This volume collects eleven short studies of the place of ethics in the Reformation as it shaped English and German contexts, originally presented at a symposium at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in September 2012. (The five German essays appear also in – somewhat uneven – English translation, so that on first sight the volume appears to include sixteen articles.) Considering ‘Ethics and identity,’ Peter Marshall suggests (p. 20) that the Reformation ‘undoubtedly raised pressing new ethical questions: how must I outwardly express my faith in Christ and his Church?’ He argues that responses were not directly related to doctrinal statements, so that a consideration of ethics may relativise the confessionalisation thesis. Stegman, in contrast, considering ‘Ethical instruction’, concludes that Lutherans understood believers to live ‘as disciples of Christ as led by the spontaneity of a love flowing from faith,’ whilst the Reformed view, which prevailed in the English Reformation, based Christian ethics on ‘a new obedience to the law made possible by the Holy Spirit’ (pp. 44–64). He concedes, however, that there was considerable common ground. Bernd Hamm focuses on the relationship between ‘Salvation, faith and action’ in the continental Reformation, drawing out the ethical implications of different theologies of justification. The evidence of ‘The ethics of the Radical Reformation’, argues Hans Hillerbrand, suggests that ‘differing Christologies can still lead to identical ethical conclusions’ (p. 128). Matthias A. Deuschle considers the practice of church discipline in two imperial cities, Schwäbisch Hall and Esslingen, and the attempts of the dukes of Württemberg to regulate the moral lives of their people through a series of church orders, culminating in the Große Kirchenordnung (1559). He concludes that ‘ecclesiastical moral discipline … served as an additional strengthening force for secular moral discipline’ (pp. 178, where ‘moral discipline’ translates ‘Zucht’). Alec Ryrie discusses the ethical dilemmas posed by exile, colonial settlement and mission: how, for instance, should exiles ‘balance their loyalty to their home country and to their new hosts?’ (p. 182) How did Protestant polity, by its nature decentralised, and the Protestant emphasis on the desirability of an informed faith affect Protestant mission? Returning to a comparative approach, Ashley Null considers the central importance of marriage for the shaping of Protestant public morality in Germany and England. Arne Dembek explores the reception of Luther's doctrine of the two regiments by the English Reformers William Tyndale and Robert Barnes, and its implications for how they understood the role of the king. Turning to the ethics of war, David Trim suggests that in the course of the Reformation ‘the norms of what was legitimate and illegitimate in the conduct of war changed’; moreover, a reluctance to accept religious pluralism ‘incontestably made wars even more perilous and lethal than they had been before’ (p. 298). David Scott Gehring discusses ethics and Anglo-German relations during the wars of religion, by which he means the wars that took place during the reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603), and not (as the term more usually implies) the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century, arguing that ‘the Elizabethan regime and the Protestants of the empire generally favoured a more religious or ethical approach to pan-Protestant diplomacy and interconfessional conflict, rather than a purely politique or self-serving one’ (p. 300) and that ‘the Queen and Princes understood themselves and each other as integral to a wider body, the Corpus Protestantium’ (p. 322). Finally, Thomas Kaufman discusses economic and social ethics and the introduction of poor chests and measures to regulate begging. Kaufmann focuses on the German context, but much of what he describes would be applicable to England also. This collection of essays makes a useful contribution to literature on the practical and ethical implications of the Protestant Reformation, although there is much more to be said, for instance on the teaching of ethics. The individual essays do not always offer the comparative element that the volume's title suggests, but taken as a whole the collection witnesses to the parallel development of ethical thinking across the multiple contexts of the Reformation in England and in the German lands, and to the importance of pan-Protestant identity.