The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Trent
Nelson H Minnich (ed)
Cambridge University Press, £29.99, 351 pages
The opening paragraph of Nelson H Minnich’s introduction to his edited history of the Council of Trent is so perfectly constructed that I wish I had written it myself.
The Council of Trent (1545-63) was a major event in the history of Western Christianity that sealed rather than healed the divisions between the Catholic and Protestant communities and shaped Roman Catholicism for the centuries that followed until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) effectively ended the Tridentine paradigm.
