There were only a few occasions when the Catholic and Protestant authorities were in agreement about condemning the same heresies. In the 1520s and 1530s, the Anabaptists were harshly repressed by the Zwinglians and the Lutherans, while the Catholics crushed the New Jerusalem of Münster with the support and approval of the latter. In the following decades, the Spanish anti-Trinitarian physician Michael Servetus was first convicted and imprisoned by the French Catholic authorities and then captured by Calvin's men in Geneva with the help of the Catholics, before ending up at the stake in 1553. Although these cases were extremely rare, many authors suggested—always in controversialist terms—a parallel between the repressive Catholic institutions and the Reformed supervisory authorities. In the vast majority of cases these were figures who sided in various ways with the Protestants but denounced the fact that their old companions were drifting dangerously toward the methods used by the Catholic Inquisition.

This volume recalls the case of Johannes Uytenbogaert, the leader of the Dutch Remonstrants, who accused the opposing party of Gomarists of behaving like a Genevan-styled Inquisition. Many others could be added to the list, including the John Milton of Areopagitica and the Italian Jacob Acontius, author of Satan's Stratagems (1565), a publishing sensation in seventeenth-century England, who did not hesitate to accuse the Reformed churches of foreign exiles in London of increasingly adopting the behavior of the much-despised “papism.” A range of writers who championed tolerance and freedom of conscience compared Calvinist discipline to the revival of papal tyranny. But how much truth was there in these polemical statements? Charles H. Parker and Gretchen Starr-LeBeau have tried to develop the controversialist comparison by inviting some of the leading specialists in early modern religious history to reflect on the similarities and differences that characterized the religious institutions involved in what historiography has defined as the phenomenon of social and religious disciplining in early modern Europe. The leading players were, therefore, on one hand the Catholic Inquisitions—Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman—and on the other hand the Reformed consistories, above all but not exclusively following the model tested in Calvinist Geneva with a board of pastors and lay elders who governed the congregation and prosecuted those charged with various moral infractions (2).

The two editors made the clever choice of structuring their research thematically rather than geographically, except for the two sections dedicated to the “Atlantic World” and the “Asian Environment” (253–305). The book thus takes shape as a series of pairs of articles (one on the Catholic Inquisitions, the other on the Reformed consistories) focusing on different topics, such as the respective jurisdictions (40–103), the relationship between judges and shepherds (104–27), the type of available records (128–52), the respective “Programs of Moral and Religious Reform” (155–79), the victims (180–203), the gender perspective of “Attitudes toward Femininity” (229–49), and, finally, the perspective of the issue of “Negotiating Penance” (204–28), which is central to the framework of the volume. Overall, the book provides a comparison that predominantly highlights the differences. The Inquisitions and consistories implemented parallel social regulation programs, often by invoking individual consciences to instill moral self-discipline in their respective believers and relying on the secular courts to punish sinners. Furthermore, the main objective of both, albeit with significantly different overtones, was to reintegrate sinners within the church community rather than punishment or permanent expulsion. Apart from these shared traits, the two institutions appear to have been quite different: the Catholic Inquisitions were hierarchical bodies that strove to exercise a universal jurisdiction, ultimately dependent on the authority of the pope or a monarch, while the consistories were independent nonhierarchical institutions of a local nature. Most importantly though, the Inquisitions concentrated on heresy and Judaizers (converts from Judaism), only focusing on morality when the concept of heresy broadened to include moral issues, while the consistories were responsible for imposing moral discipline and were rarely interested in heresy or religious conversions.

In the light of this important difference, it would be interesting to broaden the scope covered by this book to develop a consideration of the successes and failures of the two institutions in the implementation of their social and religious disciplining projects. The great benefit of these collected essays lies not only in their extensive comparative reflections about Catholic and Protestant institutions, but also in the comparison offered by each contribution within its specific field, respectively between the three different Catholic Inquisitions and between the many different types of Reformed consistory that existed at the time.