‘Love the Brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the King’, the phrase which ends the Epistle reading for Easter 3 (Matthias Claudius, Cron und Scepter [1795], 201) is the theme of this long book tracing the erosion of the ‘king's (duke's) religion’ in the preaching of German-speaking clergy like the above. They represented two generations mixing Enlightenment and Awakening in the unsettled half-century following 1789 in these duchies. Social upset, however, had more to do with an unstable post-war agrarian economy and poor weather patterns than with any revolutionary sentiment. That said, the author's ‘lightly revised’ (p. ix) Hamburg PhD thesis could have benefited from sterner editorial advice: footnotes often reduce the text to a quarter or less of a page (chapter ii, 906 footnotes; pages 584–6 are straddled by single footnote 438). Chapter i, on the impact of 1789 on church establishment at this time of significant constitutional change (1806, 1814–15, 1849) on both sides of the linguistic border, would read more easily as text incorporating research so far. A glaring omission is the widespread lay awakening, German and Danish, in these parishes. And if the author has interesting things to say about Claus Harms, he manages to reduce Grundtvig to four passing page references. It was Grundtvig who succeeded in fashioning an inclusive modern language of church worship, home devotion and parish government, ‘Borgestu Dansk, Borgestue Snak, lave og uædle’ which appealed to the commoner, ‘almuen’. Superb still is Erica Simon, Réveil nationale et culture populaire en Scandinavie: la genèse de la højskole nordique, 1844–1878 (Paris 1960). If the reader can persevere with the footnotes, this book has useful things to say on aristocratic enlightened circles in the old Helstat, on Kiel University, and the preaching of mostly senior German clergy. The thematic bibliography including published sermons, and two excellent name and thematic indices are well worth dipping into.