Most eighteenth-century historians pay no attention to monks and nuns, except as targets of Enlightened reform or of revolution. This study, by contrast, shows that a major monastic order, the Benedictines, in the German-speaking lands – essentially Germany, Austria and Switzerland – produced many proponents of a religious Enlightenment, whom I will call ‘enlightened monks’. That Enlightenment covered not only new forms of community life and new communication structures, but also a modern and strong belief in individual freedom, tolerance, human rights, non-violence and the conviction that the Church, but especially monastic life, had to modernise and adapt to society (p. 2). We are introduced by the author to numerous examples of monks who became critics of their institutions, some of whom tried, and a few of whom succeeded, in reforming them, at least temporarily. Others were imprisoned, persecuted or exiled for their pains. To take a few of the most striking cases: Gregorius Rothfischer professed his vows in Regensburg in 1740, was then invited to teach at Salzburg where he became an advocate of the new ‘Wolffian philosophy’, but he was prevented from publishing much of his work, got involved in alchemy and in 1752 turned Protestant (pp. 123–44). Monks of the abbey of Banz, where in 1772 the first Catholic journal began publication, drafted a new constitution for the monastery which ‘echoed amazingly the “tone of the French revolutionary constitution”’ (pp. 91–3, 59). Michael Winckelmann, of St Maximin in Trier, was imprisoned in his monastery for his reformist views and then, having been expelled from it, went to England where he married a daughter of the earl of Leicester, and after that to Prussia where he was ennobled by Frederick the Great (pp. 150–4). One of Joseph ii's most influential assistants in his church policies was abbot Rautenstrauch of Braunau in Bohemia (pp. 158–62). Among many other points of interest revealed here is that there was an intriguing debate involving monks already in the 1780s and 1790s about the meaning and significance of the concept ‘Enlightenment’. This very learned and highly original book, based on little-known and often obscure sources, reveals the existence of a remarkable subculture of Enlightened, even revolutionary, monks who had personal as well as literary and philosophical connections with the non-monastic world. It is evident that the history both of religion and of Enlightenment would benefit from further studies of other orders and regions.