This collection of essays is a curious inaugural volume in a new series with the rubric ‘Jesuit Studies: Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit History’. John W. O'Malley is one of the foremost historians of the early modern Society of Jesus, and his scholarship has contributed to a significant contextual expansion in early modern Jesuit studies, most notably by focusing attention on the Society's importance as patrons and creators of art, architecture and music, as well as to the ‘Scientific Revolution’. For these reasons, a collection of previously published articles and essays should offer a fascinating introduction to the shape of Jesuit modernity, and establish an agenda for the series. Most of the essays in this volume focus on the founding of the Jesuits in the 1530s and '40s, the life of Ignatius of Loyola and the Society's growth during the sixteenth century to a position of remarkable, contested, pre-eminence in the Catholic world. O'Malley's essays offer a clearly written insight into the Jesuits' early years. Any of these essays could be read profitably on their own, but collecting them in a single volume creates some problems. Most notably, the book as a whole is extremely repetitive; while each of the essays ostensibly focuses on a different aspect of early Jesuit history or Ignatian biography, the same ideas and case studies are often reused. On occasion, sentences or paragraphs are repeated virtually verbatim, and a ‘one-step forward, two-steps back’ effect is especially disconcerting because of the unvarnished concision and directness of O'Malley's prose.

One wonders if O'Malley might have collapsed the essays into a single coherent survey, and offered a synthesis of his thinking in this way.

Nevertheless, there is much of value in this volume for novices in early Jesuit history: O'Malley's emphasis on the term ‘early modern Catholicism’ resonates with his point that the Jesuits pre-dated the Reformation, and their sensibility and practice might (at least until the 1550s) be detached from it, and re-focused on Ignatius as ‘the paradigm for every member of the Society’ (p. 4). The Society's primary religious purpose is key to O'Malley's interpretation, but through the ‘civic and culturally aware dimension’ of this spirituality, polymathic mobile Jesuits could also be deeply participant in a myriad of activities, most notably education, in Continental Europe, the Americas and Asia. The final essay on the debates surrounding Ignatius' canonisation demonstrate, through a range of sources, that the early modern path to sainthood was always an interdisciplinary exercise. O'Malley's fondness for Jerónimo Nadal, his self-confessed ‘hero’ (p. 176), is particularly striking, and offers an interesting challenge to Ignatius' centrality. The book's title asks if the Jesuits were devils or saints, and the volume's inclination, unsurprisingly, tends towards the latter. But it may be that later volumes in the series offer more detailed accounts of opposition to the Jesuits, and their complex relationship with ‘modernity’, and find that the devil is in the detail after all. This volume stands as a lucid, if often frustrating, introduction to the history of the early Jesuits and O'Malley's contribution to the field.