This monograph by the well-known medievalist Ronald Finucane, who finished it shortly before his untimely death in 2009, examines the canonisation processes of five saints: Bonaventure (canonised 1482), Leopold of Austria (1485), Francis of Paola (1519), Antoninus of Florence (1523) and Benno of Meissen (1523). These were indeed, as the title has it, the ‘last medieval saints’. There were no more canonisations until after the Council of Trent, the next one (that of Didacus of Alcalá) occurring in 1588, the year of the establishment of the Congregation of Rites. Finucane's five cases are also among the earliest to afford much of a glimpse of what happened after testimony was gathered about a saint – that is, what happened in the Curia. This indeed is his main interest. The book is a sustained testimony to the fact that ‘holiness, in and of itself, was never enough’ (p. 257) to see a prospective saint through the typically long canonisation process as it evolved at Rome. In the case of Leopold, a twelfth-century nobleman who was considered the ‘founder of Austria’ by the time an Austrian archduke proposed his canonisation in 1358, Finucane's explanation of why the process took well over a century to complete covers a wide spectrum of factors from the mundane but persistent distractions of cardinals and the effects of the Black Death on daily life, to geopolitical considerations on a grand scale. The latter included the sometimes coinciding, sometimes opposing, interests of Sixtus iv and the German emperor Frederick iii in matters such as the Turkish military advances, the ambitions of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, and the perceived threat of the Hussites. In other instances the substance of the issues would be different; in Antoninus' case it was the accommodation of the legacies of Savonarola and the Medici, in Benno's the support of the Saxon opponents of Luther. But the fact of political interest was in almost every case centrally important (that of Bonaventure being the exception, promoted by the Franciscan Sixtus himself), not just in slowing down canonisation processes but also, finally, in providing the necessary motivation to bring them to conclusion. This is an erudite study; Finucane makes thorough and careful use of his sources and of other scholarship. He resists generalising too quickly from his cases: a virtue. One could wish however for some more generalised context or set of questions as a frame for the study, to invite readers not otherwise drawn by the particulars of canonisation in their own right.