The fine publication aptly begins with the question of how and why different forms of religion, more precisely Catholicism, were formulated in the Habsburg Crownland Tyrol during the nineteenth century. At times, nothing was less defined and more controversial than the proprium of Catholicism: being Catholic, believing Catholic, and acting Catholic was measured by strikingly different standards. The Trento prince-bishop Benedetto Riccabona de Reichenfels (1807–79), for example, felt compelled in 1861 to issue two letters to his “flock” of German- and Italian-speaking Catholics in 1861, which differed greatly not only in language but also above all in content. Did his German-speaking diocesans have other religious needs and expectations of him than their Italian-speaking fellow believers?

To explain this aporia, Florian Huber convincingly suggests that if additional linguistic, national, spatial, or political components were added in different configurations, there would exist internal Catholic boundaries. From this perspective, the old Tyrolean region appears to be a religious laboratory because Germany, Austria, and Italy met here, as Thomas Götz has aptly put it in a seminal contribution of 2001 (Bürgertum und Liberalismus in Tirol 1840–1873. Zwischen Stadt und “Region,” Staat und Nation). The work thus examines how different forms of public Catholicity developed in the multilingual Tyrol between 1840 and 1880, how they described themselves and their environment, and how they not only drew their borders to nation and space but also to the political system. The medium of religious communication was central; it made a decisive difference whether this took place in person through sermons or newspapers. The plot that the book reveals is thus a history of finely tuned observations about a Catholicism that was located at borders and created new borders. Hence Huber uses the new vocabulary of “Grenzkatholizismen” to describe phenomenologically his smart observations.

The structure of the book combines aspects of content and chronology. Its division into three periods (1830–48, 1850–66, 1867–75) is intended to illustrate how not only public forms of religion but also concepts of space and gender and the influence of the media on religious communication in general developed á la longue. Within these blocks, detailed thematic observations allow the author a multiperspective approach. The guidelines on which they are based are determined by the central thematic fields: the relationships of border Catholicisms to each other and to national and spatial semantics; their contribution to political communication; and the formation of gendered images.

More epistemologically speaking, Huber is relying on the principles of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, especially his concept of religion. Religion thus exists socially as exclusively communication and can only be observed as such; religious communication distinguishes itself from other forms of communication through specific codings. This access is favorable in several respects: on the one hand, it prescribes to the author a certain work and source design and, on the other hand, it is open-ended, which prevents any teleological argumentations.

As a result of his efforts, Huber has remedied a considerable regional-historical desideratum and has written an interesting history of relations between Catholicisms north and south of the Brenner pass, regardless of today's state or linguistic borders. While in recent years such cross-border and border-reflecting comparisons have mainly been carried out in Eastern European border regions, historical-religious relations between Germany, Austria, and Italy have so far hardly been investigated. Huber fills this gap splendidly.