Forswearing nationalist historiography, the edited collection Transatlantic Religion: Europe, America, and the Making of Modern Christianity seeks to “uncover exchanges, collaborations, and networks,” connecting the Old World and New and thereby contributes to a growing literature on the transnational dimensions of nineteenth-century religion (6). But more than illustrating the substantive linkages between American and European Christianity—though this they admirably do—the book models the practice of transatlantic religious history.

Tilted towards theology and intellectual history, the book's ten chapters are still topically and methodologically diverse. They analyze newspapers, class notebooks, travel diaries, and unpublished correspondence. Some authors explore the influence of German higher criticism, Dutch neo-Calvinism, and even the Danish theologian Hans Martensen. Others reconstruct networks: Philip Schaff's mentorship of Arthur Cushman McGiffert; Lord Acton's travels in the United States; the republication of news within Protestant print culture; connections between Anglican converts and Roman Jesuits. Still others focus on transnational controversies surrounding August Tholuck's purported Universalism and France's 1905 disestablishment.

Markedly cohesive and consistently interesting, these chapters demonstrate how attention to transatlantic connections bursts exceptionalist narratives and sheds new light on old narratives. They also model the steps for such research: work in foreign sources and archives; knowledge of diverse national contexts; the reconstruction of networks; and sensitivity and caution in tracing intellectual influence.

Unfortunately, however, women and black Christians are rarely mentioned, though these groups were never removed from the North Atlantic world. Just consider the lives of Elizabeth Ann Seton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and James W. C. Pennington.

Yet the book's somewhat narrow dramatis personae should also be seen as a sign that there is still much work to be done on nineteenth-century American and European Christianity. In this endeavor, Transatlantic Religion will be an excellent resource for historians seeking to recover this transnational tale.