In recent decades, the close relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment has been well-documented and analysed, but the emphasis has been largely on the role of Protestantism. This book of essays goes some way towards correcting that, providing an excellent introduction to Roman Catholicism's place in the development of the Enlightenment in Europe. Jeffrey Burson's helpful introduction places the work in historiographical context, indicating the ways in which Roman Catholicism's relationship to Enlightenment thought and culture was cast in the shadow of the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf in German scholarship, with the Enlightenment characterised as atheist, materialist and revolutionary.

This book argues for a robust, frequently positive, often complex, relationship between Roman Catholicism and Enlightenment. It does so through a series of essays on individual figures, lay and ordained, male and female, from almost all parts of Europe that had a significant Roman Catholic presence, illustrating many aspects of Enlightenment culture, thought and politics. The role of the papacy is considered in an opening essay by Mario Rosa on the ambivalent legacy of the mid eighteenth-century Pope Benedict xiv, while Jonathan Wright shows the significance of Jesuits in science through the work of the Croatian mathematician, working in Rome, Ruggiero Boscovich. Some thinkers wanted to engage Roman Catholic theology with other streams of Enlightenment thought, as is illustrated, for example, in essays on Benedict Stattler and Beda Mayr by Ulrich Lehner, and on Luke Joseph Hooke by Thomas O'Connor. Ritchie Robertson's splendid article on the Bavarian, Johann Pezzl, reveals a Roman Catholic unafraid of entering into the arena of satirical literature. Massimo Mazzotti's fascinating article on the Italian, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, explores the relationship between science and religion in her work, and – despite the lack of documentation – Mazzotti produces an intricate and rewarding reconstruction of her world, and the intellectual influences on her. Mark Goldie writes compellingly about Alexander Geddes, a figure who pressed the boundaries in the areas of Scripture, Church and politics. Geddes was, says Goldie, ‘arguably the most wayward, unorthodox, iconoclastic, and intellectually daring priest to emerge from the British Catholic community of his time’, and remained hated long after his death, though was finally celebrated from a pulpit in the 1990s.

There are, necessarily, limitations to the biographical format: it means, for example, that the book's subtitle – A transnational history – can only be explored through the lives and connections that individuals made across national boundaries, and the geographical areas in which they found themselves. Nevertheless, these articles provide an engaging form of entry into a wide-ranging field that is just now fully developing. This is a landmark book and will form an important basis for future work on Roman Catholicism's relationship with, and contributions to, the European Enlightenment.