The history of the Society of Jesus nowadays attracts many specialists. This is not surprising given the relative abundance of archival sources and the variety of themes connected with this five-hundred-year-old ‘multinational’. The present volume, with its twenty-eight essays, is a good example of this new trend. Many of the authors focus on particular issues, divided roughly along geographical lines: thus the suppression of the Society in Poland and the disastrous dispersal of its immense libraries and art works are covered in four chapters; then western and southern Europe; China; the Americas; and finally Africa. Frequently the focus is on the great papal suppression of 1773, but in their overview the editors point out that the ‘restored’ Society constantly suffered local suppressions throughout the course of the tumultuous nineteenth century. About half of the chapters research the relatively unstudied history of the ‘new’ Society. The question that looms in the background, and often surfaces explicitly, is of course to what extent the ‘restoration’ was more like the ‘creation’ of a new religious order. To answer this question, the study (pp. 197–228) of the ‘Paccanarists’ (the religious associations set up to replace the Jesuits) is particularly useful. Also revealing in this regard is the recurring, though underdeveloped, theme of the spirituality which inspired both the old and the new Jesuits. The Superior Generals'  insistence on the key importance of the two-year novitiate and the Spiritual exercises (pp. 187, 209, 301–2, and see p. 395) is one indication of a persistent preoccupation. The former Jesuit John Carroll, archbishop of Washington and founder of Georgetown University, wrote of the need in his day for ‘such men as we  have known, whom sanctity of manner, zeal for the divine glory, science, eloquence and talents of every kind rendered worthy of being the instruments of divine providence to illustrate the church’ (p. 383). An emphatic corroboration that the spirit was at work in the restored Society was its astonishing readiness to undertake missionary work – both in areas known to the earlier Jesuits and in others completely new. A further Jesuit characteristic was the continual conviction (cf. p. 193) that education – in schools – was essential to any long-lasting pastoral work for the good of souls: hearts needed enlightened minds. The days when such studies as these were exclusively in the hands of Jesuits are fortunately long past, and several very distinguished contributions to this volume come from lay scholars, men and women, prepared to investigate archives and ask questions that may not have occurred to the Jesuits involved. The overall result is a volume with a very high standard of scholarship and remarkably few misprints. Most of the writers would agree with the modest statement of one contributor: ‘this paper is more of a pointer towards ground that still needs to be broken than a comprehensive narrative’ (p. 454). But I would suggest that, while not exhaustive, at present the book is an indispensable pointer in the right direction.