This volume studies the Catholic Enlightenment and claims to be ‘the first overview of this intellectual movement’ (p. 47). The substantial introduction by Ulrich Lehner, one of the editors, which traces ‘the many faces of the Catholic Enlightenment’ (p. 1), and eight chapters which deal with individual countries provide a clear, if somewhat old-fashioned, structure to this collection. The Catholic countries dealt with are France, Austria, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Malta, Poland-Lithuania, Portugal and Spain. Whilst this structure allows the reader easily to access the information pertaining to any of these countries, it poses methodological questions, of which some are at least touched upon in the introduction. The various Catholic Enlightenments were surely shaped and influenced differently, depending on whether they were situated in countries with mixed confessions. In the Holy Roman Empire especially, severe intellectual competition and even strife informed and influenced the debates about enlightenment philosophy. This clearly makes for a difference in comparison with those countries where Catholicism was the only confession. Michael Printy's contribution is thus particularly useful and ought to be singled out as an exceptionally insightful piece of work. Enlightenment was not only criticism of existing social and political shortcomings. It was also, and fundamentally, an attitude of self-criticism. Some more discussion in this volume of the extent to which the Catholic Enlightenment also contributed to this self-understanding and critical endeavour would have been desirable. The risk that our understanding of the Enlightenment becomes distorted when we lose sight of its specific intellectual and critical fervour, is not to be underestimated. Jonathan Israel and John Robertson have masterfully shown from very different perspectives how we can determine these specific aspects of enlightenment philosophy. It seems that by too lightheartedly insisting – as is done in this collection – that the Catholic Enlightenment is to be seen as playing an equal part in this specific philosophy of enlightenment, one increases this risk. It would be useful for further discussion to re-evaluate the volume's claim and to pursue the discussion in a more comparative way.