I want to start this review with a nod to Umberto Eco's 1980 world bestseller, The Name of the Rose, which was an allegory for the ultimate failure of Catholic authority to enforce reading discipline on its flock, despite draconian threats and dire punishments, and despite the enforcers' own unshakeable self-righteousness. The enlightened detective hero of the novel, William of Baskerville—played in the movie version (1986) by Sean Connery—is both witness to and agent of this unraveling. No surprise, actually, that Eco came to me while reading Jeffrey Zalar's excellent new study of Catholic lay reading praxis in the “long” nineteenth century, in which he charts its course from pre-Revolutionary (and pre-Säkularisierung) Germany to the beginning of World War I. Both of these books, Eco's and Zalar's, have, if you will, the same “plot”: they both explore the gaping disparity between the Pietätsprogramm of the Catholic Church's reading policies and the far more anarchic reality of the actual reading diet of Catholic laity—and even Catholic clergy.Extensively using primary sources, Zalar's book debunks the myth that the so-called (by Protestants) Black Terror was an effective instrument of book discipline within Germany's Catholic population. This is the notion, memorably developed in Friedrich Nicolai's account of his journey through Catholic Germany and Switzerland in 1781, that the church hierarchy, from the bishops at the top down to the village priest, rigidly controlled the reading intake of millions of the devout. Zalar singles out several recent studies for sharp and articulate criticism for still toeing this old line of interpretation, for example, Steffi Hummel's book on the Borromäusverein (Böhlau, 2005), speaking in this context of “the seduction of the uncorrected milieu thesis”—“milieu” referring here to the tight control of the environment in which the cultural behavior of the Catholic Volk was supposed to have taken place (226–27). According to Zalar, this “seduction” comes about in part from an overreliance on “elite sources in Catholic book history” (11), in part due to the presumed lack of an empirical basis to know what German Catholics actually did read. This acceptance has changed in recent years, thanks to a perspectival shift in the study of book history and a related new willingness to seek out and take into account evidence from the consumer side of the reading equation, rather than accepting presumptively assertions of the success of clerical prescription and proscription.A fundamental error of both the historical Church and of traditional book historians is the belief “that banning books would spoil their allure,” when in fact, as both Eco and Zalar make clear, “the apple gleams because it is forbidden fruit” (72). Analogous to Aristotle's lost second book on humor—the book poisoned by the evil librarian Jorge of Burgos in The Name of the Rose—Zalar recalls that in the thirteenth century, “condemnations of Aristotle's treatises on natural philosophy, impossible to enforce, led to waves of their translations that played no insignificant role in the rise of western science” (72–73). The same mechanism played out in the nineteenth century: the more the Catholic hierarchy demonized corrosive liberal journalistic writing and escapist fiction—and the authority of science—the more attractive all of these became to Catholic readers: The sin of Adam and Eve, that primordial surrender to the temptation to know through consumption, endured as a chronic spiritual malady throughout the history of Catholic reading. In the bustle of modern markets thick with enticements, it went viral. (73) Other reviewers of this book have highlighted its importance for general, European, and German historians—for example, Eric Yonke in German History; Oliver Logan in European History Quarterly; and Iuliu-Marius Morariu in Astra Salvensis: revista de istorie si cultura (Romania). Yet as suggested above, Reading and Rebellion also contains a wealth of information and insight specifically for library and book historians: first of all, as a case study in how to apply the methods of modern book history—many of which look at library, Lesegesellschaft (book club), and bookseller records—to an actual historical problem; but also to document the importance of evolving reading behavior as compelling evidence for a change of mentalities, which in turn impacts popular belief and behavior as a movens in history writ large. Citing research by Derek Hastings, Zalar details a negative—and very chilling—example of the importance of understanding reading, the case of how Heinrich Himmler's own log of his reading tastes evolved from “Christian Nächstenliebe to racial Judenhass” (11–12).This book actually delivers far more than the title suggests, for example, by providing an excellent parallel study of Protestant book culture since Luther and Melanchthon, juxtaposing this Protestant Kulturprogramm throughout the book with the nineteenth-century Catholic Pietätsprogramm, which Zalar traces back to Augustine and the earliest bishops, fighting Arianism and other heresies. He also riffs on the alimentary allusions unfolding around the word Geschmack (taste) and the significance of words and word pairs such as gall and honey, milk vs. solid food within Catholic ideology.A final observation: not enough that this book is extraordinarily well researched, as documented in the extensive bibliography of primary sources.1 No, the author's scholarly writing style is also very elegant and readable rather than pedantic and boring—the quotation above (“The sin of Adam and Eve …”) serving as a small Kostprobe (taste!) of what readers have in store when they pick up this book. Overall, Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany is highly recommended to students of nineteenth-century German history, not just in a confessional context.