German Catholics of the Enlightenment are often thought to be an eighteenth-century past which the nineteenth century jettisoned; Gallican versus Ultramontane; liberal-minded about the constitution versus centralisation in the papacy; suspecting an excess of pilgrimage or popular devotions versus their strong encouragement. Here is an analysis of leading minds of the State who were aware that to alter the constitution of the State effectively, they must also adapt the constitution of the Church. They were not only the civil servants who made possible the more radical reforms of the emperor Joseph. This is a learned study of the plans for reform among German Catholics during the eighteenth century. Printy begins with Febronius' history of canon law, which contained a strong critique of the papacy (1763) and shows how the flowering historical scholarship of the age led inevitably to new forms of questioning about past axioms in doctrine. It was van Espen, professor at Louvain until 1728, whose book of ecclesiastical law (1700) justified what were called Gallican doctrines, especially since the Four Gallican Articles of 1682. What the French seemed to have achieved was a model for those Germans who wanted to frame a German Catholic Church out of the various episcopal and abbatial churches acknowledged by the Treaty of Westphalia, at the end of the Thirty Years War. Printy lays weight on the many-volumed Concilia Germaniae, edited by two Jesuits (1759–75). The editors found a strong sense of the bishop as the source of stability and unity in the Church. They and their followers were not anti-Roman in the manner of Febronius. The composition of the Empire, part Catholic part Protestant, produced in Bavaria and Austria a new confession. For a religious society Catholicism was best, being the truth. But since it was evident that Protestant states were more prosperous than Catholic, it was evident that for a civil society Protestantism was the more useful. The Bavarian minister of education, Ickstaat, asked why this should be so, and inferred that monasteries and pilgrimages or other devotions were a brake on the economy of a Catholic state. Ickstaat's contemporary, Osterwald, who had converted to Catholicism from Protestant origins, became a leading member of the Bavarian Ecclesiastical Council which fostered growing state control over the Church in Bavaria. The clergy ought to have spiritual authority, but had acquired secular authority – by being rich, by being allowed exemptions in law courts, by their education because for work in the civil service many laymen were not adequately educated. A disciple contrasted the money of tradesmen which circulates and helps society, with the money of cloisters which mostly stays in cashboxes. They faced the fact that Protestant states, though wrong about truth, had merit. This book shows interestingly how this was in part related to the growing use of German as a middle-class and literary language. The question was on the agenda – did the authority of the Catholic religion in Germany depend upon the existence of prince-bishoprics? When Napoleon abolished both the Empire and the prince-bishops which depended on it, the fact of Catholics being in the minority was more evident and since reconstruction was necessary, the old structure still left the old problems, inadequate training of priests, dioceses vacant for too long, ancient dioceses too large for good pastoral care. And yet Catholics came out of the eighteenth century with a sense of a united Germany and therefore of a united Catholic Church. Despite its learning the book leaves the reader with a doubt about its main thesis, whether the Enlightenment had so direct an influence on modern German Catholicism as is here argued.