In This is my body Thomas Davis offers a lucid and thoroughly engaging collection of essays around the treatment of Christ's presence in the eucharistic discourse of Calvin, Luther and, much less prominently, Zwingli. The final chapter is a fascinating sketch for a grand cultural narrative that may be where Davis should now direct his research. For here he addresses a massive shift ‘toward the literal’, a shift in which authoritative language must be univocal and in which there was ‘a collapse of distance between sign and thing signified’. In this perspective Calvin ‘served as a hinge figure’ while Beza's Tabula praedestinationis, pace Richard Mueller, seems a sign of the new literalisation and the spatialisation of the word, perhaps the world associated by Walter Ong with Ramus, method and the decay of dialogue. But if Calvin is a ‘hinge figure’ into this grisly world, we will not gather this from the profoundly sympathetic and often lyrical accounts of Calvin's eucharistic theology in this book. Thomas Davis sets out from Luther's sermon ‘on the proper preparation of the heart for the sacramental reception of the eucharist’ (1518). This gives the reference point from which Davis can describe the changes he follows in the Lectures on Hebrews and works of 1520, changes that meant that Luther was no longer a ‘most Catholic’ theologian. Concentrating in chapter ii on Luther's eucharistic preaching from 1521 to 1529 Davis argues that the central issue for Luther is not ‘ubiquity’ but the power of the Word which creates the presence of Christ and delivers forgiveness, comfort and the fruits of love. Chapters iii–viii are largely devoted to Calvin. Chapter iii addresses the role of the words of institution, eucharistic signs and the gift of knowledge in Calvin's eucharistic theology. Chapter iv stresses that Calvin's understanding of our participation in Christ entails ‘full body-and-blood Communion’, ‘participation in a real and true human body’. (How uncomfortable such language would have made William Perkins.) Chapters v and vii attend to the dialectic of divine presence and absence in Calvin's preaching of the Gospel, a dialectic whose medieval antecedents are not considered but which might be important in the bigger story the book's final chapter wants to tell. Chapter vi discusses Calvin's reflections on preaching as he commented upon Deuteronomy v in 1555. Chapter viii explores Calvin's observations on 1 Corinthians x.3–4 and developments of the Institutes. Chapter ix compares Luther, Zwingli and Calvin as they sought to explicate ‘discerning the body’, explications moving across the ‘social/spiritual body’ and the ‘natural and true body’. Chapter x sows the seeds of the grand narrative that I have mentioned, one that will demand serious attention to medieval resources and even to the strange histories of the English Reformation.