To review this book for a journal founded at the high watermark of quantitative social and demographic history and dedicated to maintaining a high quality of research in this field is a melancholy task. Ole Peter Grell is the author, editor or co-editor of many books about the history of early modern medicine, religion and refugees, including an agenda-setting trilogy of collective volumes on the history of tolerance and intolerance from the Reformation through to the Enlightenment. Here he examines two fascinating and potentially rich subjects within the social and economic history of the era: (1) the movements, family relationships and business affairs from roughly 1540 to 1640 of linked branches of three important merchant families, the Burlamacchi, Calandrini and Diodati, whose initial members all fled Lucca because of their Protestant views and whose descendants came to settle, if only briefly at times, in many of the great mercantile cities of northern Europe; and (2) the charitable collections made to assist the Protestant clergymen and schoolmasters driven from the Palatinate during the Thirty Years War, a subject that potentially speaks volumes to the geography and strength of Reformed solidarity beyond borders in the generations after the Reformation. The two subjects are linked because several members of the Burlamacchi and Calandrini families played important roles in administering the central refugee fund in Nuremberg and in transferring funds raised internationally to it.

Unfortunately, the book is written as if none of the methods and habits of mind characteristic of the Annales School and of the New Social History had ever been forged. The first two chapters follow the eventful peregrinations of members of the three Lucchese families, certain of whom became leading merchants in cities such as Geneva, Amsterdam, London and Nuremberg, others of whom became soldiers or pastors. Grell's chief source here is the remarkable compilation of twelve family histories, personal life stories, libri di ricordi and sets of genealogical notes made by Vincenzo Burlamacchi in the seventeenth century and published in an excellent edition by Simonetta Adorni-Braccesi in 1993.Footnote 1 This is enriched with complementary information about the activities of the individuals in question where such information is available in the secondary literature about early modern commerce in many languages. The movements of the family are also contextualised with information about the cities in which they settled and the events of the moment. The Libro di ricordi delle nostre famiglie being a rich source, we are able to learn much about the lives and business activities of eight members of these families and about other important merchants and financiers with whom they did business, most of them refugees from the Southern Low Countries. But as no attempt appears to have been made to enrich the published record with archival prospecting in the cities through which these individuals passed, one can only wonder how much more might have been said if the author had been able to locate business and marriage contracts, post-mortem inventories, or other such documents of the sort that the French tradition of Fernand Braudel, Pierre Goubert, Roland Mousnier and so many since has taught us to expect to find used in studies of elite families. The reading offered of the texts within the Burlamacchi family history also rarely goes beyond simply reproducing their literal sense.

Chapter three offers a rapid sketch of the fate of the Palatinate during the Thirty Years War before presenting the relief agencies founded to assist refugees from the territory in Nuremberg, New-Hanau and Frankfurt. In the final three chapters, Grell then examines, country by country and in a narrative fashion, the general collections undertaken for these Calvinist exiles in England, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, Switzerland and France, before concluding with a chapter on gifts from wealthy individuals. His most important source in this part of the book is a set of previously unstudied account books of the fund for refugees from the Upper Palatinate preserved in the Reformed church of St Martha in Nuremberg, whose custodians were not even aware they had this archive until Grell showed up and pushed them to look for it. He also draws upon a range of archival documents relating to the fund-raising drives. But the purely narrative approach that he adopts for these sections and the absence of any attempt to develop systematic answers to clear questions limits the interest of what he is able to draw from his noteworthy archival finds. The Palatine Reformed would have rejected the label ‘Calvinist’ that Grell uses throughout this book and would have claimed to fight in 1618 for a broader Protestant cause. But in the absence of any presentation or analysis of just how appeals for the exiles from the Palatinate framed their cause, whether appealing to pan-Protestant solidarity or to a narrower Reformed public, it is difficult to grasp just what gifts to this charity reveal. To the extent that these gifts trace Reformed solidarity, the exact geography of the donations and relative strength of concern for the cause in different parts of Europe becomes a revealing indicator of felt attachment to this cause and hence of the precise contours of the international Reformed movement c. 1630, but no attempt is made to offer a full tabulation or cartography of the donations to the refugee fund; we are simply told that the initial appeal in 1626 went out ‘from Nuremberg to most of the prominent centres and communities across Europe’ (p. 140, italics added). Estimates of the total sums raised for the cause from most of the individual countries schosen for examination here are offered, but these are expressed in different currencies, preventing easy comparison between them. No effort is made to compare the extent and success of this fund drive with prior or subsequent international fund drives for Reformed causes. Whatever happened to histoire problème in lieu of histoire événementielle and to an appreciation of the utility of such basic techniques of quantitative analysis such as systematic tabulation?

The conclusion does raise a large analytic issue, the validity of the Weber thesis, which Grell believes that this study of a network of Calvinist merchants may illuminate. He concludes that the personal writings within the Burlamacchi family history bear no trace of the anxiety about election that Weber diagnosed as the key to the psychology of Calvinism. This will come as no surprise to those who have read my ‘Two Calvinisms’ or Christ's churches purely reformed.Footnote 2 He nonetheless believes that their Calvinism contributed to their prosperity as capitalists, since the care and precision with which they kept accounts testify to their sense of accountability to God, which in turn stimulated business success. Did Catholics never keep careful accounts?

One puts down Brethren in Christ with a sense that Grell found a wonderful subject and some important sources but missed an opportunity to write a much better book.