These three attractive paperbacks, covering very roughly present-day Estonia and Latvia, are produced under the auspices of the society that publishes the Corpus Catholicorum, currently chaired by Professor Peter Walter of the University of Freiburg. They follow on from the seven excellent volumes (xlix–liii, lvi–lvii, 1992–7), which map the regions of the empire in the lengthy period of Protestant consolidation after the Reformation. The seventh, volume lvii, assessing the previous series, and ‘confessionalisation’ – the term for Protestant consolidation used by early modern German church historians – with a comprehensive index, was reviewed this Journal l (1999), 585. For comparison's sake Diarmaid MacCulloch's volume (lviii), Die zweite Phase der englischen Reformation (1547–1603) und die Geburt der anglikanischen Via Media (1998), and that of Matthias Asche and Anton Schindling (lxii), Dänemark, Norwegen und Schweden im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung: nordische Königreiche und Konfession 1500 bis 1600 (2002) should be mentioned.

The books under review bring together the interdisciplinary work of Estonian, German, Latvian and Swedish historians, art historians and linguists gathered at meetings held on this subject at the universities of Tallinn (2006), Riga (2008) and Greifswald (2004, 2005, 2007) under the overall chairmanship of Anton Schindling of Tübingen University, and financed by the German Research Council. Two systematic overviews, the first rural, the second urban, by Stockholm emeritus professors in volumes lxix, Aleksander Loit's ‘Reformation und Konfessionalisierung in den ländlichen Gebieten der baltischen Lande von ca.1500 bis zum Ende der schwedischen Herrschaft’ (pp. 49–215), and lxxi, Enn Tarvel's ‘Kirche und Bürgerschaft in den baltischen Städten’ (pp. 17–99), with bibliographies, show once again the significance of The Swedish imperial experience (1560–1718), the title of Michael Roberts's Cambridge Wiles Lectures (1979) in laying the foundations for native literacy and literature through fostering Lutheran primary schooling, church and home catechism (Husförhör), and the provision of town libraries. Recent interpretations reinforcing his argument are Ingun Montgomery, Enhetskyrkans tid (1595–1705) (Stockholm 2002), and Mika Sivonen, ‘Sprache und Religion als Instrumente des Grenzgangs in Ingermanland im 17. Jahrhundert’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte xxiii (2010/11), 158–79, a journal issue devoted entirely to the history of Finland's eastern border, from Arctic Karelia to Ingria.

In volume lxix, after a useful short introductory note by Raimo Raag on the nine spoken languages – Livish, Lettish, Estonian, German, Swedish, Wotish, Ingrish, Finnish and Russian (the language of Russian Orthodox communities along the Finnish and Estonian eastern borders) – in this long period (‘Sprachen der Bevölkerung in den baltischen Landen’, pp. 15–18), two essays, one also by Raag (‘Die Literatur der Esten im Zeichen von Reformation und Konfessionaliserung’, pp. 217–46), and the other by Peteris Vanags (‘Die Literatur der Letten’, pp. 263–86), are superb in prompting a reader's curiosity to know more about the relatively successful provision of primary schooling and book printing and publishing in Estonian (northern and southern dialect variants) and Lettish in Riga, Reval (Tallinn) and Dorpat (Tartu) during the reign of Charles xi (1672–97), notably the New Testament in Lettish and Estonian, and many prayer books such Arndt's True Christianity (1679) at Riga under the Spenerian Johann Fischer, Livonia's general superintendent (1674–99). Volume lxix is furnished too with six good maps (the first language; the rest church and state organisation) and title page facsimiles of early printed books such as Riga's church order of 1530 (p. 287) and the south Estonian 1686 New Testament (p. 259). In volume lxxi, Martin Klöker shows another aspect of the way in which Swedish rule, especially after the peace-making of Oliva and Kardis (1660, 1661) consolidated Reformation life and letters in his suggestive ‘Geistliche und humanistische Literatur in deutscher und lateinischer Sprache im Zeichen der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung’ (pp. 163–83 with facscimiles at pp. 164–83).

