The Catholic Historical
Review
VOL. XCIII

JANUARY, 2007

No. 1

ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY
IN MALTA
BY

MARIO BUHAGIAR*

Small islands have a need for a myth of national identity. The small
Central Mediterranean archipelago of Malta, geographically located
on the respective peripheries of Muslim North Africa and Christian
Europe, has since the Late Middle Ages used the claim to be the site
of the shipwreck of the apostle Paul in A.D. 60 (Acts 28) as a key
argument for a Latin European identity. The fact that the islands
had emerged from a traumatic Muslim experience made it psychologically imperative for them to trace their Christian roots to apostolic times. This study examines the validity of their claims and discusses the earliest known evidence for a Pauline tradition.
In 544 A.D., when Rome was controlled by a hostile Byzantine garrison and under imminent threat of attack by the Goths under Totila,
Pope Vigilius (537–555), made a calculated appeal to popular patriotic
sentiment by instructing the poet and orator Arator, whom he had
raised to the elevated status of Subdeacon of the Roman Church, to give
a public recitation of his verse paraphrase of the Acts of the Apostles
“De Actibus Apostolorum,” which he had composed around 536 A.D.
after resigning from the Court of Theodoric the Ostrogoth at Ravenna.1
*Dr. Buhagiar is Professor of History of Art and Head of the Department of History of
Art at the University of Malta.
1
Arator, De Actibus Apostolorum, ed. A. P. McKinley (Vienna, 1951). See also A. P.
McKinley, Arator: The Codices (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1942), pp. 104-118. Arator,
who was probably of Ligurian origin, had been trained in Milan under the patronage of
Bishop Lurentius (490–512), and achieved distinction as a poet, an orator, and a lawyer.
In Ravenna he was befriended by Cassiodorus (ca. 480-575), and Theodoric valued his
services and treated him with distinction.

1

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ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

The poem, written in hexameters, is divided into two books dedicated
respectively to St. Peter (Book I) and St. Paul (Book II), and has a thinly
veiled political message in the way it lavishes praise on St. Peter at the
expense of St. Paul and the other apostles. In this way the primacy of
the Roman See, at a time when it was increasingly contested by
Constantinople, is stressed. The performance, organized in the church
of St. Peter ad Vincula in front of a lay and clerical audience, was a huge
success and lasted four days since Arator had to repeat many passages
by request of his audience. In Book II the poem makes a specific reference to the Central Mediterranean island of Malta,which it calls a statio,
or “port of call for sailing boats,”2 and there can be little doubt that it
identifies the place with the site of St. Paul’s shipwreck.3
The poem contains in this way the earliest known official association of the Melita of Acts 28:1 with the Central Mediterranean island
of Malta.That such an identification was already current at a more popular level, is suggested by the Acts of Peter and Paul, a post-fourthcentury text from the New Testament apochrypha, that makes a specific mention of the Maltese archipelago, indicating Gaudomelete (i.e.,
“Melite near Gaudos”) as the place from where the Apostle, bypassing
Africa, had sailed to Sicily by way of Syracuse.4 The toponym leaves no
room for ambiguity.5 In Late Roman and Byzantine texts Central
Mediterranean Melite was often referred to by that name to avoid confusion with other islands or landfalls with similar, or identical, names.
The corresponding form of Melitegaudos (or Melitogaudos) was similarly used when the place indicated was the island of Gozo in the
Maltese archipelago.
2
De Act. Apost. ii, 1121-1127. On the significance of the word station: J. Busuttil,
“Maltese Harbours in Antiquity,” Melita Historica,V (1971), 305.
3
“. . . velamine noctis aperto pandere visa solum quod praebuit hospital nautis Sicanio
lateri remis vicina Melite. . . .”
4
For The Acts of Peter: M. R. James, The Apochryphal New Testament—Translations
and Notes, (Oxford, 1924). For an online translation: http://www.newadvent.org/
fathers/0815.htm.The passage which comes at the start of the text reads:“. . . And having
sailed from Gaudomelete, he [Paul] did not come to Africa [or] to the parts of Italy, but
ran to Sicily, until he came to the city of Syracuse. . . .” My thanks are due to Mr. Paul
Guillaumier for generously alerting me to the Gaudomelete reference in The Acts of
Peter and Paul.
5
On the significance of the toponym and its companion ‘Meltegaudos’: S. Fiorini and
H. C. R. Vella,“New 12th Century Evidence for the Pauline Tradition and Christianity in
the Maltese Islands,” in J. Azzopardi (ed.), The Cult of St Paul in the Christian Churches
and in the Maltese Tradition (Malta, 2006), p. 161, where the toponym is explained as
a composite Greek place-name “consisting of an initial adjectival component coupled
with a final nominal component.” In this case “Melite of (associated with) Gaudos.”

BY MARIO BUHAGIAR

3

Arator’s audience may, nonetheless, not have been interested in an
exact geographic location for Melita. From the available literary evidence, the patristic commentaries in particular, one gets the impression that the importance vested in the shipwreck story rested primarily in its moral lessons.The site of the island was a matter of secondary
interest and, perhaps, even irrelevant.6 A case in point is St. John
Chrysostom (ca. 347–407) who in Homily 53 on the Acts of the
Apostles limits his observations to the great honor which the natives
showed Paul and his companions. This he takes as an indication that
many of them embraced Christianity,7 but their geographic identity
falls outside his concern. It is, as a matter of fact, doubtful, if in learned
and suitably informed circles Malta was at all associated with St. Paul.
In the Descriptio Terrarum composed by the Gallician historian and
theologian Paulus Orosius (ca. 385-420), the island corresponding to
the approximate geographic location of Malta is indicated as the
“Insula Calypso,” implying that Orosius’s concern was with Homer, not
St. Paul. Calypso is likewise the name given to that island in an eighthor-ninth century Mappa Mundi that accompanies a copy of Orosius’s
Descriptio in the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana.8
There is nothing to suggest that Malta had a Pauline tradition before
the Late Middle Ages.The tenacious belief of the Maltese that they can
trace their Christian roots to St. Paul has, since then, become a prime
factor in the forging of their national identity.9 In 1536, the Abbé Jean
Quintin d’Autun, Secretary to Grand Master Philip Villiers de l’Isle Adam,
testified to their blind trust in its historical certitude.“The natives,” he
wrote,“believe as firmly and with certainty that St Paul has been in Malta
just as much as they believe that St Peter has been in Rome.”10 In spite
6
The Greek texts are listed in J. Busuttil,“Fonti greche per la storia delle Isole Maltesi,”
Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, Missione archeologica a Malta: Rapporto preliminare della campagna 1968 (Rome, 1969), pp. 15-26.
7
J. P. Migne, Patrologia Cursus Completus . . . series graeca, vol. IX, col. 350.
8
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 6018, fols. 63v-64, reproduced as Doc. 8, in
G. Aquilina and S. Fiorini (eds.), Documentary Sources of Maltese History, Part IV:
Documents at the Vatican No.2 Archivio Segreto Vaticano: Cancelleria Apostolica and
Camera Apostolica and related sources at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
416–1479 (Malta, 2005), pp. 11–14.
9
M. Buhagiar, “The St Paul Shipwreck Controversy—An Assessment of the Source
Material” in Proceedings of History Week 1993, ed. K. Sciberras, The Malta Historical
Society (Malta, 1997), pp. 181-213.
10
J. Quintinus, Insulae Melitae Descriptio (Lyons, 1536), translated and annotated by
H. C. R Vella as The Earliest Description of Malta (Lyons 1536) by Jean Quintin
d’Autun (Malta, 1980), pp. 42-44.

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ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

of this it is important to emphasize that, in the present state of our
knowledge, there is absolutely no archaeological or textual evidence for
a Christian presence in Malta before the fourth century.The epigraphic,
iconographic, and archaeological data from the Early Christian burial
places suggests a post-Constantian date,11 while the much publicized
“secure archaeological testimony” for an early Pauline tradition at the
Roman villa site of San Pawl Milqi is both inconclusive and of a dubious
nature and should be dismissed.12
An epistle of March 19, 416, addressed by Pope Innocentius I (401417) to Decentius, Bishop of Gubbio, investing him with the mission
of harmonizing practices within the Latin Church, stresses the point
that the churches established throughout Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa,
Sicily, and the islands in between (which presumably included Malta
and Gozo) owed their foundation to ‘Apostolic’ evangelization undertaken from Rome.13 Innocentius was one of the first Bishops of Rome
to insist on the primacy of the Roman See. He based his claims on the
Synod of Sardica in Illyria (343), which had recognized the supreme
authority of the Bishop of Rome.The epistle was one with a political
agenda and must be read and interpreted within such a context. It
cannot be used as an argument that the places mentioned owe their
Christian roots to Apostolic times. In Syracuse, which like Malta, has a
Pauline tradition, the first incontestable evidence for a Christian community is an epistle on the lapsi, or Christians who had relapsed into
paganism, addressed by the presbyters and deacons of Rome (ca. 250251) to the Sicilian Church, a copy of which was sent to St. Cyprian of
Carthage.14 This seems to hint at a thriving Christian presence, but
secure archaeological proof is absent.
The available evidence, written and unwritten, for a Christian presence on Malta between the early post-Constantinian Age and the
Muslim conquest of 870,15 is often ambivalent, but in spite of problems
11
M. Buhagiar, Late Roman and Byzantine Catacombs and Related Burial Places
in the Maltese Islands (Oxford, 1986).
12
M. Buhagiar, “The Early Christian Remains at Tas-Silg and San Pawl Milqi, Malta. A
Reconsideration of the Archaeological Evidence,” Melta Historica XII (1996), 15-30.
13
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,Vat. Lat. 3791, fols. xlviiiv and l, reproduced as Doc. 1,
in Aquilina and Fiorini, Documentary Sources, p. 2.
14
Epistulae XXX, 5. Cyprian was a key point of reference in the mid-third century. On
the Lapsi controversy: Hertel, Caecilii Cypriani opera omnia, I-II (Vienna, 1868-1871).
15
The evidence is discussed in M. Buhagiar, “Early Christian and Byzantine Malta—
Archaeological and Textual Considerations,” in V. Mallia Milanes (ed.), Library of
Mediterranean History, Vol.1 (Malta, 1994). See also T. S. Brown, “Byzantine Malta: A

BY MARIO BUHAGIAR

5

of interpretation, there are clear indications of a flourishing community whose strategic geographic location made it a point of encounter
for the theological, cultural, and artistic cross currents flowing from
the neighboring churches of Sicily and North Africa. A hint of an influence from the Roman Church may arguably be contained in a list of
donations allegedly made by Constantine, in the early fourth century,
to the baptistery of the Lateran.These included the grant of 222 solidi
farmed from a “massa Amalon” (or Amazon), in a place called
Mengaulum, which, there is reason to believe, is a copyist’s corruption
of Melitegaudos.16 The reference is contained in the earliest nucleus of
the Liber Pontificalis,17 compiled at the latest, as convincingly argued
by Louis Duchesne, during the pontificate of Boniface II (530-532).18
The main difficulty about the reference is its reliability. Duchesne has
demonstrated how a great number of the biographies of the early
Popes, down to the time of Pope St. Gelasius (492-496), are full of
errors and historically untenable. On the other hand, the Constantinian
donation is defended by modern scholarship including the seminal
1957 study of Ludwig Voelkl, which dates it to 317.19 The donation
must not be confused with the notorious eighth-or-ninth-century fabrication known as the Constitutum domini Constantini imperatoris,
the mythological nature of which has been known since the early fifteenth century, when Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa dismissed it as “dictamen apocryphum.”20
That the Lateran baptistery dates approximately to around the time
of Constantine can be argued on stylistic and art historical grounds.
The adjoining basilica of St. John Lateran is, in addition, built on the site
of the palace that came to Constantine through his wife Fausta.21
Indirect evidence seems to suggest that Constantine donated it to the

Discussion of the Sources” in A. T. Luttrell (ed.), Medieval Malta—Studies on Malta
Before the Knights (London, 1975).
16
As proposed by Louis Duchesne (ed.), Le Liber Pontificalis I (Paris, 1886), pp. cxlix,
193 n.63.
17
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,Vat. Lat. 3764, fols. 19-23 [olim 20-24], reproduced as
Doc. 2 in G. Aquilina and S. Fiorini, Documentary Sources.
18
L. Duchesne (ed.), Le Liber Pontificalis.
19
Ludwig Voelkl,Der Kaiser Konstantin. Annalen Zeitenwende (Munich,1957),p.90.
20
De Concordantia Catholica, III, ii, in the Baseleiner edition of his Opera, 1565, I. It
was not, however, until the publication of Cardinal Cesare Baronius’s Annales
Ecclesiastici, the last volume of which was published shortly before his death in 1607,
that the document was universally accepted as a forgery.
21
For which reason it was called “Domus Faustae.”

6

ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

Christian community in the interval between the Battle of the Milvian
Bridge (312) and the Edict of Milan (313), which enfranchised the
Christians. A church council against the Donatists was held within its
precincts in 313. There is, as a result, a discernible link between
Constantine and the Lateran complex and a bequest toward its upkeep
is probable.The Mengaulum debate opens a spiral of possibilities, but
even if Imperial lands on Gozo did in fact form part of the grant to the
baptistery, it is by no means an indication that the island had a
Christian community and, far less, a Pauline tradition.
Christianity was certainly flourishing by the sixth century, and there
is an unequivocal reference to a See of Malta in four letters of Pope
Gregory the Great written in the period between July 592 and January
603.22 The first three deal exclusively with Malta and provide precious
insight into sixth-century Maltese Christianity, but they also raise tantalizing and as yet unanswerable questions.23 They talk about the
pensio on lands belonging to the Ecclesia Africana, the disciplinary
action against Bishop Lucillus who was to be deposed sine ambiguitate for an undisclosed misdemeanor, and of the elevation of Traianus,
a Sicilian monk, as the new bishop of the island.They emphasize the
suffragan status of the Maltese Church to Syracuse, raise the possibility
of a monastic presence, and hint at close ties with the African Church
for which there is valuable archaeological testimony.24 In the fourth
letter, Gregory instructs the bishops of the province of Syracuse,
among them Traianus, Bishop of Malta, to welcome his chartularium
(proctor ?) Hadrianus, whom he is dispatching to them to administer
the patrimony of the Roman Church, and to ensure that they are acting
correctly. Bishops whose conduct is found to be unbecoming are to be
admonished privately, but he warns that Hadrianus will report to him
those who persist in their errors. He ends by exhorting them to
resume the practice of caring for sick children.

22

Published as docs. 4-7 in G. Aquilina and S. Fiorini, Documentary Sources. An earlier reference to a Lucianus “episcopus melitensis” who in 553 attended the fifth
Oecumenical Council of Constantinople (C. J. Hefele and H. Leclercq, Histoire des
Conciles—D’aprés les documents originaux par Charles Joseph Hefele, nouvelle traductions françaises faites sur la deuxième allemande corrigée de notes critiques et
bibliographique par Dom H. Leclerq [Paris, 1909], iii, 93-05) is suspect. Vide: T. S. Brown,
“Byzantine Malta.”
23
For an assessment of their importance to Maltese Paleochristian studies: M.
Buhagiar,“Early Christian and Byzantine Malta,” pp. 115-117.
24
On the Ecclesia Africana and Malta: ibid., pp. 109-111.

BY MARIO BUHAGIAR

7

Lucillus and Traianus are the only documented Early Christian bishops of Malta.The islands fade out of ecclesiastical history between 603
and 878, when an unnamed bishop of Malta was in chains in a Muslim
prison in Palermo.25 In or around 756, at the height of the iconoclast
controversy, the bishoprics of Calabria and Sicily passed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.26 That the Maltese Islands
were included in the transfer is indicated by a Byzantine notitia episcopatum for the period ca. 730–ca. 789 which mentioned Melite as a
suffragan see within the province of Sicily.27 Such an ecclesiastical situation prevailed until the islands made their first contact with the
Normans in Sicily in 1091, but the Latinization process gathered
momentum only after the definitive Norman conquest of 1127.28 Greek
influence nonetheless lingered on until at least the second half of the
thirteenth century through the activities of Sicilian Basilian monks who
may have played a key role in the re-Christianization process.29
The probability of a Byzantine shipwreck tradition centering on the
Dalmatian island of Meleda (present-day Mjlet) is suggested by the De
administrando imperio of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus,
whose writings are a precious insight on the Byzantine Empire and
neighboring areas at the turn of second millennium.The De administrando imperio, composed in the first half of the tenth century, is a
handbook of foreign politics, treating the migrations of the Slavic and
25
L. Muratori, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, I parte 2 (Milan, 1735), col. 264A.The
reference is contained in a letter composed by the Greek monk Theodosius which survives in an unsatisfactory Latin translation: B. Lavagnini, “Siracusa occupata dagli Arabi e
l’epistola di Teodosio Magno,” Byzantion, XXIX-XXX (1960), 261-265.
26
V. Grumel, “L’annexion de l’Illyricum Oriental, et de la Sicilie et de la Calabre au
Patriarchat de Constantinople,” Recherches de Sciences Religieuses, XL (1952), 49; G.
Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, 2nd English edn. (Oxford, 1968), p. 170.The
date is contested by J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Oxford, 1987), p. 351,
who reproposes the traditional date of around 732 on the basis of a report in the Liber
Pontificalis that on several occasions the envoys of Pope Gregory III (731-741) to the
Iconclast Emperor Leo III were arrested in Sicily. Leo, furthermore, confiscated Roman
Church property in Sicily and Calabria. See also A. Guillou,“La Sicilie Byzantine: Etat des
Recherches,” Byzantinische Forschungen, 5 (1977), 95-145.
27
T. S. Brown,“Byzantine Malta,” p. 80.
28
Details and references in A.T. Luttrell,“Approaches to Medieval Malta,” in Medieval
Malta, pp. 30-31.See also G. Wettinger, “The Arabs in Malta,” in Malta – Studies of its
Heritage and History (Malta, 1986), pp. 97-98, and M. Buhagiar, “Les influences SiciloNormandes sur l’architecture médiédvale de Malte,” in M. Kew Meade et al. (eds.),
L’architecture Normande en Europe—Identité et échanges (Marseilles, 2002), pp. 85-86.
29
M. Buhagiar, “The Re-Christianisation of Malta: Siculo-Greek Monasticism, Dejr
Toponyms and Rock-Cut Churches,” Melita Historica, XIII (Malta, 2002), 253-283.

8

ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

Turkic peoples and the places they settled in. Meleda is called
Maleozeate, and Constantine VII talks of the pagani who dwelt on the
island.30 Another Byzantine aspirant to the honor of the shipwreck site
was Mitylene (Mitilini) on the Greek island of Lesbos, where St. Paul
had earlier on made a brief stop in the course of his third journey (Acts
20:14). In the early seventeenth century, Mitylene’s claims were cursorily dismissed by the impassioned apologist of the Maltese Pauline
myths, the Jesuit Girolamo Manduca,31 but the tradition had an old history that stretched at least as far back as the late twelfth century.32
A Siculo-Byzantinesque tradition favoring the Maltese Archipelago
was apparently well established by the middle of the twelfth century
when a Sicilian (or perhaps South Italian) Greek subject of King Roger
II (1108–151), exiled for an undisclosed misdemeanor on
“Melitogaudos,” addressed a piteous lament, composed of more than
4000 iambic trimeters, to the admiral of the fleet and vizier of Sicily,
George of Antioch, in a bid to regain the favor of the king.33 The poem,
which can be dated on internal evidence to the period between George
of Antioch’s conquest of Gerba in 1135 and his death in 1151,34 should
be read and interpreted within the context of the long and traumatic
re-Christianization and Latinization process that started in 1127. The
exile bemoans his misfortune at being forced to dwell among
“. . . the children of the godless Hagar . . . (who invoked) only the
heresiarch, the all abominable Mohammed. . .”
He finds little comfort in the fact that the Christians were coming
out of their hiding places and that mosques were being transformed
30

For the De Administrando Imperio see the Corpus Scriptoricorum
Byzantinorum, XXXVI (Bonn, 1840).
31
National Library of Malta, Ms. 25: Relazione o sian tradizioni avute e trasmesse
dalli antichi circa le cose dell’isola di Malta e di quanto s’é potuto cavare da scritture
antiche degne di fede, fol. 179. On Girolamo Manduca:A.T. Luttrell,“Girolamo Manduca
and Gian Francesco Abela: Tradition and Invention in Maltese Historiography,” Melita
Historica, VII (1977), 105-132;V. Borg,“Girolamo Manduca—His Life and Works,” Melita
Historica, VII (1977), 237-257; M. Buhagiar,“The St Paul Shipwreck Controversy.”
32
See infra.
33
The poem (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Cod. Graec., 4577) was first exposed in J.
Iriarte, Regiae Bibliothecae Matritensis Codices Graeci Mauscripti (Madrid, 1769), pp.
140-145. Its relevance to Maltese history was first realised by A. Pertusi,“Le isole maltesi
dall’epoca bizantina al periodo normanno e svevo,” Byzantinische Forschungen, 5
(1977), 253-306. Excerpts from it are published with a commentary in S. Fiorini and H.
C. R.Vella,“New 12th Century Evidence.”
34
Fiorini and Vella, p. 162.

BY MARIO BUHAGIAR

9

into Christian churches. He then goes on to talk of priests who came
from the Norman Kingdom, hinting in the process at the presence of
a bishop on Gozo.
The poem opens a spiral of new possibilities, but it is essential to
distinguish factual recording from poetic licence and metaphor.
Pending an analytical study of the text and its full publication,35 the
new insights that it seems to provide must necessarily be tested
against the evidence of the more secure source material.36 It is, for
example, hazardous to take it as testimony for a Christian community
that survived the Muslim conquest when the written and unwritten
evidence indicates otherwise.37 The hyperbolic mention of “countless
pious inhabitants” who came “out into the open” is a possible veiled
reference to the grafting on an essentially Muslim territory of a Latin
garrison and its attendant Latin rite clergy.38 The reference to a bishop
is of greater interest. It is possible that the Maltese archipelago became
an episcopal see upon its formal integration into the Norman Sicilian
Kingdom,39 but the available documentary evidence makes a resident
bishop unlikely.40 Similarly improbable is the existence of separate
bishoprics for Malta and Gozo, and it is dangerous to take the situation
prevailing in Late Roman and Byzantine times, when Gozo had distinct
municipal and possibly military arrangements,41 as a yardstick for the
Muslim and Norman periods.42
35
This is being undertaken by S. Fiorini and H. C. R.Vella, who propose to publish the
annotated text in the University of Malta’s Documentary Sources for Maltese History
series .
36
For an overview see M. Buhagiar, The Late Medieval Art and Architecture of the
Maltese Islands, (Malta, 2005), pp. 18–38.
37
M. Buhagiar and S. Fiorini, Mdina the Cathedral City of Malta, (Malta, 1996), I,
45-51.
38
Details in M. Buhagiar,“Re Christianization of Malta.”
39
There is secure documentation for a bishopric of Malta in 1156: A. Mayr, “Zur
Geschichte der älteren christlichen Kirche von Malta,” Historisches Jahrbuch, XVII
(1896), 488-492.
40
M. Buhagiar and S. Fiorini, Mdina, I, 142 et passim. Until the sixteenth century, the
bishop was normally not Maltese and rarely visited the island. In 1366 he did not have
an official residence.
41
M. Buhagiar,“Gozo in Late Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim Times,” Melita Historica
XIII (1997), 113-124.
42
Fiorini and Vella,“New 12th Century Evidence,” p. 167, hint at the possibility that
Gaudos and Melite could have been separate bishoprics within the province of Sicily,
under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, during the period ca.
800–ca. 850, but the notitia episcopatum of Basil of Ialimbana, on which they base their
hypothesis, employs earlier records and the reference to Gaudos and Melite occurs in

10

ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

The excerpts that have appeared in print, fine-tune, but do not drastically change, the mosaic of Muslim and Norman Malta that has been
slowly taking shape since 1975, when Anthony T. Luttrell published his
seminal analysis of the source material.43 The clear reference to a
Pauline tradition may, in the final analysis, turn out to be the poem’s
most important contribution to the mosaic. It is probable that the reChristianization and Latinization movement had an interest in reviving
the identification of the Maltese Archipelago with the shipwreck story.
That the tradition took root is demonstrated by the case of the “Uomini
di San Paolo” or “San Paolari.” These were a band of charlatans and
vagabonds who claimed descent from the “household of St. Paul”44 and
made the rounds of Italian cities administering cures for venoms and
snake bites. In Sicily they were popularly known as cirauli.45 Their
alleged power over venomous substances was presumably anchored in
the story of the miracle of the viper, which became the most famous
episode of the shipwreck narrative. The poem, as a matter of fact,
describes the incident in fastidious detail.
The deceit of the San Paolari was demonstrated by Teseo Pini
around 1485,46 but popular credence in their curative virtues lingered
well into the early modern period, particularly in the hinterlands of
Sicily and South Italy.The first known reference to their activity comes
at the close of the Norman period, in 1194, in the account of a political mission sent by the Emperor Henry VI, pretender to the throne of
Sicily and South Italy. The text, contained in a letter sent by Henry’s

the descriptio orbis Romani (attr. to George of Cyprus) datable to ca. 603–ca. 606, when
Malta was securely under the jurisdiction of Rome. T. S. Brown, “Byzantine Malta: A
Discussion of the Sources,” in A.T. Luttrell, op.cit., 76, 82, points out that this is a civil geographical (not ecclesiastical) list . See n. 26 supra.
43
A.T. Luttrell,“Approaches to Medieval Malta,” pp. 29-40.
44
“. . . Questi dicono trar l’origine da San Paolo Apostolo, il che è falsissimo . . . poichè
egli sebbene ebbe stimuli della carne, tuttavia li superò con l’aiuto di Dio, non avevendo
dunque avuto moglie, né perso il fiore della verginità. . .”: Teseo Pini, Speculum
Cerretanorum..
45
On the Uomini di S. Paolo: B. Montinaro,“Credenze Popolari—Tradizione Paolina,”
Sudpuglia—Rassegna trimestrale della Banca Popolare Sud Puglia, IX (December,
1983), 91-97.
46
Teseo Pini’s manual on charlatans and crooks, Lo speculum cerretanorum was plagiarized in Italian translation, by the seventeenth-century Bolognese author Rafaele
Frianorio, who included the section on the San Paolari in chapter 27 of his book Il
Vagabondo edited with other writings on brigands and swindlers by P. Camoresi in Il
libro dei vagabondi (Turin, 1973). For a recent study see M. Masala (ed.), Il vagabondo
di Raffaele Frianoro—Fra divertimento letterario e istanze repressive (Rome, 1999).

BY MARIO BUHAGIAR

11

advisor and proctor, Konrad of Querfurth, to Herbert of Hildesheim,47
is a typically late medieval mélange of biblical lore, mythology, and geographical inaccuracies.The reference to the “Uomini di San Paolo” follows a description of Mount Etna and Syracuse, but Konrad indicates
Capri as the site of the shipwreck, and then proceeds to confuse that
island with Mitylene. He may, in fact, have been using secondary material, and there is nothing to suggest that he visited Malta.That he might
have had the island in mind is, on the other hand, suggested by his
description of the “Uomini di San Paolo” as “Saracens.” In the twelfth
century, Malta was largely Muslim.48 A few years earlier, in 1175,
Burchard, Bishop of Strasbourg, who presumably stopped on the island
while on an embassy to Egypt, had described Malta as an island a
Sarracenis inhabitata.49 There is a real possibility that the original
Uomini di San Paolo were Maltese swindlers.
Konrad makes no reference to a “household of St. Paul” and Teseo
Pini (or his informers) may, as a matter of fact, have confused Paul with
his host Publius. He talks instead of “Saracens who solely by spitting,
have the power to kill venomous animals.” Such a virtue they owed to
the merits of the apostle, who to show his appreciation for their hospitality, had invested his host (i.e., Publius), as well as his children and
grandchildren, with this miraculous power that they continued to enjoy
“to this very day.”50 In the middle of the fourteenth century, another
German cleric, Ludolph of Suchen, was more specific. After recounting
the story of Paul’s deliverance from harm, when he had been bitten by
a viper that leapt out of the fire lit by his hosts, he continues:
On this island there still live people who boast of being descendants of that household through whose hospitality such (favours)
happened to St Paul.51

47
The Pauline significance of Querfurth’s account: I. M. Lappenberg (ed.), “Arnoldi
Abbatis Lubecensis Chronica an. 1172–1209” [=Chronica lavorum], Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, 21 [New York, 1963], 196) is first noted in H. Bresc,
“Sicile, Malte, et Monde Musulman,” in S. Fiorini and V. Mallia Milanes (eds.), Malta—A
Case Study in International Cross Currents (Malta, 1991), 51, n.10. It is discussed in
detail in Thomas Freller, St Paul’s Grotto and its Visitors—Pilgrims, Knights, Scholars,
and Sceptics from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century 2nd ed. (Malta, 1996), pp. 31-33.
48
Luttrell,“Approaches,” pp. 32-40;Wettinger,“Arabs in Malta.”
49
Text in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, 21 (Hanover, 1869), 236.
50
The English translation used here follows that in Freller, St. Paul’s Grotto, pp. 31-32.
51
F. Deycks (ed.), Ludophi, Rectoris ecclesiae parochialis in Suchem, de Itinere
Terrae Sanctae Liber, Bibliothek des literarisehen Vereins, XXV (Stuttgart, 1851), 22.

12

ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

Ludolph had been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the course
of which he apparently stopped at Malta,52 even though the island did
not lie on the standard pilgrimage route.The text seems to show a personal familiarity with the Maltese islands, but gives Corsica, not Malta,
as the island of the shipwreck. It has been argued that as in the case of
Konrad of Querfurth, this may perhaps, be interpreted as a muddling
up of Mediterranean geography,53 but the problem remains unresolved.There is also a possibility that the indicated site was the island
of Pantelleria, between Malta and Tunisia, and that Ludolph unwittingly
confused its Greek name Cosyra (sometimes rendered as Corissa)
with Corsica.54 The proximity, and geophysical and socio-religious similarities, between Pantelleria and Malta did not escape late medieval
travelers and commentators. The erudite Florentine Domenico
Silvestri, who around 1400 composed a treatise on Mediterranean
islands, De insulis et earum proprietatibus, emphasized this geographical reality (“Corissa et Melite vicine sunt”), but located the shipwreck site in Mitylene.55
Until the fifteenth century, Christian cartography was more concerned with an interpretation of the Bible and a demonstration of religious themes and references, than with geographic correctness. Paulus
Orosius’s Descriptio Terrarum was an important pioneering document,
but the map at the Vatican is of uncertain date,56 and the first truly significant exponent of the theological dictatorship which stifled genuine
geographic research was the sixth-century author Cosmos of Alexandria,
who, before becoming a Christian and embracing monastic life on
Mount Sinai, had sailed, as a trader in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean,
and earned for himself the title of Indicopleustes (“Indian Sailor”).57 The
Topographia Christiana which he composed between 535 and 548
52

As convincingly argued in Freller, St. Paul’s Grotto, pp. 38-49.
Ibid., p. 47.
54
As suggested T. Freller, “St Paul’s Grotto, Malta, and its Antidotic Earth in the
Awarness of Early Modern Europe,” J. Azzopardi (ed.), The Cult of St Paul, p. 196.
55
For Silvestri’s treatise see C.Pecoraro,Domenico Silvestri – De Insulis et earum propietatibus (Palermo, 1955). See also J. Zammit-Ciantar,“Malta and Gozo in a Fifteenth Century
Codex,” Studi Magrebini, XXIV (1992), 63 who however mistakes Mitilyene for Malta.
56
Supra
57
The treatise survives in two copies: one a tenth-century MS in the Bibliotheca
Medicea Laurentiana, Florence (Nova Collectio Patrum et Scriptorum Graecorum); the
other an eighth-or-ninth-century uncial MS in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. On Cosmas:
Kosma Aigyptiou Monacholi Christianikē Topographia—The Christian Topography of
Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, tr. and ed. with notes and introduction by John W.
McCrindle, Hakluyat Society, Series 1, vol. 98 (London, 1897).
53

BY MARIO BUHAGIAR

13

A.D. contains the oldest surviving Christian maps,58 and conditioned a
cartographic tradition that found crystalization, in about 776 A.D., in the
mappamundi of Beatus of Liébana (d. 798 A.D.)59 where the “great
ocean” is fused with the Mediterranean and the two seas are sprinkled
with many islands that include Tule, Britain, Hibernia, the Fortunate Isles,
Corsica, Sardinia, Crete, Sicily, Cyprus, and six others.60
Nearer the time of Konrad of Querfurth and Ludolph of Suchen, the
tradition found an eloquent expression in the Ebstorf Mappamundi,61
which is generally ascribed to the learned Englishman Gervase of
Tilbury (ca. 1150–1220),62 who was widely traveled and had spent a
period of time, around 1189, in the court of King William II of Sicily.The
map, which is possibly related to the Otia imperialia, a compendium
of history, geography, and physics, which Gervase, composed ca. 12101214, for Otto IV,63 is a brilliant synthesis of Christian cosmography,
intended for instruction and pious meditation. Divine intervention in
human history and geography is emphasised, and the map is drawn in
the manner of a Roman road plan to facilitate the contemplation of
God’s miracles and the holy sites of the Bible and the Christian story,
regardless of distances and geographic exactitude.Gervase followed the
Ancient Roman technique of dividing the world into three parts and of
tracing twelve circles (the homes of the twelve winds) in the cosmic
ocean,64 but the treatment is stylized and generalized and there is no
attempt to display real coastline or detail. Africa is little more than the
segment of a circle and the Mediterranean is sprinkled with islands and
sweeps in a northerly direction around a landmass which is presumably
the Greek peninsula. Sicily appears as a heart shaped island in close
proximity to Venice which juts into the Adriatic.
58
It is possible that the sketches in the Bibliotheca Laurentiana MS are original drawings by Cosmas , or under his direction.
59
The map is known through a number of copies, the most important of which is the
so-called St Sever or Paris I executed about 1050 in the the Aquitanian Monastery of St
Sever (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms Lat. 8878 [S. Lat., 1075], fol.45).
60
C. Raymond Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 3vols. (London 1897-1906),
II, 550-559, 591-604, remains a standard reference.
61
So called after a Benedictine monastery near Illzen where it was discovered in
1830. It was destroyed during World War II, in 1943, but is well known through reproductions and photographs. For notes and information on the map: W. Rosien, Die
Ebstorfer Weltkarte (Hanover, 1952).
62
Tilbury in the county of Essex. Gervase is thought to have been of royal blood.
63
The treatise is variously known Liber de mirabilibus mundi, Solatia imperatoris,
and Descripio totius orbis.
64
Gervase relied especially on the writings of Mela and Pliny the Elder.

14

ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

It is against such a background of popular and highly colorful geographic misinformation that the accounts of Konrad of Querfurth and
Ludolph of Suchen must be read and interpreted. In the case of Malta,
the difficulties are further aggravated by confusion over the name of
the island. The Mengaulum debate of the late Roman and early
Byzantine periods found an echo in late medieval and early modern
controversies when documents referring to Melitene in Armenia,
Meleda in the Adriactic, and Mileto in Calabria were erroneously associated with Malta and used as proof for a vigorous early Christian presence.65 Tommaso Fazello,66 Rocco Pirri,67 and Giovanni Francesco
Abela,68 among others, used such unreliable sources which resulted in
unintentional falsifications as, for example, the myth of a Melivetan
Council, supposedly held in Malta and attended by 214 bishops, who
included St. Augustine and a Sylvanus Bishop of Malta,69 or of a Maltese
Benedictine monastery.70 The Pauline legends and traditions were
fueled by similar misinformed geographic identities, and while there is
evidence for deliberate inventions,71 the mistakes were often the result
of toponomastic confusions.
Ludolph of Suchen’s account contains the first known reference to
the medicinal properties of rock sanctified by St. Paul which, if
pounded into dust and diluted in wine, was a potent antidote against
venomous substances. In Malta such attributes have, since at least the
early modern period, been associated with stone chipped from a manmade cave, in the ditch of the Roman city of Melite, that the apostle is

65

A.T. Luttrell,“Gerolamo Manduca and Gian Francesco Abela,” p. 108 et passim.
T. Fazello, De Rebus Siculis Decades Duae, 1st ed. (Palermo, 1558). Reprinted
Venice, 1574. Italian translation by R. Fiorentino (Palermo, 1817).
67
R. Pirri, Notitiae Sicilieium Ecclesiarum (Palermo, 1641). Reprinted in Italian
Translation as Sicilia Sacra (Palermo, 1733 ed.).
68
G. F. Abela, Della Descrittione di Malta (Malta, 1647), p. 49.
69
The myth had been firmly established by the early sixteenth century when J.
Quintinus, makes specific reference to it. See:V. Borg,“Tradizioni e documenti storici” in
Missione Archeologica Italiana a Malta: Rapporto preliminare della campagna 1963
(Rome, 1964), pp. 43-44, and A.T. Luttrell,“Gerolamo Manduca and Gian Francesco Abela,”
p. 115.
70
G. F. Abela, Della Descrittione, p. 49. The monstery was actually founded on the
island of Meleda (Mljet) in the Adriatic in 1130: Luttrell, “Girolamo Manduca and Gian
Francesco Abela,” p. 108.
71
Such as in the writings of Girolamo Manduca and De Sacto Publio martyre Melite
principe, et Athenarum episcopo Divi Pauli hospite. . . (National Library of Malta,
MS.25). Manduca’s only proofs were often the recollections of fantasticating old men:
Luttrell,“Gerolamo Manduca and Gian Francesco Abela,” p. 119.
66

BY MARIO BUHAGIAR

15

credulously thought to have used as a place of refuge.72 Ludolph’s
account (if it does in fact refer to Malta) pushes back the belief in the
palliative qualities of the rock from the cave by at least two hundred
years. By 1366, a church (“Sancti Pauli de Cripta”) with a burial ground
had been built above the cave,73 presumably testifying to the fabrication of a Pauline apocrypha that was intimately related to the consolidation of the Christianization and Latinization process.The dedication
of the cathedral to St. Paul, securely documented in 1299,74is probably
an indication that Malta’s association with the apostle that achieved
formal recognition by the last decades of the thirteenth century.
This not withstanding, voices of dissent continued to contest
Malta’s claims, which, as can be deduced from the Descriptio of the
Abbé Jean Quentin d’Autun, were sometimes taken in a light vein.
Informed late medieval treatises and travelogues indicated other
Mediterranean islands. One important exception was the early thirteenth-century Bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, who may have stopped
at Malta in 1216 while sailing from Genoa to take possession of his see.
In a letter composed in the winter of the same year he describes his
journey and makes specific reference to Sicilian Malta and its Pauline
association.75
Mitylene was the place most frequently indicated, but some travelers, such as Jacopo di Verona, who departed for Palestine in 1346,
favored Crete,76 and his ideas were shared by the canon from Milan
Pietro Casola, who stopped at Crete in 1494.77 The German Dominican
friar from Ulm, Felix Fabri, who around 1480-1483 made two pilgrimages to the Holy Land, certainly did not have Malta in mind when, in
the account of his second pilgrimage, he reported on the danger
incurred by travellers sailing “among the isles called Cyclades, and in
72
G. Zammit Maempel,“Rock from St Paul’s Grotto (Malta) in Medicine and Folklore,”
in J. Azzopardi (ed.), St Paul’s Grotto, Church and Museum at Rabat, Malta, Friends of
the Museum of St Paul’s Collegiate Church Rabat (Malta, 1990), pp. 169-216.
73
The document which survives in a late copy (Cathedral Archives, Mdina, Curia
Episcopalis Melitensis, Acta Originalia, Vol. IX, fol.37), is published by G. Wettinger, “A
Land Grant by Bishop Ylario to Bochius de Bochio at St Paul’s Grotto, 1366,” in J.
Azzopardi (ed.), St. Paul’s Grotto, p. 66.
74
H. Bresc,“Malta dopo il Vespro Siciliano,” Melita Historica, VI (1974), 313-321.
75
R. B. C. Huygens (ed.), Lettres de Jacques de Vitry (Leiden, 1960), p. 97 ff. Mr.
Thomas Freller generously brought this publication to my notice.
76
Freller,“St Paul’s Grotto, Malta, and its Antidotic Earth,” p. 198.
77
M. M. Newett (ed.), Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage in the Year 1494 (n.pl,
1907) cited by Freller in “St Paul’s Grotto and its Antidotic Earth,” p. 198.

16

ST. PAUL’S SHIPWRECK AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN MALTA

the Athaenian sea, and off the coast of Illyria and Dalmatia . . . which
danger was feared by the sailors who carried St Paul, as we read in the
Acts of the Apostles, xxvii.29.”78 In the second half of the sixteenth
century, Malta was likewise excluded by the pharmacist Reinhold
Lubenau, who in 1587 accompanied a legation of Emperor Rudolph II
to Edrine and Istanbul. He reports that on a visit to the Eastern
Mediterranean island of Levkás he was informed by the natives that the
place, together with the neighboring islands of Andípaxoi and Paxoi,
had been freed of poisonous creatures by the virtue of St. Paul, who
had preached there after his shipwreck.79
The arguments against Malta were masterfully synthesized in 1730
by Ignazio Georgi, Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Veliko Jezero on
the Dalmatian Meleda (Mljet),80 provoking a vociferous Maltese reaction.81 The Pauline legend had by that time become the central element of Malta’s Christian and European credentials. Questioning it was
both irreverent and unpatriotic, and the island’s geographic location
on the fringes of Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa lent the
debate a sinister political dimension.The plethora of pseudo–scientific
dissertazioni, produced by distinguished Maltese and European apologists to refute Georgi’s arguments,82 received the active backing of
the Knights of St. John, who had a vested interest in promoting their
island principality as a bulwark of Latin Europe with a prestigious
Christian tradition that could be traced back to apostolic times.

78
The account occurs in a description of the dangers of the sea at the start of the
second pilgrimage: The Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri ca. 1480-1483,
edited and translated by Aubery Stewart, Palestine Pilgrim’s Text Society (London, 1896),
vol.1, Part 1.
79
W. Sahm (ed.), Beschreibung der Reisen des Reinhold Lubenau (Königsberg, 19121915), II, 285.
80
I. Georgi, Divus Paulus apostolus in mari, quod nunc Venetus sinus dicitur,
naufragus, et Melitae Dalmatanensis insulae post naufragium hospes, sive de genuino significatu duorum locorum in Actibus apostolicis, cap.27:27, cap.28:1 inceptiones anticriticae (Venice, 1780).
81
M. Buhagiar,“The St Paul Shipwreck Controversy,” pp. 187-188.
82
Ibid., p. 188.

CONSTRUCTING ANOTHER KIND OF GERMAN:
CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN
UNIFICATION IN BADEN, 1870-1876
BY
PONTUS HIORT*

This essay discusses how Badenese Catholics responded to the
nationalist rhetoric surrounding German unification in 1871.
Faced with a Protestant dominated commemorative discourse
aimed at reinforcing the Protestant hegemony over the definition of
Germanness, Catholics successfully contested this ideological message. By creating an alternative commemorative discourse,
Catholics were able to manifest their own understanding of
national identity instead of becoming subsumed in a new nationstate based on Protestant values. The uneasy coexistence of
Protestant and Catholic versions of German identity suggests that
confessional elements constituted integral parts of German nationalism and that Catholic and Protestant integration into the
Kaiserreich should be viewed as a contested debate over the definition and legitimization of the new state.
Just six months after the triumphant foundation of the Second
German Empire in January 1871, the Radolfzell Roman Catholic daily
Freie Stimme complained that German Catholics had become targets for
domestic warfare following the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war:
“The loyal Catholics, especially the clergy, sacrificed greatly during the
war; now, when peace has been celebrated, the liberals demand a war
with the church. . . .”1 The newspaper maintained that liberals and
Protestants sought to cast doubts on German Catholics’ loyalty to the
Fatherland by spreading rumors such as, “The Ultramontanes and the
French are sworn allies who seek to ruin Germany’s greatness!”2 Its
polemics aside, Freie Stimme was painting a fairly accurate picture of
*Mr. Hiort expects to receive his PhD in history in May 2007 from Northern Illinois
University, DeKalb.
1
Freie Stimme, July 22, 1871.
2
Ibid.

17

18

CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

the ill-treatment of many Badenese Catholics in the immediate postunification period. As the conflict became more distant, the more
Protestants and liberals had tended to “forget”Catholic efforts in the war,
focusing instead on the allegedly traitorous behavior of the Catholics.
During this time, Catholics and Protestants heatedly debated the
role Catholics had played in the Franco-Prussian war and the unification process. In July 1871, Luise, the consort of Grand Duke Friedrich
I of Baden, had traveled to Freiburg to honor the volunteer work of the
Sisters of Mercy in the recent war. In a well-publicized ceremony, she
placed a cross on their building, and respectfully enumerated the important contributions the nuns had made to the war effort.3 Only a few
days later, the lead article of the liberal Karlsruhe Zeitung asserted
that over the last few years, Baden’s Catholics had proven useless in
the defense of the Fatherland. Disloyal to Wilhelm I and lacking “true
love” for the German nation, they had allegedly proved more a burden
than an asset in the recent war against France.The article insisted that
the true Heimat of the state’s Catholics was neither Baden in particular, nor Germany in general, but rather Rome. Indeed, the wars of unification had been won despite the efforts of Badenese Catholics rather
than thanks to them.4
Shortly afterward, Stephan Braun, one of Baden’s leading Catholics,
published a reply to the Karlsruhe paper in Freiburger Katholisches
Kirchenblatt. He encouraged Protestants and liberals to question
Grand Duchess Luise concerning the wartime behavior of Catholic
clergy and laity—she would set the record straight. To demonstrate
how important his fellow Catholics had been to the military success,
he recounted the activities of the local Maltese order in painstaking
detail. Braun cited statistics on the knights’ undertakings during the
war, from how many had volunteered as doctors and nurses to the
number of bandages they had applied.5 The list reflected the pressure
that Badenese Catholics faced in a post-unification period that witnessed the resumption of a fierce prewar Kulturkampf. Repeatedly
singled out as enemies of the German nation, Catholics often considered it necessary to justify their existence in the new nation-state.
Determined not to let Protestants and liberals exclude them from the
memory of the war and unification, they refuted their critics’ accusa3

Freiburger Katholisches Kirchenblatt, August, 2, 1871.
Karlsruhe Zeitung, August 6, 1871.
5
Freiburger Katholisches Kirchenblatt, August 28, 1871.
4

BY PONTUS HIORT

19

tions in the struggle to control the discourse and rhetoric surrounding
the events of 1870-1871. Catholic determination to control the construction of the memory of war and unification became all the more
important as these milestones came to constitute one of the building
blocks for the new national identity that was being constructed in
Imperial Germany.
Faced with a nationalist rhetoric and a constructed memory of the
Franco-Prussian war that reinforced the Protestant hegemony over the
definition of Germanness, Catholics actively opposed the attempts to
construct national identity along confessional lines. Rejecting an official national identity frequently tinged with anti-Catholic sentiment,
they employed the debates on the nature of the Franco-Prussian war
and subsequent commemorative activities to manifest their own
understanding of what it meant to be German in the Second Empire.
This essay explores how Badenese Catholics responded to the nationalist rhetoric and the commemorative discourse surrounding German
unification. By focusing on the state of Baden, which constituted an
anomaly because it had a Catholic majority but was governed by a
Protestant Grand Duke and a national liberal political majority, we gain
increased insight into the complex interactions between Catholics and
Protestants at the beginning of the Second Empire. Baden is also a
useful case study because the Kulturkampf that liberals and
Protestants had initiated there in the 1860’s served as a model for the
bitter conflict in Prussia and the Reich.6
During the 1860’s relations between Catholics and Protestants in
Baden rapidly deteriorated. In their attempts to modernize, the state’s
liberals and Protestants had grown increasingly aggressive in their rhetoric and policies against the two-thirds Catholic majority, especially
after the Prussian defeat of Austria in 1866. Many of the subsequent
conflicts were intimately tied to the German question. Liberals and
Protestants advocated Baden’s integration into the North German
Confederation, while Catholics harbored strong sympathies for Austria
and were unwilling to accept unification without their southern neighbor.Tensions had reached a climax as the debates over the doctrine of

6
For an introduction to Badenese history, see Wolfgang Hug, Geschichte Badens
(Stuttgart,1992); Hansmartin Schwarzmeier (ed.), Handbuch der Baden-Württembergischen Geschichte. Dritter Band: Vom Ende des alten Reiches bis zum Ende der
Monarchien (Stuttgart, 1992); Karl Stiefel, Baden 1648-1952, Band I (Karlsruhe, 1978).

20

CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

papal infallibility immediately before the outbreak of the FrancoPrussian war polarized the state’s two predominant confessions.7
Due to the political, economic, and cultural pressure Badenese
Catholics faced following unification, an investigation of their reactions to war and unification furthers our understanding of the varied
responses that Catholics around Germany offered to the unification
process. My analysis of Protestant and Catholic uses of nationalist rhetoric and their construction of differing memories of the FrancoPrussian war and unification suggests that the integration of Protestants
and Catholics into the German nation-state should be viewed as an
ongoing debate over the definition and legitimization of the new state.8
Although the traditional view of Catholics as passive victims engulfed
in a Protestant- and Prussian-dominated national identity has recently
been contested, few scholars have focused on exactly how Catholics
asserted their own sense of national belonging.9 The confessional element in German nationalism has become increasingly important as
scholars have recently begun stressing the centrality of religion to the
everyday life of Germans in the Second Empire. Most historians no
longer view the nineteenth century as a period of linear secularization.
Rather, they agree that religion functioned as a social force that shaped
numerous social, political, and cultural actions, emphasizing the capacity of confessional loyalties to form and mobilize public opinion.
National identity did not replace religious convictions; on the contrary,
Catholic and Protestant uses of nationalist rhetoric further intensified
local confessional conflicts and polarized society.10 Consequently, an
analysis of Catholic responses to the war, the construction of the
7

For a more in-depth treatment of this period, see for instance: Josef Becker, Liberaler
Staat und Kirche in der Ära von Reichsgründung und Kulturkampf (Mainz, 1973);
Lothar Gall, Der Liberalismus als regierende Partei. Das Großherzogtum Baden zwischen Restauration und Reichsgründung (Wiesbaden, 1968); Friedrich Koeppel,“Baden
und die deutsche Entscheidung des Jahres 1866,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte
Oberrheins, 88 (1936), 451-453.
8
This analysis confirms some of Helmut Walser Smith’s theories on German nationalism. See Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture,
Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton, 1995), esp. pp. 237-239.
9
Ibid.; Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany 1800-1914 (New
York, 2001).The latter work contains some promising research into how Catholics integrated into the Empire. See especially the essay by Anthony J. Steinhoff, “Building
Religious Community: Worship Space and Experience in Strasburg after the FrancoPrussian War,” pp. 267-297.
10
For instance: Wolfgang Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination and Nationalism in
Nineteenth Century Germany,” in Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in

BY PONTUS HIORT

21

memory of the unification process, and the new national identity promises insights into how and why confessional affiliations came to play
such an important role in the Kaiserreich.
During the past decade, scholars have produced a plethora of works
on the multifaceted nature of German national identity in the Second
Empire.11 Today, most agree that the official identity emanating from
Berlin was not unconditionally accepted throughout the Reich, but
rather mediated and altered depending on geographic location, class,
confession, and ethnicity. Several of these studies have focused on the
importance of commemorations and public culture for the construction of a national identity.12 However, these scholars have tended to
overestimate the cohesiveness of the constructed memory of the
Franco-Prussian war and unification, failing to recognize the importance of the contested memory of these events as a source of tension
as Germans tried to integrate into the new nation-state.This omission
Germany, pp. 49-66; Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization: On the
Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth Century Germany,” The Historical
Journal, 38 (1995), 647-670; Olaf Blaschke, “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites
Konfessionelles Zeitalter?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000) 38-75; David
Blackbourn, Marpingen. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth Century
Germany (New York, 1994); Wolfgang Schieder, “Kirche und Revolution.
Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Trier Wallfahrt von 1844,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte,
14 (1974), 419-454; Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany.
11
For instance, Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of
Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); John Breuilly (ed.), The State of Germany. The national idea
in the making, unmaking, and remaking of a modern nation state (London, 1992);
Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor:Württemberg, Imperial Germany and
National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Abigail Green, Fatherlands: StateBuilding and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2001); James
Retallack (ed.), Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830-1933
(Ann Arbor, 2000); James J. Sheehan,“What is German History? Reflections on the role of
the Nation in German history and historiography,” Journal of Modern History, 53
(1981), 1-23.
12
For instance: Reinhard Alings, Monument und Nation. Das Bild vom Nationalstaat im Medium Denkmal—zum Verhältnis von Nation und Staat im deutschen
Kaiserreich (Berlin,1996); Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor; Dieter Düding,
Peter Friedemann, and Paul Münch (eds.), Öffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste in
Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Rheinbeck bei Hamburg,
1988); Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Der bezweifelte Patriotismus—nationale Bewußtsein und
Denkmal 1786 bis 1933,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 44 (1993), 47-75;
Ute Schneider, Politische Festkultur im 19. Jahrhundert: die Rheinprovinz von der
französischen Zeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1806-1918) (Essen, 1995);
Charlotte Tacke, Denkmal im sozialen Raum. Nationale Symbole in Deutschland und
Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1995).

22

CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

is somewhat surprising because collective memory plays so important
a role in the construction of identity, a topic that has been illuminated
by social scientists during the last decade.13 The contested memory of
the war and unification suggests that Germans did not all share the
same foundation upon which to base their new identity. Instead, the
construction of national identity became a fluid, contested, and often
contradictory project in which both Catholics and Protestants
attempted to convince the other of the pre-eminence of their own
view of German history and the future of their common nation-state.
Liberal and Protestant determination to establish their own sense of
Germanness led to a polarization of local society as struggles over the
concept of national identity infused the political and cultural discourse.Throughout Baden, locals on both sides often politicized commemorative activities and the construction of monuments, using them
as means to increase their political power. Instead of creating a more
cohesive society after 1871, German nationalism facilitated an intensification of conflicts on the local level.14
As news of the outbreak of war spread throughout the German
lands in July 1870, most Germans initially set aside their differences to
unite in a nationalist furor. As the first excitement evaporated, however, old tensions resurfaced with surprising speed. Moreover, citizens
were now equipped with a new weapon to use in their quarrels: the
nationalist discourse popularized at the outset of the war. Furthermore, as Germans began constructing the memory of the FrancoPrussian war and unification, it became evident that Catholics and
Protestants nourished different, often opposing collective memories of
the conflict and unification process. These recollections, rather than
facilitating increased understanding among citizens, provided them
with additional means to maintain and often intensify existing disagreements. More importantly, at the local level, citizens now cast their
disputes against the backdrop of an emerging fixation on national consciousness and the construction of a national identity, which tended to
raise stakes, further exacerbating tension.This suggests that we should
analyze more carefully the divisive effects that the popularizing of
13
For instance: Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989); John
Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, 1994); Eric
Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983);
Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory:The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols. (New
York, 1995-1997).
14
This view permeates Smith’s work, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict,
esp. pp. 10-11, 13-15, 237-239.

