It was in 1982 that Walter Arnstein published the definitive work on nineteenth-century attitudes to Catholic religious orders in England – and it might have been supposed that he more or less exhausted the subject. The Protestant nature of the constitution made it an important subject, too, involving the very definition of English national self-consciousness. But, surprisingly, the issue has risen up again. Arnstein centres his study on attempts in parliament to set up state inspections of Catholic institutions; in modern England the state now requires that anyone, including priests and nuns, whose service involves proximity to children, must undergo police record screening to eliminate those imagined liable to sexual irregularities. The Victorian anti-nunnery lobby would have found this acceptable. Rene Kollar's helpful and informative book – a compendium of lectures – is in that sense a timely indication that some passions have not cooled. His work has another modern reference: he is concerned to show that the Victorian nunnery issue was about the place of women in society. Many Protestants feared that the convents provided occasions for challenges to the male domination of family organisation. Kollar, who is a Benedictine monk as well as a professor of history, dedicates his book to the first women students at his Pennsylvania college, with a pointed reference to putting right the restrictive gender practices of the past. His study of the nineteenth-century convent issue broadens the scale by including the Anglican foundations, about which precisely the same accusations were made as were directed at the Catholic ones. For both Catholic and Protestant institutions his use of pamphlet literature and local newspaper reports yields valuable new dimensions and illustrations. What emerges is just how narrow the grounds of evidence claimed by the Protestant campaigners were, and how unconvincing, in reality, the salacious accounts of sexual improprieties also were. Nevertheless very many persisted in their anti-Roman beliefs. The publication of Maria Monk's Awful disclosures in 1836 had established a tradition of popular suspicions which were not easily allayed, although the book turned out to be a work of fiction. Kollar's series of lectures, as published, are rather too repetitive, and would have benefitted from radical pruning. The analysis, however, is a helpful contribution to learning, and discloses some fine scholarly judgements.