The middle volume (lxx) brings the reader face to face with the difficulty that we have today in envisaging the Protestant Churches and their inherited inventory during this period. Note, for comparison, central European examples in Robert Bevan's The destruction of memory: architecture at war (London 2006). Two indispensable maps of churches and chapels with their Estonian, Lettish and German names are supplied for Estonia/Livonia and Courland (pp. 98–102, 168–9). Raag and Vanags provide a fascinating introductory essay on Christian terminology and Christian names (pp. 15–40). They show, for instance, that in the 1520s a quarter of personal names in the south Estonian parish of Helme remained pre-Christian, but by 1600 such names had become rare if visible at all. Elsewhere, an examination of the updated 1638 land register shows that Christian names were Netherlandish or German ‘imports’ (via trade and crafts); surnames placed before Christian names, but followed dialect usage: ‘Kicka (Hahn in German) Meus’ – in south Estonian, kickas, but kukk in north Estonian, and so on (p. 28). Elsewhere along the eastern border from Narva and Lake Peipus (p. 69, map 1) and especially in the Lettish-speaking eastern area, a mass of Russian Orthodox Christian names (see pp. 35–6) were used. It is therefore not so surprising to find today, in Tallinn's St Nicholas (Niguliste) church (illustration at p. 95) the fine iconostasis, new in 1685, made by master craftsmen of Moscow and Pskov (5.5 metres wide with fifty-two icons), and donated by the regent Sofia in the names of the the czars Ivan iv and Peter i, then still minors. Two striking essays by Krista Kodres on church art in the Estonian areas (pp. 41–66, with illustrations and commentary at pp. 67–97), and the same for Lettish areas by Ojārs Spārītis (pp. 103–29, with illustrations and and commentary at pp. 130–65), show, like their linguist colleagues, a ‘flowering’ of Lutheran church art in the ‘Swedish’ seventeenth century, especially in the period 1650–1700, given an influx of Flemish, Dutch, German and Copenhagen-Stockholm craftsmen, from artists to sculptors, using wood and stone for altars: numerous new epitaphs (Swedish too), galleries and pews. Craftsmen and cargoes brought devotional literature with them too. And Spārītis shows that the Trinity church in Mitau of 1574–1620 (destroyed in 1939; illustration at p. 163), built by a Dutch master, put into practice the centralised Lutheran Sunday service with a sermon ‘theatre’ arrangement, with merely decorative Gothic vaulting, almost forty years before Joseph Fürttenbach's theoretical Kirchen-Gebaw (1649). In the period 1630–1710, in Swedish Livonia, 125 new churches were built, of which 118 were in wood (there is an illustration [p. 93] of the wooden church of St Maria Magdalene [1643–4], which survives to this day on the island of Ruhnu), the rest in stone. And yet the surviving Catholic medieval inventory was respected, notably side altars in village churches – visible still in eighteenth-century visitation reports. It is interesting to note too (illustration at p. 73), that despite Swedish schooling in Estonian and Lettish, text passages in German from the altar sacrament and little catechism remained on either side of an altar picture of the Last Supper in Kihelkonna church (1591) on the island of Saaremaa. How difficult Protestant consolidation must have been in the period 1555–1721 which witnessed seventeen major wars and pestilence (vol. lxix, pp. 39–40). That said, and without wishing to appear patronising, this reviewer missed more of an emphasis on Lutheran spirituality, the seventeenth-century's consolidation of daily and occasional prayer as a Protestant devotional canon, though Jesuit influence (spreading north from nearby Vilnius) is mentioned very briefly (by Raag at vol. lxix, p. 218). Reference, for comparison's sake, might be made to MacCulloch's book in this series. The irrepressible presence of native votive offerings and prayer needs further examination. Subsequent Moravian mission came closer to satisfying the spiritual needs of these subject peoples. All the essayists here under review deserve, nevertheless, grateful praise for stimulating this reviewer to further thought.