PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"... a judicious work of scholarship, carefully researched and elegantly narrated. The author draws from a jaw-dropping range of archival sources, and the portraits that he paints of leading Italian nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi are first-rate. Yet Mr. Kertzer interprets Pius IX and his Curia principally as political actors, eager to recover the Pope’s earthly kingdom and drag Europe back to \'medieval\' times. Such an approach offers insight, but fails to examine the theological self-understanding that the pope had of his office and the relationship between its temporal and spiritual authority. Grasping these would require a depth of historical analysis beyond the political circumstances of midcentury Europe.\