BY PONTUS HIORT

23

nationalism had on local communities, instead of assuming that nationalist excitement provided for a more cohesive society. National identity
did not develop at the same speed and in the same manner as it
replaced existing local, regional, religious, and class identities, but
instead often facilitated an intensifying of already existing differences.
Like citizens elsewhere in the German lands, Badeners responded
with enthusiasm when the on-going conflict between Prussia and
France escalated into war in July 1870.15 Hoping that war against
France would unify Germany, the citizens of Baden proclaimed that the
political and confessional struggles that had divided their state during
the last few years had now finally come to an end.16 Indeed, the first
weeks of the war witnessed a unity of purpose that superseded all previous economic, religious, social, and political divisions. For a brief
period, residents of Baden were no longer Protestants, Catholics, or
Jews, but Germans, especially since citizens were well aware of their
precarious geographical position as a bordering state to France.To add
to the uncertainty, most soldiers normally stationed in cities around
the state were incorporated into the Fourteenth Army Corps that
departed for France, leaving many Badeners fearing the threat of a
French invasion.17
After a few tension-filled weeks, Catholics and Protestants alike
embraced the first military victories. Both camps interpreted these triumphs as signs that Germany’s position in Europe was about to
improve dramatically.They began calling for annexation of Alsace and
Lorraine, which had not been fully integrated into France after the
French Revolution.18 The German victory at Sedan on September 2
caused great public excitement as people gathered in the streets to celebrate the surrender of Napoleon III.
Although Catholics and Protestants had greeted the news of early
victories with great relief, it quickly became evident that they viewed
the war differently. Already in the beginning of August, the Konstanzer
Zeitung argued that though domestic peace should be maintained,
locals must not turn a “blind eye”to the activities of the Catholic clergy
during the war. Newspapers quoted several liberals as stating that this
15

For instance, Freiburger Zeitung, July 21, 1870; Freie Stimme, July 21, 1870.
Konstanzer Zeitung, July 21, 1870.
17
For instance, Freiburger Zeitung,August 30, 1870.
18
Badischer Beobachter, September 2, 1870; Konstanzer Zeitung, October 2, 1870.

16

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

war had little to do with the Prussians and the French; instead the
Jesuits and their actions at the Vatican Council were to blame for it.
They also claimed that the hatred Catholics had displayed toward
Prussia and Otto von Bismarck had convinced Napoleon III that he
could provoke war without having to face a united German army.19 In
contrast, Catholics, while expressing general support for the war,
remarked that at least this time, all Germans would be fighting on the
same side, which constituted an improvement over 1866. Because
Baden had been a member of the German Confederation that suffered
defeat in the Austro-Prussian war, many Badeners were still smarting
that setback.20
The Catholic responses to the initial developments of the war
reflected their complicated relationship to the unification project.
When Baden was engulfed in a harsh Kulturkampf during the 1860’s,
most of which was focused on eliminating religious control over the
schools, Badenese national liberal politicians such as Franz von
Roggenbach and Julius Jolly had made it all but impossible for
Catholics to support any of the government’s policies.21 Although most
Protestant national liberals supported a closer relationship with
Prussia, especially after the latter’s victory in the Austro-Prussian war of
1866, Catholics opposed the push toward a more unified Germany.
These sentiments became especially evident in the elections to the
newly created Customs Union in 1868. Led by Jakob Lindau, Catholics
organized a successful election campaign, which had stunning results.
Although the liberals won the popular vote with 89,000, the Catholics
with 78,000 were close behind. Since Catholics had campaigned on an
anti-Prussian platform, the vote provided a clear indication of the discord between state policies and popular Catholic opinion.22
After Sedan, many German leaders began contemplating the reorganization of their territories. In these discussions, Protestants often
claimed that due to the alleged backwardness of Roman Catholicism,
the Catholic faith could not be allowed to play an integral role in their
19

Konstanzer Zeitung, July 24, 26, 28; Freie Stimme, July 26,August 2, 1870.
Freie Stimme, July 26, 1870.
21
Becker, Liberaler Staat und Kirche, pp.120-130; 132-133.
22
Excellent accounts of these elections include Becker, Liberaler Staat und Kirche,
pp. 208-214; Julius Dorneich,“Die Entstehung der badischen ‘Katholischen Volkspartei’
zwischen 1865 und 1869 im Tagebuch von Baurat Dr. Karl Bader,”, Freiburger DiözesanArchiv, 84 (1964), 349-370; Walter Scühbelin, Das Zollparlament und die Politik von
Baden, Bayern und Württemberg, 1866-1870 (Vaduz, 1965), pp. 71-102.
20

BY PONTUS HIORT

25

future state. Following the surrender of Napoleon III, many Protestantliberal newspapers claimed that the primary goal of the war was to
defeat Catholicism and found an Empire based upon the only true religion—Protestantism.23 Protestants and liberals referred to the imminent defeat of the French and the removal of the pope from Rome as
two major victories for modern civilization, signs that the primitive
and anti-modern Catholic spirit was finally about to be broken.To bolster their arguments, many papers cited a letter from the Prussian general Friedrich von Holstein to the French General Gorardin, in which
he prophesized:“The future belongs to the nordic or Protestant race
. . . Catholicism stupidifies . . . God will remain with the ones who seek
progress, which is why he is abandoning the Roman people.”24
Especially after Sedan, much German nationalist rhetoric explained
the collapse of the French forces by claiming that Roman Catholicism
had obstructed France’s transition to a modern nation-state, echoing
the views many Protestants would express after the war about the
degenerative effect of the Catholic faith.25 Leading Protestants cited
Italy, France, and Spain as examples of poorly developed nation-states
plagued by widespread illiteracy, poverty, and political disarray–
attributing all of these problems to Catholicism.26 Catholics vehemently rejected this assertion, pointing out that Protestants and liberals had misinterpreted the religious lesson of the war. Catholics maintained rather that the conflict represented God’s way of showing both
French and Germans how alienated they had become from the
Christian spirit.27 The disintegration of the French Empire was not due
to the Catholic faith, but rather the result of French inability to remain
good Catholics. Catholics were especially critical of what they considered Napoleon III’s un-Catholic behavior. They cited his decision to
support the anticlerical Italian nationalists against Austria in 1859 as a
strong indication of how far he had strayed from his Catholic convictions. Newspapers stressed that though French Catholics were currently in great agony, this ordeal would assist them in reconnecting
with their Catholic faith.28 The suffering caused by the war, not only to
23
Freiburger Zeitung, October 5, 1870. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Protestantism and the unification, see Ernst Bammel, Die Reichsgründung
und der deutsche Protestantismus (Erlangen, 1973).
24
Freiburger Zeitung, October 3, 1870.
25
For instance, Freiburger Zeitung, October 3, 5, 1870.
26
Ibid.
27
Freiburger Katholisches Kirchenblatt, August 10, 1870.
28
Ibid.

26

CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

Germans and French, but to the pope as well, should remind Christians
of all nationalities of the importance of religion. This war did not pit
one confession against another; rather, it served as a confirmation that
in their quest for modernization, Germans must not neglect their
faith.29 These sentiments constituted a continuation of the resistance
that Catholics had offered to the modernizing reforms that Badenese
liberals had initiated during the past decade. Catholics argued that
these reforms were signs that the uninhibited striving for modernity
was increasingly corrupting the German national character.30
Even before the fighting had ceased, Protestants had begun constructing a memory of the war that highlighted the importance of the
Protestant victory over the Catholic spirit, an interpretation which only
increased the hostility toward Catholics. When Protestants and liberals
outlined Germany’s promising future that was sure to follow military
victory, many questioned whether there was room for Catholics in the
new Empire:“Should Germany really contain a large part whose Heimat
is not in Germany, but on the other side of the Alps? After a struggle in
which the best blood of the Fatherland was spent, that would constitute
treason and must under no circumstances be allowed by the nation.”31
Although Catholics had contributed to the war effort, these voices
implied both that their efforts had been insignificant and that their
Catholicism excluded them from the future German nation-state. Some
Protestants and liberals viewed this military victory as an opportunity to
limit the influence of the supposedly backward Catholics in the new
state. They believed that military success would considerably enhance
their chances of transforming Germany into a dominant European
power. Many German Protestants believed that the nation-state functioned as the bearer of progress in which education, the economy, and
political conditions would be greatly improved.This notion clashed with
the presumed parochialism of Catholic Germany. Even before any peace
treaties were signed, the state-sponsored official nationalist discourse
interpreted the impending victory as a signal for Germany to assume its
rightful place as the most powerful state in Europe. Catholics, on the
other hand, placed less emphasis on the “positive” aspects of the war,
and instead expressed concern about their minority status in the future
Empire, the increasing secularization of society, and the fate of the pope,
29

Freiburger Katholisches Kirchenblatt, July 20, 1870.
For instance, Freie Stimme, October 10, 1871.
31
Quoted in Freiburger Katholisches Kirchenblatt, October 19, 1870; see also
Heidelberger Wochenblatt, September 24, 1870.
30

BY PONTUS HIORT

27

who had come under attack from Italian anticlericals in 1870 as French
forces left Rome to fight the Germans.
Relations between Catholics and Protestants in Baden deteriorated
steadily in 1870. Emboldened by the German military success, liberals
and Protestants soon began complaining about Catholic wartime
behavior.They especially targeted Catholic priests, and in several wellpublicized cases accused local clergy of praying for French victory.32
During the war, allegations of Catholic priests convincing entire villages to support the French surfaced, which increased tensions
between the two confessions.33 The behavior of Catholic priests
during times of war was not, however, a new source of tension in
Baden. After the Austro-Prussian war, liberals and Protestants had
denounced members of the clergy for allegedly boasting that in case
of Austrian victory, all German Protestants would be forced to convert
to Catholicism.34 The case that attracted most attention in 18701871was that of the Catholic priest Manfred Burgweiler in Pfullendorf,
a rural community near Lake Constance. During the fall of 1870,
Burgweiler had reportedly led his congregation in prayer for French
victory on several occasions, claiming that a Prussian triumph would
endanger German Catholicism.35 These accusations not only reflected
Protestant-liberal concerns about the loyalties of Catholic clergy, but
also fears about the increased influence of Catholic priests, especially
in rural areas. Since the election of Herman von Vicari as Archbishop of
Freiburg in 1842, there had been a gradual ultramontanization of the
Badenese Catholic clergy. Coupled with the popular religious revival
that took place throughout the German lands during the 1840’s and
1850’s, these developments had created an increasingly powerful local
clergy.The influence that priests enjoyed in their communities intimidated non-Catholics.
Toward the end of 1870, when unification of Germany seemed a
certainty, Protestants intensified their efforts to link the imminent
military victory and founding of the German Reich to their religion. At
a banquet in Constance to celebrate the conquest of Metz, the
Protestant city council member Zogelmann proclaimed a new version
32

Documentation regarding many of these cases can be found in Erzbischöfliche
Archiv Freiburg (hereafter cited as EAF), B2-29 Staat und Kirche.
33
Freiburger Zeitung, October 7, 13, 1870.
34
See for instance, Freiburger Zeitung, February 10, 12, 1867.
35
EAF, B2-29 Staat und Kirche; Freiburger Katholisches Kirchenblatt, August 31,
September 7, 1870.

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

of the “Our Father.” Modeled on the Lord’s prayer, Zogelmann’s version,
entitled “A Pious German’s Wish,” was not directed to God, but to
Wilhelm, King of Prussia. Zogelmann pleaded with the King to grant
Germans what they had so long desired: a unified nation-state.
Although this request in itself would not have offended Catholics, the
city council member also asked Wilhelm to destroy the power of the
“blacks,”who sought to divide and weaken the German nation.36 In the
following days, Zogelmann’s speech, considered blasphemous by
Catholics, was hotly discussed, and local Catholics expressed their outrage in numerous ways. They asserted that asking Wilhelm to undermine Catholic influence was not only futile, but also constituted a
grave insult to the King. Although not Catholic, Wilhelm had often
proven himself to be a man of proper religious convictions. Judging
from his frequent praise of God after German military victories, it was
evident that he was a pious man who would never deliberately hurt
his Catholic subjects. By suggesting otherwise, Zogelmann had
offended the King, and should be punished accordingly.37 Catholics,
though critical of the official commemorative discourse, strove to
stress their respect for and loyalty to the future German Emperor, providing evidence that they often excluded him from their criticism of
the official canon of nationalism.38
Catholics also argued that Zogelmann’s agenda for Catholics proved
that he and his fellow liberal Protestants were attempting to deepen divisions among Germans. His blasphemy reflected his lack of respect for
religion, which was important to all Germans, whether Catholic,
Protestant, or Jew. Catholics argued that by opposing demands to execute Napoleon III,their clergy displayed a better sense of patriotism than
most Protestants.39 They claimed that only a German lacking a deep
understanding of nationalism would call for further punishment of
Napoleon III, who had already lost everything.This incident represents
an early instance of Badenese Catholic understanding of the requirements of patriotism. Contrary to most official canons of nationalism,
Catholics often emphasized the humane aspects of their patriotism. As
nationalism grew increasingly chauvinistic and populist, they often
36
The poem was published in its entirety in Freie Stimme, November 9, 1870. The
banquet took place on October 29, 1870.
37
Freie Stimme, November 9, 1870.
38
Catholics displayed similar sentiments regarding Wilhelm’s involvement in the
Kulturkampf. They were quite willing to absolve him of all guilt, instead blaming primarily Bismarck and Falck for the persecution of Catholics.
39
Freie Stimme, November 12, 1870.

BY PONTUS HIORT

29

complained that it appealed to the worst aspects of people,encouraging
greed, intolerance, and ignorance. Catholics argued that their ability to
display compassion for the fallen enemy made them better Germans.
The approach the Catholics of Conatance took to the controversy
over Zogelmann’s comments illuminates one of the ways that Catholics
integrated themselves into the Second Empire. Highlighting the negative qualities of the national liberal version of patriotism, they stressed
their own sense of Germanness by being what Protestants and liberals
were not. When faced with accusations of not having a fatherland,
Catholics remained steadfast in their convictions, gathering strength by
portraying themselves as martyrs, falsely criticized for their un-German
behavior. Their use of the Protestant-liberal “Other” enabled them to
consolidate and strengthen their own identity. Catholics often pointed
out that national-liberals considered it patriotic to aid the government
in persecuting local Catholic priests and to label falsely Catholics enemies of the Fatherland. Most importantly, Protestant patriotism seemed
to be based on the notion that German Catholics were without a fatherland, who did not deserve to have a nation to call their own.40 Catholics
implied that simply by refraining from constantly deriding their fellow
Protestant citizens,they were being better Germans.They often pointed
out that they never called for the exclusion of anybody from the
German nation. Of course, this was a slightly idealized self-portrait as
Catholics often engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric and were sometimes
overtly hostile to the inclusion of Jews into the German nation.41
When Bismarck initiated negotiations with the south German states
in November 1870, making it evident that Germans were heading
towards unification, Badenese Catholics, though pleased with the
defeat of France, remained ambivalent about their immediate future.
Gravely concerned about the fate of the pope, they realized that in the
aftermath of a German victory, his security would be even more threatened. After French troops left Rome in August 1870, Italian forces had
occupied the city on September 20. Relegated to the small territorial
40

Freie Stimme, November 11, 1871.
The small Jewish community in Konstanz often faced discrimination. See the discussions regarding the establishment of a synagogue in Gert Zang, Konstanz in der
Grossherzoglichen Zeit. Vol. 4.2 (Constance, 1993) pp. 97-98. For a somewhat different
view of relations between different confessions in Baden, see Ulrich Baumann’s excellent essay “The Development and Destruction of a Social Institution: How Jews, Catholics
and Protestants Lived Together in Rural Baden, 1862-1940,” in Smith (ed.), Protestants,
Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914, pp. 297-315.
41

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

enclave that constituted the Vatican, surrounded by liberal Italian
nationalists, Pius IX’s independence appeared unsure.This matter was
of great concern to German Catholics, and it occupied their attention
for years to come. Badeners repeatedly stressed the need to protect the
pope, arguing that if the French could not do it, the Prussian government should assume the task.42
Catholic concerns about the independence of the Holy See, and especially their belief that the Prussian government should intervene in this
matter, was the source of great controversy.43 By incorporating the
pope’s struggles into their analyses of the Franco-Prussian war, Catholics
employed a non-nationalist discourse, which triggered charges of treason from Protestants and liberals. Catholics rebutted these attacks, claiming that their concern for the pope did not lessen their loyalty to the
German cause or make Rome their true Heimat.They claimed that their
opponents failed to understand that though their spiritual home was in
Rome, that did not make them Italians.44 German Catholics, with their
strong ties to Rome, constructed parts of their identities around the persona of the pope.They did not consider loyalties to Berlin and Rome to
be mutually exclusive, but sentiments that could—and should—be nourished simultaneously. In this aspect, they differed from their Protestant
counterparts, who did not include any similarly strong “non-German”
component into their identities.In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with its exclusive focus on national groups, these loyalties further
complicated Catholic integration into the Second Empire, particularly
while the controversial Pius IX was still pope. After his death in 1878,
the more conciliatory nature of his successor, Leo XIII, limited some of
the damaging effects that the Catholic attachment to the Vatican exercised on their acceptance as Germans.45
Although Badenese Catholics participated in the celebration of the
proclamation of the Reich on January 18, 1871, misgivings about their
status in the Empire soon replaced any feelings of elation.To be sure,
42

For instance: Badischer Beobachter, October 2, 1870, February 2, 1871.
For a good discussion of this issue, see Margaret Anderson, Windthorst: A Political
Biography (New York, 1981), pp. 146-149. I would like to thank the anonymous referee
for this journal who pointed me to this citation.
44
Badischer Beobachter, September 20, 1871.
45
For general accounts on the lives and careers of the two popes, see: Owen
Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830-1914 (New York, 1998); Georg Schwaiger,
Papstum und Päpste im 20. Jahrhundert:Von Leo XIII zu Johannes Paul II (Munich,
1999).
43

BY PONTUS HIORT

31

they approached the new Empire with guarded optimism, but the
recent anti-Catholic rhetoric concerned them. Catholics entered the
new nation-state with both different expectations about the future,
and a different memory of the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent
unification.While most Protestant Germans constructed their memory
of the recent conflict around notions of military victories, success,
prosperity, and unity, for most Catholics the war had different connotations.46 Although they were proud of the achievements of the
German troops, the accusations of anti-Germanness and the aggressive
Protestant nationalist rhetoric caused Catholics to construct a different
memory of the war. Catholics often pointed out that it was not certain
that Germany would now enter a new time of prosperity.To be sure,
Germany was now unified, which was worth celebrating. However,
they repeatedly warned against the over-confidence of their fellow
countrymen that accompanied the military victory. The official commemorative discourse surrounding unification was littered with references to Germany’s greatness and how the new nation-state would
soon be dominating European affairs. Although they took care to
emphasize the value of sound national pride, Catholics claimed that
other Germans were not behaving in a manner befitting their supposedly religious character. They consistently pointed out that these attitudes were becoming part of what it meant to be German, and that
these sentiments revealed how the Protestant-liberal stress on individuality and ego-centrism had poisoned the German national character.47
These criticisms reflected Catholic concerns about the way in which
political and economic power was distributed. Fully aware that
Protestants were in control of most of Germany’s financial and cultural
capital,Catholics often criticized the former for focusing too intently on
material issues and paying too little attention to the spiritual aspect of
their lives. Because substantial parts of the new national identity were
constructed around the memory of the war, the existence of separate
memories made the consolidation of the German nation-state much
more difficult. Instead of being able to create Germans around common
notions about the unification process, bourgeois elites were faced with
competing versions of these events and the future of the Empire.
46
For a stimulating discussion of the creation of the memory of the war, see Alfred
Kelly, “The Franco–Prussian War and Unification in German History Schoolbooks,” in
Walter Pape (ed.), 1870/71-1989/90. German Unifications and the Change of Literary
Discourse (Berlin, 1993).
47
For instance, Badischer Beobachter, October 20, 1870.

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

From the outset in commemorating recent events, Protestants and
liberals consciously excluded Catholics from much of the discourse
surrounding the wars of unification and the foundation of the Reich.
In celebrating these milestones, German Protestants emphasized the
defeats of Austria and France on the road to unification. Many of the
commemorative efforts in the wake of the war highlighted the religious aspect of the Franco-Prussian war, as Protestants stressed that
Germans should be grateful to (the Protestant) God for their victory
over Catholic France.48 Ceremonies staged throughout the Empire to
mark the return of the troops sometimes served as commencements
for the national Kulturkampf, which would function in part as an
attempt to construct a national identity along confessional lines. In
Zweibrücken, near Freiburg, the Protestant minister Heinz Roth used
the peace celebration to proclaim that now that the external enemy
had been defeated, it was time to root out the internal ones. Attacking
social democrats and Catholics, he claimed that their behavior during
the recent war proved that there were many anti-German elements
among the true (Protestant) Germans. If Germany was to grow as a
European power, these elements had to be removed from the nation so
that the new state could embark successfully on the modernizing project. Although Roth was vague in regards to exactly what Catholics
would have to do to become worthy members of the nation, these
threats still represented a serious affront to Catholics.49
The construction of a memory of the war and the subsequent formation of a national identity did not occur only in conjunction with
war commemorations. Catholics and Protestants often employed
nationalist vocabulary when engaged in conflicts over seemingly nonnational topics. Consequently, insights into the construction of
memory and identity can be found even outside the immediate arena
of commemorations.The campaign for the national parliamentary elections in late February 1871 constituted one of the first instances in
which Catholics and Protestants began to construct the memory of the
recent war and unification.Taking advantage of the favorable political
situation, liberals and Protestants conducted a very aggressive election
campaign in which they used the military victory and the unification
as proof of the superiority of their policies–all expressed through a discourse adapted from the war.50 The Protestant-liberal campaign
48

For instance, Konstanzer Zeitung,April 24, 1871.
Freiburger Katholisches Kirchenblatt, March 29. 1871.
50
Zang, Konstanz in der Grossherzoglichen Zeit. Vol. 4.2, p. 24.
49

BY PONTUS HIORT

33

focused on portraying their opponents in the Catholic People’s Party
as traitors who had not contributed to the war effort, and in some
instances even prayed for French victory. The traitorous Catholic
clergy became a prominent theme in the election campaign as liberals
used the nationalist discourse to promote their political agenda. This
was consistent with the Protestant and liberal tendencies to collectively “forget” Catholic efforts in the war, while instead focusing on
their allegedly treacherous behavior.
In Constance, the recent war dominated the political debates
during the election campaign. Liberals often noted that before 1870
the Catholic candidate, Franz von Bodman, had advocated decreased
military spending, which, had it been adopted, certainly would have
led to the demise of the Badenese Fatherland.51 In his campaign, von
Bodman was frank about his past policies, admitting that though he
was thrilled that Germany had been unified, he would have preferred
the unification process to have involved Austria as well. He was, however, quick to stress that his sentiments did not prevent him from being
a true German, and that if elected, he would ensure that the unified
Fatherland would become strong, just, and powerful.52 His statement
was important since its reference to Austria revealed that Catholics
subscribed to their own particular notions of Germanness.When von
Bodman admitted that he was still very much attached to the Austrian
cause, he publicly expressed what many Catholics privately thought.
Indeed, by declaring his pro-Austrian sentiments in such a closely scrutinized public arena as an election campaign, he was attempting to
legitimize beliefs located outside the now official nationalist discourse.
Unfortunately for von Bodman and his fellow Catholics, their assertions that these feelings did not mean that they were any less German
than their liberal and Protestant opponents fell on deaf ears.The first
few years of the Kaiserreich were characterized by the prominence of
the kleindeutsche (Borussian) historiographical school of Heinrich
von Treitschke and Heinrich von Sybel.They and many other historians
propagated a teleological view of recent events, which declared that
the war against Austria had been a necessary step on the road to unification.53 In the view of these historians, the events of the seventeenth
51

Konstanzer Zeitung, February 14, 21, 1871.
Freie Stimme, February 23, 1871.
53
For discussion of the Borussian historiographical school, see Georg Iggers, The
German Conception of History (Middleton, Connecticut, 1968).
52

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

century, especially the successes of the armies of Counter-Reformation
Austria, had prevented German religious unity and caused centuries of
political division.54 Thus, pro-Austrian sentiments were sure to provoke
accusations of treason and anti-Germanness.
As the election neared, local Protestants intensified their efforts at
portraying Catholics as disloyal Germans who had contributed little, if
anything, to the war effort. A few days before the election, the auxiliary bishop Lothar von Kübel published a pastoral letter, in which he
only briefly mentioned the recent military and political events, instead
focusing on the debate over papal infallibility. Liberals claimed that the
pastoral letter proved that Rome was the true Heimat of the Catholics.
They accused Kübel of ignoring what the majority of Germans wanted:
to continue celebrating unification. Liberals repeatedly returned to
this pastoral letter, emphasizing how it displayed the alienation of
Catholics from the German nation, and how important it was that
voters note Catholic attitudes toward the recent historical events.
Protestants and liberals stressed that Catholics could not be trusted
with political power, since they lacked sufficient knowledge of what
Germans considered to be the most important contemporary issues.
Consequently, Protestants and liberals both accused Catholics of disloyalty, and declared them unfit to hold political power.These accusations were not uncommon and reflected a growing Protestant and liberal concern about the potential success of organized political
Catholicism, which after the founding of a Catholic People’s Party in
1869 had become a concrete threat.55
The electoral results proved disastrous for the Catholic People’s Party.
Although Constance had a large Catholic majority, the liberal candidate
received more than twice the votes of his Catholic opponent.This result
was repeated throughout the province, as liberals won twelve out of the
fourteen seats that Baden held in the German Reichstag.56 Local liberal
politicians were quick to utilize this election result as yet another piece
of evidence that the citizens of Constance were tired of the poor
Catholic leadership and that people had faith in the national liberals’
ability to integrate the city properly into the new Reich. Most of their
54

Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, pp. 5, 24, 57-58.
Konstanzer Zeitung, February 21, 1871.
56
For instance, Konstanzer Zeitung, March 6, 1871. For a complete treatment of election results in Baden during the Kaiserreich, see Fred Sepainter, Die Reichtagswahlen im
Großherzogtum Baden. Ein Beitrag zur Wahlgeschichte im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt,
1983).
55

BY PONTUS HIORT

35

election analyses were framed in nationalist terms, and the fact that the
results were announced and celebrated in conjunction with the celebration of the peace indicates how keen liberals were to tie their political victory to the emerging nationalist discourse. They consistently
stressed that people had cast their votes based on patriotic and nationalist sentiments and that voters had recognized their efforts during the
past decade to integrate Constance into Germany.57
The electoral success of the national liberals was due not only to
the support of Protestants; an unusually large number of Catholics
voted liberal as well. This tendency displays that though both the
Protestant-liberal and Catholic-conservative blocs were fairly cohesive,
exceptions to this pattern did exist. Contrary to many other areas in
Germany, more Badenese Catholics remained outside the Center party
than Protestants from the national-liberals, especially during the first
decade of the Empire. As many scholars have pointed out, throughout
the nineteenth century Baden had enjoyed a relatively strong tradition
of liberal Catholicism.58 Particularly important here was the influence
of Vicar Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg (1774-1860). His demands for
reforms within the Church initiated the movement for a more liberal
Catholic faith. Even as the Catholic religious revival set in during the
1840’s and ‘50’s, many Badenese Catholics opposed the ultramontanization of the Church. Furthermore, Thomas Mergel has analyzed
the connection between the strong liberal political tradition and
reforms within the Church, which also made Badeners more receptive
for liberal Catholicism.59 Especially around the time of unification, as
the Badenese bourgeoisie was growing increasingly powerful, some
Catholic burghers elected to support the more progressive and modernizing policies of the liberals. Given the relative strength of these
sentiments, the number of so called Old Catholics, who opposed the
declaration of papal infallibility, should come as no surprise. Although
an investigation of Old Catholic attitudes toward the nation-state is
outside the immediate scope of this article, we should note that they
did play a role in many communities. However, these differences
within the Catholic community notwithstanding, its cohesiveness
remained fairly stable during most of the Second Empire.
57

Konstanzer Zeitung, March 11, 1871.
For instance, Becker, Liberaler Staat und Kirche.
59
Thomas Mergel, “Für eine bürgerliche Kirche. Antiultramontanismus und Bürgertum 1820-1850. Rheinland und Südwestdeutschland im Vergleich,” Zeitschrift für die
Geschichte Oberrheins, 144 (1996), 397-427.
58

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

One problem that Catholics encountered when attempting to
express publicly their memories of the last war was that the official statesponsored discourse failed to provide frameworks through which
Catholics could manifest their sense of Germanness as well as their view
of unification. Many scholars have pointed out that the act of remembering a war occurs through personal experience and pre-existing cultural narratives.60 Consequently, Badenese liberals and Protestants, aided
by political and economic power, sought to rework the meaning of earlier historical episodes such as the war of 1866 to fit the official narrative. On the other hand, Catholics struggled to preserve an alternative
discourse that was threatened to be subsumed by the increasingly hegemonic Protestant-liberal discourse. In the Protestant-Prussian teleological view of unification, the wars against Denmark, Austria, and France
constituted an ideal way to achieve unity and nation-state status. In this
official discourse,Germans had been divided for centuries,by the machinations of the pope and Austria, within the framework of the Holy
Roman Empire, until the threat of external enemies brought them
together in joint defense of their common Fatherland.61
Baden’s Catholics rejected this ideological message for several reasons. First and foremost, Baden had sided with Austria in 1866 as a
member of the German Confederation that demanded that Prussia demobilize in 1866. Although the liberal government and Grand Duke
Friedrich I had hoped to join a Prussian-led unification up until the outbreak of war, many Badenese had supported Austria. Consequently,
Badenese Catholics did not accept the notion that the Austro-Prussian
war of 1866 constituted a logical step on the road to unification.
Badenese Protestants, on the other hand, most of whom had supported
the philoprussian policies of the Grand Duke, and of the liberals Franz
Roggenbach and August Lamey, simply suppressed Baden’s role in the
Austro-Prussian war in their construction of the memory of unification.
Badenese Catholics also resented that the commemorative discourse declared that Germans, as in 1870, had defended their
Fatherland in 1866. Especially for Catholics in the southern part of the
60
For a useful addition to the vast literature on this topic, see T. G. Ashplant, Graham
Dawson, and Michael Roper (eds.), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration
(London, 2000); see also Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in T. Butler (ed.),
Memory, History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford, 1989), pp. 97-113; Samuel Hynes,
“Personal Narratives and Commemorations,” in Emanuel Sivan and Jay Winter (eds.), War
and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1999).
61
For instance, Heinrich von Treitschke, Zehn Jahre deutsche Kämpfe (Berlin, 1874).

BY PONTUS HIORT

37

state, which had belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy for several centuries prior to Napoleon’s reorganization of much of the Holy Roman
Empire in 1806, the term “Fatherland” had a different meaning from
what it had for other Germans. Catholics argued that in 1866, most liberals and Protestants had been quite confused about what constituted
their Fatherland. Thus, it was inconsistent to claim now that they all
along had advocated this specific solution to the German question.62
Protestants and liberals admitted that at the time of war, many had
viewed Bismarck’s actions as a case of Prussian expansionism, but history had proven that it constituted a necessary clarification of the relationship between the two great German powers. In their attempts to
rewrite the history of the previous war, they always stressed how antiPrussian the Catholics had been, failing to mention that they had too
been critical of both Bismarck and Prussia.63
Determined to establish their own cultural script in which they
could construct and express their own memories of the wars and unification, Catholic newspapers often focused on outlining and explaining some of the events (in which Bismarck’s role was becoming increasingly suspect) that had caused the war of 1866.64 During the first few
years of the Empire, they expended considerable effort trying to
uncover the “true”causes of the war, and many of these arguments were
subsequently used to attack Bismarck and the liberals’ official version of
nationalism. Drawing upon evidence surfacing from the biographies of
retired Italian diplomats, ultramontanes highlighted Bismarck’s role in
orchestrating these wars, attempting to prove that he and his fellow
Prussians had been the aggressors in these conflicts.They accused the
Chancellor of having negotiated behind the back of his King, and
quoted him as having stated repeatedly that he was “. . . much more
Prussian than German. . . .”65 According to the ultramontanes, in 1866
Bismarck had been prepared to cede [non-Prussian] German territories
to France to avoid a conflict.This was cited as evidence of Bismarck’s
and his liberal supporters’ lack of patriotism. Furthermore, by tracing
Bismarck’s plotting in 1866, Catholics claimed to have debunked the
myth that in 1870 the Fatherland was under attack and that great sacrifices were needed to save the nation. As ultramontanes strove to clarify Bismarck’s role in these wars, they criticized the national liberal
62

For instance, Badischer Beobachter, May 11, 1871.
For instance, Freiburger Zeitung,August 4, 1872.
64
These efforts intensified with time. See for instance, Freie Stimme,August 12, 1871.
65
Quoted in Freie Stimme, September 20, 1873.

63

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

notion that there had been something almost holy about the unification
process.Instead,they noted that the German lives lost in these wars had
primarily served to satisfy Bismarck’s appetite for territorial gains.66
These sentiments were an indirect condemnation of the national liberal
version of patriotism. Catholics often criticized their opponents for
attempting to change the definition of the nation to fit a variety of different political, cultural, and economic causes. Catholics argued that the
attempted rewriting of the war of 1866 served to illustrate how liberals
and Protestants were rewriting history to fit their notions of
Germanness. Furthermore, their willingness to reconstruct their
notions of German national identity indicated that they had a limited
understanding of what it meant to be a German.
These sentiments tied into a Catholic argument that liberals and
Protestants only used the concept of national identity as a means to
other ends. The Protestants’ alleged preoccupation with materialism
and their tendency to use the nationalist discourse to gain material,
financial, and economic advantages, proved that their Germanness was
not as rooted in the German historical and philosophical tradition.
Their definition of the concept was obviously highly superficial and
did not reflect any profound understanding of their own identity.67
One of the most popular ways of commemorating the recent war
and unification was to construct a monument. Especially in the first
decade after 1871, the German national landscape was filled with statues as cities and towns honored their troops and political leaders. As
many scholars have noted, monuments are especially suited to the construction of memory.68 Made out of durable material, monuments facilitated the anchoring of collective memories in shared public spaces, in
66

Ibid.
Ibid. For an additional example of these sentiments, see Freie Stimme, December
9, 1871.
68
There is a voluminous literature on the topic of monuments and commemorations.
See for instance: Alings, Monuments und Nation; Avner Ben-Amos, “Monuments and
Memory in French Nationalism,” History & Memory, 5 (1993) 50-77; Maria Bucur and
Nancy M.Wingfield, (eds.), Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, Indiana, 2001);Wilfrid Lipp,
Natur, Geschichte, Denkmal: Zur Entstehung des Denkmalbewußtsein der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1987); Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann (eds.),
Der Politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne (Munich,1994);Rudy Koshar,
From Monuments to Traces:Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990 (Berkeley, 2000);
Thomas Nipperdey, “Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in Deutschland im 19.
Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift, 206 (1968) 529-585.
67

BY PONTUS HIORT

39

which their majestic forms helped legitimize a particular interpretation of past events, and functioned as depositories for memories for
future generations. Particularly in the age of nationalism and the
nation-state, they served as confirmation of the importance of the rise
of a particular nation; they were the vehicles that made the abstract
idea of the nation real and credible. In Germany, the ideological message accompanying a statue most often fell within the confines of the
Prusso-Protestant-dominated official national discourse. Catholics
seldom constituted the driving forces in these projects and were frequently indifferent or even opposed to them.
In Baden, the discourse around the Siegesdenkmal in Freiburg indicates that while Catholics were inclined to embrace certain aspects of
German national identity, they were reluctant to accept the official
commemorative discourse, which portrayed Prussia, the Hohenzollern
dynasty, and Bismarck as the driving forces in the unification process.
For many of Baden’s ultramontane Catholics, the ideological message of
the monument, while stressing the contributions of local soldiers and
political leaders, did not represent their own sense of Germanness.69
Most of the bourgeois city fathers who spearheaded this project were
either Protestants or Old Catholics (who had broken with the Church
over papal infallibility), while ultramontanes remained largely excluded
from this exercise in local patriotism and nation-building. A brief analysis of some of the Catholic responses to this project provides useful
clues to their relationship to the highly complex web of loyalties that
constituted the post-1871 national identity.
At the suggestion of the Freiburg city council in January 1871, an
organizing committee was formed to explore the possibility of constructing a monument to honor the Badenese soldiers and their commander, General August von Werder. Letters were sent to all the major
cities in the province to inquire about the potential support for this
kind of project.70 While most communities were supportive, not everyone agreed on the ideological message and overall value of the commemorative effort. For instance, members of the town council of St.
69
For a discussion on some of the ideological messages stressing the contributions of
local soldiers and political leaders, see Ute Scherb,“Das Freiburger Siegesdenkmal–ein
badischer Alleingang? Eine Untersuchung vor dem Hintergrund national-und partikularstaatlicher Denkmalstiftungen im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts” (Freiburg:
Unpublished Thesis, 1990).
70
Stadtarchiv Freiburg (hereafter cited as St. AF), C1/Denkmäler/5. Protocol from
Bürgerausschuss meeting, January 23, 1871.

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

Blasien,all of whom were conservative Catholics,rejected the proposed
monument as a waste of money. Council members were willing to
donate only if local soldiers were to receive monetary compensation
from the new German nation-state, for which they had “so valiantly”
risked their lives.The city councils of Triberg and Breisach, both comprising ultramontane Catholics, also opposed spending money on anything other than the veterans.Instead of constructing a monument,they
argued that funds should provide assistance to crippled veterans to
help them cope with life after the war. All three cities referred in their
responses to the Austro-Prussian war, an event that was largely missing
from the official commemorative discourse. St. Blasien complained that
the veterans of 1866 had not been honored in the same manner as
those of the more recent war, although they too had risked their lives
to protect their Fatherland. Triberg echoed these sentiments, pointing
out that many veterans of 1866 had experienced economic difficulties
when they returned to civilian life.71 This was a recurring theme as
Catholics often criticized various commemorative activities for wasting
money that should instead aid the war veterans whose economic situation was often precarious. As part of their opposition to the construction of the Siegesdenkmal,some Freiburg Catholics reminded members
of the Bürgerausschuss that if the veterans of 1870-1871 were to be
commemorated with a monument, attempts should be made to include
the veterans of 1866 in this discourse as well.72
Although enjoying only tepid support from Badenese Catholics, the
process of constructing the Siegesdenkmal in Freiburg progressed
steadily, and was ready to be unveiled in September 1876. In addition
to securing the presence of Emperor Wilhelm I at the unveiling, the
members of the organizing committee attempted to include all residents of Freiburg in the festivities. They planned a parade from the
train station to the statue. Organizers also arranged for different ceremonies to be held throughout the city and were careful to include the
Catholic Church in these ceremonies. This was obviously a thorny
issue, especially since the Badenese Kulturkampf had now reached
new heights during the summer and fall of 1876 as the state parliament had passed legislation that abolished confessional schools.73
71

St. AF, C1/Denkmäler/5. Letters to the Bürgerausschuss from Breisach, February 9,
Lörrach, February 11, and Triberg, February 16, 1871.
72
St. AF, C1/Denkmäler/3. This was discussed in a meeting on March 10, 1871.
73
On the planning of the unveiling ceremony, see St. AF, C1/Denkmäler/5. On the
intensification of the Kulturkampf, see Becker, Liberaler Staat und Kirche in der Ära
von Reichsgründung und Kulturkampf, pp. 358-364.

BY PONTUS HIORT

41

Catholic attitudes toward the monument were rendered even more
ambivalent because, while monuments were being built all over
Germany to celebrate the efforts of the soldiers, members of the Jesuit
order were being driven out of the new state. In the first decades after
the war, Germans clashed over conflicting interpretations of the
Jesuits’ role in the Franco-Prussian war. While liberals and Protestants
accused them of having hoped and prayed for French victory,
Catholics pointed to the courage and love for the Fatherland they had
displayed when volunteering for the war effort.74 Most Catholics
believed that the Jesuits had played an important role in caring for the
wounded, some had even been awarded the Iron Cross for their services.75 Especially in 1874-1875, when reports about mistreatment of
Jesuits surfaced in the press almost daily, Catholics were critical of the
actions of both the national and state governments.
Consequently, members of the Erzbischöfliches Ordinariat in
Freiburg found themselves in a difficult position. On the one hand, the
monument honored unification, and they were hesitant to associate
with celebrations commemorating an event that in many ways constituted the beginning of the national Kulturkampf. On the other, they
faced on-going accusations of being enemies of the Fatherland who
maintained closer ties to Rome than to Berlin. If they elected not to
participate, liberals and Protestants would interpret their decision as
further confirmation of their hostility toward the Second Empire.
Finally, following negotiations between the organizing committee and
Auxiliary Bishop von Kübel, the latter agreed to deliver a speech that
day, not at the monument, but at the cathedral. His decision to participate in the ceremony was made easier because the monument contained no specifically anti-Catholic symbolism.76
The Catholic attitudes toward the Siegesdenkmal reflected their
approach to much of the commemorative culture in the early years of
the Second Empire. Although their greater economic prosperity usu74
See Michael B. Gross, “Kulturkampf and Unification: German Liberalism and the
War Against the Jesuits,” Central European History, 30 (1997), 545-566. Idem, The War
against Catholicism: Liberal Identity and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2004). Roisin Healy, The Jesuit Specter
in Imperial Germany (Boston, 2003).
75
These debates resurfaced in conjunction with different types of commemorative
activities. See for instance Freie Stimme, September 9, 1874.
76
St. AF, C1/Denkmäler/5. Letter from Kübel to the organizing committee, September
30, 1876.

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

ally provided Protestants more opportunity to control the process of
memory construction and nation-state building, thus disadvantaging
Catholics, the latter played an active role in debates surrounding these
projects.While they seldom displayed overt hostility to the ideological
message(s) accompanying a monument, they made sure to voice complaints about anti-Catholic sentiment, since their version of Germanness often clashed with the Protestant one.Thus, these projects seldom
facilitated increased understanding among Germans. Instead, locals
often politicized monuments and other commemorative activities and
used them as means to increase their political power.
Few commemorative activities caused more controversy that the
annual celebration of the victory at Sedan. Almost immediately after
the capture of Napoleon III, a number of Germans demanded that the
nationalist exhilaration that had accompanied the military victory
should be manifested in a ceremony. Members of the Protestant
Association in Bremen first requested an annual celebration in which
Germans could showcase their patriotism and love for the Fatherland.
During the first few months of 1871, the well-known lawyer Franz von
Holtzendorff and Johann Caspar Bluntschli, the president of the
Protestant Association, discussed initiating an “allgemeines Volks und
Kirchenfest.”77 During the 1860’s, Bluntschli, who lived in Heidelberg,
had became known as one of the fiercest advocates of the Badenese
Kulturkampf. Although he and Holtzendorff initially claimed that the
celebration would have an intra-confessional character, their private
correspondence reveals their intentions to use it to exclude parts of
the population from the German nation-building project. In February
1871, Holtzendorff wrote Bluntschli,“No law or parliamentary debate
can damage the radicals, the socialists, the Jesuits, and the ultramontanes, as seriously as a Volksfest, in which people are annually
reminded just who the founders of the Empire were, and who the enemies of the German Reich in 1870 were.”78
Especially in the first two decades after unification, local communities in Baden engaged in fierce debates concerning the value and
meaning of this celebration. Throughout Germany, most of the
speeches at the festivities focused on the need to intensify the Kulturkampf rather than to celebrate the victory at Sedan. Speakers emphasized the religious aspect of the war. The victory was most often dis77
78

Becker Liberaler Staat und Kirche, p. 310.
Ibid, pp. 310-312.

BY PONTUS HIORT

43

cussed in the context of a triumph over the Roman spirit, which had
supposedly prevented a Jesuit takeover of the German lands.79 In
much of Germany, Catholic citizens staged counter-demonstrations;
parents kept their children away from school on September 2, and
people from all classes and confessions clashed. Although social
democrats and others also abstained from participating, confessional
and not class issues were at the forefront of the controversies, at least
until 1890. Both Catholics and Protestants used this commemoration
to present their own views of the current situation in the Reich.
Instead of creating unity, the celebration deepened fissures in society.
In 1873, the local liberal association in Constance organized a Sedan
Day celebration complete with a banquet at the Konzilsaal on the eve
of September 2. Liberal politician Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch’s plenary
speech focused on the connection between the recent war and the
Konzilsaal, where the decision to execute the Bohemian religious
reformer Jan Hus had been taken in 1415.80 He urged his audience to
remember that the events surrounding the injustices done to Hus
marked the pinnacle of clerical power in Constance, and though the
last war as well as some of the domestic efforts since 1871 had been
successful in the battle against the internal enemy, the war was not yet
won. He asserted that the clerical spirit was resilient, and it would
require much determination and dedication on behalf of “true”
Germans if they were to break the stranglehold which the Church had
long maintained on local society. He ended his speech by conjuring the
spirit of Hus, stating that it was unfortunate that they could not burn
the spirit of the clericals as they had burned Hus.81 Throughout the
Kaiserreich, especially during the Kulturkampf, Badenese liberals and
Protestants often compared the current situation to the martyrdom of
Hus.82 Thus, liberals not only tied their cause to one of the best-known
79
Excellent accounts of Sedan Day include: Confino, The Nation as a Local
Metaphor, pp. 27-51; Claudia Lepp,“Protestanten feiern ihre Nation—Die kulturprotestantsichen Ursprünge des Sedantages,” Historisches Jahrbuch, 118 (1998) 201-222;
Schneider, Politische Festkultur. The last argues that since Catholics seldom organized
counter-demonstrations on September 2, they did not utilize Sedan Day as a means of rallying support to the same extent as social democrats, who often staged alternative meetings on the very day of the celebration. However, this interpretation fails to take into consideration the important role that the debates surrounding this annual celebration
played for the Catholic community.
80
Konstanzer Zeitung, September 4, 1873.
81
Ibid.
82
Konstanzer Zeitung, January 21, March 27, 28,April 10, 1862. See also Jiri Koralka,
“Konstanz als Reiseziel tschechischer Husverehrer um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts,”

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

historical figures in the area, but in doing so created a continuous historical narrative of a struggle against papal power from the time of
Hus’s conflict with Rome.
In the wake of unification, liberals and Protestants argued that it
was evident by how people celebrated Sedan Day that it had become
the new national holiday. Catholics, however, rejected this claim.They
pointed out that in many places, only the Veterans Association had
organized celebrations, and that it was apparent that people were
growing tired of this commemoration. They also pointed out that a
number of liberals boycotted the event, joining the ranks of Catholics
and socialists, which rendered Sedan Day an increasingly artificial celebration. Indeed, they claimed that the celebration had developed into
“. . . a farce arranged by the [liberal] party leadership. . . .”83 This interpretation was far removed from the liberal and Protestant attempts to
portray the festivities as something that had emerged from the people.
Freie Stimme noted,“It would be more than enough to do it every ten
years. The French are just happy that Napoleon is gone, and for us
Germans, who are more divided and hostile toward each other than
ever before–all because of the Kulturkampf that began in those
September days of 1870–it would be enough to celebrate the great
national liberal St. Sedan every ten years.”84
Such statements illustrate how differently Catholics and Protestants
viewed the war and unification. It was difficult for most Catholics to
relate to the commemorative discourse that soon surrounded
September 2.While Protestants celebrated it as one of the greatest days
in German history, and a victory over Catholicism, Catholics rejected it
for the same reasons.85 Liberal behavior proved that they, claiming to
be the true representatives of Germanness, attempted to use Sedan
Day to complete their victory over the Catholic Church. Rather than
creating unity, the celebrations of this victory served to further alienate the two confessions from each other, as it confirmed the different
fates they had suffered as Germans. Catholics also claimed that the
more divided Germans became, the more certain sectors of society

Schrr VG Bodensee [=Schriften des Vereins für Geschichte des Bodensees und seiner
Umgebung], 1987, pp. 93-130; Helmut G. Walther,“Konstanz und Hus—Zur Geschichte
einer Beziehung,” Konstanzer Almanach, 1980, pp. 9-13.
83
Freie Stimme, September 2, 1873.
84
Freie Stimme, September 12, 1876.
85
Ibid.

BY PONTUS HIORT

45

insisted on staging public celebrations and commemorations of unification. They sarcastically noted,“. . . [I]f a foreigner would arrive in
Germany, he would think that we Germans did not have a problem in
the world, since all we do is celebrate the greatness of our nation.”86
Catholics offered stinging criticism of this trend and demanded that it
stop, otherwise it would completely demoralize the German nation.
Badenese Catholics and Protestants engaged in fierce contestation of
the nature of the German national identity during the first years of the
Kaiserreich. Helmut Walser Smith has pointed out that “. . . national ideas
made sense to different groups in society not by a generalized notion
of what the nation is but by an appeal to the historical memories and
experiences of disparate groups within the nation.”87 The Protestant
attempts to link the wars and the unification process to the strength of
their confession reflected the need to support their newly found
national identity with memories, myths, and histories. However, while
Protestants shaped the memory of the three wars of unification to fit
their view of the process of unification, Badenese Catholics sought to
correct some of the fabrication behind this constructed memory.
Often politically and economically disadvantaged, Badenese
Catholics faced pressure from a Protestant-Prussian-dominated nationalist discourse, which frequently contained a strong anti-Catholic bias.
We should not interpret Catholic attitudes of indifference and hostility
toward war commemorations and nationalist rhetoric as signs of submission to a Protestant-shaped national identity, but rather view the
experiences of Badenese Catholics as successful manifestations of
their own sense of Germanness. Their persistence in uncovering the
true reasons for the war of 1866 and their fierce opposition to the celebration of Sedan Day display their unwillingness to be subsumed by
a national identity tainted by assumptions about Catholic backwardness and anti-German sentiments.
While the immediate outbreak of hostilities triggered sentiments of
nationalist unity, citizens soon returned to their old struggles. They
attended different churches; they argued over how best to modernize
their state, and they quarreled about who constituted better patriots.
The behavior of members of both confessions suggests that despite
the calls for unity during times of war, the contestation of national
86
87

Freie Stimme, September 16, 1876.
Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, p. 233.

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CATHOLIC COMMEMORATIONS OF GERMAN UNIFICATION IN BADEN

identity prevailed and in many cases intensified. Especially on a local
level, the debates over what constituted Germanness tended to further
polarize society following unification. As citizens used the new-found
rhetoric to improve their position in local society, the nationalizing
project became a source of great tension and conflict throughout the
German lands. Catholic insistence on manifesting their own version of
the German nation indicates that though they were eventually integrated into the Second Empire, theirs was a rather different nationstate from what Protestants and liberals imagined. Catholics’ frequent
insistence that their version of Germanness was superior to its
Protestant counterpart confirms that confessional sentiments constituted integral parts of German nationalism.
The struggles over the construction of the memory of unification
indicate that German nationalism and national memory divided as
much as they united. Since Catholics and Protestants constructed different memories of this event, which came to constitute one of the
most important building blocks for the national identity, their integration into the Empire should be viewed as part of a debate over the
legitimizing effects of the nation-state. Protestants considered the
founding of the nation-state to represent the apex of the long struggle
for German unity that had preoccupied Germans since the
Reformation. Catholics, with their traditional loyalties to both Rome
and Austria, were more ambivalent about the absolute value of the
nation-state. Protestants often mistook this hesitancy for antiGermanness, which prompted anti-Catholic rhetoric. Especially in
Baden, with its long history of church-state hostility, confessional affiliations played an important role in shaping the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.The advent of the nation-state and the increasing appeal
of nationalism did not mean that the latter replaced all previous loyalties. Although many scholars have tended to consider nationalism as a
sort of force majeure that quickly took precedence over all other loyalties, the experiences of these Badenese Catholics suggests that
nationalism coexisted with many of the old loyalties. Instead of replacing loyalty to the pope in Rome, German nationalism came to constitute one part in the complex web that comprised the late nineteenthcentury identities of Badenese Catholics.

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN
BY
KEVIN A. CODD*

The American College of the Immaculate Conception in Louvain
(Leuven), Belgium, has been preparing young men for service as
priests to the Church in North America for one hundred and fifty
years. Conceived in 1857 by Martin J. Spalding, Bishop of Louisville,
and by Peter Paul Lefevere, Bishop of Detroit, the seminary in its
early decades took advantage of a flourishing of missionary interest and vocations in Europe to provide much needed clergy to the
Church in North America. It also provided to American seminarians
the opportunity to study philosophy and theology in the famed
Catholic University of Louvain in preparation for priestly ministry.
It has served as an intellectual, spiritual, and pastoral cradle for
many of America's missionaries, pastors, and educators, and continues to do so to the present.
The twin notions of training American seminarians in Europe and of
preparing European seminarians for the missions of America were
nothing new to the Church in the United States at the mid-point of the
nineteenth century. Both concepts had been advanced and attempted
by American bishops almost since the foundation of the nation in the
previous century. The two young men John Carroll hesitantly sent to
the Urban College in Rome in 1787 were the first to cross the Atlantic
in hope of receiving a priestly formation distinct in quality and character from what was available to them in their own country.1 Likewise,
it was not long before foreign-born priests had proven useful in the
American missions, the famous Belgian missionary, Charles Nerinckx,2
for example, being already at work in Kentucky by 1805.

