In the years following the Reformation, plurality of religious practice and belief posed an ontological threat to social order in the Holy Roman Empire. Despite this, regimes of coexistence emerged and consolidated, formally and tacitly, throughout the sixteenth century. How they did so, and how they disappeared, are the questions that David Luebke's book seeks to answer, through an examination of the largest ecclesiastical territory of the Holy Roman Empire, the Westphalian prince-bishopric of Münster. Chapter i lays out the complex political topography of Münster's confessional dynamics, where a relatively autonomous aristocracy kept the bishop's more autocratic tendencies in check, and the violent legacy of the failed Anabaptist kingdom (1534–5) served to warn Catholics and Protestants alike of the dangers of confessional hostility. Chapters ii–vi constitute deep dives into rituals and religious practices across the region. Where other historians have examined rituals as markers of confessional division, Luebke argues that rituals like baptism, marriage and burial were rites of passage for the whole community. As such, he stresses the multiplicity of and variation between the minutiae of ritual practices as conducted by parishioners and celebrants. In the case of baptism, for example, ‘priests' freewheeling acceptance of all infant baptisands, regardless of their parents’ beliefs, was both widespread and of long standing’ (p. 52), while different denominational beliefs posed no obstacle to marriage. Luebke pays close attention to the theological as well as the social implications of such liturgical differences. In following patterns of accommodation to liturgical differences, he focuses down on Münster's clergy. A compelling section within the chapter on ‘Spaces’ examines their reading practices. The heterodox mix of books owned by Catholic and Protestant clergy provides a clear view of the lateral way in which doctrinal viewpoints developed. At the same time, there was a clear shift towards the end of the century both within the kinds of books being published, which emphasised doctrinal unity, and the patterns of ownership, which were more confessionally coherent. This pattern rehearses the overall trajectory for Hometown religion. Diversity between and within confessions became more problematic over the course of the century. In 1601 Bishop Ernst decreed that only candidates who had confessed their sins to a Catholic priest and received the eucharist according to the Catholic rite would be eligible for public office, whether elective or appointive. In 1623 Prince-Bishop Ferdinand revoked the corporate privileges of towns. Henceforth, the benefits of citizenship depended upon conformity to post-Tridentine Catholicism. In the wake of the Thirty Years War, a mono-confessional regime calcified. Or did it? In his conclusion Luebke describes six ‘modes’ of coexistence – hybrid, subcutaneous, entrenched, liminal, coequal, concentric – and their afterlife. As his complex terminology only serves to reinforce, the ‘elasticity of social being’ fails to conform neatly to any model. Belief and political system remain fitful components of early modern community. Ritual, in all its many guises, remains key to understanding it.