There is a strong Lutheran tradition in Eastern Europe that reaches back to the very start of the Reformation, which is obscured by the fate of many Lutheran communities in the last 150 years, when the forces of intolerant nationalism decisively changed the religious map. The Luther effect in Eastern Europe, published to mark the Luther quincentennial, is a handsomely-produced work designed to bring knowledge of these communities to a general readership. As it shows, East-European Lutherans deserve close study. The survival of Lutheranism across five centuries in the absence of state support despite at times considerable persecution is striking. Such resilience is hard to explain within the paradigm of confessionalisation, the dominant model within the historiography of Lutheranism, which stresses the importance of the close relationship between Church and State.

That model works well for Scandinavia and the Empire, where princes instituted a Reformation from above, protected in the Empire by the principle of cuius regio eius religio sanctioned by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. Across Eastern Europe, however, apart from in ducal Prussia and Courland, princes did not adopt Lutheranism, and frequently persecuted it. The essays in this collection, show how and why Lutheranism survived and flourished in pockets across Eastern Europe. The definition of Eastern Europe is broad, including the Habsburg lands, Poland, Lithuania and the eastern Baltic; some of the general essays at the start therefore struggle to provide depth in looking at individual topics across the region, given the necessarily restricted length.

There are several excellent essays, however. Bömelburg stresses the influence of Melanchthon in Poland, analyses irenic tendencies in Polish Lutheranism and charts the gradual process after 1650 by which a faith in which nationality had not necessarily mattered became one in which it mattered considerably. Jähnig summarises Königsberg's role in the spread of Lutheranism through the publication of religious material in Polish, Lithuanian and Old Prussian. Kowalská presents the fluctuating relationship between Lutherans and Calvinists in Hungary, and Rasche challenges Postel's thesis that the Reformation was a key element in the decline of the Hanse. Haberland's discussion of printing is rather descriptive, but Bahlcke contributes a sparkling essay on book-smuggling, which says much about how printed matter was brought to the faithful despite official disapproval. Welcome attention is paid to art and architecture: Harasimowicz analyses a range of former Lutheran churches, and Kodres contributes a thoughtful essay on Lutheran architectural forms in the eastern Baltic. Wetter considers how the Transylvanian Lutheran Church preserved pre-Reformation elements in vestments and church furnishings. The final section considers the fate of Lutheranism in the twentieth century, and discusses how its memory is kept alive.

The confessionalisation paradigm is directly addressed by Nowakowska in her excellent account of how Sigismund i of Poland-Lithuania faced the Lutheran challenge. She investigates why Sigismund, who issued a series of draconian edicts condemning Lutheranism, did little to implement them. He did intervene effectively in Danzig in 1526, executing thirteen of the movement's leaders, but thereafter failed to back up his ferocious rhetoric. Indeed, a year before he led his troops into Danzig, Sigismund had created the first Lutheran state in Europe, when he allowed Albrecht Hohenzollern to secularise the Teutonic Order and establish the duchy of Prussia as a fief of the Polish crown.

Nowakowska's response to this apparent paradox is original, thoughtful and persuasive. A scholar of the late medieval Church, she roots Sigismund's attitude in a late medieval understanding of the Church universal, in which unity was more important than rigid doctrinal orthodoxy. In Danzig he acted not to enforce orthdoxy, but to quell what he saw as a social rebellion. Once the council had been purged, he was willing to turn a blind eye to Lutheran preaching and worship influenced by Lutheran ideas. Thus Nowakowska avoids the trap of reading the rigid denominational divisions of a later age back into the 1520s and 1530s. The early Reformation was not a Protestant phenomenon: it was a dispute about how best to reform the universal Church in which many among the clergy were unclear as to where they stood.

Nowakowska's book is based on substantial archival research – her work in the diocesan archives is of particular value. The chapter on Sigismund's diplomatic manoeuverings in a world of rapidly-changing religious affiliations is excellent, as is the chapter on the response of the Polish Church to Lutheranism. The latter starts with Maciej Drzewicki, bishop of Włocławek, who, in 1529, after spending a year enthusiastically rooting out Lutheran-tainted clergy from his diocese, sent a side of smoked ham to Luther together with an effusive letter in which he expressed his desire to debate the Gospel with him. Luther was understandably cautious in his equivocal reply, but the story nicely encapsulates the theme of the book: it was not just Sigismund, but the Polish Church as a whole that was unsure about how best to approach the Lutheran conundrum.

Nowakowska's pioneering work will transform debates about the early Reformation in Poland-Lithuania. She argues that this was a pre-confessionalisation age, in which other forces were at work. She might have devoted more attention to the organs of state. Sigismund ruled a realm in which the monarchy still enjoyed substantial powers, but in which the judicial system was highly decentralised. Any persecution of Lutherans depended on the attitudes of local elites. The republican-minded middling nobility, suspicious of the exercise of arbitrary royal authority, was inclined to protect noble liberty and therefore to favour freedom of conscience over the enforcement of orthodoxy. Royal edicts did not impress the szlachta. If the sejm had passed a law, judges and officials might have been more inclined to obey it; but such a law was unlikely to pass.

Nowakowska's fresh approach and reconsideration of tired stereotypes will, however, raise the level of debate about the early Reformation in Poland. Taken together, these books challenge the outworn nationalist framework in which so much of the religious history of eastern Europe is written. Both show that the confessionalisation paradigm cannot explain everything about Lutheranism.