This exceptional well-edited collection will be of use to both students of fin de siècle philosophy in France and America, and those interested in Modernism in the Catholic Church. The individual essays are, in general, of a uniformly high order and throw considerable light on the respective movements delineated in the title. The introduction directly addresses the issue of the influence of Jamesian Pragmatism on French Catholic Modernism. Other essays in the collection steer well away from this objective. Whilst, for example, John R. Shook's is a penetrating analysis of the impact that Pragmatism had on French philosophy it has nothing to say on how this was related to the rise of Modernism. He is, however, immensely entertaining and records Jean Bourdeau's robust depiction of American Pragmatism as all that one could expect from ‘a race of semi-barbarous engineers and bankers’ (p. 69). Similarly Stephen Schlossberg's piece offers splendidly apposite perspectives on what was at the heart of the Modernist challenge (cf. p. 25), but there are a number of issues on which his sweeping generalisations will cause those familiar with the history of ideas to draw breath. He in effect attempts to give an account of the history of ideas from the Thirty Years War to the Modernist era in thirty-seven pages. Much of what he has to say is good but in general un-nuanced. The articles by Frédéric Worms and Donald Viney, dealing respectively with Henry James and Henri Bergson, and with the idea of free will in James and Charles Renouvier, are excellent in themselves but at most provide indications of the general philosophical contours from which Modernism emerged. The four remaining essays do, however, admirably address the central concern of the title and provided a rich interplay between Pragmatism and Modernism. Michael J. Kerlin, among his many achievements, shows how Fr Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange op (a teacher of the young Karol Wojtyła) relentlessly pursued Blondel, because of the latter's concept of truth, in a way that foreshadowed Pope Pius xii's condemnation of ‘la nouvelle théologie’ in Humani generis (1950) (p. 137). C. J.T. Talar's essays is a treat to read giving as it does a guide to French Catholic philosophical reactions to Pragmatism, although the main focus of his chapter, Marcel Hébert, not only left the priesthood but broke with Catholicism entirely. As indeed did the subject of Clara Ginther's essays, George Tyrrell, though in his case by excommunication. Tyrrell wrote on American Pragmatism (‘Notre Attitude en face du Pragmatisme’, Annales de philosophie chrétienne [Dec. 1905]), declaring his sympathy with the approach, and Ginther spells out the parallels between James and Tyrrell especially with relation to the idea of ‘life as a criterion of truth’ (p. 195). On the other hand Tyrrell defined Pragmatism differently from James and also feared that James's Pragmatism would lead to an understanding of religion in which ethics would be the dominant touchstone. Harvey Hill's article is the best in dealing with the philosophical correspondence and conflict between Pragmatism and French Catholic philosophy, emerging as it was from the shadow of neo-scholasticism. He examines in particular the thought of Édouard LeRoy some of whose work was placed on the Index. Despite the reservations expressed earlier there is much in this work that is fresh and as a whole it is a most gratifying read. The price, however, will deter all but the most ardent student.