Michaela Valente valuably surveys literature behind the Black Legend of ‘the inquisition’, from the sixteenth century. The niceties of the different forms of inquisition in Spain, Portugal, their colonies and in Italy were ignored by many polemicists, who focused on attacking generally the ‘tyranny’, intransigence and bloodiness of ‘the inquisition’, as the Catholic Church's chief weapon, not the different realities. Valente aims to show the evolution of the Holy Office into a negative myth which prepared the way for lay anticlericalism and a new Catholicism in the nineteenth century (p. 12). She digests much polemical literature, amply quoting from the originals, notably in Italian, Latin, English and French, with a little in German. Much early criticism accepted a need to confront heresy and errors but, alluding to the parable of the wheat and tares, argued that it was up to God to make severe judgements, not the inquisitions. Roman intransigence and severity was blamed on Gian Pietro Carafa, later Paul iv, as by Cardinals Contarini and Seripando; and on the Dominicans who largely staffed the Roman inquisition. Valente stresses the passing contributions of early critics such as Erasmus, Cardano, Cornelius Agrippa, Gasparo Contarini, De Dominis, and of Paolo Sarpi whose works widened the scope of anti-inquisition attacks, especially into jurisdictional debate. Some attacks came from direct experience of the inquisition: a few Italian trial records in the 1580s are cited via secondary studies (p. 34). But the key contributors were publications printed in foreign states, with varying degrees of accuracy and polemical exaggeration, often concentrating on dire prison experiences: note Sebastian Castellio (1551), Justus Velsius (under Cologne diocesan inquisition 1550s), and Charles Dellon (1687 acccount of his Goa experiences). Giuseppe Pignata provided a very influential account. Valente, using archival records in Bologna and Rome's Holy Office archive, valuably upholds that this was based on Pignata's real experiences in Rome in 1693 and in flight, and was not fictional, (pp. 114–20). A notable ‘source’ was Girolamo Bartolomeo Piazza, once a consultant to the inquisitor in Osimo, who fled to England, became an Anglican and published A short and true account of the inquisition (1722). Valente focuses much on English contributions to the anti-inquisition campaign, as fostered by exiles like Piazza and the Spaniard Antonio Gavin (converted to Anglicanism in 1715). Stress on the ‘Bloody Inquisition’ (as in Luke Beaulieu's 1681 The holy inquisition, or John Marchant's 1756 book thus titled), stimulated post-Restoration anti-Catholicism, and later anti-Jacobitism. Much boosted campaigns for toleration, with John Locke fostering anti-inquisition studies including Philip von Limborch's still famous history. Other notable contributions include Girolamo Massari's 1553 parody of inquisition manuals, calling for toleration, and Jean Cornand de la Crose's supplements to Bishop Gilbert Burnet's Travels, highlighting the inquisition's anti-Molinist campaigns. Valente ends with Tommaso Vincenzo Pani's 1789 erudite counter-attacking critique of anti-inquisition literature and its distortions, arguing for a moderate reformed inquisition to check heresies. Most of what Valente surveys should please Diarmaid MacCulloch who mischievously judged my recent The Italian inquisition insufficiently damnatory!