It is one thing to recognize that the religious history of the early modern Netherlands was complex and fragmented, but another thing altogether to untangle it. Church, Censorship and Reform in the Early Modern Habsburg Netherlands brings together the work of a group of scholars that is making great strides towards illuminating two distinct dimensions of the Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg Low Countries: the suppression of heterodox printing and the implementation of Tridentine reform measures.

The book's narrow geographic focus, concentrating on the “area of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt delta” (2), allows the volume to explore an unusually broad timeframe. Renaud Adam's careful assessment of pre-Reformation censorship demonstrates, for instance, that corporate regulation of the production of printed texts existed in parts of the Low Countries long before the religious controversies of the sixteenth century. Tom Beervoets's chapter, by contrast, takes us into the eighteenth century, when the ramifications of the reform of the ecclesiastical courts in Malines were still being felt. This helps lift the story of censorship and Catholic reform out of its narrow Reformation context and gives us a sense of its long-term development. Our understanding of this topic is also enriched by the transnational and comparative angles that are present in the volume. Grantley McDonald explores how censorship strategies in the Low Countries differed from those in Vienna, another center of Habsburg authority. And César Manrique Figueroa shows that the Netherlandish printers working for the Spanish market encountered a second level of control and censorship on the Iberian Peninsula, which proved very hard to navigate.

Above all, this volume demonstrates that processes of repression and reform were shaped by a surprising variety of actors. The volume includes chapters that explore the roles played by aristocratic bishops and papal nuncios, secular authorities and ecclesiastical courts, university professors and educated laymen, and monarchs and parish councils. It becomes evident that not one explanatory model will suffice as each group's actions were shaped by their own points of reference, rationale, and interests. Arjan van Dixhoorn's contribution is particularly interesting in this respect, as it points to one of the main pitfalls of this diffuse and decentralized religious and institutional landscape: who among the many stakeholders in the production of theological texts could legitimately claim authority on matters of doctrine?

One of the strongpoints of this volume is that it demonstrates so much careful and cutting-edge research. The contributors, many of whom are young historians with fresh perspectives, build their conclusions on ample and often previously unexplored or underexplored primary-source material. This great attention to detail, however, does sometimes result in rather dense prose. And the authors, who are so deeply familiar with the ecclesiastical and political institutions they study, sometimes presuppose a thorough understanding of this context, which cannot always be expected.

Moreover, there is somewhat of a disconnect between the two parts of the volume, which deal with censorship and Catholic reform, respectively. This setup does allow for the exploration of many interesting overarching themes, but it is largely left to the reader to discover them. A conclusion highlighting these common threads could have been a helpful addition. Its absence makes the volume more difficult to use for readers unfamiliar with the complex history of the Habsburg Netherlands. In the end we are left with a stimulating and valuable work for scholars of Catholic reform, book history, and the early modern Low Countries, but a rather daunting prospect for the cursory reader.