Edward Corp’s Stuarts in Italy is a very easy book to review. It is the culmination of more than twenty years’ work in the archives and material remains of the Jacobite court in exile, which has made its author the undisputed doyen of his theme. Beginning with the groundbreaking exhibition and colloquium La cour des Stuarts at Saint-Germain in 1992, Corp has single-mindedly focused on the household, physical buildings, internal spaces, organization, art, networks, and financing of the Jacobite court abroad from 1689 to 1766.

The current volume is the companion to the earlier study A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge, 2004) and The Jacobites at Urbino (London, 2008). There have been other books and many other articles, including studies of the Jacobite diasporic presence in other localities.

Based at the University of Toulouse, Corp’s awareness and use of Continental archives is outstanding and results here as elsewhere in compelling reinterpretations and even reversals of historical truisms. To take perhaps the most notable example, the Stuarts at Rome lived in the Palazzo Muti, so we might expect Edward Corp to tell us what went on there. Wrong: they lived at the Palazzo del Re, and generations of historians have repeated an error. Scrupulously, carefully, step by step, Corp takes us through the evidence and what it means. Suddenly we realize that other accounts of the exiled court are at one remove, resting their superstructure of primary research on an infrastructure of unacknowledged reiteration of secondary sources.

The subject of the book is treated with a lack of speculation and exquisitely cautious and well-balanced judgment. Corp is no Jacobite enthusiast. James in exile is called James III, for the entirely reasonable reason that this was the title by which he was recognized in the countries where he lived, and he was treated accordingly. Corp also makes clear that English and Prussian assessments of the exiled court were unduly negative. But this is not a book to cheerlead optimistic agents’ reports toward a near-miss restoration that unaccountably never took place, although would assuredly have been popular if it had. This is a detailed, sober history, with an extraordinary grasp of minutiae in everything from the bills for copying paintings for propaganda purposes to internal improvements in room layout in the Palazzo del Re, from the patronage of opera to the symbolism of the royal apartments. It is full of gems, such as the evidence adduced that the papal pronouncement against Freemasonry was sought by James and primarily aimed at Hanoverian masons.

Corp’s books on the topic of the Stuart Courts have always been excellent, and they have been getting better. The Stuarts in Italy is absolutely outstanding in its detail, its findings, its implications, and its evidence base. If it is not to be the last word, someone is going to have to work very hard to say much else.