Ferdinand II was born in Graz in 1578 to Archduke Charles II of Austria and Maria Anna of Bavaria. A member of the prestigious Habsburg family, he would be named the successor to his childless cousin, the then-emperor Matthias. Between 1617 and 1619, he would gain, among others, the titles of Archduke of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and Holy Roman emperor. It was under his watch, and largely in response to his religious policies, that the Bohemian estates revolted in 1618, an act of defiance that is usually accounted the opening salvo in the Thirty Years' War (1618–48). Ferdinand was no mere observer of this war; indeed, he helped shape it and drive it from a local disturbance into a Europe-wide conflagration. His legacy would thus be of enormous import not only for Austria and the Catholic Church, but also for Europe as a whole.

While French, English, Spanish, and even Swedish rulers of the seventeenth century have enjoyed considerable scholarly analysis, the Austrian Habsburgs have been largely overlooked. In the past decade there has been some movement, with two new biographies appearing on Ferdinand III, and a study of Ferdinand II's policies by Thomas Brockmann. Outside this latter work, however, there have been only a handful of earlier studies on Ferdinand II, and most of these, like Brockmann's and a 1981 volume by Bireley himself, have emphasized particular aspects of Ferdinand II's government or court. As for full biographies, one can look only to the nineteenth-century multivolume work by Friedrich Hurter, or to mid-twentieth-century monographs by Hans Sturmberger and Johann Franzl. Thus, Bireley's fresh assessment is both welcome and necessary.

Drawing on a mix of archival and published sources, secondary sources, and his own previous writings, Bireley provides an intricate biography with a wealth of interesting detail. Especially fascinating is his coverage of the little-known period of Ferdinand's life before the Bohemian rebellion and his ascension to the imperial throne. For example, he discusses the importance of Ferdinand's mother in guiding his political development and traces the beginnings of his long-standing ties with Maximilian of Bavaria, which began during Ferdinand's childhood and education at the Jesuit college at Ingolstadt.

Yet since Bireley's goal in this volume is not merely to illuminate Ferdinand's life, but to emphasize his larger importance and “to argue for his place in European history” (viii), the bulk of this volume concerns Ferdinand as political actor, with particular focus on the relationship between religion and politics that shaped Ferdinand's reign as emperor and head of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. In this respect, Bireley skillfully demonstrates the complexities of Ferdinand's multiple inheritances and roles, and traces how he negotiated often fraught relationships with his own regional estates, foreign crowns, imperial estates and princes, and even members of his own dynasty. All of these proved challenging, though perhaps the most problematic were the Protestants within his territories and the empire as a whole.

Bireley portrays Ferdinand as deeply moral, pious, and devoted to Catholic restoration, though also a man who thought carefully about his religious policies and so was not, as some have painted him, an unthinking religious zealot. Yet, Bireley argues, Ferdinand also saw the war as fundamentally religious in nature, and he allowed his Jesuit confessor and close advisor, William Lamormaini, a key role in shaping his policies. This would have important repercussions, for Lamormaini constantly pushed Ferdinand to adopt an inflexible attitude against heresy. Following Lamormaini's spiritual guidance, for example, Ferdinand not only attempted to purge Protestants from his own lands (Johannes Kepler was one of many expelled), but also issued the empirewide 1629 Edict of Restitution. This was an effort to roll back all territorial advances made by the Protestants since the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, and, Bireley argues, both its issuance and the emperor's subsequent unbending defense of it at Regensburg in 1630 were serious errors. Not only did the edict extend the Thirty Years War, but it also had “disastrous results for the emperor” (212) personally.

The Edict of Restitution was a victory for the policies of Lamormaini over those of Ferdinand's first minister, Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg, yet Bireley attempts to downplay suggestions that Ferdinand was a passive mouthpiece for either Lamormaini or any other faction at court. Instead, he paints the picture of a man who carefully balanced the recommendations of all of his advisors and councillors, and who, while consistently guided both by what he saw as his religious obligations (or even mission) and by his legal scruples, was also influenced by both a sense of mercy and an appreciation for reason and compromise. This was especially important, Bireley argues, in his efforts toward consolidating and unifying the Habsburgs' hereditary territories, which would provide future generations of his family with a solid base of power. “More than any other individual,” Bireley writes, “Ferdinand contributed to the formation of the Habsburg Monarchy on the pillars of the dynasty, the Catholic Church, and the aristocracy” (305).

In general, this is a sympathetic treatment of Ferdinand II, but also one that tries to provide, as much as possible, a genuine sense of the man's mind, spirituality, and personal life, as well as a survey of his political and military activities. Readers will surely be grateful for the appearance of a genealogical overview of the Habsburgs found at the back of the book, given the similarity of names and degree of intermarriage within the dynasty. This work will be of special interest and usefulness to scholars or students not only of the Austrian Habsburgs or of Austrian history, but also of the Thirty Years' War, the Catholic Reformation, the imperial court, and Central and Eastern European history in general.