Numerous academic publishers now produce some version of the same genre. We have Cambridge Companions, Ashgate Research Companions, Brill Companions, Blackwell Companions and Blackwell Handbooks, Oxford Handbooks. I could add guides and encyclopediae. Why this current fascination with introductions and summaries? Market demand? If so, has not the market been saturated? Does the publisher’s desire for introductory companions prevent scholars from original research? I have read, reviewed, consulted, and contributed to some of these editions. I have found some very disappointing and indeed irritating because the lack of an editorial vision resulted in an idiosyncratic collection of themes and subjects, or because length restraints resulted in a fatuous superficiality. And, of course, there is every editor’s nightmare: the sudden disappearance of a committed contributor into a black-hole of cyberspace with his/her article undermining the volume’s comprehensive coverage. Gaping lacunae are difficult to explain without flirting with libel. I know not whether all contributors delivered for this handbook, but the editors have produced an impressive volume both in scope and in size, assembled an impressive roster of authors, and allowed considerable freedom to each.

Lehner is Professor of Religious History and Historical Theology at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin); Muller, P.J. Zonderan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary (Grand Rapids, Michigan), and Roeber, Professor of History and Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University (University Park, Pennsylvania). Under their direction, forty-three scholars have written forty-two articles. According to them, the volume ‘offers a comprehensive introduction to Christian theological literature originating in Western Europe, from roughly the end of the French Wars of Religion (1598) to the Congress of Vienna (1815) . . . [and] present[s] a comprehensive, accessible survey of the main features of early modern theology and serve[s] as the basis for more specialized research’ (p. 1). It is indeed comprehensive, but I am not sure it is introductory and all that accessible. Some articles presuppose considerable theological and philosophical sophistication as the author leads the reader through heated, complex debates conducted by many religious leaders and thinkers without household names. Its comprehension does not include much of direct interest to readers of this journal.

The Handbook is divided into three sections: ‘Theology—Context and Form’; ‘Theological Topics’; ‘Theology and the Others’. Within each section there are numerous articles on topics as diverse as ‘Baroque Catholic Theologies of Christ and Mary’, ‘Sin, Grace, and Free Choice in Post-Reformation Reformed Theology’, ‘Forensic Justification and Mysticism in Early Modern Lutheranism’, ‘Early Modern Socinianism and Unitarianism’, ‘Early Modern Jansenism’, ‘Western Theologies and Judaism in the Early Modern World’, ‘Western Theologies and Islam in the Early Modern World’, ‘Kant’s Philosophical and Theological Commitments’, and ‘Eighteenth-Century Neology’. Unlike many expositions of early modern theology, the Handbook affords equal coverage to the Reformed (Calvinist), Lutheran, and Roman Catholic traditions with complimentary articles on Anabaptists, Moravians, Arminians, Pietists, and others.

Many articles caught my eye, but I cannot mention all. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia provides an intriguing look at the theological developments of the first years of European expansion. Catholic missionaries sponsored by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs were quicker off the mark than the Protestants. In 1658, the Belgian Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest rebuffed an Englishman’s shock that the Jesuit and his companions were on their way to China without any salary from the pope with this comment: ‘One knows that the heretic was inspired not by missionary but by mercenary zeal’ (p. 13). After a slow, hesitant start, Protestant missionary activity was surpassing that of the Catholics by the nineteenth century. Paul Shore provides a clear, concise guide to ‘confessionalization’ with quick glances of the process in Ireland, Scotland, and England.

The contributor best known to the readers of this journal is Stefania Tutino. In ‘Ecclesiology/Church-State Relationship in Early Modern Catholicism’, she returns to many of the themes discussed in Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010). With her customary deftness she presents a clear exposition of Robert Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta as formulated in the ‘oath of allegiance’ controversy in the context of Gallicanism and emerging absolutism.

Tutino’s contribution is unfortunately the only one directly relevant to early modern British Catholic studies. Paul Shore refers to Alec Ryrie’s suggestion that ‘scholarship has made the British Reformations look more important than (and thus quite different from) what they really were’ (p. 48). Was this volume intended to knock it down a peg or two? This volume then is post-Brexit scholarship in which Western Europe is synonymous with the continent. Names, hallowed and otherwise, in early modern Catholic studies are absent. I note references to John Dryden (p. 80), Thomas Stapleton (p. 137), Christopher Davenport (p. 137), William Rainolds (p. 486), Sir Kenelm Digby (p. 611), and the protean William Chillingworth (p. 367), but none to Robert Persons, John Percy (‘Fisher the Jesuit’), Thomas White (alias Blackloe), etc. Recusant contributions are not even acknowledged in the discussion of obedience and resistance. An opportunity to build on George H. Tavard, The Seventeenth-Century Tradition. A Study in Recusant Thought (Leiden, 1978), and Thomas H. Clancy, S.J., A Literary History of the English Jesuits. A Century of Books, 1615-1714 (San Francisco, 1996) has been lost. Why the omission? Are the recusant theologians less profound, less insightful than their continental colleagues? Or are their themes too insular, less universal? Or are they merely understudied? Although many articles provide insights into the theological issues then dividing Christendom and the religious culture then prevailing in the countries where the English seminaries and colleges were situated, the clergy educated, and the exiles gathered (e.g. Jean-Louis Quantin, ‘Catholic Moral Theology, 1550-1800’, and Marius Reiser, ‘The History of Catholic Exegesis, 1600-1800’), with the exception of a reference to Tom O’Connor’s research on Jansenism in Ireland (p. 445), the influence, effect, and reception of emerging doctrines and devotional practices on and by British and Irish Catholics are ignored.