An ambitious volume of eighty-six entries by nearly as many authors, this Lexikon would seem to offer an extraordinary resource for scholars and students of early modern Hispanic arts and society. It is organised into forty-three brief paired entries on single concepts, phenomena or institutions as manifested in Spain versus Spanish America, from ‘Afterlife’ to ‘Supernatural’, and it concentrates on the mid-colonial era (roughly the seventeenth century), the specialism of the anthropologist Kenneth Mills. The idea behind the Lexikon is that not only did people and objects make the trip between Spain and the Americas but so did what they call ‘technologies’: themes, concepts, worldviews and institutions. But far from being a complete or even representative list, these ‘technologies’ seem oddly arbitrary. Missing are obvious institutional headings of great importance such as ‘Franciscans’ or ‘Jesuits’ (although they do include the Inquisition); they give us ‘sodomy’ but not ‘slavery’; church interiors but not exteriors; and – particularly curious in a book on the Baroque – no entries on painting or sculpture (yet they have ‘opera’, ‘religious drama’ and four paired entries on music). Spanish and creole protagonists receive much more attention than their indigenous or African counterparts, and the editors' explanation that this is because their voices are ‘rare and harder to hear in the historical record’ (p. 2) is not satisfactory – particularly given Mills's work on aboriginal Andean documents. Partly this choice of subjects relates to the authors' fields of expertise (although Levy steps outside her own). Some of the most distinguished scholars in the field are here (for example Ramón Mujica Pinilla and the late Sabine MacCormack) and some entries are fascinating (I particularly enjoyed Daniela Bleichmar's entry on science), but others are redactions of material that the same authors have treated elsewhere at greater length and seem condensed or even potted, leaving the reader yearning for a more sustained treatment. The Lexikon is an ultimately disappointing book, designed as if by committee, and the randomness of the topics counteracts its effectiveness as a dictionary: anyone trying to use this book to research a term paper or learn more about the early modern Hispanic world would not know what to make of it. Finally, the title is off-putting. I can only guess that the choice of a pretentious (and unexplained) German spelling of Lexikon for a book on the early modern Hispanic world comes from Levy's interests – her one monograph (2005) treats the influence of Baroque ‘propaganda’ on the Third Reich. Also the use of the arts and literature period term ‘Baroque’, which even many specialists feel has had its day, only serves to confuse such an interdisciplinary book when applied as an overarching period label. Rather than admiring its ‘protean qualities’ it would have been more helpful to interrogate the idea of ‘Baroque’, questioning how such an antiquated term might in fact interfere with our understanding of this rich, hybrid and cosmopolitan period.