Expectations have been high for what might be called Thomas Mayer's ‘Galileo project’. These have also been sympathetically tempered by awareness of the author's sense of urgency, arising from the health problems alluded to on the final page of the present volume. The ambition to make sense at last, in the light of newly accessible archival material, of the puzzling trial of Galileo, not least his ambiguous relations with the relevant pope, Urban viii, can only be applauded. Completion of the project will powerfully complement Mayer's path-breaking work on the earlier, perplexing, figure of Cardinal Pole. Initial reviews of the first volume to be published, The Roman inquisition: a papal bureaucracy and its laws in the age of Galileo (2013), have positively accepted the author's own assessment of its analysis as showing a personal and political dominance of the agents and mechanisms of the Roman inquisition by Pope Urban. Two further preliminary observations may be helpful. Mayer stresses at the start of the present book that it was originally intended as ‘the second half of a single volume’, of which the 2013 publication represents the first half, yet is now ‘designed to stand independently of the earlier volume’ (p. 3). Secondly, however, the author's conclusion adds a major qualification, that ‘this book does not bear out particularly well one of the major conclusions of The Roman inquisition, Urban viii's unprecedented dominance of the institution’ (p. 223). In the present work the focus, starting from the late sixteenth century, is on the operations of the Roman inquisition in selected parts of the Italian peninsula. It is commonly agreed that such operations were anomalous within the Venetian republic and in the kingdom of Naples, though for distinct reasons in the two cases. Here the Florentine grand-duchy is chosen as a third, mid-peninsula point of comparison. The resulting chronological coverage is necessarily not exactly matched, but the advantage derived, for a specifically ‘Galileo project’, is that highly relevant figures are included: Paolo Sarpi, Giordano Bruno, Cesare Cremonini, Marcantonio De Dominis, Tommaso Campanella.

The narrative in much of the book, particularly the chapters on Naples and Florence, may not prove easy for all readers to follow. Doubtless for urgent reasons already noted, limited time seems to have been spent on proof-reading or on more substantial textual revision. The resulting word order and uncertain relation of clauses make some sentences difficult to comprehend. Where fragments of original text (Italian and Latin) are directly quoted, the translation provided is sometimes unexpected, at least in instances where there is an absence of longer contextual quotation. The understandable pressure of time, more fundamentally, means that the potentially valuable documentation at last available from the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, richly used here, is often, though certainly not invariably, left in its inherently confused and fragmentary state, untempered by possibly elucidating information from archival sources elsewhere in the peninsula. Some readers may find this particularly challenging in the narrative of the Florentine chapters. They might also sense some uncertainty over chronology there, in that the argument pursued, of flagrant political use by Urban viii of Roman inquisitorial authority at the margins of the Florentine state, seems virtually an appendix to the tale told throughout almost two whole chapters, largely set in the earlier pontificate of Paul v. In the case of Naples, however, it might well be accepted that Urban can be shown to have made some progress in introducing relatively more certain Roman direction of potential inquisitorial business within the kingdom, after long decades of parallel and even competing assertions of authority locally deployed. The building up of the role of the papal nuncio at the vice-regal court can indeed be seen as relevant here. It may be useful to note that with reference to another part of Spanish-ruled Italy, Milan, the present volume does not seek to engage at all with the arguably exaggerated claim that under Paul v the pluralist who was, among other things, inquisitorial consultor there was built up by Rome to be a ‘quasi-nuncio’. Indeed the whole case about that pontificate put forward in the Mikropolitik project conducted by Wolfgang Reinhard and his team seems to go unconsidered here. In the case of Venice, before and after the Interdict of 1606–7 imposed by Pope Paul, the two chapters provided will doubtless prove useful for readers seeking a reliable guide to present understanding of affairs, as indeed of the specifics surrounding Bruno, Cremonini and De Dominis. For the last of these, the undoubted skill of the Roman inquisition in following accurately the archbishop's disputes with the Protestant spokesmen for the established Church at his return from England to Rome is not stressed here. More generally the evidence, however, counterintuitive, for the post-Interdict policy of the Venetian republic in carefully maintaining, albeit on its own terms, the operations of the Roman inquisition in its mainland territories is arguably even stronger than might appear in this volume. The importance of the papal nuncio at Venice, above all in the post-Interdict years, is certainly uncontentious. So, surely, is the idea that the crucial offence of De Dominis, as in this regard of Sarpi too, was to the assertion of papal authority itself. Thus one is left with admiration for the undoubted erudition and endeavour demonstrated in this work, especially as achieved under adverse conditions. The completion of the project can only be welcomed and warmly applauded.