Adapting its title from Elizabeth Eisenstein’s famous study on printing, Religion as an Agent of Change is a compilation of a dozen essays that were originally delivered as papers at a conference at Aarhus University in August 2011. Like Eisenstein’s bold and provocative study that argued print was the critical agent of change in the early modern period, the Aarhus conference considered the transformative potential of Christianity from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. As Per Ingesman states in the introduction, historians have long highlighted the negative impact of Christianity on society through phenomena such as bigotry, persecution, and war. The conference conveners, in contrast, sought to feature the positive contributions of the Christian faith. This is the central thread that ties the volume together. These essays share three additional characteristics as well. First, they examine Christianity not as a theological system or worldview but as a cultural dynamic. Second, they place the emphasis on Christians as a people or a New Israel living together in society. Finally, each of the essays addresses questions from one of three important eras in the history of Christianity: the Crusades of the High Middle Ages, the Reformation period, and the age of Pietism.

The volume actually begins with the historiographical reflection of Hugh McLeod, emeritus professor of church history at Birmingham and editor of an important volume on World Christianities. McLeod effectively sets the tone of the entire enterprise by presenting an overview of the writing of religious history from the 1960s forward. We turn then to a grouping of three essays on the Crusades, a period that at least in the popular imagination remains the nadir of an understanding of Christianity as a positive force for change. Christoph Maier opens this section with a broad-ranging discussion of what actually constituted a crusade and concludes by questioning the usefulness of the term as a category of historical analysis. In contrast, Jonathan Phillips and Felicitas Schmieder offer specific case studies, the former examining the impact of the Crusades on medieval Genoa and the latter investigating the connection between the crusading phenomenon and Christian mission to the East.

The middle section on the Reformation is arguably the strongest in the volume. Ingesman was able to enlist three senior figures in the field. These essays are the most cohesive as well, as they all reflect on the common question of religion and identity. Thomas Kaufmann, the great authority on German Lutheranism, takes as his point of departure the confessionalization model of Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling. In contrast to Schilling and Reinhard who sought commonalities between the three major confessions, Kaufmann emphasizes difference as he presents a wide-ranging overview of a distinctive Lutheran confessional culture that took root in the sixteenth century. Ole Peter Grell turns to the Reformed community with an essay that builds off his most recent book, Brethren in Christ. Here he considers the impact of persecution and exile on the formation of a pan-European Calvinist identity. Finally, Peter Marshall takes us to England. He argues that the Tudor program of state confessionalization ultimately failed. As its monarchs tacked back and forth across the religious spectrum, the kingdom’s subjects mastered the lessons of outward political and confessional conformity while developing an interior space of private conscience. The book’s closing section explores the transatlantic world of Pietism with discussions on topics ranging from an assessment of Pietism’s impact on German society to its contribution to the evangelical movement in the Atlantic world.

I have my doubts concerning the effectiveness of this collection as a whole, at least as it addresses its central question. Though the public may clamor for either a simple apology or general condemnation of Christianity and its global legacy, historians wisely shy away from broad judgments. To their credit, the volume’s authors are uniformly nuanced in their approach to this question. But individually or as clusters, especially the trio of essays on the Reformation, Religion as an Agent of Change offers an intriguing series of articles worth studying on their own terms.