Jean-Pascal Gay, a professor of the history of Christianity at the Catholic University of Louvain, offers here a history of modern Catholicism, along with a social and cultural history of knowledge. As Gay shows, the prolific Jesuit theologian Théophile Raynaud (v. 1583–1663) illustrates the reconstitutions of theological knowledge in early modern Catholicism. The title of the book, ‘the story of an obsolescence’, suggests the thesis: the theologian will not survive among the tensions of Catholicism. Academic theology can no longer claim, despite Raynaud's attempts, to define itself as the universal arbiter of knowledge. Other public religious discourses have emerged which in turn attempt, within the Catholic Church itself, to build an ‘appareil de certitude’. In seven dense chapters, nourished by great scholarship and critical historiographical reflection, the author patiently develops Raynaud's itinerary under different aspects: in the bibliographic memory, then in his intellectual and institutional journey. The trajectory then allows us to stop at the changes in the conceptions of obedience in relation to Jesuit religious identity, a chapter that necessarily leads to an examination of the theological-political culture of the Society of Jesus. The next two chapters (chs v–vi), by broadening the point of view, show the situations with which Raynaud was confronted, the questions that he drew from them to carry out his task as a theologian. It is here that the paradox of the obsolescence of theology best appears, both as knowledge rooted in its context and as a practice contested in its academic authority. Raynaud hoped that theology would ensure the agency of clerical scholars. However, the discipline could not succeed in reducing the gap between it and modern knowledge, even in religious matters. Clerical knowledge was already being expelled from early modern France.