*Father Codd is a priest of the Diocese of Spokane and rector of The American
College of the Immaculate Conception in Louvain, Belgium.
1
James M. White, The Diocesan Seminary in the United States: A History from the
1780s to the Present (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1989), pp. 86-87.
2
Nerinckx, Charles (1761-1824) was ordained a priest in 1785 in Mechlin, Belgium.
He served the archdiocese until 1801 when, in the wake of the French Revolution, he

47

48

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

The need for many more priests to serve the growing church in
America became ever more critical as the young nation developed.Two
pastoral pressures were at work: First, immigration from Europe was
quickly changing the face of the ecclesiastical landscape in North
America. James T. Fisher reports that in 1826 there were approximately
250,000 Catholics in the United States out of a total population of eleven
million; but over the next three decades the Catholic population skyrocketed to more than three million.3 The number of priests to support
these Catholic communities remained dangerously low. According to
Patrick W. Carey, in 1830 there were 232 priests in the United States, and
by 1866 the number was ten times greater but still only 2,770 to serve
the entire Catholic population of the country, by then in the millions.4
Second, in the more distant reaches of the continent to the west, the
Church found itself still very much a missionary church as it attempted
to establish itself among the indigenous populations (often in fierce
competition with Protestant missionaries) as well as ministering to farflung but growing Euro-American populations of miners, trappers, and
settlers. The situation of the three missionary bishops ministering in
the northwest corner of what is now the United States and Canada’s
Vancouver Island is illustrative. When Francis Norbert Blanchet and
Modeste Demers in 1838, and later, Augustine Magloire Alexander
Blanchet, arrived in the Oregon country as young priests from Quebec,
they found themselves mostly alone as priests and later as bishops in a
vast region for which they had been given responsibility (covering
what are now the states and province of Alaska, Oregon, Washington,
Idaho, Montana, and Vancouver Island). They found some assistance

chose to go to the Indian missions of North America. By 1805 he was serving in
Kentucky, where he spent most of the remainder of his life. See Camillus P. Maes, The Life
of Rev. Charles Nerinckx: with a chapter on the Early Catholic Missions of Kentucky;
copious notes on the progress of Catholicity in the United States of America from
1800 to 1825 (Cincinnati, 1880). See also: Ben J. Webb, The Centenary of Catholicity in
Kentucky (Louisville, 1884), pp. 184-193. John Tracy Ellis,“The Influence of the Catholic
University of Louvain on the Church in the United States,” Louvain Studies, IX (1983),
269-320. Nerinckx, of course, was far from alone; French Sulpician priests, for example,
were also at work in America from early in the nineteenth century. See John Tracy Ellis,
“The Formation of the American Priest: An Historical Perspective,”in The Catholic Priest
in the United States: Historical Investigations, ed. John Tracy Ellis (Collegeville,
Minnesota, 1971), pp. 16-19.
3
James T. Fisher, Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America
(New York, 2000), p. 41.
4
Patrick W. Carey, The Roman Catholics in America (Westport, Connecticut, 1993),
p. 36.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

49

from Pierre Jean DeSmet, S.J.,5 and his small band of Jesuits stationed
mainly in the Rocky Mountains and from even fewer Oblates of Mary
Immaculate. F. N. Blanchet described the situation as he took up his
role as archbishop of Oregon City:
The Archbishop started with 10 priests including T. Mesplie, two Jesuit
Fathers at St. Ignaces residence, 13 Sisters and two educational houses.The
Bishop of Walla Walla was starting with 3 Secular priests including a
Deacon, 4 Oblate Fathers of O.M.I., and 12 Jesuit Fathers at the Rocky
Mountains. The Bishop of Vancouver Island had not even one priest to
accompany him to Victoria.6

If North American bishops needed priests and religious for its immigrants and its western missions, then Western Europe was the place to
look for them.The Catholic Church in Western Europe was in the midst
of a profound revival that took root in the wake of the 1801 Concordat
with Napoleon. One result of Europe’s Catholic revival was a boom in
vocations to the priesthood and religious life. In Belgium alone,
Vincent Viane notes, the increase was remarkable:
After a long “warming up” period, there was therefore a sudden explosion of religious energy in the wake of the Belgian Revolution, which
peaked in the early 1840’s.Whereas the country counted 4791 regulars in
1829, their numbers had more than trebled by 1856, surpassing those from
the last years of the ancien régime.7

Alongside the vocation boom, the Catholic revival in countries like
Belgium was accompanied by an expansive impulse that was deeply
connected to the increasing influence of ultramontanism in these
same countries. Even as there was a conviction that the true faith
should be defined by a single voice from Rome and that this faith
should be defended vigorously, so too there was an accompanying con5

Peter John De Smet (1801-1873) was born in Dendermonde, Belgium. De Smet was
a Jesuit scholastic when he first arrived in St. Louis in 1823. He was ordained a priest in
1827. He made his first voyage into the Rocky Mountains in 1840 and developed an
enduring relationship with the Flathead and related tribes of the region. See E. Laveille,
S.J., Le P. De Smet: Apôtre des Peaux-Rouges, 1801-1873 (Brussels, 1922). Robert C.
Carriker, Father Peter John De Smet: Jesuit in the West, ed. Richard Etulain (Norman,
Oklahoma, 1995).
6
Francis Norbert Blanchet, Historical Sketches of the Catholic Church in Oregon,
trans. Edward J. Kowrach (Fairfield,Washington, 1983), p. 130.
7
Vincent Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (18311859): Catholic Revival, Society and Politics in 19th Century Europe, KADOC Studies,
vol. 26 (Leuven, 2001), pp. 170-171.

50

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

viction that the one, true faith should be propagated to the far ends of
the earth with as much zeal and energy as possible.8 The surplus clergy
of Europe offered the Church the laborers to undertake a vast new
missionary outreach.
In search of laborers for their vineyards, bishops from throughout
North America regularly undertook long and expensive trips to Europe.
Many of the American bishops who traveled to Europe in search of
priests for their dioceses made it a point to spend time visiting the
parishes and seminaries of Belgium. A number of them had already benefited from the service of Belgian clergymen, most notably Nerinckx
and DeSmet. But other Belgians had also made their way across the
Atlantic and taken up service in the American missions. Peter Paul
Lefevere came to the United States as a seminarian and was ordained a
priest for the Diocese of Detroit in 1831. He labored in an extensive
mission field covering Missouri, southern Iowa, and western Illinois
before being named administrator of the nine-year-old diocese in 1841.
It was not long before he was recruiting fellow Belgians to his struggling diocese, among them Peter Kindekens, who arrived in Detroit in
1842 from the Diocese of Ghent and was straightaway named pastor of
Lefevere’s cathedral parish. In 1851, at Lefevere’s request, Kindekens
traveled to their home country in search of more priests, at which time
he brought back with him a fellow Belgian, John De Neve.9
Lefevere would soon go further in his efforts to bring European
clergy to North America by joining forces with the young bishop of
Louisville, Martin J. Spalding.10 Together, they would promote an alternative to the bishops’ recruitment trips to Europe: an American seminary in Belgium that would funnel some of Europe’s surplus clergy
directly into their dioceses.
In 1852 Spalding embarked on his first recruitment trip to the continent, first visiting France, then moving into Belgium, a place that
impressed him as “a truly Catholic country.”11 While in Belgium he
8
Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions, trans. Owen Chadwick, 2nd ed.
(London, 1990), p. 213.
9
John D. Sauter, The American College of Louvain (1857-1898), Recueil de Travaux
d’Histoire et de Philologie (Louvain, 1959), pp. 26-27.
10
For details of Spalding’s ancestry in America and his early life see Thomas W.
Spalding, Martin John Spalding: American Churchman (Washington, D.C., 1973). Also
see Spalding’s first biography: John Lancaster Spalding, The Life of the Most Rev. M. J.
Spalding, D.D., Archbishop of Baltimore (New York and San Francisco, 1873).

BY KEVIN A. CODD

51

Peter Paul Lefevere, Bishop of Detroit. Image taken from J.Van der Heyden, The
Louvain American College: 1857-1907 (Louvain: Fr. & R. Ceuterick, 1909),
p. 19.

came to know the professors of the University of Louvain, whom he
admired for “their faith, humility and learning.”12 He also visited the
Cardinal Archbishop of Mechlin-Brussels, Engelbert Sterckx; in the
course of a meal with Sterckx on January 7, 1853, Spalding proposed
for the first time the establishment of a missionary college in Belgium.
This proposal, Spalding reported later, was warmly received by the
archbishop, who promised all possible assistance.13 Sterckx proposed
that such a college be sited in the university town of Louvain.14 Before
day’s end, Spalding had written Archbishop Francis P. Kenrick of
Baltimore, who himself had been a priest of Louisville prior to his ele11

Sauter, American College, p. 16.
Ibid.
13
Spalding, American Churchman, pp. 63-64; Spalding, Life of M. J. Spalding, pp. 158162; Sauter, American College, pp. 16-17.
14
A. Simon, Le Cardinal Sterckx et son temps (1792-1867) (Wetteren, 1950), vol. 2,
p. 402.
12

52

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

vation to the episcopacy. Spalding was clearly animated by the idea
and had already formed in his mind the outlines of the project:
I dined to-day with Cardinal Sterckx, a most holy and learned prelate.
Conversing with his eminence on the utility of establishing here a
Missionary College, he entered warmly into the project, and promised to
second it with all his influence, which is very great, apart from his high
position. He suggested the following plan, of the success of which he entertains no doubt. I lay it before you for your opinion and advice:
The college is to be for the education of young men for the American
Mission, and is to be established in connection with the University of
Louvain, which is in the Archdiocese of Mechlin.15 The students in the
beginning will occupy a rented house, and will have the privilege of attending the courses of study at the university free of charge.The discipline of
the college will be under the direction of an American missionary, who will
teach English, and exert himself to procure the necessary funds for keeping
up the establishment, which, the Cardinal thinks, can be easily realized in
Belgium; and this is the opinion of all those clergymen with whom I have
conversed on the subject. Students will not be wanting, for in this diocese
particularly the number of candidates for the ministry far exceeds the
demand for clergymen.
Such are the outlines of the plan, which if carried out, will be of great
utility to our missions.The studies at Louvain are of a high order; and, perhaps, some of our bishops may send students of talent to perfect their education in this renowned university. The ecclesiastical spirit here is
admirable, and the simple piety of the people contrasts strongly with the
comparative coldness of Catholics in Protestant countries.
A hundred young men educated at Louvain for the American missions!
Is not the thought enlivening? And yet, it is very far from impossible; and, if
the Cardinal’s anticipations be well grounded it may be done with little or
no expense to the American prelates.16

Kenrick was not so animated by the vision of “a hundred young men
educated at Louvain.” Like other American bishops, he preferred
American priests to be trained in American seminaries.17 Opinion
against foreign-trained clergy was still strong among the American
bishops; Ireland’s All Hallows College, for example, had been in exis15
“Mechlin” is the same city as “Malines” as it is known in French, and “Mechelen” as
it is named in Dutch. It has been the primatial see of Belgium and its political
antecedents since 1560. In 1961, the name of the archdiocese was expanded to include
the capital city of Brussels.
16
Spalding, Life of M. J. Spalding, p. 162. See also: Sauter, American College, pp. 17-18;
Spalding, American Churchman, p. 66; Ellis,“American Priest,” p. 27.
17
Sauter, American College, p. 20.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

53

tence since 1842, but its offer of Irish priests to the dioceses in
America had been met with a tepid response from the American hierarchy. Not only was it expensive for the American dioceses to adopt
the Irish seminarians; there was also among the bishops a fundamental
distrust that Irish-trained priests would be culturally in tune with
American values and ways.18 Furthermore, Pope Pius IX was putting
considerable pressure on the American bishops to found an American
seminary in Rome.The Louvain project seemed to many to be in competition with that intended for Rome; in any case, neither went forward due to lack of episcopal support.19
Spalding did not let his “enlivening thought”die but rather, together
with Lefevere, looked for the appropriate moment to give the idea
some concrete form. In 1856, Lefevere assigned his vicar-general,
fellow Belgian Peter Kindekens, the task of going to Rome to represent the diocese in an unrelated issue it had with the Redemptorist
order. In the meantime, Baltimore’s Kenrick had failed in his efforts to
have one of his priests go to Rome to open an American College
there. Kenrick therefore asked Lefevere to have his man in Rome,
Kindekens, take up the charge. One might suspect in hindsight that
Kindekens and Lefevere were not altogether dedicated to Kenrick’s
summons, their eyes perhaps already set north of the Alps for any
future American seminaries in Europe; be that as it may, Kindekens at
least gave the impression of having fulfilled Kenrick’s request, though
without the success hoped for by the prelate. Kindekens continued
on to Belgium, where he became aware of certain wealthy members
of the Belgian nobility, most notably Count Felix de Mérode,20 willing
to fund an American missionary college in Louvain; within a matter of
days he had also spoken with Cardinal Sterckx and several other
Belgian bishops who all supported the proposal.With the promise of
60,000 francs from de Mérode and the encouragement of the Belgian
bishops the Louvain project suddenly came to life while that of Rome
remained stalled.21

18

White, Diocesan Seminary, pp.88-89.
Sauter, American College, pp. 22-23.White, Diocesan Seminary, pp. 100-103.
20
Felix de Merode (1791-1857) was a Belgian patriot and member of the nation’s provisional government that proclaimed independence. He served as a Minister of State and
was a member of the Chamber of Representatives. See: Sauter, American College, p. 29.
See also: Joseph Van der Heyden, The Louvain American College: 1857-1907 (Louvain,
1909), p. 14.
21
Sauter, American College, pp. 28-30. Simon, Cardinal Sterckx,Vol. 2, p. 403.
19

54

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

Martin J. Spalding, Bishop of Louisville. Original portrait in the Archives of The
American College, Louvain. Used with permission of The American College.

In November of 1856, Kindekens sent out a circular letter to the
bishops of the United States explaining his failure in Rome:
My Lord:—When, during the past summer, at Rome, I endeavored with the
utmost diligence, by the special request of the Most Rev. ________, the
Archbishop of Baltimore, to look for and secure a suitable location for the
projected “American College” in that City, I found that not only is it impossible at present, but that it will probably remain impossible for some time
to come, to establish such an institution in the Holy City. In point of fact,
the Holy Father assured me that, under present circumstances (the occupation of Rome by the French, &c.,) he could not say when it would be in
his power to assign a suitable building for the purpose. 22
22
Kindekens to A. Blanc, November 7, 1856, University of Notre Dame Archives,VI-1-K6, New Orleans.The same text is found in handwritten form in: Liber primitivus de initio
Collegii Americani Immac. Concept. B. M. Virginis, Archives of The American College
(Louvain, 1857), p. 1. See also: Van der Heyden, Louvain American College, pp. 14-15.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

55

Kindekens then presented his case for the Louvain college and
made an appeal for financial support. Of particular importance to the
college’s future is the paragraph in which Kindekens states its dual
purposes:
Your Lordship will easily perceive that the object of the institution in
Belgium would be, 1st, to serve as a nursery of properly educated and tried
clergymen for our Missions; and 2nd, to provide the American Bishops with
a College to which some at least of their students might be sent to acquire
a superior ecclesiastical instruction and a solid clerical training, without
much expense, as the college will require no other Professors than those
for the English and German language.23

Response to Kindekens’ circular from the American episcopate was
not heartening.There are eight responses held in the archives of The
American College, that of Mathias Loras, bishop of Dubuque, is typical:
In answer to your circular . . . I cannot say much about the erection of a new
college in Belgium for the U.S. I leave the decision to wiser men. I say only
that I cannot provide much help from poor Iowa.24

Martin Spalding continued his efforts to win over Archbishop
Kenrick of Baltimore, writing to him in February, 1857:“I cannot see
why Belgium should not have a missionary college, like Ireland, France
and Italy, or why we should not profit by the abundant missionary zeal
of her clergy.”25 On February 4, 1857, Spalding and Lefevere addressed
their own circular letter to the archbishops and bishops of the country presenting to them a lengthy prospectus for the Louvain college
and petitioning their support:
We take the liberty to request that if you should approve the general
objects and regulations of the college, and desire to become one of its
Patrons, you should have the kindness to signify the same to the Bishop of

William Stang,“The American College of the Immaculate Conception at Louvain,Belgium,”
American Ecclesiastical Review, New Series VI (XVI) (1897), 256. This document is
reprinted in full in: John Tracy Ellis, ed., Documents of American Catholic History, 3 vols.
(Wilmington, Delaware, 1987), I, 315-317. Also see the full text in: John A. Dick, “The
American College of Louvain,” in The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, ed.
Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1997), pp. 90-91.
23
Ibid.
24
Mathias Loras (Dubuque) to Peter Kindekens (Detroit), November 11, 1856,
Archives of The American College.
25
J. L. Spalding, The Life of the Most Rev.M.J.Spalding, D.D., Archbishop of Baltimore
(New York, 1873), p. 163.

56

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

Detroit, at as early a date as possible as the Rector proposes to leave for
Europe early in March, and it will be highly important to his success that he
should have the donation of as many American prelates as possible. Should
you feel inclined to contribute towards the foundation of the college, you
will please to specify the amount, that the Rector may be able to calculate
his resources.The eight articles of the Prospectus will indicate the benefits
accruing to contributors. We also beg to mention, as an evidence of our
own Confidence in the advantages likely to result from the proposed
College, that we have each agreed to contribute one thousand dollars
toward its establishment. Should you desire to adopt any student according
to the ninth article, you will please instruct the Rector accordingly.26

The prospectus specified that Kindekens would be the first rector
and that those European men recruited into the new college would be
free to choose their future field of work among the dioceses that subscribe to the college’s foundation.Those who could not pay the tuition
would be available for “adoption” by the subscribing dioceses.27 It was
understood that the subscribing bishops would also form a sort of
board of trustees for the new institution.28
In the meantime, Kindekens’s principal financial backer, Count Felix
de Mérode, suddenly died and left nothing in his will for the proposed
seminary.29 With little more than $1,000 each from Spalding and
Lefevere by way of financial support, Kindekens returned to Louvain
26
Circular letter of Martin J. Spalding and Peter Paul Lefevere to the Archbishops and
Bishops of the United States, February 4, 1857, Liber Primitivus, pp. 6-7.
27
Ibid.
28
The situation of inadequate episcopal oversight of the college was addressed by the
Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884; it was decided that the original system was
impractical and should be replaced by a committee of three bishops to whom the rector
would be responsible. The rector remained accountable as well to the Congregation of
the Propagation of the Faith for the spiritual and temporal administration of the seminary.
The rector was obligated to send an annual report on the college to both the bishops’
committee and the Congregation. Rectors were appointed by the Congregation upon the
recommendation of the committee of bishops. The board of three bishops had to be
formed anew at the end of the World War I and served until the closure of the college in
1939 due to the onset of the World War II. In the postwar era, the college has been under
the supervision of a committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
(USCCB), previously the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.The committee of fourteen bishops also presently serves as the college’s corporate board of trustees. See J. A. M.
De Becker, “The American College,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G.
Herbermann et al. (New York, 1907), 424-425. Also see Richard E. Cross and Eugene L.
Zoeller,“The Story of the American College,” The American College Bulletin (1957), p. 36.
29
Kindekens’s subsequent efforts to gain access to the promised 60,000 franks from
the Count’s relatives seemingly came to naught. See Sauter, American College, p. 61, fn. 2.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

57

shortly thereafter and purchased a decrepit butcher shop not far from
the town center that had once been a part of the Cistercian Aulne
College, closed and sold off in parcels in the wake of the French
Revolution.The foundation of the American College of the Immaculate
Conception in Louvain was declared accomplished by Kindekens on
the Feast of St. Joseph, March 19, 1857.30
Kindekens’s rectorship was short-lived. Though Belgian by birth he
had lived in the United States for almost twenty years, become an
American citizen,and adopted many American ways.His direct and blunt
manner as well as his lack of diplomatic finesse did not make him an
attractive figure to the Belgian episcopacy; nor did his prickly personality endear him to a number of American bishops or the proprietors of
the Paris-based Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which was an
essential institution to cultivate if the new college were to survive financially.31 By 1859, Spalding and Lefevere arranged for John De Neve,
whom Kindekens himself had recruited to Detroit from Belgium in
1851, to travel to Louvain and take the rectorship from Kindekens.
Though previous histories of the American College have painted the
transition from Kindekens to De Neve as cordial, in fact, the correspondence among the principals reveals considerable misunderstanding and
hard feelings, especially on Kindekens’ part. He wrote to Spalding:
Since the arrival at Louvain of Father De Neve, I find myself painfully disturbed. On the one hand, listless and tired from the difficulties which harass
me; but inseparable from these, from an important undertaking, and especially disgusted by the arbitrary manner of the measure which has been
taken (a measure in which has been neglected the customary courtesies
given to the lowest servant). I feel compelled to ignore all other consideration and pack my bags immediately. 32

30
Stang,“American College,” p. 258. Joseph Van der Heyden,“The Louvain American
College,” Catholic Historical Review, II (New Series) (1922), 232. Besides the American
College in Rome, there was one other attempt to found an American seminary in Europe,
that of Joseph Ehring in Münster, Germany, in 1865; it closed in 1874. See White,
Diocesan Seminary, pp. 102-103. American seminarians were also sent in significant
numbers to Innsbruck for theological studies.
31
Sauter, American College, pp. 64-69, 87-88.
32
“Depuis l’arrivée à Louvain de Mr. De Neve je me trouve dans un tourment fort
pénible. D’un côté las et fatigué de difficultés harassantes; mais inséparable d’une entreprise importante et surtout dégouté de la mesure arbitraire qu’on vient de prendre
(mesure où on a même négligé les convenances qu’on a coutume d’observer envers le
dernier de valets) je me sentais poussé à braver toute autre considération et à faire immédiatement mon paquet.” Kindekens (Louvain) to Lefevere (Detroit), February 9, 1860.

58

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

Despite his inadequacies, Kindekens was able to attract a small
number of European priests and seminarians, Flemish,Walloon, French,
Dutch, Prussian, all desirous of serving in the North American missions,
as well as a few Americans; in his two years as rector he registered
about twenty students in all,33 and in this he brought to life much of
Spalding’s original vision for the place.
As the college’s first rector Kindekens established in the institution
a unique ethos that endured for decades after him. His contribution
was threefold. His new American College was from the beginning a
missionary seminary, one dedicated to extending the Church to the
distant corners of North America. His seminarians were fed a constant
diet of missionary spirituality, and this with a typically American flavor.
Such was not usual fare for diocesan seminarians in Europe, whose
vision seldom rose beyond the needs of their own diocese or region.
Secondly, it was a fundamentally cosmopolitan seminary made up of
young men from a variety of nations and cultures who were expected
to live together in mutual respect and real fraternity. Kindekens’ house
rule was no different from any standard seminary rule of the day
except in one aspect; he added one imperative not usually found in
such documents:
They [the seminarians] are to live together with one heart, loving each
other in fraternal charity, anticipating one another in carrying each other’s
burdens. They are to be most careful in avoiding any tendency to speak
badly of one country over another.34

Thirdly, Peter Kindekens made the most of what many saw as a great
disadvantage; he taught his new seminarians to accept the poverty of
the new college as something valuable for their formation as missionaries. His leadership imposed a simple but sober spirit on those living
under his wing.35 The deprivation was real enough. One American student, David Russell of Louisville, in an unguarded moment described
the college building as “the rat hole,” yet he also wrote of his life there

University of Notre Dame Archives, Box: Detroit III 2-j-1, 1860, January 2–May 25.
Translation by P.Wallace Platt, C.S.B.
33
Sauter, American College, pp. 72-75.
34
“8. Inter se concordes vivant charitate fraterna invicem diligentes, honore invicem
praevenientes, alter alterius onera portantes. Caveant quam maxime a propensione qua
solet una natio de altera male loqui.” Liber Primitivus, p. 16. Translation by Aurelius
Boberek, O.S.B.
35
Sauter, American College, p. 78.

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59

in elegiac terms:“I could not have believed that I could so soon have
become attached to those whom I never saw nor heard of before.We
live like true brothers, all aiming at the same end by the same means.”36
John De Neve brought a softer personality and a more skilled diplomatic touch to the position of rector, especially in his affairs with bishops and financiers. Within the seminary itself, he continued what
Kindekens had begun and did not change its fundamental direction or
spirit. De Neve was at heart a pastor,37 and it would show particularly
in his relationships with his students. He added to the formation of his
students an extraordinary talent for engaging them personally and
forming deep “father-son” bonds with them. For those coming to the
American College from other seminaries, this was a most surprising
quality: that the seminarians should actually take a walk with the
rector was extraordinary to their minds. One young student, Charles
John Seghers (later bishop of Vancouver Island and archbishop of
Oregon City), having just arrived from the seminary in Ghent, wrote to
a fellow seminarian:
Dear Friend,
Taking advantage of the first free moment that I find, I hasten to furnish
you, not with news, but with a few small details that concern our position,
our way of life at the American Seminary. I was received here by these gentlemen, the 30th of September, with a cordiality that one rarely finds on this
earth: from the first moments I had already come to know the Germans, the
Brabantois, the Americans and the one Dutchman, who have taken possession of our establishment. You would hardly believe the admirable accord
which reigns here among all these men so different in country, language and
customs: I can assure you that there is not one with whom I have not already
had a conversation. What can I say? To walk around the garden with the
Rector or with the Vice Rector, is a thing which happens almost every day.38
36
Van der Heyden, American College, p. 46. Van der Heyden cites: The Record,
Louisville, January 20, 1859.
37
Sauter, American College, pp. 91-93.
38
“Profitant du premier moment libre que je rencontre, je m’empresse de vous munir
non pas de nouvelles, mais de quelques petits détails qui concernent notre position, notre
manière de vivre au Séminaire Américain. J’ai été reçu ici de la part des messieurs, le 30
Septembre, avec une cordialité comme on en rencontre rarement sur la terre: et dès les
premiers moments j’avais déja fait connaissance avec des Allemands, des Brabantois, des
Américains, et avec le seul hollandais que possède notre établissement; Vous ne sauriez
croire quel admirable accord règne ici entre tous ces hommes si différents de pays, de
langage, et de moeurs: je puis vous assurer qu’íl n’en est plus un seul avec lequel je ne me
sois pas encore promené ou avec lequel je n’aie déjà entretenu la conversation. Que disje? Se promener autour du jardin avec le Recteur, avec le Vice-recteur, c’est l’affaire de

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THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

De Neve supported his teaching and formation of the future missionaries by establishing in 1862 a “Union of Prayer,” a spiritual sodality to which his departing students joined themselves as means of supporting one another in their coming missionary lives. In the
constitution of the union, De Neve wrote:
3ly. Our blessed Lord has promised, that He would be in the midst of two or
three assembled in His name; and although the members of this association
will be separated by great distances, they can unite, at least in spirit, round
the throne of God, and beg Him to be with them, in their labors for the
glory of His divine Son.39

The rules of the Union of Prayer were dominated by promises to
pray rosaries, to add a special intention to the third hour of their breviary office for the members of the association, and to say annually at
least three Masses for both the association’s living and dead members.
Further, De Neve asked his Union of Prayer members to write at least
one letter back to the college each year offering a short account of his
mission of the current year.
From his own experience in America, De Neve saw the need for a
formal support system for his young missionaries. Mutual support in
prayer, ongoing fatherly advice from their rector even after they had
left for the missions, and the maintenance of an ongoing relationship
to their alma mater requiring them to write annual accounts of their
ministry to edify and encourage those following them, were all part of
De Neve’s project of forming and maintaining his missionaries.
De Neve stabilized the college’s financial situation and, in the
course of his first decade as rector, was able to purchase and reunify
almost all of the property that had once belonged to the Cistercian
Aulne College as part of his new American College.40 De Neve also
worked to have the college receive complete approval from the Sacred
Congregation de Propaganda Fide and its head, Cardinal Alessandro
Barnabò, something that had not been fully accomplished by his predecessor.41 During his first decade as rector, the college admitted 185
presque tous les jours.” Seghers (Louvain) to Van Loo (Ghent), October 7, 1862,Archives
of The American College, Louvain.Translation by P.Wallace Platt, C.S.B.
39
Van der Heyden, American College, p. 120.
40
Sauter, American College, pp. 98-99.The deeds for the college’s property remained
in De Neve’s or other priests’ hands until 1912, when they were turned over to the
University of Louvain.
41
Ibid., pp. 100-104.

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61

students. And with these increasing numbers of seminarians, so too
the number of young priests sent to North America also rose dramatically: 120 between the years 1863 and 1870.
The burdens of administration and of pastorally caring for his seminarians and his young priests in North America took its toll on De
Neve’s emotional health. After eleven years as rector, his first term
came to a sad end with a complete mental collapse in 1871. De Neve’s
physical and mental decline led to a sharp drop in the number of new
students coming to the college in 1870.42 As 1871 began, he became
bed-ridden and his mind continued to deteriorate. In October of the
same year, he finally asked to be relieved of his duties, and shortly
thereafter, a broken man, he reached the depths of his illness by
attempting to take his own life.43
De Neve’s act also inflicted a wound to the life of The American
College; like his own, though serious enough, it was not, in the end,
mortal. The events of that night sent De Neve’s colleagues, the
Reverends Edmund Dumont, J. J. Pulsers, and John Leroy, into a frenzy
of activity as they took over administration of the institution and
attempted to limit the damage as news of the crisis spread to America.
To Bishop A. M. A. Blanchet of Nesqually alone, they wrote at least
seven letters between September 1871 and the end of December 1872
advising the bishop of De Neve’s condition, the affairs of the college,
and the progress of their students. In one letter, acting rector, Edmund
Dumont, shared the hard truth:“the situation of the college is very precarious at this moment.”44
The search for a new rector was a frustrating process. Dumont had
the support of some American bishops but was appointed bishop of
Tournai in November of 1872 before he could be named to the rectorship. Former students John Fierens and Charles Seghers were con42

Ibid., p. 136.
Ibid., p. 36.The incident was described some years later in considerable detail by a
student, A. J. Penartz, who was present for the event:“It was not Peter but the terrible
shriek of a woman’s voice coming from the Rector’s room that aroused the students.The
first man in the room was Mr. Brincke, but the man who disarmed the insane man was
Mr. Schram. No artery was severed and all that Prof. Michaud had to do was to put in a
few stitches and to send for a Brother and a straight jacket.” Pennartz (Sigel, Illinois) to
Van der Heyden (Louvain), January 3, 1906. Archives of The American College, Louvain.
44
“. . . que la situation du collège est très précaire en ce moment.” Dumont (Louvain)
to A. M. A. Blanchet, May 25, 1872. Archives of the Archdiocese of Seattle.
43

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THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

1867 photo of American College seminarians, perhaps the first photograph
taken of American College seminarians. Identifiable among those
pictured: Francis A. Janssens, future bishop of Natchez and later archbishop of
New Orleans (seated, third from left), Peter Hylebos, Diocese of Nesqually
(standing, middle row, first from left),Augustine Van de Vyver, future bishop of
Richmond (standing, middle row, second from left),Augustine Brabant, Diocese
of Vancouver Island (standing, third row, first from left),William Van der Hagen,
Louisville (standing, middle row, fourth from left), John Willemsen, Diocese of
Detroit, future rector of The American College (standing, middle row, fifth from
left). Photographer unknown. Archives of The American College,
Louvain. Permission granted for reproduction from The American College.

sidered but not pursued, probably because of their youth. Finally,
everyone settled on Francis Janssens45 of the Diocese of Richmond, but
Janssens’ bishop refused to release him from his diocese.
Lacking a decision by the American bishops responsible for the college to name a permanent rector, Dumont led it from 1871 to 1873;
thereafter Pulsers remained as “pro-rector” from 1873 until 1881.
45

Francis J. Janssens (1843-1897), was born in Tilburg, ordained a priest in Louvain for
the Diocese of Richmond,Virginia. He was appointed bishop of Natchez in 1881 and in
1888 archbishop of New Orleans. Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley, eds., The
Encyclopedia of American Catholic History (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1997), pp. 716-717.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

63

In 1881, much to Pulsers’s consternation, De Neve returned to
reclaim his title as rector.46 De Neve’s return was the result of a rather
masterful and complex process of lining up support from a variety of
ecclesiastics in Belgium, Rome, and the United States by assuring them
of his full recovery and claiming that he had never officially been
removed from the office. Restored to Louvain, De Neve was able in the
ensuing ten years to make a significant transition from its financial
security’s being dependent on Belgian generosity to its being dependent on the generosity of a growing cadre of alumni serving in the
United States.47 He was also able to increase again its enrollment and
bring in new clergy as his collaborators, most significantly, Reverend
Jules De Becker, a young canon lawyer who had recently completed
his studies in Rome, and the man who would lead the college up to the
cusp of the World War II.48 De Neve, for his part, retired from the rectorship in 1892, once again a broken and mentally frail man.
The modest rectorship of John Willemsen followed, lasting only
until 1898.49 Willemsen was the first alumnus of the American College
to serve as rector and was known in Louvain as a fine Latinist and a
very able theologian. During his years as rector he oversaw construction of the present chapel and, like his predecessor, bought additional
pieces of the old Aulne site to add to the college’s property. He initiated the drafting of a new Constitutions and Rules for submission to
Rome, rules which were largely written by De Becker.Willemsen submitted his resignation as rector for reasons of poor health after only six
years in office. Correspondence from the time indicates that his resignation was not actually due to health reasons, but to accusations made
against him in Mechlin, perhaps claiming that he was sympathetic to
“Americanism.”50 He resided in Italy until his death in 1932.
Eighteen of the college’s alumni were raised to the episcopacy in
America before the turn of the century;51 several made enduring marks
on the growing church in the country. Patrick Riordan was appointed
the second archbishop of San Francisco; he founded the major semi46

The story of these transitions in leadership are well documented in Sauter,
American College, pp. 138-156.
47
Ibid., p. 157.
48
Ibid., p. 158.
49
Ibid., pp. 174-191.
50
Brian Dick, “Het Amerikaans College in Leuven van 1898 tot 1951” (Licentiate in
History, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1998), pp. 39-41.
51
Sauter, American College, p. 205.

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THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

nary for his archdiocese in Menlo Park in 1898 and a few years later
presided over San Francisco’s reconstruction after the devastating
earthquake and fire of 1906.52 Charles John Seghers, despite his chronically bad health, proved to be a dynamic and zealous bishop, first of
Vancouver Island, then as archbishop of Oregon City, finally returning
to the see of Vancouver Island.The poor diocese included all of Alaska,
a land that was deeply attractive to Seghers’s missionary impulse. He
used Victoria as a staging ground for a dramatic missionary voyage into
the heart of the frozen northland.There he was murdered by one of his
own traveling companions, a death which shocked the faithful both in
America and in his homeland of Belgium.53 Francis Janssens, the onetime candidate for the rectorship of the American College, was named
bishop of Natchez (now Jackson), one of the poorest areas of the
nation,serving there for seven years before being appointed archbishop
of New Orleans in 1888, where he was noted for his establishment of
Catholic parishes for blacks and Catholic schools for the poor living in
rural areas.54 John Lancaster Spalding, nephew of Martin, was named
the first bishop of Peoria in 1875 and was considered one of America’s
significant “men of letters”in the late-nineteenth century; he was instrumental in founding the Catholic University of America on the model of
his alma mater, the University of Louvain”55 William Stang, ordained for
the Diocese of Providence, served as vice-rector of the college from
1895 to 1899, during which time he also taught pastoral theology,
English, and moral theology to the seminarians.56 During these years,
52

Glazier and Shelley, eds., pp. 1210-1211.
See: Gerard George Steckler, S.J., “Charles John Seghers, Missionary Bishop in the
American Northwest: 1839-1886” (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Washington,
1963). Gerard George Steckler, S.J., Charles John Seghers, Priest and Bishop in the
Pacific Northwest, 1839-1886: A Biography (Fairfield, Washington, 1986). Maurice de
Baets, Mgr. Seghers: l’Apôtre de l’Alaska (Ghent, 1896).
54
Glazier and Shelley, eds., pp. 716-717.
55
Of Spalding’s role in founding the Catholic University, John Tracy Ellis, writes:“For
it was to this young prelate more than any single individual that the University at
Washington owed its birth in 1889. In spite of a pervasive lethargy and indifference on
the part of most of his episcopal colleagues, the Bishop of Peoria persisted year after
year, efforts that culminated in his forceful sermon at Baltimore’s Third Plenary Council
on November 16, 1884, entitled ‘The Higher Education of the Priesthood.’” Ellis,
“Louvain,” p. 272. See also: John Tracy Ellis, John Lancaster Spalding: First Bishop of
Peoria, American Educator (Milwaukee, 1961). Ellis, “American Priest,” pp. 321-322.
David Francis Sweeney, O.F.M., The Life of John Lancaster Spalding: First Bishop of
Peoria, 1840-1916, Makers of American Catholicism, vol. 1 (New York, 1965). C.Walker
Gollar,“John Lancaster Spalding on Academic Freedom:The Influence of Louvain on an
American Catholic Bishop,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, 72 (1996).
56
Dick,“Amerikaans College,” pp. 44-45.
53

BY KEVIN A. CODD

65

Stang had the honor of being the first American to be named a professor of the University of Louvain. He was named bishop of Fall River in
1904 but died only three years later. Perhaps Stang’s most significant
influence on the Church in America was through his manual of pastoral
theology,57 initially published as a text for the seminarians of the
American College. As the first pastoral theology text available in
English, the manual came into wide use in many American seminaries,
forming a generation of priests with its practicality and emphasis on the
priest’s pastoral role as “preacher and teacher.”58
The second fifty years of the American College would be scarred by
two world wars: the first it barely survived, and the second left it
closed by its patrons in the American episcopacy. A native son of
Louvain, Jules De Becker, already briefly mentioned, would be the guiding spirit of the seminary through most of its second half-century, just
as John De Neve had been in its first half.What De Becker brought to
the college by way of inspiration and direction was significantly different from De Neve’s contribution. If De Neve was at heart a pastor,
De Becker was fundamentally a lawyer. Born in Louvain in 1857, the
very year the American College was founded, De Becker completed his
degree in civil law at the university of his own hometown and was
admitted to the Belgian bar in 1878. Only a few days later he left for
Rome to enter the Belgian seminary there. Over the course of seven
years he completed a license in theology and a doctorate in canon law
in Rome’s Gregorian University. He was ordained a priest in the Basilica
of St. John Lateran in 1881 and worked for two years in the offices of
the Congregation of the Holy Office. Upon De Becker’s return to
Louvain in 1885 De Neve snapped up the young and promising cleric,
assigning him to teach canon law and liturgy to his seminarians.
De Becker was the clear choice as rector when the position opened
upon Willemsen’s resignation in 1898. With his Roman connections he
provided a valuable asset to the college in keeping relations with the
Vatican congregations positive.59 By his very person he was able to dilute
57

William Stang, Pastoral Theology, 2nd ed. (New York, 1897).
White, Diocesan Seminary, pp. 214-215, 253. Stang’s manual on pastoral theology
was followed in 1899 by that of a fellow Louvanist, Frederick Schulze, who was then
teaching at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee; like Stang’s, it became widely used in
American seminaries, going through at least nine editions over the next thirty years. See
White, pp. 215-216, 253, 369.
59
At the request of a number of unhappy Louvanists in the Archdiocese of Victoria
(previously Vancouver Island), De Becker would use his relations with the Vatican to
58

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THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

Post card image of the garden of The American College in Louvain with the
ordination class of 1885 posed informally about the yard. Photographer
unknown. Archives of The American College, Louvain. Permission granted for
reproduction from The American College.

any fears Romans or Americans might have harbored about the orthodoxy
of the instruction being received by future priests studying in Louvain,
concerns that might have led to the resignation of his predecessor.60
Almost from the start De Becker began transforming the American
College into something quite new: a proper seminary in the Roman
model. He developed the rule first proposed by Willemsen and had it
approved by Pope Pius X almost immediately. He carried his copy of
the new Regulae Collegii Americani with him at every meeting with
his seminarians, it serving, in the words of his successor, Pierre De
Strycker,“simultaneously both as a symbol and a weapon.”61
facilitate the forced resignation of American College alumnus,Archbishop Bertrand Orth
from the Victoria see in 1907. Heynen (Nanaimo) to De Becker (Louvain), December 21,
1907. Archives of The American College, Louvain. For more on Orth’s resignation, see
Vincent J. McNally, The Lord’s Distant Vineyard: A History of the Oblates and the
Catholic Community in British Columbia (Edmonton,Alberta, 2000), pp. 231-233.
60
Dick,“Amerikaans College,” pp. 42-43.
61
Pierre de Strycker, “In Memoriam: Mgr. Jules de Becker,” The American College
Bulletin, XXX, no. 1 (1937), 9.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

67

He reordered the academic life of the college by negotiating with the
rector of the University of Louvain for the re-establishment of Schola
Minor of the Faculty of Theology expressly for his seminarians.62 Prior
to this development, the seminary courses had been taught partly by the
priests of the college staff and partly by the Jesuit priests of Louvain.The
Jesuits continued to offer spiritual direction to the students along with
De Becker’s good friend, the prior of the local Benedictine abbey of
Mont César, Dom Columba Marmion.63 De Becker himself continued to
lecture on matrimony in the field of canon law, an area in which he was
considered a world expert. By 1906 he had announced the establishment of a program in philosophy for his seminarians, allowing his seminary, for the first time, to be responsible for the full course of study and
formation of a young man for the priesthood.64
Early in his rectorate De Becker began publishing The American
College Bulletin, which provided to the college’s alumni and friends
news both of the college and of its many alumni and their labors in
America.The Reverend Joseph Van der Heyden, a college alumnus who
had served for many years in the Idaho missions (he had returned to
Louvain due to the loss of a leg from frostbite while riding a stagecoach in Idaho), was made its first editor. Van der Heyden took to his
task with gusto and collected information on the college’s history and
its clergy wherever he could find it.
In 1901 De Becker made his first formal visit to Rome on behalf of
the college, meeting with the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide and Pope
Leo XIII. Following his journey to Rome, De Becker sailed straightaway
to America; in the course of his six-month journey he visited alumni
throughout the country. He also took the opportunity to visit as many
bishops and archbishops as possible, making himself and his college
known to them. This was the first of four such tours of the United
States, tours that would take him to virtually every corner of the nation
62

Dick,“Amerikaans College,” p. 21.
Columba Marmion, O.S.B. (1857-1923) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and ordained a
diocesan priest in Rome in 1881, together with De Becker. In 1886 he joined the
Benedictine Abbey of Maredsous in Belgium and from 1899 to 1909 served as first prior
of the newly established Abbey of Mont César (Keiserberg) in Louvain. In 1909 he was
elected abbot of Maredsous, a position he held until his death. He was beatified by Pope
John Paul II in 2000. See Mark Tierney, O.S.B., Blessed Columba Marmion: A Short
Biography (Dublin, 2000).
64
J. de Becker, “To the Friends of the American College,” The American College
Bulletin, IV, no. 2 (1906), 58-59.
63

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THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

and included Canada’s chronically impoverished Vancouver Island. De
Becker visited his alumni in their parishes, saw their work firsthand,
and came to admire deeply the unique vigor and energy of the Church
in America as it tackled the many challenges facing it.Though never a
pastor or missionary himself, he appreciated what his alumni were
accomplishing and how they were accomplishing it, and he then
applied these lessons to his seminary program back in Louvain. He
was, for example, quite liberal in offering his seminarians an unsupervised life during their summer vacations in Europe, a policy that evidently caused discomfort on the part of others. De Becker’s response
to their concern:
I know that there exist serious objections to this system of spending far
from home the long holiday period.We ought therefore to have at Louvain
only young me capable of leading during the school term the rather austere
life of a clerical seminary and of persevering in that life of their own volition during vacation. Often, whilst musing over the large amount of freedom accorded to the clergy in the Untied States, I said to myself whilst traveling about the immense country,“How absurd to subject the future priest
to a régime of extreme supervision, of privation of liberty, during the entire
period of his formation and then, upon the morrow of his admission into
the ranks of the priesthood, to let him loose into this vast world of which
he knows perhaps but imperfectly all the dangers!”65

As the fiftieth anniversary of the college approached, De Becker had
something grand in mind to mark the occasion: a bold new building to
take the place of much of what had previously served as quarters for
the seminarians. He had already developed the gardens of the college
and restored a seventeenth-century Cistercian chapel on the lower
property, but his new scheme was of a far grander scale than that
which anyone before him had ever dreamed. In 1904 he undertook
another visit to Rome followed by a second visit to the United States,
where he met almost one hundred of the college’s priest and bishop
alumni at a formal reunion in St. Louis. His intentions in making the
visit almost certainly included preparatory work for the announcement of the construction of a grand new edifice to replace what he
referred to as the “ramshackle student quarters.”66 By the time of his
formal announcement of the project in April 1905 he already had completed his architectural plans for a building designed to house one
65

Jules de Becker,“The Past Year,” The American College Bulletin, XV, no. 1 (1922),

5-6.
66

Van der Heyden, American College, p. 308.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

69

hundred and twenty seminarians. In his letter to the alumni, De Becker
made clear he had the permission to proceed of the Congregation of
the Propagation of the Faith and the bishops serving on the college’s
board of directors. Perhaps more to the point, he indicated in his letter
that, even as he was writing, the old buildings were being leveled and
the students “forced to seek shelter wherever they could find it.”67
The new building was completed by October 1905 at a cost of
$38,000. De Becker raised all but $10,000 of the total, an amount he covered from his personal wealth. On its exterior, the architect placed a
sculpture of an Indian chief,arms crossed and looking out over the street
below with great dignity: a permanent sign of the college’s missionary
tradition and its bond with the Catholic Church in the United States.
In 1911, De Becker negotiated with the University of Louvain a significant change in legal status for the college. Previously, all the deeds
for the college real estate had been held either in De Neve’s hands or
in those of other alumni priests at work in the United States.The deal
was simple: the deeds would be turned over to the university even as
the university promised full and complete rights to the property in
perpetuity to the American College as long as it should exist.The new
situation meant a much more stable ownership situation for the college as well as reducing the weight of Belgian taxes on the extensive
property and buildings.68
The great test of De Becker’s leadership would come less than ten
years after the construction of the new College. By 1914 the threat of
war was felt in Belgium, despite its neutrality. At the time, over onethird of the seminarians in the college were Germans, another third
Americans, and the remainder Belgians, French, and Irish.69 With the
student body as nationally diverse as ever, the rector had to tend carefully to the relations among the seminarians if he were to maintain
among them a spirit of fraternity as European political pressures were
building. With the coming of summer vacation, most of the seminarians had gone to their homelands, never to return.
67

Ibid., p. 311.
L’acte de cession de la propriété du Collège Américain à l’Université Catholique,
August 12, 1912. Archives of The American College, Louvain. The agreement was the
basis both for the American bishops to turn over the property to the university at the
onset of World War II and for those same bishops to make claim to the property again
after the war. It continues to be the operative agreement between the college and the
university to the present.
69
Cross and Zoeller,“The Story,” p. 28.
68

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THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

By the 19th of August, Louvain had been occupied by the advancing
German forces. De Becker had already volunteered his new building as
a Red Cross center so that it flew above its roof both the American flag
and that of the Red Cross.70 That evening, a German officer demanded
use of the building for his troops, but De Becker convinced him to
make use only of the large classroom on its main floor. The next day
another German officer assured De Becker that the American building
would not be harmed. A week later, after a skirmish with Belgian
troops followed by a disastrous “friendly fire” exchange among the
Germans, the invaders began to execute Louvain’s citizens and set fire
to the city. The ancient University of Louvain Library was one of the
first buildings to be put to flames.71 De Becker and his vice-rector,
Pierre De Strycker, remained within the college buildings while the
city burned and the executions continued for the next two days.72
During the same two days and nights, the university’s rector magnificus, Monsignor Paulin Ladeuze,73 joined them by climbing over the
wall that separated his garden from that of the American College.Three
days further on the German forces ordered De Becker, De Strycker, and
Willemsen, who happened to be visiting, to flee the city altogether.
They joined thousands of other refugees on the road to Brussels. Upon
arriving in the capital city, they were brought to safety through the
intervention of the U.S. Ambassador, Brand Whitlock.74 Whitlock later
described his meeting with De Becker in poignant detail:
He sat there at my table, a striking figure—the delicate face, dignified
and sad, the silver hair, the long black soutane and the scarlet sash, in his
70

Hugh Gibson, A Journal from our Legation in Belgium (Garden City, New York,
1917), p. 78.
71
Chris Coppens, Mark Derez, and Jan Rogiers, Leuven University Library: 14252000 (Leuven, 2005), pp. 135-179.
72
Gibson, A Journal, pp. 154-155. The burning of Louvain in 1914 has been widely
written about by historians; see Barbara W.Tuchman, The Guns of August, Reprint, March
9, 1994 ed. (New York, 1962), pp. 311-324.
73
Paulin Ladeuze (1870-1940) was doctor and magister in theology at the Catholic
University of Louvain, where he taught patrology and New Testament exegesis from
1898 to 1900. In 1900 he, along with Albert Cauchie, established the Revue d’Histoire
Ecclésiastique. Ladeuze became Rector Magnificus of the Catholic University of Louvain
in 1909 and remained rector until his death in 1940. In 1929 Ladeuze was ordained
bishop. Leo Kenis, The Louvain Faculty of Theology in the Nineteenth Century. A
Bibliography of the Professors in Theology and Canon Law with Biographical Notes
(Leuven, 1994).
74
For the ambassador’s own recollections of these events, see Brand Whitlock,
Belgium Under the German Occupation: A Personal Narrative, 2 vols., vol. 1 (1919),
99-117. See also: Gibson,A Journal, p. 153.

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71

white hand a well-worn breviary. . . . Monseigneur described the experience. He told it calmly, logically, connectedly, his trained mind unfolding
events in orderly sequence: the sound of firing from Hérent, the sudden
uprising of the German soldiers, the murder, the lust, the loot, the fires, the
pillage, the evacuation and the destruction of the city, and all that.
The home of his father had been burned down and the home of his
brother; his friends and his colleagues had been murdered before his eyes,
and their bodies thrown into a cistern; long lines of his townspeople, confined in the railway-station, had been taken out and shot down; the church
of St. Peter was destroyed, the Hôtel de Ville—the finest example of late
Gothic extant—was doomed, and the Halles of the University had been
consumed. And he told it all calmly. But there in the Halles of the University
was the Library; its hundreds of thousands of volumes, its rare and ancient
manuscripts, its unique collection of incunabula—all had been burned
deliberately, to the last scrap. Monseigneur had reached this point in his
recital; he had begun to pronounce the word bibliotèque—he had said “La
biblio. . .” and then he stopped suddenly and bit his quivering lip.“La bib. . .”
he went on—and then, spreading his arms on the table before him, he
bowed his head upon them and wept aloud.75

When De Becker was eventually allowed back into Louvain, he
found his college intact. Not one to stand helpless in the midst of his
destroyed hometown, he headed a committee to tend to the material
wants of the survivors and returning refugees; the American College
became one of the city’s primary relief centers for the remainder of
the war. Six of his seminarians managed to return to the college, and
for them Monsignor Ladeuze officially reopened the ancient University
of Louvain, they being its only students for the 1914–1915 academic
year. The college served the university in another way: the medieval
statue of the Sedes Sapientiae, the very symbol of the university, as
well as the town’s most important reliquary, that holding the remains
of Blessed Margaret of Louvain, were housed in the college’s chapel
throughout the war years.76
With the end of the Great War in November of 1918, the question
of the continued existence of the American College arose.There were
serious issues of financing the college in the wake of the war, as well
as those that had always nipped at the heels of the institution in times
of crisis. Had it not outlived its missionary purpose? Could not
American seminaries form American priests better? If America needed
75
Whitlock, Belgium, pp. 104-105. Also see Coppens, Derez, and Rogiers, Leuven,
p. 158.
76
Cross and Zoeller,“The Story,” pp. 29-34.

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a seminary in Europe, was not the one in Rome enough? And more
lately, was not the academic quality of institutions like the Catholic
University of America now equal to that of the University of Louvain?
De Becker journeyed to America in 1917 to re-establish a board of
directors among the American bishops, reaffirm the college’s importance to the bishops, and round up support for his seminary’s continuation. De Becker succeeded admirably and upon his return set about
getting the buildings back in order and renovated where needed.
Evident in all this was a noticeable change in De Becker’s vision for
the college: from this point onward he would, of necessity, look primarily to America for his seminarians, postwar immigration rules having
changed in the United States, severely limiting the ability of many
European seminarians to immigrate legally. He chose a vice-rector
accordingly: an American from the Diocese of Providence, Charles
Curran. In November 1919, his new students began arriving: two from
Newark, sixteen from Hartford, and six Belgians, one of whom was a
prewar seminarian of the college. With these twenty-four men, the
American College began a new life in the postwar era. De Becker continued to appeal to the Church in America for students, outlining in
every way possible the unique advantages of study in Louvain, including the benefit of spending vacations in European countries, being
immersed in their cultures, and learning their languages.77
De Becker’s persistent efforts at recruitment were effective, for in
the following years enrollment increased gradually, giving the college
renewed stability; by 1930 and the golden anniversary of his ordination, De Becker had the satisfaction of counting eighty-six seminarians
filling his building.78 That same year he accepted his former vicerector, Pierre De Strycker,79 as his coadjutor rector; a year later, feeling
the weight of his increasing age and after thirty-three years of leadership, De Becker resigned his rectorship altogether, remaining in residence as rector-emeritus until his death in September 1936.80
Though a Louvanist by birth and a Roman by education, De Becker,
in his vocation as rector of the American College, became, in a
manner, an American in spirit. Shortly after his death, one of his former
77

Ibid., pp. 35-37.
Ibid., p. 39.
79
De Strycker’s Curriculum Vitae may be found in Collectanea Mechliniensia, vol. 34
(1949), 639.
80
De Strycker, pp. 6-11.
78

BY KEVIN A. CODD

73

students and at the time spiritual director in the college, Louis Smet,
wrote of him:
Although he never labored in America, he had a genuine love and admiration for our great country. He took a pardonable pride in being the Rector
of the American College, never tired of speaking about his journeys to
America, had Old Glory flying over the college on all solemn occasions.
(This reminds us that it was the American flag that saved the college from
destruction during the War.) All the alumni will remember with what zest
Monsignor De Becker used to sing “omnes in Americam,” the concluding
words of our College hymn each year at the eighth of December. He was an
American in voto!81

De Becker’s successor, Pierre De Strycker, when not serving the
American College as a professor or vice-rector,had served as rector of the
nearby Pope Adrian VI College. He had gained further stature in the years
after the Great War as the man most responsible for organizing Cardinal
Désiré Mercier’s82 triumphal tour of the United States at war’s end.83 The
rectorship of Pierre De Strycker was neither a long nor pleasant one.
Even as he was taking hold of the reins from De Becker, fearsome noise
was coming once again from Belgium’s neighbor to the east. The hot
breath of the Third Reich was first felt in the college itself in September
of 1938 when rumors of imminent war cut short the summer vacation of
the seminarians, forcing them to race back to Louvain. War itself was
delayed, and sixty-one seminarians began the new academic year. During
that year De Strycker managed to make additional improvements to the
college buildings and added a few amenities, but his work was cut short
as more and more students were called home. There were only thirtyeight students to open the 1939 academic year, but even they began to
dwindle as the weeks passed and the threat of war became ever more
81
Louis J. Smet, “Mgr. De Becker and the American College,” The American College
Bulletin, XXX, no. 1 (1937), 15.
82
Désiré J.Mercier (1851-1926) was ordained in 1874 and eight years later became
professor of philosophy at the University of Louvain; at the request of Pope Leo XIII, he
organized in Louvain the Higher Institute of Philosophy, which dedicated itself to the
study of St.Thomas Aquinas. He was appointed archbishop of Mechlin in 1906 and made
a cardinal in 1907. During World War I, Cardinal Mercier became the pre-eminent opponent to the German occupation of his land. See: John A. Gade, The Life of Cardinal
Mercier (New York, 1934). For more on Mercier’s opposition to the German occupation
of Belgium see, Désiré J. Mercier, Cardinal Mercier’s Own Story (New York, 1920).
83
Roger Aubert,“Cardinal Mercier’s Visit to America in the Autumn of 1919,” in Studies
in Catholic History: In Honor of John Tracy Ellis, ed. Nelson Minnich, Robert B. Eno, and
Robert Trisco (Wilmington, Delaware, 1985), p. 321. See also: Gade, Life of Mercier, pp.
212-222.

