Henry A. Jeffries and Richard Rex, eds. Reformations Compared: Religious Transformations across Early Modern Europe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. 304. $105.00 (cloth).

The coherence and overall thrust of the chapters in this volume demonstrate both the powerful central message of the Reformation as well as its varied impact across different geographies and cultures.The editors, Henry A. Jeffries and Richard Rex, have assembled an international team of expert scholars whose twelve substantive chapters assess the course and consequences of the Reformation in lands as diverse as they are similar.Each author focuses on two or more areas (sometimes quite near, sometimes farther apart) to offer an internal comparative framework for each chapter, but the overall comparisons across the chapters drive home the impression of religious and political heterogeneity with which we have become familiar over the past generation.Indeed, scholars now generally recognize that there was no single Reformation, that all was contingent on time and space, and that the older national and insular narratives of "the English Reformation," for example, are no longer tenable.The editors' introduction lays out the general aims of the volume and offers some good food for thought regarding the early decades of the sixteenth century: "The very fact that the [Catholic] church was shattered so dramatically and so profoundly by a maelstrom triggered by a young professor based in a tiny university that had been founded hardly a decade earlier in an obscure little town shows that late medieval Catholicism was far more vulnerable to challenge than anyone could have imagined" (5).In the subsequent chapters, readers are treated with geographically specific cases of the Protestant Reformation, historiographical synopses, and suggestions for further reading; readers looking for treatments of the Catholic or Counter-Reformation will find much of value here but may also find themselves looking elsewhere.Christoph Volkmar's chapter grounds the discussion in Saxony with a comparison of Ernestine/Electoral and Albertine/Ducal lands.Arguing against historical determinism and for the unexpected turns of the Reformation, this chapter "represents Europe's dilemma in a nutshell" (20).Amy Nelson Burnett then shows how the Swiss Confederation "poses in miniature the question" of the whole volume because of the Confederation's political organization and complexity (42).Particularly welcome in her discussion is the variety of Protestant opinion across the cantons because, after all, Basel was not the same as Bern or Zrich.Moving slightly east, Howard Louthan examines the cases of Austria and Bohemia, illustrating "the limitations of [an] approach where national blinders have frequently screened out the networks and connections that existed" (62).The same applies to linguistic limitations.Heading further east, Bla Vilmos Mihalik considers the multiconfessional variety in Hungary and Transylvania, where varieties of Protestantism,