Luke Wadding is one of those pervasive presences in early modern Ireland that historians have chosen virtually to ignore. He was an Irishman who spent little of his life in Ireland and his ‘patriotic’ credentials were so doubtful that they needed to be defended by Canice Mooney in a brave 1957 essay published by the Irish Franciscans in their Father Luke Wadding: commemorative volume. He was a Franciscan who had the misfortune not to belong to the Irish Franciscan community at Louvain that has attracted considerable notice from historians in recent years whereas Irish Franciscans in early modern Rome have received meagre attention. His monumental scholarly efforts, particularly the Annales Scriptores Ordinis Minorum—a history of the Franciscan Order from the birth of Francis to 1540 spanning eight volumes in Wadding’s lifetime but growing to sixteen volumes in the second and third editions—require all the resources of a polymath to engage seriously with them. For this reason, his admirers have been largely scholars within the Franciscan Order and particularly the Irish province of that Order. The book under review, however, brings Wadding to a new audience and reclaims Wadding’s place as a significant figure in the European history of ideas.

As with all collections of essays the book has limitations but it effectively chalks out what would be the lineaments of a larger study of this fascinating scholar and diplomat. It does this by sketching a series of contexts for Wadding: a Spanish context, a Roman context, a general cultural context, and an Irish context. All this is topped and tailed by an introduction and a conclusion by the editor of the volume. Of these contexts it is the third, the cultural context, that is the most crucial. Unsurprisingly, Wadding’s cultural world was that of print and this is reflected in the four essays in this section by Donatella Bellardini and Claudia Costacurta, John McCafferty, Guilia Spoltore, and Ian Campbell. The first two of these consider the evolution of Wadding’s own book collection in the context of European libraries of the time, while the second two deal with Wadding’s artistic entourage and the ideas that might be called political within the circle around Wadding in Rome.

The remaining three sections deal with Wadding’s geographical contexts. Like many of those who migrated from Ireland to continental Europe in the seventeenth century, Wadding was notoriously mobile. During his life he had contacts with both Spain and Rome as well as maintaining an interest in, and attempting to influence, events in Ireland. These three spheres of activity define Wadding’s world. The Ireland that he left was obviously one in which he felt at home and with which he maintained relations for the rest of his life. Mícheál Mac Craith discusses the consequences of an event that Wadding must have heard about when a novice in Spain: the Flight of the Earls in 1607. After the death of Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Donnell in Rome they were buried there. The later writing about the history of the tombs, and Wadding’s involvement with that, is at the core of Mac Craith’s essay. From the perspective of the latter end of Wadding’s career, indeed after his death, Clare Carroll considers Wadding’s reputation during the 1640s as it was filtered through the life written by his nephew Francis Harold. Harold’s characterisation of Wadding as an exile, the saviour of the Confederation and an ally of the secretary of that body, Richard Bellings, situates Wadding much where his contemporary reputation still lies. Yet, as Carroll points out, this image was constructed to defend Wadding and the College of St Isidore from adverse comments in the 1660s: a persuasive case, if one were needed, for a new assessment of Wadding.

The Spanish dimension of Wadding’s career is well dealt with by Ben Hazard in an essay on the Irish Franciscans and the Santiago province of Spain. By reconstructing the careers of some two dozen Irish friars in the Santiago province this essay locates Wadding’s early European experience within a specific ecclesiastical context. While primarily a scholar, Wadding could never resist the lure of the political world, and in his years at Rome he acted as agent for the Spanish government in the city in the same way that he did for the Irish Confederates in the 1640s. Building on his important 2008 monograph on Irish influence at the seventeenth-century Spanish court, Igor Pérez Tostado deals with this aspect of his career. He neatly connects Wadding’s scholarly activities with his political ones using the idea of trust between the Spanish royal patron and the Franciscan agent that bound the two together, with shared social capital, enhanced by Wadding’s learning, as the cement.

Finally, there is the context in which Wadding spent most of his life and where he was most comfortable: Rome. Here, the editor of the volume takes on a central problem of Wadding’s career—his friendship network. In a short but incisive essay, Matteo Binasco demonstrates the complex network of contacts that Wadding developed in Rome that enabled not just himself but a wider Irish community to integrate into the world of the city. Echoes of Wadding’s relations with the Spanish court and the use of learning as a way into that courtly world are revealed. Such connections acted as a way of forging trust and creating social capital that could be utilised by Wadding in other contexts. There is also an essay by Matteo Sanfilippo on the importance of the migration of foreigners into Rome in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, it does not mention Wadding at all (indeed it mainly deals with Protestant migrants). It does, however, reveal aspects of the context for the formation of foreign communities in the city, of which the Irish were one, and the Inquisition records that he deploys can be used to shed light on Wadding’s Irish world in exile as Thomas O’Connor’s Irish voices from the Spanish Inquisition (Basingstoke, 2016) demonstrates.

Luke Wadding is one of those figures from the seventeenth century whose career requires thorough re-evaluation. At the very least this book demonstrates the truth of that statement. Indeed, it does a great deal more. In different ways the essays cast light on Wadding’s experience in Ireland, Spain, and Rome and emphasise the centrality of his scholarly work that had political as well as religious implications. It will require a rather unique scholar to undertake the broader task but the harvest will be truly great.