As its title indicates, this collection of essays treats transregional borders, paying special attention to those of the Low Countries, in the early modern period. A particularly turbulent time in Northern Europe, the two centuries covered in these pages saw the borders and boundaries in this region shift constantly. Transregional history is a methodological tool that offers researchers a lens through which to analyze how borders worked in the early modern period and to demonstrate that while borders separated territorial entities from each other, they simultaneously connected them to each other. It encourages historians to explore what transpired in these border spaces and to follow the people and goods that crossed or moved along them.

The volume opens with Bram De Ridder and Violet Soen's introduction to transregional history. They outline how this methodological approach emerged from discussions about transnational history and articulate its usefulness as a heuristic tool. The eight case studies that follow are divided into three sections. Part 1 focuses on transregional families. Central to Raingard Esser's contribution is the transregional politics of elite cross-border families of the Duchy of Guelders. Sophie Verreyken focuses on the Arenberg dynasty and the marriage politics of two seventeenth-century dukes of Aarschot.

Part 2 groups three chapters that address cross-border circulation. Yves Junot and Marie Kervyn chronicle the episodes of destruction and reconfiguration of the francophone border towns of the Low Countries that marked the constant renegotiation of the loyalty of the French-speaking border provinces to the Spanish Habsburg dynasty. The next essay moves away from the boundaries of the Low Countries to a consideration of the Franche-Comté (County of Burgundy) as a border state. As Patricia Subirade confirms, the Franche-Comté was the recipient of Marian devotional cult practices originating in the Spanish Habsburg Netherlands. Additionally, during this period the Franche-Comté and the Catholic Canton of Fribourg constituted a cross-border zone: artists from the Franche-Comté, principally painters and wood sculptors, migrated to and settled in the Canton of Fribourg, and artists from Fribourg worked in the Franche-Comté. The third chapter in this section puts the focus on the internal politics of the Duchy of Jülich, and specifically the conflicts between the duke and the duchy's nobility. Studying the pamphlets that circulated during this period of dispute, Christel Annemieke Romein concludes that the nobility deliberately published pamphlets in Dutch and German, with the intention of securing the involvement of its ally, the Dutch Republic, should the necessity arise.

Part 3 comprises three chapters on border management. The first two chapters explore border management as it evolved during the years of the Dutch Revolt, also called the Eighty Years’ War. Victor Enthoven's contribution treats the management of trade on the Scheldt river, and Bram De Ridder's the strategies individual travelers devised when faced with cross-border challenges. In the concluding essay in this volume, Fernando Chavarría Múgica analyzes Louis XIV's aggressive and arbitrary border policies regarding France's shared borders with the Spanish Netherlands and especially with Spain along the Bidasoa river in the years following the peace treaties of Nijmegen.

This publication makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of transregional history, a field that the authors in this collection endorse. Taken together the chapters are representative of the varied issues that this historical approach can elucidate. The eight case studies are well researched and rich in detail. While the volume has its share of typographical errors, missing words, and mistranslations, they in no way detract from the overall readability of the texts or diminish the global value of this important research. Anyone interested in and curious about the challenges that boundaries and border politics posed in Europe during the early modern period will find reading this work rewarding.