Overwritten, plagued with typographical errors and grammatical mistakes, and accompanied by an index that refers to several dozen non-existent pages, this is a curious book. Although the author, in his preface and at the opening of chapter vi, modestly acknowledges inspiration and research from many recent scholars, I was often not able to recognise the positions of these scholars from the descriptions given of them. And the great historian of the last century, M.-D. Chenu, who came closest to making a similar argument to that of Mungiello – although with deeper learning, nuance and gracefulness of theology – is not even cited. Hypostases march through the purple prose: Renaissance and Reformation (never defined or chronologically located), the Medieval Mind, the Incarnational Age, medieval identity (as if there were only one) and individualism (again never defined and never distinguished from ‘the individual’, whoever he might be). Jesus is described as ‘the still point’ within ‘all this heaving metamorphoses’ (sic). The reader gasps in relief when told (p. 56) that the term heresy must be defined. But this is the first glimpse we have of the author's awareness of a need for definition. For the past forty years, no scholar has seriously doubted that much of the complex sensibility of late-medieval/early-modern Italy has roots not only in the revival of the classics but also in the piety of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (which should include more than the Franciscans upon whom Mungiello concentrates). Thus it is hard to reject what seems to be Mungiello's basic argument. And many readers will sympathise with his castigation of the abuses of our present age. But, assessed as scholarship, this book merely restates received opinion in garbled and overheated prose.