“Man is the measure of all things,” a philosopher once opined, which is a concept very much at the heart of this offering in the continuing Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition series, especially when it comes to defining such murky geopolitical notions as Central Europe at the time of the Reformation(s). Knowing full well that conceptual borders have shifted considerably since 1989, and continue to shift still, the editors chose to become the measures of things themselves and posit their voluminous research in an amorphous geographical locale better called perhaps Greater Central Europe, or, to be even more precise, every place east of Western Europe and west of Muscovy. Bringing this up is not a critique, however, but rather an appreciative nod to a book bringing together such disparate medieval and early modern lands as the Bohemian Crownlands, the heterogeneous vastness of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Habsburg domains, and Hungarian and Transylvanian regions both free and under Ottoman suzerainty: namely, lands that have so far been less than blessed with detailed anglophone analysis, especially pertaining to the time of the Reformation(s).

The historic specificity of the narratives presented within gives one hope that the age of treating Central Europe (or Eastern Europe, or South-Eastern, or … however you want to call it) with broad and heavy brush strokes of (mostly) negative pre-1989 comparisons to Western European standards of historic development has been happily jettisoned, and that the liminal space in which Central European scholarship in general and Central European Reformation scholarship in particular has been brewing for the last twenty-five years or so has finally produced an outline that stands opposed to outdated pre-1989 models and the equally shaky indigenous-nationalistic vantage points that replaced them. The present volume is a magisterial, insightful, and replete collection that approaches the tangled web of Central European Reformation(s) from a variety of contextual focal points. Of course, just like the history of the region it tries to cover, this is a necessarily conflicted work: conflicted about its geographic definitions as well as the nature and composition, and even the plurality, of the movements it presents. The story covers the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and nearly as many types of Reformations as geography; here there are nods to the Hussite, urban, noble, orthodox, late, humanist, radical, and Catholic Reformations in wide panoply of analysis that tries to define common elements as well as preserve disparate meanings and national varieties.

Equally conflicted is the volume’s engagement with existing historiography. A particularly favorite preoccupation of one of its editors, Howard Louthan, is the substitution of nationalistic accounts—often ingrained in the historic spirit or soul of the country discussed—with more modern and objective analysis. An example of the former would be the opinion of some critics that Poland’s Reformation was nothing more than a “grand intellectual adventure” (202) of the nobility that played itself out when the nobles discovered something else to tinker with. This (almost) dismissal of the Reformation in Poland is corrected here, but no final word on the nature of the movement in the commonwealth is offered. This might frustrate the reader from time to time, as one can find the experience similar to digesting an early Socratic dialogue—the work is best at telling the reader what the point in contention is not, without ever saying what it actually is.

This is one drawback to an otherwise outstanding volume that finds itself out of necessity in confrontation with past scholarship. Nearly every chapter presents reappraisals necessitating engagements, but due to length and focal constraints deals with it in a somewhat perfunctory way; a case in point is an early chapter on the Hussite movement and its eventual appropriation back into the Hapsburg Catholic fold following the 1436–37 Basel Compactata. It’s a good chapter, well researched and presented, and one that offers a reappraisal of traditional approaches, but its engagement with preceding Marxist historiography and the Czech nationalistic narrative is minimal at best. A section of primary and secondary literature that follows each chapter is a good addition, but is not enough. The work almost seems to naturally beg, welcome, and require additional historiographic discourse.