‘Fool that I was’; ‘What a wretch’; ‘I don't forgive myself anything’: thus Lancellotto Politi admitted that he had changed his mind ‒ in fact he had done so quite often. Politi was born in Siena, he became a Dominican in 1517 and took the name Ambrogio Catarino; it was a relatively late vocation for he was already thirty years old. He had seen corruption in the Church and he wanted change. Caravale's interpretation is engagingly subversive of the hard-edged categories that have often sapped the historiography of reform in Italy. This writer also has a gift for using one life history to illuminate other ‘roads not taken’: here he moves confidently from Savonarola's teaching to Lutheran theology, from the spirituali to the early Jesuits. The book's most poignant moment comes late in 1553, when Politi, critical friend of popes, was at long last bound for Rome to receive his cardinal's hat at the age of seventy. He died on the way. Ignatius Loyola hoped that he would have ‘a better hat’ in heaven.

That end is characteristic: Politi never quite made it. Far from being a rigid anti-Lutheran controversialist, he is revealed here as an independent thinker in an age of ever-tightening orthodoxies. He was a lifelong outsider, a jurist turned theologian, a Dominican in controversy with fellow Dominicans, especially about the Immaculate Conception (he was for it). Politi was a troubled man longing to belong. Savonarola's passionate call for reform held him ‘bound’ for ‘a long time’, but later he regretted his own ‘foolish credulity’. His conclusion that the great preacher and prophet had been plain wrong was perhaps the greatest wrench of his life. Caravale emphasises that it affected the way in which he viewed the preaching of Europe's reformers. As he had been ‘bound’ by Savonarola, so Politi thought that others were being deceived by Luther. Rescuing them was his bounden duty, but his methods changed. At first he believed in keeping the controversy in Latin, yet the electrifying preaching of Bernardino Ochino and the success of the vernacular and wickedly anonymous Beneficio di Cristo served to change his mind. He began to write in Italian and to name the authors and preachers who were leading the simple astray, especially his bête noire, Ochino. Politi's great controversial work of 1544, Compendio d'errori et inganni luterani, was one of his few achievements that would feature positively in the ‘selective memory’ of the Catholic Church. On the other hand, his conflicts with fellow Dominicans at the Council of Trent were best forgotten.

Caravale's slant on the spirituali is intriguing: he allows us to see them through the sceptical eyes of Politi, who concluded that they were Nicodemites ‘saying one thing in the pulpit and another in the ear secretly’ (p. 110). Yet Politi shared much with these mostly noble opponents and at first he kept the dialogue open. Like Cardinal Contarini, however, he thought that some of the spirituali took their insights too far. When Vittoria Colonna provoked Politi by arguing that it was no wonder that people joined the [protestant] enemy, given the degeneracy of the clergy, he acknowledged the corruption but refused the Lutheran conclusion; they ‘came near to dispute … even went beyond’. Finally, he distanced himself from Contarini and also from Colonna and Reginald Pole. In each case his timing was perfect, just before they were in serious trouble at Rome. Later, after 1550, he refuted messianic ideas forming around the figure of Pole as the new ‘angelic pope’. Undoubtedly, Politi was ambitious and I came away suspecting that he was rather good at dumping risky contacts at the eleventh hour. In another well-timed reaction, he claimed that heretics ‘had learned from Machiavelli the arts of religious simulation’. Independent he may have been, but he was also, as Caravale concedes drily, ‘sensitive to the humors of the time’ (pp. 198–9).

One of the delights of this book is the lively translation by the late Don Weinstein, eminent historian of the Renaissance and of Savonarola. Between them, author and translator manage to make even Tridentine theological controversies accessible. As usually happens, however, Italian scholarly conventions have been carried over into the English-language version, where they cannot and do not fit. In a perfect world someone would have been empowered to divide over-long paragraphs and prune discussion of hypotheses prior to publication in English. Similarly, an index which included topics like ‘double justification’ and ‘certitude of grace’, as well as proper names, would have helped younger researchers through difficult terrain.

Caravale unpicks the ‘excessively schematic’ categories of spirituali and intransigenti, and shows how both Politi and the Jesuits sometimes dodged the Inquisition, especially as regards the persuasion and absolution of relapsed heretics. Caravale's earlier studies of figures like Giacomo Aconcio, Francesco Pucci and Ippolito Chizzola have made historians listen to those not at the centre of the reformation stage. He achieves the same in this new work on Politi, always highlighting the ‘fluidity of doctrinal options’ during the religious crisis of the mid-sixteenth century (p. xi). Politi's own road was tortuous and his character volatile; he was fiery and conciliatory, honest and calculating, independent and ambitious. Because Caravale is so spectacularly in charge of his extensive source material, he can interpret these contradictions. He makes Politi a convincing representative of the ‘possible and practical alternative Counter-Reformation’ (p. 211), which looked Beyond the inquisition, preferred persuasion to repression and remained open to some Lutheran views.