The papal election has long fascinated scholars. Since the nineteenth century, they have published studies that have investigated individual elections and their conclaves, institutional and electoral reforms, and the sede vacante, the time between the death and the election of a pope. Yet other than Frederic J. Baumgartner's Behind Closed Doors (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), a mostly narrative work, few studies in English have appeared that attempt to construct a far-reaching synthesis of the election. With Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700, Miles Pattenden fills this gap, drawing both on the wide scholarship on the papacy and the election and on his own expertise in the archives of Italy and Spain. Pattenden's study is unique in that he examines the election primarily from the perspective of the cardinals, the sole electors of the pope since the issuing of Nicholas II's bull, In nomine Domini, of 1059. Nevertheless, Pattenden ambitiously seeks to make broader arguments about the trajectory of papal absolutism from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century based on the elective nature of the papacy and its relationship to nepotism, the power of the cardinals as a political class, and the economic viability of the papacy.

The first half of Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy finds Pattenden in familiar territory for most students of the papal election. The four chapters of this section examine the cardinals as an oligarchy and their relationship to the growing power of the pope; the rules of the conclave and concomitant election; the challenges of governance during the sede vacante; and the compromises made by members of the Sacred College in deciding upon the Vicar of Christ. Pattenden is to be praised for his detailed research on and analysis of a host of factors pertaining to the election that include the lengths of conclaves, the average age of popes on their election, and the number of votes cast by cardinals. Although he is predominantly interested in in the cardinals, Pattenden gives sufficient space to civic elites, Roman nobles, foreign ambassadors, and common folk, all of whom at times wielded some influence over the happenings taking part in sealed conclave.

Pattenden breaks new ground in the second part of the book by analyzing the impact of the election on the papacy as an institution over the course of the early modern era. Here he actively engages with the works of Paolo Prodi, Jean Delumeau, and Wolfgang Reinhard on papal absolutism, nepotism, and governance. His results, however, are mixed. On one hand, Pattenden successfully demonstrates that the elective nature of the papacy, which saw a regular rotation of offices (despite growing venality that he makes note of) and cardinal nephews, limited the absolutist ambitions of the popes. On the other hand, his argument becomes reductionist when he links the election to an assortment of long-term trends, including the decline of nepotism, the transformation of the papacy from a personal to bureaucratic institution, and the economic stagnation of Rome and the Papal States. While most specialists would agree with Pattenden that the pope's election played a significant role in the institutional development of the papacy and that it contributed to some of the transformations he studies, they surely would not support his argument that it was the sole cause behind them. Locating the elective nature of the papacy in the larger economic and political world of the late-sixteenth and -seventeenth century would reveal other factors—such as the Thirty Years’ War—that equally influenced the papacy's evolution.

Nonetheless, Pattenden accurately sees the late seventeenth-century as a major turning point in the transformation of the papacy. The last twenty years of the seventeenth century saw the demise of institutional nepotism, the rise of the secretary of state in place of the cardinal nephew, and the continued decline of papal power on the international scene. However, Pattenden endeavors to show how these late seventeenth-century developments continued into the eighteenth century, while admitting, in the introduction, that he only dips a toe into that period of papal history. This is especially problematic since he relies on Hann Gross's notion of a “post-Tridentine syndrome” in describing the social, economic, and political life of eighteenth-century papal Rome. A deeper and more sustained analysis of the papacy's social and economic development over the course of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries might have provided a more nuanced picture. The inherent problem lies with Pattenden's focus: he devotes much of his attention in the first four chapters on the papacy, the cardinals, and the popes, but then brings the Roman economy and society into his study in the last two without placing them into their greater historical context. Rome and the papacy, while having intertwined histories, are not necessarily the same.

Despite these criticisms, Pattenden's book should remain the standard work on the papal election due to his ability to synthesize the vast literature on the papacy comprehensibly along with his own substantial archival work. Pattenden gives the papacy's institutional evolution a much-needed examination from the perspective of the longue durée. His effort to place papal absolutism into the context of the election is admirable, and it should generate further debate on early modern popes and the papacy.