In this impressively researched volume, Antonín Kalous focuses closely on how papal legations in the fifteenth century operated: what was the basis of legatine authority; how did that authority work (or not), especially depending on political and diplomatic contexts; and what were the logistical circumstances of a legation? Legates essentially functioned as papal fixers acting canonically within existing hierarchical structures, but at the same time as a sort of interference in and even imposition on local affairs, which was surely not always welcome. Building on his prior works on the prosopography and functions of papal legates in Central Europe, Kalous breaks his material into four categories, with one chapter for each: theory and practice, rights and powers, modus operandi (the most tedious chapter, it must be said, but one that provides necessary and precise information), and politics and diplomacy. An introduction places late medieval legations into a longer context, beginning with the creation of the papal monarchy during the eleventh-century Gregorian Revolution as a means to counter secular monarchies and to extend papal authority descending from Rome into large regions and smaller locales. Greater attention might have been paid here to the concomitant development of the college of cardinals. Although not all legates in the high and later medieval centuries had to be cardinals, Kalous points out they were increasingly so in the period under examination. Regardless of church rank, the legati de latere “became an alter ego of the vicar of Christ with the highest possible authority” (9); so a legate de latere who was also a cardinal functioned as a formidable combination.

Kalous concentrates on the role legates played in the restorationist agenda of fifteenth-century popes, such as Eugenius IV, Nicholas V, and their successors, as they sought to recover the advantage after the damage done by the Avignon papacy, the Great Western Schism, and conciliarism's challenges. He spreads his prior work further than Central Europe, although examples from those regions dominate, as in table 2 (206–08), delineating papal legates and nuncios in German and Central European territories from 1447 to 1525. He presents a valuable case study of source issues in section 1.2.1, on the legation of Bishop Angelo Pecchinoli as a nuncio cum potestate legati de latere to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, near the end of the fifteenth century. Chapter 2, “Rights and Powers,” is notably praiseworthy not only for its prodigious research and analysis, but also for the generous space given to footnotes in Latin (for which, in both cases, credit is due to the publisher for allowing the author to offer this material). He concludes that permanent papal nuncios increasingly, though not completely, replaced the legatine system, which we expect would have been an organic structural development given the early modern rise of the nation-state.

Kalous makes no pretense at offering the final word. Early on, he points out that much work has been done on individual legations—most readers will be familiar with the well-known though quite-troubled legation of Nicholas of Cusa to German territories, 1450–53—while noting that this subject has received little comprehensive treatment. Graduate students and researchers would profitably heed Kalous's advice on what is needed next (215): a complete list of legates in a database that would in turn allow for deeper and comparative analysis. He concludes that his contribution in this volume was to move the discussion along by framing important issues and providing a status quaestionis. In this, Kalous places us in his debt by demonstrating where the field of legatine studies might next travel and how it should be pursued.