The eight articles published in this important volume trace the history of Franciscan education over five centuries and explore the activities of the order's missionaries in the early modern period. Six of the pieces (1–4, 7, 8) are based on earlier versions which have already been published; two chapters (5, 6) are printed here for the first time. In the first article, on ‘Francis of Assisi and the pursuit of learning’, Roest underlines his view that the systematic creation of a Franciscan education system was already under way in the 1220s, decades before traditionally assumed. The theme is taken up in the second contribution where further evidence for the early existence of a Franciscan study network is found. Narrative as well as normative sources indicate that this was based on the first studium generale in Paris. A closer look at the order's school network is taken in the third chapter with its outline of a model career structure beginning with the noviciate. Roest can show that within this educational hierarchy there was always a central role for religious formation, despite the privileges granted temporarily to some students. The next contribution (‘Mendicant school exegesis’) focuses on Dominican as well as Franciscan scholars as continuators of the pre-mendicant Parisian scholastic tradition. Roest confirms the traditional view when he highlights the mendicant contribution to Bible exegesis in thirteenth-century Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. However he denies that there was a decline in Franciscan biblical scholarship in the later fourteenth century, pointing towards the achievements of the Observants whose works are less well known because their authors did not obtain advanced academic degrees. This is followed by a study of the role of tradition in Franciscan theology, after the response to Aristotelianism led to different preferences for the teaching of either Bonaventure, who stood for Augustinianism, or Scotus, in the emerging rival branches of the order. The sixth contribution, ‘Franciscan school networks’, provides an extensive survey of changes to the Franciscan study system at the time of the Reformation which coincided with significant shifts in the order itself. The remaining two articles focus on the situation in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Roest argues that Protestantism was not as widespread in the region at that time as previously thought and he discusses the efforts of Franciscan missionaries and theologians to defend Catholic doctrine. The volume is an excellent contribution to an important series.