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serious. By Christmas the enrollment had shrunk to twenty, at which
point De Strycker judged the continuation of the college program no
longer viable; he announced to his students that the college would be
formally closed on Christmas day, 1939. Some of the twenty seminarians
still at the college upon its closure returned to the United States, while
others continued their studies in Rome, St. Brieuc, or Genoa.
De Strycker, his vice-rector, Harold Gonder, and a few others
remained in the college building, preparing it for the probable invasion
of Belgium by hiding valuables behind secret walls. On May 10, 1940,
the invasion began, and that same evening Louvain endured its first
bombardment of the new war. Gonder evacuated the next day while
De Strycker heroically vowed to remain in Louvain; by May 12 the
rector of the university, Honoré van Waeyenberg, advised De Strycker
to leave as well. The abject rector worked his way to Bordeaux and
finally caught from the port there the last ship to the United States,
where he remained in exile for the duration of the World War II. On
May 17 the new library of the university, built largely through
American generosity, was the target of a German incendiary bomb; the
library and all of its holdings, for the second time in less than fifty
years, burned, and its 900,000 volumes were lost.84
Van Waeyenberg kept the University of Louvain in operation despite
the occupation of the city and refused at every turn to co-operate with
the Nazis in their multiple demands to turn over all lists of students so
that they could be conscripted as laborers in the war effort. Van
Waeyenberg immediately began restoring the lost library, bringing
together collections from elsewhere and encouraging donations of
books from professors and other individuals and institutions, much of
which was placed in the halls of the American College where students
continued to access them throughout the war years.85 The college had
been protected until December 1940 from German occupation by a
large document from the American ambassador posted on the building
declaring the buildings to be the property of the American hierarchy;
after Germany declared war on the United States,the document was useless. German officials sought to occupy the space as housing for their
soldiers, but that was avoided through the intervention of the occupa84
Coppens, Derez, and Rogiers, Leuven, pp. 313-322. E. Lousse, The University of
Louvain during the Second World-War, trans.Th. Crowley (Bruges, 1946), pp. 10-13.
85
Cross and Zoeller,“The Story,” pp. 49-50. Coppens, Derez, and Rogiers, Leuven, pp.
327-328.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

75

tion force’s town major, who was sympathetic to the university’s need
for the buildings.86 Once again, the college buildings and its holdings
were largely unharmed during the various bombardments of the city.
Meanwhile, in New York, De Strycker worked to keep interest in the
American College alive and joined forces with Monsignor Fulton J.
Sheen, a noted alumnus of the university’s Institute of Philosophy, to
raise funds for the reconstruction of Louvain’s university library. Neither
enterprise found much success, and De Strycker began to lose enthusiasm for both projects, though even as late as January 1945, several
months after Belgium’s liberation,he wrote a circular letter to the alumni
of the college expressing his hope of reopening it.87 He returned to
Belgium in August 1945 and, after disembarking in Antwerp, immediately
went to visit his family, walking unexpectedly into the midst of a family
baptism to the surprise and delight of all.88 He then visited the American
College, finding it intact. He was pleased that it had had such an important role to play as the university’s library during the war years, but by
then, he no longer had the strength or vigor to pursue its reopening. He
expressed his opinion on the matter to a Louvain alumnus,Archbishop
John G. Murray of St. Paul, then serving as the Chairman of the Board of
Trustees, making it clear that he believed the American College had
finally outlived its usefulness.The Board of Trustees thereafter commissioned De Strycker to negotiate the definitive transfer of the college
property to the university; he retained his title as rector and remained in
residence in the college. His own condition seriously weakened, leading
to his death in July 1949 at sixty-nine years of age. For all practical purposes, the American College, at the age of ninety-two, died with him.
From September 1947, the property was used as a residence for university students,89 Canon Louis Janssens serving as rector.90
That the American seminary in Louvain might still be the “enlivening
thought” that it had been for Martin J. Spalding one hundred years
86

Cross and Zoeller,“The Story,” p. 54.
Ibid., 55.
88
Personal interview with Mr. Louis De Strycker, December 26, 2005, Brussels. Mr. De
Strycker, nephew of Pierre De Strycker, recalls the moment of his uncle’s arrival vividly.
89
Cross and Zoeller,“The Story,” pp. 55-57.
90
In the wake of the Second Vatican Council Janssens would come to be recognized
as the Louvain Faculty of Theology’s most significant moral theologian in recent times.
As such he influenced several generations of American Catholic pastors who studied in
Louvain. See Roger Burggraeve, “The Holistic Personalism of Professor Magister Louis
Janssens,” Louvain Studies, 27, no. 1 (2002).
87

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before, was about to be tested. The unhopeful conclusion that De
Strycker had forwarded to Archbishop Murray was still very much in
the air in 1949 when the question of reopening the college was again
broached among the American hierarchs.The matter was discussed at
the November 1949 meeting of the American bishops, and a committee
was formed, with Bishop Matthew F. Brady of Manchester as its chairman, to review the matter. Bishop Brady took his job seriously and commenced substantial communication with various parties concerning
the college’s future. He kept in regular contact with the rector magnificus of the university,Van Waeyenberg, as well as the Reverend David
M. Ellwood, secretary of the Alumni Association. Bishop Russell
McVinney of Providence, an alumnus himself, served on the committee
and became a formidable advocate for reopening the college. McVinney
prepared a sheet of “talking points” responding to possible objections
from other bishops; his first point took on the De Strycker issue:
I.

“Has it any usefulness now for the dioceses of the United States?”
—Monsignor de Strycker thought not—
Ans. 1. Msgr. de Strycker was an old, tired man when he said this.The
problems necessarily to be faced in reopening overwhelmed him.
2. Msgr. de Strycker was never over enthusiastic about the college,
though he had been vice-rector for a time and was the last rector.
3.There should be an American rector. It would make a big difference.

II. “The College has lost its initial usefulness,” wrote Msgr. de Strycker
before his death.
Ans.-—True, it was founded to supply priests for the American Missions.
But it has served another purpose almost entirely since the First World
War.
N.B.-The Councils of Baltimore recommended the American College,
Louvain, and urged Bishops to send promising students there as well as
to the American College in Rome and the University of Innsbruck.
III. “Most American Bishops judge it useless.”
Ans.—Q. E. D.Take a vote.91

The fact-finding committee reported back to the bishops in
November 1950 with a positive recommendation.The committee was
then authorized to take preliminary steps towards a reopening in
1952, steps that included sending to all the bishops of the United
States a request for information as to how many students they might
91

“Comments of Bishop McVinney on points contained in the letter of Cardinal Van
Roey to Cardinal Spellman,” copy,Archives of The American College, Louvain.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

77

be willing to send to Louvain. The circular letter was sent out in
October 1951; the responses came back with promises of eighty-one
seminarians.With this information in hand, the bishops finally took the
vote in November 1951; the result was a positive one. McVinney was
thereafter made chairman of the American College’s new Board of
Bishops; it came as no surprise that, under his influence, the committee should choose as the man responsible for bringing the American
College of Louvain back to life92 a priest of his own diocese, the
Reverend Thomas F. Maloney. He would be the first American to serve
as the college’s rector.
Maloney arrived in Louvain in April 1952 to begin preparations for
the official reopening of the American College at the beginning of the
1952-1953 academic year.93 The first new seminarian, James Chapman,
arrived from Dubuque on September 23, 1952, followed by fifty-three
others.94 Maloney worked hard to connect his new students with the
traditions of the past, celebrating anew the college’s patronal feasts,
hanging a portrait of De Becker in the dining room, singing again the
venerable college hymn, O Sodales, on feast days. The new students
endured privations due to plumbing problems, lack of recreational
areas, and inadequate library facilities, but the spirit of fraternity that
had been a hallmark of the college since its inception seemed strong
among them under Maloney’s care.95
At Mahoney’s urging the schola minor was reopened by the university for the seminarians, and by 1954 the publication of The
American College Bulletin had recommenced. To the readers of the
first issue of the resurrected Bulletin, Maloney wrote:
92
Cross and Zoeller, “The Story,” pp. 57-59. Also see Philip Dominic Irace, “The
Louvain American College: 1952-1974” (MA in Religious Studies, Katholieke Universiteit
te Leuven, 1974), p. 12.
93
Maloney’s arrival in Louvain in 1952 was rather floridly described five years later by
Joseph Coppens in these words:“Pushed by the will of success, by optimistic temper, by
the sense of endeavor and of confidence in Divine Providence, bright characteristics of
the American people, they dropped as by parachute into the still gloomy sky of partially
ruined Louvain, the new rector of the college, the today so deeply venerated Monsignor
Maloney.” Joseph Coppens, “Promotion de son Excellence Mgr Russel McVinney:
Allocution de M. le Chanoine J. Coppens,” Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia XIV (1958).
94
Cross and Zoeller,“The Story,” pp. 60-61.
95
As an example, the “Chronicles” entry for December 25, 1954, includes a reflection
on what makes the celebration of Christmas in the seminary so different from anywhere
else.The response:“it seems to be that most indefinable thing called a spirit of fraternal
union. . . .” Donald A. Panella,“Chronicles,” The American College Bulletin, XXXIV, no. 1
(1955).

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The reopening of the college has been a delicate task if only because of
the importance of calling back to life the spirit of the place, and reviving
old customs among young men of a different age and of new tastes.
....
You would almost expect to hear and see your own former classmates
among the throngs of students who crowd the college. You would find
them doing the very things done in our day: playing the games we played,
singing as we did, carrying on animated and profound discussions with an
earnestness all their own, practicing their foreign language acquisitions as
they walk the paths in the lower garden.96

Beginning in 1955, renovations to the building were undertaken in
preparation for the one-hundredth anniversary of the college’s foundation, coming up in 1957. Meanwhile, in the wake of the postwar
“vocations boom” in the United States, the student census rose in the
college; by the golden jubilee year, there were over one hundred
American seminarians in Louvain.97
Maloney’s celebration of the jubilee was a grand one, the highlight of
which was the academic session held in the University Halls, the same
ancient building that had housed the original university library until its
burning in August 1914. Van Waeyenberg welcomed two distinguished
guests and honorees to the proceedings, Russell J. McVinney, Bishop of
Providence, and Fulton J. Sheen,Auxiliary Bishop of New York, to whom
honorary degrees were awarded; McVinney was acknowledged for his
efforts to reopen the college in 1952 and Sheen for his evangelical work
in print, radio, and television media. In his response to the honor, Sheen
proclaimed:“When we look back over a life that is rather full, we recognize how much we owe to the good Lord.But,next to God,on this earth,
I owe what I am to the University of Louvain.”98
Maloney served as rector until January 1960, when it was
announced that he had been named auxiliary bishop of Providence.
Only two years after his return to Providence, in September 1962,
Maloney died.With Maloney’s departure from Louvain, the keys of the
college were handed to the Reverend Paul D. Riedl, a priest of the
Diocese of Springfield. If Maloney had to breathe new life into a mori96
Thomas F. Maloney,“The Rector’s Letter,” The American College Bulletin, XXXIII,
no. 1 (1954), 10.
97
Irace, p. 22.
98
Fulton J. Sheen, “Réponse de son Excellence Mgr Fulton Sheen,” Annua Nuntia
Lovaniensia, XIV, no. 1 (1958), 47.

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79

bund institution, Riedl had the even more difficult job of guiding it
through a decade marked by startling and oftentimes disorienting
reforms to the Church and seminary, upheaval and social revolution in
western societies, and the division of the Kingdom of Belgium and its
Catholic university over the country’s long-simmering “language wars.”
Riedl maintained the order and life of the college as it had been
under his predecessor for as long as it was reasonable to do so. With
the tectonic plates of culture and society moving under his feet, it was
not long before he had to take a new approach to his ministry in
Louvain. As perhaps a symbol or, better, a prophecy of what was to
come, one of his first major works was to replace in 1961 the traditional stained glass in the apse of the college chapel with brightly colored glass executed in a dramatically contemporary style.99
The opening of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962
marked a turning point in the life of the Church and, with it, in the life
of the Louvain seminary, as in every seminary around the world. For
the seminarians of Louvain, a unique and privileged window into the
proceedings that followed was made available. The council was an
event deeply influenced by the theologians of Louvain, due to the
extraordinary role given to the archbishop of Mechlin (Malines),
Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens,100 who was called upon to serve as one
of the council’s principal moderators. Suenens liberally used the theologians of Louvain in preparing and revising the council’s declarations, so much so that it was not a great exaggeration for some to claim
later that “the Second Vatican Council was the First Louvain
Council.”101 Since the professors of the seminarians of the American
99
The new glass was designed and executed by local artist, Roger Daniels of Hasselt.
The complete set of new windows for the chapel by the same artist was not completed
until 1970.
100
Leon Joseph Suenens (1904-1996), born in Ixelles, was ordained a priest in 1927
for the Archdiocese of Mechlin. He was appointed auxiliary bishop of the same archdiocese in 1945 and archbishop in 1961. In 1962 he was made a cardinal. He retired from
the archbishopric in 1979 and died in 1996. See: Leon-Joseph Suenens, Memories and
Hopes, trans. Elena French (Dublin, 1992); http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/
bsuenens.html, February 6, 2006.
101
“. . . non sans exagération métonymique, de se référer au Concilium Vaticanum
Secundum comme au Concilium Lovaniense Primum.” M. Sabbe,“Les Archives de Vatican
II à la Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,” in Sources locales de Vatican II, ed. J. Grootaers
and Cl. Soetens (Leuven, 1990), p. 39. Among the Louvain professors involved in the
council cited by Sabbe are: L. Cerfaux, Ph. Delhaye, A. Dondeyne,V. Heylen, Ch. Moeller,
G. Philips, G.Thils, and W. Onclin.

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College were often traveling to Rome as periti or to offer counsel to
Suenens, those same seminarians found themselves in the privileged
position of receiving first-hand, insider reports on the work of the
council fathers. Thus, the seminarians of the American College were
among the first to be “formed” by the theological and pastoral directions being taken by the council fathers.
By 1964 the aggiornamento of the council was having its effect in
Riedl’s seminary. Tensions between those looking forward to liberalization of the house rule and those who found change frightening
made their way even into the pages of the usually discrete American
College Bulletin.102 Riedl had to find new ways to dialogue with his
seminarians, involving them more in decision-making and leading less
autocratically. Riedl was, for the most part, given high marks for his
wise and attentive handling of the transitions.
In October 1965, a decree particularly pertaining to seminary formation, Optatam Totius, was approved by the council fathers; the document stressed the importance, among other things, of improved pastoral formation for seminarians.103 To fulfill that mandate Riedl took
advantage of a request by Cardinal Suenens, the task of supplying a
pastor to minister to a newly founded English-speaking parish in the
Brussels area. With the liturgy quickly moving into the vernacular,
Anglophones living in the cosmopolitan capital found themselves
without the opportunity to participate in the “new Mass” in their own
language.The new parish was named “Our Lady of Mercy,”and the vicerector of the American College, the Reverend Albion Bulger, was named
its founding pastor. It quickly became a center for the Louvain seminarians to be trained pastorally in a parish setting.The chaplaincies of
nearby military bases offered similar opportunities for the seminarians,
but Our Lady of Mercy Parish was an especially important venue for
the seminarians’ pastoral formation as it eventually became the testing
102
The June 1965 issue of The American College Bulletin is, perhaps, where the tensions become most visible to today’s historian.The first three articles are all reflections
on the new conciliar decrees and their pastoral applications, while the introduction to
the issue notes that a “lack of balance” in the process of “synthesizing and compromising” had resulted in “an individualism, a lowering of our esprit de corps.”This in turn had
led to the development of a new house rule, which, in turn, led to the development of
unspecified “tensions.” The American College Bulletin, XLIV, no. 1 (1965).
103
Mathijs Lamberigts,“Optatam Totius—The Decree on Priestly Formation: A Short
Survey of its History at the Second Vatican Council,” Louvain Studies, 30, no. 1-2 (2005).
See also White, Diocesan Seminary, pp. 409-412.

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81

ground, and the seminarians of the American College the testers, of
new catechetical methodologies being pioneered by the Catholic
University of Louvain’s lecturer in pastoral catechetics, Dr. Christiane
Brusselmans.104 Those methodologies eventually found their way into
parishes throughout the United States and the English-speaking world,
influencing several generations of catechists and Catholic children.
Brusselmans would later become a key figure, along with some of her
former American College students, in developing practical methodologies for implementing the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA),
again testing them in the college and at Our Lady of Mercy.
The renewed interest in the historical and scriptural foundations of
theological studies that was promoted by the council found particular
expression in the establishment of a scholarly journal by a number of
the college’s seminarians in 1967, Louvain Studies. The journal quickly
became a forum for Louvain’s theologians and others to publish their
research in English, making it available to a world beyond the FrenchDutch- and German-language communities that theretofore had been
their usual audiences.
A particularly troubling challenge faced by Riedl was taking shape
in the streets of Louvain just outside the gates of the college.The longsimmering resentments over language issues in Belgium and, in particular, in the Catholic University of Louvain, broke out into passionate
demonstrations and student riots.The so-called “language wars” forced
on the university a division into two autonomous institutions, one
French-speaking, the other Dutch-speaking. Riedl decided early on that
it was not his or his college’s fight and remained resolutely neutral
throughout. Nevertheless, the effects of the division of the city and university could not but be felt deeply within the American College.The
“Flemish university” in Leuven began to offer many of its academic
programs in English, including the entire course of studies in theology,
philosophy, and canon law. The “French university,” in its newly constructed village, Louvain-la-Neuve, or “The New Louvain,” some twentyfive kilometers to the south, taught only in French. Riedl and his successors strictly enforced the college’s neutrality, allowing any American
College seminarian or his bishop to choose between the two, and for
many years thereafter some seminarians remained in Leuven while
others traveled to Louvain-la-Neuve for daily classes. Under the new
104

Susan K. Roll and Thomas P. Ivory,“‘It is a joy for me to do it’: An Appreciation of
Christiane Brusselmans,” Louvain Studies, 17, no. 1 (1992).

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THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF LOUVAIN

regime, no one seminarian could have full access to all the academic
resources formerly available to all. The two academic traditions that
developed in the separated universities, nevertheless, lived together
rather commodiously within the college, perhaps one of the few
places in Belgium where such was possible.
The decade of the seventies welcomed a new rector, the Reverend
Clement E. Pribil, who served in the position for only two years.
Desiring to be an interim rector, in January 1972 Pribil handed over
responsibility to his successor, a young priest of the Diocese of
Providence and a professor of New Testament studies at the university,
the Reverend Raymond F. Collins.105 Collins divided his time and his
considerable energy between his responsibilities at the Faculty of
Theology and those of the rectorship.The challenges of sorting out the
proper manner to form young men for the priesthood in the postVatican II era remained as more and more marks of former times were
left behind, including use of clerical clothing and titles such as “Father”
in the house. Collins was credited particularly with strengthening the
college’s ties to the university and expanding the pastoral opportunities available to the seminarians under his care.106
With the use of English in the Leuven university, it became more
common for young priests pursuing higher degrees in theology, canon
law, and philosophy to take up residence in the American College. No
longer limited to seminarians, the character of the community began to
change, as did the college’s sense of its mission. More of these priests
came from English-speaking nations other than the United States, giving
the house once again a more international character. In 1975 a monthlong summer institute in theological studies was initiated under
Collins’s rectorship and continues to this day; though initially designed
for priests looking for theological renewal, it was later opened to all religious and laity. Finally, priests wishing to take semester or yearlong sabbatical programs began to join the college community on an increasingly regular basis. As it moved through the seventies, the American
College became more than a seminary; it was evolving into a house of
studies, offering a variety of academic and renewal opportunities that
would benefit the mission of the Church in many corners of the world
even as it guarded the seminary program as the core of its ministry.
105
Joseph A. Selling, “Raymond F. Collins: U.S.A.-K.U.L.-C.U.A.,” Louvain Studies, 20,
no. 2-3 (1995).
106
Ibid., p. 105.

BY KEVIN A. CODD

83

Collins’s years as rector came to an end in the summer of 1978. By
then, there was a sense that the rector’s position, like that of most pastors, should have a set term. Five years became the norm, and with that,
a series of rectors followed in rather rapid succession: the Reverend
William Graytak of the Diocese of Helena, the Reverend John Costanza
of the Diocese of Pueblo, Reverend Monsignor Thomas Ivory of the
Archdiocese of Newark, the Reverend Melvin T. Long of the Diocese of
Salinas, the Reverend David E.Windsor, C.M., and presently this author,
the Reverend Kevin A. Codd of the Diocese of Spokane.With the lack of
temporal distance from these rectorates to provide fitting historical perspective, it is best to draw to a close this survey of the history of the
American College as it now celebrates the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of its foundation. Since its opening, the American College has provided to the church in America almost two thousand missionaries, professors, pastors, lay leaders, and bishops. “A hundred young men
educated at Louvain for the American missions! Is not the thought
enlivening?”107 wrote Martin J. Spalding in 1853; his vision has been fulfilled twenty times over in the past century and a half.

107
Spalding, Life of M. J. Spalding, p. 162. See also: Sauter, American College, pp.
17-18.

REVIEW ARTICLE
PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”
IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
BY
WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.*
Les Prêtres des montagnes; La vie, la mort, la foi dans les Pyrénées centrales
sous l’Ancien Régime (Val d’Aran et diocèse de Comminges). By Serge
Brunet. (Aspet: Universatim Pyrégraph. 2001. Pp. 863.)
Clergés, Communautés et Familles des Montagnes d’Europe; Actes du colloque “Religion et montagnes,” Tarbes, 30 mai-2 juin 2002. Edited by
Serge Brunet and Nicole Lemaître. [Histoire Moderne 50, Université Paris I
Panthéon-Sorbonne.] (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. 2005. Pp. 421.)
Montagnes sacrées d’Europe; Actes du colloque “Religion et montagnes,”
Tarbes, 30 mai-2 juin 2002. Edited by Serge Brunet, Dominique Julia and
Nicole Lemaître. [Histoire Moderne 49, Université Paris I PanthéonSorbonne.] (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. 2005. Pp. 427.)
Defining the Holy; Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Edited by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton. (Aldershot, Hants., and
Burlington,Vermont:Ashgate. 2005. Pp. 345.)
Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Will Coster and Andrew
Spicer. (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. 350)

Mountains and Priests
Serge Brunet’s monumental Les Prêtres des montagnes is a study of customary religious practice and institutions in the Val d’Aran in the Pyrenees and
of diocesan attempts to bring this high, isolated valley to heel. Formed by the
river Bavarthès, the Val d’Aran rises from an altitude of 600m at the frontier
with France to peaks as high as 2500m; in a space of 633 km2 there are thirty
villages or hamlets with a total population in the early modern period of about
6000 persons. For centuries part of Spain but in a French diocese, the valley
was able to garner considerable ecclesiastical independence by playing off the
two jurisdictions.The book is a fascinating case study of an unusual prolonga*Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.The author is grateful for suggestions from a number of
readers, acknowledged in the notes, and the especially careful perusal by Lisa Godson.

84

BY WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

85

tion of custom in the face of the uniformizing forces of modern nation states
and the Council of Trent.
Following Marc Bloch, Brunet practices a “regressive history” which shows
“how much religion has left its clues which, consciously or not, the historian
follows up, going back to the source” (p. 59). He does so, in the words of the
historian Bartolomé Bennassar, in an exercise of “total history,” starting from
architecture, art, kinship, patterns of inheritance, family names, place names
and travelers’ reports, as well as a wide range of ecclesiastical, civil, military and
administrative documents at the local, regional, and national level both in
France and Spain.
For virtually every topic Brunet compares his findings (on vocations,
reform, education, migration of priests, etc.) with other valleys in the diocese
of Comminges, valleys in neighboring dioceses, and those of other studies of
the Catalan valleys of Àneu and Boí, Andorra, Brittany, Savoy, cities of
Languedoc, and Paris.The comparisons reveal great variation, and sometimes it
is hard to discern the landscape in the thicket of detail.
The result is a book that, well, sprawls.The pilgrim reader has to keep an
eye on the compass as the author goes on major, if rewarding, detours.Topics
are scattered through the 863-page work (itself only part of his unpublished
four-volume thesis). There are statistics on everything countable (those who
choose to wade through them should bring hip boots) and a profusion of photographs, maps, and charts. All in all, this reader felt quite at home.
From the fourteenth until the eighteenth century, the valley pretty much
had its way. Each new bishop had to come and confirm the valley’s privileges
“on knees, with head bowed, before representatives of valley clergy and laity,
his right hand on the holy scriptures” (p. 89), then add his signature to that of
his predecessors on the original 1372 parchment. These privileges, incremented by customary accretion, included valley retention of all tithes (half for
the priests, half for the parish expenses), parish council presentation of
curates, the figure of a local archdeacon with bishop-like judicial authority
who could be appealed only to the archdiocese or the pope, and the limitation
of episcopal visits (with no retinue) to once every seven years at most. On the
Spanish side, the Aranese had the right to apply for benefices anywhere in
Spain, and a number held them in Catalonia and Aragon.
The apogee of valley religious autonomy and prosperity came in sixteenth
century during French religious wars, when Aran was pampered by Philip II as
a bulwark of Catholicism with privileges for cross-border trading, especially of
mules to Spain and horses and military supplies to the French Ligue. Alone
among Spaniards Aranese traders had the right to circulate throughout
Gascony. Church constructions, furnishings, and art from this time testify to
the valley’s wealth.

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

The Catholic Reformation in the diocese of Comminges, as elsewhere in
much of France, was put off until the end of the sixteenth century by religious
struggle. In Aran it had to wait much longer, with the first inroads made by
Jesuits missionaries, who in the 1640’s catalyzed reconciliations within and
between parishes. But despite the concerted efforts of one bishop after
another in the seventeenth century the Aranese were generally able to retrofit
reforms to their own institutions.
Its plethora of peasant clerics were active as armed militia in the revolt of
the Catalans, and later in the battles in and around Aran in the War of
Succession (1701-1715) against the troops of Spain’s Bourbon king. Around
1715 a French military officer reported:
There are 360 clerics, most of whom have no scruples about using guns. It is
scarcely believable that there could be so many clergy in such a small territory
where there is not even a [collegiate church] chapter. The tiniest village has
seven or eight, most of whom would have trouble getting by if they did not cut
wood for sale or work the land. They are poorly dressed and almost all wear
wooden shoes (p. 369).

But by this time the situation of the clergy was in decline.The decisive blow
to Aran’s privileges came when the bishop of Comminges won support for
reform in the valley from the French Bourbon Philip V of Spain through the
king’s Jesuit confessor, after the Aranese had made strategic mistakes by throwing their lot in, first, with autonomy for Catalonia, and then, with the wrong
contender for the Spanish throne.
In 1790 the diocese of Comminges was abolished, and in 1804 the Val
d’Aran became part of the diocese of Urgell. Since 1814 the valley has been
both part of Spain and a Spanish diocese, and its days of playing diocese and
nation against each other are long over. At present there are only five priests
in the valley, only one of whom, retired, is native born. A friend from the adjacent valley of Boí who attended the Urgell seminary in the 1960’s tells me that
he had never heard anything special about the Aran clergy or their history.
Lesser clergy like coadjutants and those without parish duties, who have
left little trace in parish records, are virtually invisible in ecclesiastical history,
and Brunet’s book is largely dedicated to them, revealing their intense and
complex participation in community and spiritual life.
In 1715 the valley’s 360 clerics (of whom about 140 were priests) represented about 7% of the population.This percentage (which was higher still in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was high for the zone; at the end of
the Old Regime the valley’s priests comprised 29% of those of the diocese,
though the valley comprised 5% at most of the diocesan population. As in
much of the Pyrenees, the production of priests was an integral part of a
strong house system, whereby only one son inherited the house and the land,

BY WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

87

and the houses that could, invested in land-secured chaplaincies that maintained generation after generation of junior sons.
The clerics were organized on a village or village-group level in corporations called taulas or mesaus (<Latin mensa), a kind of cooperative that held
land, loaned money, and conjured storms. Each had its meeting house, which
also served as a kind of dinner club and storehouse for the priests, and the
whole troop of them would go for dinner whenever there was a death or
anniversary. Their chief income was from death Masses, which they administered collectively, as villages and valleys administered collectively their mountain pastures. A kind of feral clergy, they wore lay garb, and often had wives or
women.They were educated by apprenticeship, often by clerical uncles in village schools funded by pious bequests. In early modern Aran, priests were generally the only literate people and served as notaries.
The gradual effect of concentrated effort by the Comminges bishops over
the seventeenth century was to enforce the residence of rectors in diocesan
parishes and insist on stays in the seminary for new ordinations,“a situation in
which the parish priest was absent and native priests were stable [making]
way to one in which rectors were stable and native priests actively circulated”
(p. 206). The process was slow, however. A rudimentary seminary (run by
Jesuits) did not open until 1712, and the first students from Aran arrived three
years later.
The new system, which prioritized formal education in order to produce
priests or notaries, meant that by the mid-eighteenth century families invested
less in death Masses to endow family clergymen and more in schools and seminary. Many of the “perpetual” Masses lapsed or petered out as their endowments became devalued. Lay persons took over from priests as notaries and
town secretaries. In 1731, in a crippling blow to the lesser clergy, all death
Masses were reassigned from the mesaus to the curate. In 1750 a decree of
Spain’s Fernando VI reduced the interest on the land-secured loans that were
the basis for the system (already reduced by bishops from 81/3% to 5% in the
sixteenth century) from 5% to 3%. Brunet suggests that few new chaplaincies
were founded, not because of a change in “religious mentality,” but because
they no longer served their purpose of endowing native clergy, many of whom
were no longer in the valley. Nevertheless, some mesaus and their dinners persisted into the 1790’s.
The Aran parishioners, on the occasion of episcopal visits, seem to have
protected their clergy. But the diocese made every effort to eliminate priests
who drank too much, wore lay clothes, bore arms, or lived with women.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Brunet maintains, French
dioceses chose to have fewer, but higher-quality priests, while Spanish ones
had begun their reforms earlier, and did so by upgrading the priests they had.
The result was that in this period numbers of Spanish priests continued to
accumulate, while there is a dip in the number of French secular clergy. In fact,

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

many of the poorer Aran priests started migrating in the winters to Spain,
where they survived by begging. Philip V, when he rejected the appeal of the
valley’s notables against their bishop’s reform, did so in part, he said, because
of “the multiplicity of priests . . . who since they do not have enough to live on
in the valley, become vagabonds and dishonor their condition by asking for
alms” (p. 407).
The last 300 pages of the book contain a historical ethnography of the
“home priests”—their evolution from the married priests of the high Middle
Ages in the high valleys of the Pyrenees; their involvement as valley government leaders; their exclusion from patrimonies; their role as spiritual leaders
of families as godparents; their tower or section of the stem household known
as the “abbey”; their communal refectory and its use as a tithe storage deposit,
storm lookout, and conjuring post; and their function as record keepers, advisors, and notaries.
As in the rest of the work, these chapters are peppered with surprises.The
home priest served as godparent for the children of the inheritor, not of other
non-inheriting siblings. Meals were a kind of money, and priests who were
remiss were penalized by the mesaus by having to provide a certain number
of meals. The physical presence of tithe goods from the community in the
mesaus headquarters seemed to give spiritual force to the storm conjuring
performed there. Households grouped land parcels with liens for Mass foundations, and the wheat (or hay fed to animals) from that land went to feed the
priests for the funeral meals. Funeral banquets also provided a community
audience for the reading of wills. Feeding the dead with offerings was in some
places considered the feeding of fairies, in others a way to feed the poor.
Brunet lays out the economic organization of mesaus for death masses in
terms of different kinds of loans secured by land; the mesaus as a kind of bank,
with loans and entailed lands as currency; and how these loans were eventually
switched over to the fabrics of the parish churches, which themselves became
detached from community control. Finally, he examines wills, death rituals,
burial, death banquets and offerings, and the spaces of the dead. The entire
system served the stem houses.The houses made foundations from which the
priests lived; the priests in turn prayed for the household and community dead,
provided credit, helped the household to accumulate capital goods, and, as
executors of wills, guided transitions from one generation to another.
Brunet is entitled to be forgiven for the rather strange first chapter, in
which he attempts a kind of atemporal synthesis of Aranese cosmology that
associates carnival figures with the dead, the dead with Moors and fairies, and
the devil with the high peaks. Unlike the documentary rigor of the rest of the
book, this chapter is a fanciful mix of present-day usage, nineteenth-century
folklore, vocabulary, and place names, with evidence from elsewhere adduced
when it fits. Brunet here directly cites no living persons to support his syn-

BY WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

89

thesis.1 While some of what he suggests is in keeping with highly cathected
notions of some older rural Basques in regard to certain mountains,2 it does
not fit this reader’s experience with acquaintances in the eastern Pyrenees or
the Cantabrian mountains, who tend to be quite matter of fact about their environment.The author’s identification of the dead with the Moors in particular
required more evidence for this reader.
It is churlish to ask for even more information and comparisons, but once
one enters in the dynamic of learning about everything, a kind of intellectual
gluttony takes over.The Val d’Aran Brunet describes fits well Eric Wolf’s notion
of a “closed corporate community.”3 In the high Pyrenees this place-corporateness is broadened to the valley level and exacerbated and concentrated by
topography. The subject begs for more comparison with the Spanish side.
Brunet is keyed into Catalan scholarship, but over the border from Aran in
Aragon is the greatest concentration in all of Spain of district shrines visited by
villages from surrounding villages, which reflects intensely and cooperatively
developed valley identities.4 Some of the idiosyncrasies of Aran compared the
rest of the diocese of Comminges, may be differences between Spain, or
Aragon, and France, or Gascony. The Aranese carnival, for instance, shares
1

His article “Le carneval en Pays de Luchon, 1880-1950” in Folklore, revue d’ethnographie méridionale, 36: 190-191 (1983), 57, however, includes ample oral sources.
Brunet has two more historical works in press: Relation de la Mission des Pyrénées
(1635-1649). Jean Forcaud, jésuite, et la montagne, text translated, annotated, and presented by Serge Brunet with the participation of Paul Fave (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S);
and “De l’Espagnol dedans le ventre!” Les catholiques du Sud-Ouest de la France face
à la Réforme (vers 1540-1589) (Paris: Honoré Champion) based on the archives of
Simancas.
2
See José Miguel de Barandiarán, Mitología Vasca, 5th ed. (San Sebastián: Txertoa,
1983), and Sandra Ott, “La Montagne and ‘The Old Religious’ in a French Basque
Mountain Commune,” Montagnes sacrées d’Europe (hereafter cited as MSE), pp. 357360.
3
Eric R. Wolf, “Closed Corporate Communities in Mesoamerica and Java,”
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 13 (1957), 1–18; his “The Vicissitudes of the
Closed Corporate Peasant Community,” American Ethnologist, 13 (May, 1986), 325-329;
and specifically for mountain border Europe, John W. Cole and Eric R.Wolf, The Hidden
Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000).
4
See José C. Lisón Arcal, Cultural e identidad en la provincia de Huesca: Una perspectiva desde la antropología social (Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada,
1986), and Enrique Satué Oliván, Religiosidad popular y romerías en el Pirineo
(Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses, 1991). See also, for other matters María
Tausiet, Ponzoña en los ojos: Brujería y superstición en Aragón en el siglo XVI
(Zaragoza: Institución “Fernando el Católico,” Diputación de Zaragoza, 2000). Marc
Salvan-Guillotin, in the MSE volume reviewed below, demonstrates the close artistic
connections between the Aragonese and Gascon sides of the Pyrenees in the sixteenth
century,“Le décor peint de l’église San-Juan-Bautista de San-Juan de Toledo de la Nata et
ses équivalents pyrénéens,” MSE, 161-191.

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

aspects of others in Spain.5 He would surely also find use for works on death
and funeral customs in Spain, and for Peter Sahlins’ history of the SpanishFrench border in Cerdanya.6
This said, this reader has no doubt Brunet’s work will stimulate new lines
of research for Spain, especially on clerical corporations and vocations. In
Spain, clergy in many larger towns were organized in formal corporations
known variously as cabildos de clérigos (for example,Almazán,Atienza, Ávila,
Béjar, Guadalajara, Madrid, Molina de Aragón, Priego in Cuenca), cofradías de
clérigos, or universidades de clérigos. One author refers to these corporations
as “cabildos menores” to distinguish them from cathedral and collegiate chapters.7 Some of these groups, at least, owned property (including a house where
they met), had special privileges, and made loans. James Melvin of the
University of Pennsylvania is researching these cabildos for his thesis. He
kindly informs me that the statutes of those in Ávila “suggest that the groups
functioned as both trade organizations that regulated clerical comportment,
adjudicated disputes between clergy over tithes, wedding stipends, etc., and
likewise provided material and spiritual assistance to members.”8 That of
Priego stated in 1600 that it “was founded not so much for wealthy priests as
for the mercenary and poor ones.”9 José Sánchez Herrero writes, referring to

5

Julio Caro Baroja, El carnaval (análisis histórico-cultural) (Madrid:Taurus, 1965);
Josefina Roma Riu, Aragón y el carnaval (Zaragoza: Guara, 1980); Juan Garmendia
Larrañaga, Carnaval en Navarra (San Sebastian: Haranburu, 1984); Kepa Fernández de
Larrinoa, Mujer, ritual y fiesta: Género, antropología y teatro de carnaval en el valle
de Soule (Pamplona: Pamiela, 1997); and slightly farther afield, William A. Christian,
Trovas y comparsas del Alto Nansa (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 1998).
6
María Cátedra, This World, Other Worlds: Sickness, Suicide, Death, and the Afterlife
among the Vaqueiros de Alzada of Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
which makes ample use of oral testimony in its construction of a cosmology; William
Douglass, Death in Murelaga: Funerary Ritual in a Spanish Basque village (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1969); Ritos funerarios en Vasconía [Atlas etnográfico
de Vasconía, Vol. X] (Bilbao: Etniker Euskalerria, 1995) [846pp.]; Josetxu Martínez
Montoya, Pueblos, Ritos y montañas: Prácticas vecinales y religiosas en el tiempo y en
el espacio de la comunidad rural (Valle de Arana-Alava-Euskal Herria): Ensayo
antropológico (Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), pp. 109-118; Peter Sahlins,
Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989).
7
María del Carmen Martín Martín, Dos ejemplos de Cabildos menores en la tierra de
Béjar : La Universidad de Clérigos de la Villa y el Cabildo de clérigos del Cuarto de
Arriba (Béjar: Centro de Estudios Bejaranos, 2002).
8
Personal communication; documents in Tomás Sobrino Chomón, Documentos de
antiguos cabildos, cofradías y hermandades abulenses (Ávila: Institución Gran Duque
de Alba y Caja de Ahorros de Ávila, 1988).
9
Sara T. Nalle,“Inquisitors, Priests, and the People During the Catholic Reformation in
Spain,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, XVIII (1987), 574. I am grateful to Dr. Nalle for
this reference.

BY WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

91

the dioceses of the kingdom of León in the late Middle Ages, that those brotherhoods of clergy “that included all kinds of clerics were mainly dedicated,
whether by the intention of their founders or as the result of their evolution
over time, to the celebration of Masses for the dead.”10 The Spanish cabildos
came in a great variety of forms, some open, some closed. As far as this reader
knows, the subject is not well studied.
Brunet’s book has 550 pages of text (with many photographs, maps, graphs,
and diagrams interspersed throughout), 172 pages of notes, 28 pages of appendices, a 9-page glossary (though some terms in the text are neither in the glossary nor standard dictionaries), a 17-page bibliography, and a 46-page index.
This reader came away from this exuberance energized by how much remains
to be learned, and how much fun it can be to learn it.
Brunet and other scholars alert to the dynamics of local variation organized
a conference in Tarbes in May 2002 to explore how themes that arose in his
study might play out in other areas, especially mountain areas of the Pyrenees,
the Alps, and the Massif central. The papers have been published by the
Sorbonne in two separate books.
Compared with the detail and bulk of Brunet’s information, that of Clergés,
Communautés et Familles des Montagnes d’Europe,11 in thirty twelve-page
chapters, comes in less detail and smaller portions. But many of the chapters
are substantial and open fresh lines of inquiry. Most deal with areas of France,
three with Spain, two each with Andorra and Switzerland, and one each with
Portugal, the Italian Alps, and Transylvania. Five of the papers deal with late
antique or medieval periods, the vast majority with the early modern period,
and two with the twentieth century.The papers are arranged in five sections—
Clerics and their Families; Clerics and Community Identities; Services to or
Control of Communities?; Mountains as Refuges, Mountains to be
Christianized; and The Era of Religious Competition. But the great variety of
places and periods within each section means that reading the volume sequentially was like a steeplechase.
Building on Timothy Tackett’s work on recruitment of priests,12 the authors
examine family inheritance structures to explain the disproportionate origin
of priests in some mountain zones, including systems that reserve positions for
family members or pass them on from one to another. They suggest that the
imbrication of clergy in local society before Trent, due to the patronage of
parish posts and local rights to tithes, local clerical sources of credit, and
10

José Sánchez Herrero, Las diócesis del Reino de León, siglos XIV y XV (León:
Centro de Estudios e investigaciones “San Isidro,” 1978), p. 389.
11
Hereafter cited as CCF.
12
Timothy Tackett, Priests and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France. A Social and
Political Study of the Curés in a Diocese of Dauphiné, 1750-1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

priests as notaries, continues after the Catholic Reformation in new and ingenious ways. In his introduction, Brunet suggests that diocesan correctives tend
to reach the mountains later and mountain communities can be particularly
resistant to them.
For this reader many essays were illuminating. One learns how families in
Andorra from the tenth to the fourteenth century by founding chapels spun
off clerical posts for younger sons and reinforced the position of the single
inheritor;13 a similar system, perhaps without the physical chapels, seemed to
hold in the Gévaudan (now Lozère, roughly), where at the end of the fourteenth century almost one out of five persons who made wills endowed clerical posts for family members and one out of ten benefices studied for the fifteenth century were handed down from one relative to another by the system
of resignatio in favorem.14
In Val d’Aran the community and the parish were so intertwined that the
priest notary kept the parish accounts and the village accounts in the same
book, one starting from the front, one from the back. Consuetes of communities in Andorra show a similarly interlocked administration of parish and community property.15 The early modern period witnessed a concerted attempt on
the part of dioceses to reduce community control over parishes through
inspections of parish accounts, prohibition of government meetings in
churches, etc.16 For Corsica Michel Casta addresses the effort, fairly general
throughout contemporary Catholic Europe, of bishops to avoid placing parish
priests in their home villages.17 Breaking that centuries-old link has not been
easy, as it addresses the heart of the issues that Brunet is raising, the maintenance of local usage and custom. It appears to have been harder to do in
mountain zones, because fewer outside clergy were eager to go there, and
closed mountain communities were less willing to have them. While some
mountain regions export priests, few are able to attract them.
13

Roland Viader,“Le clergé dans la société andorrane (Xe-XIVe siècle)” CCF, pp. 23-34,
based on documents transcribed by Cebrià Baraut.
14
Philippe Maurice,“Famille et clergé en Gévaudan à la fin du Moyen Âge,” CCF, pp.
35-45.The Gévaudan continued as a reservoir of priests; the diocese of Mende sent a disproportionate number of students to the French seminary founded in Rome in 1853,
leading to a privileged connection and a reputation for the mountain zone as a bulwark
of faith against modernism. Patrick Cabanel,“Une foi de granit: les montagnes romaines
du XIXe siècle,” CCF, pp. 331-342. The author’s Cadets de Dieu; Familles, vocations et
migrations religieuses en Gévaudan (XVIIIe-XXe siècle) (Paris: CNRS, 1997), is frequently
cited in the book.
15
Martina Camiade, “Relations entre la paroisse et la communauté d’habitants en
Andorre, aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, d’après les consuetes,” CCF, pp. 125-136.
16
Joaquim M. Puigvert i Solà, “L’histoire sociale de la paroisse de montagne en
Catalogne (XVIIe-XIXe siècle),” CCF, pp. 201-208.
17
Michel Casta,“Les carrières sacerdotales dans les paroisses de la montagne corse à
la fin du XIXe siècle,” CCF, pp. 149-161.

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93

Mountain communities could make good use of clerical outsiders, as with
Jesuit missionaries in the Pyrenees.In the sixteenth-century episcopal territory of
Trent, where communities had far less autonomy, the key usefulness to communities of the parish priest, often an outsider, was in servicing the dead and dying
and pacifying disputes through the sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist;
but his status was ambiguous, and village complaints during visitations show him
in an uneasy position between leader and employee of his parishioners.18
Only one contribution, alas, had to do with communities of priests.
Stéphane Gomis asserts that communitarian native-son priests (“filleuls et
communalistes”) were organized right across France from the Jura to the
Pyrenees, and they sang canonical hours in churches, performed anniversary
Masses, elected officials, and distributed revenues. They held common property, but did not usually live together.Those in the diocese of Clermont, at least,
also ran schools and hospitals.19
New doctrines, at least initially, must break the link between locality and
religion. Cathars,Waldensians, and Calvinists arrived from cities and then over
time became localized; in this process mountains came to serve as hideouts or
redoubts for their perpetuation among the non-elite, sometimes long after
elites had reverted to Catholicism. As with the Val d’Aran, religious exceptionalism seems to thrive in mountains that are also borders—whether between
nations, dioceses, or both.20 But Catharism held out the longest in the
Pyrenees, one contributor suggests, merely because it was the last place that
the inquisitor bishops got to.21 For new doctrines this process of localization
is a reverse, in a way, of the delocalizing effort Brunet describes. In parts of
Protestant Switzerland it was urban ministers assigned from Zurich who in the
sixteenth century applied outside doctrines and norms; by the eighteenth century, with more local candidates available, the ministers were locally born, tied
in to family networks, and sympathetic to local customs.22
Two of the most interesting contributions regard regions in which, unlike
the Val d’Aran, Protestants and Catholics lived side by side. Robert Sauzet
describes the great variety in religious coexistence in the Cévennes: some
18

Cecilia Nubiola, “Suppliques et requêtes religieuses du clergé, des fidèles et des
communautés rurales au prince-évêque de Trente (XVIe siècle),” CCF, pp. 101-109; ClaudeMarie Robion, “‘Indes pyrénéenes’. Les communautés montagnardes vues par les missionnaires jésuites au XVIIe siècle,” CCF, pp. 293-304.
19
Stéphane Gomis, “Enseignement et assistance. L’action de prêtres communalistes
dans le diocèse de Clermont sous l’Ancien Régime,” CCF, pp. 177-187.
20
Gabriel Audisio, “La montagne: un refuge pour les vaudois?” CCF, pp. 23-242; Joël
Fouilleron,“La montagne cantalienne et les morsures des déviances religieuses (XVIe-XXe
siècle),” CCF, pp. 261-280.
21
Pilar Jiménez,“Y a-t-il eu un catharisme des montagnes?” CCF, pp. 223-235.
22
Anne-Lise Head-König, “État protestant, clergé de montagne et encadrement des
paroissiens dans la Suisse du XVIIIe siècle,” CCF, pp. 189-199.

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

towns with harmonious interaction, mixed marriages and shared shrines; and
some identical pairs of villages choosing opposing confessions seemingly out
of prior rivalry. Overall there was a process of “confessionalization” whereby
(not unlike in American small towns) a family’s primary identity became its
religion.23 Valérie Sottocasa shows that at the beginning of the French
Revolution, Catholics initially favorable in some of these mixed zones were led
to “read” the Revolution as “Protestant,” thereby turning violently against it and
its local supporters, including constitutional priests.24
Finally, an analysis of religious practice in the diocese of Gap based on the
kind of detailed information not available for earlier periods anywhere in
France sounds a note of caution in regard to blanket statements about enduring zones of devotion, in mountains or otherwise, showing that the rate of religious practice and clerical recruitment fluctuated dramatically over the nineteenth century from canton to canton.25
Brunet and others remark on the fragility of migratory flows, especially of
priests. Room in the geographical analysis of clerical vocations must also be
made for migratory specialization by town. Some towns and villages, in all
essential respects identical to their neighbors, develop the specialty of providing priests and religious, often handed down through family lines, just as
other towns produce itinerant stone masons, hotel operators in Mexico, or
waiters in Manhattan. And similarly, within regions that habitually produce
clergy towns often develop specialization in particular orders that is passed
from generation to generation. Such clusters may begin, as in a Spanish
instance this reader was told of, with the visit of a charismatic missionary who
convinces a group of youth to join his order, much the same way as whole
cohorts of village youths chose to emigrate to Germany in the 1970’s or
become shepherds in the American West.
The question of mountains and vocations becomes: Which mountain cultures produce a disproportionate amount of priestly vocations, and why? The
obvious reason is the system of impartible inheritance in many of those zones.
But, as Isidro Dubert points out for the mountains of Lugo,26 there are zones
of impartible inheritance that historically have not produced a disproportion
of vocations, and other explanations must come into play. For some of the
23

Robert Sauzet, “Les catholiques cévenols, des minoritaires mal connus,” CCF, pp.
307-318. In her lucid conclusion Nicole Lemaître points out, “For reasons still to be
explained, religious parameters are incomparably more powerful and long-lasting in the
mountains than in towns or the ordinary countryside,” CCF, p. 402.
24
Valérie Sottocasa,“Révolution et religion dans le sud du Massif central: sensibilités
populaires en terre de frontière religieuse,” CCF, pp. 319-330.
25
Nadine Vivier,“La pratique religieuse dans le diocèse de Gap au XIXe siècle,” CCF,
pp. 355-367.
26
”Montagnes, clercs et vocations religieuses dans la Galice intérieure, 1685-1859,”
CCF, pp. 75-86.

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95

poorer mountain regions, the production and exportation of priests seems
simply one more kind of skilled labor export for a zone that needs children but
not adults. And local studies in Spain have shown that in the last one hundred
years recruitment of priests has a lot to do with family traditions, the political
climate, and the effect of particular curates.27
Together with Brunet’s opus, Clergés, Communautés et Familles suggests the
feasibility for broad studies to identify the historical geography and ethnography
of vocations in other countries, identifying regions that specialize in the production of priests and religious (such as,in Spain,portions of the northern and southern slopes and piedmont of the Cantabrian mountains), and relating this to kinship and inheritance structures, settlement patterns, and means of production.
The other volume of papers from the Tarbes conference, Montagnes
sacrées d’Europe, is quite different, and rather more of a grabbag.The underlying themes are to what extent and in what ways mountains have been
regarded as sacred (Eliade-type notions that mountains can be intrinsically
sacred are quickly dispensed with28) and to what extent mountain people are
especially devout or devout in special ways. On the whole, the essays deal
more with representations than with social realities. The book has twentyseven chapters (twenty on France), an introduction by Christian Desplat, a
conclusion by Dominique Julia, and indices of persons, places, and themes.
A cultural reading of the landscape has occurred in most if not all civilizations, and the book opens with essays on the imagined mountain in ancient
Greece and the template of special hills and mountains in the Bible.29 A general
pattern, identified by Brunet in his monograph and laid out here by Alain
Cabantous,30 is a switch on the part of non-mountain urbanites from considering mountains to be a fearsome zone of danger and wilderness inhabited by the
uncouth and the backward, to, in the late eighteenth century, considering it to
be the last reserve of the noble and God-fearing shepherds and country folk. A
number of essays debunk these stereotypes, demonstrating that mountain
people were neither especially backwards nor especially pious.31 The attempt
27

See, for instance,Antón M. Pazos, El Clero Navarro 1900-1936 (Pamplona: EUNSA,
1990).
28
Jean-Pierre Albert,“Les montagnes sont-elles bonnes à penser en termes religieux?”
MSE, pp. 65-71.
29
François Quintin,“À propos de l’imaginaire montagnard en Grèce ancienne,” MSE,
pp. 23-34.
30
”La turbulence des sacralités montagnardes dans l’Europe moderne,” MSE, pp. 47-55.
31
Marie-Hélène Colin,“Des saints vosgiens de la montagne? Amé, Romaric et Claire,”
MSE, pp. 109-119; and, similarly, Philippe Martin, “Les Vosges: terre de superstitions ou
terre de missions?” MSE, pp. 289-299; Philippe de Robert,“Montagnes inspirées: Histoire
religieuse et romantisme chez Napoléon Peyrat,” MSE, pp. 57-64; Gérald Chaix,“La montagne et les chartreux. Imaginaire et réalité d’un refuge (1816-1903),” MSE, pp. 317-323;
Jean-François Galinier-Pallerola, “Le Canigou: précipices affreux ou montagne sacrée?
Ruine et reconstruction de l’abbaye Saint-Martin,” MSE, pp. 325-337.

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

to deduce from archaeological remains a particular pagan piety in mountain
zones or toward peaks is considered a recent example of the topos.32 Alpinism
subsequently gave a new familiarity to key mountains,33 and in the twentieth
century skiing brought them yet a different kind of desacralization.34
Many essays in MSE seem to have tacked onto them the consensus of the
conference that little aside from the outside ascriptions distinguishes the religion in the mountains from that of the plains. But there is no systematic, serial
examination of the theme.The travelers’accounts,of course,tell more about the
travelers than what they see.35 One has the feeling that if the sense of the meeting had gone the other way, a number of the essays would have read the (largely
anecdotal or literary) data to come up with another conclusion. And, indeed,
Dominique Julia in his conclusion plausibly disagrees with many of the authors,
pointing out aspects of mountain life that make it different and can have a discernible impact on its religiosity: transhumant pastoralism, which sets up connections with sometimes distant areas; danger in landscape, snow, and storms,
which leads to the establishment of particular kinds of shrines and devotion to
particular saints (like Mary,36 Saint Michael for heights, and Saint Maurice and
the Theban legionnaires in the Alps37). Mountains are often borders, and borders
are often strategic locations for shrines that attract multiple communities. Mary
has historically had this kind of agglutinative devotional attraction, and many
border shrines are dedicated to her, as papers on Laus,38 Montserrat,39 and
Catalan shrines to Mary40 point out. Mountains lend themselves to penitential
practice, especially for non-mountain people, and the topos of the mountain
32

Robert Sablayrolles, “Être pieux en montagne durant l’Antiquité. L’apport de
l’épigraphie dans les Pyrénées centrales,” MSE, pp. 75-95; Jean-Luc Schenck-David,“Être
pieux en montagne. L’apport de l’archéologie des sanctuaires d’altitude dans les
Pyrénées centrales romaines,” MSE, pp. 97-101.
33
Three contributors cite Philippe Joutard, L’invention de Mont Blanc ( Paris:
Gallimard-Juillard, 1986).
34
Christian Sorrel,“Une nouvelle montagne sacrée? Catholicisme, tourisme et sports
d’hiver en Savoie au XXe siècle,” MSE, pp. 367-379.
35
Frédéric Meyer,“Le regard des voyageurs étrangers sur la religion des Savoyards du
XVIe siècle au début du XIXe siècle,” MSE, pp. 301-313.
36
Christian Desplat,“Des eaux, des rocs, un culte: Marie dans les Pyrénées occidentales françaises à l’époque moderne,” MSE, pp. 121-135. See also Ottavia Niccoli,
“Madonne di montagna: Note su apparizioni e santuari nelle valli alpine” in Ottavio
Besomi and Carlo Caruso, Cultura d’élite e cultura popolare nell’arco alpino fra
Cinque e Seicento (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1995), pp. 95-121.
37
Cyril Isnart,“Saint alpin, saint local, saint légionnaire. Usages et variations du modèle
de sainteté légionnaire dans les Alpes du Sud,” MSE, pp. 151-160.
38
Marie Hélène Froeschlé-Chopard, “Notre-Dame de Laus au diocèse d’Embrun.
Cristallisation d’une religion des montagnes au XVIIe siècle?” MSE, pp. 137-149.
39
Ignasi Fernández Terricabras,“Montserrat, montagne sacrée. Spiritualisation du territoire montagnard dans un massif catalan (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles),” MSE, pp. 193-206.
40
Marlène Albert Llorca,“La Vierge et les montagnes:l’exemple catalan,” MSE,pp.207-213.

