a very well researched, important, and constantly interesting book which adds greatly to our knowledge of sixteenth-century Rome. It is, in many respects, a model of what the history of scholarship should be.

Jean-Louis Quantin, École pratique des Hautes Études, Erudition and the Republic of Letters

This is an exemplary monograph on an individual scholar

Peter Burke, University of Cambridge, English Historical Review

the book offers in compact form valuable insight into an important part of the evolution of European historiography. The book will be especially valuable to early modern European and Church historians, but is accessible to non-specialists as well.

David Kertzer, Brown University, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

It is mandatory reading for anyone interested in historical scholarship in sixteenth-century Italy.

Jetze Touber, History of Humanities

a much needed contribution on the roots of a tradition of studies, in order to understand also the standing and the status of church history and papal history today.

Massimo Faggioli, Theologische Revue

...meticulously researched book...

Stefania Tutino, Church History

Stefan Bauer's The Invention of Papal History is an admirably readable and fascinating portrait, not only of its principal subject, Panvinio, but also of the culture of late Renaissance humanism at a time of profound instability in Europe. It is a significant achievement by this author, who, one hopes, has a great deal more such scholarship ahead of him...

Daniel Woolf, Queen's University, Marginalia Los Angeles Review of Books

Stefan Bauer's study of Onofrio Panvinio's complex contribution and intellectual legacy should be praised for its clarity, in-depth research and useful reflection on the complicated past.

Jennifer Mara DeSilva, Ball State University, LSE Review of Books

The erudition diffused across Bauer's book is impressive and the arguments are delivered with convincing elegance... a joy to read.

Fabien Montcher, Saint Louis University, Journal of Jesuit Studies

...insightful and enlightening... should inform all future investigations into the historiography, and especially the religious historiography, of this period

William Stenhouse, Yeshiva University, Revista de historiografía

The Invention of Papal History fulfills its objectives. It presents a biography that supersedes earlier lives of Panvinio, elucidates his historical method, and demonstrates how this method differed from those of earlier and later Catholic histories ... it is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of a period of historiography

Sam Kennerley, Reformation

The Invention of Papal History is an impressive work. Stefan Bauer has scoured the European libraries and archives with extraordinary competenceand thoroughness. His work ranges far beyond the figure of Panvinio, dealing with the confessional pressures to which historians were subjected, the various aspects of patronage, the ins and outs of censorship, as well as the far broader matter of Catholic historiography in the early modern period. It will remain a major contribution.

Alastair Hamilton, The Warburg Institute, Church History and Religious Culture

this important book helps us to better see papal history-writing not simply as polemical or as a chronicle of events, but as a dynamic intellectual field with its own critical methods.

Robert John Clines, Western Carolina University, Renaissance Studies

This thoughtful and judicious monograph is to be welcomed for the considerable light it sheds on confessionalisation of historiography and the cultural politics of papal Rome.

Peter Marshall, University of Warwick, History Today

Stefan Bauer has written an outstanding study of one of the most important Catholic historians in early modern Europe...This exceptional new book promises to do much to shape future work on history writing in early modern Europe.

Crawford Gribben, Queen's University Belfast, New Books Network

This book succeeds in restoring to the foreground a figure of considerable importance within the development of Catholic historiography in early modern Italy, a field which the study convincingly argues was central in establishing the contours of different confessional positions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...It is clearly an important book.

Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Journal of Jesuit Studies