Cornelius Hoen's (d. c. 1524) short treatise Epistola christiana (published posthumously in 1525) tends to feature as a ‘back-story’ in accounts of the Abendmahlsstreit. Hoen's supporter Hinne Rode materialises (as it were) in Zurich in 1523, and hands a manuscript copy of the Epistola to Zwingli. Zwingli thereupon concludes that ‘est’ means ‘significat’, while Hoen and Rode fade obligingly into the background again. In contrast Bart Jan Spruyt focusses on the Epistola itself and, in doing so, fleshes out the complex relationship between the eucharistic thought of the pre-Reformation period and the birth of Reformed theology. Spruyt accepts Albert Hardenberg's claim that the treatise was not, strictly speaking, Hoen's own work. Rather it was a vetus scriptum found among the papers of Jacobus Hoeck, dean of Naaldwijk, and the Epistola is this text together with Hoen's interpolations. The extent of these interpolations is moot, though Spruyt attempts some demarcation: allusions to Luther and Erasmus, for example, were Hoen's own. More broadly, however, the treatise's content finds multiple correspondences in medieval discussion of the eucharist – heterodox as well as orthodox, scholarly as well as popular. Thus the elusive vetus scriptum itself might have been a collection of Wycliffite or Hussite arguments against transubstantiation circulating in the fifteenth-century Low Countries or a document attempting to refute them. Whatever the case, the wide availability of the arguments to which the Epistola appeals makes it difficult to pinpoint its sources, or indeed its influence, in any straightforward way. So, for example, the well-known comparison of the eucharist with a wedding ring (often attributed to Zwingli) had already been used by Bernard of Clairvaux and Wessel Gansfort in a sense perfectly consistent with medieval orthodoxy. It was also deployed in support of the differing eucharistic theologies of Zwingli, Bucer and Brenz. Spruyt suggests that the treatise's most distinctive contribution to later Reformation discussion was its use of Matthew xxiv.23 against the alleged local presence of Christ in the elements. The treatise also appears to have taken Wycliffite and Hussite eucharistic thought in a more symbolic direction than its authors intended. Spruyt suggests that in both respects one can see the influence of the treatise on Karlstadt, Bucer and Zwingli. Spruyt's book ends with new critical editions of the Latin text of the Epistola and the German translation published in 1526. Although the Latin Epistola has previously been republished in modern editions of Luther's correspondence and Zwingli's works, Spruyt argues that previous editors have mistaken the origins of the first editions and their interdependence. There is, for example, a (somewhat polemical) attack on Thomas Kaufmann's recent identification of Bucer as the editor of the 1525 Strasburg edition, though Spruyt concedes the possibility that Bucer may be the principal author of the German translation. Spruyt's is a densely argued and annotated piece, and its conclusions are sometimes quite tentatively drawn, but such rigour is a useful warning against overhasty attributions of ‘influence’ in the history of theology.