Robert Bireley has long since established his credentials as the leading expert on Church-State relations in the period of the Thirty Years War. He is now integrating his findings into a full biography of the crucial player of these years, the ‘Counter-Reformation Emperor’, Ferdinand ii, a ruler who – whatever you think about him – certainly took his ‘job’ seriously. Ferdinand was early on warned to beware of favourites. Most diplomats had their doubts whether he did in fact follow that advice: Bireley, however, does not regard Eggenberg as an equivalent of Richelieu even if he also faced opposition from the Austrian equivalents of the dévôts, like Ferdinand's father confessor, William Lamormaini, subject of one of Bireley's earlier studies. In fact, Bireley relies on his earlier text a lot in the last few chapters of the present book, but has added material on the period when Ferdinand was not yet emperor but only archduke of Styria. With his supreme knowledge of Vatican sources, Bireley is in a good position to point out that even with such a pious ruler, popes and emperors (or emperors-in-waiting) often worked at cross-purposes. Clemens viii Aldobrandini gave priority to the fight against the infidels rather than the heretics, whereas a few years later Ferdinand's predecessor Matthias was excommunicated by Paul v Borghese for his concessions to Protestants. Relations took a turn for the worse with the election of Urban viii Barberini in 1623, who was far less enthusiastic about the 1629 Edict of Restitution than might be expected, even if church diplomats tried to camouflage that reluctance as much as possible. (When challenged about his alleged approval of the edict, Urban put the blame on his secretaries.) In terms of the Counter-Reformation in Ferdinand's hereditary lands, Bireley stresses the different approaches between the bishops who wanted to preserve the autonomy of the Church and Lamormaini's Jesuits who regarded state intervention as a necessary evil because the authority of the Church had become too weak. At one point, Bireley even hints at Ferdinand's efforts as the ‘beginnings of the policy that will later be called Josephinism’ (p. 138). Bireley takes a curiously detached view of the Holy Roman Empire. Several times he claims, in a somewhat misleading phrase, that Ferdinand was ‘pulled into the Empire’, for example by the pretensions of his cousin and later on also son-in-law Maximilian of Bavaria. While Wittelsbach greed certainly fuelled the flames of conflict, did the head of the Empire really need to be ‘pulled into the Empire’? Bireley also tends to predate the rise of the Habsburg hereditary lands to the status of a European great power as Ferdinand ii's crowning achievement. More realistically, excepting the years of Wallenstein's ascendancy, this development had to wait for the reconquest of Hungary and the spoils of the Spanish inheritance around 1700.