This is a carefully crafted, rich and informative study about religious displacement in the seventeenth century. Originally conceived as the author's PhD dissertation, it offers a comprehensive overview of the Huguenot experience in the Dutch Republic. The United Provinces served as a major hub for French Protestants in the decades of increasing religious intolerance on the part of the French government. It has been estimated that after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) about 35,000 Huguenot refugees (out of a total of 150,000) settled in the Dutch Republic, particularly in its main province of Holland. Van der Linden's study confirms the impression that economic and religious incentives were often intertwined in the decision to leave France. The towns of Holland offered attractive trade and banking facilities and accommodated a sophisticated infrastructure of textile and print industries. What is more, the Dutch Republic facilitated a network of Walloon – hence French-speaking – Calvinist churches. Founded during the Dutch revolt in the sixteenth century, the Walloon congregations functioned as an official branch of the Reformed Church of the Republic. The Huguenot refugee community in the Netherlands has been studied in the past but much of this scholarship tended to be rather narrow in scope and subject to a confessonial perspective. Eschewing older narratives of heroism and victimhood, Experiencing exile focuses on what the author calls the social experience of exile. It seeks to offer a more nuanced picture of the living conditions and mixed fortunes of individual refugees, and examines the ways in which Huguenots constructed identities for themselves in exile. The book is clearly organised and consists of three parts. The first section, ‘Economy of Exile’, addresses the socio-economic conditions of refugees and maps their involvement in the textile industry, the business of print and the labour market for Protestant ministers. Part ii, ‘Faith in Exile’, assesses spiritual culture within the Walloon churches and considers the importance of preaching in fashioning a common Huguenot identity. The third part of the book focuses on ‘Memories of Exile’ and investigates the practice of story-telling and history-writing within the refugee community. Experiencing exile is a lively read, clearly signposted throughout and enriched with a great variety of sources. It combines quantitative analyses with cultural historical approaches and aptly situates its findings within some larger historiographical debates about early modern migration, Protestant culture and international politics. Some readers may be surprised by the author's decision largely to ignore developments in the host society in which the refugees settled. It is true that the social integration of Huguenots in the Dutch Republic has been documented relatively well, but those readers not familiar with this strand of scholarship might have liked to hear more about such interactions and in particular about the popular response to the influx of Huguenots in local Dutch communities. All the same, Experiencing exile is an exemplary study of a seventeenth-century exile community and will be a point of reference for any future exploration in this field.