Maximilian von Habsburg has examined over three hundred manuscript and printed editions of the Imitatio Christi produced across geographic, linguistic, and confessional borders from roughly 1470 to 1650 in western Europe. Operating between Latin, French, German, and English versions of the text shaped in various Catholic and Protestant sects, he argues that acts of translation offer insight into the process of adaptation, a means to decode the choices made by particular religious cultures. By focusing on the contribution of the Imitatio Christi to late medieval and early modern religious culture, Habsburg positions his book as a historiographical intervention aligned with the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, André Vauchez, and Eamon Duffy; one that will demonstrate the “historical value of studying spirituality” (5). While acknowledging the enduring importance of such a proposed intervention, this reviewer found the real historiographical value of Habsburg's study to lie in its detailed analysis of early book production and transmission.

The book unfolds chronologically, geographically, and linguistically according to the particular adaptation under investigation in each chapter. Habsburg first surveys, rather generally, the content of the Imitatio Christi, isolating the key themes to which he will return in order to examine possible alterations in each edition and translation. He identifies the text's salient themes as: “the perspectives on human nature, the role of the saints and their relationship to Christ, the emphasis on interiority and the centrality of the Eucharist” (8). He seeks to place the conception and framework for the text in its original context by describing the cultural milieu of the Devotio Moderna of which, he argues, the Imitatio was “paradigmatic.” Habsburg envisions the Imitatio as having emerged from the tradition of rapiaria, or the collection and transcription of pithy but emotionally powerful excerpts from devotional tracts into a personal notebook. Focusing on the activity of the Windesheim Canons, Habsburg argues that the Imitatio was written in order to be accessible to all social groups involved in the devotio moderna, including the laity.

From the original context of the creation of the Imitatio Christi, Habsburg proceeds to investigate its transmission and adaptation across religious cultures. He starts with French and English incunabula from the first three decades of the sixteenth century. Here, Habsburg picks up on indications of the text's adaptation for lay readers, including the adoption of new terms, a simplification of phrases, the explanation of key themes, and other curious emendations. His study of two French translations, the Internelle Consolation and the Imitation de Jésus Christ, is particularly adept, revealing how the vernacular translations removed certain phrases that smacked of monasticism and added explanations (c'est a dire) to encourage the perception of a loving relationship of God to all humans.

The first Protestant translation of the Imitatio Christi appeared in 1531, in German, the work of the Silesian reformer, Caspar Schwenckfeld. Schwenckfeld's translation may have provided a model for both the Swiss German edition of 1539 produced by Leo Jud and the classicized Latin edition by Sebastian Castellio intended for teaching use. Habsburg defines all three translations as indeed “protestant” by a series of emendations: the omission of Book Four on the Mass; the deletion of references to monasticism, intercessory prayers, veneration of the saints, and purgatory; a Christocentric emphasis; and a devotional language nuanced for the Protestant reader (128–129). Habsburg's explanation for the creation of a devotional language is most clear in his exploration of the adaptations made by Castellio. Castellio, he notes, was keenly sensitive to the virtue of humility as provided strictly by God's grace, and not a result of human merit. Habsburg detects that Castellio replaced seemingly benign words such as Kempis's “humilem” with the phrase, “demissum hominem,” in order to diffuse the notion that this virtue was achievable through human effort. The most illuminating conclusion from this section is the argument that Protestant translations of the Imitatio Christi were, in the end, “not overtly Protestant” (143). Schwenckfeld's editions were found to have provenances in the libraries of Jesuit colleges (the reformer's name was not included on the title page, after all), leading Habsburg to suggest that the Imitatio's emphasis on Christocentricity and its dedication to interiority rendered it inexhaustibly adaptable. Such flexibility contributed greatly to the longevity of the text in cities with confessional diversity, like Augsburg, Strasburg, and Basle. But despite this adaptability and appeal, Habsburg is careful to note that translators and printers were not motivated by ecumenical concerns.

The final section of Habsburg's study examines Jesuit editions of the Imitatio Christi, editions that were largely responsible for the long-term significance of the text. The Imitation had an immediate effect on sixteenth-century culture in Europe and beyond owing to Jesuit efforts to provide Latin editions and translations, and to provide access to the text in educational and missionary contexts, all a result of Ignatius Loyola's recommendation of the Imitatio in his Spiritual Exercises. Habsburg is interested in reconciling what he considers false assumptions about the contradictions in Jesuit spirituality and the goals promoted in the Imitatio, for example, its supposed anti-intellectual orientation and its emphasis on detachment from the world. In doing so, he seeks to draw attention to the medieval roots of Jesuit spirituality and devotional practice. Similar to his remarks about Protestant translations of the Imitatio, here, once again, Habsburg concludes that Kempis's treatise was ultimately adaptable, even to an active educational ministry. Although Protestant translators decontextualized the Imitatio by omitting overtly Catholic practices and doctrines, Habsburg's exploration of Jesuit facility with the text shows that it never required Catholic recontextualization (246).

Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650 is certainly a positive contribution to scholarship in the history of the book. While it does not explicitly engage some of the more salient problems in the field as articulated by Franco Moretti, Anthony Grafton, and Roger Chartier, it nonetheless harnesses the critical tools of the codicologist to call attention to production, transmission, and the practical elements of printing and distribution, aspects of intellectual exchange all too often overlooked in religious and cultural history. In this vein, Habsburg also provides a thorough Short Title Catalog, covering a wide range of editions and translations. I am more ambivalent about Habsburg's contribution to the historical study of spirituality, however. Habsburg uses an unspecific and ill-defined “Protestant” theology to guide him to a sense of the specific spirituality of the culture making a certain translation; therefore, he explains changes in the text according to a Protestant theological framework, rather than exploring, or even allowing for the possibility of, alternate motivations and significations for those changes. The result is less a new contribution to the history of spirituality of the later Middle Ages or the religious culture of early modern Europe than an assertion of the prominence of the Imitatio Christi to our already established understanding of that culture.