Much of the conventional writing regarding Europe's urbanisation experience between the mid-nineteenth century and the First World War emphasises a persistent decline in religious belief, practice and piety among the populations of the continent's large cities. Anthony J. Steinhoff's new book, on the other hand, joins a growing body of recent scholarship critical of what he calls this tendency both to oversecularise the urban experience and to exaggerate the degree to which Churches succumbed to the corrosion of religious indifference. To enlarge our understanding of religion's response to the challenges posed by modernisation and urbanisation, Steinhoff calls attention to the Protestant communities of Strasbourg, the administrative seat, important cultural centre, and major commercial hub for Alsace-Lorraine following that region's annexation to imperial Germany in 1871. Based on his prodigious research efforts in French and German archives and among parish-level records, Steinhoff provides a meticulously detailed, intrinsically interesting account of Protestant experiences in one of Germany's medium-sized and religiously-diverse cities between 1870 and 1914. The result is a thoughtful, persuasive study that shifts attention away from the decay of traditional religious observance as measured by a decline in church attendance, baptisms and church-sanctioned marriages. He emphasises instead a qualitative transformation, an enhanced sense of confessional belonging within both the Lutheran and Reformed Churches that enabled them to adapt and even to flourish in the face of secular challenges and new, sometimes inhospitable urban conditions. This reshaping process, according to Steinhoff, was facilitated by innovative patterns of pastoral activity, the introduction of improved, more up-to-date forms of religious expression and practice that made worship more relevant to urban populations, and the creation of a web of mutual aid societies, charitable agencies and denominational newspapers better suited to meet the contemporary needs of Protestantism's larger and more diverse congregations. This revitalisation process, he argues, was encouraged by Protestant theological divisions and a religious pluralism that, when combined with denominational competition, afforded religious choices to match nearly every spiritual taste. Even governmental policy, Steinhoff adds, while intended to neutralise church opposition to Berlin's rule and to accelerate the assimilation of Alsace-Lorraine's inhabitants into mainstream German society, did much to make Protestant Churches more relevant and attractive to their adherents. State-mandated reforms for seminary instruction, for example, led to a growing professionalisation of the Protestant clergy and heightened respect for their pastoral activities. Post-1871 compulsory schooling, where religion occupied a central place in the curriculum, intensified sectarian differences, reinforced ‘religion's significance as a social marker’, and gave rise to a more religiously active population (p. 309). Unlike those moribund, dispirited institutions so often portrayed in conventional accounts, institutions that contributed little or nothing to the shaping of a modern, urban culture, Strasbourg's Protestant Churches, according to Steinhoff, helped to construct that city's modern identity where both ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ influences coexisted. Beyond the debate regarding secularisation and its impact on urban populations, however, Steinhoff also situates Strasbourg's religious experience within those standard controversies over Alsace-Lorraine itself, its French or German character, even the success or failure of policymakers to integrate the region into the larger German nation. As such, this book adds a new and important dimension to the complicated ‘relationship among religion, cultural integration, and national identity in Imperial Germany’ (p. 3).