2013 saw a number of conferences to mark the 450th anniversary of the closing of the Council of Trent (1545–63). This volume publishes the proceedings from the one held at Trent in September of that year; others were held at Freiburg im Breisgau, Lille and Braga.Footnote ¹ What characterised all these conferences and their published proceedings was their avowed attempt to re-position Trent both historiographically and geographically; in other words, not just according to the eurocentric agenda that gave coherence to the two volumes occasioned by the conference held to mark the 400th anniversary in 1963 and which continued to shape subsequent collections down to the end of the twentieth century.Footnote ² Accordingly, the longest section of the book under review (at a little under 180 pages) – ‘Trent out of Europe’ – is dedicated not only to the reception of the council's decrees in Spanish and Portuguese America, Portuguese India and China, but also includes valuable essays by Giovanni Pizzorusso (in English) on the attempted ‘ecclesiastical colonisation of missionary spaces’ (p. 425) by the Papal Congregation of Propaganda Fide, which was founded in 1622 with the express purpose of challenging royal monopolies over ecclesiastical appointments enjoyed by the rulers of the Iberian overseas empires, and an essay by Luis Martínez Ferrer on the Third Provincial Council of Lima (1582–3), known as the ‘Trent of the Americas’, which, unusually, Philip ii of Spain permitted to be approved by the papal Congregation of the Council in Rome, the body which had been specifically charged with the monopoly over how Trent was to be interpreted.Footnote ³ In an essay well-translated into English (by Phillip Villani, who is the only individual credited as such in the entire volume), Evergton Sales Souza makes the excellent point (‘The construction of a Tridentine Christianity in Portuguese America’) that we need to remember that ‘even in Europe the Tridentine program was not fully realised’ (p. 481), which should make us more understanding of the situation in Brazil where: ‘there was not so much a church to be reformed as one to be constructed’ (p. 484). Portuguese India is particularly well-served, with essays on missionary opponents to Trent by Giuseppe Marcocci and Sabina Pavone on the rules over the degree to which celebration of the sacraments could accommodate local practices, Dubia circa sacramenta (as viewed principally from the perspective of the Roman Inquisition). In addition, there is an essay of particular significance by Ines Županov (in English) on the use of vernacular languages, such as Tamil, in a confession manual printed in 1580 under the watchful eye of the Jesuit Henrique Henriques who, in a letter written in Cape Cormorin and published in the same year (1551) in Portugal, announced that he was enclosing a grammar that he had already composed of the language. Županov thereby challenges what has become lately something of a cliché: that the Council of Trent might perhaps be considered more remarkable for what it left out including, notoriously, any reference to the overseas missions. Instead, Županov draws attention to a section (vii) of the Reform decree issued on the same day as the famous canon on marriage (Tametsi), 11 November 1563, on the occasion of the penultimate, twenty-fourth, session of the council, which mandated that the efficacy of the sacraments should be explained to indigenous peoples by bishops and priests, ‘this even in the vernacular tongue’, and that the former should see to it that catechisms similarly be ‘faithfully translated into the vulgar tongue’. Županov goes on to note that ‘linguistic efforts by the missionaries [in India] intensified exponentially after the Council of Trent’ (p. 571). This ‘Tridentine’ approach to vernaculars of course completely bypassed such colonial languages of command as Castilian and Portuguese, and Županov concludes by asserting that ‘the Council of Trent [thereby] authorized all vernaculars in the world, as legitimate vessels of conversion, and made them equally valid and meritorious’ (p. 580). A good two-thirds of the volume, however, is still focused on the Old World, although these include Elizabeth Tingle's valuable history of indulgences after Luther, as viewed from France, which shows how integral they became to Roman Catholic worship after Trent; Wietse de Boer's characteristically insightful discussion of debates and controversies in Italy over the veneration of saints and images, which pre-dated the briefest of decrees issued only in the last days of the council by several decades (at least from the late 1530s) and Paul Oberholzer's fine essay on the Jesuit contribution to the council, which situates and analyses some thirteen letters, dating from the third and final period of the council. These were directed by Juan de Polanco to spread word to Jesuits throughout the world of the Society's involvement in its deliberations: specifically of Diego Laìnez's significant contributions to the preparatory work and informal conversations over the ius divinum of episcopal jurisdiction: clandestine marriages and diocesan seminaries. Matteo Al Kalak focuses on the positions of three influential Dominican theologians: Egidio Foscarari, Girolamo Muzzarelli and Tommaso Maria Beccadelli, who all tried to keep alive a more eirenic vision of Catholicism, which could be traced back to Gasparo Contarini and which Foscarari, the only one who participated in the final period of the council, this time also as bishop of Modena, fought for right to the end.Footnote ⁴ Emidio Campi's arresting account of Protestant and Calvinist treatments of Trent includes discussion of John Calvin's Acta Synodi Tridentinae cum antidoto (1547), which was then published the following year in French. This work had as its centrepiece a reliable and complete text of the canons and decrees of the first six sessions, with a balanced commentary that in the case of those relating to justification, in the sixth session, ended with an emphatic ‘amen’ (p. 344). This is therefore a rich and rewarding collection which every serious student not only of Trent but also of the making of Tridentine Catholicism as a world religion should definitely engage with, notwithstanding Brepols's variable editorial standards, including rather too many typos and some decidedly unidiomatically translated abstracts in English.