This fascinating and important collection of essays grew out of a conference held at the University of Sussex in July 2010. Collectively, the papers do much to deepen and enrich our understanding of monarchism and absolutism in early modern Europe. As several of the contributors point out, these are examples of words ending in ‘ism’ that were not used in the early modern period. As a result, they have proved notoriously slippery in the historiography and they pose intractable problems of definition as well as real hazards of anachronism. These essays go a long way towards clarifying what such terms might mean and how they should and should not be used.