The title of this collection of essays promises a broad frame of reference and in this respect its contents do not disappoint. That very breadth, however, allowing as it does comparison of developments in Church–State relations across Europe, does come at the expense of its internal unity. Four of the essays put into context the life and thought of Bishop Thomas Burgess (1756–1837), bishop successively of St David's and of Salisbury and also founder of St David's College, Lampeter, now part of the University of Wales. If the other contributions are sometimes only tenuously related to Burgess and his interests, the quality of each is uniformly excellent. Mark Smith offers a compelling account of the High Church Bishop Burgess's cordial but limited cooperation with Evangelicals (offering on the way the priceless observation that Bishop Bull was a ‘sacred cow’ for High Churchmen), while Peter Nockles examines Tractarian and Evangelical polemical manipulation of Caroline historiography and theology in their competing attempts to corner the ‘true’ identity of Anglicanism. Welsh Nonconformity is much in evidence, as Eryn White studies early divisions within Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Nigel Yates looks at Welsh Evangelicalism in a wider context, drawing links between the extravagance of religious expression to be found in the Celtic parts of Britain and seeing European Evangelicalism as an anti-establishment movement of political alienation. Aidan Bellenger explains the early nineteenth-century movement of English Roman Catholics from a survival to a mission mentality, turning away in the process from an irenic enlightenment identity to one of ultramontane counter-culturalism. Education was a major concern for Burgess. Joris van Eijnatten offers a close look at the Dutch academic theologians contemporary with Burgess. Paula Yates shows how elementary education became a significant battleground between the established and nonconformist Churches in the diocese of Bangor in the 1820s, and Peter Miles, in an engaging narrative, reveals the links between Bishop Burgess and Bishop Philander Chase of Ohio, drawn together by their passionate commitment to the establishment of their ‘western seminaries’ of St David's in Lampeter and Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Two other essays look at national Churches in the context of changes taking place in the wider society. Anders Jarlert sees Scandinavian Churches undergoing not so much secularisation as a ‘diversified confessionalisation’: the changing nature of the Churches' secular relationships allowed the renewal of their religious identity. Keith Robbins points to the continuing strength during the nineteenth century of belief in the intimate connection between the English Church, State and Nation despite the growing strength of Roman and Protestant dissent. The conviction in the early century that the Church of England could be the established Church of the British Empire and even of the United Kingdom was eroded by the evident contradictions and national tensions within the establishment.