This book, a collection of thirteen papers resulting from a conference held in Dornburg near Jena in April 2010, marks a turning-point in the history of research on Martin Luther's ‘Tischreden’ (table talk). On the one hand, it stands at the end of a great tradition, for it contains the last paper of the late Helmar Junghans, the Nestor of Luther-research in the GDR, who died shortly after the conference. The text in the volume reproduces unchanged his article on the history of the editions of the table talk. (This gives his contribution the character of a swan song, but it would probably have been helpful for readers of the volume if the editors had also reprinted Junghans's classic 1980 paper on the table talk, which is referred to many times throughout the volume.) On the other hand, the volume collects together many valid arguments and important source material in favour of a new attempt to face the editorial challenge which the material of the table talk poses because of the complexity of the manuscript sources. Constituting not a single work by Luther, but the product of several collections of notes taken during conversations with Luther not only at his table, but also on many other occasions by known and many unknown interlocutors or witnesses, it is impossible to reconstruct an ‘original text’ with established editorial techniques. After the six-volume edition within the Weimarer Lutherausgabe (WA.TR i–vi, 1912–21) by Ernst Kroker and two later volumes (WA xlviii, 1927, and WA lix, 1982), so many additional manuscript sources have been found that a new editorial enterprise has become necessary. With the new possibilities created by electronic publishing, the new findings could be combined with the WA edition into an even more complex picture of the transmission. Wolf Friedrich Schäufele not only discusses these problems, but also provides a new list of no less than 110 manuscripts, twice as many as had been known to the WA editors. Additional information about sources in Gotha, Jena and Dessau is brought to light in the papers of Daniel Gehrt, Stefan Michel and Ernst Koch respectively. Co-editors Volker Leppin and Katharina Bärenfänger demonstrate new hermeneutical and methodological approaches, while Barbara Müller, Alexander Bartmuss and Jörg Zimmer locate the table talk as a genre in the tradition of classical colloquia and fabulae. Finally, the papers of Thomas Wilhelmi and Margit Glaser discuss philological problems facing a new edition. The volume convincingly demonstrates the need for a new edition of this very popular part of Luther's heritage – unfortunately, it is marred by an unusually large number of copy-editing flaws.