This collection of twenty-three articles comes out of a 2013 conference held at Freiburg to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the ending of the Council of Trent. Like all such collections, it is a mixed bag. Some of the contributions, for example the opening sermon by the archbishop of Freiburg and the welcoming speech by Cardinal Kurt Koch, reflect current discussions about religion, ecumenism and church history as well as the sponsorship of the conference by the Catholic Church. Others, like a long ‘disputation’ between Peter Hersche and Wolfgang Reinhard on the subject of ‘how modern is Baroque Catholicism, or how Baroque is modern Catholicism?’, are more historiographical. The ‘disputation’ also bears the marks of a freewheeling oral discussion, which does not translate well into text. There are eighteen men and only three women among the contributors, with the preponderance of the authors holding senior chairs in religion and history at German and Austrian universities. So, in a sense, the collection reflects the concerns and conclusions of an older generation of scholars, rather than a discussion of current developments in the field. Two of the articles are in English, the rest in German and there are no French, British or American scholars in the collection.

Despite these concerns, the collection makes useful contributions and reflects developments in religious history over the last twenty-five years or so. There are four main sections, the first on Trent as a place of memory, the second on theology, the third on Trent and the Curia, and the fourth on the reception of Trent. The volume is focused on the German- speaking lands, with some discussion of connections between Germany and Italy, as is appropriate for a council that was intentionally held in a city on the boundary between German and Italian cultural worlds. Importantly, the best of the contributions examine the long-term impact of Trent, both intended and unintended.

Günther Wassilowsky's introduction very effectively lays out the important scholarly discussions of the Council of Trent. He begins with a discussion of myths. Already in the sixteenth century Protestant identity was built around myths about persons, the founding fathers of Protestantism. For Catholics, however, ‘a myth of an event [ein Ereignismythos] played a decisive role … [and] it was the myth of the Council of Trent’ (p. 2). Catholic writings and images of Trent from the sixteenth century emphasise that the council was not dominated by the papacy but rather presented it as ‘the fundamental episcopal constitution of the Church’ (p. 5). Protestants of course developed a different myth of Trent, which emphasised the chaotic progress of the council and, of course, ‘papal despotism’. At Wassilowsky says, these two competing myths remain part of the discourse about Trent until this day.

Wassilowsky then moves on to discuss broader scholarly engagement with Trent. Over time scholars have highlighted the contradictions, complexities and nuances in the discussions and decrees at Trent. Much ink has also been spilled over the relationship between the council and what has been called ‘Tridentine Catholicism’. Here too, research has revealed a range of responses among Catholics to the decrees of the council, from resistance to enthusiastic support, with a consensus that Tridentine norms had to be adapted to regional and local traditions to be effective.

Wassilowsky also points to a relatively new challenge to the historiography of the Council of Trent exemplified by the work of Peter Hersche, who has argued that the influence of the council led to a burst of reform, but that by about 1600 Baroque religiosity came to dominate European Catholicism. According to Hersche, this Baroque Catholicism was a continuation of traditional medieval religiosity, not a response to Protestantism or a modernising development. This interpretation is taken up again in the ‘disputation’ between Hersche and Reinhard in the last contribution to the collection. Here Reinhard defends his interpretation of Catholic confessionalisation, originally developed in the 1970s and 1980s, which argued that Church and State worked together to create more (self-) disciplined believers and subjects, creating a more modern society in parallel to developments in Protestant Europe. In this volume Reinhard laments some of the directions that the confessionalisation discussion took, particularly the statist focus promoted by Heinz Schilling, but he also rejects Hersche's focus on the Baroque.

Hersche defends his position here, pointing to his interest in social history and the daily lives of Catholics as a spur towards his interpretation of Baroque Catholicism. He also ties the historiographical discussion of Tridentine and Baroque Catholicism to the debates around Vatican II in the 1960s, when conservatives defended Trent and the ‘traditional’ liturgy. In his view, the four hundred years between Trent and Vatican II cannot be understood (as the traditionalist did) as a ‘unitary block’ (p. 499); and he suggests a more complex chronology and a more nuanced understanding of developments within the Catholic Church. The implication is that a more complex understanding of church history is necessary to facilitate any move to revive European Catholicism in the twenty-first century.

Although not all the contributors agree with Hersche's insistence on a chronology that includes Tridentine, Baroque and Enlightenment forms of Catholicism, they all complicate the story of the reception of Trent. Julia Zunkert's article about the influence of Carlo Borromeo, the exemplary Tridentine bishop of Milan, on Germany examines (at the theoretical level) the concept of connections (Beziehungen) but also finds that Borromeo's influence was very limited north of the Alps. Herman Selderhuis's valuable contribution on the Protestant image of Trent shows how Protestants, from the beginning of the council, blamed it for permanently ending any chance of Christian unity. Joachim Schmiedl moves to the twentieth century to examine the view of Trent held by Catholic traditionalists, particularly Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. For Lefebvre and his followers Trent symbolises a rejection of religious freedom and ecumenism, as well as a source of theological and liturgical tradition.

Philipp Zitelsperger discusses the role of the council in determining Catholic policy toward images. His discussion illuminates the complexities of this reception history. The council decrees were somewhat confusing on the issue of images, both allowing their use but limiting their power considerably. The papacy, however, quickly signalled toleration of holy images, refusing in most cases to suppress their worship. Zitelsperger emphasises the back and forth between Rome, bishops, local clergy and the laity throughout the early modern period, which was the highpoint of the worship of holy images in Catholic Europe. This presentation, like most of the articles in the collection, shows that the decrees of Trent were almost never definitive or decisive in informing Catholic policy or practice; more often they served as starting points for continuing discussions, disputes and negotiation.

The structure of the conference and the volume reflects its role as part of a semi-official Catholic celebration of the Council of Trent. The roster of presenters also indicates that the volume represents the view of the history and religious studies academic establishment. Despite these limitations, there are interesting articles here that reflect an increasingly complex and nuanced understanding of the importance and long-term impact of the Council of Trent.