Antonio Gallonio (1556–1605) is one of the lesser known intellectuals of Counter-Reformation Rome, when compared to the sacred archaeologist Antonio Bosio and the church historian (and fellow Oratorian) Cesare Baronio. In this clear and insightful new study Jetze Touber brings together Gallonio's disparate (manuscript and in print) writings in the field of hagiography. This corpus, written in both Latin and Italian, was aimed at a wide public and Touber does a marvellous job, showing how Italian and Latin versions were written with different audiences in mind. The Italian edition of Gallonio's treatise on martyrdom, for instance, included engravings of ingenious-looking machines of torture, designed to appeal to the aristocratic circles in which Gallonio also moved. Touber's succinct discussion of the relationship between historia sacra (of which hagiography was part) and worldly history offers some wonderful vignettes (for instance, of Gallonio's use of material objects). Yet Touber's main intervention is to argue that in order to bolster the credibility of his hagiographical works, Gallonio also had to appeal to the expertise of other disciplines and their representatives. The hagiographer, for instance, made much of the findings of the autopsy carried out on the founder of the Oratorians, Philip Neri, and the supernatural anatomy (notably Neri's enlarged heart) that it revealed. Although the expertise of physicians (or their inability to offer a natural cause) was valued in death, in life their advice was hardly credited at all and Neri, whom Gallonio knew intimately, constantly upstaged them with spiritual advice and miraculous healing powers. (Neri's intercession, for instance, cured one physician of kidney stones and converted him to a life of hagiographical pursuits.) Touber's study, then, neatly brings out how hagiography despite and because of itself could not be separated from other pursuits of knowledge and those practices of collecting (studied by historians of science) which sustained them. Gallonio had a very sophisticated toolkit at his disposal to convey what was, for him, a very basic truth: all worldly ambition is vain, only divine mercy offers salvation. Touber shows that behind simple messages can lie whole worlds awaiting historical investigation.