This is a handsome book: no flippant comment, since the University of Pennsylvania Press is fast emerging as the wise choice for those seeking to engage in trans-American and trans-Atlantic dialogues. In this case, the collection of ten essays plus editorial introduction has been in debate for seven years and the most recent meeting of the participants to discuss their work took place under the auspices of Penn's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Its title is broad, and its participants are drawn from a number of disciplines – history, art history, divinity, literature – and offer the prospect of coherence. In his chapter Sir John Elliott posits four questions for the volume to answer. In the first, he manages to sneak two questions into one: what were the aspirations of the religious when they travelled to the Americas, and how were they modified by experience? Second, the book should explore the impact of European religion on indigenous communities. How did religion shape the distinctiveness of colonial societies? And finally, though not explored here, or at all, how did the Americas shape religious practice in the mother countries? So, it is left wide open as to who or what is being transformed, but the slice of the Americas which is explored is the Luso-Hispanic and the English (New England and the Chesapeake). The essays are predominantly from the former colonies/empires: in itself a welcome advance as there is not enough discussion in English of Spain's and Portugal's American experience, and thus the debates often run in parallel but never talk across the tracks. The most coherent and forward-looking section was that on ‘Missions’ (part iii). Matt Cohen searches for ‘indigenous piety’ in New England through the use of objects; a bundle of grave goods buried with a Pequot girl and a group of poppets found in the walls of a Long Island house. A comparison with Spanish (and Portuguese?) attitudes towards objects such as tunjos would be interesting to follow up. Júnia Ferreira Furtado explores the mission by two mulatto priests to convert Agonglo, king of Dahomey. This is surprisingly the only reference to Africa and to the religious experience of those of African heritage in the Americas. In the final essay in this section Carmen Fernández-Salvador explores the Jesuit mission at the Quito frontier. The other essays are varied and variable, but the volume's competitive price, the chapters’ subtitling and the overall impression of territory surveyed suggest this volume might be aimed at students. I will certainly use it with my own.