With this second volume Derek Beales completes the work launched magisterially with his Joseph II, I: In the shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–1780 (Cambridge 1987), the most ambitious treatment of its subject since that of Paul Mitrofanov before the First World War. There is much to admire. Not only does the author bring to his task vast erudition, based on unmatched consultation of potential source material across Europe, which makes his footnotes a mine of authoritative obiter dicta, but he does not shirk robust and trenchant judgement. Joseph emerges as a seriously flawed person, whose obstinacy, sarcasm and arrogant self-centredness alienated all those closest to him while leading, particularly in foreign policy, to an unscrupulous opportunism, as in his self-defeating manipulation of the Scheldt and Bavarian succession questions. In domestic fields, however, he often appears both modern and enlightened, as witness his personal funding of surgeons, whom he favoured over physicians, his much underestimated role as cultural and musical impresario and the whole tenor of his pro-peasant legislation. If he had not been hectoring he could not have driven forward remarkable achievements like the land surveys in Austria and Hungary; advisors who most felt his unreasonableness also recognised his rare qualities. This balanced approach informs Beales's on the whole positive evaluation of Joseph's religious policies, in which he traces successive shifts in which the eventual general seminaries were not prefigured from the start. He dismisses as ‘simply astonishing’, however, the views of Grete Klingenstein and others that the emperor's reign merely continued toleration trends growing under his mother's aegis. Joseph's reforms – and Beales asserts the emperor's centrality against claims that Kaunitz or Heinke were the prime movers – amounted to a Catholic enlightenment which may well have enabled the Church to adapt to what was to come more effectively than in France: they helped to embed the monasteries that survived in the strengthened parochial system and in society as a whole in ways reflective of the traditional stronger public role of Austrian monasticism: attention is paid to specific Hungarian religious structures. One of the writer's major theses, that Joseph's belligerence did not necessarily exclude eventual elements of compromise, is particularly pursued in the religious sphere. Thus Joseph was more willing than Kaunitz to save Pope Pius vi's face, albeit more in matters of form than substance. Kaunitz by contrast was more concerned to salve the feelings of the German Catholic prelates, whose interests were challenged by the emperor's bid to make diocesan boundaries coincide with political ones. Beales perhaps lacks something of the architectonic gift needed for a classic volume. The way in which the land tax issue turned cancerous in the last stage of the reign or the encounter of Joseph and Pius could come over more powerfully, while his no-nonsense lucidity leaves the speculative question of the nature of Joseph's personal religion, possibly because unanswerable, largely unasked. No new view of the age emerges from this deliberately tightly focused biography, but that is hardly a fair expectation. With this work of exemplary and judicious scholarship Derek Beales has put all subsequent students of Joseph ii lastingly in his debt.