This volume consists of papers presented at the 2017 St Andrews Book Conference. According to Howard Louthan's introduction, ‘Towards a literary culture of central Europe’ (pp. 1–14), the volume investigates whether ‘the books, pamphlets, and broadsheets that rolled off its presses [were] ever more than the sum of its parts’ (p. 1). There are four principal themes: geography and language; religion; learning and education; and the dynamics of cultural exchange and transfer (pp. 5–7). The book is in five parts. It is worth providing an overview of each chapter to see the impressive scope of the volume.

Part i covers confessional diversity and book production within a Hungarian and Transylvanian context. According to Graeme Murdock, the biblical culture of early Reformed Transylvanian and Hungarian-speaking churches was aural and symbolic (pp. 17–33). Maria Crăciun next detects a close and complicated relationship between the contents of Transylvanian clerical libraries and clerical identities (pp. 34–57). Borbála Lovas enriches our understanding of the European book trade by tracing the significance and reception of an anti-Trinitarian work, György Enyedi's Explicationes (pp. 58–84). In Radu Nedici's chapter on book production from 1750 to 1780 in the Greek Catholic Church in Transylvania, we learn of a cross-confessional print shop that contributed to a distinctive Greek Catholic identity (pp. 85–104). Lastly, focusing on the east of the Habsburg monarchy, Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux considers the post-Tridentine printing of Propers of saints, liturgical books that were characteristic of Central European Catholic piety (pp. 105–21).

Part ii investigates the Renaissance world of Central Europe. Jan Volek's examination of the Czech translation of Erasmus’ Latin New Testament underscores, for example, the popularity of Erasmus through the interaction between women's monasticism and humanist biblical scholarship (pp. 125–42). Martina Pranic next showcases the Renaissance Bohemian folly of Histories of Brother Jan Paleček, a text of popular tales about a court jester that has roots in an established humanist tradition that saw folly as integral to Christianity (pp. 143–57). While Magdalena Herman analyses the complex process of categorisation in four famous libraries in the Habsburg lands, which gives us insight into the way early modern cataloguers understood books (pp. 158–76), Marianna Czapnik inspects the collection of books by Polish travellers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, advancing our knowledge of the personal acquisition of books and their provenance (pp. 177–94). Zsuzsa Barbarics-Hermanik subsequently studies how propagandist books emerged in the face of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic Ottoman empire (pp. 195–212).

Part iii is about Martin Luther and the book. Whereas Grażyna Jurkowlaniec records adaptations of woodcut images in Luther's published sermons on the sacraments (pp. 215–44), Drew B. Thomas investigates Michael Lotter, a successful printer of Luther's works in Magdeburg (pp. 245–68). Analysing a pamphlet whose authorship was attributed to Luther, Jiří Černý next considers how a successful book market depended on the revision of a book's title page (pp. 269–87). Luka Ilić and Marija Wakounig explore the missionary zeal of a Croatian, Cyrillic and Slovenian printing house in Urach that spread Lutheran literature (pp. 288–306). Closing this section, Maciej Ptaszyński focuses on book culture in the process of self-fashioning among the Lutheran clergy of Pomerania (pp. 307–23).

Part iv deals with local communities and the book. Magdalena Komorowska argues that the growth of Catholic print shops in post-Tridentine Cracow coincided with Counter-Reformation reform (pp. 327–43). Still in Cracow, Katarzyna Płaszczyńska-Herman uncovers the existence of a thriving book industry on bound books from analysis of bookseller inventories (pp. 344–66). Following this, Olga Sixtová detects how the content of Prague Jewish publishing between 1590 and 1619 was influenced by factors such as, for example, scholarly ambition, audience demand, finance and imperial legislation (pp. 367–86). Heightening the importance of using quantitative methods in assessing Jewish books, Pavel Sládek hypothesises that learned Hebrew literature had little employment in wider Jewish society in comparison to, say, prayer books (pp. 387–410). Rounding this section off, Maria Piasecka studies the phenomenon of occasional literature in early modern Oels, paying close attention to the standard structure and individual innovation of this literature (pp. 411–31).

Part v is on print culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Inspecting Hebrew book approbata (letters of endorsement), Joshua Teplitsky points to the mutual dependence of the author-endorser relationship and the epistemological function of approbation within Jewish communities (pp. 435–50). Veronika Čapská's exploration of book circulation and consumption as well as heterodox literature associated with eighteenth-century noble families in Bohemia sheds light on the history of religious nonconformity under Catholic surveillance (pp. 451–71). According to Agata Paluch, when messianic movements emerged in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the mid-eighteenth century, rabbis in Brody attempted to supress manuscript material rather than printed books because they feared that the circulation of manuscript esoterica would subvert rabbinical authority (pp. 472–93). Finally, Liudmyla Sharipova considers overlooked translations of Thomas à Kempis's famous Imitation of Christ into the East Slavic languages, showing how a Catholic stream of piety became popular within Eastern Orthodoxy (pp. 494–512).

Like the methodology of David Wallace's Europe, this volume's expansive perspective of Central Europe moves beyond studies that work within politically and linguistically confined regions. It establishes that the international character of early modern printing contributed to a distinctive literary culture in Central Europe. The broad, unknown territory that the book explores is therefore justified. It persuasively shows that early modern literary culture developed in complex communication networks that transcended national boundaries. Moreover, each chapter is superbly researched, original and offers rich footnotes.

Three minor shortcomings exist. First, perhaps ‘Lutheranism’, ‘Reformation’ or some word should have been included in the section heading of part iii, for chapters xiv and xv (both learned contributions) deal with Luther's books indirectly. Second, part v is lopsided towards the eighteenth-century. Third, James M. Brophy's excellent contribution on the enduring importance of the hand press in modern politics might (although not necessarily) belong to a separate volume that deals with modernity. However, it signals potential research on the web of literary connections between pre-modernity and modernity. Overall, this volume represents a monumental work on print culture across Central Europe during the early modern period.