The Roman Curia, because of its longevity, its complexity and the international character of scholarship devoted to it, is well suited to a collaborative work of this type. The editor has not aimed at providing a comprehensive handbook, which would have required several volumes; rather he has assembled a group of scholars willing and able to cover a selected range of topics over a relatively long time-span. Sandro Carocci, for instance, successfully rises to the challenge of analysing nepotism from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and one can say the same of Cesare Santus’ treatment of relations with the Eastern Churches from 1500 to 1800. Although the volume has its origins in a conference held in Rome 2022, only a couple of the contributions have the character of more specialised conference papers. Inevitably there are gaps. Danica Summerlin’s chapter on the role of the Curia in general councils stops short of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (admittedly this council is more than adequately treated in other collaborative volumes). Perhaps the most striking omission is the apostolic chamber and finance before 1564, when Massimo Carlo Giannini’s account of the subject begins, proceeding as far as the end of the eighteenth century – although Miles Pattenden’s chapter on the Renaissance Curia underlines the importance of the extension of the sale of offices under Sixtus iv. No doubt the explanation for such omissions is the difficulty of recruiting contributors with the right expertise.

Reading this volume, which ranges from the fourth to the eighteenth century, one is struck by a great disparity in the survival of sources. In the essays on the early Middle Ages (Rosamond McKitterick on papal officials in the Liber pontificalis; Bronwen Neil on papal letters in the Collectio Avellana; Rita Lizzi Testa on the origins of the Curia, for which she identifies the pontificate of Damasus i, d. 384, as crucial; and Dominic Moreau on the relationship between papal archives and canonistic collections) careful detective work is needed to elucidate curial personnel and institutions. The somewhat fuller sources of the twelfth century may partly reflect the increasing popularity of judicial appeals to Rome, considered by Bruce Brasington. The papal chancery during its apogee, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, is the subject of Barbara Bombi’s chapter. There is indeed a vast increase in the extant documentation from the thirteenth century onwards, contained above all in the register series of the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (formerly the Archivio Segreto Vaticano), so that the problem for scholars becomes not so much lack of sources as their superabundance. The main archives of the papal penitentiary and the Roman Rota begin in the fifteenth century, and these institutions are treated by Peter D. Clarke and Kirsi Salonen respectively. Daniel S. Prudlo describes how the close collaboration between the mendicant orders and the papacy in the thirteenth century led to the friars’ infiltration into various curial offices. These included the Curia’s lector in theology, the subject of a separate chapter by Anthony John Leppin.

The final section of the book, on the early modern world, contains, in addition to the work of Pattenden, Santus and Giannini mentioned above, Elena Bonora on the impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation on the Curia and its relations with Europe, Maria Teresa Fattori on the Congregazione del Concilio and provincial councils, and Giovanni Pizzorusso on Francesco Ingoli, first secretary of the Propaganda Fide.

Comparisons between the papal Curia and other administrations and governments are largely absent from this volume, nor one would expect its scope to be widened in this way; but I think it worth mentioning that nowhere have I found evidence for Donald Prudlo’s claim (p. 2) that ‘In many ways it was a prototype of the bureaucracies of the modern age.’ None the less, the editor deserves our gratitude for having assembled such a well-qualified team of writers. It is to be hoped that a less expensive paperback edition can be issued.