Letters sent home to family members from someone far away can provide great insights into how immigrants adapt to a new country or culture. British historian Das’ book uses these and other documents to tell the stories of how immigrants to England in the 16th and 17th centuries found their new homes and how those leaving England encountered their own new worlds. This often charming and insightful collection takes on both serious and mundane issues: Bring “two little wooden dishes to make up half pounds of butter,” a Flemish hatmaker writes to his wife as she prepares to join her husband in London. The English, he tells her, use “all pigs fat.” About 30,000 of the hatmaker’s fellow Protestants across Europe joined him in England during this period, driven by “forces of confession, conquest and commerce over which they had little control.” These displaced persons moved into the unknown, sustained by hope that “the future, however uncertain, was still worth moving towards” and that perhaps among the lard, there might be a pat of butter. On the flip side, those receiving the displaced persons are also in a state of “unknowing,” a destabilizing feeling that can bring with it hostility, suspicion, and fear. Sometimes the presence of the “mobile stranger” is seen as a threat to a community or nation. “In such cases,” the author writes, “mobility becomes not a vector of hope, but a trigger for violence.” For example, a brief but violent riot on Easter Sunday in 1517 was sparked by a sermon condemning the “aliens and strangers” who “eate the bread from the poore fatherless children.” Meanwhile, English Catholics, no longer at home in England, were fleeing in opposite directions—some to other European countries, some to American colonies. As for any parallels to our time, Das writes that the stories she includes “are not instruction manuals for the present….All they reveal is that these questions are neither new nor settled.”