The publication of this book marks the completion of I. B. Tauris's seven-volume series on the History of the Christian Church. In an accompanying preface, the series editor states that the project has been organised ‘so that the boundary-dates between volumes come in some unexpected places’. In fact, the chronological extents of C. Scott Dixon's work – 1500 to 1685 – are by now fairly familiar and conventional ones. They map the unfolding of Europe's ‘confessional age’, starting with the origins of Luther's revolt against the papacy, and charting its political and cultural consequences over the course of a century and a half of creative conflict culminating (but not terminating) in Louis xiv’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But if Dixon's brief is a fairly traditional one, his execution of it is imaginative and inventive, and takes us (conceptually and geographically) to some interesting places.

Scott Dixon is a highly distinguished and prolific historian of Lutheran Germany, so it is not surprising that his account of the Luther affair and of the subsequent formation of Protestant territorial Churches is illuminating and reliable. It involves crisp and effective summaries both of political developments and of divergent eucharistic theologies, and produces along the way some pithy and insightful turns of phrase: I particularly enjoyed a reference (p. 119) to ‘the claustrophobic urban ecclesiologies of Bucer and Calvin’.

The chronology does not allow for a very detailed investigation of the medieval roots of Reformation developments, though Erasmus receives due acknowledgement in an opening chapter on ‘Renaissance Christianity’. Here, a remark (p. 19) that the catechetical efforts of the late medieval Church were ‘just enough to invest the communal experience of the faith with Christian meaning’ uncharacteristically smacks a little of essentialism and presentism in its understanding of the character of Christianity. In general, Dixon is sensitive and alert to the variety of ‘embodied’ forms in which faith manifests itself historically.

Students and teachers will particularly welcome a clear-sighted explanation and discussion of the ‘confessionalisation thesis’, which Dixon regards as a more useful interpretative paradigm than some recent critiques have allowed. He is not averse to deploying the broad brush when the canvas calls for it, observing (p. 120) that in the post-Reformation rise of Protestant princedoms it becomes possible ‘to see the first faint outlines of the modern nation-state’, and that the logocentric religion of Lutheranism and Calvinism ‘created the conditions for the rise of modern individualism’. But Dixon is too subtle a historian simply to reinstate Protestantism to its old role as the midwife of modernity, noting that social and political developments in Protestant states were often mirrored in Catholic ones.

The attention to Catholicism, seen as possessing (p. 68) ‘a dynamic of reform that was at least the equal of the Protestant phenomenon’, is one of the principal strengths of the book. Too often, even surveys which recognise that ‘the Reformation’ was not the same thing as ‘the Protestant Reformation’ relegate the Catholic material to a single appendant chapter: here it is properly and comparatively integrated at every point, both within and beyond the boundaries of Europe.

Yet what many readers will welcome most in this book is the space devoted to themes which are often neglected entirely in surveys focused more narrowly on western Europe and the Reformation: the developments within Orthodoxy and the indigenous Christian Churches of Africa and the Middle East. In part, this is a story of how Orthodoxy reacted to the convulsions within Latin Christendom – an initial curiosity and excitement about Protestantism often giving way upon better acquaintance to disappointment and disdain. But we are also reminded that not all significant changes within early modern Christianity should be viewed through the Reformation lens. Dixon supplies a valuable account of the rise of Russian Orthodoxy in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, and of the elevation of Moscow to the status of Patriarchate in 1589. In the following century, Russia witnessed its own ‘confessionalisation project’ in the reforms of Patriarch Nikon and the repression of the Old Believers.

Arguably, Dixon might have said more about a crucial development of this period: the 1596 Union of Brest and the origins and outcomes of the split between Greek Catholic and Orthodox traditions. But this is more than compensated for by informative discussions of the experiences of Syrian Maronite, Armenian and Ethiopian Christians, and of the travails of Egyptian Copts (giving the lie to suggestions that the experience of Christians under Ottoman rule was invariably one of relatively benign toleration).

In dealing with such a wealth of material, Dixon occasionally forgets to gloss terms (hesychasm, Ignatius Water) with which student readers (and not only student readers) will likely be unfamiliar. Still more occasionally, points of detail can slip. It is just about allowable (p. 155) to call Edward vi a ‘Calvinist’, but no English Protestant of the sixteenth century should be labelled an ‘Anglican’, and historians need to stop reusing the map (p. xi) of ‘confessional divisions in Europe towards the end of the sixteenth century’ employing variant shading for an ‘Anglican’ England which in fact firmly identified itself as part of the family of Reformed Churches. It is not quite true (p. 156) that in Elizabethan England the clergy were expected to wear copes and surplices: after 1566, only the surplice was required for parish clergy. I was also momentarily nonplussed by a reference (p. 157) to ‘the Puritan bill of rights of 1572’, before working out that this must refer to the reformist bill ‘concerning rites and ceremonies’, introduced that year into parliament.

But these risk sounding like the carpings of a narrow specialist about an admirably expansive, ambitious and almost entirely successful work of synthesis and interpretation. Teachers of early modern Christianity will welcome an important addition to their reading lists, and researchers in a variety of fields will recognise an invaluable first point of reference and orientation.