These essays are the products of two workshops held at Fiesole in 2003 and 2004 at the Center for the Study of Italian History and Culture the general theme of which was the reasons behind the emergence of the concept of decadence in the Counter-Reformation and of the perceived link between Catholicism and anti-modernity that scholars are currently dismantling. The contributions are wide-ranging and often stray far from what is already a wide remit. The first three offerings centre on North America. John T. McGreevy investigates successive waves of concern about the presence of Catholics in the United States, noting correspondences to anti-Catholic currents in nineteenth-century Europe, especially the debates on schooling; in ‘Decadence deconstructed: the North American scene’, John O'Malley charts the move away from a Burckhardtian negativism regarding religion and the Church in the Italian Renaissance since the publication of Wallace Ferguson's The Renaissance in historical thought: five centuries of interpretation (1948) and the writings of Paul Oskar Kristeller, while John Monfasani offers a companion piece on contemporary ‘Catholic American exchanges’ in the university sector against a background of Catholic assimilation into American life. We then move without any preliminaries to Europe. José Martinéz Millán ponders the way in which historians of Spain since the eighteenth century have resorted to the concept of Catholicism as a form of decadence, while Simon Ditchfield offers some preliminary reflections on ‘Nations, nationalisms and “historia sacra”’, concentrating on Jesuits' writings in various genres that laid the foundations of national, regional and local identities. He emphasises again the tight link between historiography and hagiography in the long seventeenth century as well as the vitality of clerical humanist scholars writing before Muratori. In a long essay that occupies more than a quarter of the volume, Chiara Continisio considers the paradigm of decadence in an examination of nineteenth-century commentators' attitudes to political doctrines found in Italy in the early modern era, and Manfred Hinz makes ‘Four remarks’ about ‘Catholicism and “decadence” in 19th century German literature’ focusing upon Nietzsche. The book ends with Helen Hills charting the changing definitions of ‘the baroque’ and expressing the hope that it may be neither periodising nor decadent but ‘could even be redemptive’ (p. 210). In the end, however meritorious some of the essays, the volume is no more than the sum of its parts. The problem seems principally editorial: Fantoni and Continisio might have been far more rigorous in requiring contributors to produce publishable versions of their papers that actually address the general theme. Future volumes would also benefit from a longer introduction and more thought given to the ordering of the essays. And an index, a bibliography and an improved standard of proof-reading are also recommended.