This volume has a portrait of the young Martin Luther on its cover, but it is not the Luther of the German lands. With a Czech inscription describing Luther's encounter with Charles V at Worms, this pamphlet illustration introduces a collection of essays that focuses on Bohemia-Moravia, Poland-Lithuania, Hapsburg Austria, and Hungary-Transylvania. It encompasses the hundred years of Hussite Reformation following Jan Hus's martyrdom in Constance in 1415, the eastern European aspects of the Catholic Reformation after the Council of Trent, and the Uniate-Orthodox schism in Poland-Lithuania following the Union of Brest (1595–1596), the eastern European impact of Erasmian biblical humanism, and the Christological disputes in Poland and Transylvania that gave rise to Socinianism. In other words, these articles provide an entry to the under-studied east central European religious outbreak that both preceded and succeeded the better-known Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican Reformations. In its later phases, the east central Reformation was in constant contact with Erasmus, Luther, Bullinger, and Calvin, and the Jesuits were the ultimate victors in most of east central Europe; but it was no mere echo of the Reformation further west. The single chapter in which Luther figures prominently is, in the view of this reviewer, the most disappointing in what is, on balance, a very good book. Rudolf Schlögl, in his chapter entitled “The Town and the Reformation as an Event,” expresses himself in terms of linguistic theory, too often in an idiosyncratic, opaque personal language.

There are no fewer than twenty-three authors of the volume's seventeen chapters; and many of them acknowledge that they are providing a provisional assessment of scholarly discussions still in progress. The better-known Catholic and Protestant Reformations in west central Europe can work with long established critical editions of all sorts, which is not the case with the east central European Reformation. The presence of the Soviet Bloc from 1945 to 1991 placed a damper on study of the subjects in this volume, filtering interpretation of the region's past through a Marxist lens that, while it focused on genuine revolutionary accompaniments of the east central European Reformation, hindered searching the regional archives for additional sources. Since the 1990s, archival research in the former East Bloc has exploded, and the several national Reformations are increasingly integrated with one another by scholarship.

The history of the Czech Reformation, from its beginning in 1420 until it was closed down by Habsburg absolutism in the late 1620s, is the most thoroughly studied aspect of the east central European Reformation, but the emphasis of this scholarship is changing. In the present volume, the continuing vitality of the Czech Utraquist Church throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is stressed. Utraquism preserved its own identity and was not absorbed into the Protestantism spreading from Germany after the 1520s. Also, the sectarian identity of the Bohemian Brethren is underscored; these Czechs avoided government office and war long before such ideas arrived with Swiss and south German immigrants in the late 1520s. Similar “Anabaptist” ideas predominated among Polish Anti-trinitarians in the later sixteenth century, but not among the Unitarians in Transylvania. Lutheranism tended to concentrate among pockets of east European Germans, such as the Saxons in Transylvania or the Polish Prussians. Correspondence of non-German Polish and Hungarian aristocrats with Melanchthon, Bullinger, and Calvin gave a Reformed identity to those estates in the late sixteenth century. Anti-trinitarianism emerged from the mixture of Reformed Protestantism and Biblical humanism in Poland and Transylvania, as the decrees of early ecumenical councils lost authority and different explanations were advanced about the connection between John 1 and Jesus's life on earth. Only very extreme Unitarians reduced Jesus to the level of a human prophet. Orthodox believers in the eastern parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth experienced a flourishing of lay confraternities that seemed to echo the anticlericalism of the early German Reformation; but the Orthodox were ill-equipped to respond to the theological disputes of their Protestant and Catholic neighbors—their only recourse was to appeal to the first seven ecumenical councils (325–787). Ultimately, a split among the Orthodox in 1595–1596 created the Uniate church which combined Catholic doctrine and Orthodox practice, a body which made a major contribution to later Ukrainian identity. With the seventeenth century came the victory of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. In Austria and Bohemia-Moravia, Habsburg absolutism suppressed a Protestant population in the early seventeenth century, but the strength of Protestantism among the aristocracy in Poland and Hungary temporarily secured religious freedom for all confessions. There the victory of Catholicism in the course of the seventeenth century was gradual and peaceful, the achievement of Jesuit education, which converted the new generations of the elites, as well as patronage by Catholic monarchs that gradually transformed the aristocracy from local notables into courtiers.

The story of the Reformation in east central Europe is one of re-Catholicization under powerful monarchs. Around 1600, Bohemia-Moravia, Austria, Hungary, Transylvania, and Poland-Lithuania were in the majority Protestant, certainly in the towns and among the aristocrats; the state of the peasantry was more nebulous. By 1700, only Transylvania remained multi-denominational. Alexander Schunka notes: “What seems to have been a rather exceptional feature in Western Europe, namely the co-existence of more than one Christian denomination within the same territory, was the rule in large parts of Central Europe” (260). This is accurate for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but not for the seventeenth. Conversely, in the seventeenth century, religious pluralism emerged in the west, first in the Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth century, followed in the mid-seventeenth century by England, and soon after by English North America.

An especially valuable specialized chapter on “Visual Cultures” by Maria Crăciun and Graźyna Jurkowlaniec contrasts the visual cultures of Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Christianity, showing how much Catholic imagery remained in Lutheran churches, albeit with changed doctrinal significance. The authors also show the gradual transition from visual images that aimed at doctrinal instruction to those that sought artistic effect.