Historians have paid scant attention to the history of monasticism in and after the eighteenth century. This book is designed to help fill the gap. It is made up of sixteen articles, nine in English and seven in French, and has been masterminded by an international research network (RELINS: European Forum on the History of Religious Institutes in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries), assisted by the universities of Leuven and Brussels. The subjects of the articles range across Europe – or, more precisely, over those countries in western and southern Europe, excluding Germany, where either the Reformation or the French Revolution had outlawed monasticism and where its revival in the nineteenth century had to contend with serious legal obstacles. The first two articles are concerned with the general issue of monastic landed wealth and its management between 1773 and 1930. The remainder deal with particular cases: three on France, two each on Belgium, England and Italy, and one each on Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Corsica and Luxembourg. There has been understandable confusion among historians about the precise legal position of monasticism at different stages in the various countries discussed. Complicated and varied though the position was, the impressive articles in this fine collection go far to clarify it. In every case some subterfuge seems to have been required to enable monasteries to exist at all, and further sleight-of-hand to allow state funds to assist their educational and caring work. It is striking how great a role was played by the donations, the work and the management of women – again, usually without full recognition, and often only by subterfuge. For English readers the stories of Anglican Ditchingham in Norfolk (by Joy Frith) and Catholic provision in St Helens (by Carmen Mangion) will have special resonance, and for Irish readers the chapter by Maria Luddy. But perhaps the most striking piece, and the one likely to have the greatest impact on modern historians generally, is Preston Martin Perluss's on ‘Monastic landed wealth in late eighteenth-century Paris’. He shows that the houses of the more recently founded monastic orders had to settle on sites outside the centre of the city, but then found that their location put them in a position to build on their land fine residential housing which they leased profitably to relatively wealthy citizens – thereby arousing envy and hostility (and a desire to purchase) that contributed to their dissolution during the Revolution. It should perhaps have been made clearer that Germany, Poland, the Austrian Monarchy and the Orthodox lands present a different picture. But overall this is a path-breaking collection of genuinely original articles making a major contribution to a neglected but rewarding field of study.