Five chapters deal in turn with Friedrich von Hügel, Henri Bremond, Maurice Blondel, Albert Houtin and Alfred Loisy. They are written respectively by Lawrence F. Barman, C. J. T. Talar, the late Michael J. Kerlin, Talar again, and Harvey Hill. In the opening chapter William L. Portier and Talar explore the different kinds of interest in the Christian mystical tradition which these ‘Modernists’ showed. Thus, this excellent collection, dedicated to the memory of Michael Kerlin, features the greatest of the usual suspects, treated by the leading North American scholars in the field. Portier and Talar highlight a remark by Nicholas Lash, made in 1977, in a reassessment of the Modernist crisis, where he noted the appeal that the baron made to seventeenth-century spirituality (Fénelon, Mabillon and others) as a way of reforming the neoscholastic and ultramontanist Catholicism by which he was surrounded and felt suffocated. As the book demonstrates, this return to ‘a forgotten tradition of wholeness’ was almost as attractive to Bremond, Blondel and even Loisy. For them all, the Quietist controversy seemed paradigmatic of their need for a certain mysticism. No doubt some would recall Newman's witticism that mysticism starts in mist and ends in schism. The most attractive feature of this book is, however, that the contributors treat their subjects with respect, insisting in particular on the importance of their resistance to the marginalisation in the Church at the time of the ‘mystical element’ (in von Hügel's phrase in his book on St Catherine of Genoa). In the chapter on Houtin, however, we are introduced to his biography of the Benedictine abbess Mère Cécile Bruyère, Une Grande Mystique (1925): testimony to the crassly reductive conception of mysticism in French academic circles at the time but also a sad display of the lifelong bitterness of the one-time novice at Solesmes (surprisingly misspelled in the text). Similarly, the chapter on Loisy considers his debates in the 1930s with Bergson, again showing how mysticism was viewed. In contrast with such ambivalence and even hostility, Bremond and Baron von Hügel are shown to have reopened perspectives on mystical experience, which perhaps, in the long run, as indeed Lash suggested, may have something still to teach Catholics – this interest in mysticism might prove the most valuable legacy of the ‘Modernists’. For Blondel, as Kerlin shows, even in L'Action, ‘philosophy is prayer from beginning to end’, a thought that would have angered the neothomists who attacked him so relentlessly for what they took to be mere ‘pragmatism’. With nine pages of bibliography this is a first-rate collection, breaking new ground, and a worthy memorial to a fine scholar.