Larry M. Jorgensen and Samuel Newlands's edited volume on Leibniz's Essais de théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal from 1710 (often referred to simply as the Theodicy) is the principal outcome of a major conference, ‘Leibniz's Theodicy: Context and Content’, held at the University of Notre Dame in 2010 under the auspices of the Templeton-funded research project ‘The Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought’. It is the latest addition to a number of recent publications on the topic, published in the years around the 300th anniversary of Leibniz's book. Paul Rateau, author of a voluminous study of Leibniz's theodicy in French, La question du mal chez Leibniz (Paris 2008), has been instrumental in the publication of several multi-lingual volumes dedicated to the topic, including L'idée de théodicée de Leibniz à Kant (2009), Lectures et interpretations des Essais de théodicée de G. W. Leibniz (2011), and a forthcoming volume on Leibniz and Bayle, to be published, like the two previous ones, in the ‘Studia Leibnitiana Sonderhefte’ series. There has also appeared recently a major study in Spanish, the Metafisica de la permision del mal (Pamplona, 2011) by Augustin Echavarria.

New Essays on Leibniz's Theodicy is, however, the only book in English dedicated entirely to this topic. It features a preface by the editors and some twelve articles written, except for three contributions by younger or mid-career academics, by senior scholars of international renown. The volume is moderately representative of international research. Apart from two contributions by Rateau and Echavarria, all contributions are written by North American scholars or by English-speaking scholars based in North America. Notably, no Leibniz scholars in Italy or Germany have been invited to contribute.

The contributions are generally of indisputable quality. Christia Mercer's article dedicated entirely to the short ‘Preface’ of the Theodicy struck me as particularly original, but also reminded me that other parts of Leibniz's book could benefit from more detailed scrutiny of this kind, especially the appendices, including the ‘Synopsis of the controversy reduced to arguments in forma’, the ‘Remarks of the book on the origin of evil’, and the splendid mini-treatise on divine justice, ‘De causa Dei’. Donald Rutherford approaches the material with the synoptic precision and good sense that already characterizes his excellent Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge, 1995). Newcomers to the topic can begin here.

Articles by Maria-Rosa Antognazza and Tad Schmaltz on the different kinds of evil in Leibniz (moral, physical, metaphysical) both include impressive analyses of Leibniz's precise conceptual apparatus that completely belie Bertrand Russell's contention that the Theodicy is a philosophically sloppy work only intended for half-educated courtiers. Daniel Garber's controversial attempt to show the relative independence of Leibniz's theodicy-project from his Monadology left this reader deeply doubtful about the argument but also in admiration of Garber's interpretive boldness. Highlighting those texts is not to say that the remaining articles are any less engaging. Readers with different sensibilities and theoretical interests may very well put the emphasis on other contributions.

Leibniz's Theodicy was written from notes he made during some conversations with the Queen of Prussia about Pierre Bayle's monumental Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). The text constantly quotes directly and at length from Bayle's magnum opus. Unlike the Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (c. 1703–1705), Leibniz's extended discussion of Locke's Essays concerning the Human Understanding, which stages the confrontation as a dialogue between two fictive partisans of the two philosophers, Philalèthe and Théophile, the Theodicy does not have recourse to narrative devices to set the scene. The confrontation with Bayle's text is direct and unmediated. This said, it is surprising that not a single contribution to the volume is dedicated to the dialectical aspects of the confrontation between Leibniz and Bayle. To be sure, Kristin Irwin provides a spirited defence of Bayle's position against Leibniz's onslaughts, arguing that Leibniz read Bayle through the lens of scholastic distinctions foreign to Bayle's position; and Jonathan Israel places the Theodicy in the context of the attacks by ‘moderate’ Enlighteners against the ‘Radicals’ Bayle and Spinoza. But none of the contributions approach Leibniz's reasoning as a piece of argumentation, dialectically and rhetorically structured to counter the contrary arguments presented by his primary interlocutor, Bayle.

Admittedly, arguments exist in favour of reading the Theodicy in and for itself, independently of the dialogical context in which it took concrete shape. As Paul Rateau has stressed in La question du mal chez Leibniz, the ‘theodicy’ as a project largely pre-dated Leibniz's confrontation with Bayle. The Dictionnaire must in some respects be considered the occasional rather than the efficient cause of the Theodicy: Leibniz was pre-occupied by the problem of evil since his youth. In the Confessio philosophi, a text written around 1673, we already find central elements of the conceptual machinery that Leibniz opposes to Bayle in the Theodicy; Leibniz uses the term ‘theodicy’ before even reading Bayle's Dictionnaire when speaking of an important aspect of his own general philosophical enterprise. Moreover, parts of the book clearly do not debate with Bayle in the way Leibniz does in the main body of the text, such as the Discours préliminaire that precedes the Theodicy proper (although this text, on some level, can be considered Leibniz's contribution to the controversies on faith and reason between Bayle, Isaac Jaquelot, and Jean Leclerc). Other parts of Leibniz's book, in particular the ‘Remarks on the book on the origin of evil’, were prompted by other contemporary debates, in this case Hobbes's response to Bramhall in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656). Nonetheless, the massive presence of Bayle's text and arguments throughout the Theodicy is a feature that can hardly be missed and that ought not to be ignored in a volume such as this one, which aims to provide a state-of-the-art examination of Leibniz's book.