Dominican inquisitors of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were powerful representatives of a new trend in Christian history. They were the enforcers of the compulsory Christianity of the high medieval period, but they were more than that: as highly-educated, mobile and well-connected men, they were at the forefront of a ‘renovation of Christian belief’. Christine Caldwell Ames argues that inquisition took Christianity in new directions, but she is at pains to point out that these directions cannot be fully appreciated unless one accepts that inquisitors believed their mission to be mandated by Christ. The detailed exposition, based on trial records, inquisitorial manuals, writings by inquisitors and a host of other material, covers anti-inquisitorial violence, the educative role of inquisitions, the phenomenon of inquisitor-saints, the Dominican order's changing conception of its foundation, the revolution in penance and confession and the practice of execution. Ames convincingly shows that inquisition was seen by its practitioners as the fulfilment of the pastoral vocation, and that the substantial medieval antipathy towards inquisition, acted out by heresy suspects and urban protesters, is evidence for this being a period in which the structures of divine truth were severely contested. There is much interesting detail and careful analysis in this book, but the author's claims about the originality of the argument are excessive, and the importance of the conclusions is limited because of this. It is likely that Ames has framed her argument with popular caricatures of inquisition in her sights. However, the argument is not taken to Dan Brown and Umberto Eco, but to James Given, John Arnold, Robert Moore and others, who, it is claimed, have denied the role of religious belief as a motivation for inquisition. This is incredible, and does a real disservice to those historians. Ames wishes to counter the view that inquisition was all about social control and power, but I cannot think of a historian who takes such an simplistic position, and certainly not of a historian who does not assume that inquisitors regarded their work as Christian. These assumptions are commonplaces of the literature. Ultimately this means that Ames is unable to acknowledge the very real role that power and control played not only in inquisition, but more generally in the Christian culture of this period. The book is quite difficult to read in parts. While the sections of exposition are generally clear, the extended passages of argument and historiographical polemic are written in a densely metaphorical style, frequently employing mixed metaphors, and some sentences are likely to be comprehensible only to the author. Inverted commas are used sometimes for quotation, sometimes for emphasis, and sometimes to give the impression that truths are being revealed and errors exposed; this is confusing. I would also have liked to see an explanation of the term ‘spiritual geography’, which is important to Ames but opaque to the reader.