Historians of religion in colonial North America have paid insufficient attention to the middle Atlantic colonies. In fact, except for Randall Balmer's A perfect babel of confusion (1989), no book-length study on the subject has been published in the last three decades. This reason alone makes Transatlantic pieties a significant contribution. This book is a collection of biographical essays detailing the lives and ministries of fourteen Dutch-American clergy during the period between 1628 and 1876. Each written by an internationally known scholar, these reveal much about religious life in the middle Atlantic colonies, with some attention to its legacies in the early national period. The real strength of the book, however, lies in its cumulative insight, helpfully summarised in Dirk Mouw's introduction to the volume. The immigrant Dutch clergy in the middle Atlantic colonies did more than preach and teach in the churches. They maintained discipline, thus preventing church life from becoming disordered; they served as ‘cultural mediators' who passed on the norms, values and knowledge of the old world to the new; and contributed significantly to the ‘batavianisation’ of the region, the process by which Dutch culture came to dominate the middle Atlantic colonies, in spite of English imperialism in the eighteenth century (cf. Balmer). These biographies illustrate interesting patterns in the lives of these clergy which reflect broader developments in the religion and culture of the middle Atlantic colonies. For example, after the English takeover of New Netherlands in 1664, clergy were less often sent to the colony than attracted to it, mainly by a desire for greater autonomy. Further, a preponderance of these clergy were themselves shaped by the Nadere Reformatie – Dutch Reformed Pietism – and cultivated that ‘theological style’ in their ministries. Thus these biographies afford, as the editors claim, ‘fresh perspectives on familiar historical events'. Unlike many collections of essays, this one includes contributions that are consistently well-researched and well-written. And the introduction is especially helpful in drawing the reader's attention to the larger issues at stake. However, despite the fact that the editors claim that their selected subjects were ‘spread evenly over time’, nine of the fourteen clergy treated in this volume died before the Great Awakening. While this imbalance addresses the historiographical neglect of the few previous studies on the subject, it appears to short-change the story of the Dutch clergy in the critical periods of increasing Anglicanisation and revolution. None the less, this is a much-needed and most welcome contribution to the history of religion in the middle Atlantic colonies. In addition to providing a valuable interpretation of religion and culture in the colonies themselves, it is a model of transatlantic scholarship that should open up new opportunities for comparative study.