For most of the readers of this Journal, the principal fruit of the Bollandists' labours (published between 1643 and 1925), the sixty-seven volumes of the Acta Sanctorum, which supply editions, often with extended textual commentary, of the most important vitae of saints whose feasts fall between 1 January and 10 November (plus the first Propylaeum to December), is a resource to use rather than to study. This tendency has been accentuated since the advent of the online version whose keyword search options have made it easier for users to divorce content from form: and mine for disembodied information while discarding (and largely discounting) the wider context. This is to be seriously lamented, although I am not sure whether the book under review, which is the first extensive treatment of the Acta Sanctorum by a non-Bollandist, is going to supply this lack. It is simply too long and expensive, with too many unnecessary digressions and too much undigested bibliographical information. Not infrequently the footnotes overwhelm the main text to a degree which the Bollandists themselves, for all their prodigious learning, would never have countenanced. Here the series editors and the apparent absence of any word limit for doctoral dissertations in Germany must take their share of responsibility. Sawilla's study is also too dependent on printed sources. When seeking to understand Bolland's own thoughts about the project, I cannot believe that there is nothing beyond his preface to the first volume of the Acta to fall back on. In addition, failure to use any manuscript material outside the Brussels Royal Library has meant that Sawilla was unable, for example, to follow up references in such vitally important collections as that of the Oratorian Vallicelliana library in Rome (whose importance to the Bollandist project from its earliest years Sawilla rightly acknowledges). This would have revealed that the unnamed Oratorian scholar referred to in correspondence from the Jesuit father-general as having already begun a project similar to that which the Bollandists would later undertake, was in fact Antonio Gallonio, first biographer of St Philip Neri and indefatigable collector of the acts of the early Christian martyrs (material which is now kept in Fondo H that was comprehensively described by the Bollandist Albert Poncelet in his catalogue of hagiographical manuscripts held in Roman libraries aside from the Vatican; a reference tool with which Sawilla is evidently familiar). Furthermore, in the case of the Bollandist Papebroch's clash with both the Spanish and Roman inquisitions over that scholar's calling into question the traditional account of Carmelite origins – that the order had been founded by the prophet Elijah – one might have expected that Sawilla would at least have had a look in the recently opened central archive of the Roman Holy Office. For those short of time, David Knowles's concise yet unhurried treatment in his 1962 essay collection, Great historical enterprises, still provides an excellent point of departure and complements nicely the comprehensive overview offered almost exactly a century ago now by the great Bollandist Charles De Smedt in his entry for the Catholic Encyclopedia. Sawilla's instincts, however, are bang on target and his intellectual energy and ambition is to be applauded. The cumulative effect of his attempt to do for the republic of ecclesiastical erudition what Steven Shapin has done for the world of early modern science – and give due weight to the strategies used by the Bollandists to claim authority for their work (i.e. the processes behind the product) – enables us to see the Acta Sanctorum more fully located in time and space than ever before. To begin with, the Bollandists were operating not from the security of Roman Catholicism's Mediterranean heartlands but from the frontier city of Antwerp, not far from the border with the Calvinist United Provinces. Moreover, the origins of the Acta Sanctorum lay in a work by the Liégeois Héribert Rosweyde, whose very title reveals its provincial, local origins: Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae in belgicis bibliothecis manuscriptae (1607). At his death in 1629 Rosweyde does not appear to have moved significantly beyond an ambition to supplement the work of the most comprehensive collection of saints' Lives yet available, the six-volume De probatis sanctorum historiis (1570–5), by the Cologne Carthusian Lorenz Sauer (Surius) in which the editor had shown little feeling for the integrity of the vitae that he was editing, as demonstrated by the Carthusian's willingness to ‘improve’ the Latinity of his source materials. Rosweyde's successor, Jean Bolland also worked alone until in 1635 he was joined by Godefroid Henskens (Henschenius). Together they produced the first volumes of the Acta Sanctorum until they were themselves joined by perhaps the greatest of all Bollandists, Daniel Papebroch, in 1660. That such a numerically insignificant informal grouping from a single Jesuit province was in its early decades less well known to contemporaries than such Franciscan scholars as the Irishmen Luke Wadding and John Colgan is unsurprising; especially when one considers, as Sawilla ably demonstrates, how dependent the Bollandists were – both linguistically and codicologically – on their Franciscan colleagues for information about Irish saints. (Indeed, the polyglot bravura of the Bollandists of modern times has perhaps made us overlook the fact that it was only after the famous pilgrimage to Rome by Henskens and Papebroch for manuscripts in 1660–2 that the Bollandists began to include even Greek hagiographic material.) Sawilla is also good at showing in some detail how pragmatic were the Bollandists' ‘editing principles’. Whether all of this amounts to demonstrating conclusively that the Acta Sanctorum in the seventeenth century was more an expression of early modern antiquarian culture – and so may be considered ultimately as a contributor to the early Enlightenment – rather than essentially remaining, for all its erudition, a Tridentine defence of the cult of saints is maybe less important than Sawilla seems to believe it is.