This impressive collection of essays offers comparative assessment of the nature and impact of Reformed (or Calvinist) consistories and Catholic inquisitions across the early modern period. The volume is divided into ten thematic sections of paired articles about consistories and inquisitions. A further section of five articles considers these institutions in the context of other forms of religious and civil discipline. The collection opens with a helpful introduction by the editors, followed by overviews provided by Raymond A. Mentzer and Christopher F. Black, and ends with a summary conclusion by E. William Monter. The editors have encouraged contributors not simply to write narrowly on each theme according to their geographic area of expertise. Articles frame points of discussion within the diversity of practices adopted within each confession and highlight points of similarity and difference across the confessional divide. The volume reads as a coherent and thorough-going effort at thematic and trans-territorial analysis of early modern regimes of religious and moral discipline. Presumably constraints on space mean that many chapters have only a rather limited number of supporting notes, but the volume has an excellent supporting bibliography. Contributors cover areas within western and southern Europe as well as regions of the Atlantic world and Asian societies affected by inquisitions and consistories. There are very valuable contributions on imperial contexts, with surveys of the consistory in Batavia by Hendrik E. Niemeijer and of the inquisition based in Goa by Bruno Feitler. Mark Meuwese charts the slow spread of consistories to Dutch Churches in the Americas while Allyson M. Poska covers the vast territories under the authority of Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions in central and southern America.

Consistories and inquisitions shared some of the same goals of eradicating erroneous beliefs and challenging moral misconduct. This volume also highlights points of difference between the character, powers and activities of consistories and inquisitions. There is much at least that is parallel about the historiography on both consistories and inquisitions. Both institutions gave rise to black legends about their sinister reputations (Mentzer cites a frustrated Genevan declaring in the mid-1550s that ‘the devil and the consistory never sleep’ [p. 24]). Writing about inquisitions and consistories has been affected by confessional history-writing and restricted by the confines of national historiographies that this volume does much to challenge. Research was also impacted by the quantitative techniques of social history and is currently affected by trends in cultural history and gender history (discussed here by Jeffrey Watt and in a further article by Allyson M. Poska). Some shared agendas of current research also emerge. For example, William Naphy and Kimberly Lynn explore the need to understand more about the elders and inquisitors who staffed these institutions. Naphy, building on his expertise on the Genevan Church, makes the very important point that consistories are too often treated as if they had a collective mind of their own. Christian Grosse and Kim Siebenhüner provide excellent reflections on the enthusiasm of both institutions for record-keeping and discuss the comparable potential and challenges of interpreting the narratives in these records.

What impact did consistories and inquisitions have on communities? Authors are wisely hesitant about making grand claims about the long-term capacity of these institutions to alter religious beliefs and impose moral norms. Essays by Philippe Chareyre, Doris Moreno Martínez, Timothy Fehler, Lu Ann Homza, Karen E. Spierling and John F. Chuchiak iv address this question in different ways. Individual lives were of course profoundly impacted by interactions with inquisitors and elders. While acknowledging the power imbalance between discipliners and the disciplined, some authors are less than convinced about either the repressive or pedagogic capacity of consistories and inquisitions. Articles discuss the degree of agency held by ordinary people as they considered what to say to the authorities and how they might negotiate (a term deployed by a number of authors) the best possible outcome to interviews and trials. To the degree that consistories and inquisitions were able to enforce strict standards of orthodoxy or to tame societies in the arena of sexual morality, how can this impact be measured in contrast to societies beyond the reach of inquisitors and elders? Important contributions are made by Martin Ingram and Edward Behrend-Martínez on Anglican and Catholic episcopal courts. These essays only tend to reinforce the need for caution about claims of the alleged impact of either consistories or inquisitions in early modern European communities.

The power of the state emerges throughout the volume as crucial to the fortunes of inquisitions and many consistories. Articles explore the jurisdiction of Scottish kirk sessions (Margo Todd) and relations between ecclesiastical and civil authorities (essays by Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, Kimberly Lynn and Sara Beam). James E. Wadsworth explains the decline of inquisitions from the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The nuncio in Vienna did his best to defend the Milan inquisition as ‘the purest gold, which admits no measure of measure of impurity’. However, Maria Theresa's chancellor Kaunitz countered that this ‘bloodthirsty’ institution was incompatible with the authority of the state and advised a speedy survey of the inquisition's property to ensure that as much as possible could be seized (p. 318). The inquisition's reputation was apparently so grim that even Maria Theresa could suggest that she acted in 1775 to close a barbaric and fanatical institution. This was the same Maria Theresa who had expelled the Jewish community from Prague and who persisted with state policies of persecution, incarceration and deportation of Lutherans and Calvinists. Wadsworth highlights that it was above all the shifting balance of power between Church and State across the Catholic world that frames the decline of inquisitions. Joke Spaans argues that consistories proved more tenacious than some have assumed but that many of the roles of consistories were slowly taken on by state authorities. The localised character of consistories helped to ensure their survival. However, by the late nineteenth century some prominent neo-Calvinists reflected on the apparent errors of previous generations who had allowed their Church to become entangled within the tentacles of the State. They did not look to Geneva for inspiration but rather to the example provided by Jan Łaski and the London exiles’ congregation as providing a better model of how to revive the autonomy and spiritual purposes of Reformed consistories.