Officialities formed a complex system of justice in Europe between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, and their tribunals have provided fertile ground for historians of law intent on determining their institutional organisation and procedures. A number of the sixteen essays in this collection concentrate on these areas of research, but the majority assume a less familiar perspective, in order to shed new light on the tribunals' personnel and activities, and especially on the experiences of the diocesan clergy and laity who appeared before the courts as petitioners, witnesses or defendants. The collection offers a mix of recent scholarship and summaries of scholarly findings in recent decades; amongst the latter, Martin Ingram provides a masterly sketch of church courts in Tudor England, the scholarship on which has benefited hugely from his own work as well as that of others such as Ralph Houlbrooke. The religious changes of the period provide a rewarding framework, as not only did the church courts survive the initial schism under Henry viii, they were also used to enforce versions of Protestantism and a restored Catholicism over four reigns. Kevin Saule distils the conclusions of his recent doctoral dissertation in his interesting essay on the courts of Beauvais diocese in southern France, which can be usefully compared to Tudor institutes; in seventeenth-century Beauvais, the courts also acted as promoters of reform objectives, in this case, of the Catholic Reformation, so that officials increasingly imposed their sanctions as pedagogical imperatives to improvement rather than as punitive measures. Furthermore, the vigour with which they did so tantalisingly suggests that in France, as in England, the courts did not decline in importance before the eighteenth century. Indeed, Saule proves that they did not cease to exist in France even during the tumultuous Wars of Religion in the preceding century, which is an important corrective to the common assumption that they did. It would therefore be valuable to read an essay in this volume which would test its plausibility more thoroughly. However, only two of the sixteen contributions reach much beyond 1500, and even then do not focus on the following hundred years, while the eight essays on France focus on the north. These are fairly minor quibbles, for this is, of course, not a volume dedicated to French officialities, or even to the early modern period, but to describing the current ‘state of play’ in research on Europe generally between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.