This is a superb anthology of primary sources relating most directly to sixteenth-century Reformation movements. The initial selection is from the late fourteenth century and the final two from the mid-eighteenth century. The fifty texts here are wide and well focused. They are drawn from forty-one authors with diversities across many categories—birth, occupation, gender, religious orders, and “the rest married women of middling and noble rank” (xi). Fifteen are Roman Catholic with twenty-six coming from Lutheran, Reformed, and radical movements. King notes that genres include “treatise, lecture, pamphlet, letter, speech, devotional work, martyr testament, diary, memoir, and autobiography.” So this is as representative a group of documents as one can imagine, spanning 400 years and conveying essential insights that fueled Reformation thought.

In addition to the judicious selection of pieces, the book is clearly organized. It features perceptive, focused descriptions of each selection conveying its backgrounds and contexts, and providing insights for readers to help in understanding and comprehending the content and importance of the piece. This is an immense benefit. King gives true texture and brings her masterful teaching instincts to bear on the selections. Her annotations in themselves are an instructive guide through Reformation movements. The selections are short but well-focused. They are accessible in form, and thirty-eight of the fifty pieces have been newly translated by King from a number of languages. Spelling, punctuation, and diction of pieces that have appeared in earlier English editions (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries) have been modernized. The New International Version (NIV) has been used for biblical quotations in the narratives. In short, every effort has been made—and has succeeded—in providing a reliable, accessible, and truly useful anthology to serve a number of functions.

The book has ten chapters beginning with “In Search of Christ: Steps toward Reformation” and ending with “The Reformation Overseas.” This final chapter helps give the book its uniqueness since it moves beyond traditional Reformation sources to include Roman Catholic and Protestant overseas ventures for global mission. King notes that “the impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, which reconfigured the map of Christendom and the soul of the Western world, were not only European, but also global” (182). She points out that “these religious movements unfolded concurrently with European expansion abroad”—westward to the New World and eastward to Asia (182). King has included pieces from the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier, and the Ursuline nun Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation, as Roman Catholics. Guyart was the founder of the first school for girls in North America. She hoped to draw them into the Roman Catholic Church. Guyart’s piece is fascinating, portraying several of her Huron and Algonquin pupils in striking images to give an up-close experience of the difficulties experienced. Yet despite it all, Guyart concludes her letter to “a lady of quality” by saying, “Are we not of all people on earth the happiest and most fortunate?” (195). This was Christian faith in action. The Protestant pieces in this chapter are from Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a religious refuge and who rejected all limits on religious freedom; and Jonathan Edwards from his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (1736). As King writes, “On the edge of the wilderness, the European Reformation blossoms into the American Great Awakening” (xv).

The core of this book provides excerpts from primary sources that forged the Reformation movements. They begin with Wyclif and Hus and move to five pieces from Erasmus as background. Luther’s and his “lieutenants’” works follow, along with the Swiss response from Zwingli, Jeanne d’Albret, Calvin, and Beza. “The Radical Reformation” and “The English Compromise” are next, then “Catholic Reform and Renewal,” and “The Expanding Reformation” represented by Arminius, Boehme, Johanna Eleonora Petersen, Margaret Fell, and John Wesley, before the final chapter. This book has many excellencies. It can be highly recommended as a well-conceived collection of well-constructed presentations and as an eminently useful textbook.