Interpreters of interwar Romanian history have traditionally privileged politics, economics, education, ethnicity and literary activity over religion, despite indications that contemporary actors did not always see the former factors as prevailing over or even dissociated from the latter. Maner examines, in the two ‘core regions’ of post-1918 Romania, i.e. ‘Old Romania’ and Transylvania, the relationship between the ‘new statality’ and the three principal denominations of Christianity, namely the Romanian Orthodox, Greek-Catholic and Roman Catholic Churches. (This leaves aside various territories – Maramureş, Bukovina, Bessarabia, southern Dobrogea, the Banat – and also various faiths, notably Lutheranism and Judaism; but in the absence of any general work on the subject it is quite legitimate to focus on core regions and religions.) Methodological considerations and a concise historical background sketch precede a successive analysis of the relations between the new State and the three Churches.

Maner's is the first book of such length on this subject and everybody interested in interwar Romania should read it, both for the quality of the information and the attempt to structure the subject into a coherent set of problems. Particularly pertinent is the author's insistence that the problem of the status of the Churches should be examined not just from the point of view emerging from state legislation and ministerial archives, but also from that of the Churches themselves.

The main conclusion regarding the Romanian Orthodox Church (which stands at the heart of the book, and often the problems of the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches are treated briefly, for comparative purposes) is the great difficulty encountered in establishing a unified vision of the Church–State relationship. Although it had been autocephalous in the Old Kingdom since 1885, the Romanian Orthodox Church had not sought to minister to Romanians outside the country. Therefore, when the new provinces were added after the First World War, the Orthodox authorities therein had quite different priorities and traditions which led to sharply divergent attitudes towards the creation of a national Church. Negotiations between each province and the centre took on quite different forms. Issues of territoriality raged for a considerable time: as late at 1934 there were no agreed ecclesiastical boundaries between Romanian and Serbian Orthodox in the Banat, while in Bessarabia political shenanigans won out over geography or belief. The situation of the Roman Catholic Church was also marked by regional contrasts: in Old Romania, the relatively few Catholics had been ethnically diverse, geographically spread and politically insignificant, while in Transylvania they were more numerous, largely Hungarian and had particular stances to defend.

Maner does not succeed at all times in his aim to provide a church-focused view of Church–State relations, not least on account of the unfortunate circumstance that he was refused access to the archives of the Orthodox Synod in Bucharest. (For the Transylvanian situation, he has made good use of materials from the personal archive of Nicolae Bălan, Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania.) And overall, a larger proportion of the narrative is given over to expounding the reactions of the church hierarchy to problems, with relatively less focus on the sociology of religion that he advocates in his initial statement. The second half of the book picks up a number of issues in a series of most interesting case studies: on the Concordat with the Vatican; a chapter on ‘ways out of the crisis’, including women's movements and popular cults; further chapters on interconfessional conflict, and on the Churches' support for schools. But for the latter subjects we are still getting the administration's view, rather than a sense of what it was like to be an Orthodox woman or to attend a religious school. In other words, Maner's social history of religion is more a history of institutions than of religious experience. But his very thorough investigation and exposition of the former will be of use to those seeking to elucidate the latter.

Maner has also, in collaboration with Norbert Spannenberger, edited a very interesting volume on the Greek-Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection arises from a conference held in L'viv in 2002: but, the editors insist, this is a coherent analytical volume rather than a set of proceedings. Contributors are from Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Transylvania and Serbia, and number both ecclesiastical and political historians, as well as an anthropologist, Chris Hann, who notes two important points. First, that the subject is largely misconstrued by the general public, who frequently mistake Greek-Catholics for either Greeks, or Catholics, or both. Secondly, that much recent historiography occurs in the emotionally-charged context of property restitution and the general reorganisation of State–Church (and more broadly, public-private) relations following the collapse of Communism and of the USSR and Yugoslavia. In the light of this, the comparative and historical dimension brought by this volume is most welcome. All the major Churches in today's Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine receive some treatment. While several minor Churches are left aside (there are a few thousand Eastern Catholics apiece in Belarus, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece), Bojan Aleksov's interesting study of conflicting discourses on the Greek Catholics of the former Yugoslavia is valuable beyond the numerically insignificant size of the actual community. Nearly all contributors manage, while focusing on particular cases, to alert the reader to interpretive tensions and the political stakes of certain problems; and the relation between ‘episodic’ case studies and the broader picture is well handled. Given the accumulation of expertise achieved here, one might even suggest that the editors could move towards producing a Handbuch or small reference volume on the Greek-Catholic Church in east-central Europe as a whole. In doing so, they could perhaps present more neatly the chronologies, demography and cartography of the various Churches (some quite useful maps are provided here, but they are borrowed from other publications), and look also at wider ‘cultural’ aspects such as architecture, or everyday social practices. But this volume is certainly a welcome step towards a clearer understanding of the complex and ongoing history of Eastern-rite Catholicism.