Critical works examining the extensive written corpus of Erasmus of Rotterdam have appeared almost since the death of the ‘prince of humanists' in 1536. The modern reader can thus be forgiven for doubting claims to novelty in certain authors' attempts to review his career. However, Marie Barral-Baron's book amply delivers on just such a claim. This work of scholarship represents an important contribution to the dismantling of the myth that Erasmus was unresponsive to history and the turbulent historical developments of his age. In three well-crafted sections, the author unveils Erasmus' progressive descent into his own personal nightmare or enfer. At the dawn of the 1510s, Erasmus aspired to a new golden age of Christianity, a world where the virtues of eruditio and pietas would blossom in all the baptised. Barral-Baron carefully draws on Erasmus' many writings to explain the core bases for his early methodology. As Barral-Baron announces, for Erasmus ‘doing and speaking of history [was] above all an opportunity to evoke the figure of Jesus Christ’ (p.143). This approach led him to caution Christian readers when reading profane history (historia), focusing more reliably on historia sacra and legends (fabulae). Ranking the humanist's textual armoury in such a way prepares the reader for understanding Erasmus' obsession with presenting the Word of God in all its philological exactness. Steeping himself in Scripture and the work of the early Church Fathers, the young Erasmus exulted in correcting the Vulgate and other important works, upbraiding the centuries of distortion by medieval scholastics (the clearly dreadful moines). However, as Barral-Baron demonstrates, Erasmus' error was in forgetting his place as a ‘subject of history’ (p. 223) and not simply as a devotee of the Gospel. The cornerstone of Barral-Baron's thesis follows. Carried away by his folie for sacred texts, Erasmus went too far. When Martin Luther mounted his critical move against the Church in 1517 – erecting thereafter a bold new eccelesiology that decisively rejected, inter alia, the value of Erasmus' much-loved Church Fathers – the great humanist was silent. Caught in a tortuous bind, Erasmus was slow to realise how closely his message praising the Early Church intersected with Lutheran critiques of the church abuses that had developed subsequently. In fact, for much of the stormy 1520s, Erasmus temporised. For him, maintaining peace in the Church was far more crucial than direct participation in the ongoing doctrinal jousts. Mining Erasmus' correspondence with most of the major players of the era (Luther, Zwingli and Zasius for example), Barral-Baron pulls no punches, arguing that the great humanist was deliberately duplicitous in initially avoiding confrontation with Luther (p. 301). The rest of Barral-Baron's book tightly analyses the long-running and convulsive disputes that finally erupted between the two men, driving Eramsus into successive phases of deep reflection (p. 367), frantic literary combat in the late 1520s and beyond, and the hell of his final years. As Barral-Baron concludes, the tragedy of Erasmus' life, scholarship and historical perspective lay in his too-tardy defence of historia – that is, a Christian chronology inseparable from the contributions of the Middle Ages – which he had long excoriated for being cut off from its apostolic moorings (p. 672). Like most works distilled from francophone doctoral theses, this dense study is only for the committed reader. However, Barral-Baron has excavated and surveyed an impressive quantity of primary material. Her complete mastery of the existing secondary authorities lends additional weight to this study, which fully captures the figure of Erasmus in historical mouvement.