If you go to Prague today, you would not guess that it was once the centre of intense religious feeling. If you visit the Hussite church there (one of the last remaining), you will find but a handful of meek congregants. In the early fifteenth century, a home-grown Protestantism swept through Bohemia and fostered Europe's first mass-movement wars of religion; by the early eighteenth century, as Louthan so engagingly shows, the Czechs were not only Catholic but renowned for their piety. Louthan does an excellent job of showing both the drama and the complexity of the process that brought this about. He deftly sweeps away centuries of nationalist mythmaking about the skirmish at White Mountain in 1620 (traditionally seen as the final loss of Czech political and religious independence). He will not settle for a simple story of Catholic versus Protestant, Czech versus German, native nobility versus the foreign king. Early modern Bohemia was one of the most sophisticated polities in Europe; the masses who mobilised in both small-scale riots and large-scale battles expected to have a say. Bohemia was also remarkably complex in its religious affiliations, with strong and ardent communities of Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Catholics, Hussites (Utraquists) and Bohemian Brethren, dissidents to the dissident Hussites. Within a span of two generations this motley population almost uniformly showed (at least outwardly) obedience to Rome and to the Habsburg dynasty. Indeed, Louthan's narrative fully delivers what he promises in his introduction: ‘the confessional transformation of the kingdom was nothing short of breathtaking’. Louthan adroitly tackles issues of broad interest to European history: religious art as an instrument of propaganda or persuasion, the growth of pilgrimage sites and miracle stories on the eve of the Enlightenment, the flourishing Catholic press and the complex relationships between royal and religious authority. The Counter-Reformation explains why Prague, and the smaller towns and even villages around Bohemia, look as they do today: Bohemia was systematically built up with Baroque churches, monasteries, pilgrimage centres and even roadside chapels. ‘Though there were shortages of priests in the countryside’, Louthan writes, ‘though ignorance of doctrine was widespread, though literacy rates remained low, this new Catholic art was everywhere’. The famous Charles Bridge (famous even in the seventeenth century) was peopled with statues of Catholic missionary-saints (and references to their unbeliever targets – Muslim infidels, Protestants and Jews). The result of the Catholic Reformation in Bohemia was not a populace more educated in dogma or doctrine, but one that followed the essential practices of the Roman Church and self-identified as Catholic. The Czechs had been persuaded away from their two centuries' love affair with dissidence. Louthan is undeniably correct when he laments that the Bohemian Reformation is widely neglected; this is not special pleading but a solid, well-told narrative that convinces the reader that early modern Bohemia indeed merits (and rewards) much greater attention. We are both enthusiastic and grateful that Louthan has so ably and engagingly stepped into the gap. Any scholar of the Reformation, or of early modern Europe in general, should read this book, not only out of obligation to know something about what transpired in this small kingdom in the heart of Europe, but to better understand European history as a whole.