How helpful is the confessionalisation paradigm in considering the operation of Roman censorship in the second half of the sixteenth century? Claus Arnold considers this question on the basis of material in the archive of the Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede. (He provides an excellent selection, seventy-two-pages long, of archive material.)

More particularly, he is concerned with the fate at the hands of the Roman censorship of important works by three theologians: Cajetan's Commentaria on the Scriptures, and on the Summa theologica of Aquinas; Contarini's Opera omnia; and Gropper's Enchiridion. Arnold explains at some length the concept of confessionalisation with which he works. He introduces Ernst Walter Zeeden's model of confessionalisation as a comprehensive paradigm for the description of the process of transformation in Church, State and Society in early modern Europe, and assumes that the reader is familiar with the detailed development of this view by Wolfgang Reinhardt and Hans Schilling. This confessionalisation paradigm is closely connected with the social-historical concepts of social disciplining and modernisation. But Arnold has also been influenced by J. W. O'Malley's work on early modern Catholicism, which questions the range of the confessionalisation paradigm in the Catholic area, warns against the temptation of wanting to bring a whole epoch within the scope of a single concept, and argues for the inclusion of a combination of different concepts with restricted range. Consequently, while the notion of confessionalisation remains fundamental to Arnold's work on Roman censorship in the sixteenth century, he also accepts the concepts of ‘Counter-Reformation’ and ‘Catholic Reform’, for with regard to the first of these, the canons of Trent can scarcely be understood without their Protestant background, and with regard to the second, the reform intentions of Trent often continued the course of the reform councils of the fifteenth century. The application of this modified version of the confessionalisation paradigm to the three case histories that Arnold discusses yields some interesting results. The Congregations of Inquisition and Index, the agents who imposed the Church's view of Catholic orthodoxy post-Trent, were prepared, like the council itself, to allow certain differences of opinion within Catholicism, for example those that distinguished various scholastic lines of thought, but they were not prepared to tolerate trends within Catholicism which had been moulded by humanism (for example, the orientation towards Bible theology) or responded to the opinions of the reformers (for example, the critique of scholasticism). What was to be done about theological works that infringed the post-Trent requirements? It depended partially on the extent of the ‘error’, and partially on the importance of the theologian concerned. In the first two of Arnold's cases, the Church attempted to remove or neutralise the doctrinally offensive parts without discrediting the author and reducing his status and importance in the Church. Cajetan's works, tersely characterised as ‘between humanism and Thomism’, offended when humanism led their author to challenge on textual grounds the canonicity of the Epistle to the Hebrews, or to take an independent line in spite of the ‘torrent of the doctors’. Contarini, on the other hand, was ambivalent ‘between Evangelism and Counter-Reformation’. Although he had been compromised by his association with a number of spirituali who had attracted the attention of the inquisition after his death, his own work escaped censorial scrutiny until after 1570. Part of his good fortune was attributable perhaps to the fact that in the last years of his life he had distanced himself from their views. Nevertheless, in 1572, the Opera omnia were forbidden ‘donec expurgentur’. The Gropper case, introduced as an epilogue, is actually very interesting in its own right. The Enchiridion originated in the context of the Provincial Council of Cologne of 1536: it was published along with the statutes of that council, and was intended as a manual for priests who wished to instruct their flocks in the truths of the Gospel. It was first censured by Bartolomeo de Lugo op, who, in 1558, identified it as Lutheran on the grounds of its teaching on the sacraments, faith, works and imputed justice, but nothing was done until it was again censured – by Bellarmine – when it was introduced to the Congregation of the Index on 20 January 1601, on the grounds that it smacked of Melanchthon's doctrine and contained many things that could be understood heretically. It was therefore forbidden, but this condemnation was not published until 3 July 1623.

Arnold's reflections on his findings in this very informative work focus on four aspects of the process of confessionalisation: the creation of uniformity; censorship by expurgation; the professionalisation of the personnel employed by the Congregation of the Index; and the relationship between censorship and controversial theology. He also considers the implications of his research for the history of the Roman inquisition and Index, and for the history of theology.