Antwerp in the first half of the sixteenth century was awash with heterodox religious sentiments. Its evangelicals organised conventicles, its presses pumped out illicit publications, its chambers of rhetoric performed dramas that openly challenged the Catholic Church, and its communities of foreign merchants included Portuguese ‘New Christians’ suspected of Judaizing. As Victoria Christman shows, all of this had the tacit consent of the city magistrates, who did their utmost to circumvent or at least mitigate the harsh anti-heresy edicts of Charles v. Why the magistrates shielded Antwerp's heterodox inhabitants is proclaimed by Christman in the title of her book: out of a ‘pragmatic toleration’ whose motivations, she argues, were purely economic and political: to promote the prosperity and defend the autonomy of their city. Their toleration was accordingly selective, extending only to ‘their most (usually economically) valuable inhabitants, while allowing the less valuable to be harshly prosecuted’ (p. 11). The Anabaptists, in her argument, were the exception that proves the rule: of scant economic value, they were proactively prosecuted and promptly executed by the local court – partly as a diversionary tactic to protect others. Through this and other forms of ‘pragmatic toleration’, the magistrates sought constantly ‘to appease their emperor without disturbing the social and mercantile health of their city’ (p. 2). Not that they succeeded always, but it required heavy pressure from Brussels to bring the magistrates to execute several non-Anabaptists in the mid-1540s. Christman shows that Charles v’s regent, Mary of Hungary, was personally responsible for much of this pressure, and that she was more implacable than Charles in her stance against ‘heresy’. Christman's book concurs with other recent historiography that finds religious toleration being practised earlier and more widely than once was thought; indeed, Christman shows that economic arguments for toleration were being made in Antwerp as early as the 1520s. Her findings are also in line with recent work that sees the practice of toleration as not dependent on any principled commitment to tolerance as an ideal. At times, though, Christman goes to an unwarranted extreme in reducing the magistrates’ motivations to economic and political interest. Her chapter on the chambers of rhetoric suggests that a different kind of value – the honour and prestige of the city – motivated Antwerp's magistrates to shield the city's unorthodox rhetoricians, and one might ask whether this was not a consideration too in their shielding of others, for example printers and publishers. It is not clear either whether it was economics that weighed most heavily in the magistrates’ refusal to protect Anabaptists, who were perceived as uniquely violent and seditious. Not everyone whom the magistrates protected was well-to-do; in fact, one gets the impression that the magistrates tried to protect everyone except the Anabaptists, which suggests that ultimately their toleration may not have been so selective after all. Nevertheless, Christman's concise book offers much new insight into the early history of religious toleration in the Low Countries.