The sixteenth-century historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–1568) is a difficult figure to pin down. A member of the same religious order as Martin Luther, that of the Hermits of St. Augustine, Panvinio benefited from the patronage of several popes and cardinals and was a committed defender of the papacy against Protestant attacks. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to criticize the greed and ill-fated ambition of several medieval popes and provided corroboration for historical documents and practices that were unfavorable to the papacy. Panvinio was a skilled researcher, able to collect and analyze a wealth of texts and epigraphs. Yet not only did he make glaring (and influential) mistakes in his evaluation of sources but he also forged documents to please some of his patrons. His historical work rejected many of the methodological and intellectual legacies of the humanist tradition, but it was not informed by the stringent confessional agenda that would characterize the work of the most influential post-Reformation Catholic historians. Because of his liminal quality, scholars of post-Reformation Catholic historiography have mostly ignored Panvinio, considering him merely as a transitional figure from the Catholic humanist historiography of Platina to the fully-formed confessional historiography of Baronio.

Stefan Bauer's dense, tightly organized, and meticulously researched book fills this gap, shedding light on the value of Panvinio's work in the cultural, religious, and social context of his times.

The book is divided into four chapters. The first two chapters are mostly bio-bibliographical, reconstructing, in painstaking detail, Panvinio's life and works as well as his social and intellectual networks. The third chapter provides a close and convincing analysis of Panvinio's De varia creatione, a history of papal elections, which Bauer uses as a case study to explore Panvinio's historical method. As Bauer explains in detail, most of Panvinio's texts were not printed during their author's lifetime for a number of reasons. After Panvinio's unexpected and rather sudden death, family members and associates tried to have some of his works published. These efforts, however, ran against the censorship apparatus of the Catholic Church, which managed to prevent the publication of most of Panvinio's corpus. Bauer's final chapter analyzes the censures produced in response to some of Panvinio's works, showing the difficulties that ecclesiastical history as a discipline posed to the confessional agenda of the post-Reformation Curia.

Informed by ample, solid, and accurate research, this book succeeds in exploring the complexities of Panvinio's work and of the context in which it was produced, read, and evaluated. Bauer pays great attention to the competing and, at times, conflicting pressures to which Panvinio, his patrons, and his censors were subject. Panvinio embraced the standards of historical truth and documentary authenticity, and yet he was also mindful of the need to both defend the truth of the Catholic faith and flatter his patrons so that he could make a living outside the cloister (where he preferred to operate). The Roman leaders were certainly convinced that the truth of history needed to aid, not antagonize, the preservation of the truth of the Catholic dogmas. Yet, this does not mean that all Catholic censors were utterly insensitive to questions of historical authenticity, as Bauer's analysis of Bellarmine's censures demonstrates.

This book is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to revise our understanding of the nature of post-Reformation Catholicism and the value of ecclesiastical historiography in the second half of the sixteenth century. Bauer's work clearly demonstrates that old categories and rigid dichotomies are not helpful to understand Panvinio's work. For instance, Panvinio's view of the relationship between history and theology does not easily fit into either a “Catholic Reform” or a “Counter Reformation” model. Indeed, as Bauer contends, Panvinio's work is an example that, in many cases, “Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation are inherently difficult to distinguish” (14). Also, Bauer correctly notes that Panvinio's mixture of rigorous historical research and blatant forgeries would look “puzzling” (55) if we judged it according to traditional dichotomies between historical authenticity and confessional agenda.

While Bauer deserves credit for highlighting ambiguities and complexities, I would have liked to see more discussion of their wider religious, intellectual, and cultural implications. What does Panvinio's case suggest concerning the relationship between doctrinal and historical truth? How does Panvinio's case change our view of the cultural and intellectual role of censorship? How does it affect our understanding of the political and cultural dynamics of power within the Curia? Although Bauer's attentive and meticulous book has not significantly engaged with those larger questions, it certainly provides an insightful reevaluation of an important protagonist of the religious and cultural history of post-Reformation Catholicism.