This substantial book, weighing 2.4 kilos, publishes the papers given at a conference held in Oxford in 2012. Its distinctive feature is that it concerns both the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation on the libraries of religious houses and that of the secularisations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of the thirty-five contributions, a few cover both periods, but the majority of them deal with the later period. The volume consists of seven parts, with overlapping subject-matter, as will be clear from the summary below. A purely geographical arrangement might have been less opaque. Perhaps this was avoided because geographical coverage is incomplete, something for which it would be unfair to blame either the editors or the authors.

The first and longest part of the book seeks to provide a ‘territorial and temporal map of the dissolved collections’, beginning with Fiorenzo Landi on the economic effecs of the dissolutions. This is the only contribution with a wide geographical scope, apart from the perceptive introduction. It is followed by the late Richard Sharpe's fine overview of the effect of the Reformation in England and Rudolf Gamper on German-speaking Switzerland, 1525–30 and 1840–50. Jeffrey Garrett discusses the expropriation of monastic libraries in German-speaking Europe, 1773–1817, and Javier Antón Pelayo the secularisation of Catalan religious libraries, 1767–1836. Two essays labelled ‘case studies’ follow (although in fact most of the contributions to the volume are ‘case studies’): Luis Cabral on Portugal, and especially Porto, and Maria Luisa Lopez Vidriero on Seville and Madrid. The section concludes with Pedro Rueda Ramírez's account of the three phases of secularisation of religious houses in Latin America.

Part ii, ‘State Policy towards Book Collections’, contains three substantial essays about Italy: Dorit Raines on Venice in the years 1768 to 1819, Vincenzo Trombetta on Naples, 1767–1815, and Marie-Pierre Laffitte on confiscations in Italian monasteries under Napoleon. This is followed by a section on sequestration, re-distribution and the foundation of public libraries, beginning with the city libraries of the Netherlands, notably the city library of Amsterdam, founded in 1578 (Jos Biemans). There are three papers on Italy: Tuscany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Emmanuelle Chapron), the Vatican library and the dispersal of religious libraries, 1798–1814 (Andreina Rita) and the dispersal of the monastic libraries of Rome, 1849 and 1873 (Marina Venier). Attention then moves to Eastern Europe, with Marek Derwich discussing the fate of books from the monasteries of Poland and Silesia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, and Oleh Dukh those from the Catholic and Uniate houses in Russia from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century.

Part iv focuses on the book trade, with Dominique Varry's account of the antiquarian trade in France after the Revolution, Marino Zorzi on the market in nineteenth-century Venice, Bettina Wagner on sales of ‘duplicates’ by the Munich Court Library in the nineteenth century and Richard Linenthal on the nineteenth-century English trade with particular reference to early printed fragments. The next section is headed ‘Migration of Books, Access to New Publics’ and contains three essays: Bart op de Beeck, ‘Jesuit libraries in the Southern Netherlands and their dispersal after 1773’; Antonella Barzazi, ‘Before Napoleon: change and continuity in Italian religious book collections’; and William P. Stoneman, ‘North-American collection building’. In part vi, on the destruction of books and the spoils of war, Tuomas Heikklä discusses the Swedish realm during the Reformation and Martin Germann books from monasteries in Zurich from the Reformation to the nineteenth century.

The final section (‘Tools for Research’) concerns four current projects: the digital version of Neil Ker's Medieval libraries of Great Britain (James Willoughby); material evidence in incunabula and other information concerning provenance, applied principally to the holdings of the Bodleian Library (Cristina Dondi); the Ricerca sull'Inchiesta della Congregazione dell'Indice and its database called ‘Le biblioteche degli ordini regolari in Italia al fine del secolo xvi’ (Giovanna Granata); and, much the longest contribution in the volume, on the incunabula of S. Giorgio Maggiore, osb, Venice (Cristina Dondi, Lavinia Prosdocimi and Dorit Raines). There are indices of persons and places, and a helpful chronological table at pp. 19–23.

As is often the case with collaborative ventures, and especially those with many contributors, great variety is evident in the papers. A few mainly summarise the existing state of knowledge in their chosen fields, but much more numerous are those which present the results of new research. This means that the volume is a rich resource concerning different parts of Europe. But it is more than the sum of its parts, and it is likely to be regarded as a major work of reference concerning monastic libraries. It also documents great variety in the fate of the libraries covered. At one extreme is the destruction or dismemberment of the books, at the other their preservation to become the basis of new libraries.