This close reading of familiar and lesser-known thinkers and polemicists adds considerably to our understanding of the political thinking that sustained the Catholic League. Nicholls's clear exegesis of often difficult-to-decipher texts demonstrates with more certainty than hitherto the debt to medieval scholastics in articulating the belief that civil society was unthinkable without religious unity. League thinkers were neither reactionary nor mere plunderers of the monarchomachs, but part of an Aristotelian natural law tradition, a continuum that reached its apogée in the works of Bossuet. Whereas the League's enemies denounced it as a cabal of rebellious anarchists, Nicholls identifies its apologists as conservative royalists, whose advocacy of tyrannicide and elective monarchy had long been part of the armour of political thinking. This is not to suggest that League thinking was coherent. In eight well-ordered chapters Nicholls demonstrates that it was diverse, sometimes contradictory and developed according to circumstance. Chapters i and ii place the League in context and demonstrate the common ground they shared with their politique enemies. Far from being fanatical enemies of civil society, League thinkers were another facet of the remarkable efflorescence of French thinking about la science politique which attended the Wars of Religion. Following Aristotle, they argued that political life was rooted in natural sociability and maintained the scholastic claim that the Church was the guarantor of concord between citizens. Heresy was equated with earthly tyranny because it led to disharmony and sundered the natural bonds of fellowship. Chapter iii explores the League's imagining of the ancient constitution, which bridled royal authority, but under Henri iii had fallen into vice and corruption. Hotman's Francogallia was an inspiration, but not a model to be slavishly followed. She underlines the role attributed to the parlements, as opposed to the Estates, pointing to the social basis of the Paris League and its roots among lawyers and the basoche. Chapters iv and v outline their vision of the Church in a commonwealth, refuting claims made by hostile observers that the League was nothing more than a vessel for the ambitions of Rome. In fact, most League supporters saw papal power as heavily circumscribed. Their writings display a variety of opinions that expand the boundaries of Gallican liberty. Chapter vi develops in more detail the debt to scholasticism's reconciliation of Aristotle and Augustine through an analysis of one text, De justa reipublicae christianae. In the light of the League's espousal of a monarchy bounded by divine and natural law, chapter vii shows why Bodin's support may have been more enthusiastic than is often claimed. Chapter viii explores the notion of patria. League thinkers turned again to scholastic thinkers to disprove claims that they were selling out to the Spanish. The book has all the strengths and some of the weaknesses associated with the Cambridge school of political thought. Scholars will be grateful for the close reading of arcane texts. Nicholls has established beyond doubt the range and sophistication of League thinking, its significance in renewing the scholastic tradition and its contribution to mainstream thinking about the commonwealth and civil society. Students may struggle to make the connections between the texts and experience. On one side, politiques, such as Montaigne, a founding member of the first Catholic League in Guyenne, learned that toleration was a practical virtue. On the other side, Leaguers came together in the early 1580s not around a coherent ideology, but through political activism – the English mission and the conspiracy to depose Henri iii.