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Although these two fascinating volumes in many ways complement each other, Carnal Knowledge, which is solely concerned with England, is likely to be of greater interest to a non-specialist reader of this Journal than is Judging Faith, Punishing Sin. This is because the latter is a collection of 25 short articles (each by a recognised expert in his or her field) dealing almost exclusively with, and in part contrasting, protestant consistories in Scotland, mainland Europe and to some extent further afield with Roman Catholic inquisitions, whereas the former is concerned almost entirely with the English courts. Individual historians necessarily have their own specialties and the study of inquisitions and consistories have in the past followed parallel trajectories or, as the introduction to Judging Faith, Punishing Sin states: 'For all the rich insight yielded. .. scholarship on Catholic and Calvinist programs of discipline has remained in two divergent and self-contained fields of research and discourse' (p 2). Judging Faith, Punishing Sin is aimed at bringing together these differing fields of scholarship and, in so doing, it threads together three themes: the bureaucratic framework of early modern inquisitions and consistories; consistories and inquisitions in action; and the expanding reach and decline of ecclesiastical discipline. The breadth of field is necessarily immense but, judging from these articles, there is a growing interest in a comparative approach, the fruits of which are likely to throw greater light on each of the institutions concerned and those persons involved with them. Although all such scholarship is both complicated and limited by the extent to which court records have survived, historians are becoming increasingly aware of the treasures to be mined from those that have survived. Indeed, while this reviewer was reading the volume in question, the Times Literary Supplement (8 December 2017) included an article by another historian, Suzannah Lipscomb, entitled 'Magdaleine's dance' and outlining 'what court records can tell us about the lives of women in early modern France'. It is therefore not surprising that court and inquisitorial records throw a light, not only on the machinery of the institutions themselves and their administrators, but on the lives of the everyday men and women who

One of the most heated debates in the admittedly sedate field of medieval Jewish history is the degree of fidelity to Judaism of the conversos, the Jews who accepted baptism in late-fourteenthand fifteenth-century Spain, and their descendants. One camp--exemplified by Yitzhak Baer and Haim Beinart--views the conversos as faithful to Judaism insofar as possible. According to this view, the Inquisition, despite the evil of its means, was to some extent justified in its ends in the sense that it responded to a real problem for Spanish Christian society. The other--exemplified by Benzion Netanyahu and Norman Roth--contends that the Inquisition blew far out of propor-

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