Dr. Kidd’s book on the Counter-Reformation is at once a delight and a disappointment. It is a delight because of the skill with which a wealth of knowledge and historical insight, together with a strong sympathy with the Catholic mentality of the sixteenth century, have been compressed and woven into the lucid, scholarly narrative of 262 pages. It is a disappointment because the author's strict following of the conventional treatment of the Counter-Reformation and his attempted adherence to an artificial chronological terminus ad quem, have prevented him from seeing all round his subject and from shedding any really new illumination upon it. Like most of his predecessors he begins with spirituality and ends with politics. At the beginning it is the Oratory of Divine Love, the new Orders, the Exercises, that confront the reader; at the end it is the details of wars, plots, and dynastic policies that hold the attention. The inevitable implication is not wholly justified. Though Dr. Kidd naturally sees that the Counter Reformation was more than a mere reaction of medievalism against Protestantism, he is writing at the end as if the classification of territories lost or won, and by what external agencies, were the whole of his business. On any adequate interpretation of the Counter-Reformation— by which I mean one that recognizes in it a positive and potentially self-sufficient internal development of Catholicism, in touch with all the new forces of the sixteenth century, though undeniably much stimulated and indeed gravely modified by the fight against Protestantism; on any such interpretation, surely, for example, that wonderful and much studied flowering of French Catholicism in the early seventeenth century is as much, if not more, of its essence than the Wars of the League?