Church reform, understood in the narrow sense of the institutional adaptation of ecclesiastical structures in response to pastoral, social and political challenges, was a central concern of late twentieth-century church historians, particularly in Britain. The six-volume series which these volumes inaugurate (later we are promised Social welfare, Education, Piety and modernity and Liturgy, architecture and the arts) expands the agenda by defining church reform expansively as ‘the conscious pursuit of renewal with the aim of adapting organised religion to the changing relations between church, state and society’, and pursues it across ‘Northern Europe’ (defined here as constituted by the British Isles, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia) and all its Christian traditions, both Protestant and Catholic. Produced under the auspices of KADOC at the University of Leuven, through their aim to integrate different national historiographies they inevitably in part stand to a British reader as a memorial to the important work of the late Nigel Yates (with Joris van Eijnatten editor-in-chief of the project) and his colleagues at Lampeter in encouraging such interchanges, not least within the British Isles.

The series has an ambitious brief, especially as each volume is of modest proportions. It should be acknowledged at once that the tight confines have not prevented some authors from producing essays from which even those familiar with the themes could benefit. Thus in the case of the sections on ‘the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland’, Stewart J. Brown's and Nigel Yates's essays on the early nineteenth century in the State and Church-focused volumes respectively provide effective and in places enhanced summaries of arguments advanced in larger works in which they had already embraced the British rather than a one-country perspective on church reform, while Frances Knight offers a useful revisionist take on the place of ecclesiastical reform in the later nineteenth century. However, the relatively novel perspective produced by the ‘British’ frame of these essays is not reproduced in the other sections in the volumes, where subdivision follows national rather than chronological divisions: thus the section on church reform in ‘the Nordic countries’ sees separate essays devoted to Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In the case of ‘Germany’, a one-state one-essay solution is chosen from the alternatives on offer within the time-span of the volume: it is with measured understatement, therefore, that Heiner de Wall and Andreas Gestrich entitle their 50-page contribution to volume i ‘Constitutional complexity and confessional diversity’ (how they might envy the brief of Peter Nockles – in volume ii allowed almost the same space to cover the Oxford Movement from 1833 to 1845 alone as three authors spend on Belgium between 1780 and 1920). In some cases the non-specialist at least will gain much from some lively and engaging accounts of unfamiliar contexts: this reader in particular took food for thought from Joris van Eijnatten on church-sponsored reform in the Netherlands and Eric Sidenvall's account of the same theme for Sweden, and in the first volume Emiel Lamberts's account of Church and State in the southern Netherlands. Although this far from exhausts the list of ‘good things’, some other essays try to cram too much information and not enough argument into their narrow confines, leading to rather colourless and often confusing processions of regime change, dates, synods and pastoral initiatives to which insufficient attention can be devoted in each case to bring them alive for the non-specialist let alone, one suspects, to engage readers already familiar with the subject of the chapter.

Unusually frank editorial commentary reveals that the configuration of the essays as published was not that initially envisaged. But some of the problems clearly result from the brief for these first two volumes. As the editors confess, separating out ‘State’ and ‘Church’ initiatives makes much more sense in some countries/periods than others, and in some cases almost none; moreover, both have a complex relation with the other four categories reserved for later volumes. There one suspects it may prove much easier to define – and fulfil – the author's brief; pity those confronted with that for the church reform volume, each asked to address ‘church organisation, clerical education and professionalisation, separatism and reunion, theology and doctrine’, and ‘mission and outreach, including such topics as lay-led organisations, “secularisation”, and use of the media’ . In both volumes some contributors have clearly struggled with what to include and what to leave aside for coverage in the later instalments or the companion, and inevitably there is considerable duplication. Most disappointing, in what is after all work emerging from a funded international research programme, is the extremely limited extent to which any of the essays reflect this context, resolutely keeping their heads down to concentrate on their regional or national story and eschewing the kinds of comparisons that, within the more limited British context, enliven the essays noted above. The task of such commentary is left to the introductions: but in volume i Keith Robbins largely confines himself to the naming of parts and indicating the difficulties confronting generalisation, while in the space available in The Churches to van Eijnatten and Paula Yates they can do little more than gesture towards some unsurprising commonalities – increasing involvement of the laity both in pastoralia and church governance, responses to urban society, a growth in both the numbers and professional attributes of clergy. Such comparative work is of course easier asked for than done, but it must surely have provided the main justification for the collaboration in the first place. We must hope that it proves easier to encourage in the later, more focused collections to come. As it is, these two volumes feel like a missed opportunity in setting future agendas, while not quite doing justice to the riches of a historiographical tradition of work on modern church reform which seems now, in the British case at least, to be drawing to a close.