Trent: What Happened at the Council . By John W. O'Malley. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. 335 pp. $27.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Trent: What Happened at the Council . By John W. O'Malley . Cambridge, Mass. : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press , 2013. 335 pp. $27.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesJohn O'Malley sets a clear goal for this very readable book: to provide an introduction to the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and to furnish a "framework" (12) for understanding it. Both the long struggle to convoke a council, and what happened when it finally met at Trent, as well as what did not happen over that eighteen year period, are the focus of this study, suitable for use with undergraduate students as well as with more advanced students. Though O'Malley briefly mentions the abundance of recent studies of reception and implementation of Trent, he devotes relatively little attention to this important aspect of the Council.One thing O'Malley does very well indeed is make the essential content and arguments of the massive study of Trent by Hubert Jedin--published in German over fifty years ago and only partly translated--available to an English-language readership. For this reason alone, the book is well worth purchasing, and its price is actually quite modest for a significant, hardcover book. Jedin worked within a tradition of institutional history, one focused on popes, bishops, monarchs, and also on religious orders. It is an approach that revealed much about the Church's past, but also one that ignored or occluded much else. Few laypersons, other than heads of state, got any attention from this vantage point.O'Malley devotes much attention to what Trent did and did not do, and to its successes and failures. He points out the narrowness of the "Eurocentric" (274) orientation of the Council, and he is not hesitant to point out the Council's silences on issues of enormous import for the Catholic Church in the 1500s and beyond, especially missions to the Americas, Asia, and most of the non-European world. Trent thought of women religious as cloistered nuns only, and thus considered reform of women religious to mean getting them to respect strict enclosure. On marriage Trent required witnesses for a valid marriage, and insisted on the free consent of the spouses. Though Trent articulated qualifications for a candidate for episcopal appointment, it left in place a situation in which most bishops were nominated by monarchs or elected by cathedral chapters. As for the papacy, O'Malley makes clear the credit due to Pope Paul III (r. 1534-1549) who at long last was successful in convoking a council; it was also Paul III who succeeded in steering it away from any condemnations by name of reformers such as Martin Luther (thus making Trent somewhat less problematic than it might otherwise be for later ecumenical dialogue). In the documents it produced, Trent actually had little to say about the papacy, despite relentless Protestant criticism, because Catholic theologians, bishops, and monarchs could not agree on the extent of papal authority in governance of the Church or as final arbiter of doctrine. …