The Jesuit culture of obedience is proverbial, and yet the order has arguably produced more independent and idiosyncratic individuals than any other religious order. Moreover, from the 1570s onwards a series of Jesuit rebels as well as members of the church hierarchy took exception to some of the features of Jesuit obedience. Silvia Mostaccio's essays, which have appeared before in French and Italian and are presented here in English translation in book form, investigate some aspects of this intricate story, albeit not in coherent fashion. The first chapter examines how some Jesuits reflected on obedience in their (political) writings (Mariana, Suárez, Botero, Possevino, Coster, Canisius, Bellarmine). Chapter ii compares the Jesuit rules on obedience with those of other religious orders, highlighting parallels especially with Franciscan sources. Chapter iii shows how the Ignatian ideal of obedience came under pressure from the papacy and the Holy Office following denunciations by the French Jesuit Julian Vincent. The last chapter looks at the specific way in which women engaged with Ignatian spirituality. This created tensions amongst the Jesuits, whose founder had always excluded the creation of a female branch, whilst many members of the order, including Ignatius himself, entertained relationships of spiritual guidance with high-profile mystics. The author advocates a ‘multi-focus perspective’ (p. 3) that privileges a semantic approach (p. 4). Unfortunately the result fails to convince: in order to understand why the problem of obedience was so significant at this precise moment, it would have been necessary to provide a fuller historical-political background to situate the complex seeds of dissent within the order. A few of the challenges that emerged under Acquaviva are mentioned in chapter iii, but the account is too vague; it also comes too late, if one reads the chapters in order. The same might be said for the Ignatian tradition of obedience and its subsequent development within the order, which is mentioned in a very scattered fashion throughout, when ideally this should have been dealt with and examined in a systematic introduction of some sort. Overall, the essays remain descriptive, and the engagement with the secondary literature is at times clumsy. In particular, in the chapter on ‘gendered obedience’, one might have expected some reference to Jodi Bilinkoff's work on confessors and female penitents (2005), or to Renée Baernstein's Convent tale (2002), whose insights into some of the questions at stake here might have been useful for the author. In the end, this book falls between two stools: it is too disjointed and thus likely to confuse the novice, but not innovative or informed enough to satisfy the expert.