Flannery's monograph is thrice welcome for taking up three facets of early modern Christian missions that have been understudied in recent scholarship: the Augustinian order (overshadowed by Jesuits and Franciscans), travelling to the Middle East (overshadowed by more ‘indigenous' missionary fields) and proselytising mostly among Eastern Christians (overshadowed by their more numerous brethren in Europe). As each facet enters the story background information of generous length brings the reader up to speed. Flannery paints a human picture, with his missionaries ‘ranging from the saintly, to the comical, to the somewhat unedifying’ (p. 72). (The last two adjectives are perhaps best exemplified by the deadbeat Augustinian ending the order's Isfahan mission by surrendering their convent to the Carmelites before fleeing to Goa to escape his debts.) The Augustinians met little success among the Muslims in Persia, and so attempted to bring the Safavid empire's Eastern Christian minorities into communion with Rome, without much better fortune, mostly due to the missionaries' refusal to countenance the continuance of eastern rites in the hoped-for union. Flannery gives appropriate weight to the role of Shah Abbas i, whose economic and political pragmatism alternately quickened and dashed the missionaries' hopes. Avoiding discussions of more theoretical issues, the study grounds itself firmly in archival work in Portugal, Spain and the Vatican and builds on an impressive array of sources, chiefly Augustinian but supplemented by those from the Carmelites and others; the notes, principally to Portuguese works, also include odd references to Arabic and Persian texts. Mission is versed in a secondary literature, and aware of the global context (drawing connections with, for example, Tibet). In passing Flannery notes that the Augustinian approach to mission was probably more representative of early modern Catholicism as a whole than, say, that of the more celebrated Jesuits; thus the focus on the Augustinians is useful not just in filling out our knowledge, but even as an important corrective intervention in the scholarship. A final chapter helpfully picks out thematic wefts woven into the narrative warp of the earlier chapters and then comments on overarching issues of ecclesiology, soteriology and the wider political context. The volume is more narrative than analytical, appropriately for a pioneering work, and ends with a discussion of future research. Mission encourages us to look forward to more mature scholarship from John Flannery.