BY WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

97

retreat for hermits is explored in a number of essays, including signally
Christine Delaplace on the imitation in the West in the fifth and sixth centuries
of the desert saints in the East.41 The connection of mountains and hermits is
shown to be more myth than reality, as hermits have generally preferred to be
close to communities and highways.42 (Also rejected is the Trevor-Roper idea
that witchcraft is a particularly mountain phenomenon.43)
Two key questions in the book are whether mountains were intrinsically
sacred, and whether mountains (all mountains) were held to be sacred. A different question would be whether particular mountains were held to be more
sacred than others around them.
This reader could have used more maps, and in the case of both collections,
a glossary.
In all three books under consideration, there is remarkably little direct
inquiry of living people about their ideas or conceptions, or at least few direct
quotes.44 It is as if a seventeenth-century traveler’s written account were considered direct evidence for ideas about mountains, but not a twentieth-century
inhabitant. Cabantous suggests that a switch has taken place, and that outsiders
now have a desacralized, matter-of-fact idea of the mountains, while some
mountain people have internalized the romantic and folkloric notions of an
earlier generation of outsiders. Just how people do feel about their landscape,
almost nobody in these books has bothered to ask. Of all the present-day clues
available for a regressive history, it would seem that present-day people were
the least used, or, if used, the least acknowledged.
But all in all, these three works, which belong together, are a valiant, sustained inquiry into rural religion and its clergy in the mountains of France and
its neighbors, for which readers will be deeply grateful.

“Sacred Space”
In April, 2003, a month before the Tarbes conference, a somewhat similar
conference was held at the University of Exeter. Fifteen of the papers presented there have been published in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe [hereafter DH], edited by Sarah Hamilton
and Andrew Spicer. The contributors include social historians, art and architectural historians, and an archaeologist. A similar collection, also published in
41
”Aux origines du ‘désert’ en Occident. Érémitisme et premières fondations monastiques en Gaule et en Italie aux Ve-VIe siècles après Jésus-Christ,” MSE, pp. 217-226.
42
Catherine Sanstchi,“Essai de géographie érémitique dans les Alpes,” MSE, pp. 235251, where, however, there appears to be a running confusion between hermits and
shrine keepers, as in an essay by Philippe Masson.
43
Oscar Di Simplicio,“La sorcellerie dans l’ancien état siennois,” MSE, pp. 265-273.
44
An exception is Ott,“La Montagne,” MSE, pp. 357-366.

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

2005, Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe [hereafter SS], edited by Will
Coster and Andrew Spicer, is more focused on the context of the Protestant
and Catholic Reformations; the contributors are all social historians. Many
essays in both volumes are fresh and stimulating, and those interested in the
subject will want to look at both. Nine of the thirty papers in the two books
deal with the United Kingdom, four with France, four with Germany, two each
with Flanders, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain and one each papers with
Netherlands, Bohemia, Transylvania, and Moldavia. The two works share an
editor, and it makes sense to talk about them together.
When one compares these two British collections with the two French
ones reviewed above, aside from evident differences in the content addressed
there are basic differences in the approach.The French-based collections, with
the Val d’Aran study in mind, have a rural emphasis and address the dynamics
of the local terroir: what happened here, and why it differed elsewhere; what
are the demographic, kinship, geographic factors that govern variation. The
Britain-based collections, which build on the work of Eamon Duffy, Robert
Scribner, and Natalie Zemon Davis, are more centered on cities and more
interested in laws that govern the generation and organization of sacred topography in general, the confessional doctrines and devotional trends that establish religiously-valenced precincts irrespective of locality or local culture.
The two British-based collections examine the spatial dynamics of the
sacred in various arenas: the home, the church, the streets and squares of cities
and villages. A good half of them examine how religious aspects of these
arenas are disputed or redefined over the early modern period.
Home devotions are so important in people’s lives and so little studied. Five
papers examine them (all in DH). Diana Webb’s lucid overview provides examples from throughout medieval Western Europe; it is particularly insightful, this
reader thought, on the subject of formulaic prayer.45 Late fifteenth-century
Dutch paintings of the Annunciation apparently reflect interiors of the betteroff non-noble houses of the time, the household devotions practiced, and the
kinds of books and devotional paintings used; the author suggests that devotional areas were temporarily created in rooms generally used for non-religious
purposes.46 Lisa A. Banner describes the special apartments in monasteries for
the married knights of the Order of Santiago in Spain.47 And two essays lay out
examples of the private religious geography of sixteenth-century England: the
private gentry chapels and clandestine Mass sites of Catholics (with wonderful casuistic material on what could and could not be done); and three chapels
45

Diana Webb,“Domestic Space and Devotion in the Middle Ages,” DH, pp. 27-48.
Jeanne Nuechterlein, “The Domesticity of Sacred Space in Fifteenth-Century
Netherlands,” DH, pp. 49-79.
47
Lisa A. Banner,“Private Rooms in the Monastic Architecture of Habsburg Spain,” DH,
pp. 81-93.
46

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99

of the powerful Cecil family that reflected the evolution of official attitudes
toward churches over an eventful sixty-year period.48
Many essays deal with church interiors. A number of them emphasize the
role of liturgy and ritual in creating a sense of holiness and marking its location or concentration. A reading of the consueto of two thirteenth-century
Flemish churches, Saint Omer and Lille, show how rituals restore and maintain sacred precincts,49 and internal manuscripts of the Cistercian convent
of Wienhausen from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century show how
the nuns created “a spiritual journey that involved the imaginative recreation
of the via crucis and the loca sancta of Jerusalem within the convent.”50
Contributors point to the role of candles, incense, music, and liturgical bells
in emphasizing key places and moments, and filling and thereby distinguishing from the exterior by their light, odor, and sound the devotional area.
Other essays describe transformations of church interiors.The remodeling
of churches in Brittany made the consecration more visible,51 and that of the
“Jerusalem” type Burchtkerk in Antwerp related Catholicism to ancient traditions.52 The partial transformation of the church interiors under Lutherans in
Nuremburg, from domus dei to domus ecclesiae, left images but removed
attention from them, allowing a kind of ambiguous transition period in which
image-based devotion dwindled by attrition.53 Fine essays describe more radical transformations by Calvinists in Geneva54 and Transylvania,55 and by
Friends with their Gracechurch Street Meeting House in London,56 revealing a
new aesthetic of light and white, and a new notion of attention.
The true ornamentation of the temples lies not in ivory, gold, and precious
stones, but in the frugality, temperance, piety and all the virtues of those who
are in the church.57
48

Richard L.Williams,“Forbidden Sacred Spaces in Reformation England,” DH,pp.95-114.
Annabel Ricketts with Claire Gapper and Caroline Knight,“Designing for Protestant
Worship: the Private Chapels of the Cecil Family,” DH, pp. 115-136.
50
June L. Mecham,“A Northern Jerusalem:Transforming the Spatial Geography of the
Convent of Wienhausen,” DH, pp. 139-160.
51
Elizabeth Tingle,“The Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir: the re-Christianising of the
Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Brittany,” SS, pp. 237-258.
52
Cynthia Lawrence,“Ruben’s Raising of the Cross in Context: The ‘Early Christian’
Past and the Evocation of the Sacred in Post-Tridentine Antwerp,” DH, pp. 251-275.
53
Bridget Heal,“Sacred Image and Sacred Space in Lutheran Germany,” SS, pp. 39-59.
54
Christian Gosse, “Places of Sanctification: The Liturgical Sacrality of Genevan
Reformed Churches, 1535-1566,” SS, pp. 60-80. One of this reader’s favorite essays.
55
Graeme Murdock, “‘Pure and White’: Reformed Space for Worship in Early
Seventeenth-Century Hungary,” DH, pp. 231-250. In CCF see also Péter Sahin-Tóth,“Les
‘gardiens des cols’ face à la Réforme. Éclatement confessionel et restructuration de la
société sicule en Transylvanie (fin XVIe-début XVIIe siècle),” CCF, pp. 111-124.
56
Simon Dixon,“The Priest, the Quakers and the Second Conventicle Act:The Battle
for the Gracechurch Meeting House, 1670,” DH, pp. 301-318.
57
Second Helvetic Confession, cited in Gosse,“Liturgical Sacrality,” SS, pp. 74.
49

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

The latter cases provide the starkest alternatives to Catholicism. We hear,
and hear of, the astonishment of the unconverted.
They enter into their churches with no greater reverence than they enter
into taverns; they bow or make reverence to nothing therein, for that they have
made all sacred things away. . . .58
They have leaft their churches as fit to mooue people to pietie and deuotion, as theyr barnes are, when all the corne and hay is out of them, and nothing left to be seene besides the roofes, walles and silles.59
When [the Papists] enter our temples, they are so astonished that they are
completely taken aback or feel they have entered a new world.What? (they say)
a Church without any pictures.60

It is through juxtapositions like these that these two collections acquire a
special force, as the reader confronts what striking divergences emerged from
the (common?) medieval matrix.
Several essays explore the evolution of the religious use of church interiors
within confessions: the exclusion of lay functions from churches, whether
courts, town meetings, dances, or ales; the maintenance of gender, social, or
civic hierarchy in seating and burial patterns;61 the return of consecration ceremonies in the churches of England and Scotland,62 and, in an engaging piece
of reconstruction, the role of congregations in shaping services by singing
psalms, groaning devotionally, and bringing dogs.63
Public areas of localities—streets and plazas—are treated in about a third of
the essays. A fascinating essay on taverns as secular counterpoints of churches, in
synch with the thought of Robert Scribner, nuances notions of a clear line
between the sacred and the profane, showing mixes of taverns and breweries
with churches and monasteries.64 That on Lille and Saint Omer suggests that Palm
Sunday,Rogations,and relic processions temporarily make civic areas sacred,con58

Thomas Hill, A quatron of reasons of Catholicke religion ([English secret press]
1600) cited in Williams,“Forbidden Secret Spaces,” DH, p. 113.
59
Ibid.
60
Calvin, Opera, XLIX, col. 613, cited in Gosse,“Liturgical Sacrality,” SS, p. 73.
61
Will Coster,“A Microcosm of Community: Burial, Space and Society in Chester, 1598
to 1633,” SS, pp. 124-143.
62
Andrew Spicer, “‘God Will Have a House’: Defining Sacred Space and Rites of
Consecration in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” DH, pp. 207-230; and Andrew
Spicer,“‘What kinde of house a kirk is’: Conventicles, Consecrations and the Concept of
Sacred Space in post-Reformation Scotland,” SS, pp. 81-103.
63
John Craig,“Psalms, Groans and Dogwhippers: The Soundscape of Worship in the
English Parish Church, 1547-1642,” SS, pp. 104-123.
64
Beat Kümin, “Sacred Church and Worldly Tavern: Reassessing an Early Modern
Divide,” SS, pp. 17-38; Kümin is the author of The Shaping of a Community: The Rise
and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400-1560 (Aldershot:Ashgate, 1996); Sarah
Hamilton and Andrew Spicer,“The Delineation of Sacred Space,” DH, p. 22.

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verting a town into Jerusalem.65 Surely also they are ways of marking territory in
the face of other local communities, such as Jews and international enemies.This
function becomes much more accentuated in the Counter-Reformation, not only
where there are substantial dissenting populations, but also in the Catholic heartland of Italy and Spain.The essay on Rome shows its Post-Reformation refashioning to emphasize its ancient sacred past,66 and those on Lyons,67 Prague,68 and
Antwerp69 detail a post-Reformation “refounding,” in dialogue with Rome’s retooling, to reassert their Catholicism, revitalize late medieval shrines, enhance their
similarity with Jerusalem, and stake their claim for authenticity and antiquity in
the face of dissenters and iconoclasts. In these strategic programs the “other” is
kept in mind and visible, whether heretic, Jew, or Turk.
Essays on Augsburg and the enclaves in France of Orange and Avignon
describe conflict and negotiation over the use of public zones. In Orange the
conflict was between local Protestants, Dutch rulers who enforced a kind of
tolerance, local Catholics, and the French monarchy, with intervals of equilibrium and sharp shifts due to international politics;70 in Avignon it was between
the papal legate, the town council, and the French monarchy, and it played out
in festivals, shrines, and rituals.71 In Augsburg the system of civic parity
between Catholics and Protestants required constant, vigilant management.72
All of these studies point to the emergence of neutral places, uncapped by
monuments to martyrs or other confessional markers, forerunners to what we
would now call civil society. Along with the contributions of Sauzet and

65
Stijn Bossuyt,“The Liturgical Use of Space in Thirteenth-Century Flanders,” DH, pp.
187-206.
66
Simon Ditchfield,“Reading Rome as a Sacred Landscape, c. 1586-1635,” SS, pp. 167192; see also his Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy; Pietro Maria Campi
and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
For another, state-religious landscape proposal,Thomas Dandelet, Spanish Rome 15001700 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2001).
67
Judi Loach,“The Consecration of the Sacred Realm,” DH, pp. 277-300.
68
Howard Louthan, “Breaking Images and Building Bridges: The Making of Sacred
Space in Early Modern Bohemia,” SS, pp. 282-301.
69
Lawrence, op. cit.
70
Amanda Eurich, “Sacralising Space: Reclaiming Civic Culture in Early Modern
France,” SS, pp. 259-281.
71
Eric Johnson,“La Ville Sonnant:The Politics of Sacred Space in Avignon on the Eve
of the French Revolution,” DH, pp. 319-335.
72
Duane J. Corpis,“Mapping the Boundaries of Confession: Space and Urban Religious
Life in the Diocese of Augsburg, 1648-1750,” SS, pp. 302-325. On Augsburg see also Lee
Palmer Wandel,“Religion, Raum und Ort” in Johannes Burkhardt,Thomas Max Safley, and
Sabine Ullmann (eds.), Geschichte in Räumen: Festschrift für Rol Kießling zum 65.
Geburtstag (Konstanz: UVK, 2006), pp. 279-292. Wandel cites Emily Fisher Gray, Good
Neighbors:Architecture and Confession in Augsburg’s Lutheran Church of Holy Cross,
1525–1661, Diss. University of Pennsylvania 2004, which I have not seen. I am grateful
for Dr.Wandel’s assistance.

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PRIESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND “SACRED SPACE”

Sottocasa in the CCF volume, these essays speak to the instability of confessional coexistence, of which we learn again and again in the news.73
Only two essays consider non-urban landscape: a survey of the seventeenthcentury missionization of Brittany (by Jesuits, as in the Pyrenees) that shows a
cultivation of local saints and capping of supposed pre-Christian sacred stones
and wells, in a “conscious attempt to reconstruct the mental and physical world
of the early Breton saints and Church”;74 and a study of the seventeenth-century
enclosed “deserts” of Carmelite solitaries in Spain, simulacra “not only of Carmel,
but of Eden,” and also pagan wildernesses to be sacralized by penance.75
Cynthia Lawrence’s bravura “contextual investigation” of a Rubens painting
for Antwerp includes a consideration of the church’s prospect from the
wharves and wraps together cityscape, the internal sacred geography of the
church, and the composition of a work of art.76 Yet, as with virtually all the
other essays (whether based on evidence from devotional treatises, custom
books, works of art, material culture, or chronicles), this reader hungered for
an additional kind of information: how these sacred places were experienced
by people who went to them. Surely letters and diaries, art, canonization, and
miracle testimony could be scrutinized for this kind of information.We are told
of prescriptive “programs” but not emotional outcomes.The root question, of
course, is how did the great transformation that the more radical Reformations
presuppose take place in individuals?
The general pattern of reproduction of Jerusalem and the Holy Land within
the church,churchyard,city,or village,often in some measured way,whether fullscale or reduced, was fed by pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in turn fed pilgrimage, not only to Jerusalem but also to Holy Land relics (the True Cross,
shroud, tunic, and other clothes,Veronicas, the milk of Mary), European shrines
of biblical saints, European replicas (Holy Sepulchres, Sacromonti), and relicreplicas (Loreto, on the jacket of SS).77 This tendency was emphasized in the
73
David Nirenberg, Communities of Violences: Persecution of Minorities in the
Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); for an influential statement of
this instability, Robert Hayden,“Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious
Sites in South Asia and the Balkans,” Current Anthropology, 43 (2002), 205-232.
74
Alexandra Walsham,“Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in post-Reformation Wales,”
SS, pp. 211-236, quote 241. She is the author of Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity
and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Royal Historical
Society, 1993).
75
Trevor Johnson, “Gardening for God: Carmelite Deserts and the Sacralisation of
Natural Space in Counter-Reformation Spain,” SS, pp. 193-210.
76
Lawrence, op. cit.
77
The archaeologist Martin Biddle has made a wide-ranging survey of replicas of the
Holy Sepulchre in Europe. See now also Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics,
Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) (I am grateful to
Felipe Pereda for this reference).

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103

Counter-Reformation in an attempt to demonstrate religious authenticity and
pedigree, but it built on late medieval spiritual exercises like those at
Wienhausen in which, as in the later ones of Ignatius Loyola and those described
for pilgrims to Rome, believers imagined themselves in other places and times.
While the creative and restorative power of ritual for sacralizing site is
amply addressed, only two essays treat the radiating power of images, wellknown relics, holy bodies, or even living saints in the creation of sacred spaces
around them.78 One deals with the Holywell shrine of St.Winefride in Wales, a
rare exception in that it survived the Reformation and continued to serve as a
healing site, as well as a clandestine base for Catholics;79 another with a
twelfth-century Cistercian pilgrimage site to the True Cross, Bromholm in
Norfolk, for which the mapping of metal objects with metal detectors reveals
much about how the precinct was used.80
Finally, this reader shares Simon Ditchfield’s scruple about the term “space”
for the early modern period, when the word used would have been “luogo,”
“lugar,”“lieu,” never “space,”“spazio,” or “spatium.” Ditchfield worries about the
“fundamentally anachronistic notion of considering space as in any way an
abstract quality.”In this reader the uneasiness is compounded by the feeling that
“space” as used in some essays has an Eliade-like connotation of immanence.81
Perhaps the obliteration of devotion to images, relics, and saints from the
British landscape has removed them and the landscape itself somewhat from
the history of British Catholicism. Or was the landscape already less sacralized
in areas that turned Protestant? Certainly, part of today’s striking contrast
between Northern and Southern Europe is due to the fact that the sacralization of the landscape in areas that remained Catholic has been an ongoing,
cumulative process that continued well beyond the Reformation, with ever
more mountains, valleys, and other natural locations, as well as city squares,
being capped, imaged, and crossed.

78
Two other collections of essays treat these themes: Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucetta
Scaraffia (eds.), Luoghi sacri e spazi della santità (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990);
and, like DH with a stimulating mix of historians with art historians, María Cruz de
Carlos, Pierre Civil, Felipe Pereda, and Cécile Vincent-Cassy (eds.), Usos y espacios de la
imagen religiosa en la Monarquía Hispánica del siglo XVII/Usages et espaces de l’image religieuse dans la monarchie hispanique du XVIIe siècle (Madrid: Casa de
Velázquez, in press).
79
Alexandra Walsham, op. cit.
80
Tim Pestell,“Using Material Culture to Define Holy Space:The Bromholm Project,”
DH, pp. 161-186.
81
Ditchfield, op. cit. SS, p. 191.

BOOK REVIEWS
General and Miscellaneous
The Catholic Church through the Ages. A History. By John Vidmar, O.P. (New
York and Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 360. $18.95
paperback.)
At the outset the author notes the obvious difficulty of achieving balance
in doing a one-volume history of the Church. He says one either adopts a
breezy approach loosely combining broad topics or includes so much detail
that the reader gives up. However, he aims to produce an outline of the history
of the Church that combines substance with readability.
As to readability, I would say he has certainly succeeded though it does get
a little breezy at times. He displays a fine talent for clearly and succinctly summing up a period, and he excels in his characterizations of leading figures. His
depiction of Pope Paul III is a good example (p. 233). Moreover, he includes
many well chosen illustrations.
In attempting to achieve substance he divides the main periods of church
history into six ages following a schema of Christopher Dawson. It provides a
good framework in keeping the myriad facts in some kind of order. Within
each age he treats the material topically rather than following a strict chronological order, though this can at times be confusing as when he treats
Modernism before Vatican Council I.
The book, of course, includes many broad all-encompassing statements. But
one expects as much in a book that covers 2000 years in 360 pages though I
would quarrel with more than a few of them. But they do provoke thought.
For instance, in view of the many literary antecedents of the Enlightenment it
is interesting to read, “Two great books heralded the Enlightenment,” viz.,
Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) and John Locke’s Essays on Human
Understanding (1690).
Let me single out a few of his judgments to which one might take exception. His treatment of Augustine, for instance, I find guilty of special pleading as
he glosses over the negative features of his legacy.Then there is the way he presents Modernism as an offshoot of Liberal Catholicism, and in his treatment of
the development of doctrine he mentions Mohler, Sailer, and Schlegel but curiously fails to mention Newman’s great Essay on the Development of Doctrine.
One of the merits of his short history is the way he zeroes in on matters
that are currently relevant, giving informative accounts of the issues involved.
104

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105

A reader will find his treatment of the rise of Islam especially useful today. I
also found helpful the eighteen pages he devotes to the relations of the
Catholic Church with the Nazis, showing the considerable resistance put up
by the Catholics though they were hogtied by the destruction of the Catholic
press. As he says, the few diocesan papers that managed to stay alive after 1938
paid dearly for their existence by complying with the Nazis.
For those who want a rapid walk down the mine-strewn road of Catholic
history, Father Vidmar will prove a useful, if sometimes controversial, guide.
Cincinnati, Ohio

THOMAS BOKENKOTTER

Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale. By Anna Benvenuti, Sofia
Boesch Gajano, Simon Ditchfield, Roberto Rusconi, Francesco Scorza
Barcellona, and Gabriella Zarri. [Sacro/Santo, 9.] (Rome: Viella. 2005. Pp.
427. €28.00 paperback.)
Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo
antico al concilio di Trento. Edited by Anna Benvenuti and Marcello
Garzaniti. [Atti del IV Convegno di studio dell’Associazione italiana per lo
studio della santità, dei culti e dell’agiografia. Firenze, 26-28 ottobre 2000.]
(Rome: Viella. 2005. Pp. viii, 501. €39.00 paperback.)
No academic culture is more welcoming to the study of sanctity and holy
people in Christian history than that of Italy, where even some secular universities have faculty chairs dedicated to hagiography, and where faculty in general departments of history can make careers based on the study of saints and
sainthood. Anna Benvenuti, the force behind these two volumes, a professor
of medieval history at the University of Florence, has long been an expert on
the role of holy people in medieval Italy, just as her colleague at Florence,
Gabriella Zarri, has blazed a trail for the study of different forms of Christian
sanctity in the early modern period. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Roberto Rusconi,
who teach, respectively, medieval history and the history of Christianity at the
Università di Roma Tre, are also well known for their work on Christian saints
and the role of sanctity in Christian culture, especially in medieval Italy. The
first volume under review here, Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (The History of Sanctity in Western Christianity) brings this remarkable quartet together with Francesco Scorza Barcellona, who teaches the history of Christianity at the Università di Roma Tor Vergata, and Simon Ditchfield,
who teaches modern history at the University of York in England, to offer a
detailed and thoughtful overview of changing ideas of holiness and the roles
of those we call the saints in Christian history from the beginning of the
Christian cultus to the pontificate of John Paul II.
The material is divided chronologically, and to some inevitable extent, by
theme. Francesco Scorza Barcellona begins with a chapter entitled “Origins,”
that brings the discussion up to the beginning of the fourth century.This chap-

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ter starts with the idea of martyrdom in Second Temple Judaism and earliest
Christianity, and traces the development of the Christian holy person through
the beginnings of church hierarchy, the rise of the ascetic communities, and
the development of sacred biography, pilgrimage, cults, and iconography
specifically associated with saints.
The second and third chapters cover the Middle Ages. In the second chapter, Sofia Boesch Gajano considers the “structuralization” of Christian hagiography after the development of Christian political states, from the fourth to the
twelfth centuries, as seen in monastic reforms, the role of the Papacy, holiness
associated with visionary activity, and the rise of new forms of sanctity associated with holy war. Anna Benvenuti then takes over for a chapter on her specialty, late medieval urban life, in which she develops themes of local patronage as opposed to the centralized authority of Rome, new forms of religiosity
among the laity, the rise of the Mendicants, and the development of a formal
system of canonization.
The fourth and fifth chapters focus on Renaissance and early modern
Christianity. Gabriella Zarri takes the story to the late sixteenth century, through
the Council of Trent, focusing on the christianization of society and the rise of
Christian Humanism, the development of formal hagiographical literature, the
rise of Marian cults, and the role of political prophecy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the “Sante Vive” of Renaissance courts, and culminating in the figure of Girolamo Savonarola. In the fifth chapter,“The World of
the Reform and the Counter-Reform,” Simon Ditchfield considers how ideas of
Christian sanctity were formed by confessional identity (considering briefly,
and for the only time in this volume, Christian sanctity in a Protestant context).
Ditchfield’s essay focuses on the development of saintly cults, the Congregation
of Rites and the Inquisition, the impact of the liturgical reforms of Trent on
saints’ cults, and the sea-change that came with the missions to Asia and the
Americas and brought the Society of Jesus into the forefront.This chapter ends
with an analysis of the ambivalence toward saints in the Enlightenment.
Finally,Roberto Rusconi steps out of his normal medievalist shoes to consider
“The Church Confronts Society,” the title of his chapter on the saints in the
modern world. Rusconi traces the re-emergence of saints’ modernity according
to new themes: the emergence of a “societal saintliness,” the role of the Church
in colonial and post-colonial Africa and Asia, including the new saints and martyrs associated with that story, the rising importance of male and female
founders of religious orders, twentieth-century changes in the process of canonization, the increasing appeal of devotion to the Sacred Heart and modern
Marian cults, and the particular role of the Papacy. These last topics bring the
discussion to a consideration of Pope John Paul II, the pontiff who created saints
with an “exasperated accent on the recognition of sanctity by the supreme
authority of the Catholic Church,”but nevertheless,according to Rusconi,did not
change the basic definition of the role of saints that had developed at the turn
of the nineteenth century. “In particular, the supreme ecclesiastical hierarchy

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wished to inculcate in the devotion of the faithful the role of a saint as an exemplary model of Christian life, to be imitated, not an intercessor to be invoked” (p.
377). The problem of miraculous cures, and the popularity of figures such as
“Padre Pio di Pietrelcina” (now of course, Saint Pio of Pietrelcina) still remain,
but even here, Rusconi says, the increasing medicalization of the miraculous has
put the holy power of healing into another, less miraculous, mode. Rusconi suggests (p. 379) that the future of sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church may
involve a process of beatification at the local or national (episcopal) level, with
actual canonization still in the hands of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
In the introduction, the authors describe this volume as an effort to bring
together long paths of research and differing methodologies, individual and collective research that articulate different themes and contexts, but putting it
together into a common “historical horizon” (p. 15). Overall, I think this
endeavor has been successful.There is nothing quite like this in English, but it
would be useful to have a translation for courses in Christian history. Such an
endeavor would necessitate a few additions: an American publisher would
probably ask for more about Protestant forms of holiness; and certainly now the
canonization of Saint Pio and the death of Pope John Paul II have added new
considerations to the account of Christian holiness in the twenty-first century.
The second book reviewed here, Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e
Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo antico al concilio di Trento, presents twenty-one essays on liturgy and hagiography in East and West, from the
late antique period to the Council of Trent.The majority of these essays treat
questions of liturgy and hagiography either in the medieval West (mostly in
Italy) (eight) or in the Byzantine or Slavic Churches (five), a few are methodological in nature, and the rest cover topics that involve both East and West,
like the essay of Giovanni Battista Bronzini on the shrine of the Archangel
Michael on the promontory of the Gargano (pp. 387-396).
These essays are derived from papers presented at the conference of the
AISSCA, the Italian Society for the Study of Sanctity, Cults, and Hagiography,
held in Florence in 2000. The organizers of the conference, Anna Benvenuti
and Marcello Garzaniti, provided an introduction and an afterword, while Sofia
Boesch Gajano wrote the prologue to the volume. Like many volumes of conference proceedings, this collection is a bit disjointed, although some of the
essays are clearly excellent contributions. I found especially interesting Robert
Taft’s study of the origins, significance, and development of the liturgy and cult
of saints in the Greek Byzantine and Slavic worlds (pp. 35-54), Ferdinando
Dell’Oro’s analysis of the genesis and development of the western Sanctorale
and Sacramentary (pp. 79-119), Christian Hannick on the liturgical cult of the
saints in the Greco-Byzantine world (pp. 279-291), Marcello Garzaniti on the
cult of saints in medieval Slavic manuscripts of the Gospels and the Epistles
(pp. 311-341), and the Bronzini study of the cult of the Gargano mentioned
above. Other chapters will doubtless be of particular interest to other readers,
since most of the contributions to this book are on well-defined topics.

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What is of greatest interest in this volume, in my estimation, is the attempt
it makes to open a dialogue between scholars of the eastern and western
churches. More work of this sort obviously needs to be done, and the cult of
the saints is a rich field for such comparative study. More could certainly be
said about the Italian cities where liturgies from both sides of Christianity still
continue to be practiced, and saints from East and West are venerated. AISSCA
is to be congratulated for dedicating one of their conferences to this endeavor.
I hope other scholarly associations will follow their example.
University of Pennsylvania

E. ANN MATTER

The Oxford History of Christian Worship. Edited by Geoffrey Wainwright and
Karen B. Westerfield Tucker. (New York: Oxford University Press.2006. Pp.
xx, 916. $55.00.)
It is truly admirable that a work of this breadth (and length) is at once
useful to the liturgical specialist, to the trained theologian, to the church historian, and to the educated layperson. Its scope and structure of thirty-four
chapters is mostly chronological with separate topical chapters on such things
as women in worship, liturgical music, spatial setting, visual arts, vestments and
objects, and a retrospect by the highly qualified and well respected scholars
who are the general editors of the volume. Geoffrey Wainwright brings a
wealth of knowledge and experience from a decidedly theological and ecumenical approach to liturgy. His professorship at Duke University was preceded by prestigious positions in England, then Cameroon, and New York City.
His masterful book of liturgical theology, Doxology, deserves the name “classic” with which it is often described. Karen Westerfield Tucker’s contribution
“Women in Worship” reflects her astute grasp of a number of issues related to
liturgy, not the least of which is the contemporary relevance of such a traditional part of church life.
Among the more difficult decisions such editors have to make is how to
introduce such a volume.That it begins by a fundamentally scriptural and theological approach from the pen of Wainwright himself is both an important
statement of the depth of this book, as well as setting an important theological tone for much of the rest of the book. One could debate a few of his assertions; one could also opine that it is too brief.Yet on balance the theological
overture struck here is admirable, especially given the way liturgical studies
have been so variously described and pursued of late.
It is important to note the format of this book. Photographs, sketches, and
copies of art work and liturgical vessels fill its pages. Also at regular intervals
the authors quote at length from a church document, prayer book, commentary on liturgy, or another writing from the period at hand. These are easily
noticed because they are set off from the rest of the print by their grayish
background and dark border.These documents give an important glimpse into

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the issues being discussed. They offer a primary source for the secondary
reflection about the sources and phenomena under discussion.
Almost all of the over thirty international contributors to this volume represent the first tier of liturgical scholars alive today. Each is recognized in his
or her field and almost always are well recognized to be connected with the
chapters they have authored, e.g., John Baldovin on “the Empire baptized”
(312-622 A.D.) or Andre Haquin, “The Liturgical Movement and Roman
Catholic Ritual Revision” (nineteenth century on). Certainly Anscar
Chupungco is well known for his work on liturgical inculturation (“Mission
and Inculturation: East Asia and the Pacific”) but one needs to note that his
particular contribution is somewhat dated (it was the topic of his doctoral
dissertation) and that in Catholic circles one would have welcomed at least
some reference to the 1994 document from the Vatican’s Congregation for
Divine Worship, Varietates Legitimae, on the very topic. The editors’ intention to include Orthodox, Catholic, the Reformation churches, Mennonite,
Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal churches from the widest geographical
spectrum (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe) is sustained
throughout. At times one might debate the relative importance given to a particular topic, e.g., a chapter on “The Reformed Tradition in Korea” (by
Seung–Joong Joo and Kyeong-Jin Kim) without a parallel treatment of the
worship of other traditions.Yet even these (admittedly brief) “windows” into
what might be regarded as a surprise do precisely that, offer a window into
an aspect of the world-wide liturgical scene that is not normal material for
such an important dictionary.
Understandably the first part of the book is devoted to generous treatments
of the apostolic era (Maxwell Johnson), the empire baptized (John Baldovin),
the ancient oriental churches (Christine Chaillot), the conversion of the
nations (Michael Driscoll), western Christendom (Timothy Thibodeau), and
Byzantine and Slavic Orthodoxy. From these one should note the clarity of
Chaillot’s piece and the important methodological assertions and cautions
offered by Michael Driscoll, although one would have wished for some more
substantial primary sources in the notes for his interest in semiotics, etc.
Otherwise his use of “classical”liturgical sources is judicious and wide-ranging.
Catholic historians and liturgical scholars might well be disappointed at the
relative brevity of the treatment of (Benedictine) monasticism and the mendicant tradition. Other scholars might judge that some repetition could have
been edited out for the sake of including other things, i.e., some of what
Nathan Mitchell argues in “Reforms, Protestant and Catholic” is taken up more
thoroughly by Hans-Christoph Schmidt-Lauber in “The Lutheran Tradition in
the German Lands,”and Bruno Burki in “The Reformed Tradition in Continental
Europe.” One might also question whether Katarina Schutz Zell deserves a
special two-page excursus when other contemporary voices are more prominent and obvious candidates for such emphasis.

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Matters of contemporary debate, e.g., the authorship and dating of
Hippolytus’ The Apostolic Tradition are admirably noted and summarized. One
characteristic of this volume is the attention authors pay to the historical and
cultural context for the worship orders they describe. Placing texts in context
is enormously important.“Proof texting” has no place in the study of liturgy.
There is none in this important volume.
Given the helpful insights about liturgical method, including “context,” one
could only wonder what another such “dictionary” might look like if the conventional, chronological, and then topical approach were jettisoned, beginning
to end, with another approach where music, architecture, visual arts, vestments and objects, etc. were integrated into the chronological approach to
studying liturgy. For example, given the theological weight which many
Reformed traditions place on music and which the Orthodox place on the
visual arts what would a chronological study that included these topics look
like? Clearly the impact of the visual and music on the liturgy is essential to
understanding what the liturgy is and does.
But that is for another book.The present dictionary is well worth its (comparatively) modest price and deserves to be referred to by specialists and non
specialists alike for years to come.
The Catholic University of America

KEVIN W. IRWIN

Sacred Rhetoric: Preaching as a Theological and Pastoral Practice of the
Church. By Michael Pasquarello III. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. viii, 143. $15.00 paperback.)
This volume seeks to situate contemporary homiletic practice within the
Church’s tradition. The author, an associate professor of practical theology at
Ashbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky and an ordained elder in
the United Methodist Church, is catholic in his appropriation of the Christian
past by calling upon the witness of Augustine, Gregory the Great, St. Benedict,
Bernard of Clairvaux, Humbert of Romans, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Erasmus,
Latimer, Luther, and Calvin. This is traditional church history, that is, church history as a branch of theology in the service of the Church.While there are perceptive insights into the authors discussed, the book does not claim to break
new ground historically. In fact, it does not claim to break new ground theologically or homiletically. Quite the contrary, the book is itself an example of its argument: rather than look to new theories of communication to render preaching
more effective, the preacher should look to the great preachers and great
Christians of the past as exemplars.This approach, of course, perpetuates tradition. The ancient and medieval Church relied on the imitation of Christ, the
Apostles, and the saints to form Christians. Imitation, not rules, were what
worked. As the author argues, one reason is that the Holy Spirit is not confined
by rules, and it is the Holy Spirit who in the end is the true speaker. The human

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voice is only its instrument. For Pasquarello, the preacher only becomes that
instrument by first embodying the message that is to be communicated. In a
sense (pace Marshall McLuhan) the message is the medium. In the end, the
Gospel preaches itself. Pasquarello also hopes to recapture that tradition, at least
as he saw it existing before the Enlightenment divided the theological disciplines and caused a modern homiletic poverty. For preaching to be truly effective, the preacher must reintegrate homiletics into the content and experience
of faith.The goal should not be mere technical skillfulness,but Christian wisdom.
Pasquarello goes too far, however, in claiming that his authors “neither presumed
to be technical experts, nor were they concerned with writing theory” (p. 134).
Augustine was certainly a technical expert. Both Erasmus and Calvin were
“expert” practitioners of humanist rhetoric. All three were also interested in
communication theory. In fact, it was the knowledge of all levels of communication (or rhetoric) that led them to choose the sermo humilis to reach less educated believers including many of their clerical colleagues. Pasquarello is certainly correct in emphasizing the scriptural character of the traditional sermon
both in content and in the language employed. For Pasquarello, the Bible does
not need to be translated into a more modern idiom since it was crafted by the
divine Word, the most expert of preachers. Translation and the elaboration of
new theories or practical tips only distance the speaker and the audience from
the eloquence of the Gospel.That distance contributes to the “homelessness” of
homiletics and the Christian people who “struggle to maintain an alternative
vision, identity, and vocation in an increasingly indifferent and even hostile
world” (p. 136). Pasquarello uses his sources responsibly and well, although he
passes over in silence the sacramental life of the pre-Reformation Church in his
exclusive emphasis on the written and preached Word in the authors he discusses.To be sure, the Word was sacramental, but “mute” sacraments also spoke
to both learned and simple Christians. However, this privileging of the Word is a
pardonable failing in a book devoted to preaching.
Villanova University

R. EMMET MCLAUGHLIN

Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and
Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas. By Francis Oakley. (New York:
Continuum Press. 2005. Pp. 143. $29.95.)
This excellent book provides a sophisticated but accessible introduction to
some fundamental problems in the history of natural law thinking, and the
writing throughout is elegant, lucid, and persuasive. Oakley’s central argument
is that a major shift occurred in the fourteenth century and that it influenced
both the scientific and the moral philosophies of the succeeding age. A
byproduct of the argument is a reminder that the traditional periodization of
Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern is “more of a hindrance
than a help” in the study of intellectual history (p. 81), an observation that will
be applauded by many medievalists.

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Historians typically treat the physical laws of nature as conceptually distinct from the natural law that directs our moral behavior. But Oakley challenges this sharp distinction. He is not concerned to refute Hume’s is-ought
argument, that we cannot derive moral propositions from factual ones. His
argument is rather that the same underlying set of ideas informs both kinds of
thinking and that the physical laws of nature can provide a sort of “intellectual
template” to which the natural moral law conforms (p. 70).
Underlying Oakley’s whole argument is his concern with a persistent tension between the Greek and Hebrew sources of Christian thought. On the one
hand we have the Greek idea of a divine reason immanent in an eternal
cosmos, a reason reflected also in the workings of human reason. On the other
hand stands the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, an all-powerful, willful
God of untrammeled freedom who made the universe from nothing and out
of his own good pleasure. Oakley shows how the church fathers, especially
Augustine, and then the scholastic theologians, especially Aquinas, sought to
reconcile the two ideas. Aquinas envisaged an eternal law, a manifestation of
divine reason directing all created beings to their due ends, a ground of both
the physical laws of the universe and the natural moral law known to man. As
Oakley notes, in Aquinas the fit between the templates of moral and physical
natural law is very close.
But a later generation of theologians, prominent among them William of
Ockham, saw in this way of thinking an unacceptable restraint on God’s
absolute freedom and omnipotent will. Ockham argued that the characteristics
of the existing universe did not flow by any kind of necessity from the reason
of God; God could have made a different universe with different laws of
motion and different rules of morality. And this teaching, Oakley argues,
helped to shape the new scientific thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In a contingent universe one could not explain the way things
behaved by pure reason, by hypothesizing about natural ends and occult
essences.The only way to understand the material world was by observation
and experiment and mathematical formulations of the resulting data.
The problem is more complicated when we consider the moral natural law.
Ockham’s teaching that moral norms depended entirely on the will of God
was reflected in some natural law theories of the early modern period. But
alongside this doctrine Ockham also presented a “non-positive moral science”
based on reason and experience, and this too had echoes in later thought. In
Ockham’s own later political writings, where he discussed explicitly the varieties of natural law, he appealed persistently to right reason as a guide to
human behavior. Oakley explains the dichotomy by pointing to the common
medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained powers of God.
However, Oakley’s argument here leaves open a much-disputed question that
he raises but does not finally answer, the question whether Ockham’s voluntarist theology did in fact exercise any significant influence on the content of
his later political thought and his teachings there on natural law.

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In a last chapter the author considers the emergence of a doctrine of natural rights, another area of current dispute,“a crowded and confusing field,” as
Oakley notes (p. 88). Here Oakley presents a clear and succinct account of the
views of Leo Strauss, who saw a radical innovation in the teaching of Hobbes
on rights, and of Michel Villey who found the origin of individual natural rights
in the philosophy of Ockham. Finally, he considers more recent work (some of
it my own) that finds a beginning of natural rights thinking in the juridical
writings of the twelfth century. In this area Oakley leans to a doctrine of continuity, seeing “a slow, evolutionary development of natural rights talk” from
the twelfth century onward (p. 105), but he also notes that there were “significant differences of emphasis and nuance” (p. 107) in the early modern writings, and rightly observes that much detailed work remains to be done.
Cornell University (Emeritus)

BRIAN TIERNEY

Die Zisterzienser: Geschichte eines europäischen Ordens. By Immo Eberl.
(Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag. 2002. Pp. 614. €29,90.)
This is the most recent comprehensive history of the Cistercians from the
foundation of Cîteaux in 1098 to the present day, comparable with the Englishlanguage The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (1977) by Louis J. Lekai, a landmark work but inevitably somewhat dated, and the not altogether reliable
French Les moines blancs (1993) by Marcel Pacaut.
With over six hundred pages it contains a wealth of material, chronologically arranged.The first chapter, surprisingly little more than thirty pages long
(pp. 11-46), covers the first half century to the death of Saint Bernard in 1153.
New is the claim by Eberl (p. 38) that it is conceivable that Bernard and his
companions deliberately spent six months preparing to enter Cîteaux in order
to give the abbot, Stephen Harding, the opportunity of arranging the foundation of the first daughter-house, La Ferté. The next chapter deals with the
expansion to the papal reform bull Parvus Fons in 1265, covering approximately twice the period of the opening chapter but over two hundred pages
long, or about a third of the book’s total (pp. 47-255). Much of the space is
taken up by a very thorough, almost daunting, catalogue of abbeys and an
equally exhaustive overview of the subsequent growth of their estates.This is
followed by thematic sections on the leading figures in the Order, its privileges
and constitution, its relations to its female members, its spirituality, liturgy, art
and architecture, culture and learning, and the economy of the Order. By placing these topics within a chapter terminating in the thirteenth century, the
treatment of later developments within these areas is inevitably precluded. For
example, although the early leading figures are discussed, there is only a cursory reference later to the important abbot of La Trappe, de Rancé, after whom
the later Trappists are named, and no mention at all of Thomas Merton in the
last chapter. Also, although early Cistercian architecture is discussed, there is

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no mention of the later elaborate Baroque churches of Austria and southern
Germany or the magnificent classical buildings of many French abbeys.
The next chapter (pp. 257-385) covers the impact of the Hundred Years’
War, papal schism, and the Black Death, and the general decline occasioned by
the appointment of “commendatory” or absent abbots, often not even monks,
whose chief interest was the revenue which went with the office. A chapter
of less than one hundred pages follows (pp. 387-477) and takes the story forward three hundred years from the Reformation to the secularization of many
abbeys at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Here the dissolution of the
monasteries in northern Protestant countries could have been dealt with at
greater length. A short chapter (pp. 479-516) covers the last two centuries
with the restoration of the Order and its subsequent expansion to America,
Africa, and Asia, and completes the history to the present day.
The extensive bibliography (pp. 574-614) reveals the breadth and depth of
the author’s research. The fact that personal and place names are invariably
correctly spelt may in itself not seem an important point, but is nevertheless
indicative of the author’s reliability and attention to detail. It is a pity that there
is no index and that the map shows only the main French and German abbeys
and thus belies the text which embraces the Cistercian world as a whole.This
is an important book which contains a tremendous amount of material. It is to
be hoped that it may appear in an English translation.
Blewbury, Oxfordshire

JAMES FRANCE

English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585-1954. By
John Vidmar, O.P. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Distributed in the USA
by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 2005. Pp. vii, 196. $69.50.)
The title could be “Some English Catholic Catholic Historians. . .” since this
is largely history seen through the eyes of those in opposition to the “forward”or militant protagonists of Rome and pope. After a summarizing chapter
on “History and Religion,” “Exiles and Appellants” (pp. 10-22) features the
Catholics in England who never criticized the popes but appealed against the
baneful influence of Jesuits and Catholic exiles who, safe from Protestant persecution, could afford militancy. William Watson’s rollicking prose against the
hated Company gets quotation.Was it worth noting that, as he awaited execution in 1603, he retracted everything he wrote against the Society?
Two subjects recur like the themes in an operatic overture: the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth in 1570 and the insistence on an oath of loyalty
or supremacy which reopened the war on papal claims in 1559. Earlier rigidity petered out in the 1770’s when the government needed men to serve in
the forces, even Catholics. Vidmar reminds us that Paul III drew up a bull of
excommunication against Henry VIII in 1538. It was never “published” and so

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no one ever remembers it.Who published the excommunication of 1570? Cui
bono? “It is likely that the government even welcomed the pope’s bull . . . and
sought to exploit the resulting confusion” (p. 16).The remaining evidence suggests that the dark trio Roberto Ridolfi, Francis Walsingham, and William Cecil,
who organized the Ridolfi plot, also saw to the excommunication reaching the
public at the right time: see The Dangerous Queen (1964) and The Marvellous
Chance (1968).“The Quest for Catholic Emancipation” (chap. 2) pursues the
subject further.
These themes evolve in the remaining chapters, with a discerning recognition of the differences of emphasis affecting all shades of opinion. With the
Cisalpine movement at the close of the eighteenth century, the demurring of
the Appellants had become a positive murmuring against papal claims.“To the
Cisalpines”—Joseph Berington, Alexander Geddes, Sir John Throckmorton, and
even John Lingard—“all that stood between English Catholics and emancipation was papal claims” (p. 29). Berington wrote to John Kirk predicting “the
imminent extinction of the papacy” and added,“the sooner this happens the
better” (p. 39).Vidmar substantially endorses the case made by Edwin Jones for
John Lingard and his history (chap. 3).“The Jesuits and Mark Tierney” (chap. 4)
almost achieves light relief but there was nothing to amuse obliging archivists
in his cavalier disregard for returning borrowed manuscripts. With the final
achievement of emancipation, Catholic writers became outspoken in their
defense of past issues—notably Gasquet and his revision of the monastic reputation and the more aggressive Belloc who reintroduced emotionalism in his
defense of everything together with a nonchalant disregard for recording documentary evidence.The last two chapters largely round off and recapitulate.
Jesuit and other pro-papal writers have their mention: Robert Persons,
Charles Plowden, and J. H. Pollen, notably, but with little mention of wellknown writers before the cut-off line, 1954.Vidmar’s brief is altogether legitimate but needed clearer statement.The anti-Jesuits are allowed generous quotation, but Vidmar, while not dismissing all they say, deals with them critically.
The frequent presence of prejudice and ignorance in their flaying the victim
is recognized.The book abounds with interesting facts and cogent short summaries. It is the work of a scholar and a judicious student.
London, England

FRANCIS EDWARDS, S.J.

The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody. By
David W. Bebbington. [A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movement and
Ideas in the English-Speaking World.] (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity
Press. 2005. Pp. 288. $23.00.)
David W. Bebbington is a general editor of the series in which this book is
volume three in the projected five-volume series which will cover the eighteenth century to the present. His subject is the evangelical movement in the
English speaking world—Britain, the United States, and the settler colonies of

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the British Empire—in the nineteenth century. He deals with this vast subject
skillfully, and has produced a useful and clearly written account based upon an
impressive familiarity with both primary and secondary source materials.
The central thesis of the book is the dominant place of evangelicalism in
the culture of the nineteenth century.The steps which defined the evangelical
experience were the acceptance of the Bible as the source of truth, conversion
as its beginning, redemption as its object, and work as its consequence. The
spread of literacy and a common text, the English Bible, allowed evangelicals
all over the world to share a religious bond that transcended distance and
national and denominational identities. Bebbington uses two men to symbolize this unity, the American revivalist, Dwight L. Moody, and the English Baptist,
Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Moody, together with his musical director, Ira
Sankey, crossed the Atlantic to preach to huge audiences with a message that
cut across denominational lines. Moody’s powerful sermons and Sankey’s
upbeat hymns were followed by “inquiry rooms,” a form of personal counseling, innovations widely copied. Spurgeon presided over London’s Metropolitan
Tabernacle, where he preached to the largest Protestant congregation in the
world for nearly forty years. Spurgeon’s printed sermons, published weekly,
made him famous all over the world. Though a Baptist, like the nondenominational Moody, he was a man whose appeal was far beyond his religious base.
Bebbington emphasizes throughout his work the unity of evangelicals
world-wide.“What is most striking about the movement is less its heterogeneity over space than its internal connections.” (p.78) National historians have
ignored the inner dynamic of evangelical experience which bound the faithful
together. Evangelicals shared a common view of spirituality which found its
expression in prayer, was reaffirmed by the home, guided by the sermon, and
expressed in the conviction that Jesus was personal savior. That evangelical
spirituality fueled outreach at home and the mission field abroad.
Nineteenth-century evangelicalism was influential, because it was in harmony with the dominant cultural movement of Romanticism. Bebbington
argues that the evangelicals were not as hostile to the Enlightenment as generally believed, and offers as evidence the influence of Enlightenment
Commonsense Philosophy, particularly the argument that belief in God was
intuitive in all human beings. Evangelicals also drew upon the eighteenth-century argument from design which posits that because the universe clearly
shows signs of design, there must be a Designer. Some of his quotations from
nineteenth-century evangelicals offered in support of the view that they were
influenced by the Enlightenment seem tortured. He is on much safer ground
in suggesting the impact of Romanticism upon evangelicalism, an impact that
was felt in theology, preaching, liturgical practice, ecclesiastical architecture,
and in the sentimental language of outreach which appealed to the heart. A
problem for many evangelicals was that in many of these areas Roman Catholic
Romantic affinities were well established. Furthermore, in John Henry
Newman, they had one of the great Romantic prose writers of the age.These

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connections were not lost upon many evangelicals who raised the alarm
against Popery loudly and often. Nonetheless, by the century’s end evangelicals all over the world were building Gothic Revival churches and incorporating more ritualistic elements into worship as well as adding organs and robed
choirs. Spurgeon, it should be noted, opposed all of these changes.
Bebbington offers a cogent summary of the impact of modernism within
the evangelical community, attributing its success in large part to “the spread
of the cultural mood associated with Romanticism as it evolved into a more
popular phase”(p. 182). In response, the evangelical doctrine of the atonement
became less mechanistic and there was a growing consensus that everlasting
punishment was “not to be given undue weight” (p. 170).
Perhaps the greatest impact of the movement was that evangelical morality
became the prevailing system of values in the English speaking world.The antislave movement, the temperance movement, the social purity movement, and
the social gospel all had evangelical roots, as did other moral crusades which
are generally less-well regarded today, such as Sabbatarianism or the strident
hostility of many evangelicals to novels, social dancing, and the theater. It is not
without significance that virtually every great English novelist of the century
showed little sympathy for evangelicals. But it would be wrong to judge a
movement by its most fallible characters. If Obidiah Slopes, the odious
Evangelical clergyman in Trollope’s Barchester Towers, had his actual counterparts, there were far more men and women motivated by genuine piety and
goodness. And if evangelicals sometimes erred in their zeal to monitor the
behaviors of others, perhaps it can be said of them what Bebbington writes
concerning evangelical attitudes toward women, that evangelicals both circumscribed and enlarged. It is those evangelical works which enlarged that he
honors in his writing.
PATRICIA S. KRUPPA

University of Texas, Austin
Ancient

From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early
Church. By Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. (New York and Mahwah, New Jersey:The
Newman Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 253. $28.95.)
Father Sullivan’s confessional allegiances are not unimportant in this book
and neither, therefore, should mine be. I am an ordained minister of the Uniting
Church in Australia (a union church of Congregational, Methodist, and
Presbyterian churches formed in 1977); half my teachers during my foundational theological training in Melbourne in the late 1970’s were Jesuits; I am
Principal of the Uniting Church theological college in Brisbane, which is itself
part of a highly integrated ecumenical consortium (the Brisbane College of
Theology: Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Uniting), and with the Roman

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Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane (John Bathersby) I am Co-Chair of a National
Dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Uniting Churches.
The basic question which Father Sullivan explores in this very well written book is whether the historic episcopate, particularly as understood by
the Anglican, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic traditions, is of divine institution, an issue he properly describes as “truly church splitting.” In his own
words,“[t]he question that divides Catholics and Protestants is not whether,
or how rapidly, the development from the local leadership of a college of
presbyters to that of a single bishop took place, but whether the result of
that development is rightly judged an element of the divinely willed structure of the church” (p. viii). He acknowledges that none of the Apostles could
be described as “bishops” in the historic sense, that until the early part of the
second century no single bishop presided over any Christian community,
and that even then, apart from in Antioch and the Roman province of Asia,
probably nowhere did they do so until the middle of that century. By the end
of the century, however, and this would be agreed across confessional
divides, in a development which can only be described as rapid, the structure of single bishop-presbyters-deacons had become the norm everywhere.
This fact leads to a number of observations: first, that the traditional Roman
Catholic claim that there is, as an integral part of the structure of the Church,
an apostolic succession represented by an “unbroken line of episcopal ordination from Christ through the apostles down through the centuries to the
bishops of today”1 is unsustainable as our author himself acknowledges; and
second, that while the historical record alone will not support such a claim,
the rapid emergence of the threefold ordering of the Church as normative
does require, at the very least, the exploration of potential theological arguments arising out of that record. It is this which Father Sullivan skillfully and
thoughtfully explores. That I do not believe that he has made his case does
not diminish his fine scholarship.
Father Sullivan’s opening chapter (“Apostolic Succession in the Episcopate:
a Church-Dividing Issue”) is a very fair and balanced account of the issues at
stake here both between and for Catholics and Protestants. His short
“Afterword,” again very balanced, offers useful and positive reflections on possible ways forward in this ecumenical divide. In between he offers some observations, mainly by way of textual commentary, on the writings of the New
Testament and those of both Church Fathers and other early Christian writers
from Clement of Rome to Cyprian of Carthage as they either address or inform
the presenting issue. In these brief commentaries there is, however, just the
slightest touch of coloring by what he is trying to demonstrate, that is, evidence for a theological argument for the divine will in the early ordering of the
Church and the emergence of a separate and singular episcopate.
1
The Vatican Response to the Final Report of ARCIC I (1991) as quoted by Father
Sullivan.

