Hippolyte Delehaye: Hagiographie critique et modernisme. By Bernard Joassart. 2 vols. [Subsidia hagiographica, 81.] (Brussels: Societe des Bollandistes. 2000. Pp. viii, 442; 443-897. 150 Euros paperback.) Although interest in critical church history and in has not been entirely absent in scholarship on the modernist period, it has not, until recently, received the attention it deserves. Brigitte Wache's 1992 biography of Louis Duchesne has gone a long way toward redressing the balance. Although not a biographical study, Joassart's work on the Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye (18591941) takes another significant step in illuminating these areas. Joassart acknowledges his subject's contributions to positive hagiograpical research in the Bollandist tradition, especially in the area of Byzantine hagiography. But his focus is on the more reflexive side of Delehaye's production, on works of method and synthesis based on that research experience. These include Les Wgendes hagiographiques (1905, 1906, and 1927), Les origines des cultes des martyrs (1912), Les Passions des martyrs et les genres litteraires (1921), Sanctus (1927), and Cinq lecons sur la metbode bagiographique (1934). It is the first of these, the Legendes, that constitutes the core of this study, as Joassart traces the difficulties it encountred, within the Society of Jesus, then with the Holy Office, and with integralist opponents of critical approaches. The focus is appropriate, as the Legendes in its own right functioned as a manifesto of critical hagiography (p. vii) and remains a classic (an English translation was reprinted in 1998). Beyond this, it opens a perspective onto the controversies raised by the use of historical method in turn-of-the-century Catholicism. After some preliminary materials-a chronology of Delehaye's life, a helpful list of Jesuit authorities, a chronological bibliography of Delehaye's publications, and a note on archival sources-Joassart traces in Part I the route followed by Delehaye in becoming a Bollandist. Part II fills in Bollandist background: the history and operating practices of this group of Jesuit scholars formed for the critical study of the lives of the saints. It then surfaces the difficulties the Bollandists encountered, culminating in Roman censorship of the Analecta Bollandiana, imposed in 1901. Despite repeated efforts on the part of the Bollandists, this surveillance would remain in place until 1920. This constituted the climate in which the Legendes appeared, first as a series of articles in the Revue des questions historiques in 1903, and in expanded book form in 1905. That climate worsened specifically with respect to the Bollandists as a result of three hagiographical controversies which surfaced in the course of 1906 (the year in which a second edition of the Legendes appeared), reinforced papal and curial suspicion of Bollandist activity, and evoked from the Jesuit Provincial the comment, L'hagiographie est un terrain bridant (p. …