This volume initiates a new series. The editorial introduction has something of the character of a manifesto. It notes that pluralism may have been embraced officially but beneath the surface a more traditional scepticism of multi-ethnic, multi-faith and multi-cultural societies has continued and indeed ‘may be experiencing efflorescence’. The debates that ensue, it is suggested, need more than the expertise of political theorists and sociologists of religion. Historical understanding is required if interfaith and intercultural bridge-building efforts – in which Bonney is personally involved – are to succeed. This initial exploration consists of a dozen essays by British, American and European scholars, largely historians. The focus is on Britain and France, present-day allies and historical enemies, who have both been transformed from homogeneous to heterogenous societies. This transformation may often be presented as an exclusively late-modern phenomenon and, perhaps in its scale and complexity, it is. The editors argue, however, that the contemporary implications of this transformation need to be seen against a long history. The papers that have been solicited – many, but not all, arising out of a conference – have presumably been chosen to support this contention. It is the editors, however, whose substantial introduction is the longest individual contribution, who seek to establish the pertinent conceptual and geographical parameters. Pluralism, they accept, scarcely surprisingly, can mean many different things. Their subsequent subdivided sections, ranging across time and between the two countries, deal rapidly with a host of particular matters. Their observations are pertinent but necessarily sketchy. Their other contributors, however, in their individual papers, by no means invariably directly address the ‘pluralism agenda’ within the conceptual framework which the editors have been at pains to set out. Bonney himself, in his own contemporary analysis of British and French Muslims poised, as he titles it, between assimilation and segregation, and Aubrey Newman, in his exposition of the Jewish presence in Britain and France, 1650–1914, however, do really engage in that comparative historical perspective which the introduction lauds. Randolphe Vigne has something further to say about Richard Hill and the fate of the Vaudois, concluding that, many decades later, the concern in Britain for Protestant minorities played a major part along the road to establishing their civil liberties. John Wolffe, also, has an interesting essay on British Protestants and Europe, what they saw, how they interpreted it and what influence their perception had. It prompts reflection, as almost all the papers do, on how we are to envisage ‘minorities’ and ‘majorities’. Rik Torfs, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Leuven, in providing an illuminating essay on the present state of religious minorities in Europe, does address this question very specifically – and admits that definition is far from straightforward. As a lawyer, he asks himself whether liberty necessarily includes equality. The answer is not simple. That is not to say that the other papers in this volume lack interest and quality, but their authors largely restrict themselves to either England or France. Some focus on illustrative episodes, others range widely. Gwynne Lewis, for example, writes discerningly on the ‘French state, Calvinism and pluralism, c. 1550s–1848’, but Terrie Aamodt writes much more narrowly on ‘Mother Ann Lee and the English origins of the Shakers’. Similarly, though over a shorter span than Lewis, William Lamont reflects on ‘religion’ as represented in the historiography of the ‘English Civil War’, while Bryan Ball writes less centrally on post-Restoration sabbatarianism. Robin Briggs pursues Jansenists and their enemies with his customary authority. The celebration of the three-hundredth jubilee of the French Reformation is used by James Deming to illustrate what contrary lessons Protestants and Catholics in mid-nineteenth-century France could derive from the Huguenot martyrs. Finally, it is a little difficult to see how Penny Mahon's reflections on ‘Woman as writer in the early nineteenth-century Peace Society’ quite fit the general scheme. In short, the individual pieces are all of interest, but they do not quite add up to a volume which takes the ‘pluralism agenda’, as set out so ambitiously by the editors, significantly forward.