Luther, conflict, and Christendom. Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West. By Christopher Ocker. Pp. xii + 526 incl. 13 figs. Cambridge–New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. £24.99 (paper). 978 1 316 64784 4

The book's principal focus is on German-speaking lands, which is understandable in the light of the author's background, but the wider canvas of European and international significance is never neglected. Once established, the Reformation's two major orthodoxies, Lutheran and Reformed, ensured permanent conflict not just with one another and with the third orthodoxy, Catholicism, but with Jews, Muslims and eventually with the forces of secularism. By presenting the Reformation as an ‘unresolved controversy’, a provisional and incomplete process, Ocker is able at last to disentangle it from the big claims traditionally made for it by American historians such as Bainton: the idea that Luther and his followers ushered in religious liberty and the separation of Church and State never really rang true.