At first glance, this text might seem daunting, a compendium of some 612 texts, primarily letters but also just over sixty related documents, written in Portuguese, Latin, and Italian, preceded by short summary notes indicating the contents. However, for scholars of Renaissance secular and religious history, the universe of letters, and the social milieu of the fifteenth century this volume is in many ways invaluable, and the editor, Rita Costa-Gomes, rightly deserves recognition for the years of painstaking work she devoted to making the letter collection of abbot Dom Gomes Eanes accessible to a wide audience of researchers and scholars. While the collection has long been known to those who devote their research to Portugal and Italy and who have studied parts of the collection, Costa-Gomes is the first to consider it in its entirety, and thus this book makes a significant contribution to the study of a number of fields within Renaissance history and literary studies.

If the text is devoted almost entirely to the letters themselves, the first forty or so pages offer important introductory remarks about the abbot himself, the letter collection, the role of letter writing during the Renaissance, the organization of the text, the work of a variety of scholars, and the tradition of letter writing in the Renaissance. In these pages we meet the Portuguese-born abbot Dom Gomes Eanes, the son of a notary, who left Lisbon for Padua in 1409 to pursue the study of law, only to change course and become a monk. Drawn to Benedictine religious life, and the reforms taking place within the order by the early decades of the 1400s, Eanes entered the monastery of Santa Maria of Florence, also known as the Badia Fiorentina, and by the 1420s he had become its leader. Eanes remained at the Badia until 1439, when he left for a short tenure as the head of the Camaldolese order. Eanes left Italy in 1441 to head the monastery of Augustinian canons in Portugal, Santa Cruz of Coimbra, where he died, in 1459.

As a complement to a biographical sketch of Eanes, the editor sheds light on both Eanes's religious circle and the wider web of those who corresponded with him—useful background for contextualizing the abbot as a sought-after intermediary by both religious and lay elites. For example, in a letter from July 1431 the assistance of the abbot is requested in the return of a young man who was on his way to taking up a monastic life but had wandered away from a monastery in Verona (327), while a letter dated 16 October 1427 comes from the heir to the Portuguese throne, Prince Duarte, who requests the abbot's help in procuring a number of items, including gold cloth, for his upcoming nuptials (191). The latter illustrates not only that the abbot's assistance was sought by members of the Portuguese court but also that he would have had access to merchants who could acquire the needed items, illuminating the multifaceted world of which the abbot was a part.

Beyond the world in which Gomes Eanes pursued his religious career, the editor rightly points out that the texts represent a letter collection as opposed to a correspondence, as the letters are those received by Gomes and do not include those sent by him—an important distinction. In the introduction, the editor further offers insight into the letter writing found in the collection, the evolution of the preservation of the abbot's voluminous correspondence, and the overlap between letter writing and oral communication in the fifteenth century.

Despite the brief preface to each letter, this collection is not accessible to those who lack reading ability in Portuguese, Latin, and Italian, which in some ways might be considered a shortcoming of the book in terms of accessibility to a wide audience. The decision of the editor not to offer translations is also the volume's greatest strength. Transcribed, and arranged chronologically in as much of their entirety as has survived the ravages of time, the editor allows the authors to speak as much as possible for themselves. Indeed, reading the letters as they were written is a particular pleasure for those able to do so, offering a nuanced insight into a Renaissance world that cannot be understood in translation.