In a famous 1970 article John Bossy set out a vision of early modern Catholicism that presented the Church's bishops as drivers of reform: ‘from the parish register to the primary school they were laying many of the foundations of the modern state’. When David Luebke included the essay in his 1999 The Counter-Reformation: the essential readings he commented how Bossy reduced the ‘people of Catholic Europe’, so prominently flagged in the title of Bossy's essay, to pawns. (Bossy, it should be said, was no fan of bishops for that very reason, growing more hostile towards them over time.) It seems that bishops have gradually clawed their way back and into the limelight. By the early 2010s, historians, once primarily interested in Catholicism from below, began to focus on revival from ‘the middle’, led by magistrates and returning exiles. With bishops again centre stage, have we come full circle?

This last question sprang to mind when reading Celeste McNamara's lucidly written study of the life and struggles of Gregorio Barbarigo, Padua's late seventeenth-century bishop. The question can easily be dispatched: we have learned a great deal since the 1970s, and McNamara contributes greatly to our knowledge. Yet it remains striking how McNamara's main source, Barbarigo's (particularly meticulous) visitation records which have so often been mined to tell tales of lay or local resistance, are here marshalled for the purpose for which they were originally recorded: to record the imposition and (very halting) progress of reform. McNamara's mastery of this source base is complete. Barbarigo encounters a great deal of (especially clerical) malfeasance during his visits to Padua's many rural parishes, with infractions ranging from priests moving their married concubines into their parsonage to sheep grazing in cemeteries. In the latter case it is clear that this practice was considered something of a win-win by locals in an age before lawn mowers, but generally McNamara's focus is not on the offenders, but on Barbarigo's response to these challenges.

It is here where the undoubted significance of McNamara's contribution to scholarship lies and where her choice of a late seventeenth-century bishop as an object for study is truly vindicated. Barbarigo was standing on the shoulders of giants. His approach to Catholic Reform thus borrowed from the very different reform strategies of earlier bishops, notably Carlo Borromeo in Milan and François de Sales in (well, near) Geneva. McNamara shows that when dealing with his wayward priests, the bishop preached Borromeo's hardline disciplinary position but practised the gentler Salesian approach of paternal (or fraternal) admonishment. In his dealings with other sources of power, Barbarigo, as an erstwhile diplomat and the eldest son of one Venice's aristocratic families, also borrowed from the Serenissima's strategies, particularly in his approach to the papacy. Conversely, his approach to clerical and lay education actively borrowed from the Jesuits, an order long expelled from Venice for its support of the pope. By highlighting the multiplicity and diversity of approaches to reform and the ways these could be combined McNamara offers an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of the Counter-Reformation and the role that institutions played in it.

At the same time, there are some limitations inherent in using a single bishop as the lens through which to view reform, and while McNamara is keenly aware of them, she cannot avoid them altogether. The book opens with Barbarigo on his deathbed despairing about all the souls in his care that he could not save. This anecdote offers a strikingly clear view of how the Catholic Church as an institution, staffed by elite men, saw itself (and how a young Bossy still saw it in 1970). This perception of both history and the Church locates all agency and responsibility in its heroes, towering figures who alone are capable of and responsible for reform. The fact that Barbarigo, like Borromeo and de Sales before him, became a saint of the Church does not help the historian overcome this deeply ingrained narrative. Of course, simply because some events are hagiographical tropes does not make them insincere: they may just constitute another Barbarigo borrowing. The bishop may sincerely have been despairing about the souls of his diocesans or resisted the cardinal's hat – because that is what was expected of him. Yet the consolidation of agency in Barbarigo's hands remains an issue in this study. McNamara pays some attention to Barbarigo's staff but ultimately she cannot overcome the narrative of the bishop reforming his diocese unaided because those very old, very deep Catholic cart tracks are almost impossible to escape. This is particularly the case in the last chapter where McNamara pays attention to Barbarigo's interest in missionary activity. This chapter makes a valuable contribution by showing how missions inside and outside a bishop's diocese could be extensions of each other. Yet the traditional heroic role assigned to Barbarigo – printing a translation of the Qu'ran (for use in converting the Ottoman Empire) and even working to convert the England of James ii – cannot stand up to reality. There is no doubt that a particularly strong-willed and long-lived bishop like Barbarigo could make a real impact inside and outside his diocese, but it nevertheless still took a village to reform a Church.

In sum, The bishop's burden offers an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of early modern Catholicism. It points us to the multiplicity of approaches that local bishops could take towards reforming their diocese. In so doing, it offers us yet another way in which Catholic Reform stands at the intersection of ‘universalizing the particular and particularizing the universal’ (to quote Simon Ditchfield's memorable phrase). The book, enlivened by rich anecdotes, makes that case in a highly readable fashion. Still, while using the life of an individual as a prism onto a wider story always carries risks and rewards, the lives of Catholic saints make for particularly perilous waters. Decentring Barbarigo could have made for a still more compelling study.