Andrea Del Col's topic is vast: not only the institutional control of orthodoxy in Italy from about 1230 to the present, but also the situation that led up to it, including the criminalisation of dissent by Innocent iii in 1199. The book provides an overview and is not written for specialists, though specialists will benefit from reading it. It follows the lines of a new historiography on the institutional control of doctrines and religious practices that has been developing recently, particularly in Italy; and it considers all ecclesiastical and state institutions that defended orthodoxy. Del Col's book is divided into three parts: the inquisition in medieval Italy; the inquisition in sixteenth-century Italy; and the inquisition in Italy from the seventeenth century to the present day. In the first of these periods, we are told, structures and practices were established that would last for centuries: systematic arrangements (in which secular governments acquiesced) were made for arresting heretics, and for imprisoning, torturing and punishing them by death or confiscation of their goods. Written records were made of the interrogations to which they were subjected. The mendicant orders, particularly the Dominicans, supplied most of the personnel required by these operations. Persecution was not long restricted to dissidents: in fact, the enlargement of the jurisdictional competence of the inquisition tribunal became a regular feature of its history. The first enlargement applied to Jews. There was a further enlargement in about 1400 when the inquisition took cognisance of all practices and behaviour that might suggest heresy, for instance witchcraft, magic, contempt for the ecclesiastical authorities and political opposition to the papacy. In about 1500 another enlargement also brought bigamy, blasphemy, embezzlement and abuses of the sacraments under inquisitorial control. One momentous development around 1400 was the introduction of the notion of diabolical witchcraft, a kind of cross between ritual magic and popular magic for which theologians were responsible. It involved three interconnected elements: apostasy from the faith; participation in a meeting with the devil; and acts of malice. This development came to a head aound 1500 when the witches' sabbath was ‘discovered’. The upshot was a series of bloody witch-hunts in the early decades of the sixteenth century, which coincided with the resurgence of heresy in Italy in the wake of the Lutheran revolt. The way in which the inquisition responded to the Protestant challenge, seen as a mortal danger, is the key topic in the second part of Del Col's book. Though the inquisition began to persecute adherents of the new doctrines from the 1520s, it is evident that its response to dissent became progressively harsher after the bull Licet ab initio of 1542. Although it contained no new provisions but was limited to assembling and rationalising previous measures, this bull established the Congregation of the Holy Office as a powerful instrument for directing and coordinating the campaign against dissent. In 1543 the first steps were taken to prepare an index of prohibited books. Under popes Paul iv, Pius v and Sixtus v, the Holy Office totally defeated the Italian movement for religious reform. Notable casualties in this process were those at the top of the Church who were disposed to dialogue with the Reformation, or were close to the evangelical doctrines of predestination and salvation through faith alone. Inquisitorial activity in Italy peaked between 1585 and 1644. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Italian states allowed the ecclesiastical hierarchy increasingly to extend its control over the sacred and the secular, civil life and behaviour, elite and popular culture; but during the Age of Enlightenment the popes and the inquisition were forced onto the defensive in dealing with Galilean science and the new philosophy: the scope of the inquisition tribunal was accordingly expanded. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries papal antipathy towards principal features of modern culture and society led to the condemnation of, for example, liberalism in politics, evolutionism in science and the modernisation of biblical culture and ecclesiastical history. Pius ix, Pius x and Pius xii were notably conservative popes under whom the Church was always concerned to protect the primacy of revealed truth, and to maintain control over the conduct of human life: but popes thereafter have decisively changed direction by opening the Catholic Church to the modern world. The Second Vatican Council suggested that the Holy Office should be subjected to a major revision: it changed its name, procedures and purposes, and the Index of Prohibited Books was suppressed. The question is, and Del Col poses it, ‘What future is there for the catholic judiciary control of religious dissent?’ The bare outline given above of the rise and fall of the Catholic inquisition as Del Col sees it, gives a necessary, but only very limited, idea of the riches of this stimulating and impressive book, for throughout the narrative is embedded in a rich context that includes, inter alia, pen portraits of leading figures, a large quantity of statistical material derived from archival research and an admiring review of the work of Carlo Ginzburg on the ‘benandanti’ of Friuli, and its further ramifications in a European context.