In this expansion of his University of York dissertation, Thomas Flowers invites us to take a second look at Peter Canisius (1521–1597) and to see his main catechism (published in 1555, but revised often and extrapolated into two shorter versions) not only in its sixteenth-century context but also within the history of catechisms and particularly related to its Ignatian sensibility and pedagogical intent. Flowers contends that Canisius’ work departed from the standard polemical tone and rote statement of doctrine by advocating that a believer first undergo a personal reform. He argues that Canisius has been misunderstood by scholars and prelates as a one-dimensional “hammer of heretics” whom Pope Pius XI in 1925 named a saint and church doctor. Canisius’ approach did not, Flowers argues, belong to the same warrior genre as his fellow Jesuit, saint, and church doctor Roberto Bellarmino, whom Pius XI canonized in 1930 and added to the list of doctors the following year. Canisius took a more pastoral—to the eyes of Pope John Paul II, even an ecumenical—approach, while Bellarmino enjoyed a good fight.

Flowers rightly understands the importance of late medieval efforts predating Luther to reform the church from within individual souls, although he does not give that aspect of what happened before Canisius enough detail or weight in his first chapter. There has been much recent work on how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reformers laid the groundwork for early modern Catholicism’s embrace of individual piety and devotion even in the face of late medieval institutional chaos and post-Trent centralization. Consider the devotio moderna flourishing during the catastrophic Great Western Schism a century before Luther and the upsurge in personal piety after Trent despite that council’s assignment of bishops as key agents and even compliance officers of reform and orthodoxy. Greater consideration of this broader context would have made Flowers’ presentation of Canisius’ place among competing catechists more convincing. He notes that Canisius wrote not to move a Lutheran to return to Catholicism but to, in essence, convert the baptized Catholic (proving that this post-Vatican II phrasing is nothing new), although one may ask then and now if anyone is moved spiritually by a catechism, which is a teaching and not an evangelizing tool.

Throughout this study, Flowers often and helpfully revisits historiography to critique and nuance prior understandings of Canisius and his catechisms, beginning with his second chapter on the catechetical tradition. Flowers then walks through his subject in the next four chapters, first by tracking the catechism’s path from idea to fruition, all the while unspooling misconceptions in the received textual history. Next, in the book’s most intriguing chapter, he uncovers what made Canisius’ catechisms specifically Jesuitical, noting here the important influence that Pierre Favre played on Canisius and the Jesuits’ particular interest in educating young people. A chapter treating the polemical nature of his work compares Catholic and Lutheran manuals, which is followed by another on the catechism’s life and afterlife: who were its patrons, how was it distributed, and how did it fare among other catechisms, especially the Roman Catechism that came out of Trent’s impetus in 1566. The volume ends with five appendices concerning versions of Canisius’ catechisms and comparisons of how certain topics were treated by Canisius and other Catholics, Luther and other Protestants, and then Trent’s Roman Catechism. These seem to be something of a path toward future work that Flowers and others might now take given his reconsideration of Canisius as far more than just another catechist.