This collection of essays, based on papers of the Fifth International Munich-Freising Conference (2011), presents an interesting insight into the challenges facing the study of church history. The aim of the conference and this publication is to draw attention to the polycentric structures of the history of Christianity but also to give a fresh stimulus to a conceptual reorientation of the academic discipline ‘church history’, as the editor outlines in his detailed and very informative introduction. While the latter aim seems to be directed primarily to the German readership (for example, see Kaufmann's call for a revision of church history as academic discipline at pp. 370–1), it does not undermine the importance of this volume for a wider understanding of the globalisation processes of Christianity throughout the centuries. The eighteen chapters and two commentaries reflect on four distinct paradigms: the East-Syrian-Nestorian Church of the East as a continental network in the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries; the Jesuits as global players in the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries; German Pietism in the eighteenth century; and the Protestant Missionary movement(s) around 1910, the year of the Edinburgh conference. While globalisation has been part of Christianity from antiquity, these four paradigms demonstrate the ‘dialectic of inculturation and transculturation’ as Kaufmann writes in his commentary (p. 361) – while Christianity adapted to the cultural environment wherever it went, it also maintained transcultural features which preserved its cultural otherness. Koschorke begins his introduction with a fascinating example of this dialectic process: the paintings of Marcos Zapata (1710–73) which can be found in Cusco, Peru, and which portray central topics of the history of Christianity in Latin America such as the Last Supper (Cena ultima) that includes in addition to local fruits and flowers also guinea pig as a dish (still considered a culinary delicacy in the Andes). Koschorke's introduction gives a good overview of the area of studies and highlights the contribution of this volume to the wider debate about the history of Christianity. Each of the following chapters (six in English, the others in German, but all with abstracts in German and English) presents a detailed case study. The topics vary from a study of early relics of the presence of the Church of the East in China (for example, a bilingual inscribed stele from the Tang Dynasty) and a report of transcontinental marriages in the eighteenth century (for example, Rebecca Freundlich Protten from St Thomas with Christian Jacobus Protten Africanus from Ghana) to a study of the development of indigenous Christianity in China and a reflection on the rise of independent Churches in Africa and Asia in the early twentieth century. The volume arouses interest to look deeper into these cases and will hopefully inspire further research.