Ulrich Lehner's book presents a detailed description of early modern Catholic devotional theology and the various methods ‘charismatic church reformers’ (p. 165) advocated to support the spiritual renewal of individual believers. Lehner insists that ‘for early modern Catholics, church reform began with personal reform and by trying to live and remain in a state of grace’ (p. x). He is clear that the book is based on ‘normative resources’ and that he is not undertaking a study of the reception of these ideas. The book is thorough and deeply erudite while remaining clear and accessible. Lehner's presentations of early modern spiritual texts are especially lucid, as he explains devotional writings about the priesthood, sermons, sacraments, family, lay religious movements, prayers, symbols and images and the cults of Mary and Joseph.

One focus of these presentations is on the optimistic and transformative character of much of the Catholic devotional theology of the early modern period. Sermons and catechism lessons, Lehner argues, aimed at transforming human character by appealing to emotions and imagination. Catholic reformers particularly focused on the family – ‘the resources that the church poured into families were massive’ says Lehner (p. 83). Devotional materials highlighted the mutually supportive nature of marriage and the importance of instilling virtue in children. Lehner recognises that the goal of taming the passions, especially sexual passions, had a strong disciplinary character as well. For example, priests were expected to supervise pregnancies in their parish, in order to assure the provision of baptism and to identify possible abortions or infanticide.

Lehner emphasises throughout the book that there was always a dialectic between fear and mercy in the devotional theology. For example, confession could be used to instill a fear of damnation, but most instructions to confessors emphasised moderation and leniency, what Lehner calls ‘confession as individualized pastoral care’ (p. 100). If pastors were encouraged to use sermons to motivate their congregation through a fear of hell or the devil, the theology of prayer was more positive, encouraging affective prayers that gave the faithful hope and supported spiritual growth.

In a chapter on Mary and Joseph, Lehner further works through the dialectic between fear and mercy. The cult of Mary and Joseph ‘espouses the optimism of post-Trent spirituality – that God loved humanity and offered plentiful ways of salvation. Both devotions contributed to tilting the dialectic of fear and mercy … in favor of the latter’ (p. 155). Marian spirituality, Lehner further argues, ‘connected easily to ancient native myths’ (p. 145) in the Americas and thus contributed positively to Catholic missionary work. He further emphasises that praying the rosary was an accessible devotional practice that ‘assured Catholics of a benevolent mother in Heaven’ (p. 143). These arguments are quite plausible, but Lehner's didactic and prescriptive sources provide little evidence of the reception of these devotions. This is one of a number of places in the book where Lehner drifts away from his professed focus on the goals of spiritual theologians to assert (or speculate) on the reception of their works.

There was another tension in this devotional theology, between encouraging and supporting laypeople's religious initiatives and maintaining clerical control of religious life. Lehner's presentations of lay movements point out the ways confraternities ‘allowed laypeople living in the world an affiliation with a religious order and its spiritual benefits and enabled them to imitate the monastic lifestyle they venerated within the modest means of their own households’ (p. 87). This spiritual engagement did not just occur in Europe, but across the world as well. Yet every confraternity and sodality was required to remain under church control. Lehner qualifies his generally positive assessment of lay movements within Catholicism by pointing to the efforts of Catholic thinkers to foster ‘intentional submission’ (p. 79) of women and rein in overly independent female devotional movements. This led, of course, to resistance, from Jansenist women, lay sisters in the Philippines, Teresa of Avila in Spain and others.

Unfortunately, Lehner's excellent explications of a wide range of devotional writings is at times undermined by an argumentative and sometimes inaccurate historiographical framing. There was certainly a time when ‘most historians have characterized Catholic reformers as “backward-looking” or “conservative” based on a Protestant understanding of reform, infused with anachronistic political vocabulary from the nineteenth century’ (p. 6). However, this understanding of Catholic reform has been superseded over the last forty years or so by a wide range of historians of religion, particularly in the Anglophone world, but also in French and German historiography. One example of Lehner's focus on this issue is his repeated criticism of the French historian Jean Delumeau, whose influential books on a Catholic ‘pastoral of fear’ were published in the 1970s and 1980s. These dated arguments detract from the strong positive points that The inner life of Catholic reform makes about Catholic devotional theology and its contribution to a religion ‘that celebrated a salvific egalitarianism that transcended social and ethnic boundaries’ (p. 11).