This is a welcome book. Bernard Joassart, who is himself a member of the Société des Bollandistes, reconstructs the foundation and evolution of historical erudition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jean Bolland (1596–1665) was the founder, and first editor, of the Acta Sanctorum, a critical edition of the Lives of the saints, which were ordered according to the calender, relied on authentic sources and were exuberantly annotated. The idea, however, was developed by the Dutch Jesuit Heribert Rosweyde, who died before the first two volumes were published at Antwerp in 1643. Joassart quotes in extenso from the preface to the Acta Sanctorum, elegantly translated into French (pp. 11–44). The text is an important source for the formation of Quellenforschung in the early modern period and the history of Catholic historiography in the era of confessionalisation. The systematic recourse to the manuscript tradition and the philological interpretation of the sources should discredit Protestant criticism against Catholic hagiography. Joassart then moves to the second great historical enterprise of Catholic Quellenforschung in the seventeenth century, the Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, the history of the saints of the Benedictine Order, of which the most erudite of all Maurist scholars, Jean Mabillon, published the first volume in 1668 (pp. 45–82). The following chapter demonstrates philological criticism at work: in 1675 the Bollandists doubted the popular story told by the Carmelites that their order was founded by the Old Testament prophet Elijah. Their ‘de-constructivist’ approach was condemned as heretical by the Spanish inquisition (pp. 87–124). Finally, Joassart elucidates the Bollandists' fate in the eighteenth century, introducing some scholars like Adrien Baillet, Jean Lebeuf and Claude Chastelain who were more interested in reconstructing church history than editing texts. The Bollandists' innovative undertaking was suppressed when the Society of Jesus was abolished in 1773, and their famous library was soon dispersed. By that date fifty volumes of the Acta Sanctorum had been published. But in 1837 the Society was re-established and its work resumed (pp. 125–63). This book is less an intellectual synthesis than a collection of key documents, mainly in translation, illuminating the history of the Bollandists and the Maurists. The author cites some important French and Italian contributions to the subject, but he seems not to be familiar with recent Anglo-Saxon and German scholarship on the history of historiography and hagiography. Even Arnaldo Momigliano's prominent studies on Wissenschaftsgeschichte and the intellectual history of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries are absent. But the author would certainly agree that he does not intend to integrate his study into the wider context of the history of learning and scholarship in the the early modern period; he is happy to provide ‘aspects de l’érudition hagiographique’.