Sam Kennerley's study of Maronite-Roman relations from the late fifteenth to the mid- sixteenth century achieves a great deal despite being only 139 pages in length. The book would make excellent introductory reading for students and researchers unfamiliar with this field, as it is clearly written, provides key narrative and introduces much relevant recent scholarship. But it goes far beyond this, drawing on a wide range of little-known primary sources, providing a definitive new account of this topic and offering original analysis which will be of great interest to historians of Renaissance Rome and of Eastern Christianity alike. The timeframe of the book is deliberately chosen. Whereas previous scholars have focused primarily on Roman-Maronite relations after the Council of Trent, suggesting that this marked a watershed after which western Catholics became increasingly confessionally strict in their dealings with eastern Christians, Kennerley argues instead that from the earliest days of the Reformation Catholics became more concerned about confessional rigour and increasingly sceptical of the orthodoxy of eastern Christians.

In the introduction, Kennerley justifies his choice of perhaps unfashionable terminology (such as ‘Renaissance and Reformation’ rather than ‘early modern’ and ‘centre and periphery’ rather than ‘metaphors of connection, crossing, or even entanglement’ [p. 3]. The first three chapters are structured chronologically, looking respectively at the fifteenth century, the papacy of Leo x (1513–21), and the period from 1523 to 1555. Many important themes emerge. Recent scholarship has shown that eastern Christian confessions were often unstable and contested (in contrast to earlier assumptions that they were unchanging and fixed), and that modern understandings of their identities and histories often began to be forged in the early modern period.Footnote ¹ Kennerley's analysis of the Maronites offers a new perspective on this. We discover that the Maronites were often divided, both geographically (with Maronites in Lebanon, Cyprus and Jerusalem sometimes acting independently of each other), and in confessional terms: in the late fifteenth century, the Maronites were split between a pro-Roman and pro-Syriac Orthodox (‘Jacobite’) party, while in the sixteenth century tensions emerged between pro-Roman and pro-Melkite factions. The fifteenth-century tensions inspired the Maronite Franciscan Gibrail ibn al-Qilaʿi to write confession-building texts seeking to create a firmly Roman Catholic identity for the Maronites; Kennerley notes that these were reused by seventeenth-century Maronites, but adapted to the very different confessional context of this later period, by which point it had become unacceptable to admit that Maronites had ever strayed away from Roman orthodoxy.

Kennerley's analysis demonstrates the different interests of the Maronites and Roman Catholics involved in negotiations. Maronite patriarchs generally initiated contact, often because they sought confirmation from the papacy to reinforce their status in the context of internal divisions. The sixteenth-century patriarch Musa al-Akkari was determined to strengthen the Maronites’ ties with Rome permanently, seeking the establishment of a cardinal protector for the Maronites in Rome, as well as the education of Maronite priests in Latin and Italian. Individual Maronites such as the subdeacon Elias ibn Ibrahim played a crucial role in the emergence of Arabic and Syriac scholarship in Rome during this period.

On the Catholic side, Kennerley argues that the papacy's attitude became increasingly confessionally rigorous after the beginning of the Reformation. Leo x had been willing to confirm Shimʿun al-Hadathi as Maronite patriarch in 1515 despite being aware of Maronite differences from Catholic orthodoxy, but later Catholics were stricter, requiring proof of orthodoxy and orthopraxy before support was given. Cardinal Marcello Cervini, later pope Marcellus ii, is a central figure in the book (his letters provide one of its key sources). Kennerley argues that Cervini's wide-ranging interests in eastern Christianity were primarily motivated by his desire to find materials to combat Protestantism. He thus sees Roman-Maronite relations as part of the story of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

In chapter iv Kennerley shifts his focus away from the Maronites to provide a broader perspective on eastern Christians in Rome during Cervini's cardinalate (1539–55). He considers various communities in turn: Ethiopian Christians, Syriac Orthodox, Armenians and Chaldeans/Church of the East. The Maronites appear only in passing in this chapter, but Kennerley emphasises that they often held the role of ‘trusted intermediaries’ between Roman Catholics and eastern Christians. Throughout the discussion, he highlights evidence of Catholic suspicion about eastern Christian orthodoxy, again suggesting that the Reformation encouraged Catholics to take a harder line with eastern Christians even before the Council of Trent. His arguments are generally persuasive, but I would suggest that Catholics were not consistent in applying a rigorous approach in the mid-sixteenth century. In the Chaldean case, for example (discussed on pp. 74–6), it is true that Yohannan Sulaqa made a ‘Catholic’ profession of faith before he was confirmed as patriarch in 1553. But the Catholics evidently did not investigate the patriarch very closely; it was only after he had been confirmed as patriarch and returned to Mesopotamia that the two Dominican missionaries who accompanied him discovered that his rival patriarch, Shemʿon bar Mama, whom Sulaqa had claimed was dead, was still alive. Sulaqa's own beliefs, as Kennerley discusses, are difficult to pin down, but his successor as patriarch, ʿAbdishoʿ of Gazarta, seems to have continued to profess traditional ‘Nestorian’ beliefs and to venerate saints viewed as heretical by Catholics – and he also received confirmation from Rome, which he visited in person in 1562, at the same time as the final session of the Council of Trent.Footnote ² This was not yet an environment in which Catholics consistently prioritised the strict confirmation of orthodoxy over expanding the Church.

The fifth chapter of the book takes a different perspective on Maronite-European relations, exploring Maronite efforts to make political and military alliances with western European powers. Kennerley demonstrates that Musa al-Akkari repeatedly encouraged Charles v to invade the Ottoman Empire, promising Maronite support for military intervention. Kennerley's discussion shows that the Ottoman government was not unduly paranoid in regarding Christians within the empire as a potential threat, since, while many remained loyal to the Ottomans, others did seek Christian European allies, or were encouraged by Christian Europeans to resist Ottoman rule.

A valuable appendix publishes thirteen documents relating to Roman-Maronite interactions. Twelve documents in Latin/Italian are offered as editions, with no translation (though a short English summary is provided), whereas the one text in Arabic Karshuni is given in translation, with no edition. This seems a sign that the book is primarily targeted at scholars working on Renaissance Rome, rather than specialists in eastern Christianity. This is also signalled in the introduction, where it is suggested that ‘we find it unexpected that the Maronites and Franciscans knew more about the languages and history of the Levant than did the popes and scholars of the golden age of Renaissance Rome’ (p. 3); this is unlikely to be a surprise to scholars whose background is in Middle Eastern Christianity. Yet despite this framing, Kennerley's groundbreaking book undoubtedly has much to offer to historians of eastern Christianity as well as of Renaissance Rome. Indeed, with Kennerley's consistent and persuasive efforts to view negotiations from the perspectives of all parties involved, it should contribute to the breaking down of still persistent barriers between these two fields.