In this erudite and fascinating study, Stefania Tutino breaks open the contemporary hermeneutical and epistemological anxieties over the power of language to communicate truth both human and divine. The seeds of this anxiety, Tutino implies, are embedded in human nature itself and in the origins of language. But Steven Toulmin raised the stakes by convincingly arguing in his Cosmopolis (1990)—as Susan Schreiner astutely renders him: “The story of modernity as an ‘onward march of human rationality,’ is distorted since it ‘hides ambiguities and confusions'” (Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era [New York: Oxford University, 2011], 7).

Tutino dedicates her study to her hometown of Divieto, Sicily, where, she says, “We told stor[ies] per passarci il tempo,” a Sicilian turn of phrase that means not only to pass the time but also to surpass it. In other words, telling stories was a way to discover in the ambiguity, confusions, and ineffableness of human living a truth that “saves” or validates humanity's power to know transcendent realities. History is, in a sense, a succession of stories per passarci il tempo.

Only later—in this book, for example—did Tutino, with the help of key early modern figures (among others: ex-Jesuits Agostino Mascardi and Paolo Beni, Cardinal Cesare Baronio, Jesuits of the Roman College such as Pedro Juan Perpiñán, Famiano Strada, Francisco Suárez, and Leonardus Lessius; along with contemporary hermeneutical theorists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur) cast brilliant light on the “shadows of doubt” that inevitably play on human language so that we can acknowledge both its astonishing power and fragility; counterintuitively, the “shadows of doubt” are “the bond linking language, human reality, and theological certainties” (9).

This volume is a tour de force of reflection on historical method, contending that “theology was the very fiber of the early modern discussion on truth and history” (87), as it was primarily in the post-Reformation Catholic theologates that key scholars processed their anxieties over the power of language to be true to both reality's ambiguity and the human ability to know reality sufficiently to discern within it divine revelation and come to a reliable grasp and expression of it.

Scholars of history, historiography, church history, and church historiography, particularly of the early modern period to the present, will find much in this book's five densely argued chapters to enlighten their paths of inquiry. This book is not to be missed.