Over a hundred years since the pope condemned the religious reform movement this volume collects contributions on aspects of the modernist controversy from specialists known throughout the scientific community, along with essays by younger historians. Gnosticism (1907), a youthful work by the leading light of Italian modernism, Ernesto Buonaiuti, was investigated by the Congregazione dell'Indice and it is to this debate that Annibale Zambarbieri devotes his essay; while this throws new light on areas of cultural open-mindedness within the Roman Congregation (the Jesuit Gismondi is one example), it also serves to clear up certain episodes in Buonaiuti's own life. Claus Arnold, who edited the volume together with Giovanni Vian, goes into the tortuous drafting process of Lamentabili sane exitu and the impact that this had on the Roman Curia. Arnold documents the disgruntlement that this decree produced among the die-hards and Pius x, and how this last would shortly be moved to voice his vituperation more forthrightly in the encyclical Pascendi. Giovanni Vian's contribution is to show in full detail how the French and Italian bishops toed the pontifical line of censure here; on a pastoral level it would lead to a drastic clamp-down on areas of free-thinking within the Church. Not even the utmost caution would contrive to keep such areas open, as Giacolo Losito convincingly shows in an essay on Laberthonnière and his ‘Annales de philosophie chrétienne’. The fetters would tighten still further in 1910 when the antimodernist oath was introduced. The various drafts of this are central to Judith Schepers's article. The climate of suspicion engendered by Pascendi is also well represented by the case of Monsignor Fernando Rodolfi, bishop of Vicenza, which forms the subject of the closing essay by Raffaella Perin. Perin relates how Rodolfi was hounded for his doctrinal leanings and goes on to describe in rich detail both the hard-line antimodernism of the Vicenza clergy and the Roman support for these sentiments in the person of the pope himself and Cardinal Gaetano De Lai. As the editors rightly comment in their short introduction, the modernist issue had delayed after-effects. Subsequent pontiffs (except for John xxiii) would continue the refrain, especially in the defensive campaign which would later rekindle ‘that minute pervasive call to discipline and rallying round the Holy Father that were the deliberate or partly uncontrolled effect of the early twentieth-century bout of wide-ranging strictures’ (pp. 11–12). Not for nothing does the subtitle of the volume allude to the ‘consequences’ of such condemnation, and not just interpretations and documentation. As the editors are well aware, it not only whipped up a climate of fundamentalism and intolerance, but left issues of hermeneutics, theology and doctrine in vain expectation of an answer down to the present day.