Brian Outhwaite was a versatile historian of early modern England whose work encompassed many topics, including agriculture, dearth, inflation and crown finances. One of its main strands, however, was marriage, and especially clandestine marriage, which led in turn to the church courts, the subject of this book, sadly his last. It is a succinct, judicious and lively survey, which falls naturally into two halves. The first explains the expansion of the courts' business between the Reformation and the early seventeenth century. It is a clear survey and critical appraisal of the main discoveries and conclusions of historians of the courts' fortunes between the break with Rome and the civil war. It is for the most part thoughtful and perceptive. The notion of a ‘rise’ of the ecclesiastical courts during the sixteenth century is based above all on their increasing workload after c. 1540, well documented by several researchers, including this reviewer. Their true ‘rise’, however, needs to be located, if anywhere, in the twelfth century. The courts experienced a serious short-term crisis during the 1530s. Some of their critics suggested that their jurisdiction should be drastically pruned. Thomas Cranmer and other reformers hoped that they might be reformed and strengthened. The crown adopted neither course of action. The courts survived, but faced continuing problems. This account recognises the deep-rooted and growing problem of contumacy, though without mentioning the courts' much greater reliance on excommunication rather than suspension in order to deal with such recalcitrance. It concedes that some statutes either transferred jurisdiction from spiritual to temporal courts or created a concurrent temporal jurisdiction, though it underestimates the scope of these changes, more particularly in the correctional field. Outhwaite believed that regular visitation presentments replaced information from apparitors as the main foundation of official prosecutions only during the later sixteenth century. This is seriously misleading. The routine of presentments by churchwardens or other sworn men had been established long before the Reformation. Far from being an ‘incontrovertible fact’ it is simply not true that ‘instance suits outnumbered office prosecutions in the regular business of the church courts’ (p. 69) between 1540 and 1640. The second half of the book explains how and why the courts' activity declined between their restoration in 1660–1 and the statutory abolition of most of their jurisdiction between 1854 and 1860. This second half draws not only upon the work of other scholars but also on Outhwaite's own previous research on the problems of clandestinity and delinquent clergy. It gives clear and trenchant descriptions of successive reform projects, the opposition they encountered, and the eventual process of step-by-step yet relatively speedy removal of all the courts' most important and profitable sources of business. This stimulating concise introduction will be essential reading for anybody interested in the history of the church courts. It fully merits the warm tribute paid to it in a foreword by Richard Helmholz, the foremost historian of English ecclesiastical law.