Two popes – Pius xi and Pius xii – held office during the years when Italy was dominated by Mussolini. The two major Anglophone studies of their respective pontificates portray them in a negative light, both because of their complicity with Italian Fascism, and more broadly because of their readiness to endorse, or at least accommodate, the unpleasant policies of vicious totalitarian régimes, especially Hitler's Germany. For John Cornwell, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius xii) was ‘Hitler's pope’, a profoundly antisemitic figure, who proved happy to collaborate with Nazis.Footnote ¹ In a more recent work, David Kertzer portrays Pius xii's predecessor, Achille Ratti, not just as willing to work with the Fascist state, but as a key force in shaping it: for Kertzer, for example, the Catholic Church and its head were not only criminal in their failure to denounce Italian antisemitism; they also played a key rôle in its inspiration.Footnote ² Cornwell's book was sensationalist and controversial; according to some reviewers it was wilfully misleading. While perhaps more nuanced in its treatment of the papacy, Kertzer's account of Pius xi is, for this reviewer's tastes, far too eager to privilege lively narrative and local colour over sustained analysis. The volume under review here contrasts very sharply with the approaches of Kertzer's and Cornwell's ‘secret histories': anyone wishing for sensational revelations or damning accounts of Ratti or, indeed, for psychological insights into what made the pope tick will be disappointed. This is instead a collection of thirty-nine well-researched and judicious essays and reflections, ably if slightly unimaginatively edited by Laura Pettinaroli. They cover an extremely wide and varied set of topics: from papal attempts to mediate during the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr to the Holy See's response to the Abyssinian War; from relations between the Apostolic See and the Ukrainian Uniates to those between the Secretary of State and the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of Faith, seen through the prism of their activities in India and China; from the 1932–6 inquests on Communism that led to the encyclical Divini Redemptoris to the preparation of Mit brennender Sorge; from the censorship of Gide's Corydon (a series of Socratic dialogues legitimating homosexuality) to a comparison of the papal regulation and supervision of Catholic universities in Canada, the USA and France.

What underpins all these articles is their close engagement with archival sources. This is unsurprising given that the book itself emerges from two conferences – held under the auspices of the École française in Rome in 2010 and 2011 – that were inspired by the opening of the archives for Pius xi's reign in 2003 and 2006. There can be no doubt that the new archival material has permitted scholars to cast fresh light upon Ratti's reign (a period roughly bounded by the Fascist seizure of power and the outbreak of the Second World War) or that the experts who have published their work in this volume have engaged with these materials rigorously. However, anyone looking for a clear overview of his papacy will not find it in this book. Indeed, while individual essays may be of use to scholars with, say, an interest in the history of German relations with the Church under Weimar and the Third Reich, or the development of papal diplomacy or bureaucracy, or even papal cultural policy, the exceptionally focused nature of many of the pieces included will make some of them of scant appeal even to scholars with a particular interest in the Catholic Church in the interwar period.

Laura Pettinaroli has made some attempt in her introduction to provide the reader with a general sense of the way in which the new availability of sources has led the historians represented here to reconsider Pius xi's pontificate, not least in terms of the modernisation and restructuring of the Vatican's governmental structures. But ultimately she has missed an opportunity to provide a clearer sense of how the historiography has developed and how this collection contributes to wider debates concerning the papacy, religion and political, social and cultural developments in the interwar period. Indeed, the entire collection is very much a record of the two conferences – essentially the atti or comptes-rendu de conférence – which would have benefitted from bolder editorial decisions: this collection of thoughtful and intelligent essays would have been so much more useful had a few of the more tangential ones been lost, had readers been spared the often tedious record of conference discussions, and if a few additional framing essays had been added, offering contextualisation through broader analysis of the development of papal policy and practices. What we are left with is a rich mine of information, from which it is possible to derive a broadly sympathetic view of Pius xi – few of the authors here would share Kertzer's view of Ratti – and, indeed, of the Vatican as a whole confronted with a vast range of extremely difficult and rapidly evolving national, international and global problems. The essays also clearly illustrate that the Catholic Church, even at its centre, was far from monolithic, and that to hold its head responsible for the actions – admirable or reprehensible – of its clergy both high and low would be absurd. The story of Pius xi's reign is a fascinating and important one. This book gives us many insights, but does not provide us with a balanced and comprehensive overview. This is a pity because we need a work to replace both Kertzer's attack on Pius xi's ‘pact with the devil’ – the Italian title of his work – and Yves Chiron's apologetic and exculpatory biography.Footnote ³