If, in the mind of early modern Catholics, there was an interaction between the celestial and the terrestrial world, it could not remain without consequences for the way in which celestial patrons were chosen and addressed by mortal clients. Celestial patronage mirrored the political agenda of the day, and Marie-Élizabeth Ducreux's book explicates these complex relations by way of several well-chosen case studies from the long seventeenth century.

The core of the book consists of detailed accounts of attempts to canonize—or extend the status of—patron saints of the Habsburg lands, and above all of Bohemia, in particular St. Wenceslaus and St. John of Nepomuk. These attempts consisted of processes initiated by ecclesiastical and secular authorities with the respective Roman offices. They could be successful—like in the cases of St. Wenceslaus (1670/1729) and St. Casimir (1602/36); they could fail—like the requests for the creation of Hungarian saints who were not pursued due to tensions between Vienna and Rome, as detailed by Péter Pázmány; or there is nothing is known about the fate of the respective dossier, as in the case of Agnes, promoted by Bohemian Franciscans. Successful processes resulted in a variety of closely related dissemination activities, acquiring shape in all available media of the period: music, theater, hagiography, and liturgy, to name just a few that are discussed in the book.

The volume's title term “Habsburg Europe” is fully justified because it deliberately creates a common context for central European and Iberian/Italian settings. Of particular interest regarding Spain is the practice of copatronage (allowed until 1629), which illustrates the monarchy's need to adequately integrate regional and royal saints and to bring them into a proper relation with each other. Different dimensions of religious identity are at stake here: the antiquity of pre-Islamic Spain, warranted by the Visigoth saint Hermenegild, or the model of a holy queen, represented by Elisabeth of Portugal. The deliberations about the fragmented “sacred” landscape of Italy resonates well with the observations regarding the attempted use of St. John of Nepomuk as a “global” saint for the emerging Monarchia Austriaca in the eighteenth century. This is a key insight, highlighted in the editor's excellent introduction and summary: one can start thinking, for the first time, about the Enlightenment's disdain for “saints” as a targeted grasp at the then-predominant paradigm of imperial unity in its regional variety. Natural law replaced universalized saints.

The book is carefully crafted. This includes the conceptual coherence throughout the contributions as well as the use of primary source material, remarkable both in quantity and quality (handling of Latin and sound knowledge of the ecclesiastical language and concepts). The index and the selected bibliography guarantee for easy navigation and informed orientation. If the reviewer may articulate a request, it will be that of additional interaction of the volume's contributors with extant strands of scholarship. Recent research on religious confraternities would help add a dimension of premodern “Öffentlichkeit” to issues of political-religious identity; a broader contextualization of these phenomena in the field of early modern antiquarianism would help link the topic to the debates about the history of science and scholarship; and, finally, research on “empire” and “state building” in the early modern period could benefit greatly from a perspective in which the actual community can be perceived both in social and in transcendental terms. To be sure, case studies from Bohemia are very prominently represented in the book, followed by Italy; an additional consideration of the Alpine Habsburg lands could provide some proof of concept.

To sum up, Dévotion et légitimation is highly inspiring because it places a presumably religious topic at the center of premodern political identity, while restoring its intellectual dimension.