Promoting the Counter-Reformation in Vienna before the last two decades of the sixteenth century was a politically hazardous and frequently frustrating task, given the strength of Austrian Protestantism, the irenicism at Ferdinand i's confessionally mixed court, and Maximilian ii's Lutheran affinities. The importance of the Spanish and Bavarian connections in furthering the Counter-Reformation in Austria and the activity of the Jesuits and the papal nuncios have received much scholarly attention, but, as Fulton convincingly argues, more work needs to be done to investigate the part played by Catholic officials such as the Aulic Councillor and Bavarian protégé Georg Eder. A Bavarian subject by birth, as he was keen to emphasise, and of modest but impeccably Catholic origin, Eder's subsequent career illustrates the opportunities for social advancement through service to the Catholic cause: Eder was supported by the Jesuits while studying law in Cologne, where he formed a life-long friendship with Petrus Canisius. His transfer to Habsburg service seems to have been owed to the patronage of the von Salm family, and in particular to the intercession of the bishop of Passau, Wolfgang von Salm. Eder's attachment to the Jesuits may have facilitated this transition, and it accounts for his commitment to Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Fulton draws on a wide range of court and episcopal records from the Bavarian and Viennese archives and some of the Jesuits' German correspondence, and she explores in depth Eder's numerous pamphlets and voluminous correspondence with the dukes of Bavaria to demonstrate how Eder deliberately undermined the uneasy peace with the Protestant Estates by his religious polemics and headlong attacks on the politique party of ‘court Catholics’. In this he had the support of the Bavarian court, whose uncompromising Catholicism Eder espoused. His crusade against heresy and ‘court Catholicism’ culminated in the publication in 1573 of a particularly controversial pamphlet which incurred the emperor's wrath, as Fulton argues, primarily because he perceived it as a challenge to his authority. One could have added that Eder's assault on moderate Catholicism came at a time of heightened tensions with Rome in the wake of the emperor's botched candidacy for the Polish crown. While his links with the Wittelsbachs became much closer after this episode, Eder's fall from grace in Vienna in 1573 was short-lived: he was allowed to resume his duties as Aulic Councillor within a fortnight of being chastised by the emperor, he retained his academic posts in the University of Vienna and he continued to publish on religious issues, all of which suggests that his dismissal was intended as a shot across the bows to warn him, and perhaps by implication his interfering Bavarian patrons, and as a conciliatory gesture towards the Austrian Protestants. Fulton's close-up of ‘Eder's Vienna’ fills in a number of gaps in the existing research on the beginnings of the Counter-Reformation in Austria, but there are just a few minor points to be mentioned by way of criticism, for example concerning the structure of the argument in chapters i–iii on pp. 1–37, in which the subject of the study is introduced in a rather roundabout way with quite a few tantalising allusions that are not followed up. A few printing errors have crept into the book titles in the footnotes and bibliography. However, these are minor quibbles that do not detract from the value of an instructive case study in which the fruits of extensive archival research are presented in a convincing fashion, and with much engaging enthusiasm for its important subject.