Stefania Tutino's ambitious book argues that in post-Reformation Catholic intellectual culture we can see some of the roots of our own. Across a number of writers, thinkers and contexts, she traces early modern concerns with the relations between the linguistic world that humans inhabit and ‘truth’. In her account, some Catholic thinkers began to express and wrestle with doubts about the stability of the links between human language and truth, of either the human or divine variety. Her book offers a history of these doubts across different areas of intellectual and theological concern. Chapters focus on the theologies of equivocation, post-Reformation historiography, the teaching and theory of rhetoric and the juridical and theological dimensions of oaths. Along the way, she brings into the foreground central institutions (such as the Roman College), familiar thinkers (such as Francisco Suarez), and lesser-studied figures in order to unsettle scholarly notions about the supposedly rigid certainties of early modern Catholic intellectual culture. For instance, she reads the little-known Paolo Beni alongside the much more familiar Cesar Baronio. For Baronio, she argues, a firm belief in the truth of Catholicism undergirds and indeed enables ecclesiastical history. In Beni's view, however, Baronio's work is theology, not ecclesiastical history, precisely because history of any variety must remain mired in the uncertainties of all human endeavours. In this innovative work, Tutino offers nothing less than early modern theories of language in which we may find the seeds of our own postmodern concerns with the complexities of representation. One might wish that the book were written in a less diffuse prose style, but this is a minor quibble. Stefania Tutino masterfully demonstrates that post-Reformation Catholic intellectual culture shaped our own. Her work should be read by scholars of early modern literature, rhetoric, religion and history alike.