Stephan Scholz's book is difficult to assess and to characterise because its principal arguments are opaque and also shifting in purpose. On the one hand, it provides a superficial picture of the political turmoil within partitioned Poland during the early nineteenth century. On the other hand, it draws on a wide variety of printed sources to describe Roman Catholic opinion within the German Confederation regarding the spectre of revolution among its eastern neighbours and demonstrates how those attitudes differed from those held by their coreligionists in western Europe, especially France. The resulting narrative is a careful and enormously detailed examination of Catholic viewpoints regarding the legitimacy of revolution as a means to achieve religious or political goals and the limits of denominational solidarity across ethnic and national frontiers. Scholz's method, furthermore, is not so much to describe the reality of those Polish uprisings as it is to chart German Catholic perceptions of that reality from the 1830s down to the European-wide mid-century revolutions. Those perceptions, Scholz maintains, were both complex and ambivalent. Some German Catholics held a favourable image of their Polish neighbours as coreligionists resisting Russian political oppression and religious persecution. Others were more hostile because they viewed Polish nation-building aspirations with suspicion, and they convinced themselves that Polish strivings, while not inherently illegitimate, should be religious, not political, and subordinated to the larger interests of Austria, Prussia and Russia – the great powers that had partitioned Poland in the eighteenth century. Still others, according to Scholz, showed little patience for Polish chaotic processes that they deemed so inimical to Catholic interests – especially the protective role of the Habsburg state – within the German Confederation itself. Nearly all German Catholics, he concludes, agreed that an alliance with Central Europe's princely rulers was a better safeguard for the Roman Church and its interests than cooperation with a liberal, revolutionary movement. At the same time, however, Scholz argues that Polish developments, with their fusion of nationalism and religion, did more than simply shape and mould this highly complex German Catholic response. Polish insurrections, and the German Catholic perception of them, did even more to complicate the relationship between Germany's ultramontanes and their counterparts in France and elsewhere in western Europe. If French ultramontanes, for example, greeted Polish uprisings between 1830 and 1849 as nothing less than a religiously-motivated struggle for freedom, German Catholic opinion remained deeply divided and far more complicated. It was precisely this division within Roman Catholic ranks, Scholz concludes, that challenges those traditional assumptions that portray the ultramontane movement across Europe as a ‘community of sentiment’ (p. 377) or some kind of seamless, monolithic force. While Scholz attempts to broaden the appeal of his book and to locate his story in this historically fashionable, transnational context, his Problemstellung – the very heart of his thesis – will likely interest only a small band of specialists.