The subtitle to Amy Nelson Burnett's new monograph on the early development of the eucharistic controversy is significant. Right away, Burnett promises to do more than just offer a new interpretation of the early years of the controversy that permanently divided the Protestant movement in 1529. She also promises that the book will make a methodological argument about how historians should approach the study of ideas, including religious ones. She advocates a very painstaking and deeply contextual approach to the primary sources that charts – as much as is possible – the passage of ideas from one author or group to another. In this approach, Burnett acknowledges the influence of what she calls the Cambridge school of early modern political thought, that is, the work of scholars like Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. She also draws from recent developments in cognitive theory, asserting that no mind is a blank slate, and while some ideas may be original to one person or author, he or she always develops them in the context of preexisting ideas and traditions.

The main thrust of the monograph is a thorough analysis of the pamphlet literature on the eucharist between the years 1521 and 1525, not only the pamphlets by the leading reformers – Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli – but also those by lesser known (and some virtually unknown) theologians, in order to chart the progress and development of different ideas about the eucharist across Germany and Switzerland in these early years. Burnett has also published a separate volume of her own English translations of the eucharistic pamphlets of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, the early reformer in Wittenberg who fell out with Luther over the eucharist and whose critical role in the controversy and in the development of Reformed eucharistic theology has not, according to Burnett, been properly recognised. These two books offer students and scholars of the Reformation not only valuable, innovative conclusions about this key event in Reformation history, but also the opportunity to follow through with their own analysis of many of the primary sources that led Burnett to those conclusions.

In addition to the methodological argument, Burnett makes some very important arguments about the early years of the eucharistic controversy and the development of Reformed eucharistic theology. Three of the most important are as follows. First, that Huldrych Zwingli and the Basle reformer Johannes Oecolampadius both came to reject Christ's bodily presence in the bread and wine on their own, but that Karlstadt was crucial for the development of their (and thus Reformed) theology in two ways: his publication of several pamphlets on the subject in 1524 forced Zwingli and Oecolampadius to, in essence, go public with their rejection of the corporeal presence, which they had been discussing with supporters in private but had not published; and Karlstadt's writings deepened the theology of the Swiss leaders by providing them with more arguments against the corporeal presence that they adopted in their writings. The second main argument is that the primary influences on Karlstadt's eucharistic thought were Erasmian humanism and late medieval heresy. Specifically, Burnett goes into much detail tracing the ideas of the Bohemian Brethren (a subgroup of the followers of Jan Hus), who, in turn, took some of their arguments against the corporeal presence from John Wyclif and the Waldensians, as well as from Hus himself. Some of these ideas ended up in the writings of Karlstadt, Zwingli, Oecolampadius and others. Burnett, however, does not just stop at showing that the ideas are the same; in order to verify the link, she demonstrates conclusively how these sixteenth-century reformers came into contact with the writings of the Brethren. Burnett's third argument is that the controversy cannot be seen as two unified, static sides opposed to each other. The sacramentarian side – those opposed to the corporal presence – was very diverse, and not all the authors agreed with each other on all points; the Lutheran side was also somewhat diverse, but not to the same extent, due to Martin Luther's singular authority. This argument leads us back full circle to Burnett's methodology, for the diversity of the authors’ opinions stemmed, in part, from the diversity of their sources. Burnett's efforts at tracking down these sources are as valuable a contribution to intellectual history as is her analysis.

Readers will be hard pressed to find much to criticise in these books. Burnett's prose is clear and precise; the translations are rendered into English modern enough to read easily, but not so modern as to sound anachronistically colloquial. The analysis in the monograph can occasionally be hard to follow, but that is due more to the intricacy of the research than to any fault of the author's. Thus, instead of the usual paragraph at the end of a review containing criticisms, this review will end with one more example of Burnett's method and argument at work. Burnett demonstrates how many Reformed authors adopted Karlstadt's arguments in their writings without acknowledging his influence. She shows this not only for leading theologians, like Zwingli and Oecolampadius, but also for lesser ones. For example, an author by the name of Conrad Ryss zu Ofen published a pamphlet in 1525 entitled Answer to the highly learned Doctor Johann Bugenhagen … concerning the sacrament. In it he put forward many of Karlstadt's arguments again the corporeal presence. Burnett points out that this pamphlet, which was printed in Augsburg, Zurich and Strasbourg, became more popular than any of Karlstadt's own, but that because Ryss did not attribute Karlstadt's ideas to him, they became associated more with Zwinglianism. This is just one example of the fascinating insights that these books offer into the circulation of ideas in this crucial phase of European history.