This handsome volume, the production values which it reflects constituting a fitting complement to the elegance of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini's prose and the smoothness and apparent facility with which the editors/translators succeed in transposing it into English, makes conveniently available a carefully-chosen selection of seventy-five of the more than twelve hundred letters of Aeneas which Rudolf Wolkan edited and printed a century ago. To these the editors append (the now) Pius ii's treatise-length and revisionist De rebus basiliae gestis commentarius (1460) as well as two of his papal documents: the celebrated bull Execrabilis (1459) – celebrated, at least, in the post-First Vatican Council era – prohibiting appeals from pope to future general council, and the In minoribus (1463), often known as his ‘retraction bull’, in which he attempts to explain his shift from conciliarist to papalist convictions and urges his critics to ‘believe the old man more than the youth’ or to ‘count not the private man of more value than the pontiff’. In effect, to ‘reject Aeneas; accept Pius’. If this last document rounds out the letters reprinted here and provides the volume with a fitting title, the letter chosen as opener dates to 1432. Written by an eager young Aeneas while journeying to the Council of Basle as secretary to Cardinal Domenico Capricana, it conveys to us his claim that it is ‘my resolution at the present time not to write anything unless I have seen it with my eyes or touched it with my hands’. These two documents constitute the fitting bookends between which the editors have packed a fascinating array of letters revelatory of the great events of Church and State in which Aeneas participated or to which he was a well-positioned, perceptive and articulate witness. Revelatory also, it should be added, of the sort of person Aeneas himself was – poet laureate, man of letters, Renaissance humanist, skilled orator and ambitious secretary, as he cannot refrain from boasting, ‘of two popes, an emperor, and an anti-pope’. Well-versed in the history of conciliarism in general, of the Council of Basle in particular, and of the contemporary events on which both impinged, the editors preface each letter with helpful, context-setting remarks, and the book as a whole with a lengthy and judiciously-informative introduction. Their contribution is a substantial one. The volume enriches our understanding of an important but protean, elusive and ultimately enigmatic personality. And, ironically, elusive in some measure because of the prolific exuberance of his self-revelation. For there is much that is artful about these letters. As the editors point out, while ‘an exercise in humanist self-reflection’, they also served Aeneas/Pius as ‘a means of shaping a public persona’, one ‘that could [safely] be left to posterity’. And that fact those of us who read his correspondence should not be too quick to forget.