Birgit Emich, “The Cardinal Nephew”, in Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal (Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 91), edited by Mary Hollingsworth, Miles Pattenden, and Arnold Witte, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2020, pp. 71–87.

The Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal is the first comprehensive overview of its subject in English or any language. Cardinals are best known as the pope’s electors, but in the centuries from 1400 to 1800 they were so much more: pastors, inquisitors, diplomats, bureaucrats, statesmen, saints; entrepreneurs and investors; patrons of the arts, of music, literature, and science. This contribution is one of thirty-five essays that explain the cardinals’ social background, positions and roles in Rome and beyond, and what they meant for wider society. The volume shows the impact which those men who took up the purple had in their respective fields and how their tenure of office shaped the entangled histories of Rome and the Catholic Church from a European and global perspective.