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In his final chapter (“Successors by Divine Institution?”), Father Sullivan
argues that the post-New Testament development of church order into a single
episcopate supported by a normative threefold structure is not only consistent
with what he presumes to be the divine will for the defense and maintenance
of both unity and orthodoxy in the face of schism and heresy, but provides sufficient proof that it was by virtue of that divine will that such developments
took place. That evidence of such consistency might point to the possibility,
even the probability of divine planning and guidance, does not, however,
finally prove it.That Father Sullivan offers a strong and well-argued case for the
traditional Catholic position is clear; whether he has done so beyond reasonable doubt is less so.
Trinity Theological College, Brisbane

DAVID RANKIN

Early Christian Literature: Christ and Culture in the Second and Third
Centuries.The Apologies, Apocryphal Acts and Martyr Acts. By Helen Rhee.
{Routledge Early Church Monographs.] (New York: Routledge. 2005. Pp. xiv,
266. Paperback.)
Most discussions of the relation between Christianity and the culture of the
Roman world focus on the writings of the apologists, figures such as Justin
Martyr,Athenagoras,Tertullian, or Origen.Their writings respond to criticisms
of Christianity and attempt, in varying ways, to show that Christians are not
irreligious and respect, at least up to a point, the moral ideals that govern life
in society. In the nature of things apologists seek points of intersection
between the beliefs of Christians and the larger world around them.Which is
to say that the writings of the apologists are a unique literary genre within
early Christian literature with specific aims and characteristic features. With
some exceptions, notably Tatian, they give us one perspective on the relation
between Christ and culture.
The central idea behind this book, a reworking of a dissertation submitted
to the Center for Advanced Theological Studies at the School of Theology of
Fuller Theological Seminary, is that any assessment of early Christian attitudes
toward Greco-Roman culture must take into consideration at least two other
bodies of literature.The first is the apocryphal acts of the apostles, e.g. the Acts
of Thomas, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the Acts of John.These are imaginative expansions of the lives of apostles written to entertain the Christian folk
with edifying stories and miraculous tales of fabulous adventures that often
stretch the bounds of credulity.The martyr acts, by contrast, have a historical
basis and offer narratives of trial and martyrdom of individuals or groups of
individuals. Examples are the Acts of Justin, the Martyrdom of Perpetua and
Felicity, and the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs.
The sources are treated under three headings, the superiority of Christian
monotheism, the superiority of Christian sexual morality, and loyalty to the

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empire. Rhee, assistant professor of World Christianity at Westmont College,
Santa Barbara, California, shows how differently the three bodies of literature—apologists, acts of the apostles, and martyr acts—address the topics. On
the first, monotheism, the apologists attempt to demonstrate the rational foundations of belief in one God and present Christianity as the “true philosophy.”
Christ comes across first and foremost as a teacher. By contrast the apocryphal
acts emphasize the miracles of the apostles and present Christianity as a “true
power.”The martyr acts contrast devotion to the one God and sacrifice to the
many gods of Rome or the “genius” of the emperor. Rhee’s phrase for these
writings is “true piety.”
The second section, on the superiority of Christian sexual morality, is the
most illuminating. Rhee shows that the apologists promote marriage as a religious and social good, and see virginity and continence as a laudable virtue.
The apocryphal acts, however, are strongly encratitic, and reject marriage and
sexual intercourse as sinful. The martyr acts, especially those dealing with
female martyrs, highlight the tension between marriage and family and commitment to Christ. Similar accents come through in the final section on loyalty
to the empire, the apologists promoting allegiance to the emperor while the
acts defy imperial authority.
The idea behind the book is a good one and Rhee has read widely in the
ancient sources and in the modern literature. She asks intelligent questions and
sheds fresh light on a well-worn topic. But I found the categories too
schematic and the distinctions between the three bodies of literature too neat.
To be sure, attitudes toward society in early Christianity were quite varied and
the apologists cannot be taken as normative. Still I don’t see that the apologists
and the authors of the martyr acts necessarily represent two different attitudes
toward Greco-Roman culture. It is understandable that in recounting the trial
and death of martyrs, the authors of the acts reject the religious values of the
society in which they live.What gives the acts their unique character, however,
is not that they represent a different form of Christianity but that they were
composed to celebrate the heroic death of faithful Christians and hold up the
martyrs as models of total devotion to Christ.
There is no reason why the apologists and authors of the martyr acts could
not come from the same communities. One of the “acts” records the martyrdom of Justin, who was an apologist in the mid-second century. It was certainly possible to commemorate the fidelity and courage of the martyrs and
still live in Roman society in a Christian family with all the daily adjustments
and compromises that required.The acts of the apostles, however, breathe a
different spirit. They represent a more radical, even deviant form of
Christianity, that appealed only to a certain kinds of Christians. Several of the
acts of the apostles are clearly influenced by Gnosticism.The martyr acts, like
the writings of the apologists, spring from mainstream Christian communities. Looked at from this perspective the apocryphal acts of the apostles
would represent a minority view, whereas the apologists and martyr acts

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reflect different ways the great Church related to culture, at times seeking limited accommodation, at other times resolutely confessing the Lordship of
Christ against all earthly authority.
University of Virginia

ROBERT LOUIS WILKEN

Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature: A Literary History. By Claudio
Moreschini and Enrico Norelli.Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. 2 vols.
(Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 455;
xxvi, 734. $99.95.)
Two questions are especially raised by this weighty but finely translated
survey. First, what does one mean by “Christian Literature”? Second, what
should one make of the new subtitle,“A Literary History”? (The original title,
Storia della letteratura, is equally problematic; and comparable difficulty
arises with titles like Histoire littéraire or Literaturgeschichte.) The authors
suggest (I, xi) that “literatures” are defined by their languages, whereas
Christian literature is defined by its content. They admit that the languages
used have their own histories and therefore their own effects; but they would
not divide Christian literature in the first instance according to language.
One should note at once the authors’ deliberate omission of material in
Syriac and other languages of the Oriens christianus. It is true that the earliest
Christian texts have to be placed within the context of (predominantly Greek)
Hellenistic culture, which they modified by their particular approach to sacred
texts and sacred rituals, to the Hebrew Bible, and the sacramental life.Yet the
impact of languages further east, not to mention Hebrew itself and Aramaic,
had become apparent by the second century at the latest, and continued to
grow in importance. It also has to be borne in mind that several elements of
early Christian literature survive only in their “eastern” translations and recensions—which raises the immediate question of whether the survivals mirror
accurately the originals. In short, it is no longer acceptable to fly the Greekand-Latin flag and still lay claim to an inclusive “Christianity.”
I also think an opportunity was lost when the authors turned to the Latin
tradition, in which “the importance of the Bible . . . was utterly decisive” (I,
318). Here a new thread could have been identified and pursued; but that does
not happen, and in particular there is never an attempt to set down in one
place a comparison between the Greek biblical tradition, so conscious (with
time) of both the Hebrew and the Septuagint texts, and the Latin tradition,
based essentially (until Jerome) on a translation or translations. How odd, also,
to confine to a chapter on “The First Christian Literature of the West” the
observation that Christians “tried to find in the Bible elements that could be
matched to standards by which secular texts were usually judged” (I, 323)—
hardly a peculiarity of the West.

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A real attempt is, however, made to define a literary history.“Literary forms
and genres were adapted to the needs of the new faith,” and “literary history
focuses on the development of literary forms in relation to the development
of institutions and ideas” (I, xiii). In other words, needs, institutions, and ideas
have a certain priority, an explanatory force in relation to the texts themselves
(even though the needs are betrayed to us only in texts). These are brave
avowals, but the temptation to rest content with textual forms alone is never
quite resisted.“In literature,” the authors declare,“it is not possible to reach the
same certainty—or probability—as in the interpretation of historical or economic facts” (whatever they are, I, 317), which is to overlook their earlier suggestion that the two have to go hand in hand: if one lacks security, then so does
the other. When we come, in the second volume, to the period after
Constantine, we find a more explicit emphasis on “rhetoric,”which encourages
or demands “a reading that includes formal structures as part of the linkage of
literature with its times”—which must consist in part, one assumes, in “needs,
institutions, and ideas.”“In late antiquity,” we learn,“reality and rhetoric were
closely connected in an indissoluble symbiosis” (II, 9). Is this a new phenomenon? Why do we not hear more about it?
Let us take a particular example, relating to gnosticizing gospels. (One has
to admire, by the way, the analysis of “canonical” and “apocryphal” gospels as a
single phenomenon, I, 30 f.) The “Gnostic” gospels, like their canonical confrères, are preoccupied among other things with competing claims to authority. They display a confidence of their own in their predominantly dialogue
style, which contrasts with the more historical and developmental emphases
of the canonical narratives. There is a choice of leadership and instruction
hidden here, which provokes a particular curiosity about the competing
claims of teachers and presbyters and a general curiosity about the relationship between text and power. Not enough is made of this, either as an identifiable theme or as a theoretical issue (which comes first: the text that supports
the leadership, or the leadership that is reflected in the text?).There is, indeed,
little on the development of episcopacy, in spite of an early chapter on “ecclesiastical discipline and homilies” (I, 126 f.); and the papacy in particular merits
a mere snippet (I, 318).
One is led to ask, therefore, how chapters function in the book as a whole.
Gospels are treated,as I say,in one chapter;but then we have a separate account
of “The Johannine Tradition” (I, 75 f.), and other New Testament texts are separated according to category—apocalypse (I, 85 f.), letter (I, 101 f.), treatise (I,
112).What methodological policy lies behind such groupings (and overlaps)?
There are chapters and lengthy sections devoted to writers of major significance, and they often seem to mark what are perceived as moments of major
development or change. Clement of Alexandria, for example, exemplified (he
did not originate) a crucial transition from an essentially post-Jewish to a neoclassical tradition: “he takes his place on the border between a Christianity
that adopts secular literary forms and a Christianity wholly focused on its own

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oral tradition and concerned essentially with an intense labor on its own
Scriptures and sacred traditions, still substantially using the tools of Judaism”
(I, 266). Origen gets a chapter entirely to himself (I, 268 ff.), and is pleasingly
presented as both venturesome and loyal: “faithful not only to the Scriptures
but to the church,” and anxious “to offer not a close, rigid system but an openended study, which he urges all to pursue on their own” (I, 289).The chapter
on “The Christian Literature of Africa” (I, 329 ff.)—devoted for the most part,
naturally, to Tertullian and Cyprian—introduces the arresting notion that
Africa’s prominence in the Christian tradition merely matches its importance
as the native land of Fronto and Apuleius (I, 329). As we could expect,
Augustine is another figure treated separately at length (II, 362-409).
These self-contained analyses are not, however, typical of the work as a
whole. It is more common to find elements oddly scattered, with corresponding breakages in sequence. I have mentioned the separation of “The
Johannine Tradition” from both gospels and later apocryphal and Gnostic
developments. Irenaeus is set apart from Apologists, especially Justin, which
interrupts any coherent treatment of, for example, Logos theology.The formation of the New Testament canon is presented in the first volume, but in a diffuse form; and we have to wait until II, 200-235 for a fuller treatment of apocrypha and their gradual exclusion.
The difficulty is accentuated in the second volume, which makes in some
ways a fresh start, and reflects the heavier influence of Moreschini.There is a
more forceful definition of “literature”: it does not include “documents,” but
represents rather “something that does not have a purely practical purpose”
(II, xvii).The writers congratulate themselves here on a “disarming simplicity”;
but it proves in the end only a recipe for vagueness. How does one decide
whether a document is not literary? And in what sense is literature never
purely practical? Poetry fares well in this work, albeit in fits and starts; but
hagiographical texts, sadly, are regarded as only “marginally” literary (II, xviii),
even though they merit a later treatment in at least their Latin guise (II, 348 f.).
The Life of Antony makes no appearance as a text (except as translated by
Evagrius, II, 325), even in an earlier chapter devoted in part to “Ascetics” (II, 57
ff.)—although Antony’s Letters are mentioned briefly (II, 62-63).
The historical framework, meanwhile, is presented in familiar but now
debatable form. Continuity (especially of “forms”) is less evident in the West
than in the East (even though, apparently,“late antiquity was marked by an evolution of literary forms,” II, 11). We begin to detect, we are told,“clearer divisions” (although the implied lack of earlier clarity is not described), divisions
that “herald the new (medieval) culture” (II, xvii). The differences are then
explained simply by the presence or absence of barbarians—“the break in literary traditions that was caused by the barbarian invasions” (II, 236). No sector
of the West, therefore, was exempt from “barbarism,” and there were no barbarians in the East.

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The authors’ touch here is less certain. Therefore on the one hand, late
antique Christianity is set firmly in an era of “decadence” marked by the
“exhaustion of pagan thought” (II, 1-3). The Church, at least in the West, begins
to separate itself from the state, and in that sense separates religion from the
state’s control—an important novelty. We observe the development of a “new
social reality” (II, 2). So is Gibbon deftly overlaid with more recent depictions.
Then, on the other hand, we are made to veer away from decadence and
exhaustion. Exhaustion was not, apparently, a sign of decadence, but “signified
a transformation and at the same time a continuity” (II, 6). We now have to
believe in “basic cultural elements shared by all these writers without exception,” and in a species of “social conditioning, which yielded a shared esthetic
outlook”; a conditioning (or an outlook) imposed “by a fixed set of social conditions coming from the culture they received prior to and independently of
any and every literary activity and creation” (all in II, 7). The interior contradictions and the changed senses (compared with the first volume) of both “literature” and “continuity” are evident enough.
So, one is saddened by a loss, in this second volume, of any attempt to trace
development and textual relations.The most telling (and weary) symptom of
indifference is the readiness to make heresy and controversy the governing
frame. “Western Christian Culture,” for example, is subsumed under Arianism
(II, 236 ff.).This is the context provided for Ambrose (II, 268 ff.)—even though
he is eventually characterized in a way that belies his implied significance in a
chapter of such a sort: he disclosed “a Christian spirituality that was warm and
welcoming”; his sermons were “sensitive, reflective, and carefully thought out”
(echoing Christine Mohrmann);“his art . . . embraces everything in a kind of
psalmic garb, halfway between prose and poetry”; and “for him ideas were
never separable, or separated, from the echoes they could awaken in the hearts
of the listeners” (II, 287). Jerome is comparably squeezed within a broader
chapter (II, 298-320)—albeit devoted to “Science and Biblical Philology”—
along with Rufinus and Pelagius. How he would have loved that! Indeed, further conjunctions are even more bizarre.“As happens,” we read,“in periods of
great cultural fervor a happy homogeneity unites the major figures among
themselves and the minor figures with the major” (II, 299)—the happy homogeneity aligning Jerome with Hilary, Ambrose, and Augustine! Only the
Cappadocians are allowed to escape into a chapter of their own (II, 81-135).
What might one suggest instead? Surely, the development of the homily,
alongside the related but distinct skill of the commentary, dominates the
Christian literary scene in this period. There are dispersed treatments of
homily—relating to Basil, for example (II, 96-99), and Chrysostom (II, 149155)—and there is an interesting section on stenography (II, 236-237).
Commentary one has to rummage for—in the section, for example, on Didymus
(II, 70-80)—but the emphasis is on the senses of Scripture (yes, we have a chapter on The Antiochene School,” II, 136-177, which is where Chrysostom is
forced to find his literary niche).There is little on the “needs” or the “institutions

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and ideas” so confidently appealed to earlier; on the “indissoluble symbiosis” of
reality and rhetoric.The social circumstances of homily, the purposes of commentary, are left aside.To take only one example,Averil Cameron’s Christianity
and the Rhetoric of Empire, published years before Moreschini and Norelli’s
original Italian Storia, showed how we should now harmonize the varied elements of “discourse,”including literary discourse, in this turbulent and inventive
age. In that connection, by the way, it is difficult to understand why, on the subject of “Christianity and Ancient Education,”we are limited to a study of Synesius
and Nonnus (II, 178 ff.); rather than of Basil and Augustine (although De doctrina christiana eventually gets its treatment, II, 377-381).
From this point, we descend quickly into mere miscellany.The chapter on
“The Age of the Barbarian Invasions in the West” (II, 410 ff.) does nothing to
bring together in any unified way the more than thirty writers mentioned. In
particular, it gives no vivid impression of how western Christians reacted, at a
literary level, to the barbarian event; this is no updated Histoire littéraire des
grandes invasions. And look who is tightly squeezed into this assortment:
Orosius (II, 413-415), Cassian (II, 432-436), Sidonius (II, 457-460), and Leo (II,
462-465).The authors then explicitly admit that they are not sure what distinguishes this chapter from the one following, “The Literature of the RomanoBarbarian Kingdoms of the West” (II, 470 ff.). Here we come up hard against
their uncertainty as to how to create an integrated account. Kingdoms in the
fifth century were apparently “still in flux,” but in the sixth century “solidly
established.” Yet, in the very next sentence, it becomes clear that they were
nothing of the kind (II, 470). At one moment, older forms were “gradually vanishing,” but then we lurch into “fragmentation,” seen as “a characteristic of sixthcentury literature” (II, 470). Again, nearly thirty writers are treated individually
in some sixty pages; and Boethius, Ennodius, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours,
Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville are lumped together under a catch-all
heading. Benedict gets one small paragraph (II, 498); compare the space
devoted earlier to Cassian, Eucherius, and the Lérins writers (II, 432-439).
The final section on the East is equally disappointing. We start with an
emphasis on Ephesus and Chalcedon as unifying factors; the resulting sense of
inadequacy echoing that induced by the Arian focus earlier.There is a chapter
on “Asceticism and spirituality in the Greek World” (II, 631 ff.); but we are not
told why we should happily separate the writers concerned from their western
counterparts and from the earlier treatment of “monasticism” as a distinct category (II, 61-64).Views of the past, we learn, were now predominantly ecclesiastical—a view that might have surprised Jordanes or Gregory of Tours. Analysis
of the chronicle as a distinguishable genre is first applied to Prosper: “with him
the chronicle henceforth replaces all history in the narrower sense of the term”
(II, 421). One assumes that the authors mean in the West: Malalas is tacked onto
the end of the chapter on “Greek Christian Historiography” (II, 685 f.).
What starts out as a “literary history,” therefore, ends in the realm of the
encyclopedia. A brave attempt has been abandoned. The work will have to

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compete, therefore, with other studies more honest about their aspirations.
One thinks, for example, of Siegmar Döpp and Wilhelm Geerlings’ excellent
Dictionary of Early Christian Literature (also translated by Matthew
O’Connell). It bears saying also that, while the English translation may naturally
continue to favor an Italian bibliography and scholarly antecedents, it seems
odd that several works originally in English are cited in their Italian translations, as is also the case with primary texts.
The Catholic University of America

PHILIP ROUSSEAU

Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts. Edited by
Patricia Cox Miller. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America
Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 340. $29.95.)
Patricia Cox Miller has provided a sourcebook for the study of women in
the first five centuries of Christianity which should prove useful for both
undergraduate teaching and for reference use by scholars as well. The book
begins with a helpful synthetic introduction in which Miller discusses the
nature of the sources she draws upon, gives an overview of the larger themes
covered in the book, and provides some more general historical and theoretical background. The sources used are of three kinds: documentary, popular literary, and theological. Miller has drawn upon material ranging from the canons
of church councils to hymns, martyrologies, hagiographies, funeral orations,
and theological treatises. The book’s organization into larger topics and subthemes represents perhaps the feature which will be most appreciated and
useful for the teacher: Miller has given us an elegant way of organizing and
trying to make sense of a wide body of disparate sources. She has broken her
material down into five different sections: “Women’s Roles in the Church,”
“Women and Virginity,” “Portraits of Ascetic Women,” “Women and Domestic
Life,” and “Female Image and Theology.” Each section is in turn divided into a
number of different subtopics; thus, for example, the section “Women and
Virginity” contains texts on the topics “Female Comportment,”“Major Treatises
on Virginity,”“The Subintroductae,” and “Transvestism.” Some of the translations
are Miller’s own, while a larger number have been reprinted from other works.
The teacher will appreciate Miller’s short introductions to each subsection and
each individual text, as well as her glosses of words and phrases which might
prove delphic to undergraduates. She has also inserted organizing headers into
longer excerpts to make their structure more readily apparent and has identified most scriptural and classical allusions.There are three appendices and two
indexes. The first appendix is a timeline listing Christian women of the first
five centuries, providing dates where they are available. The second appendix
is a second timeline, this one giving the dates in the first five centuries of the
authors and works used in the book. The third appendix offers suggestions for
further reading, grouping the bibliographic entries by topics which correspond to the sections of the book. Finally, there is a general index followed by
an index of scriptural references.

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Any attempt to compile a sourcebook such as this must inevitably force
upon the editor the unenviable task of leaving certain texts on the cutting room
floor, so to speak. Granting this limitation, one still wishes that Miller had
devoted more space in her introduction to discussing any similarities and/or differences which might obtain between the representation and roles of women
in non-Greek Christian texts—not just Latin, but also, for example, Syriac.
Nevertheless, Miller has drawn together and clearly organized an impressive
body of material, giving us a book which should facilitate the incorporation of
the role and importance of women into the teaching of early Christian history.
Hers is an effort for which both students and teachers should be grateful.
Princeton University

JACK TANNOUS

Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History. Edited and
Translated by Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek. (Baltimore, Maryland:The
Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 220. $48.00.)
If there were ever any doubts that women were ordained to ministerial positions in the early church, such doubts can now be put to rest. Madigan and
Osiek have presented overwhelming literary, canonical, and epigraphic evidence for the ordination of women deacons and women presbyters, and for the
ordination of women to other offices.The authors have collected, edited, and
translated all the extant data in Latin and Greek (and some Syriac) for both the
East and the West until ca. 600 A.D., including about seventy-five inscriptions.
Madigan and Osiek present clear and accurate translations of all the items in
their documentary history, providing the original Greek or Latin, where appropriate, in footnotes.The documents are preceded by helpful, brief background
comments, including biographical statements concerning ancient authors.
Commentaries discuss the item’s significance for providing evidence concerning the ordination of women. Extensive footnotes provide bibliographical references to the most relevant scholarship. Surprisingly, there is no comprehensive bibliography.There are, however, excellent appendixes, indexes, and maps.
Madigan and Osiek warn against assuming that ordination in the early
church meant exactly what it means today. They also distinguish correctly
between “ordination, membership in the clergy, and special group status” (p. 5).
Chapter Two shows that patristic commentators almost invariably interpreted
Rom 16:1–2 and 1 Tim 3:11 to refer to women deacons and that members of
the “order of widows” (cf. 1 Tim 5: 3–13) were, at least by one commentator,
equated with deaconesses. Similarly, Chapter Five, which contains data from the
post-600 A.D. era, demonstrates that later authors and councils took it for
granted that there were women deacons in the earlier period. Chapters Three
through Seven deal with the extant evidence for women deacons in the East.
Chapter Six covers the material on women deacons. Chapter Eight presents and
discusses the (far less extensive) data for women presbyters.

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Madigan and Osiek take care not to draw conclusions that cannot be supported by the literary texts, canons, or inscriptions they present. Only on one
occasion was it unclear to me how a particular literary text (John of Damascus,
On Heresies 49) was directly relevant to a discussion on women deacons (pp.
133–134). I also think it would have been better to indicate consistently in the
translations themselves, rather than in the commentaries, parts of names or
other words which need to be restored because of missing letters in inscriptions (e.g., contrast Arete [p. 72] and Severa [p. 90] with [Ce]lsa [p. 75] and
傽
[Epipha]n[e]ia [p. 80]). Similarly, given the extant ␶␩ s before the letters ␮␣␶ in
the text of “Matrona of Stobi” (p. 84), it seems to me better to restore the text
␶␩s ␮␣␶[␳´␻␯␩s] and to translate the words as “of the matron” rather than “of
Matrona.” There is an inconsistency between the date of the discovery of
Sophia’s inscription as given in the caption for figure 9 and the introduction
to the inscription (p. 90).The form Theoprepia should have been given in the
translation as that is the spelling given in the text of the inscription—or, at
least, the alteration should have been indicated by parentheses as in the heading (p. 93). The correct spelling of the findspot of the Ammion inscription is
Uşak, not Uçak (p. 169).The authors, unintentionally, give the impression that
Tertullian thought Montanism to be a “deviant group” (pp. 8–9) and that
Cyzicus was closer to Constantinople (p. 47) than the approximately 180
Roman miles which separated the two cities by road. All the above, however,
are minor issues.
Madigan and Osiek have produced the best, most comprehensive, and
extremely useful documentary history to date regarding the ordination of
women in the early church, correcting a number of earlier held false assumptions (pp. 3–4; 204–206).
Phillips Theological Seminary

WILLIAM TABBERNEE

Constructing Antichrist: Paul, Biblical Commentary, and the Development of
Doctrine in the Early Middle Ages. By Kevin L. Hughes. (Washington, D.C.:
The Catholic University of America Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 278. $59.95.)
This handsome volume grew out of a dissertation written under Bernard
McGinn, master mentor of many students of medieval theology.The title presents it as a study of the “doctrine” of Antichrist, that enigmatic figure of the
apocalyptic tradition that kept the imagination of theologians, preachers, and
common people busy for centuries. McGinn himself has interpreted the
antichrist theme socio-theologically as “two thousand years of the human fascination with evil.” Hughes’s study moves in a different direction. On the
assumption that Christian doctrine is based on biblical texts and their interpretation, the author follows step by step and with impressive learning the history of just one particular biblical text which is of prime importance for all
antichrist lore and speculation, Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians—not
just its famous second chapter but the entire letter.With this approach he joins

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the growing number of scholars, especially medievalists, who are taking up the
history of biblical exegesis as a field of research that can throw new light on
the history of Christian thought. Methodologically, Hughes is aware that working in this field stretches the skills of the historian to the limits, analytically as
well as synthetically. He proceeds with great caution and knows the importance of being open to surprises. The surprise in this case is that the early and
medieval commentaries do not reflect the burning contemporary concerns of
an age when apocalyptic emotions and fears reached new peaks time and
again. As the author explains, medieval commentators saw Paul primarily as a
teacher, not as a prophet, and tried to extract coherent doctrine from the text,
not predictions of their own contemporary situation. Hughes finds two major
strands in the early exegesis of the letter: an apocalyptic realism that considers
Antichrist as an individual figure, tyrant or deceiver, whose appearance will be
part of the actual events at the endtime, and a spiritual interpretation, typical
of the Latin tradition, which reflects on interior dangers in the individual soul
and speaks of a communal “body of antichrist” in contrast to, but also within,
the Church, the “body of Christ” throughout history. Major representatives of
the former strand are the Ambrosiaster, Pelagius, and Theodore of Mopsuestia
(in Latin), of the latter Tyconius, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. The author
himself is uneasy with the term “spiritual” for the Tyconian-Augustinian interpretation;“spiritual” exegesis refers to the anagogical function of the biblical
text.“Metaphorical” or “figurative” may be better choices. Hughes shows that
early medieval interpreters do not choose between these two options but hold
them together as parts of the one normative tradition of Bible and Fathers. He
is at his best in the presentation of the Carolingian authors. The sections on
Rabanus Maurus and especially Haimo of Auxerre are masterpieces of careful
source analysis and authoritative textual/contextual reading. The eleventh-century authors (Lanfranc, Bruno) whose Pauline commentaries have not found
much interest to date, will need more work; here Hughes’s bold deductions are
less convincing because the textual basis presents him with problems. The
diachronic survey of the material ends with the Glossa ordinaria and Peter
Lombard, whose exegetical work Hughes sees correctly at the transition point
to a new form of scholastic commentary. Throughout the book, the introductions to each exegete, which show the author in full command of the literature
in the field, are particularly valuable. Together they form a helpful roadmap of
the state of scholarship on the medieval interpretation of Paul and could be
used as such by anyone planning to venture into this relatively unexplored territory. More than that, Hughes’s competent investigation of one short letter in
its entirety demonstrates that the exegetical history of the Pauline Epistles is a
gold mine for the historian of Christian doctrine. One can only wish that he
will find imitators, equally enthusiastic prospectors who will continue to
explore the mighty river bed of Pauline exegesis at other points. The results
will be well worth the effort.
Boston University

KARLFRIED FROEHLICH

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There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the
Christian Roman Empire. By Michael Gaddis. [The Transformation of the
Classical Heritage, 39.] (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2005. Pp.
xiv, 396.)
One of the most difficult questions for students of early Christianity to confront is the reason for the violence and coercion that followed in the wake of
Constantine’s conversion early in the fourth century. Scholarship, of course,
has had a comfortable answer for generations: Christianity, as Edward Gibbon
taught us, is inherently intolerant; once Constantine gave them access to the
levers of power, Christians quite naturally used them to suppress and persecute their religious rivals. Despite this solution’s prima facie plausibility, however, it has always had gaps, one of the biggest being its failure to grapple with
a strong pacifist movement based on Jesus’ central commandment to return
hatred with love. For scholars attuned to this problem, the issue has been to
find a plausible alternative explanation for Christianity’s coercive turn.
With this book, Michael Gaddis does just that. Using as both his title and a
leitmotif for the strands of his argument the Egyptian firebrand Shenoute’s
retort to a pagan magistrate whose house he had ransacked (“There is no
crime for those who have Christ”), Gaddis takes his reader into the mind of
those late antique zealots who did so much to reshape the face of Christianity
during the period between the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of
Chalcedon in 451. Demonstrating how these rigorists and their supporters justified such actions as God’s anger and not their own, Gaddis argues that religious violence grew out of a distinct shift in Christian thinking about martyrdom. What was once the reward for exemplary suffering and endurance
became instead a reward for “those who struck out directly against the enemies of the faith” (p. 93).
But the thinking of zealots is only part of the problem. More important, as
Gaddis recognizes, is understanding why their actions were accepted by the
wider community. Scholars have long recognized that monks drew much of
their prestige from their willingness to suffer like martyrs, but this connection
did not explain either the greater propensity to violence or the readiness of
other Christians to accept it. A new discourse about martyrdom supplies the
missing link. It shows itself in John Chrysostom’s urging his congregation to
rebuke and even strike “blasphemers,” because in this way they would be imitating the martyrs (p. 175).
Discourse, more than violence itself, is the real subject of Gaddis’ interest,
and it leads him to two important conclusions. First, unlike so much modern
scholarship, Gaddis does not identify the thoughts and actions of the Shenoutes
of Late Antiquity with mainstream Christianity; instead, he firmly labels theirs an
“extremist discourse” and devotes much space to demonstrating that it did not
go uncontested. Second, he is equally attuned to the rhetorical strategies devel-

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oped by the imperial center to justify the violent suppression of Christian as
well as pagan adversaries in the name of unity and salvation.
What tipped the balance in favor of extremists was their readiness to put
their lives’ on the line, and the readiness of their followers to read such behavior as martyrdom.“Their willingness to die,” he observes (in one of many fine
turns of phrase),“gave them the right to kill” (p. 181). Gaddis is fully aware of
the contemporary implications of his study. Indeed, he concludes that both
secular and religious ideologies of the modern world have their origins in this
Late Antique discourse. Such thinking makes this book not only important, but
also timely.
University of California, Santa Barbara

H. A. DRAKE

Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late
Antiquity. By Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony. [The Transformation of the Classical
Heritage, XXXVIII.] (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. xvi,
250. $45.00.)
Israeli scholars have of late produced tremendous work on the topic of pilgrimage.The present volume, a substantially revised dissertation written at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, makes available to non-Hebrew-speaking historians a taste of that rich, ongoing work. Bitton-Ashkelony surveys an impressive variety of late ancient sources (in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, from western
Gaul to Mesopotamia) in her exploration of nascent notions of sacred geography. Rejecting overly simplistic rubrics such as “popular religion,” BittonAshkelony instead probes the theological, political, and social dimensions of a
religious phenomenon whose origins are obscure (or even irrelevant) but
whose impact was ineluctable. At the heart of her study lies the city of
Jerusalem, allegorized in the New Testament but brilliantly rematerialized in
late antiquity, a religious center around which crystallized diverse responses to
the idea of venerable Christian place.
An introductory chapter lays out scholarly approaches to the question of
sacred space, betraying a tendency, little expressed in the rest of the volume,
toward a religionsgeschichtlich approach.The first three chapters tackle “great
thinkers” of late antiquity. Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa were lukewarm toward Jerusalem pilgrimage, even as they heavily promoted local cultic
shrines, possibly due to competition with other bishops such as Cyril of
Jerusalem (chap. 1). Jerome at times embraced the sanctity of the holy land (in
which he settled), yet at other times polemically rejected the special sanctity
of the holy city. Once again, for Bitton-Ashkelony, ecclesiastical politics intervene; yet even a political figure such as Jerome cannot escape the rising tide
of the adoration of sacred space (chap. 2). Augustine pointedly refrained from
articulating any theology of sacred geography beyond typically Pauline allegories of God’s omnipresence and the “New Jerusalem.” Bitton-Ashkelony

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views this reticence as pastoral condescension from the great bishop, focused
more on the behavior of his flock than on their locus (chap. 3).
The final two chapters push into the monastic realm which, BittonAshkelony argues, was central to the political and theological developments of
a “territory of grace.” She persuasively demonstrates the productively paradoxical importance of both xeniteia (wandering) and he–sychia (tranquility) in the
accounts of desert saints in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria into the sixth centuries.
Three significant monastic thinkers then ground these hagiographic sources:
Athanasius of Alexandria, who deftly acknowledges holy land pilgrimage but
subsumes it into (episcopally supervised) monastic practice; Evagrius
Ponticus, whose highly theorized mystical monasticism provides an even more
thorough (and influential) internalization of the pilgrimage idea; and
Theodoret of Cyrrhus, whose biblical interpretations incorporate pilgrimage
into a supersessionist, anti-Jewish theology.The last chapter (chap. 5) returns
to the question of “local versus central” pilgrimage in Palestinian and Syrian
sources. Here Bitton-Ashkelony produces her most compelling argument: the
imagination of local pilgrimage sites (particularly monastic sites) as a “second
Jerusalem,” suggesting that “local” sacred space could only predominate
through an imagined, and redistributed,“center.”
Encountering the Sacred is an enormously learned volume, superbly written and notated, required reading for students of early Christian pilgrimage and
monasticism. Bitton-Ashkelony dispenses with the typical frameworks for discussing Christian theologies of space—most notably (and perhaps a bit
hastily) the persistent influence of Platonism—and in so doing presents us
with theologians and theorists who are always responsive and reactive. Some
more tantalizing suggestions might have been pursued further, such as the
importance of monastic theology as foundational for medieval pilgrimage, or
the ways in which biblicism could mediate between material piety and theological anti-Judaism. It is, however, the mark of a dynamic study to leave the
reader wanting more, and doubtless the groundwork laid here will provide
intellectual provocation for numerous further studies.
University of California, Riverside

ANDREW JACOBS

Augustine: A New Biography. By James J. O’Donnell. (New York: Harper
Collins Publishers. 2005. Pp. xvi, 396. $26.95.)
The subtitle of this new life of Augustine announces a biography.It is both that
and rather more. Before O’Donnell’s Augustine, there were two big standard
works on Augustine’s life. Peter Brown’s now-classic Augustine of Hippo first
appeared in the 1960’s. It was a spectacular and pathbreaking work of genius
written by a young man who was then only in his early thirties.Not without good
reason does O’Donnell himself laud Brown as “Augustine’s best biographer” (p.
73).Brown’s Augustine appeared again at the turn of the millennium,with recon-

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siderations that looked back on the author’s original work from the perspective
of a half-century of changes in which Brown himself had a large part.Then Serge
Lancel’s Saint Augustin appeared just before the turn of the millennium, first in
French and then,within three years,in an English translation—a biography whose
extraordinary quality was assured by the author’s incomparable command of the
whole range of ancient North African history. Whereas Brown’s work set
Augustine’s life in the context of the development of Late Antique culture and
thought, Lancel offered a more strictly biographical perspective that placed the
man more firmly than ever in his African homeland and culture.
O’Donnell’s Augustine is not like either of these now-classic lives.His Augustine
is not set in any context. Instead, the reader is taken for a sometimes breathtaking
ride, invited to sense the forces involved in making the man from the inside out.
The “more” that the reader gets is a postmodern rush.We feel the depression and
anxiety, the rage and anguish of a man living his driven life of success and failure.
Patently influenced by cybernetics, virtual and deconstructive currents, this
Augustine is not a neat narrative retold in careful chronological order. It is a critical inspection that strives to break down the pieces of personality (p. 84). In the
postscript that has appeared with the paperback version (2006, p. 7), the author
confesses that he had toyed with the subtitle of “An Antibiography,” much in the
manner that my clothing has sometimes been derided as an Antifashion,I suppose.
The result is anything but neat or intended to satisfy.
O’Donnell’s Augustine is a site of immense talent, huge ambition, and great
frustrations whose self-fashioning, down to the center of the famous conversion, was deliberately constructed in his Confessions. Alert to the stratagems
of deliberate amnesia and fiction, there is a constant drive to interrogate the
subject.What is it that Augustine is not telling us? And why? In a man who was
so attuned to his increasing celebrity, the tactic is useful and produces better
insights. Moved by a hermeneutic of suspicion, O’Donnell is determined not to
be seduced or hypnotized by his subject’s words. In his prying apart, he does
not shrink from imaginative reconstructions, fictional biographies, and counterfactual scenarios that might well make an Edmund Morris blush (e.g., pp.
51-52, 80-81, 171-172, 205-207, 230-231). He brings into the glare of his spotlight experiences that Augustine most wants us not to see—amongst others,
his eleven (not nine, as he minimized) years as a devoted Manichee, and his
beloved mother’s involvement in the Donatist church. The personal story is set
against a deep cultural background: the making of sermons, the writing of letters, the quality and knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Punic, and the complex
and rapidly evolving template of late antique social relations.
O’Donnell warns us, as we might expect, not to take the power of late
paganism as gravely as it is presented to us:“Christian parody and polemic is
taken too seriously” (p. 189).The fright of a great religious threat was needed
in the forging of a new Christianity in the late fourth century.The polemics did
serve one great end and personal success:“Augustine’s part in shaping catholic
identity was the central achievement of his career” (p. 201). As with “pagan-

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ism,” the author also moves to a new telling of the Donatist-Catholic battle that
reconstrues it in novel ways by using an inventive terminology—”Caecilianists”
v.“Donatists”—to circumvent Augustine’s willful triumphalism (chap. 8).There
follows one of the best analyses of Pelagius and his heresy. Here too, there was
a huge price tag attached to success. O’Donnell makes clear how much
Augustine was a Pelagius “wannabe”—a fighter who was forced from positions
that we would expect him more naturally to hold, finally to espouse ever more
logically refined and coherent, but extreme ideas (p. 269). In the end,
Augustine was to be decisively shaped by his own African world, one with
which he coped so badly (p. 272). Since the searchlight is shone so relentlessly
on the man—it is, after all, a biography—the one less-than-fulsome chapter
devoted to Augustine’s “theologies” is bound to disappoint some.
In the laudable desire to communicate with a generation of e-mailers and
video-gamers, there are turns of phrase and expression that some are bound to
see as over-reaching. Augustine appears as a C.E.O., a gunslinger, an attack-dog, a
Don Quixote,a horny young man on the hunt for hookups;the Greatful Dead play
and the Manichees arrive as a New-Age sect. The author has taken the risks of stylistic inconcinnity and anachronism,but for all the right reasons. And mostly with
success. Reading this reconsideration of this one human life, I have had to accept,
again,that there is something unusual in Augustine that I will never understand—
a fascination, as O’Donnell rightly names it. No other figure from all of antiquity
has attracted three of the finest spirits of our age and has provoked from them
three masterpieces that so admirably mirror the lives of the writers. His own little
trinity. Of all these modern views of this ancient life, there can be no doubt that
O’Donnell’s is the one for our age—an Augustine for the threshold of the twentyfirst century. It is that good. Beg, borrow, or buy.Then pick it up and read.
BRENT SHAW

Princeton University
Medieval

Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. By Nicole Chareyron.Translated by
W. Donald Wilson. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Pp. xviii,
287. $45.00.)
For medieval Christians the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an act of extraordinary devotion. Rich spiritual rewards awaited those who could visit the city
sanctified by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet the long,
expensive, and dangerous journey from Europe to the Holy Land was itself also
an act of penance. Utilizing more than fifty contemporary accounts, Nicole
Chareyron opens in this book a fascinating window into the world of these pilgrims. In evocative (although occasionally over-florid) prose, Chareyron creates a composite picture of a typical pilgrimage from its hopeful departure
until its uncertain conclusion. Her close familiarity with what she refers to as
“our authors” makes this book both interesting and entertaining.

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It is important to point out that, title notwithstanding, this is a book about
Jerusalem pilgrimages at the end of the Middle Ages—specifically the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. A pilgrim in the twelfth century, for example, would have had a dramatically different experience than
what is described here. Chareyron recognizes the diversity of late medieval pilgrimage routes, yet focuses on what she sees as the most common one and
then follows it closely. It begins at home with a ceremony and tearful departure and then moves on to Venice, where ships’ captains compete with one
another to sell package tours that seem never to go as promised. After experiencing the rich beauty of Venice, the pilgrims then board a cramped vessel
where poor food, bad smells, nasty rats, cagey oarsmen, and disease are the
norm for the next five weeks.When the pilgrims finally do arrive at the ruins
of crusader Jaffa they are packed into caves where they must wait until they
have paid sufficient fees, bribed sufficient officials, and submitted to sufficient
depredations. Only then can they depart under the guidance of the approved
Franciscan tour leaders. Along the way and throughout their visit to the Holy
Land they will be beset by corrupt authorities and local Muslims who routinely lob insults or stones at them while all the while seeking to rob them
blind.The journey was a penance indeed.
Once in Jerusalem, things do not get much better. Most pilgrims were given
Spartan quarters and strictly limited in their ability to move about. Aside from
visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, they took excursions to Bethlehem,
the Jordan, and other holy sites. After a month of all that, most pilgrims were
eager to return home, yet Chareyron follows those who pressed on to Gaza,
Mt. Sinai, Cairo, and Alexandria.Through the eyes of those travelers the reader
explores rich bazaars, filled with luxury items, exotic animals, and pitiful
slaves, trudges along difficult desert treks, and marvels at the pyramids, which
were generally believed to be Joseph’s granaries. At last comes the voyage
home, usually more eventful than expected or wanted.
There is no grand thesis here, nor should there be. Chareyron has instead
woven together the accounts of her authors into a compelling narrative in
which their voices, at once flawed and human, come through to the modern
reader. It is a page-turning story accessible to a general audience that would
also be ideal for classroom use.
Saint Louis University

THOMAS F. MADDEN

The Foundations of Medieval English Ecclesiastical History: Studies
Presented to David Smith. Edited by Philippa Hoskin, Christopher Brooke,
and Barrie Dobson. [Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, vol. 27.]
(Rochester, New York: Boydell Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 235. $90.00.)
The economics of the publishing world make the publication of
Festschriften much rarer than used to be the case; however, this volume shows

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a great combination of personal tribute to an eminent scholar and a pioneering archivist, on the occasion of his retirement from the directorship of the
Borthwick Institute, University of York. It is a focused and interesting collection of essays, the subjects of which reflect the breath and scope of David
Smith’s work.
The first two contributions in the book, by Christopher Brooke and
Christopher Webb respectively, present the scholarly work of David Smith as
the editor of the British Academy’s English Episcopal Acta series, general
editor of the Lincoln Record Society, and editor of many volumes of other
medieval ecclesiastical documents from the York diocese as well as director of
the Borthwick Institute, which under his leadership became one of the most
important repositories of documents related to the ecclesiastical and regional
history of northern Britain as well as an active research center and training
ground for new generations of archivists.
Julia Barrow’s contribution, “Why Forge Episcopal Acta? Preliminary
Observations on the Forged Charters in the English Episcopal Acta series”
argues that forgeries were produced primarily by large Benedictine monasteries and cathedral priories and to a lesser degree by other ecclesiastical institutions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.The most active in this field were
post-Conquest foundations at Gloucester, Rochester, Durham, and Norwich,
and the charters were produced to assert the right to numerous parish
churches or tithes granted in the late eleventh century, which was a low point
in the production of private charters as well as an attempt to secure freedom
from various demands of episcopal officials.This article contains also a useful
list of forged episcopal acta and beneficiaries of these documents. The next
essay, by Nicholas Bennett, “Pastors and Masters: The Beneficed Clergy of
North-East Lincolnshire, 1290-1340,” argues for a less gloomy picture of lower
clergy in later medieval Britain, which has traditionally been seen as dominated
by absenteeism and lack of care for parish duties. Using the example from the
registers of the bishops of the dioceses of Lincoln, he finds many examples
contradicting this view. Then, Janet Burton elucidates how another type of
sources—so called “cause papers”—concerning payments of ecclesiastical
dues, matrimonial cases, defamation, and testamentary wills can be used to
explore complex relationships between religious houses in Yorkshire and their
lay neighbors. Charles Fonge moves on to study the role and development of
collegiate churches in the pre-Black Death period using the cartulary of St.
Mary’s collegiate church in Warwick. The next contribution, by Christopher
Harper-Bill, moves away from the corporate to the individual to examine the
career of Walter Suffield, Bishop of Norwich (1244-1257), who has been rather
positively described by Matthew Paris’s chronicle. The literary picture is analyzed here in conjunction with his acta to reveal a conscientious administrator and pastor who was particularly concerned with supplying charitable provisions for the poor.The theme of charity is taken up by R. H. Helmholz, who
discussed legal bases of charitable giving in the canon law and evidence for

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practical application of these principles by the late medieval English ecclesiastical courts. Then, Philippa Hoskin returns to figures of bishops, offering a
study of the composition of the episcopal household and shows a significant
continuity in personnel under successive bishops of Durham in the thirteenth
century. The next article, by Brian Kemp, brings together a selection of acta
issued by English rural deans in the early stages of this office’s existence
between mid-twelfth century and c. 1220 to illustrate the range of activities
performed by the deans. F. Donald Logan turns our attention to a range of matters dealt with by the Court of Arches (a provincial court of appeal for the
province of Canterbury).The actual records of the court perished in the Great
Fire of London, but Bishop Roger Martival of Salisbury (1315-1330) kept a separate register of inhibitions sent by the court to him as a local bishop, and this
material provides a unique glimpse into the legal machinery which covered
several dioceses. The penultimate essay, by A. K. McHardy,“Bishops’ Registers
and Political History:A Neglected Resource,” focuses on the non-ecclesiastical
aspects of the bishops’ role in late medieval England.The final contribution, by
Jane Sayers, discussed the “ultimate” sources of church history—the papal registers—and the history of research and publication of material relevant to
Great Britain and Ireland.
The Foundations of Medieval History is a well designed and focused
volume that is engaged with traditional sources of ecclesiastical history, but
asks new questions and as such is useful and interesting to historians of the
English medieval church, whilst many of the articles from this book could be
included in the reading lists of advanced undergraduate courses on late
medieval England.
University of Leeds

EMILIA JAMROZIAK

Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389. By Dawn Marie
Hayes. [Studies in Medieval History and Culture.] (New York and London:
Routledge. 2003. Pp. xxiii,193. $78.00.)
Buildings deemed as sacred in the Middle Ages were never exclusively such,
as Dawn Marie Hayes so engagingly shows in her Body and Sacred Place in
Medieval Europe, 1100-1389.Whereas space, both sacred and secular, became
increasingly compartmentalized and differentiated in the early modern period,
there existed in the Middle Ages an ambiguity between sacred and profane
that, according to Hayes, reflected the similarly nuanced medieval human
body. The body, in fact, served as a didactic tool, inasmuch as the medieval
Christian’s understanding of the spatial arrangement and proper use of
churches was based upon the medieval conception of the arrangement and
proper use of the body.
Hayes uses the murder of Thomas Becket to illustrate her church=body
metaphor.The attack upon Becket in 1170 occurred at the altar, the area of the

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church regarded as the “head” of the cruciform building, and it was Becket’s
head, the “locus of archiepiscopal consecration,” that received the fatal blows.
Yet, Becket’s murder, although a profane act carried out in a sacred space,
caused Canterbury to “became more powerful as it absorbed its violated
human self.” The relics associated with Becket’s body and the hagiographies
that focused on his abused head ultimately served to affirm church authority
over secular authority. Thus, the body of Becket paralleled the body of the
church, both edifice and community.
Chartres cathedral also receives Hayes’s refreshing analysis. Chartres was
“off the beaten path” and destined to be eclipsed when a clerical advertising
campaign of the early thirteenth century that focused on the miracles associated with the shirt worn by Mary at the birth of Christ propelled it to the forefront of pilgrimage sites. The shirt, which had touched the bodies of both Mary
and Christ, was Chartres’ most famous relic, along with the stones on which
Becket’s body fell and a phial of Becket’s blood brought to Chartres less than
ten years after Becket’s death. Hayes notes in her detailed examination of the
Chartres miracle stories that the vast majority of miracles were directly concerned with bodies, giving substance to her argument that “the currency of
Chartres is human flesh.”
Hayes’s artful pairing of human body and church edifice serves to illustrate
the ambiguity of profane and sacred in the medieval period, and underscores
the extent to which medieval theology responded to practical needs.
Churches were places of worship, certainly, but were also used for storage,
lodging, legal proceedings, shopping, and sexual assignations. As Hayes points
out, sacred buildings were like bodies, with some parts more sacred than
others. Ideally, the entire consecrated edifice should have been considered
sacrosanct, but ideal seems to have comfortably accommodated reality in the
Middle Ages.
Hayes maintains in this well-written, extensively annotated short book that
there were two “façades of Christian worship,” the physical space of a church
building and the physical body. One could not be understood without the
other. Each relied on the other for definition.The church sanctified the corporeal, while the bodies of saints prompted the establishment of churches; the
bodies of pilgrims who visited the sacred structures both confirmed the sanctity of the church and challenged it by their profane utilization of its interior
and environs. Ironically, the very nature of the human body—its fleeting existence and corruptibility, was, as Hayes explains,“integral to the establishment
of medieval sacred place [and] central to its function.” Thus, that which was
reckoned to be eternal relied upon the transitory body, an assumption upon
which medieval Christianity negotiated its place in society.
Tennessee Tech University

SUSAN LANINGHAM

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139

The Gothic Enterprise:A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral. By
Robert A. Scott. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xiv, 292.)
On the surface, this book is a study about the great sacred structures of the
High Middle Ages and the causes and circumstances of their creation. But
anyone who reads it carefully will soon understand the actual topic paramount
in Scott’s distinctive perspective. The author is a social scientist who has discovered for himself the sheer fascination of the English cathedrals, reporting
here in a very individual way about that voyage of discovery. At the core of this
biographical process is Salisbury Cathedral, and it stands at the study’s center.
And because the Stonehenge megaliths are but a few miles away, at the book’s
end Scott juxtaposes two monuments as the creations in stone of two differing
historical collectives. In this many-faceted and compelling study, he attempts to
explore the motives and circumstances of existence of these two collectives.
The book begins and ends with a sense of wonderment about the artifacts
which first awakened the interest of scholars in the Gothic period some 250
years ago. Scott includes himself in the ranks of these discoverers of wonder
in knowledgeable awe of Gothic artistry. He is in search of a kind of holistic
understanding of the phenomenon. So he is not only interested in the construction of the great churches between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries,
and their fuller meaning.The buildings are also viewed as examples reflecting
the ambition and productivity of a medieval feudal society whose cultural
habitus was significantly stamped by a belief in the world beyond, cultic practices, magical thought, thinking in symbols and images, and the multiple constraints of a way of life constantly at existential risk.
Scott has worked through an abundance of interdisciplinary literature in
order to present as many varied aspects of his topic as possible, and his investigative curiosity carries him into the furthest nooks of medieval studies.This is
further enriched by frequent consultation of standard works of diverse neighboring disciplines, and these lead to surprising and illuminating insights.
However, the selection suffers from an essential limitation in that except for
two studies, all the literature he cites is in English, or a work in English translation. The consequence is that Scott can report authoritatively on recent work
in social history and the history of mentality, where Anglo-American research
has been at the leading edge of inquiry, but when it comes to questions that
require a better knowledge of Continental European discourse, his treatment
remains inadequate. What I have in mind are, for example, the highly controversial debates, relativizing older theses, on the possibilities for a philosophicaltheological interpretation of the medieval church as a model for heaven. Or
inquiry on sacred space as a space for social and spiritual acts, or studies on the
material economy and technology of the great stonemason workshops. A further result of his selective approach is the heavy focus on a specific geographical area, namely England.This tilt is not necessarily inimical to a correct total
cultural-historical portrait, but that rather Anglo-centric picture is difficult to
project and transpose onto the continent without certain gaps and fractures.

