Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468–1503) was the youngest son of Kazimierz iv, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania. At the age of twenty he became bishop of Cracow, then archbishop of Gniezno, a primate and a cardinal. He was the head of the Polish Church and played an important role in the internal affairs of Poland: he supported his brothers Jan Olbracht and then Aleksander in their efforts to attain the Polish crown and introduced them as kings. During their absence it was he who on several occasions acted as regent. He was, in sum, one of the most important personages on the Polish political scene at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a person who certainly deserves a monograph. Strangely, so far there has been just one monographic study in Polish, Henryk Rybus' Kardynał-królewicz: Fryderyk Jagielończyk jako biskup krakowski i arcybiskup gnieźnieński, written in 1935. Since then Fryderyk has not attracted much attention from Polish historians, let alone west European ones. There are a number of reasons for that. First, the negative references of contemporary writers who called him, for example, an ‘indolent, slothful inebriate who presided over a continual round of drinking parties, and who wasted away in vile living with his companions’ (Kromer). Such opinions have determined the attitude of the historians who have tended to regard Fryderyk as a drinker and libertine and underestimated his influence on Polish politics and the Church. In her book, Natalia Nowakowska tries to revise such opinions (opinions which in fact do not find much support in the sources). The book, developed from her doctoral thesis, presents various aspects of the personality of the cardinal-prince. After a most helpful short summary of Polish history under the Jagiellonian dynasty, Nowakowska discusses in separate chapters Fryderyk's role in the government and the Polish Church, his image-making and propaganda, his relationship with Rome, and his legacy in Poland. In the last chapter Nowakowska tries to see Fryderyk's political and administrative efforts in the European context. The book is not an exhaustive monograph, but it was surely not Nowakowska's aim to write one. First, she wanted to present some material, hitherto inaccessible to English-speaking historians – and that she has done very well. She has taken advantage of the latest Polish literature and included materials from the most important Polish and foreign archives such as those in Gniezno, Crakow, Warsaw, Poznań, Włocławek, Kórnik and Rome (the only flaw could be the lack of material from the Geheimes Staatsarchiv in Berlin and the Warmian archdiocesan archive in Olsztyn – where a wealth of materials on Fryderyk is preserved, for example his correspondence with Bishop Lukas Watzenrode). The second important merit is that Nowakowska has incorporated this piece of Polish medieval history into the history of western Europe: she compares the actions of Fryderyk with the actions of other powerful European prince-cardinals at that time, for example Ippolito d'Este or Andrew Stewart. She interprets Fryderyk's behaviour and policy in the context of the political changes that were taking place at that time all over medieval Europe: the slow decline of papal authority and the beginning of modern national Churches.