities. Its archive-based narrative presents a lucid and often vivid description of life in early modern Perth, a key borough in the development of Protestant religious change in Scotland. Verschuur focuses in particular on the political influence of the Ruthven family and their clients, arguing that the process of reformation was driven less by new patterns of religious affiliation than older patterns of social and economic obligation. There are moments when this book's argument could have been usefully developed, but Politics or religion? should take its place alongside the series of texts recently published on urban reformation in Scotland.