a masterly telling of a 19th-century scandalanalysed in a consummate way by Hubert Wolf
Metro, Iain Pears
Wolf's absorbing unravelling of the Inquisition trial convincingly recovers a lost world of rancidly overheated religiosity, rendered toxic by the force of a monstrous ego. It also opens a disturbing window on a closed ecclesiastical establishment in which unquestioning support for ... Read moreauthority might excuse almost anything. To that extent, it can stand as a salutary tract for the times.
Guardian
astonishing story
History Today
an extraordinary and fascinating book
New Shiny Books
microhistory at its best
Tablet
It has taken Hubert Wolf's... skill as a historian to retell their story and let his readers contemplate a moving case study of the crimes, follies and tragedies of humankind.
Literary Review
Wolf has not only provided us with a fascinating narrative that is compulsive reading, but also with an illuminating insight into the high politics of the papacy in one of the most crucial periods in its history.
English Historical Review
Makes for fairly amazing reading ... Wolf has not held anything back. The result is an account that reads a bit like a crime novel.
Chris Clark, University of Cambridge
an extremely intriguing retelling of events, and Wolf's highly structured narrative unpicks the trial in meticulous detail. He assesses the characters with unbiased opinion and does not stray into speculation or theory, using direct transcriptions from the trial to leave it up to the reader to form their own judgement ... the story is told expertly, and Wolf deals with the diverse layers of intrigue in a systematic yet compelling style.
Ms Sara Charles, Reviews in History
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