If you wanted to update the encyclopedic synthesis of Ludwig von Pastor on the foreign relations of the popes, this volume is where you should start. The editors have gathered eleven articles tightly focused on the international dimensions of the early modern papacy by noted Italian historian Maria Antonietta Visceglia, only one of which has appeared in English. Visceglia's message to foreign and Italian scholars alike is that the pope's territorial concerns were a constant of his international politics and policies, but at the same time the papacy always remained an institution above states. The papal court and capital city Rome were by definition supranational; foreign affairs took place not only when the pope received diplomats or called for a Crusade against the Ottomans but also when Portuguese fought Spaniards in the city streets or when cardinals claimed precedence over ambassadors in a palace antechamber. Reflecting the author's unusually broad historiographic reading (Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian studies) and engagement with multiple historical problems and methods, the collection is an invitation to look freshly at many settled interpretations.

The essays cover etiquette, diplomacy, plots, ceremonial, factions, and war over the period 1485 to 1720, immediately revising the presumed end to the papacy's international importance with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Unconventionally, Visceglia begins her story (chapter 8) not in Rome but in the Kingdom of Naples, where the baron's plot of 1485, instigated by Innocent VIII, foreshadowed the disastrous invitation to foreigners to intervene in Italy, which took place in the 1490s and led to the subjection of the peninsula. On the other hand, as Machiavelli pointed out, the papacy's own territories emerged stronger rather than weaker from this debacle. The pontificate of Clement XI (1700–21), with his hard line on Catholic rites in China and inability to defend his state in the war of the Spanish succession (chapter 9), seems a more fitting conclusion to the story of the early modern papacy's international role than the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

In a brief review I will highlight two essays that display the author's characteristically learned, multifaceted, and unpolemical but not uncritical approach. Contributing the Roman case to the comparative study of royal ceremonial, chapter 3 on the Corpus Christi procession discusses the liturgical substratum that underlay papal politics and the ways that alterations in the public cult over time revealed changing power relations. Focusing on a discrete ceremony, Visceglia braids together the many strands of interest—papal, local, religious, political, international—that made Rome a stage set for which all Europe was the audience. While the sixteenth-century popes and Curia promoted a Vatican-focused festival at the expense of civic religious traditions, they did not foresee that the populace would embrace the concept so heartily that it would soon establish fifty separate Corpus Christi processions in addition to the pope's. This spiritual effervescence lost its popular dimension by the end of the seventeenth century, and the ceremony became a feeble vehicle for elite display. When conflict between the Catholic powers in the war of the Spanish succession sparked crisis in Rome, however, the long marginalized civic leadership took back its role in organizing collective public ritual.

Visceglia opens a completely different perspective on papal foreign policy in chapter 10, when Clement VIII moved to Ferrara in 1598 apparently (according to the traditional view) to integrate the Este lands into the Papal States, but more importantly to urge directly the war against the Ottomans in Transylvania. Her emphasis in this and other essays on the popes’ commitment after 1570 to evangelizing Eastern Europe and fighting the Turks on land, not sea, is a welcome corrective to the conventional spotlight on the great powers. It is also a reminder to scholars overly focused on the pope as a territorial prince not to neglect the spiritual ambitions and supranational nature of the papacy. By keeping both dimensions constantly present in her many finely grained studies, Visceglia not only offers us new questions but outlines the places from which additional new questions might spring.