Historians who write about the use of the Bible among German Pietists and Anglophone evangelicals face a difficult task: how to write about a book so often used to turn readers away from their own historical context. The fourteen essays collected here make a start at that task. Staying close to published and unpublished Bible commentaries, devotional guides, and Bible-related publishing ventures, the essays show that evangelicalism did not emerge from the awakenings of the 1730s alone but was nurtured from the beginning by the Bible reading practices and writings of early German Pietists, who were themselves influenced by earlier Dutch critics of the Bible and English Puritans (4). Ryan Hoselton's concise, carefully cited introduction to the collection is excellent. Crawford Gibben, in an especially good essay, contends that John Owen's habit of casting himself as a simple, unlearned reader led primarily by the Spirit, “enabled the habit among evangelicals of reading the Bible apart from confession or exegetical tradition” (76) and in reaction “to the claims of ‘enlightened’ [contemporary] critics” (86). Robert E. Brown does an admirable job tracking the political thought of Richard Baxter and Cotton Mather in their commentary on key biblical passages like Romans 13 (104). Ruth Albrecht, after describing the way that Anna Catharina Scharschmidt and Johanna Eleonora let scripture interpret their life experience and vice versa, notes that they nowhere “highlight their positions as women” (161). Hoselton's essay “Early Pietist and Evangelical Missions” points out that “minimalistic, conversionist-oriented exegesis failed to apply Scripture to confront the sins of colonialism” (123). Such Bible reading habits may illumine the lived religious experience of individual readers but little beyond that experience, leaving an interpretive shadow that some of the contributors to the collection seem more aware of than others. This matters because, as Hoselton comments in the introduction, early German Pietism was not made obsolete by later German higher criticism of the Bible; it was made essential with the global spread of evangelicalism (4).