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One may also wonder about the general utility of the findings. Scott investigates several of the fundamental questions on the position, function, and collective frame for action of the clerics almost exclusively in reference to the
monastic vita communis of the early medieval period and High Middle Ages –
being aware and correctly pointing out that some English cathedrals were
under the control of monastic communities. But that was by no means the rule
when viewed from a Continental vantage. There the clerical communities of
the cathedral chapters were in the quickening process of dissolution precisely
at the same time the first Gothic construction projects were launched. So the
model of the vita communis cannot be regarded as a spiritual correlate of the
community enterprise of the “cathedral.”
The specific weight given various topics here springs from a distinct discursive intention. Scott very clearly is not intent here to present a finely balanced and well-argued compendium on the topic of the cathedral. Rather, his
primary concern is to engage in a scientific re-narration and presentation of
his own epistemic interest.The great strength of this book is thus the power
invested in its clarity of expression, which is able to spark a reader’s enthusiasm and interest, persuasive in the way a gifted lecturer captivates his or her
audience. The Gothic Enterprise is a personal enterprise of the author, in a
sense a form of biography as a mode of knowledge. It reads like the invitation
to a journey of discovery replete with astute insights rather than a textbook
claiming to give a full account of all relevant views and opinions.
University of Cologne

NORBERT NUßBAUM

A Call to Piety: Saint Bonaventure’s Collations on the Six Days. By C. Colt
Anderson. (Quincy, Illinois: Franciscan Press. 2002. Pp. xix, 213. $21.95
paperback.)
In the introduction to his book, Colt Anderson compares Bonaventure’s
Collations on the Six Days (of creation) to Egyptian pyramids full of “beautiful hieroglyphics and symbolic ornamentation” (p. vi). These things are mysteriously beautiful in and of themselves, but when properly understood they
reveal a culture and a religion that is “vibrant and alive to the immediate concerns” of its contemporaries. Such are the collations of Bonaventure; they can
be seen in and of themselves or entered into to discover how he spoke to the
Friars Minor and the Church of his day about things of which they were very
much a part. Anderson’s work helps the contemporary reader understand the
complex situation and controversies that the Franciscans were involved in
soon after the death of their beloved founder.
Today’s Franciscans have been around for almost 800 years and are a well
respected family in the household of the Christian Church. Not so the brothers and sisters who formed the early Franciscan movement. They fought
among themselves as they established their Franciscan identity, and they

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clashed with bishops, priests, and scholars about their role in the Church.They
were a rapidly growing and not so well formed group of mendicants caught
up in the whirlwind of church reform between the Fourth Lateran Council in
1215 and the Second Council of Lyons in 1274. In the midst of this turmoil,
Bonaventure addressed his final collations to the friars in particular and the
Church in general.
Anderson’s A Call to Piety tries to situate the Collations in their historical
context. It is divided into seven chapters with an introduction. In the first two
chapters, he does a marvelous job of explaining the Order that Bonaventure
inherited in 1257 when he was installed as Minister General.This he does by
expounding on the scandal that the friars found themselves involved in. He
does an excellent job of explaining the Joachimite tendencies that many of the
so-called “spiritual friars” were attracted to and why they were.
Anderson focuses his attention and ours on the Collations in chapters 3-6.
He begins with a description of Bonaventure’s understanding of good members of the Church as “observers of divine law, lovers of divine peace, and
singers of divine praise”(p. 65) with Christ as the center of all things. He moves
on to give us Bonaventure’s defense of “scholasticism and its usefulness for
preaching” (p. 90) as well as an explanation of the multiform exegesis of
Scripture. This was a difficult thing for Bonaventure to do, especially given the
zealot Franciscans’ Joachimite leanings and distrust of learning. Bonaventure
takes the very symbols and language used by Joachim in order to bring these
“spiritual” men into a more ecclesial understanding of the faith.
“Bonaventure has no problem speaking of the sin of the church” (p. 144)
according to Anderson, who moves on to describe how Bonaventure saw a need
to return to the Church’s “original perfection” and a contemplative ecclesiology.
Finally, Anderson explains the collations as Bonaventure’s call to piety
through kenosis. In his conclusion, he invites the reader to heed this call in the
context of today’s Church. I would recommend that all Franciscans, especially
the Friars Minor, read Anderson’s book as they continue to struggle with
reforming their identity after the Second Vatican Council. I believe that in it
they will find Bonaventure still has the strength to challenge his brothers and
call them to the task of preaching within the Church.
Catholic Theological Union

GILBERTO CAVAZOS-GONZÁLEZ, O.F.M.

Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. By John V. Tolan.
(New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. Pp. xxvi, 372. $52.50 cloth;
$22.50 paper.)
For the past forty years, there have been two standard reference works on
this subject: Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960) by Norman
Daniel, and Richard Southern’s Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages

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(1962). With the publication of John Tolan’s well-researched, theoretically
informed, and thoughtful account of Western attitudes toward Islam from the
seventh through the thirteenth centuries, we now have a third.
Beginning with a chapter on the Church Fathers, and another on the
polemics and apologetics of Eastern Christians in the seventh and eighth centuries, Tolan shows how Latin authors built upon tradition; how, for example,
Christians living in Muslim-occupied Spain in the eighth and ninth centuries—
like the protected minorities (dhimmi) of the Middle East before them—saw the
conquest of Islam as a punishment from God; and how northern scholars, lacking any firsthand experience of Islam, tended to characterize Muslims either as
pagans, akin to the Roman persecutors of old, or as arch-heretics, based, again,
on the typology of early medieval authors such as Isidore of Seville.
By the time of the Crusades, Muslims had become idol-worshipers—and
Muhammad their heresiarch leader. Never mind the inconsistencies. Actual
experience of Islam rarely got in the way of ridicule and contempt; and negative images served to justify the use of force. Add to these attacks the more genuine attempts to understand this rival faith, and one finds that by the end of the
thirteenth century, multiple and varied images of Islam were circulating—some
positive, most negative—in a society where the boundaries between scholarly
and popular views were not as clearly marked as is commonly assumed.
Tolan’s intent in this book is to “complement” the work of Daniel and Said,
and for those who study pre-modern Muslim-Christian relations, he does this
admirably well: his nuanced and subtle analysis of Western images is based not
only upon a thorough familiarity with the sources but also upon an equally
close reading of the cultures that produced them.When examining the ninthcentury Córdoban martyrs’ movement, for instance, he contrasts the inflammatory writings of Alvarus and Eulogius—aimed at shoring up Christian resistance and at painting the world in apocalyptic terms—with the reserved
reactions of the rest of the dhimmi community (the majority), who at least on
some levels had come to terms with their Muslim overlords, and who wanted
the fanatics to go away, so that they could continue to enjoy the protections
and privileges the caliph had granted them.
For other readers, however, for historians working on the nineteenth- and
twentieth-centuries, for example, or for social scientists studying the ideological role of dehumanization,Tolan does much more than merely “complement”
the earlier studies: he corrects the impression left by Daniel and Said that the
history of Islam in the European imagination is but an unbroken chain of
stereotypes in the service of timeless colonial ambitions.
On the contrary: the negative “orientalist” portrayals of Islam that Said sees
as the ideological underpinning of French and British colonialism, actually
have their origins in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries—in the resistance
of Christian “orientals” to their Muslim colonizers (p. 67). The martyrs of

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Córdoba are a case in point. By having themselves executed for publicly defaming Islam, and by demonizing those Christians who co-operated with the
Muslim overlords, they wanted to incite hatred and to erect a “wall of violence”
between Muslim ruler and Christian subject. And this,Tolan rightly points out,
corresponds to the logic of what Said called anticolonial “resistance culture”
(p. 88)—a stance that can be traced to early eastern polemics/apologetics such
as the Risâlat al-Kindî and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.
Inevitably, in pondering the Middle Ages, we ponder modernity; and at one
point, as he runs through the various conflicting representations of Muslims
that existed in miniatures, manuscript illuminations, troubadour poetry, mystery plays, polemics, and hagiographies, Tolan observes that some small
Spanish towns still celebrate their liberation from the “Moors” by setting up an
effigy of the Prophet.“Eight centuries,” he writes,“after the Chanson de Roland
describes the Saracens of Saragossa toppling the idol Mahomet into a ditch,
eight centuries after Raoul de Caen imagines Tancred destroying a gilded idol
of Muhammad in the temple of Solomon,Valencian villagers re-enact this imaginary idol-destruction as a central part of their dramatization of the reconquista” (p. 133).
A thoroughgoing reference work like Saracens was long overdue; it is also
quite timely.
The American University in Cairo

DAVID BLANKS

Cistercian Nuns and Their World. Edited by Meredith Parsons Lillich. [Studies
in Cistercian Art and Architecture, 6.] (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian
Publications. 2005. Pp. xii, 366. $49.95.)
This is the first book to be devoted to a broader study of the arts of
medieval Cistercian nuns.While considerable attention has been given to the
architecture of monks in the Order, little has been written on the women’s
houses. Professor Lillich must be given credit for compiling eight articles that
successfully provide a groundwork on which future studies can be based.
The edition begins with an excellent analysis of the iconography of Bernard
of Clairvaux and his sister Humbeline.The author, James France, traces the surviving medieval images of these two early Cistercian religious and proves that
Humbeline enjoyed a privileged position within the Order because of the
brother as well as her status as a nun in the foundation years of the twelfth
century. Her most well-known image appears on the cover of Hidden Springs:
Cistercian Monastic Women (Kalamazoo, 1995), in which she sits front and
center under a tree of holy nuns as found in a painting dated in 1635 from the
convent at La Paix Dieu.
Next is a series of regional studies of the architecture of Cistercian nuns.
Constance Berman’s study of the remains of four houses in southern France

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follows the same lines as her controversial study of The Cistercian Revolution:
The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia,
2000). The Low Countries come next with Thomas Cooman attempting an
overview of what little remains of the eighty-five nunneries founded there in
the Middle Ages. Using old photographs, documents, and some archaeological
evidence, he focuses on the nuns’ churches, cloisters, ranges, abbess lodgings,
and gate houses. Christine Kratzke follows with her study of the architecture
of Cistercian nunneries in Northern Germany, where more physical evidence
survives. As with the preceding articles, however, she was forced to consider
what it is to be called “Cistercian” and to determine if the convents were similar to houses of monks. Her conclusions, as well as the other two above, find
that there is great diversity especially in the churches and it is impossible to
find a medieval “plan type” that applies to the female houses of the order.
The next two articles focus on two individual convents: Las Huelgas in Spain
and Ss. Jacobi and Buchardi in Germany. The former,written by James D’Emilio,
is an excellent summary concerning the founding of this famous royal nunnery.
He was able not only to analyze the extensive physical remains and place them
in their architectural history, but also to detail the importance of Las Huelgas for
its political significance in the unification of Spain, as well as the religious significance within the Cistercian order, especially as it relates to nuns.The next
article, on the much lesser-known house in Germany by Cornelia Oefelein,
focuses on the primary documents that have only recently been made available
to scholars, as well as looks cursorily at the nun’s church, which was the only
building left standing after the convent was secularized in 1810.
The last two articles focus on single works of art in two specific monasteries. Charlotte Ziegler concentrates on a fourteenth-century charter from St.
Bernard for the Horn nunnery in Austria. A sixteenth-century tapestry antependium commissioned by two abbesses for their community of Flines outside
Douai is the topic of Andrea Person’s study.
In sum, the articles with the accompanying 173 figures as well as lists of
convent and geographical locations, are more than just a study in Cistercian art
and architecture of nuns.They are a beginning for future studies on the physical remnants that touched the lives of women called to religious life in
medieval Europe.
Slippery Rock University

JOHN A. NICHOLS

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The History of Leo the Deacon: Byzantine Military Expansion in the Tenth
Century. Introduction, translation, and annotations by Alice-Mary Talbot and
Denis F. Sullivan with the assistance of George T. Dennis and Stamatina
McGrath. [Dumbarton Oaks Studies, XLI.] (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton
Oaks. 2005. Pp. xx, 264.)
Byzantine civilization has left a rich and varied body of historical writings.
The assortment of chronicles, histories, and memoirs provides an almost
unbroken narrative of the empire’s history from the sixth to the fifteenth century. The early chronicles offer thin gruel to modern historians trying to form
a coherent account of the “dark”seventh and eighth centuries, but by the tenth
century the growing maturity and scope of Byzantine historiography allow for
a more developed understanding of the dominant events and people of the
time. The History of Leo the Deacon, focussing mainly on the reigns of the two
great soldier emperors Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969) and John I Tzimiskes
(969-976), has long been recognized as the most important source for the military and dynastic policies that shaped the course of events in the later tenth
century. Strangely, however, Leo’s history has long languished in an outdated
edition, without an English translation, and has until now remained inaccessible to all but specialists. The appearance of this fine, meticulously annotated,
translation by Alice-Mary Talbot and Denis Sullivan will be welcomed not only
by Byzantinists, but perhaps even more so by students and scholars in the
related fields of western medieval and Islamic history.
The History of Leo the Deacon bears all the hallmarks of the genre. The
author writes in an archaic Greek full of recondite vocabulary and allusions to
earlier models, particularly Procopius and Agathias. He employs rhetorical
devices, notably the set speech and the excursus, to dramatize the narrative.
He intends to present an orderly, connected record but often strays from his
chronological line and occasionally conflates events. Leo was also writing the
history of his own time, stating when he was an eyewitness or participant in
the events he describes. This gives his work an authoritative immediacy and
firsthand perspective; yet Leo also displays the fantastic conception the
Byzantines had of the outer world, its workings and peoples.Throughout his
work the classical idea of Chance and the Christian agency of Providence operate side by side, reminding readers of the uncertainty of this life and reinforcing the moralizing, instructive value not just of this history but of History itself.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Leo’s history is the insight it offers into
the mind of an educated Byzantine of middling social rank—what he knew,
what he made of the world around him, and what he deemed useful or necessary for his and later generations to know.
All the many challenges posed by the History of Leo the Deacon are ably
handled by the translators. Their introduction begins by sketching the historical background, with due emphasis on the military campaigns that set the later
tenth century apart as the zenith of Byzantine power in the eastern
Mediterranean. This serves to elicit the primary value of the History as a

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source for the wars against the Hamdanids in Cilicia and Syria, and against the
Rus in Bulgaria, but the translators also direct the reader’s attention to the
other significant ingredients of Leo’s work. These include his sources and
methods, his discussions of political and ecclesiastical affairs, comparison with
other historians, and the random bits of information Leo supplies on
Constantinople, natural phenomena, and on the men and women who people
the text. In its thoroughness, and its integration of foreign scholarship on Leo
the Deacon, the introduction gives readers new to the text the tools by which
to assess its strengths and weaknesses as a historical source.
The translation itself reads well—no small feat considering the florid Greek
in which Leo composed his work. Readers will be especially grateful for the
annotations which explain the nuances of Leo’s vocabulary and clarify the
meaning of the text in many places.The discussions of chronology, technical
details, and geographical references enhance the value of the translation and
put the full range of Leo’s work clearly before the reader. Included in the scholarly apparatus are genealogical tables, maps, and specialized indices which
underline the book’s usefulness to specialists and students alike.
The scholars involved in preparing this translation deserve congratulations
for an impressive, immensely helpful addition to Byzantine scholarship, both
as a research and teaching resource. It is worth emphasizing that it is the work
of many hands. Such a collaborative undertaking, blending the philological, historical, and interdisciplinary expertise necessary to extract the full worth of
opaque historical sources, should inspire similar projects focusing on the many
Byzantine texts still in need of the comprehensive examination given so profitably to the History of Leo the Deacon.
St. Clement’s School, Toronto

ERIC MCGEER

Crusader Art in The Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre,
1187-1291. By Jaroslav Folda. (New York: Cambridge University Press.
2005. Pp. lxvii, 714; 11 colour plates, 10 maps, 415 figures, 501 illustrations
on the compact disc. $150.00.)
Jaroslav Folda’s monumental book is another link in his life’s work that has
been dedicated to the research of crusader art. Besides his numerous articles
on the subject, his books show systematic development, from his Crusader
Manuscript Ilumination at Saint-Jean d’Acre, 1275-1291 (Princeton University Press, 1976), through The Art of the Crusades in the Holy Land 10981187 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and up to the current comprehensive volume, which will be a basic resource to any researcher of the crusaders.
The need for such a book was evident for a considerable period of time, since
only parts of the relevant period have been investigated, and no all-embracing
view on the subject existed.

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In his book, Folda examines the art created for the crusaders by various
social classes and ethnic groups, from Western merchants to Muslims in the
Orient. But more than that, the book provides significant new contributions to
a number of aspects and concepts in the research of crusader art.
Unlike any previous work, Folda places art itself, in its various forms, in a
primary position, and raises the discussion on the essence of crusader art of
the thirteenth century to a theoretical level, thus creating and setting it as a significant chapter in art history.This is a major innovation.
Unlike many art historians, Folda discusses historical events in the Holy
Land, which he considers relevant to his research. It is my belief that this
meticulous discussion contributes to the interpretation of the conditions of
artistic creation in the following chapters.
In the introduction to his book, Folda informs the reader of his work
process and the significance he accords to each chapter. The first chapter, dedicated to the historiography of crusader art history, is of the utmost significance. Here, Folda not only reviews the contribution of the various scholars of
the Latin Orient since the nineteenth century, but also examines the efforts
and perceptions of those who shaped the field in the twentieth century. Thus,
he presents a progressive process of the development of research, in all artistic media, discussing, for example, the work of two of the leading art historians, Camille Enlart and Paul Deschamps, whose works paved the way for future
scholarship and are still in use today. In an extensive and accurate analysis,
Folda shows Enlart’s positions, specifically the parallels Enlart draws between
crusader architecture and the contemporaneous architecture in France and his
constant desire to view crusader architecture as part of French architecture;
Folda also points to the relative absence of observations in Enlart’s work
regarding local elements that do not fit his theory.
After a meticulous review of researchers like Lucy-Anne Hunt and Doula
Mouriki, Folda discusses the definition of the essence of crusader art. He
shows that there is a great development in the perception of the unique
essence of crusader art, particularly in the study of icon paintings, as both
Mouriki and Hunt begin to discuss Syrian artists, unlike their predecessor, Kurt
Weitzmann, who discussed artists who came from Southern Italy. Furthermore,
in this chapter not only does Folda remember every researcher who dealt with
problems of crusader art, but he also presents the views of these researchers.
I must note that I view this as a perfect example of how historiography should
be written, particularly now, when many researchers quote selectively.
At the end of this chapter, Folda presents his credo:“Our study of the art of
the crusaders in the Holy Land during the period 1187-1291 is a fresh attempt
to discover, analyze, interpret and characterize the nature and development of
this art and architecture in a particularly troubled historical setting” (p. 18).

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Also exemplary is Folda’s use of historical knowledge to understand the
location and context of the objects and art works, in the life of the crusaders
and others in the period. In one such example, which supports his statement
on the importance of the presence of panel painting and icons in the art world
of the crusaders in the Holy Land from 1250 onwards, he quotes a very significant passage from the Templar of Tyre, who tells about an Assassin attacking
Philip the lord of Tyre and his son:“when he saw the Assassin coming in with
the naked sword in his hand, he lunged toward the altar which had a board
painting with pictures of saints on the front of it, and he got behind it”(p. 435).
This text depicts a comprehensive picture of art, life, and the perception of
religious art in the period.
The chapter on the painting of icons and the examination of styles and
artists is central, and teaches us of varied art schools with their own features
and traditions.
It is beyond the scope of this short report to refer to the individual chapters in detail. But I believe that each of them provides a significant contribution to the study of artistic creation in the crusader kingdom and will serve as
a foundation and scholarly guide for students of the period and of art history
in general in the future.
Tel Aviv University

NURITH KENAAN-KEDAR

Charity, Endowments, and Charitable Institutions in Medieval Islam. By
Yaacov Lev. (Gainsville: University Press of Florida. 2005. Pp. x, 215. $59.95.)
Charitable institutions—hospitals for the sick, homes for orphans, asylums
for the aged—did not exist in Classical Greco-Roman civilization nor in
Germanic or Celtic cultures of northern Europe. Christianity created these
institutions in the fourth century in cities such as Antioch, Alexandria,
Caesarea (Cappadocia), and Constantinople in the Eastern Mediterranean.The
rapid development of these philanthropic institutions into specialized facilities for needy people was no doubt linked to the conversion of Emperor
Constantine to Christianity and the process of Christianizing the Roman state.
Historians have traced the subsequent evolution of Christian philanthropic
institutions in the Eastern Christian society of Byzantium and their slower
development in the Western Latin provinces. Scholars of European civilization,
however, have largely ignored the history of charity and charitable institutions
in the Islamic world, although medieval Muslim hospitals, orphanages, poor
houses, and free schools represent an important element in a continuous history of charity which began with the fourth-century Christian foundations.
Yaacov Lev’s monograph is the first attempt in English to fill this lacuna by
summarizing the history of Islamic charity from its origins in the Koran to the
rise of the Ottoman Empire.

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Lev begins by discussing the basis of Muslim charity found in the Koran,
zakat and sadaqa. Zakat was an obligatory payment to benefit the poor paid
by believers; sadaqa a voluntary contribution for the needy, offered by Arab
tribes allied with Mohammed. In the wake of the Muslim conquests and the
formation of the caliphate, zakat evolved into a tax paid to the government,
not given directly to the poor. By 1171, the government of Saladin in Egypt collected zakat as a port tax in Alexandria, and used its proceeds not for the
needy, but for holy war against crusaders.
The concept of sadaqa (voluntary aid to the needy) proved more effective
in helping the poor, the sick, and others in need of society’s support. Like
Christianity, Islam emphasized that voluntary deeds of charity atoned for sins.
Thus, in 972 the Fatimid Calif al-Muizz expiated his cruel execution of rebels
by conspicuous acts of charity. Personal acts of charity also helped to legitimize a new ruler’s authority. Nur al-Din, the Turkish beg who seized power in
Syria and Egypt (1100’s), justified his de facto independence of the Caliphate
through his impressive charitable foundations.
Sadaqa proved to be an effective concept for supporting charitable institutions because early on it was supported by a flexible legal institution called
a waqf. By establishing a waqf, a private donor dedicated land and sometimes
movable wealth to support a particular charitable cause. In establishing the
waqf, the founder prepared a written document often with very detailed
instructions on exactly how the charity was to function. Waqf donations supported the great Islamic hospitals (bimaristan) including the Tulunid hospital
in Fustat (872-874), the Adudi hospital in Baghdad (982), and the houses of the
sick founded by Nur al-Din in twelfth-century Syria. Some of the waqf documents describe the number of physicians assigned to treat the sick and the
organization of the hospital wards.
Through waqf donations, Muslims funded many other charitable activities.
Waqf endowments provided ornate drinking fountains in many towns, maintained libraries, and provided food and lodging for pilgrims to Mecca, Medina,
and Jerusalem. By the late eleventh and twelfth centuries many waqfs were
supporting educational institutions such as free Koranic schools for orphans
and poor children where students learned to read, memorize, and recite the
Koran, and madrasas, schools in which older students learned Islamic law. Lev
stresses that very few Muslim charitable foundations actually provided food or
shelter for the truly poor. Lev maintains that even those institutions founded
to shelter wanderers (fuqara) were often for mystics—sufis or later
dervishes—rather than those who were destitute.
In addition to his descriptions of Muslim charities, Lev also summarizes
some of the scholarly debates surrounding key issues. For example, he explores
the possibility that the waqf was not a pure Islamic institution, designed specifically to support sadaqa, but may owe much to earlier Byzantine laws governing charitable institutions (the piae causae of the emperor Justinian’s legisla-

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tion). Lev’s book also provides an excellent bibliography which includes recent
monographs on Islamic charity written in Hebrew.
My only criticism of Lev’s study is of its organization. I would have structured the chapters either according to chronology or according to specific
types of charitable institutions. I cannot discern any system in Levi’s chapter
divisions. Despite this shortcoming, the book offers a wealth of information for
scholars outside Islamic studies who want to see the whole picture of
medieval charity, from Baghdad in the East to the elaborate philanthropic institutions of Renaissance Italy.
Salisbury University, Maryland

TIMOTHY S. MILLER

The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town.
By Marcia Kupfer. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
2003. Pp. xviii, 202 plus 117 figures. $45.00.)
Marcia Kupfer’s lively book is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.
Drawing on extensive archival research and deftly moving from archaeology to
hagiography to nosography, among other myriad fields, the study focuses on
the little-studied crypt frescos of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher in central France.
Kupfer frankly admits that these paintings, produced around 1200, are of middling quality, but she insists that their emphasis on scenes of healing offers
important insights into the social uses of the monument, particularly the care
of the sick body and soul.
As with her earlier book, Romanesque Wall Painting in Central France:
The Politics of Narrative (New Haven, 1993), political motivations of the
clergy feature prominently.The college of canons, the presumed patrons of the
paintings, emerges as a group determined to assert their role as mediators of
divine healing.The first two chapters consider how the canons interacted with
local lords and the many institutions dedicated to healing the sick in and
around Saint-Aignan, especially in relation to ongoing changes in the cityscape.
The third chapter asks what motivated the house of canons to sponsor an artistic program focused on healing. Repeated outbreaks of ergotism in this region
are posited as one likely factor, but Kupfer believes more fundamentally that
the crypt’s representation of saints, associated with nearby and administratively subordinate institutions of healing, ultimately asserted the hegemonic
position of the canons. Some recent scholarship, most notably Cynthia Hahn’s,
has questioned whether political motivations significantly informed pictorial
hagiography in the High Middle Ages. But because Kupfer weaves a host of
other threads into her narrative, her readings contain nuances that a short
review cannot convey.
After establishing a social context, Kupfer turns to a sustained analysis of
the monument. Chapter four presents the unusual disposition of the crypt—

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rendered inaccessible from the nave during the course of a twelfth-century
campaign—primarily in relation to a posited penitential function. The fifth
chapter analyzes the paintings individually. Throughout Kupfer painstakingly
and convincingly identifies a number of heavily damaged scenes, such as a
meal of Bethany in the crypt’s axial chapel. But in a few cases her reconstructions overstep what the evidence warrants. For example, she asserts that paintings in the crypt’s north apsidiole, of which only faint silhouettes remain, originally presented a hagiographic cycle (pp. 13, 44). This is a reasonable
hypothesis, but without any support (e.g., documenting traces of halos) it is
only that; Kupfer directly acknowledges this only later in the book (p. 85).The
identification of Roland among the figures present in an image of the
Miraculous Mass of St. Giles is speculative (p. 97). Nevertheless, the hero’s purported presence provides the basis for an excursus on spiritual healing.
The quibbles I noted while reading this book do nothing to detract from
the sophisticated interpretive framework it develops and which bears fruit in
the final chapter.Themes teased out earlier in the study are linked with wider
concerns, including the body, gender, and ecclesiastical power. Kupfer boldly
examines the fragmentary remains of a “minor” monument to expand our
understanding of the complex ways in which art could function for medieval
viewers. She opens up an important chapter on the relationship between art
and institutions of healing in the West, of which the Isenheim altarpiece is a
celebrated case.
Although richly illustrated, it is unfortunate that a volume on paintings lacks
color reproductions (presumably the publisher’s decision). Kupfer’s descriptions are consistently vivid, but they are no substitute.
University of Colorado, Boulder

KIRK AMBROSE

The Mirror of Salvation: Speculum Humanae Salvationis. An Edition of
British Library Blockbook G. 11784. Translation and commentary by
Albert C. Labriola and John W. Smeltz. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 194; 58 black and white illustrations. $65.00.)
It is difficult to imagine the audience envisioned for this edition by its
editor-translators. The editors say their purpose is to present the Speculum
Humanae Salvationis “in an immediately accessible and understandable form
and to the widest possible present-day audience” (p. 6). Judging from their
approach, they are resurrecting this late-medieval text for a modern, non-specialist reader.While the translation of the Speculum text that forms the core of
the volume will be useful as a finding aid for English-speaking scholars working in the fields of medieval art history, history, theology and literature, the
explanatory texts are simplistic and the apparatus is minimal.
The volume consists of a short introduction, a list of woodcut illustrations,
reproductions of the woodcuts accompanied by an English translation of their

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Latin captions and texts, a modern commentary on the text titled “Interpreting
the Blockbook,” a cursory and somewhat dated bibliography, and an index.The
editors provide no rationale as to why they chose the second Latin edition of
the Speculum, dated by van Theinen and Goldfinch as c. 1474-75 (Incunabula
Printed in the Low Countries, 1999, item 2007), for translation and reproduction. This Speculum edition is, in fact, very interesting as it combines xylographic printing (also known as prototypography) with moveable type, though
readers are not told why this might be interesting.The first Latin edition, also
printed in the Netherlands, and subsequent editions are not discussed.
In their brief discussion of xylographic reproduction (the terms ‘xylography’ and ‘prototypography’ are nowhere used), the editors say that the woodblocks were “moistened with dye” (p. vii), which is odd, as the usual substance
for printing in this period is ink.Very little is said about the role of blockbooks
in the early history of printing; there is no mention of A. H. Stevenson’s important discovery about watermarks in blockbooks, for example; and there is no
discussion at all of the role that typographical images like those found in the
Speculum play in the margins of Books of Hours, the best-selling book of the
later Middle Ages. In their introduction, the editors do say they hope their work
will encourage readers to explore further the iconography in “Gothic” stained
glass and sculpture, and in Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (p. 7),
a general gesturing toward art history. Similar statements are made about the
book’s relevance to medieval history and theology.
The Speculum itself is described throughout as a book “for teaching the
common folk” (pp. 5-6), though this notion has been mainly discounted by
recent scholarship, which suggests that the book is rather more complex than
first imagined.The discussion of typology, that is, reading Old Testament stories
as prefiguring the New, the central organizing device of the Speculum, is also
explained at the most basic level. One would think that with the Speculum
text so immediately at hand, more might have been said about the complex
interrelationships of its images and texts.The interpretation of specific texts in
the “Interpretation and Commentary” is sometimes helpful (as in identifications of more obscure stories found in the Apocrypha and in Peter Comestor),
but sometimes not. On the question, for example, of the female face of the serpent that tempts Eve there are any number of scholarly articles and at least one
important monograph that immediately spring to mind, but the editors interpret this as reflecting Eve’s “alter ego,” then discuss the myth of Narcissus,
which appears nowhere in the medieval text.
The Speculum itself, though, remains just as compelling as it was to readers
of the fourteenth-century manuscripts and of later blockbooks and printed
editions, and it is good to have this English prose translation to supplement the
Middle English verse text edited by Avril Henry (The Mirour of Mans
Saluacion, A Middle English translation of the Speculum Humanae
Salvationis, 1987), along with the English edition produced by Adrian and
Joyce Lancaster Wilson (A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis,

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1324-1500, 1985). In their English translation, the editors have done a service,
however irritated scholars might be by the cursory introduction and bibliography, and by some of the editors’ commentaries.The imagined audience might
further include advanced high-school students and undergraduates interested
in medieval culture, students of theology working at a fairly introductory level,
generalist Christian readers exploring medieval meditative texts, and perhaps
even priests seeking sermon materials.
Pace University

MARTHA W. DRIVER

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry
in England, 1350-1500. By Kathleen Kamerick. [The New Middle Ages,
Series No. 27.] (New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. xi, 292. $89.95.)
Kathleen Kamerick refers to the process of working on this project as a
“search for understanding holy images.”The result is a kind of archaeological
excavation of late medieval religious and social culture that was distinguished
by its multifaceted approach to images.
Her first two chapters deal with both sides of the image controversies of
this period in English history. The Lollards charged that images were prohibited in the First Commandment as idolatrous and that money spent on them
should go to the poor, who were the true image of God. The defenders of
images argued that the Incarnation of Christ meant that images of his human
nature could be portrayed. Christ himself sanctioned their use by imprinting
his image on Veronica’s veil. In addition to this and other defenses, Roger
Dymmok stated that God ordained them because of the superiority of sight
over hearing. The defenders and attackers of images were, as Kamerick
observes, concerned chiefly with how laypeople used them. The rest of
Kamerick’s study is an attempt to recover how the largest segment of the population used images.
Her third chapter examines the evidence of wills in Norfolk and Suffolk. She
gives useful charts about the distribution of image gifts by gender and geographical distribution. Particularly valuable insights are offered in Kamerick’s
fourth chapter dealing with the social and political dimensions of the images
used by various communities.The parish accounts of church wardens, as well
as the membership lists and account records of gilds, indicate how individual
groups gained a sense of communal fellowship in their support of specific
images and the public spaces they occupied. Images could also inform political
allegiances, as in the case of the cult images of the Lancastrian King Henry VI.
A highlight of this book is Kamerick’s sensitive and probing analysis of the
role of images in the lives of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Holy
images, especially the crucifix, helped Julian understand and feel Christ’s
Passion. Bodily and spiritual sight worked concurrently as a conduit to reveal

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God’s love. Margery Kempe also fused bodily and spiritual senses in her
visions. She was able to transfer the import of Christ’s suffering on the cross
to the suffering of animals and people in whom she saw the Lord. It is no
wonder that she reacted bodily with loud weeping!
The sixth chapter deals with the variety of responses to images in prayer
books that fused the acts of reading and beholding. Rather than replacing
books for the unlearned, a justification for their use given centuries earlier by
Pope Gregory, images combined with texts, both together comprising the
book. In many cases the texts guided the viewing of the pictures.There was a
dynamic interaction between image, rubric, and text.This required the reader
to flip back and forth, merging visual and verbal devotion with the physical
and temporal movements of reading. Kamerick goes on to discuss indulgences
and charms that became associated with images.Yet, according to Kamerick,
the massive iconoclasm of the early sixteenth century was sparked less by the
questionable magical properties assigned to certain images than by the ways
in which people attributed animate qualities to statues.
This book is indispensable for scholars of late medieval culture and for
those seeking to understand this period of religious transition in England.
University of Victoria

MAIDIE HILMO

Suppliques et Requêtes. Le Gouvernement par la Grâce en Occident (XII e-XV e
Siècle). Edited by Hélène Millet. [Collection de l’École Française de Rome,
310.] (Rome: École Française de Rome. 2003. Pp. 434. €45.00 paperback.)
The product of a conference held in Rome in 1998, this superb collection
epitomizes both the pan-Europeanism which has long characterized French
exploitation of the Vatican Archives and the multidisciplinary approach to
which French historiography has given such productive stimulus. The object
of a comparative study of supplications to the pope with analogous requests
to other rulers is magisterially achieved by the collaboration of a distinguished
international body of experts tackling the various branches of diplomatic and
placing it in its broader cultural context. So, after the editor’s introductory
review, Geoffrey Koziol traces the Carolingian origins of the later medieval rite
of supplication, in which sophisticated legal elaboration rests on enduring
conventions of prayer and beneficence. These conventions are graphically
expanded on by Jean-Marie Moeglin in a re-examination of a much-discussed
miniature, argued as showing Pandolph IV of Capua before Henry II, and by
Jean-Claude Schmitt, on the basis of illustrations in manuscripts of Gratian’s
Decretum. Charles Vulliez examines the rhetorical underlay of supplication.
Regarding papal petitions, Patrick Zutshi’s careful sifting of evidence for the
commencement of their enregistration suggests that the practice in the form
of the surviving series may be due to the reforming zeal, otherwise marked, of
Benedict XII (1334-1342). Javier Serra Estellés presents Clement VII’s secretary

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Egidius Iuvenis maintaining his own register of particular business. Ludwig
Schmugge lucidly delineates the scope and legal reference of the business
processed by the Papal Penitentiary, while recalling to the historian’s attention
the spiritual dynamic (apt to be overlooked in concentration on bare procedure) in the relationship of supplicant and pontiff. From the 20,408 supplications to Urban V in 1362-1366, Anne-Marie Hayez surveys the approximately
12,000 over benefices. Élisabeth Lalou presents the special case of Philip VI’s
household and quasi-household officers. Such studies of actual supplication
complement and are complemented by Pascal Montaubin’s depiction of the
earlier development of curial techniques adequate to the extent of recourse. If
grace was in theory unlimited, not so the stock of benefices and in the resulting competition influence counted, whether available on an individual basis,
as in Nathalie Gorochov’s cases of Paris university supplicants c.1340-1420, or
through the well-known university roll, as represented by Charles Vulliez’s
account of that of the Picard nation from 1414-1415. As regards secular government, three papers deal directly with France. Olivier Mattéoni presents the
requests for official appointments made to Louis XI as an illustration of the dialogue between prince and subject which (cf. Koziol and despite the criticisms
of reformers) was integral to their relationship. Claude Gauvard, in a lengthy
and nuanced excursus, examines the exercise of royal grace in criminal cases,
and Jean Hilaire the civil context.Timothy S. Haskett considers bill process in
England, offering in course interesting observations on the rôle of conscience
underlying the Court of Chancery’s jurisprudence. José Manuel Nieto Soria
reflects on the king of Castile’s contact with the papal court in the fifteenth
century and its implications. Andrea Barlucchi describes the character of the
Archivio di Stato di Siena’s holding of petitions to the city’s government. At a
theoretical level, Antonio García y García’s analysis of the juridico-political
dimension and Christian Trottmann’s of the theology of government by grace
are thought-provoking.
The production is handsome, with thirteen plates. Misprints are few for a
multilingual volume. Documentation is copious. This is a well-executed and
integrated contribution to the study of governmental process.
Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin

MICHAEL HAREN

Florence and Its Church in the Age of Dante. By George W. Dameron. [The
Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005.
Pp. x, 374. $65.00.)
From 1250 to 1330 Florence suffered a succession of overlapping conflicts
between Guelfs and Ghibellines, Black and White factions, popular and elite
forces for which Dante famously blamed the papacy and its Angevin and
Florentine Guelf allies. In his earlier study of Episcopal Power and Florentine
Society 1000-1320 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1991) pp. 145-153,
George Dameron suggested that competition among Florentine lineages

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within the local church may have exacerbated the violence. Here, instead,
aiming to refute the anticlericalism of Robert Davidsohn’s much cited Storia
di Firenze, he emphasizes that “the church played a constructive role institutionally, economically, culturally, and politically in the process by which
Florence became the dominant commune in Tuscany” (p. 5).
The church was not monolithic. Dameron details the operations of
Florence’s myriad ecclesiastical institutions, emphasizing the importance of
rural alongside urban contexts, secular and monastic as well as mendicant
clergy, and underscoring the clergy’s involvement in local dispute resolution
(p. 32) and the development of confraternities and charitable institutions that
“helped maintain social peace” (p. 52). Although papal interventions and
Florentine politics provoked disputes, especially among the upper clergy,
these “constituted social processes that channeled and reconciled . . . competing interests and constituencies” (p. 27).
Clergy comprised roughly 3% of the Florentine population (p. 82), controlled a quarter to a third of landed property (p. 114), and contributed 10-20%
to the communal fisc in gabelle and other taxes (p. 152). Among the upper
ranks Ghibellines disappeared (p. 81) and the influence of older aristocratic
families waned (p. 97) while members of upwardly mobile popolano families
rose thanks to their “political and economic connections with the papacy” (p.
105). Meanwhile two-thirds of the lower clergy lived on incomes below those
of unskilled urban laborers (p. 128). Benefices varied greatly in value, tithes
were unreliable, and many priests supplemented their incomes with mortuary
fees, altar offerings, and testamentary legacies (pp. 133-135). While elite institutions profited from and stimulated Florence’s expanding economy, rising
episcopal, communal, and papal taxes in the 1320s fell most heavily on the
lower clergy, precipitating a crisis in diocesan finance and experiments with
clerical self-government (pp. 157-163).
Parochial clergy nevertheless ministered satisfactorily to their parishioners,
who in their testaments and burial choices did not abandon them for the mendicants (p. 176).The doctrine of Purgatory became central to Florentine piety,
serving “to vindicate, legitimize, and facilitate the culture of money-making and
civic aggrandizement” (pp. 167-168) and offering the possibility of atoning for
usury through charity to the poor and ecclesiastical benefactions. The
Renaissance “cult of remembrance” identifed by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. first
emerged in late Duecento Florence: men endowed chapels “to imprint their
names and those of their lineages,” women patronized art “to benefit the spiritual needs of their communities” (p. 194).
From 1285 Florence passed a series of laws curbing ecclesiastical prerogatives that gave it the upper hand—despite nine interdicts—in “an unequal but
generally collaborative partnership” with the church (p. 217). In turn, the inquisition “served to shore up religious orthodox beliefs and to encourage loyalty
to the Guelf commune” (p. 229).Through elaborate ecclesiastical building proj-

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ects and the ritual celebration of Florence’s expanding circle of leading saints
“the ruling elite of the city drew on established religious traditions to help construct a set of pro-Guelf guild-based beliefs that underscored the legitimacy of
the post-1266 regime” (p. 224). Leading ecclesiastical institutions smoothed
Florence’s assertion of control over its surrounding territory (pp. 233-239) and
helped mold “a composite but continually divided ruling class” (p. 241).
Church historians will welcome Dameron’s regard for rural as well as urban
settings and his emphasis on the ongoing importance of parish clergy even if his
rebuttals of Davidsohn seem unnecessarily defensive. Political historians will
surely agree that Rome and the local church were key to the formation of
Florence’s Guelf regime and ideology in this period,though they may miss a more
chronological and comparative approach and, like Dante, regard the process as
less benign than does Dameron.The cluster of arguments and variety of sources
that he has opened up are certain to stimulate further research and discussion.
Washington and Lee University

DAVID S. PETERSON

Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni
Dominici (1356-1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380-1444). By Nirit
Ben-Aryeh Debby. [Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Volume 4.]
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers. 2001. Pp. xii, 344. $82.00, €72,00.)
Intensely engaged with the major issues of the day, as well as the salvation
of the soul, preachers of the late medieval and early modern period have
become key interpreters of their complex societies. In the last decade, the historiography of Italian preaching has especially grown and deepened as scholars have moved from theological issues to the importance of the sermon as a
social and cultural text.
A welcome addition to the literature is Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby’s study of
two master preachers of the early fifteenth century, the Dominican Giovanni
Dominici and the Franciscan Bernardino da Siena. Focusing on sermons
preached and recorded in Florence, Debby examines a variety of topics, including politics, economic life, the family, anti-Semitism, and public controversies.
Meticulously researched in terms of the historiography of preaching, the
author’s approach can be relatively conservative (for example, the chapter on
“Family,Women, and Social Fringe” could be enriched by a thorough consideration of the extensive scholarship on gender). And, perhaps because of the
timing of publication, she covers aspects of Bernardino, such as women’s roles,
anti-Semitism, peacemaking, and public performance that have been handled
recently by other scholars (Mormando, 1999; Polecritti, 2000).
However, this careful overview still provides a sound analysis of Dominici’s
and Bernardino’s fiery social preaching in Florence and provides a revealing
glimpse of the many nuances between them as they worked, only a few

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decades apart, within a particular setting. Each of the seven chapters moves
back and forth between Dominici and Bernardino, permitting a finely honed
comparison. Particularly relevant to the intellectual context of Florence is the
discussion in Chapter Four, “The Preachers on Culture and Education.” For
instance, although both friars disapproved of pagan poetry, Debby convincingly argues that Bernardino’s attitude toward secular education was more
open and relaxed than Dominici’s; the latter, keenly interested in the teaching
of the young and in the curriculum of the grammar schools, was nonetheless
suspicious about excessive learning on the part of the laity.
The strongest element of the book is Debby’s analysis of Dominici, who has
been studied less intensively than Bernardino and whose sermons are far less
familiar, even to other historians of Italian preaching.While many Renaissance
scholars are acquainted with the Regola del governo di cura familiare and
the Lucula Noctis, Debby instead works closely with Dominici’s unpublished
sermons to reveal his witty storytelling and sharp, insistent personality. Less
circumspect than the more tactful and pragmatic Bernardino, he was sometimes bold enough to challenge directly the Florentines:“If someone wants to
kill me for telling the truth, he is welcome!” (p. 41). In the politically charged
atmosphere of his birthplace, he criticized the tightening of citizen participation under the Albizzi regime and didn’t hesitate to attack the proud and ambitious rulers of the city, calling them “cursed hypocrites” and labeling the commune as “a fine example when instead of the good it is governed by the bad”
(p.71). Yet he was surprisingly more reticent than Bernardino when he discussed sexual issues, especially the delicate topic of sodomy.
A valuable supplement to the book is the generous appendix (pp. 219-312)
with complete, edited texts of ten of Dominici’s sermons preached between
1400 and 1406, from the MS. Riccardiana 1301, discovered in 1907 and unpublished until now. Along with Debby’s book as a whole, these sermons will provide an important resource for scholars of both late medieval preaching and
the social history of Florence.
University of California, Santa Cruz

CYNTHIA POLECRITTI

Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation. By Brian Patrick McGuire.
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. Pp. xviii,
446. $85.00 clothbound; $30.00 paperback.)
More than forty years ago now, in the distinguished two-volume tome on
the later medieval church contributed to Fliche and Martin, Histoire de
l’Église, F. Delaruelle chose to devote a whole chapter to Jean Gerson (13631429), long-serving Chancellor of the University of Paris, dedicated pastor,
gifted preacher, tireless advocate of church reform “in head and members,” distinguished theologian, and one of the leading intellectuals of his day. In so
doing, and speaking of the first half of the fifteenth century, Delaruelle felt it

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warranted to portray the great Chancellor as “the mirror of his times” and to
entitle the chapter “Le siècle de Gerson.”
By the time he did so, scholarly interest in matters Gersonian had long since
begun to quicken.That that was the case is evidenced inter alia by the decision
of Palémon Glorieux to undertake the first new edition of Gerson’s complete
works since that of Dupin in 1706, by Max Lieberman’s extraordinary (and
extraordinarily gritty) series of articles on his life and writings, and by the work
of Louis Mourin on his sermons,André Combes on his mystical theology, and J.
B. Morrall on his ecclesiology. In the years since then interest in one or other
aspect of Gerson’s richly varied career has, if anything, intensified. It is reflected,
for example, in Gilbert Ouy’s fundamental researches on the Gersonian manuscript tradition, in the works of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes on his ecclesiology,
Louis B. Pascoe on his idea of reform, D. Catherine Brown on his pastoral theology, in Brian Patrick McGuire’s translation into English of a whole series of his
early writings as well as in his sponsorship and editing of a multi-authored
Companion to Jean Gerson scheduled by Brill for publication in 2006.
All of that duly noted, the surprising thing about the currently thriving field
of Gersonian studies is the fact that nobody since John Connolly in 1929 has
made a full-scale attempt at a new biographical treatment of the man himself.
That prominent gap in Gersoniana McGuire himself has now moved boldly to
fill. He has done so in this substantial, painstakingly-researched, carefully-balanced, and finely-nuanced study, clearly the outcome of long years of sustained
effort. Unlike Connolly, who organized his somewhat anachronistically defensive biography in thematic fashion, McGuire has gone about his task in straightforward chronological fashion, conducive to the charting of a lifetime’s maturation and development on the part of his subject, basing himself on an
attentive reading of the full corpus of Gerson’s writings, French as well as
Latin, and quite self-consciously eschewing “any fashionable theoretical
approach” (p. xi).
In 1964, noting the sheer volume of Gerson’s writing and the self-revelatory
nature of much of it, Delaruelle expressed surprise that his complex psychological make-up had not been made the object of any really probing scholarly
study. In his own non-theoretical way, McGuire may be said to have remedied
that lack. In the course of his book he dwells, often at length, on most of the
salient features of Gerson’s public career, from his early and surprisingly unrestrained attack on the teaching of the Dominican theologian Juan de Monzon
concerning the Immaculate Conception, down to the passionate but ultimately unsuccessful campaign he pursued at the Council of Constance (and in
the teeth of Burgundian opposition) to secure a full-blown condemnation of
Jean Petit’s attempt to vindicate the legitimacy of tyrannicide.Thus he focuses,
in the years intervening, on Gerson’s unsuccessful attempt as dean to reform
the chapter of the collegiate church of Saint Donatien at Bruges, on his leadership of the Parisian faculty of theology in its opposition to the attempt

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(1409) of the Franciscan Jean Gorel to vindicate the alleged pastoral prerogatives of the mendicant orders, on his ongoing effort via sermon and tract to forward on a broader front the reform of the universal Church in head and members, and on the slow maturation of his position vis-à-vis the deepening scandal
of the Great Schism, his eventual embrace of the via concilii, his passionate
advocacy before and during the Council of Constance (1414-18) of the conciliarist claim that general councils, acting without a pope, were under certain
circumstances superior in jurisdiction to the pope and possessed the power
to judge, condemn, and, if need be, depose a recalcitrant pontiff.
To all of those prominent moments in Gerson’s public life McGuire pays
due attention, and the reader can certainly rely on his careful and wellinformed analyses of them. His scholarly heart, however, lies elsewhere, and his
central, driving concern in this book is less with Gerson the public figure than
with the psycho-spiritual dynamics of his inner moral and spiritual life. And
here he confronts something of a challenge. For though Gerson did much in
the course of his voluminous writings to expose the complexities of his inner
emotional and spiritual life and to make that life accessible even to the gens
simples for whom he wrote so often in French, McGuire is forced to concede
that that “inner life remains an enigma” (p. 196). And he is forced also to find
a precarious balance between the invitation to render an anachronistically
harsh judgment on his subject’s odder and less attractive features and the
countervailing temptation to dwell more exclusively on what made Gerson so
compelling and attractive a figure, the features that subsequently led his editors to label him the doctor consolatorius—as Jacob Wimpheling put it,“a consoling and most Christian doctor” (pp. 325-326).
That balance, and to his great credit, McGuire does succeed by and large in
achieving. His Gerson may well have been obsessed with what he saw to be
the omnipresent perils of sexual attraction (lurking for him even in the confessional) and he may have been careful to distance himself from the company
of women. But unlike so many of his clerical contemporaries he was no misogynist and managed to be generous and sensitive in his extension of spiritual
counsel to members of the opposite sex. His Gerson may also have been something of an austere loner, in some ways frightened of human intimacy, anxious
to free himself of the bonds of friendship, capable of vindictive vilification of
his opponents and of being single-minded to a fault in his effort to vindicate a
matter of principle. But he was also a man capable of questioning “almost
everything . . . in his [own] life and career” (p. 60), one whose critical selfknowledge ran deep and who was not too proud to describe himself as a hesitant fellow “full of scruples and fear” (p. 112). He was a man more interested
(he said) in living well than disputing well (p. 318), and one engaged, it seems
clear, in a lifelong struggle between his commitment to discipline and self-control and his yearning for the human warmth of affective bonds. And he was
also a man capable, perhaps accordingly, of responding to others with warmly
empathetic and generous instincts.

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And so on. In coming to terms with the complex dynamic of Gerson’s inner
life, McGuire’s careful balancing act is, I would judge, successful. Somewhat
less successful, however, is the balance he achieves between the depth and
rigor of his analyses of Gerson’s own writings and his somewhat uneven handling of the contextual background against which they are seen. Thus it is
impossible to grasp the full significance of Gerson’s clash with Gorel on the
matter of mendicant privileges without seeing it in the context of the great
mendicant-secular controversy at Paris in the 1250’s or the seventeenth-century struggle in France to vindicate the divinely-established hierarchical status
of the parochial clergy. Nor can it convincingly be claimed that “Gerson’s last
contributions at Constance have for the most part been ignored” (p. 281).
After all, the first blow struck in the great war of words surrounding the
Venetian interdict of 1606 was the republication in Italian translation of two of
Gerson’s tracts from 1418—his Resolutio circa materiam excommunicationum et irregularitatum and his De sententia pastoris semper tenenda.That
blow was struck by the acerbic Venetian theologian Paolo Sarpi, and it had the
effect of drawing down on him (and on the memory of Gerson) the ire of none
other than Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. Nor, again, is it altogether accurate to
assert that after 1706 Gerson was to become something of a parochial figure,
“celebrated by French academics and more or less forgotten elsewhere” (p.
318). He figures large, after all, in the De statu ecclesiae which the auxiliary
bishop of Trier (writing under the pseudonym of “Febronius”) was to publish in
1763 and which was soon to be a best seller, circulated all over Europe in
German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese translations. Nor was Gerson
unknown to the recusant “Anglo-Gallicans” of late-eighteenth-century England
or, across the Atlantic, to their “Cisalpine” fellow-travellers in the newly-independent United States.
In connection, however, with a book of this scope, such shortcomings are
minor ones and it would be churlish to make too much of them. McGuire is
the first scholar in almost eighty years to have had the spirit to take on the formidable task of attempting a full-scale biography of Gerson. Going about that
task with thoroughness, sensitivity, and good, calmly-balanced judgment, he
has indeed succeeded in establishing the “benchmark” for future work on
Gerson’s life. And that has to be recognized as no mean achievement.
Williams College

FRANCIS OAKLEY

Ordensreform und Konziliarismus: Der Franziskanerprovinzial Matthias
Döring (1427-1461). By Petra Weigel. [Jenaer Beiträge zur Geschichte, Band
7.] (Frankfurt am Main-Berlin-Bern-Brussels-NewYork-Oxford-Vienna: Peter
Lang. 2005. Pp. 540.)
This well-researched and highly structured book, based on a doctoral dissertation defended in 2001, presents in three main parts the official policies of

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a controversial and dynamic Franciscan figure in fifteenth-century Germany,
friar Matthias Döring (ca. 1390-1469), provincial minister of the Franciscan
Saxon province during the period of the Observant reforms.
Part One deals with the politics of Döring between his election to the position of provincial minister of the Saxon province (1427) and the election of the
first Observant provincial vicar in same province in 1449, when the Observants
started to implement their autonomous administrative structures in accordance
with the papal bull Ut Sacra, issued by Pope Eugenius IV three years earlier.
Part Two treats as an interlude the conciliarist role of Döring at the Council
of Basel, and his election by friars from the German provinces to the position
of general minister during the Pentecostal chapter meeting at Freiburg in
1443, which led to a temporary divide within the order, due to the simultaneous election of Antonio Rusconi at the general chapter of Padua. With their
choice of Matthias Döring, the German provinces not only chose a conciliarist
supporter of Pope Felix V, but also an exponent of the Conventual faction
within the order, who consistently opposed the autonomy aspirations of the
leaders of the regular Observance (who by and large had received the support
of Pope Eugenius IV).When Felix V abdicated in April 1449, Döring’s position
as minister general became so weak that he withdrew, concentrating his activities henceforth on the Saxon province.
The third part charts the policies of Matthias Döring as provincial minister
until his resignation in 1461. This period was characterized by Döring’s
attempts to thwart the Observants’ attempts at building a parallel organizational structure within the Saxon province under an Observant provincial
vicar.The author rightfully indicates that Matthias Döring was not completely
opposed to Observant reforms, as long as they enforced religious discipline
and were performed sub ministris, that is to say, under acknowledgment of
the authority of the provincial minister.Yet he loathed the systematic attempts
by the Observants to undermine the authority of the provincial minister, claiming autonomy for all the Observant friaries along the lines of papal privileges
granted to them. Döring saw these attempts as a threat to his own position, but
even more as a threat to the unity of the Franciscan Saxon province.
Before 1449, Matthias had been able to regulate many reform initiatives
within the existing provincial framework under his control. After that date he
was faced by a growing congregation of Observant friaries under a semi-independent provincial vicar. In his opposition to the aspirations of the regular
Observance, Döring developed a reform policy of his own that validated both
Conventual and Observant viewpoints concerning the practice of poverty. He
gave this a theoretical basis in his Informatio de Regula Fratrum Minorum,
presented to the theological faculty of the University of Erfurt in October
1451, just at a time when the cardinal legate Nicholas of Cusa had confirmed
the papal privileges accorded to the Observants in the Saxon province.

