For the past couple of decades, a small but growing community of scholars has attempted to integrate the history of early modern Scandinavia into a broader narrative of Northern Europe—a North that encompasses the British Isles, the Baltic rim, and the Scandinavian dynastic states. Overall, the trend has been a boon for historians of Scandinavia, and it certainly has enriched our understanding of early modern Britain as well. Scandinavian history was and is dismissed as being peripheral, but in the new Northern European scholarship it has found a much-expanded audience.

Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives, a collection of essays drawn from two workshops held in Durham and Bergen, comes from this endeavor. The twelve essays in this volume explore a number of interpretive threads, conveniently explained in the book's thorough introduction. A few of those threads—the role of the diaspora of religious refugees in spreading and shaping the Reformation, the local adaptation of foreign religious ideas and practices to suit regional sensibilities, the role of language in expanding and constraining religious change, the connection between confessional change and state-building—are particularly obvious and run through nearly all of the essays in the collection. For the most part, the essays draw comparisons and explore connections between two broad regions: Britain and its periphery—including Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Shetland, and Orkney—on the one hand, and the Oldenburg dynastic state—centered on Denmark, its subordinate kingdom Norway, and Norway's vassal state Iceland—on the other.

That is a lot of ground to cover, and for the most part, Northern European Reformations does it successfully. Many of the chapters are true gems. Morten Fink-Jensen's essay about Denmark's influence on Protestant worship and church organization in England and Scotland is an illuminating and engaging study of the role of cultural exchange in the Reformation. Laura Katrine Skinnebach's excellent piece on medieval prayer books in Reformation Denmark and England demonstrates the persistence of medieval religious practices and expressions of piety long after the establishment of state Protestant churches. Raymond Gillespie's essay on “Reformations in Print” in Ireland and Norway is an exemplar of well-executed comparative history. Two essays (by Peter Marshall and Charlotte Methuen) on the Reformation in Britain's northern periphery—the Orkneys and the Shetlands—provide truly fascinating glimpses into the challenges of imposing a new way of worship on distinctly different cultures—in the case of the Orkneys (Marshall), the introduction of a way of worship grounded in Scots, while the Orcadians themselves still spoke in the Norn tongue. John Ødemark and Henning Laugerud's chapter on superstition and popular religion also stands out as worthy of special mention.

As is often the case with workshop-derived anthologies, though, the quality of the individual essays is uneven. Some essays, otherwise excellent, do not fit in well with the rest. In more than one chapter, the comparative element seems forced. That is to be expected, perhaps, when scholars stray outside their areas of expertise to draw parallels with—in this case—Scandinavia, but it can result in lopsided comparisons. It is also to be expected that comparative essays written by non-Scandinavian scholars will rely heavily upon English-language literature, missing the still substantial body of Nordic scholarship that is not written in English. Errors of omission lead to sometimes questionable interpretations. Nordic historians might be surprised to learn, for example, that the Oldenburg monarchs of the Reformation era “aspired to absolutism” (49), a judgment that is applicable to neither Christian III nor Frederik II, let alone Christian IV. It is mildly hyperbolic to claim that Danish Lutheranism in the era of Niels Hemmingsen—a disciple of Melanchthon—was “radicalized” (84), or that Scandinavia experienced a “decline in learning” in the wake of the Reformation (164). The near-complete omission of the Vasa dynastic state—Sweden, Finland, and the growing Swedish Baltic empire—is a more serious problem. Despite the title, this volume's focus is squarely on Britain, Ireland, and the Oldenburg state.

Taking into consideration the intrinsically episodic and uneven nature of scholarly anthologies, Northern Reformations is still a solid contribution to the historiography of the early modern North and to English-language literature on the Scandinavian Reformations.