‘They are wretched Tridentines everywhere.’ Thus Hurrell Froude, in one of his epigrammatic and often contradictory judgements, described the Roman Catholic church of the early nineteenth century. How true is the implication that the Council of Trent created modern Roman Catholicism? In one sense the conclusion is inescapable. The fact that after Trent closed in 1563 the Roman church summoned no further general councils until 1869 tells its own story. In the three hundred years between there was much development. Doctrinal disputes evoked papal condemnations of certain types of theology. Although the canon law, destined to be codified in 1918, was not fundamentally changed, yet the development of the supervisory powers of the papal curia by means of the Roman congregations was a post-Tridentine innovation. Missionary work in and far beyond Europe vastly increased the area of Roman Catholic influence. Yet no comprehensive review or reform of Catholic teaching and practice comparable to that effected by Trent was attempted until the Second Vatican Council of our own day—for the First Vatican Council of 1869–70 was limited in its aims and in any case was cut short. Trent, then, was certainly formative. Was it innovatory? It is far too easy to overlook the extent to which it merely codified and defined medieval teaching and practice. On the doctrinal side this is very apparent, and even the disciplinary reforms, which seemed to many at the time revolutionary and for that reason aroused the suspicion of Catholic states jealous of their lucrative control over ecclesiastical institutions, were often in essence attempts to restore old principles, such as the episcopal control of the lower clergy and religious, so much undermined by medieval exemptions and privileges.