Historians have long noted that the key to the survival of Catholic authority in south-west France during the 1560s was Catholic success in securing the key urban centres of Bordeaux and Toulouse along with a number of small strategic towns including Agen. In this important work, Kevin Gould fully explores for the first time both how Catholic militants succeeded in securing these strongholds even as many neighbouring cities fell to Huguenot forces, and ultimately how the leaders of these bastions organised counter-offensives in the region. In so doing he uncovers a grass-roots organisational framework amongst Catholics that paralleled, and in some ways even rivalled in sophistication and effectiveness, the organisation of Huguenot forces in the region long before the better known Catholic Leagues of the later 1570s and 1580s took root. To draw these conclusions Gould looks in turn at local developments in Bordeaux, Agen, Toulouse and Béarn/Navarre. He addresses the complex narrative of each local struggle with commendable economy and clarity and fully recognises the importance of local circumstance in shaping individual responses. However, the key conclusions of the book draw on these case studies to identify patterns in Catholic organisation. These patterns overturn standard historiographical interpretations that emphasise the local and episodic nature of organised Catholic militancy before the 1570s. Instead, Gould notes how Catholic militants drew on organisational apparatuses developed during grass-roots confrontations with Protestants on the streets in the 1540s and 1550s to organise syndicates, leagues and confederations in the 1560s. By the late 1560s, when vacillating crown policies had disenchanted many Catholic moderates, Catholic militants had formed into flexible and effective organisations headed by royal court officials, town officers, the clergy and military captains largely drawn from the local nobility. But perhaps even more important for our understanding of these movements, Gould shows how the grass-roots support of the Catholic population played a key role in the successful defence of Catholic urban strongholds. These early militant groupings were not merely organisations of privileged Catholic elites. Indeed, many of their most effective forces were drawn from the general population. This is less surprising when one considers the central role played by confraternities organised by trainee law clerks in Bordeaux and Toulouse in combatting Protestant activism in the 1540s. This brief summary of the forces at work does not do justice to the rich texture of the story. Blaise de Monluc, the enigmatic leader of Catholic opposition to the Huguenots in the south-west during the 1560s, features prominently in Gould's study as does the continual disbanding of formal confederations by royal order, which stunted the formal development of Catholic sectarian institutions. Nevertheless, the overall development of Catholic resistance that energised all social groups to the common cause is a key outcome that certainly shaped the course of the religious wars in the south-west. At a broader level, this study provides new insight into the later Wars of Religion by exploring Catholic grass-roots militant organisations before the Holy League of the 1560s. It also provides new evidence that Catholic renewal in the south-west of France began before the impact of Trent and was in part shaped by the crucible of sectarian struggle.