There is something almost intimidating about The Luther Effect in Eastern Europe. From a purely physical standpoint, this is a huge book, more reminiscent of undergraduate college biology or chemistry textbooks than of a history offering. There is a purpose to the volume's volume, however, and that purpose is readily apparent as soon as the pages are opened and leafed through. This is a gorgeous-looking work, and the artistic heart and soul that went into its creation and presentation—in the form of old photographs, full-color drawings and paintings, and such—stares at us from every glossy page. There was a definite effort to make this book look good. However—as always—it behooves us as scholars to follow that old adage, and not judge a book by its cover alone, when examining a work of history.

Here, I'm happy to say, the verdict is almost equally as positive. Written to celebrate and commemorate the fifth hundredth anniversary of the Reformation's beginning, the work—in many ways—serves as an in memoriam to a once vibrant—politically, intellectually, and socially—religious reform movement that, when taken from the perspective of the present day, has left little to no trace in the ultra-Catholic Poland or the equally strong Orthodox lands to its east. And yet once, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the currents of time, faith, and politics, aided by strong sympathies among the burgher and aristocratic classes, stood ready to overturn those places’ established religious order and usher in Luther's interpretation of the Word. It is that moment, and the lingering moments after, that form the basis of the Luthereffekt. Since, in many ways, the work is a paean for Luther and his reform, the reasons for its failure (besides organized and systemic persecutions) are but slightly touched upon, perhaps the most glaring—though, in a sense, understandable—omission. And that, in effect, is the essence of this impressively constructed offering: those scholars in search of new research, reappraisals, and cutting-edge theoretical approaches will have to look elsewhere, as the work has an encyclopedic, almost museum quality to it. Luther's effect on Eastern Europe is presented, packaged, described, and explained, often in fascinatingly minute details—nothing less, and nothing more.

Geographically the work does service to Central and Eastern Europe, with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth front and center (about a quarter of the essays included deal with either the Polish Crownlands or the grand duchy specifically), but with the exegeses expanding over the kingdom of Hungary, principality of Transylvania, Bohemia, the Baltic lands, and, when dealing with the twentieth century, Ukraine and Czechoslovakia. This is a wide net to cast, but the essays remain on point throughout, giving the whole work a welcome focus that many other current compilations sorely lack. The heady interplay of politics and faith is mostly reserved for the beginning of the story, while the instruments of the new religion's transmission (the printing press, universities, burghers, nobility), the visual language of the transmission (images, architecture, furnishings), and its memory, both material and cultural, follow.

And yet when heartbeats are raised as questions of modern nationality and historic land claims come to the forefront, those more emotionally vulnerable among us might perceive a tint of controversy emanating from the page: there are passages some could interpret as providing a rationalization for a sense of lost German cultural ownership of Eastern territories. These strands come close to the surface, for instance, in Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg's essay on Lutheran national assumptions and cultural positioning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where, to be honest, such strands are expected to form the whole basis for discussion. Likewise, Anna Mańko-Matysiak's essay on Polish representations of Luther could be made out to stir the echoes of cultural dichotomies. Doubtful if any of this is the author's intent—the point here is to provide a historical context to illuminate some of the current issues rather than to stir them, but nationalistic sentiment has been known in the past to have been stirred by even less than the words of historians on a page.