Even fifteen years ago, one would struggle to identify recent studies about the College of Cardinals in the early modern period, especially any that examined the Sacred College as a whole rather than focusing on individual members. This volume more than successfully fills that void. This is a truly comprehensive study, comprising over six hundred pages of text and another seventy of bibliography. The editors have gathered an international mix of scholars who are authorities in their respective areas of research, ranging from early-career to senior scholars, and who represent diverse methodological approaches.

The volume's thirty-five chapters are divided into eight sections exploring the office of the cardinal as well as cardinals’ relationship to the universal Church, secular power, property and wealth, the city of Rome, missions, literature and the visual arts. Each chapter is a concise overview of a topic, and, helpfully, includes cross-references to other chapters in the volume for further reading. In fact, for most chapters interested readers can find full, monograph-length studies by the same author, as with Mary Hollingsworth on conclaves, Irene Fosi on the Papal States, Birgit Emich on the papal bureaucracy, or John M. Hunt on the sede vacante. The authors also gesture toward areas for future study, and the extensive bibliography includes many important works that have appeared over the last decade in a variety of languages, particularly in Italian and German.

To navigate the volume one might start with Miles Pattenden's contribution about the Sacred College, which outlines its history from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries and summarises the relevant historiography, as well as Jennifer Mara DeSilva's chapter on the rituals surrounding the creation and abdication of cardinals, and Maria Antonietta Visceglia on the geographic, social and educational backgrounds of cardinals, underlining the group's diversity over the early modern period (this is the most-commonly cited piece by other authors in the volume). Every chapter offers its own insights, however. Mary Hollingsworth's contribution includes wonderful details on the allocation and decoration of cubicles during conclaves, just as Carol M. Richardson provides a fascinating analysis of the different dyes and fabrics used to make the cardinals’ signature pieces of clothing. Regardless of a reader's own background and expertise, these chapters offer concise introductions to otherwise complex topics, whether that is Giovanni Pizzorusso lucidly explaining the operation of the Congregation de propaganda Fide in the seventeenth century or Clare Robertson describing the formulae of cardinals’ portraits. Though each chapter advances its own argument, taken together the volume clearly demonstrates the central role of cardinals throughout the multifaceted activities of the early modern Catholic Church and how cardinals operated both in concert with and, at times, in opposition to the pope, who was chosen from their own ranks. It is equally clear that research has focused disproportionately on the sixteenth century; much remains to be learned about the Sacred College in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries. The editors rightly identify many of these themes in their introduction to the volume.

If there is anything potentially missing from such a wide-ranging study, one does walk away after 700 pages wondering whether any of these cardinals was particularly religious. As this volume explains, the early modern cardinal could variously be a legate, inquisitor, ‘protector’ (whether of nations or religious institutions), patron, client and more. A cardinal's administrative and juridical roles, both formal and informal, are thoroughly detailed here in illuminating ways, but there is curiously little said about matters of faith or piety, especially given the position of these men at the apex of the Catholic Church during a period of such religious change. Two exceptions are Pamela M. Jones's chapter on vitae written about saintly cardinals and Jean-Pascal Gay's on cardinals and theology, though the former is more focused on the construction of Life-writings by different authors and the latter on the cardinalate as an object of theological study and the number of cardinals who had formal training in theology. This is not to take anything away from the volume or from Jones's and Gay's excellent essays. Rather, it seems important to ask how cardinals participated in the broader currents of early modern piety and efforts at reform, especially if we consider these questions, in the words of one chapter, ‘in relation to their ecclesiastical positions’ (p. 511). Some cardinals were reform-minded bishops, both before and after their elevation to the cardinalate (most famously Carlo Borromeo, but also Giovanni Morone, Gregorio Barbarigo and many others); others were the driving force behind reform at ecumenical councils, and not just as legates; and still others (such as Robert Bellarmine) wrote popular devotional works. In what ways did membership in the Sacred College impact all of these activities? We might consider, for example, why Paul iii considered it important to elevate eight of the nine men who wrote the famous Consilium de emendanda ecclesia to the cardinalate, as well as how that decision was seen by contemporaries.

But this is a minor point given the volume's many successes. Any scholar who wishes to learn more about the early modern cardinalate and who seeks to contextualise its members within the early modern world should make use of this rich, accessible volume, whose editors should be commended.