The past two decades have witnessed a virtual explosion of scholarship on the Catholic or Counter-Reformation. In the early 1990s a series of books appeared that redefined the way we think about this field in fundamental fashion. As change continues apace, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin's Catholic Europe 1592–1648 in certain ways looks backward and offers an important reminder of what we can learn from an earlier generation of scholarship. In this respect, Catholic Europe provides an intriguing perspective on three important issues—geography, chronology, and methodology. In recent years, the study of Catholic Europe in the early modern period has given way to a broader consideration of the Catholic world. Ironically, this turn to global history has often reinforced a more traditional and parochial view of a Catholic Europe centered on the Mediterranean. Ó hAnnracháin, in contrast, leads his reader on a fascinating tour of the “periphery.” His excursion extends from Ireland in the west, arches across England, over the North Sea into the Low Countries, follows the Baltic on to Poland/Lithuania before turning to the south, traversing the Habsburg lands, and concluding in the northern Balkans. To Anglophone scholars of Central Europe, Catholic Europe offers a superb overview of Catholicism's growth and recovery in this region during the first half of the seventeenth century. The chronology is also distinctive. So much of the current scholarship, as Ó hAnnracháin notes, emphasizes continuities, how developments in the late Middle Ages carried through into the early modern period. Or, if historians want to emphasize a specific starting point in the sixteenth century, they frequently point to more celebrated events such as the sack of Rome, the Council of Trent, or the founding of the Jesuits. Ó hAnnracháin begins his story in a very different place, the papacy of Clement VIII (1592–1605), for he maintains that the 1590s marked a critical decade in Europe's confessional development. This is a novel and interesting argument, and while some may quibble with the chronological scheme, it does cast a different light on the evolution of continental Catholicism. Finally, there is methodology. While much recent work on early modern Catholicism borrows from the anthropologist's tool chest and examines religion from below, Ó hAnnracháin works in the opposite direction and focuses on the world of high politics and diplomacy. As such, he provides an Anglophone audience with the first general roadmap of this region as a whole for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here he has done a marvelous job mining the correspondence of papal nuncios, Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries, and various clergy in institutions such as the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide.

Ó hAnnracháin makes good use of this spadework in the closing chapters of the book. Here he offers two case studies from southeastern Europe. In the first he assesses the efforts of the papacy to construct a coalition against the Islamic threat. The first decade of Clement's pontificate was a particularly active period for papal diplomats. Ó hAnnracháin highlights Rome's great reach with missions going as far afield as Persia to confront the Ottoman menace, but at the same time he points to serious weaknesses of this diplomatic enterprise. Despite the significant resources Clement poured into this project, he could not square the circle and bring Prague and Warsaw together in a durable alliance against the Turks. In similar fashion, Ó hAnnracháin offers an intriguing overview of missionary activity in the northern Balkans. The linguistic challenges of this region alone were immense. One seventeenth-century missionary noted that a successful Christian emissary to this territory needed no fewer than ten languages. There were other obstacles as well. Catholic interaction with Orthodox communities was problematic at best while the Catholic cause was not monolithic as evidenced by the serious rivalry between the Franciscans and Jesuits. But despite these difficulties the Catholic missionary presence was robust, and Ó hAnnracháin brings attention to some of the remarkable figures of this period, including the peripatetic Jesuit Bartol Kašić, who compiled the first Croatian grammar and completed an important translation of Scripture. In sum, Catholic Europe is an ideal starting point for those interested in exploring the Catholic lands of Central Europe in the early modern period. The comparative perspective that Ó hAnnracháin brings to this project strengthens the volume and demonstrates that Central European Catholicism was a capacious phenomenon able to adjust and adapt to the very different political, social, and cultural conditions of this complicated territory.