This thought-provoking volume collects the papers given at the tenth spring conference on the Wittenberg Reformation, held at the Leucorea in Wittenberg in March 2012. As the title indicates, the papers focus on the manifold ways in which the civic and church authorities sought to impose social order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The volume focuses on orders – in the sense of codes – of various kinds: church and consistory orders, civic charters and edicts (‘Policeyordnungen’), codes regulating court life, the use of water, visitation instructions, school and university orders, dress codes and marriage law, the regulation of the poor chest and orders of burial. The range of English words used in this review to translate the German term ‘Ordnung’ represents a multiplicity which is present in the German terminology also: several authors open with a discussion of the complexity of defining this genre. Ordnungen of all kinds were used to define, order, control and shape social interaction, attempting, as the editors of the volume argue, to produce the ‘good order’ which was understood as God's desire for society. Ordnungen might actively seek to define social structures, or might focus rather on controlling or discouraging disorder, imposing penalties on those who contravened rules or social expectations. Dingel and Kohnle include examples of Catholic Ordnungen as well as Protestant, but the focus of the volume is on the Reformation, and as such it offers a fascinating insight into the challenges of defining not only order, but new structures of authority, particularly ecclesiastical.

The volume opens with Irene Dingel's essay considering the ways in which confessions of faith, such as the Augsburg confession, served to define confessional difference, concluding that the Confessio served as an ordering factor in politics, the Church and wider society. Sabine Arend highlights the level of detail in sixteenth-century church orders, which not only regulated what happened in church but also served to define societies. She concludes that Protestant ‘good order’ was explicitly intended to offer a counterpoint to the ‘ceremonies’ of the Roman Catholic Church (p. 47). As it developed, Protestantism brought with it a quite new church order. Exploring consistory orders, however, Arne Butt points out that they were intended to continue the roles and responsibilities previously exercised by the bishop, as a response to the need to develop new forms of church leadership. The assumption that the territorial ruler could act as bishop – albeit in Luther's view an ‘emergency bishop’ – was not yet widespread. As Heiko Jadatz and Stefan Michel show, episcopal visitation orders already existed in Catholic areas: Saxony's ‘Instruction to visitors' functioned as a prototype church order. Its development suggests that it took the Reformers and Protestant rulers some time to realise what level of regulation was needed.

Moving into the civic sphere – although that the distinction between ecclesiastical and civic order cannot easily be made at this period is part of the argument of the volume – Johannes Staudenmaier and Christian Winter consider Policeyordnungen, which sought to regulate society, and which were promulgated both by Catholic and by Protestant rulers. Staudenmaier shows that the bishops of Bamberg used this ‘worldly’ instrument to order church affairs. Winter concludes that this interest in modelling civic order according to divine order, which he observes in both Saxony and Tirol, can first be observed in the latter part of the fifteenth century. Orders existed for elements of society as well: Joachim Berger considers how courts were structured to ensure the proper regulation of business, control who had access to the territorial ruler and ensure that their consequence was properly protected. Members of the court were also intended to attend church, so such court orders often also included directions about representative services. It would have been interesting here to consider an example of a court in which the wife of the ruler was of a different confession, such as in Schaumburg-Lippe where limited provision was made for Reformed worship.

In an urban context, clean water was essential, and Susan Richter explores the way in which access to and use of wells and fountains were regulated. Clothing codes were intended to show a person's status, as Thomas Weller clearly shows. He does not, however, recount the disorientation experienced when Protestant clergy ceased to don clerical dress at the Reformation, as evidenced by Caritas Pirckheimer's Denkwürdigkeiten. Thomas Töpfer considers the way in which schools were considered to support the common good. School orders were often integrated into church order, although a few were stand-alone. Schools were clearly intended to produce good citizens, and German Protestantism is often heralded as providing the first access to universal education. Töpfer points out, however, that the ideal laid down in the order and the reality experienced on the ground could be two very different things – a critical question which might usefully have been engaged with in other essays. It is disappointing that Armin Kohnle's presentation of university orders does not engage with accounts of the tensions between different educational ideals (was the Arts Faculty to focus its teaching on rhetoric, moral and natural philosophy, or should it teach all students Hebrew and the catechism?), as shown over thirty years ago by Norbert Hofmann in his Die Artistenfakultät an der Universität Tübingen (Tübingen 1982).

The volume concludes with three essays considering marriage, burial and the poor chest. Christian Peters discusses the different ways of ordering the poor chest: were the running costs of the parish church, including the pastor's pay, considered part of the poor chest or an expense separate from almsgiving? Different orders took different views, but all were concerned to support the deserving, local poor. Henning Jürgens outlines the (complex) process of incorporating marriage into civil law, and shows that regulations governing marriage became steadily more complex. Here the emphasis was on controlling disorder, and in particular adultery. Finally, in the only English essay in the volume, Bob Kolb explores the way in which burial orders intertwined religious and theological concerns with those of hygiene.

These essays illuminate the complexity of implementing and ordering the Reformation, in a context which believed that social order was an earthly manifestation of divine order. My one complaint was the lack of an essay exploring these important philosophical and theological underpinnings. But, for those who read German, this is a useful and in the main fascinating collection.