Reviews Enlightenment and Reform inEighteenth-Century Europe. By Derek Beales. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. 2005. + 326 pp. ?49.50 (hardback), isbn 1-86064-949-1; ?16.95 (paperback), isbn 1-86064-950-5. In this important, subtle and always elegantly written collection of essays, Derek Beales ranges widely across the political, social, cultural and religious history of eighteenth-century Europe, while also focusing notably on the relationship between political history and political ideas in the Enlightenment. However, for readers of Austnan Studies, itwill be the essays devoted to the Habsburg Monarchy thatwill doubtless be of most salient interest. Here, while some of thematerial may be familiar, there are also many chapters thatwere published originally in recondite locations and three contributions that have yet to be published at all. Not only is it very useful to have all these studies gathered together for the first time, but reading them in a single sequence also offers an exciting set of anticipations of the themes thatwill dominate in the author's eagerly awaited second volume of his biography of Joseph II, which will cover the years of the Personal Rule. Part One of the collection, which contains five chapters, offers a series of contexts, 'European and Austrian', for the remaining seven in the second part, devoted to Joseph and Reform'. The item that readers will most readily recognize among these contexts, 'The False Joseph IF, is a fine example of Beales's forensic skills in stripping away the legend of Joseph from the underlying historical reality.The essay has been fullyupdated to include more recent publications that (remarkably!) perpetuate the same errors originally identified in the 1970s, thereby justifying itsrepublication here and establishing this version as the best future point of citation. The same may be said for the new translation of Joseph's Revenes, which makes fully available an important genuine source for Joseph's ideas. Among the other 'contexts' proposed in the firsthalf of the book, special attention should be directed to a sequence of three chapters which, taken together, provide a good sense of the author's reading of the French Enlightenment and Joseph IFs relationship to it.Finally, this section is rounded offwith a sparkling account ofMozart's dealings with theHabsburg dynasty as a whole, which reveals Joseph to have been much more supportive of the composer than cinematic and other recent accounts have suggested. A discussion of a little-known song composed at the height of the Turkish War is used as the basis for some suggestive and sensible remarks on Mozart's ideological beliefs, which the author considers to reflect 'the confusions of the age and ofJoseph II himself, humanitarian and militaristic, reformist in religion and in his own view an orthodox Catholic' (p. 107). In Part Two the essays that revisit earlier writings focus on the political and personal relationship between Joseph and his mother. In some areas Beales has revised the views he adumbrated in the firstvolume of Joseph II, and so 35? Reviews these chapters will now need to be read alongside the latter,unless the relevant sections are themselves revised when the complete biography is issued. There are twowholly new pieces: a brief revisionist account of the circumstances that led to the papal visit toVienna in 1781, which makes original use of the reports of the papal nuncio of the day; and a full-length essay on the suppression of the Jesuits in theHabsburg lands in the early 1770s. This latter is particularly revealing in the case it develops for Joseph as a leader of the Catholic Enlightenment, determined to purify the Church in the cause of reform, rather than its nemesis. This contention might on the face of it seem paradoxical, given Joseph's notorious reputation as the scourge of themonastic orders, but as Beales has shown in his monograph Prosperity and Plunder (2003, written at the same time as many of these essays) the experience of European Catholic monasteries and state churches in the pre-revolutionary era was a complex one, where the interactions between Church and government gave meaning and intellectual substance to the term Catholic Enlightenment in Central Europe, rather than responding passively to purely Erastian...