Robert Benedetto has produced a compact dictionary including nearly 1,400 articles covering figures, events, movements and themes from the beginnings of the Church until 1700 contributed by a wide range of authors, mostly based in North America, with a few from Europe and Australia. The dictionary aims to be a successor to Jerald Bauer's Westminster dictionary of church history (1969). The second volume of the dictionary, covering the period from 1700 to the present day, is in preparation.

The scope of the entries is wide and coverage reasonably detailed. Besides more familiar names, the reader will find entries on topics ranging from the Armenian theologian Grigo Tat‘ewac‘i and the Armenian historian Sebeos, through Arab scholars such as Al-Farabi and Hunain ibn Ishaq, the early German poem the Heliand, to the early modern spiritualist Valentin Weigel. Entries on Reformation figures include not only Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, Bugenhagen and Oecolampadius, but also Katharina von Bora, Katharina Schütz Zell and her husband Matthias, Argula von Grumbach, and Caritas Pirckheimer and her brother Willibald. The English Reformation is also well represented, although Elizabeth Barton, the Maid of Kent, does not merit an entry. However, the seventeenth century is less well covered: there is no entry on the Caroline divines, and although William Laud is included, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert and Jeremy Taylor are not. Nor do significant figures in English Baptist history, such as Benjamin Keach, achieve an entry. Perhaps early Baptists are to be included in the second volume; there is no indication of how those who were born before 1700 but died afterwards have been treated.

Thematic entries include a series of articles on ‘Historiography’, considering both the use made of history in particular eras and contemporary historiography; considerations of ‘Preaching’ and ‘Hymns’ (but only in the early Church: strangely there is no entry on Reformation hymns); and larger themes such as ‘Islam and the western Church’ and ‘Jewish polemic against Christianity’. There is some duplication, for instance between the articles on ‘Bible in the Reformation’ and on ‘Bible translations, early modern’. Considerable effort has been made to include women in the work, although this has had some odd results: Hildegard of Bingen is not mentioned in the article ‘Preaching, medieval women's’ although she does appear under ‘Preaching, medieval’. Moreover, attention to contemporary historiographical trends has in places limited the work's usefulness: there is an article on ‘Catholicism, early modern’, but no entry – not even a cross-reference – under Counter-Reformation. Here a cross-referenced heading could be of considerable help to an unwitting student.

Indeed, and irritatingly, there is considerable unevenness in cross-referencing possible article titles and very few cross-references between articles (I found only one, in the article on ‘Penance’, referring to ‘Lateran councils’, although there may be more). Thus, taken together the entries on ‘Calvinism’ and ‘Reformed Church’ give a good picture of the complexities of the Reformed tradition, but they do not reference to each other. There is no entry under Giovanni Pietro Carafa, so that those who do not know that Carafa became Paul iv will not find him; ‘Fournier, Jacques’, however, does yield a reference to ‘Benedict xii’. Lombard's Sentences appear under ‘Four books of sentences’; again, the reader is unlikely to find this entry unless they guess from the article on Lombard that this might be the article heading. Looking up Apostolic constitutions gives a cross-reference to an article on ‘Church Order, early’ (in which the Apostolic constitutions are not actually mentioned); however the Didascalia apostolorum, Apostolic tradition and Testamentum domini, all which are mentioned in that article, are not cross referenced. The article on ‘Mysticism, medieval women's’ does not mention some of the women mystics, such as Elisabeth of Schönau and Gertrud of Helfta, who have their own entries elsewhere, and while it discusses Hadewijch of Antwerp, her entry refers to her as Hadewijch of Brabant. These odd editorial decisions extend to the ordering of articles, which is strictly alphabetical, so that ‘Ignatius of Antioch’ appears after ‘Ignatius Loyola’ and ‘Peter of Alexandria’ after ‘Peter Lombard’.

Despite these editorial quirks, this is a useful and in its contents well-conceived reference work which deserves a place on the bookshelf of any student of church history who can afford to buy it.