The four books under review examine different aspects of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study of communal responses to religious reform has become a significant aspect of Reformation research in recent years, and it has served to emphasize that religious reform was a process rather than an event, and that it was a collective concern, which involved families, neighbours, and all those in guilds and congregations at all levels of society, both in town and village. Study of the community in history has, however, raised some problems, principally over definition, for communities were not institutions or geographical areas, but a complex web of overlapping social, economic, and cultural groups, within which there was a range of shared and conflicting interests. Despite the value placed by rulers and magistrates upon unity, communal life was a constantly mutating mix of conflict, concession, and change, to which the Reformation added a dynamic and volatile new dimension. Although the authors here use the notion of community, they attach to it a variety of interpretations, and one might wonder whether such a malleable term has value as a tool for historical analysis. In fact, these works show such flexibility to be a strength, for in the Reformation, beliefs were only gradually defined, and levels of support were variable and unpredictable. Interpretations which recognize the changing secular and spiritual worlds inhabited by the people of the period are particularly useful for providing new insights into how religious reform was experienced by the majority of those living at the time.