Regardless of his characteristically scholastic rebarbativeness and prolixity, Marsilius of Padua remains the most intensively studied political theorist of the later Middle Ages, as he has been for almost a century. This volume is the latest in a recent outpouring of publications in Europe and North America, and includes contributions from many of those who have been most active on both sides of the Atlantic. One reason for the continuing interest is an assumption that Marsilius descried, albeit through a glass darkly, modern political issues; an assumption which owes more to the Chicago philosopher Alan Gewirth's 1951 English translation and accompanying monograph than to Marsilius' original works. Annabel Brett's much more accurate translation of 2003 – preferred by some, but revealingly not all, contributors to this volume – renders such an assumption much more difficult to sustain. A second reason is a deepening of our understanding of Aristotelian scholarship at the University of Paris in the fourteenth century; of the debate on apostolic poverty; of Marsilius' own role in these and other developments; and of contemporary reactions to his writings. This second approach underpins the most interesting contributions: W. J. Courtenay on Marsilius' Parisian career; R. Lambertini on apostolic poverty; M. J. Sweeney, on Marsilius' theology and its implications for his view of the Church; and, perhaps most of all, F. Godthardt, on Marsilius' extraordinary career: quite exceptionally for a major political theorist, Marsilius became a powerful political player after he had written his great work, and had an opportunity to try to reshape the world in accordance with his ideas. Godthardt rehearses all the evidence which has been familiar since C. K. Brampton first put it together in 1922, but he goes much further. He becomes a little over-exercised by the question of whether or not Marsilius was forced to flee from Paris by the threat of exposure as the author of the immediately notorious Defensor pacis, but this opens up the fascinating story of his subsequent career. Like many other contributions, Godhardt's is particularly useful to an Anglophone audience because he digests much recent continental scholarship. G. Briguglia, writing about Marsilius' minor works, is better versed in it than in recent Anglophone work, some of which had pre-empted him; and T. M. Izbicki, in a brief survey of Marsilius' rich medieval and early modern afterlife, fails even to notice the most detailed modern assessment of William Marshall's 1535 English version, by Shelley Lockwood. These quibbles aside, both these contributions enhance the second approach to Marsilius' work. By contrast, the three supplied by the editors, all jointly written, are a throwback to the first, older approach, which they seek to defend in overwrought and occasionally opaque terms. Specifically, they contend that Marsilius advanced a ‘secular political theory’ in discourse i of the Defensor pacis, and appear to think that this was one way, perhaps the most important way, in which Marsilius consciously devised something ‘relevant not only for [his] contemporaries but also for posterity’. This is a remarkable assertion, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it is undermined by many of the other contributions to the volume in which it appears. It nevertheless illustrates how Marsilius continues to provoke intense debate, which is one thing which has remained true ever since his lifetime.