The Thomas Handbuch, edited by a German Evangelical, forms part of an ambitious series of theological manuals emanating from Tübingen. As the title ‘handbook’ suggests, it offers a comprehensive overview of the work and thought of Aquinas as also of Aquinas scholarship (though the latter appears limited to the English, French, German and Italian languages; Polish and Spanish might also have been expected).

The internal structure of the work, which is divided into four books, is somewhat unexpected. The initial section, ‘Orientation’, considers the textual tradition of Aquinas's works, and the main printed editions, along with a description of scholarly aids and an assessment of the current (early twenty-first-century) state of Thomas studies. This is followed by a second ‘subbook’, ‘Person’, which, while including a relatively brief (8-page) account of Aquinas's life, devotes the rest of its 160 pages to background, influences and what its editor terms ‘relationships’. That covers the social and ecclesiastical context of Thomas's biography, with bespoke chapters on the Dominican order, scholasticism and the wider academic study-system of the European universities and order institutions of the thirteenth century; a selection of influences, consisting of Augustine, Denys, Boethius, the Latin Aristotelians, Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, the Arab philosophers, the ‘papacy and secular powers’, and Dominican spirituality; and, as to ‘relationships’, a quintet of Albert the Great as teacher, Bonaventure as ‘colleague’, and the pagans as ‘challenge’, along with the ‘mendicant Orders and the secular clergy’ (certainly an uneasy relation in Thomas's lifetime), and, tagging along at the end the translator William of Moerbeke (where the opportunity is taken to look again at the issue of whether Thomas in some sense actually commissioned at least part of Moerbeke's work).

Sieving through the material of the first two ‘subbooks’, the reader is soon alerted to the difficulty of avoiding repetition in a compilation structured in this way. It is a problem that does not become less acute when moving on to the third ‘subbook’, ‘Work’, which divides up its material into ‘writings’, ‘themes’ and ‘structures’. Only in the fourth subbook, ‘Effective influence’, on the reception of Thomas's thought, extending from his canonisation to the mid-twentieth century, is there no sense of déjà-vu. But perhaps no one except a reviewer is expected to read through a handbook from beginning to end.

When so much is provided, it may seem hard to cavil about coverage, but the ecumenical team of writers does not appear to include any Eastern Christian. This may be responsible both for the one most obvious omission, which is an adequate account of the influence on Thomas of Damascene and other Greek Christian sources (excluding Denys), and also for the one notably weak subsection, on modern Orthodox attitudes to Aquinas's theology.

How useful is this work? Given the excellent summaries of Thomas's writings, large and small, already available in the first volume of Jean-Pierre Torrell's magisterial and well-translated study of Aquinas, readers in the Anglophone sphere are not likely to turn in the first place to this handbook, excellent though its treatment is. But they will be well advised to do so for a generally penetrating account of Thomas's philosophical and theological thinking, notably in those areas where a talent for metaphysical analysis is most pertinent (the theology of God, and anthropology). The section on the reception of Thomas's writing might be thought more dispensable granted the relative ease with which histories of Thomism, or, as the French say, ‘thomismes’, can be accessed; one might think first in this respect of the 2005 survey by the American Romanus Cessario, more sympathetic than the evaluation offered here to the mainstream Neo-Thomism which had its principal historic source in the late Renaissance figure of Thomas de Vio (‘Cajetan’). But this is to overlook the utility of a concise survey of the sixteenth-century Reformers’ attitudes to Thomas, embedded in the closing section of this book, which could productively be confronted with the comments on modern-day ‘Protestant Thomism’, chiefly in North America, to be found in the opening section, ‘Orientation’.

The handbook includes a very substantial bibliography, a register of citations and indices for both names and themes.