There have traditionally been identified three major views on music in the early days of the Protestant Reformation. Music in Martin Luther's Wittenberg emphasised simple melodies while slowly moving towards the vernacular, Huldrych Zwingli's Zurich eschewed liturgical music altogether, and Jean Calvin's Geneva lay between the two extremes by limiting liturgical music to simple, vernacular settings of the Psalms. If Strasbourg and Martin Bucer are mentioned at all in these discussions, it is only to assert their influence on Calvin. Trocmé-Latter's study of music in the early decades of the Reformation in Strasbourg moves beyond a simple affirmation of the city's influence on Calvin, however. He reveals that the city's flourishing printing industry allowed for a number of competing views to be promoted not only from pulpits but in books and proposed liturgies. He paints a portrait of a city and group of reformers who had to wrestle with the three competing views of liturgical music: Lutheran, Zwinglian and exclusive – or nearly exclusive – psalmody (ordered by the Tetrapolitan Confession and adapted by Calvin). Reformers and city officials also had to determine what to do with secular music, as polemical and bawdy songs continued to proliferate, despite efforts encouraging people to sing instead the godly songs emanating from Reformed church circles.

Trocmé-Latter brings together a wide variety of resources, including printed editions, manuscripts and contemporaneous accounts to illuminate his discussions of liturgical and secular music as well as performance practice. Given such a wide variety of content, the work could have been better organised to clarify the arguments and to integrate the supporting evidence in ways that moved the narrative forward. It is easy to get lost in minutiae and descriptions of books and songs, losing sight of the overall flow of the discussion. However, the summaries at the end of each chapter do bring clarity and focus to Trocmé-Latter's observations. He also could have done a better job of defining terms. For instance, he does not define what he means by ‘hymn’ or ‘psalm’, and he seems to use them interchangeably. This makes statements such as the one on p. 127 difficult to parse: discussing the crossover between liturgical and devotional music (and vice-versa), he writes, ‘we know that hymn-singing in church [in Strasbourg] was taking place at this time’. While the footnote only makes mention of Psalms and scriptural songs and hymns, the structure of the argument seems to suggest that newly composed devotional music was making its way into the church.

Stylistic and editorial issues aside, there are two significant arguments that are not particularly convincing, based on the evidence that Trocmé-Latter provides. First, on pp. 90–1, he argues that Bucer seems to have made a ‘U-turn’ in his approach to the liturgical use of Latin, and then he proceeds to set up a false dichotomy in which Bucer had to either accept or reject the use of Latin absolutely. Based on the quotations provided, however, Bucer did not object to the use of Latin per se. Rather, he believed that Latin was not imbued with any supernatural power, and therefore he argued that Latin texts should be translated into the vernacular if they were to be used in worship services, so that all could understand them. Second, on p. 188, Trocmé-Latter suggests that popular songs disappeared from Strasbourg in the 1520s, on the basis of a significant drop in printed collections of popular songs during that decade. It could be argued, however, that popular music continued to exist through the 1520s, and that the reduction in printed collections is evidence not of silence having fallen over secular singing, but of commercially-canny printers who were afraid of upsetting reformers such as Bucer. After all, given the market for sacred works, which Trocmé-Latter repeatedly highlights, the resulting loss in business from being banned from printing sacred works was likely to be rather more significant than any gains to be made from printing popular songs.

The opening and closing chapters on ‘The Church and the “wonderful art” of music’ and ‘The 1541 Gesangbuch and Strasbourg's external influence’ are lively and include a number of helpful discussions. In particular, the final chapter reveals the many ways in which Strasbourg influenced Geneva (and hence, as is pointed out, France and Scotland), England, and a number of German cities. The extensive appendices – though containing little new material – draw together a wide variety of resources that are helpful in illuminating the book's analyses. Overall, this work begins to fill a lacuna in Reformation musical studies by highlighting Strasbourg's major impact on liturgical and extra-liturgical music. Because of the city's many printers, it became a place where the three differing approaches to liturgical music were tried and tested over the decades explored here. This brings nuance to our understanding of the debates about liturgical music that erupted in cities in Germany, Switzerland and the Low Countries following the Reformation.