In this slender and learned book Gustavo Costa examines the reaction of the Roman Curia and in particular of the Congregation of the Index to three works by Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715): De statu mortuorum et resurgentium (1720), De fide et officiis christianorum (1722) – both condemned by the Index in 1734 – and the Telluris theoria sacra (1690), condemned in 1739. Gustavo Costa's book is divided into three parts: the first represents an introduction to the theological questions that Burnet examines in his treatises. Among these, Costa devotes particular attention to the discussion on the status of souls between death and resurrection, an issue that was theologically crucial for the Protestant world after the abolition of the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, and that in the seventeenth century became an important component of the question of the relationship between theology and natural philosophy. In the second part Costa elucidates the background to the condemnation of Burnet's works by the Congregation of the Index, and the third and final part of Costa's volume is an appendix containing some documents of the Congregation of the Index concerning the censures of Burnet's book. Much can be learned from Costa's essay, and from his accurate examination of Burnet's theological views. This is an important work not only for historians of religion, but for any scholar interested in understanding the complex ways in which religion and natural philosophy interacted in early modern Europe. As Costa argues, ‘contrary to common opinion, Burnet is neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but he is a theologian who uses philosophy and science to corroborate his religious thought’ (p. 4). At this level, Costa's study of Burnet's theology not only against the background of English Protestant theologians, but also against that of continental Protestantism and Catholicism – and in particular with respect to Robert Bellarmine's theological opinions – represents a useful contribution to the understanding of some theological and intellectual features of English Protestantism in a European context. Costa's analysis of the Roman reaction to Burnet – aside from the valuable documentary evidence he presents – is slightly less compelling. Costa attributes the actions of the cardinals of the Index against Burnet to ‘a diversity of opinion between the defenders of the Papal orthodoxy and a product of Protestant free examination [of Scripture]’ (p. 60). This papal orthodoxy is characterised by a lesser degree of theological ‘flexibility’ than that of the Church of England (p. 3), and it is ‘anchored to an absolutist ideal, which coincided with a tyrannical vision of the political-social life, toto coelo different from the tolerant British pluralism’ (p. 4). While there is certainly some truth in those statements, treating late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Catholicism as a monolithic entity of the kind that Costa delineates is not entirely correct. An example of this is an author whom Costa himself mentions in his book, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who refuted Burnet's De statu in his De paradiso regnique caelestis gloria (1738). While Muratori was certainly in agreement with the Catholic censors on many doctrinal issues, and his affinity with the Enlightenment – underlined vigorously by a certain strand of Italian historiography – has significant limitations, nevertheless his Catholicism cannot be considered as of the same intellectual and theological kind as some of the cardinals who elaborated the censures against Burnet's books. Nevertheless, Costa's work is an important contribution to scholarship for many reasons, and one of them is precisely Costa's invitation to take into account the links between London and Rome.