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In subsequent decades, Döring was not able to stop the spread of the regular Observance.Yet he was able bring several Observant monasteries more or
less within his obedience through their acceptance of a visitator regiminis
answering to the provincial minister. Moreover, Döring was moderately successful in his support for the wished-for reformatio sub ministris, represented
by the so-called Martinians (named after the order’s constitutions approved by
Pope Martin V in 1430), who from the 1450’s onwards became a viable alternative to the regular Observance within the Saxon province.
Petra Weigel’s command of the secondary literature is impressive, as is
shown by the scope of her annotations and her exhaustive bibliography. Even
more impressive is the way in which she has uncovered, used, and presented
a wealth of primary sources. Readers will find in an appendix of ca. 150 pages
references to and editions of many letters, statements, and administrative documents by Döring and other protagonists, including Döring’s Informatio de
Regula Fratrum Minorum. In short, this is an exemplary study, providing a different perspective on the struggle surrounding Observant reforms during the
fifteenth century.
BERT ROEST

Groningen University

Early Modern Europe
Storia economica del clero in Europa: Secoli XV–XIX. By Fiorenzo Landi.
[Studi superiori, Studi storici, 505.] (Rome: Carocci Editore. 2005. Pp. 209.
€17.50 paperback.)
When a title promises four hundred years of economic history one is
tempted to put the book down and steal away quietly. But Fiorenzo Landi has
prepared a relatively short overview to the economic framework of religious
life in the modern era. It has the flavor of an introductory course, acquainting
the reader with the basic structures of religious life and the broad trends regarding their economic survival in Europe. In order to accomplish this task, Landi
must provide sufficient background to religious life in general to acquaint those
more familiar with economic history while spending the bulk of his attention
on the broad sweeps of the economies of diverse religious orders.The task is
made difficult by his treating every type of religious order, from monk to clerk
regular, over a period that includes the Protestant Reformation with its dissolution of religious orders; the various reform governments in the age of
Absolutism that appropriated the wealth of many of the orders for their own
purposes; the liberal revolutions which proposed to replace religious social
institutions with government sponsored care; and finally, the Napoleonic
period, determined to accomplish all of the above and more.
One of the principal sources for Landi’s work is the Dizionario degli
Istituti di Perfezione Religiosa, which he cites frequently in the preface and

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introduction in outlining the structures of the religious orders.While this can
be seen as a weakness, it underlines the value of this multi-volume work as the
most comprehensive resource for the history of religious life. In such a brief
overview as Landi gives, some inaccuracies are bound to creep in. In figure I
(p. 16) chierici regolari are portrayed as both masculine and feminine, when
the word “cleric” would indicate that branch of religious life as exclusively
male.The line in the same figure connecting the Franciscans and Dominicans
should be eliminated so as to indicate that they are two distinct mendicant
foundations. More appropriate would be a line between the Dominicans and
Augustinians to show the formers’ adoption of the Augustinian Rule.
Landi’s overview covers the British Isles, Portugal, Spain, Benelux, France,
the imperial territories, Switzerland, the Baltic countries, Poland, and Italy. In
Italy, where he gives the most complete development through all four centuries, he further divides his study into political regions: Milan,Venice, Calabria,
and Sicily. Here he has a much better command of the primary sources available, indicating the area with which he is most familiar. In each of these chapters he identifies the key local elements of religious life and how they are
treated by the state. In France, for example, he identifies the issue of Gallican
autonomy in church affairs as the perennial factor in each distinct period.
In the end, 200 pages of economic history only whet the appetite. Early on
(p. 24) Landi teases the reader with the assertion that religious orders had a
strong impact on the development of accounting. Perhaps because this section
is aimed more at economic historians who might already know the details (he
cites three accounting innovators), he ends there. Later (p. 42) he introduces
the compatibility of Protestantism with capitalism (via Max Weber), leaving the
question of how this might relate to religious orders unanswered.
Nevertheless, his bibliography is strong, indicating further directions for
research. But this introduction to the economic history of religious orders in
the modern era is by no means comprehensive. It acquaints and orients rather
than exhausts.
Spring Hill College

MARK A. LEWIS, S.J.

Renaissance Monks: Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches. By
Franz Posset. [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, CVIII.]
(Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill. 2005. Pp. xix, 196. $156.00 or €109,00.)
This book consists of expanded versions of biographical articles published
in several lexika and The American Benedictine Review.The six monks, all but
one of them active along the upper Rhine or Danube basin, are (1) Conradus
Leontorius [Konrad Töritz of Leonberg] (ca. 1460-1507/1511), a Cistercian of
Maulbronn; (2) Benedictus Chelidonius [Benedikt Schwalbe of Nürnberg] (ca.
1460-1521), monk of St. Aegidius in Nuremberg and then abbot of the
Benedictine Schottenstift in Vienna; (3) Wolfgangus Marius [Lukas Mayer of

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Dorfbach near Passau] (1469-1544), a Cistercian of the abbey of Aldersbach in
Bavaria; (4) Henricus Urbanus [Heinrich Fastnacht of Orb near Gelnhausen]
(d. after 1538), a Cistercian of Georgenthal in Thuringia; (5) Vitus Bild [Veit
Bild] (1481-1529), a Benedictine of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg; (6) Nikolaus
Ellebog (1481-1543), Benedictine of Ottobeuren in Swabia.
The chapters usefully explicate, with accompanying bibliographical citations in footnotes, the personal networks among the German humanists inside
and outside the monasteries in the last decade of the fifteenth century through
the first two or three decades of the sixteenth century. Posset rejects the
model of late-medieval deformation yielding to Reformation, explaining the
Protestant Reformation more as the product of late medieval reform and
humanism than as a response to abuses.
We catch a glimpse, for example, of Leontorius trying to mediate between
Jacob Wimpfeling and the prior of the Dominican friary in Basel after
Wimpfeling debunked the belief that Augustine, the author of the rule the
Dominicans followed, was a monk. Leontorius, having done all manner of editorial work for the Basel printer Amerbach, requested a gratis set of the elevenvolume Augustine edition in return, or, from the printer Froben, a set of spectacles. We follow Benedikt Chelidonius in his classical poetic collaboration
with Albrecht Dürer’s picture books on the Passion of Christ and the life of
Mary and Heinrich Urbanus’s midwifery on behalf of the Croatian humanist
Marcus Marulus’s Carmen on the crucified Christ. We learn about Veit Bild’s
careful preservation of 550 letters from and to the leading German humanists
of his day but also of his studies in mathematics, astronomy and astrology, cartography, and hagiography, not to mention his pastime of turning the library
catalogue of his monastery into Latin verse. And we observe Nikolaus
Ellebog’s efforts to learn Hebrew with the aid of Johannes Reuchlin.
The book could have used more rigorous editing. It alternates between writing down to a very basic level, on the one hand, and employing technical language and orthography that only a specialist could figure out, on the other.
“Scholastic manuscript” on page 88 probably means “scholastic treatise.”
Sometimes Posset’s prose reflects undigested Latinisms or Germanisms: the ablative-of-means use of cura and its variants, so common on Latin title pages, has
put on English dress as “took care of” (p.51) when “edited by”would make more
sense to most readers;“six-liner” for “hexastichon” makes sense in German but
not really in English (p. 81). Oddly enough in a book of biographies, we find no
consistent treatment of birth and death dates for the six humanist monks.
Indeed,in the chapter on Henricus Urbanus we learn only after plowing through
three or four pages that his dates are unknown. Posset does not attempt a “ca.”
guess even in the running text of the chapter, but leaves it to the reader to figure
out Urbanus’s approximate birth date based on his university matriculation.
The book’s reference value is clear; it offers in addition in some places
glimpses of real human beings and their networks that would not so readily

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emerge from entry after entry in a bio-bibliographical lexicon.The indexes are
very thorough.
Loyola University Chicago

DENNIS MARTIN

Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450-1750. By Jodi
Bilinkoff. (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 181.
$45.00.)
The implicit question Jodi Bilinkoff addresses here is one that has been asked
for decades now: How much power did women truly have in early modern
Europe? When women’s studies first began a half-century ago, the given was that
they had none. It has taken two generations of scholarship to correct this initial
erroneous assumption, but thanks to scholars such as Bilinkoff the task is nearly
complete. The text is lean and well organized. It studies the relationship
between women and their spiritual directors by examining forty-two vitae of
women (twenty from Spain) written between 1450 and 1750. The first chapter
provides the historical context, while the second places the hagiography in its
literary context. Chapters three and four are the meat of the book where the
texts are analyzed and five case studies presented. In the final chapter Bilinkoff
examines women’s reading habits and the influence the lives and Lives of other
women had on them.In her conclusion she offers her interpretation of the effect
these relationships had on early modern Catholicism.
Bilinkoff’s book is the best kind, one that leaves you asking for more when
you turn that last page. It is a book that leaves you with more questions than
it answers—and that is what keeps historical investigation alive. For example,
she comments in passing that these vitae also “provide a window into the lives
and aspirations of that most neglected of social groups, Catholic priests” (p.
10). She is right; couldn’t someone take these texts and re-examine them with
clerical history in mind?
Of course, the answers Bilinkoff does provide are of utmost importance,
and they are answers particularly close to my heart. In 1994 I wrote an article
where I suggested that there was a correlation between women, their spiritual
directors, and women’s increasingly visible role in church life. I used broadbrush strokes and offered minimal documentation to support the thesis. But it
rang true, and through the years others began supplying the missing documentation. I see Related Lives as the final word on the matter. It is the definitive study of how these “frequently reciprocal, if not equal in power” relationships between male confessors and female penitents provided “a key to
understanding the persistence and perpetuation of Catholic culture throughout the early-modern period” (p. 11).
Now to the portion of the review where I criticize some obscure point;
unfortunately, I fail this test because I really do not have any criticism. The best

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I can do is to offer to debate a minor argument Bilinkoff makes in her conclusion. Bilinkoff blames the Jansenist-Jesuit conflict for the end of the confessorfemale penitent relationship (Jesuits were popular hagiographers and confessors of women) and all the positive ramifications of those relationships. I do
not deny that the controversy created havoc within Western society in general
and for women in particular, but I think Bilinkoff stops short of identifying the
real culprit: the Enlightenment. It is when the Enlightenment comes with its
more secular, antireligious tenets that relationships grounded in religious
tenets become less effective. From that point on, women needed to establish
equal relationships in the secular realm to be effective, and confession was
obviously not in the secular realm. Insofar as Jansenism contributed to the loss
of prestige for Jesuits and thus confession, it was detrimental to women, but
the Enlightenment was the hundred-pound gorilla. Response, Prof. Bilinkoff?
Central Michigan University

PATRICIA RANFT

The Cambridge Companion to Raphael. Edited by Marcia B. Hall. (New York:
Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 416; 39 plates. $95.00.)
The recent exhibition held at the National Gallery, London,“Raphael: From
Urbino to Rome,” demonstrated that the artist continues to be attacked and
defended within an essentially nineteenth-century intellectual framework.
Remarkably, Raphael is still being framed alternatively as an academic pedant
and enemy of modernism or a triumphal genius so singular as to render the
investigation of broad, fundamental issues superfluous. The Cambridge Companion to Raphael is very much the product of the latter school, and its overall purpose is to refine and update a range of topics on which there already
exists a massive scholarly literature:Raphael’s early formation and patronage,his
dazzling Roman career, his workshop and drawing practices, his role as a stylistic exemplar, and his critical fortunes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century.To readers from outside the discipline of art history or new to the study
of Raphael, the volume’s emphasis on summarizing and restating recent secondary literature may serve as a useful starting point. However, for those seeking a major reassessment of this pivotal but also elusive Renaissance painter,
archaeologist, and architect, this collection of essays is a disappointment.
The opening essays by Jeryldene Wood and Sheryl Reiss offer two accounts
of the artist’s training and early career in Urbino. Both stress the significance
of Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, and his contacts at the Montefeltro court
for establishing the young artist once he emerged from Perugino’s workshop.
Wood advances the counter-intuitive claim that the youthful Raphael’s sweet,
undemanding style appealed to his first patrons, particularly female religious,
precisely because of its stylistic conservatism. Perugino’s thriving practice, his
harmonious workshop, and his eventual rejection in the urban crucible of
Florence all had a formative impact on Raphael. Through detailed stylistic

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analysis of the early altarpieces, Wood demonstrates just how profoundly
Perugino shaped the young Raphael, making the artist’s subsequent ability to
throw off that influence and rethink his professional practices in response to
intensively shifting demands appear all the more remarkable. Reiss provides a
comprehensive list in prose form of Raphael’s early commissions, including his
very first Roman patrons.
While Urbino formed this promising maker of Madonnas, there is no question that Rome made Raphael. Linda Pellecchia provides a wide-ranging introduction to the urban fabric of a city rapidly transforming from the stench and
chaos of the late fifteenth century to the wide streets and stately palaces envisioned and in some cases executed under the popes Julius II and Leo X, as well
as Raphael’s great patron, the banker Agostino Chigi. Here Raphael rose from
his salad days to the princely velvet-clad figure promoted by Vasari; surrounded
by his own large shop, colleague to intellectuals and humanists, beloved by
popes and cardinals, and ardent admirer of female beauty in the abstract and
in the concrete.Vasari’s is a mythic image to be sure but one that vividly conveys Raphael’s supreme contributions to the elevation of the artist’s social
status from artisan rooted in workshop practice to high-flying intellectual free
agent. Ingrid Rowland returns to the commission that launched Raphael onto
that elevated plane: the frescoes in the papal apartments known as the Stanze
begun under Julius II and continued by Leo X. She reads the frescoes as a succession of straightforward, simplified theological illustrations and positions
with Julius II as the driving intellectual force behind the original commission.
Joanna Woods-Marsden focuses on Raphael’s two celebrated papal portraits
and lavishes attention on every detail, synthesizing a great deal of recent multidisciplinary scholarship on subjects ranging from Julius’s beard to the treatment of papal corpses. The abysmal quality of the book’s reproductions particularly undermines her essay, since Woods-Marsden locates her discussion in
specific features of these luminous paintings that are totally illegible on the
page.While her methodology is laudable, she shares with Rowland and other
students of the artist a conception of Raphael as a mystical conduit. Any contemporary social, political, economic occurrence or intellectual, theological,
and cultural discursive practice or artifact produced in Rome during the first
two decades of the sixteenth century can, in this view, be safely assumed to
have filtered through Raphael. Like Greenblatt’s Will Shakespeare, Raphael is
everywhere and nowhere. In Bette Talvacchia’s account, Raphael’s large workshop is yet another of his virtuoso performances. The crushing demands of
multiple vast commissions are managed with Olympian detachment, an argument rooted in a hyper-idealized construction of the artist.
Patricia Emison acknowledges the seams in Raphael’s collaboration with
Marcantonio Raimondi on a famous series of engravings, correcting a long-standing disciplinary underestimation of the print medium. In these, the cheapest and
most widely disseminated products of his craft, Raphael emerges at his most
learned and antiquarian, assimilating knowledge gained on the job as Rome’s

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commissioner of antiquities.While the volume cries out for incisive work of critical historiography, an admittedly daunting task, contributions focused on prior
scholarship tend to be superficial and tendentious, revealing the author’s own a
priori convictions and formative training. Linda Wolk-Simon decries recent studies of Raphael drawings that expand the corpus of widely accepted attributions
but fails to secure the distinction between (good) reasoned arguments and (bad)
subjective judgments. Marcia Hill roots her discussion in the warhorse debates
of the 1960’s over mannerism as a stylistic category in contradistinction to a classic style, of which Raphael is the ultimate champion. She looks to an undefined
future when contextualist scholarship on culture and society informs definitions
of style. The late John Shearman, to whom this volume is dedicated, reinvigorated Raphael studies precisely by navigating the transition from reductive stylistic debates to the penetrating contextualist scholarship that unraveled the
false dichotomy between style and content Hall reasserts. His high standards of
evidence and argument, his appetite for fundamental questions and brilliant
problem-solving, his refusal to transmit passively the inherited intellectual paradigms of his own training still have a great deal to teach.
Trinity University

LAURA CAMILLE AGOSTON

Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin. By John Beldon Scott.
(Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xxxii, 443,
214 figures, 16 color plates. $75.00.)
It is always a great pleasure to have in one’s hand a book from which one
may learn a lot.That is the case with the new work of John Beldon Scott about
the majestic Chapel for the Shroud behind the Cathedral of Turin. After the
fire in the night of April 11-12, 1997, that destroyed a substantial part of this
most important baroque architecture in northern Italy, this book has an invaluable importance, even for the restoration that will take still many years until it
is completed.
The whole work is divided into three parts and ten chapters. The first part
is dedicated to the peregrination of the Shroud from Lirey to Chambéry and
from Chambéry to Turin, and to the pilgrims and the manner in which the
Shroud was shown to them in the different places. The second part treats of
the central object of the book: Guarini’s Shroud Chapel and its meaning. The
third section shows how the presence and showings of this most important
relic had a very strong impact on the urban evolution of Turin as the residence
of the Savoy family.
The role played by the “king of the relics” for the Savoy family in its efforts
to distinguish itself from other noble families and become a royal house is the
real aim and content of the whole book in all its three parts, so that the title of
the whole work could be “the Savoy family and its relic” or “the Shroud and its

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functions in a noble European family.” Sometimes the reader encounters this
theme a little overstressed and too often repeated.
The very heart and aim of the book is the second part: the history of the
construction and the explanation of the meaning and the function of the architecture of the Shroud chapel that was built by the Theatine architect Guarino
Guarini. The author shows how this extraordinary architect “operates on the
perception of pilgrims . . . alike to expand visually the interior of the chapel as
though that space were pressurized by the power of the relic pushing [it] outward to infinity. . .” (p. 133).With the means of the geometric structure of the
equilateral triangle, Guarini has created a “high cupola with minimum weight
and maximum fenestration” (p. 143).
The author observes for the first time that the introduction of the huge
crystal window interrupted the view from the church to the chapel, so that
the original thought of the concept of Guarini does not furthermore work on
the observer’s view. The original plan was to give with purely geometric patterns the same effect in the cupola as the visions of heaven have given the perspective frescoes of the domes since Correggio in Parma.
After all these positive aspects it is very curious to notice that the author
sometimes speaks of the faithful only in terms of past times, as nobody “seeing
the Shroud” today could have “a spiritually transforming experience” (p. 117).
When he mentions the firemen who saved the Shroud in April, 1997 (cfr. p.
319), it is more precise to say that it was only one of them, Mario Trematore,
who had the honor of risking his life to save the Shroud.
Besides this excellent and precise explanation of the effects of the Shroud
on the architecture of its chapel and on the urban development of the residence town of Turin and of the impact of this relic on the noble Savoy family
and millions of pilgrims, there remains one question not even mentioned by
the author: could not all of these effects have been produced by a real relic of
Christ?
Pontificia Università Gregoriana

HEINRICH PFEIFFER, S.J.

Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence
and Bologna By Nicholas Terpstra. [The Johns Hopkins University Studies
in Historical and Political Science, 123rd Series (2005), Nr. 4.] (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 349. $50.00.)
Historians of the Italian Renaissance, and those of the more general history
of early modern Europe, will be pleased to know that Nicholas Terpstra has yet
another fine book examining the intersection of state-building and religion in
the development of social services. Previously, Terpstra has enlightened the
subject of confraternities and the social order in Bologna; since 2000 he has

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expanded his field of inquiry to include Florence.This recent volume is a truly
superb, even magisterial comparison of the development of orphanages in
Florence and Bologna in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
We have known for some time now that Europe’s population in the early
modern period was quite young—half under the age of fifteen, one third under
the age of eight.With such a large percentage of children, given the combination of subsistence crises, economic dislocations, the regular occurrence of
diseases, faced by all of society, the plight of abandoned children was recognized as a grave problem from the high Middle Ages on. In a family-oriented
culture, it was logical that the creation of surrogate families would provide the
model for coping with the numbers of orphaned children, charity the motivation. Initially, shelter was on a small scale, centered on a workshop or a
woman’s home, but by the sixteenth century these arrangements, as well as
foundling hospitals, had given way to orphanages. Though these institutions
could not recreate love, and although many children died within their walls,
Terpstra elucidates a real and tenacious effort on the part of religious men and
women, secular and clerical, princes and artisans, in these Catholic cities that
saved vulnerable young lives.
Florence and Bologna both created networks of homes that co-ordinated a
web of care but they did so differently. In the Medici grand duchy, the focus
was on development of a statewide, rational, and efficient bureaucratic structure, under the authority of the grand dukes for the benefit of all subjects.
Bologna, smaller and a part of the papal state, developed a less bureaucratic
structure with a focus on helping citizens of the city. Finances were always
problematic, with many Bolognese houses dependent on extremely small
pledges, even from the wealthy, while in Florence, the grand dukes also tried
to create a revenue stream through taxation on shops.The dispensing of charity was based on gender and class, both of nearly equal importance. Of greatest concern were abandoned girls who could be abused sexually, as prostitutes
or otherwise. Orphanages for boys were also established, but the moral situation for girls grabbed more rhetorical attention.Terpstra takes us through the
processes for admission to orphanages, different in each city, the internal
regimes—largely the monastic one of work and prayer—to which the children
were subject, through the various ways that children were released back into
the world—largely marriage for girls, and apprenticeship for boys. Boys left as
maturity and opportunity provided, while, if a girl did not leave within ten
years, she usually stayed in the orphanage. Not unexpectedly, because of the
efforts made to control their behavior, many children tried to escape or
rebelled against authority in other ways. Enclosure and discipline were poor
substitutes for the love of parents, but, on the other hand, despite barriers,
many parents placed their children in these institutions because they believed
they stood a better chance to survive.
Terpstra’s research excavates in great detail the operation of many conservatories, ospedali, houses, and orphanages, combined with mature and subtly

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structured interpretations leading to important conclusions concerning the
differences between the Florentine and the Bolognese organizational
approaches, identifying the Florentine model as one then used by much of the
rest of Europe.
University of Cincinnati

JOHN K. BRACKETT

Scipione Borghese als Kardinalprotektor: Studien zur römischen
Mikropolitik in der frühen Neuzeit. By Martin Faber. (Mainz:Verlag Philipp
von Zabern. 2005. Pp. x, 544. €51.)
This valuable volume belongs to the series of studies of the “micropolitics”
of the early modern papacy undertaken by Wolfgang Reinhard and his students
over the past thirty years. Many of them center around Cardinal Scipione
Borghese (1579-1633), papal nephew of Pope Paul V, because of the rich documentation surrounding him that survives. The book follows upon and confirms in many ways the findings of Birgitte Emich, Bürokratie und Nepotismus
unter Paul V. (1605-1621) (Stuttgart, 2001) (reviewed ante, 90 [January, 2004],
127-129), who showed that Borghese devoted most of his energy to the exercise of patronage with a view to the establishment of the Borghese as a leading family in Rome and the Papal States while leaving his nominal obligations
in the secretariat of state and the government of the Papal States to others. But
this volume goes well beyond the examination of Borghese’s role as cardinalprotector; it also provides us along the way with a provisional overview of the
development and function of the institution of the “cardinal-protector,” about
which little scholarship exists.
The author shows the difficulty that one encounters in attempting to
define the role of the cardinal-protector; it varied greatly from instance to
instance but nearly always was associated with a form of patronage and the
exercise of influence. It did not bring direct financial gain. Faber divides
Borghese’s fifty-one protectorates, derived from a list that the cardinal drew up
in 1625, soon after the death of his papal uncle, into three categories, on behalf
of religious orders and congregations, of nations and cities, and the broadest
category of all, of pious works (luoghi pii) which stretched from the Holy
House of Loreto to the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore to confraternities in Rome to the German College. Protectorates over religious orders dated
back to the request of St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century for a cardinal-protector. The protector was expected to represent the interests of the
order in the Curia, but his role in the internal affairs of an order differed
greatly. Generally speaking, Faber contends, it was the request or need of an
order for assistance that led to the appointment of a cardinal-protector, not the
desire of the cardinal to expand his influence. Faber discusses at length
Borghese’s exercise of this position with the Dominicans and with the
Olivetans, an Italian Congregation of Benedictine monks founded in 1319. In

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neither case was he concerned significantly with the policy of the order or
movements for reform; this he left up to his uncle the pope or other authorities. He involved himself chiefly in personnel decisions on the basis of requests
from inside or outside the orders, such as recommending that a member be
moved to another house or awarded an academic title. In this way he built up
his contacts and clients, to the benefit of the Borghese family. Faber contrasts
sharply Borghese’s activity with the Olivetans with his predecessor’s as cardinal-protector, Paolo Sfondrati, himself the papal-nephew of Gregory XIV, who
for many years virtually micro-managed the congregation.
The office of cardinal-protector for nations, as well as other political entities, had come into existence in the fourteenth century, and it involved the representation of the interests of a particular ruler at the papal court; it brought
prestige to the cardinal. But already in the sixteenth century it was losing its
significance with the development of diplomatic institutions. Faber looks in
detail at Borghese’s service as protector of the German nation which he began
in 1611.The author points out the conflicts of interest which the office could
create for a cardinal, and especially for a cardinal-nephew, whose first loyalty
was to the pope, for example, when during the early years of the Thirty Years’
War the emperor sought to obtain financial support from often reluctant
popes. Furthermore, advocacy of the interests of one nation in Rome could
elicit hostility from another nation, in this case, France.
The protectorate over pious works also offered opportunities to exercise
patronage, though it would be a mistake to attribute Borghese’s activity solely
to this goal. He took very seriously his protectorate of the Holy House of Loreto,
the principal goal of pilgrimages in Italy outside Rome and the destination of
the only journey that Borghese himself undertook beyond Rome once he
became a cardinal. But it also gave him a chance to oversee the appointments
to both ecclesiastical and secular positions there and to make special provision
for visiting dignitaries from church and state who would then remember him.
There exist 1075 letters regarding Loreto in his archive for the years 1622 to
1632. Faber indicates that recourse to a cardinal-protector by Roman confraternities, many of which were archconfraternities with influence well beyond
Rome, was often dictated by the desire to escape from the control of the diocesan bishop, in this case the pope himself or his vicar for Rome.
Faber draws on a rich variety of sources. Occasionally, the book makes difficult reading. But it constitutes a significant contribution to the history of the
early modern papacy and has to be consulted by specialists.
Loyola University Chicago

ROBERT BIRELEY

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La Biblioteca Ambrosiana tra Roma, Milano e l’Europa: Federico Borromeo
Fondatore della Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Atti delle giornate di studio 25-27
novembre 2004. Edited by Franco Buzzi and Roberta Ferro [Studia
Borromaica. Saggi e documenti di storia religiosa e civile della prima età moderna, 19] (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana. 2005. Pp. 590. €30.00 paperback.)
This volume with different contributions not only on the Biblioteca
Ambriosana and its foundation and development, but also on some of the most
important European libraries, shows more than their history and their transformation up to the present time, it also depicts their cultural responsibility as protectors of humanity, art, and science and also of the exchange of ideas. Modern
technology offers a new way into the future by the application of new technology and electronic information resources, such as CD-ROM editions or the
internet. Three groups of themes have been discussed at this conference: the
concept of the humanistic libraries in Europe and their organization, the foundation of the Ambrosiana, and the presentation of some libraries and their function in the papers of their directors.The praise of books of the English bishop
Richard of Aungervly (Philobiblon sive de amore librorum) points the way forward for the humanists with their collections and shows at the same time the
value and the beauty of books. This beauty was lost during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, when the book became a part of the architecture of the
reading-room with its desks. The ideal of the classical library as a representative
not only of the service of the knowledge but also of beauty and as an expression of the cultural sensibility too had been renewed in the rococo period in
the Catholic areas, specially in Rome and that of the Empire. Humanists like
Petrarca condemned the pure collectionism of some nobles. As bibliophiles
their own collections were open to their friends and all scholars, a practice that
preceded that of the public libraries, the first of which was opened in Rome in
1595 by Angelo Rocco who wanted the Angelica open to all interested people.
Printing offered a greater opportunity for acquiring books to learned laymen
such as Pico della Mirandola and Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, whose collection later
on was purchased by Cardinal Federico Borromeo. A network of intellectuals
all over Europe was created through this collecting of books by changing information about books and catalogues of different collections. The French king
Francis I intended to establish a library for scholars. On the one hand he bought
or ordered copies of manuscripts and on the other hand the printer Robert
Estienne prepared an edition of classical texts using the royal manuscripts.The
Jesuits adapted for their library concept the program of Roman humanism, but
they placed emphasis on the theories of the Counter-Reformation and on the
anti-Gallicanism of Antonio Possevino (Bibliotheca selecta).The political situation in Germany caused the emergence of small collections by princes, sometimes also influenced by scholars of the university founded by them,such as the
Bibliotheca Palatina of Heidelberg.The library situation in the Balkans is characterized by the Turkish war and occupation, except for some towns on the
Adriatic coast of Croatia. During this period most monasteries had been
destroyed, including their books.The whole coast was a part of the dominion

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of Venice and stood under its cultural influence. Scholars and bibliophiles
acquired their books mainly in Venice. There were ecclesiastical collectors, as
the bishop Juraj Kružić, who had about 2,000 volumes accessible to everybody,
which was to be given after his death half to the Franciscans and half to the
Dominicans. There were also lay patrons, such as the orientalist Ivan Paštrić,
who stayed for many years in Rome, and whose books ended up in the
archiepiscopal seminary of Spalato.
The first library of modern times was the Escorial, founded by Philip II, with
all books accessible to everybody and with its alphabetic catalogues and some
subject catalogues too at its entrance. Cardinal Federico Borromeo wanted his
library, the Ambrosiana, connected with the college of the Oblates and to
become a center of knowledge. Twelve clerics, each with a doctoral degree,
chosen by the cardinal had the responsibility for different sections.The cardinal tried to work out precise rules for his institution from the Foundation Act
(Clement VIII, 1606) to the Notary’s Act (1607), to the papal confirmation of
the Ambrosiana (1608), to the first proofs of the Constitution of the college
and the library (1610), and the Constitution itself (1616).The Ambrosiana was
one of the first public libraries in Italy, the first being the Angelica in Rome.
In the presentation of some important libraries, their directors put their
trust for the future in modern technology. The Marciana project handles all
Cinquecentini (printed books of the sixteenth century) and all titles up to the
letter H are just transferred on-line. The bibliographical database relative to
manuscripts, realized in co-operation with forty other libraries, has plans to put
11,000 entries with 70,000 quotations of 50,000 manuscripts onto the net.The
retrospective view of the catalogue of printed books is nearly finished.
Therefore about 90% of the whole collection is accessible on the Internet.
In 1985 the Vatican Library, where it was possible to read only manuscripts
until 1902, started the cataloguing on-line using the program of the FrenchCanadian society GEAC. Between 1994 and 1996 the old sheet-catalogue was
transferred in a retrospective version into an electronic one; now the whole
catalogue of printed books is accessible by Internet. Digitalized prints,
designs, medals, and coins protected by the copyright are as well passed onto
the Internet.
The Mazarine has also transferred its catalogue onto the Internet. But illuminations and decorations of medieval manuscripts have been prepared
together with the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes using the
iconographic base “Liber floridus” to be put on-line. The Herzog August
Bibliothek intends not only to conserve and make its collection accessible also
by modern techniques, but it is at the same time a center of research, giving
grants to enable scholars from all over the world to study in the library. The
Ambrosiana had from the beginning intensive contacts with other libraries and
scholars, such as the Greek scriptor of the Vatican Library, Giovanni Santa
Maura, with whom Federico Borromeo had close contact since his stay in

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Rome. He copied several manuscripts for the Ambrosiana. The Ambrosiana is
particularly interested in Borromeo’s life and correspondence. Half of his letters have been transferred in the last years into the database: at the moment it
includes 40,000 letters in 196 folders, the originals are spread all over Europe.
Since 1993 the Accademia di San Carlo has begun to reproduce and catalogue
this material in the form of a CD ROM in an analytic index in five volumes, and
in the website of the library itself. A very illustrative introduction shows the
four possibilities of research (place, names, civil or religious institutions).
This volume gives a varied presentation of European libraries from their
foundation during the period of humanism until the present with their
prospects for the future. Particularly the last part shows very well how some
of the most important libraries are trying to protect their precious collections
and how they use different databases and new technology to make the manuscripts, books, prints, etc., accessible while conserving them at the same time.
Besides some small errors, such as the wrong indication of the call numbers of
the Vatican manuscripts (pp. 120f.) as Cod. Pal. Lat.Vat. which means a mixing
of two sections Pal. lat. and Vat. lat. and therefore creates confusion and anyway
they are missing in the index of manuscripts, or transferring the Marciana to
Florence (p. 193), this publication is a very instructive representation of the
library system and of the integration of modern database systems to make the
treasures accessible to a larger field of interested people and to make an
important contribution to cultural development. The two indices at the end
(personal names and manuscripts) make the volume very accessible.
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

CHRISTINE MARIA GRAFINGER

Juan van der Hamen y León and the Court of Madrid. By William B. Jordan.
(New Haven:Yale University Press. 2005. Pp. 336, 170 black and white and
75 color illustrations. $ 60.00.)
Juan van der Hamen y León (1596-1631) is the most influential Spanish still
life painter of the seventeenth century. His still life paintings manifest the progression from a calculated reduced representation of objects mainly in their
natural state and in rural settings, such as the one created by Juan Sanchez
Cotan (1560-1627) around 1600, to an introduction of a rich and diverse range
of motifs in which fruits, vegetables, flowers, and pastries, along with magnificent jugs imply the royal court of Madrid.
Although there also exists in Van der Hamen’s still life paintings allusions
toward Antiquity, pursued by early artists and elitist collectors of such works
of art, it is precisely the variety of motifs and the great number of paintings that
determine the creation of a genuine market for this new genre of painting. In
the 1620’s, this market was completely dominated by Van der Hamen and continued to be strongly influenced by him well up to mid-seventeenth century.

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Forty years after having shown to a specialized, thus limited, audience his
extensive knowledge of the painter through his doctoral thesis (published only
in microfilm),William B. Jordan with this monograph which has accompanied
both in English and Spanish versions Van der Hamen’s exhibitions in Madrid
(Palacio Real, October, 2005 to January, 2006) and Dallas (Meadows Museum,
February to May,2006),organized likewise by Jordan,presents the greatest compilation of information regarding this painter of Flemish roots, who died at the
age of 35. However, the author not only limits himself to the still life output, a
facet of Van der Hamen’s works praised by many contemporaries of the period
such as Francisco Pacheco or Lope de Vega, but he also aims to represent the
artist in the complete extent of his artistic output and place him amongst the
most important painters of the Spanish Baroque. For this reason, portrait and
religious painting take up an important part of the book.
The extraordinary talent of Van der Hamen as a portrait painter is proven
by the fact that there were no other painters during his lifetime as praised as
he was by his contemporaries for his portraits. In this sense, it is very revealing that Cardinal Francesco Barberini preferred his portrait painted by Van der
Hamen to the one Velazquez painted of him. Interesting also is that amongst
the twenty portraits that are listed in the painter’s inventory, carried out in
1631, portraits of intellectuals as well known as Lope de Vega, Francisco de
Quevedo, and Luis de Gongora can be found.
For the patronage in Spain, extremely interesting is the identification—presumed by other historians but here explicitly mentioned for the first time—of
a noblemen such as Jean de Croÿ, II Comte de Solre (Plate 28, private collection).The great vertical couple Still Life with Vase of Flowers and a Dog (Plate
29) and Still Life with Vase of Flowers and a Puppy (Plate 30), currently in the
Prado Museum, can be found amidst the works carried out by Van der Hamen
for this captain of the Royal Guard of Archers.
The San Isidro (Plate 1, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland) painted in the
context of the beatification (1620) and the canonization (1622) of the patron
saint of Madrid and the recently rediscovered Saint John the Baptist in Prayer
(Plate 2, Madrid, private collection), are early examples of religious paintings in
Van der Hamen’s work. Only a few years later, between 1624 and 1625, paintings of the barefooted Augustinian nuns were completed for the Convent of
the Incarnation, located in the immediate proximity of the Alcázar. The
Adoration of the Apocalyptic Lamb (Plate 17) is worthy of mention as it
reflects the exegesis of the Revelation of Saint John by the brother of the
painter, the theologian Lorenzo van der Hamen. The painting that simultaneously serves for the glorification of Saint Augustine and the commemoration of
the first prioress of the Convent, Mother Mariana of Saint Joseph, namely, the
painting of Saint John the Evangelist, becomes prominent as the prophet of
Revelations not only because of the frontal lighting of his reddish-green clothing but also because it may be a self-portrait of Van der Hamen.

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His masterpiece of religious output is nonetheless the Apparition of the
Virgin Immaculate to Saint Francis (Plate 52, Philadelphia, Philadelphia
Museum of Art) painted for the Convent of Holy Isabel of Kings in Toledo.The
saint engrossed in his vision is perhaps one of the most refined figures of Van
der Hamen’s work. The exceptional realism is matched by the faces of the
angels and flowers placed at the foot of the Immaculate, carried out with
great expertise.
More than a simple monograph of the artist, the book seems to be a cross
section of the society of Madrid in which the data collected during a task of
investigation of more than four decades creates an exhaustive view of Spain in
the first half of the seventeenth century.The abundance of information and its
rigorous use lead one to await with great anticipation the detailed catalogue of
Van der Hamen announced by Jordan for the year 2009.
Goethe-Institut, Madrid

FELIX SCHEFFLER

The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English
Church. By George W. Bernard. (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 736. $40.00.)
The King’s Reformation charts the religious twists and turn of Henry VIII’s
reign, beginning with Henry VIII’s questioning of the validity of his marriage
to Catherine of Aragon. In the period 1527-1533 Henry consistently threatened
the Pope with unilateral action in England to secure the divorce if the Pope
did not comply: the Royal Supremacy, we are told, was a possibility from the
beginning as the essential ideological framework was present.The visitation of
the monasteries in 1535, and the subsequent dissolution of the less economically viable houses in 1536, stemmed from a genuine reforming impulse, not
financial motivations. Henry’s attitude toward monasticism in general only
deteriorated as a result of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Although the King’s reformation led to changes in doctrine and worship, it did not introduce continental evangelical reform, but was rather initially inspired by Erasmian humanism.
The changes, however, were so substantial that the nature of religion afterwards cannot simply be characterized as an interpretation or rethinking of pre1530’s Catholicism, but should instead be recognized as partially radical and
unique to Henry’s kingdoms. In light of the opposition Henry VIII faced from
conservative quarters, Bernard argues against the notion that English subjects
complied with religious change because they negotiated the reformation for
their own profit. Rather, it was Henry’s tyrannical suppression of outspoken
critics that silenced men across the religious spectrum. In contrast to historians who depict religious policy in the 1530’s and 1540’s as contingent upon
the influence of competing factions on the King, Bernard instead describes a
monarch in control of his church and episcopate, who assiduously pursued a
considered via media. Even those assemblies which were ostensibly debates
among the leading clergymen to determine doctrine, were, apparently, con-

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ducted along lines prescribed by the King.The King’s Reformation takes issue
with interpretations that suggest that Thomas Cromwell,Thomas Cranmer, and
other leading evangelicals were attempting to influence Henry into a more
reformist religious stance. Bernard’s Cromwell was not continually pursuing
his own, more evangelical agenda, but instead was emphatically a Henrician,
while if Archbishop Cranmer influenced anything, we are assured, it was
merely the details, not the direction of religious policy. Readers who are relatively unfamiliar with this area should be aware that Bernard assumes a large
degree of background knowledge of both events and historical debate.The balance of Bernard’s book is also somewhat problematic.While early opposition
to the Divorce and Supremacy, and the Pilgrimage of Grace receive substantial
attention, some areas which do not easily fit Bernard’s picture of a king-driven
and coherent via media are discussed only relatively briefly, most notably the
debates in 1537 which led to the drafting of the Bishops’ Book and the developments of the 1540’s. The King’s Reformation is undeniably an important
contribution to the study of reformation in Henrician England, which will
undoubtedly provoke much debate.
Pembroke College, Oxford

TRACEY A. SOWERBY

Lest We Be Damned. Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among
Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642. By Lisa McClain. [Religion in
History, Society, and Culture, 6.] (New York and London: Routledge. 2004.
Pp. xvi, 393.)
For a long time the historiography of Catholics in early modern England
was dominated by debates about whether they were old-style, traditional
Catholics, or the product of post-Tridentine missionaries. Lisa McClain has very
usefully sidestepped that argument by asking what the Church meant to
English Catholics in a world in which access to priests, sacraments, altars, pilgrimage sites, and all the other means of worship was banned, abolished, dismantled, and forbidden.
Her question is in keeping with current historiographical trends in English
religious history, which see English Protestants creating their own new forms
of personal faith in the post-Reformation period. McClain shows us that
English Catholics were doing exactly the same thing. All English people were
involved in the same process with similar roots. English Catholics saw themselves as the heirs and defenders of the true historical faith, linking themselves
to the early Church in ways reminiscent of the way their Protestant neighbors
were insisting that they were restoring the primitive Church. Moreover,
Protestant separatists had an analog in English Catholics, whose Catholicism
varied radically from that of their Continental co-religionists. They, too, were
feeling their way toward new expressions of spirituality and worship that did
not depend on the presence of ordained clergy or legal worship spaces.

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McClain’s book establishes a number of ways in which Catholics did this,
and then explores Catholicism in Cornwall, London, and Northern England to
illustrate how these new forms of Catholicism functioned in different settings.
In doing this, she defines “Catholic” as anyone who believed in the sacraments
and rituals of Catholicism.This sidesteps the definitions imposed by Protestant
authorities and by Catholic purists, leaving a group with widely varying practices that helped them resolve some basic conundra: How does a Catholic worship without a priest to provide the sacraments? How does one function without sacred spaces? How does one maintain a spiritual life in the community of
the saints when there is no visible community? Can one be a good subject of
the English monarch or must one be obedient to the Pope in all things?
Using a wide range of sources, she reaches some stimulating conclusions.
There were, she finds, several ways of being Catholic. The English Catholics
maintained an historical identity with the martyrs and persecuted faithful of
the past, drawing their strength from historical models of triumphant resistance. As the number of their martyrs grew, so did their identity with martyrdom as proof of their faithfulness. This way of thinking allowed them to see
themselves as part of the whole communion of the saints. But what they did
to stay in that communion varied.There were those who practiced a form of
rosary-based mystical union, even, in some cases, arguing that the Mass was not
necessary for communion with Christ. There were communities in which
membership was maintained through prayer, and communities that shared
Catholic books and catechisms. Prayers for the dead kept up their identity with
the larger Catholic world, past and present.These communities, however, were
English, and McClain demonstrates that the popes’ refusals to understand the
peculiar problems of English Catholics led the English faithful to distance
themselves from obedience to Rome, relying on their own indigenous understanding of what it meant to be a faithful Catholic.
This is an important book that moves the study of English Catholicism into
a new realm by insisting that its subjects be studied as they lived, not as an ideological subset. However, it prompts a desire for further work on the nature of
Catholic communities. I suspect that the origins of English Catholicism are
probably to be found in the intellectual and political confusion of the reign of
Henry VIII and the compromises of the 1550’s, rather than in the period after
1559.
Additionally, some of her players, like William Alabaster, moved between
Protestant and Catholic faiths, and one suspects that they need to be put in
their personal contexts if we are to understand what they really believed.
Moreover, the communities she describes are not fully articulated, and their
practices are sometimes very hard to nail down. Her question is one that she,
and many others, will want to pursue further.
Utah State University

NORMAN JONES

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Samuel Werenfels: Il dibattito sulla libertà di coscienza a Basilea agli inizi
del settecento. By Camilla Hermanin. [Studi e Testi per la Storia della
Tolleranza in Europa nei Secoli XVI–XVIII, Volume 7.] (Florence: Leo S.
Olschki Editore. 2003. Pp. xii, 352. €33.00 paperback.)
Camilla Hermanin offers a broadly situated intellectual biography of the
Basel theologian and professor Samuel Werenfels (1657-1740), concentrating
in particular on his conception of the liberty of conscience within Reformed
Protestant regimes. The book also includes Werenfels’ Epistola de iure in conscientias ab homine non usurpando (1702) and thirteen letters from
Werenfels’ correspondence. Werenfels belonged to the triumvirate of Swiss
“orthodox reformers” that included Turrettini in Geneva and Ostervald in
Neuchâtel, who challenged the authoritarian approach to religious dissent
they saw embodied in the Formula Consensus Ecclesiarum Helveticarum
Reformatarum, which Basel imposed on all pastors and teachers between
1674 and 1723. In Hermanin’s view, “the liberty of conscience was officially
denied in Switzerland” (p. 12) through this document, which explicitly
rejected seventeenth-century universalism, ecumenicism, and historical/philological approaches to the sacred canon.
Hermanin’s first two chapters effectively introduce late seventeenth-century Basel and Werenfels’ own life. Although the confessional views that ruled
at the time might seem inhospitable to a moderate defender of consciences,
Werenfels (scion of the Werenfels and Grynaeus dynasties) enjoyed an excellent education with the Cartesian Johann Jacob Hoffmann and the younger
Buxtorff before completing his degree in theology under the influence of
Johann Rudolf Wettstein, who had refused to sign the Formula Consensus but
retained his chair. After formative journeys through Reformed Switzerland,
Germany, and the Netherlands, Werenfels joined the Basel faculty. Although
Hermanin describes his career as restless, he successively occupied the chairs
of Greek, Christian rhetoric, dogmatics, and the Old and New Testaments, as
well as becoming rector of the university: his nonconformity and provocative
publications may have caused awkward moments, but never interrupted his
life. His first high-profile contribution set the tone by attacking the “logomachies” of religious controversialists of all stripes.
The remaining three chapters of Hermanin’s book set Werenfels, and particularly his Epistola, in larger intellectual context. In Chapter 3, she argues that
the irenic and humanist approach championed by Werenfels responded not
only to external intellectual developments, but also had roots in Basel’s own
intellectual milieu reaching back to the era of Erasmus. Humanism and philology, as well as rationalism and natural law, shaped the way Werenfels and his
reforming colleagues approached the problem of conscience and authority. In
Chapter 4, Hermanin turns directly to the key question addressed in Werenfels’s
Epistola: the proper balance among power, law, and individual conscience.
Although insisting on the ultimate sovereignty of the conscience, Werenfels
fully recognized the authority of magistrates to preserve an ordered society in

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which orthodox doctrine enjoyed public encouragement and protection. His
position thus remained inside the cultural framework of early modern orthodoxy, even if his insistence that reason provided one foundation for true faith
pointed toward the paradoxes that eventually undermined the entire system.
He also remained consistently Erastian in his conviction that the magistrate
might punish “professed Christians who act against the teachings of Christ” (p.
219), whereas theologians should play a limited role in such matters.
The book’s final chapter addresses European responses to Werenfels’ work
by looking at two specific conflicts. During the Bangorian controversy in
England, Werenfels’ Epistola was translated by the Latitudinarian and Erastian
thinkers supporting the Bishop of Bangor’s defense of royal authority to tolerate dissent. In the Netherlands, ironically, the same work was republished (with
a crucially modified title) to support the Reformed church’s authority against
alleged Socinians during the Stinstra affair, recently analyzed by Joris van
Eijnatten. In both cases, the debate involved not traditional persecution of
heresy, but rather the limits of clerical and state authority in the face of learned
individuals’ interpretation of Scripture. Hermanin’s erudite study therefore
helps characterize a distinctive phase of Reformed Protestant debates over
religious toleration, though one soon marginalized by the very different
approaches growing out of Spinozan and later Enlightenment thought.
University of California, Riverside

RANDOLPH C. HEAD

Rus’ Restored: Selected Writings of Meletij Smotryc’kyj 1610-1630. Translated
and annotated with an introduction by David Frick. [Harvard Library of
Early Ukrainian Literature English Translations: Volume VII.] (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute, 2006. Pp. lxx, 810. $32.50.)
In the seventeenth century, the Ruthenian Orthodox church in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth was split between those supporting and those
opposing the Union with the Roman Church concluded by their metropolitan
and bishops in 1596. As layman, monk, and archbishop, the grammarian and
polemicist Meletij Smotryćkyj (Meletii Smotryśkyi) (1577?-1633) was among
the most eloquent and prolific opponents of the Union.Then, around the age
of fifty, he formally converted to Catholicism—first covertly, then openly—and
became a leading proponent of the Union.
David A. Frick has published a number of articles on this enigmatic and controversial churchman as well the biographical-philological study Meletij
Smotryćkyj (1995) and the introductions to the facsimile editions of his
Collected Works and Jevanhelije učytelnoje (Homiliary Gospel) (Volumes I
and II of the Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, Texts, 1987). The
present work comprises nineteen translations (mostly from Polish) of selected

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works and selections from works, most of which appear in the aforementioned
facsimile volumes, to which references are provided. In addition to several letters (two of them to Pope Urban VIII), a number of Smotryts’ kyi’s writings are
translated in their entirety: A Verification of Innocence (1621), A Justification
of Innocence (1623), Apology (1628), A Protestation (1628), and Paraenesis
(1629). In footnotes, Frick supplements incomplete biblical citations, supplies
many that are missing, and provides historical and textual references. The 53page introduction guides the reader through Smotryts’ kyi’s life and works. A
brief but useful glossary is followed by a list of cited works, an index of biblical references, and an index furnishing valuable biographical information.
Most interesting historically as well as psychologically is the period from 6
July 1627 to mid-August 1628, when the secret Catholic convert remained an
Orthodox archbishop seeking to bring together the Uniate and Orthodox
sides. Based on a close reading of the texts of this time, Frick speculates that
Smotryts’ kyi may have felt most comfortable as “a man in the middle”
(Introduction, p. lv). He is probably correct in suggesting that the hierarch
“may have been pursuing a plan for a unified particular Ruthenian Church in
somewhat looser union with Rome, perhaps under the immediate jurisdiction
of a Ruthenian patriarch in Kyiv” (ibid.). Smotryts’ kyi’s vision of East-West unity
was to some degree shared by the Uniate metropolitan Iosyf Veliamyn Ruts’ kyi
as well as the Orthodox metropolitan Peter Mohyla, and in the twentieth century by the Greek-Catholic metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’ kyi. In Smotryts’ kyi’s
view, however, the Orthodox could only achieve union among themselves and
with Rome by reforming their church and cleansing it of Protestant-inspired
heresies. Without union, he feared, some might convert to Protestantism and
the rest to Latin-rite Catholicism, leaving neither an Orthodox nor a Uniate
Ruthenian church (see Paraenesis at p. 618).
Frick’s translations flow easily and gracefully while preserving Smotryśkyi’s
Baroque complexity and rhetorical verve. Perhaps the most absorbing reading is Smotryts’ kyi’s lively and immediate account in the Protestation of the
dramatic events surrounding the Kyiv Orthodox council of August 1628,
when the crypto-Uniate hierarch saw his Apology publicly condemned and,
after Cossack threats, was compelled to sign a revocation, which he promptly
withdrew.
Smotryśkyi’s writings leave an impression of a truth-seeker committed to
rescuing the Ruthenian church first through reform and then, after much
reflection, through union with Rome. Or does this impression merely testify to
the success of his rhetorical strategies? The publication of these translations
invites the historian, as well as the theologian and the philologist, to explore
these and many other questions.
Rockville, Maryland

ANDREW SOROKOWSKI

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Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France: The Paris Chambre de
l’Édit, 1598-1665. By Diane C. Margolf. [Sixteenth Century Essays and
Studies 67.] (Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press. 2003. Pp.
xx, 227. $36.00 paperback.)
Diane C. Margolf here offers the first archival investigation of the Paris
Chambre de l’édit, most important of the courts established to protect the
legal rights of French Protestants under the terms of the Edict of Nantes.The
Edict, issued by Henri IV in 1598, aimed at ending more than thirty years of
war between Catholics and Protestants in France.
The Edict of Nantes and the courts it established were not an unqualified
success, however. Margolf’s exploration of the Chambre’s records reveals several reasons why this was so. The courts were not independent but, rather,
branches of the parlements, royal courts of appeal that dominated the judicial
systems of the French provinces. Most of the parlements’ judges were
Catholics, which made it difficult for the subordinate Catholic-Protestant
courts to act decisively in defense of Protestant rights. Just as the Paris parlement had the largest jurisdiction of any court in the system, so its Chambre
de l’édit was the court of last resort for Protestants all over northern France.
Yet it never had more than one Protestant judge.
Margolf divides the Chambre’s cases into three groups.The first covers lawsuits arising from actions taken during the wars of religion.The court had to
decide what constituted religiously motivated crimes and what fell under the
king’s command that the violence normal in wartime should be forgiven, if not
forgotten. Next come the numerous cases due to intermarriage between
Catholics and Protestants and the familial disputes that resulted. Finally,
Margolf considers slanders, violence, and judicial malfeasance caused by tensions between the two religions. In most situations, the Chambre did little to
bring about genuine denominational reconciliation, but it did force both
Catholics and Protestants to accept royal justice as the thread binding the
French nation together.
Margolf has thoroughly explored the Chambre’s records.The book’s greatest fascination comes from the stories of individual men and women trying to
achieve justice with dignity in a world still riven by confessional prejudice.
Most of the work focuses on the first two decades of the seventeenth century,
and the author has made little effort to correlate the Chambre’s work with outside events. It would have been interesting to know if the number and nature
of cases changed after the Protestant rebellions of 1621-1628 or the Fronde of
1648-1653. Nonetheless, this is important reading for any scholar of early
modern French history and should certainly interest anyone concerned about
the long-term effects of religious violence upon society.
University of Northern Iowa

CHARLOTTE C.WELLS

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Les jésuites à Lyon XVIe–XXe siècles. Edited by Etienne Fouilloux and Bernard
Hours. [Collection Société, Espaces,Temps.] (Lyon: ENS éditions. 2005. Pp.
274. €32.00 paperback.)
The thirteen studies on Jesuit history presented here, papers given at a conference held in Lyon in September 2002, all show a high level of scholarship,
offer a wealth of information drawn from extensive research, and are interestingly written, from the introduction by Bernard Hours to the conclusion by
Etienne Fouilloux.
Part I, consisting of five studies on “L’ancienne Compagnie,” the Society of
Jesus before the Suppression in 1773, begins with Yann Lignereux’s “Une
implantation difficile: controverse religieuse et polémiques politiques (15651607).”This first stage of Jesuit presence in Lyon, after a few years of tensions
mainly with King Henri IV, seems to have resulted in general feelings of esteem
among the Lyonnais for the Jesuits. Annie Regond’s article tells of a very gifted
and famous Jesuit architect at the Collège de la Trinité, Brother Etienne
Martellange. Stéphane van Damme’s insightful article,“Le corps professoral du
college,” offers much information on the stress on scholarship and the way the
Jesuit province of Lyon consistently devoted resources to the school. Sophie
Roux offers a very interesting article on another very gifted individual Lyon
Jesuit, Father Honoré Fabri (1607-1688), who in his day was well known in the
field of philosophy of nature. Yves Jocteur-Montrozier’s “Des jésuites et de la
bibliothèque municipale de Lyon,” is an especially valuable report on the role
of the Jesuits in the building of their large, much-admired library, confiscated
by the city at the Suppression.
Part II,“Le temps des collèges,”moves into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Philippe Rocher very competently traces significant developments in
teaching in Jesuit education in Lyon from 1850 to 1950. Bruno Dumons, in
“Jésuites lyonnais et catholicisme intransigeant,” offers an extremely interesting
study of the role of a number of Jesuits in supporting and inspiring Catholics of
the traditionalist, anti-liberal, anti-Third Republic viewpoint. The strongly anticlerical Republic outlawed Catholic schools in 1901, and Patrick Cabanel’s article tells how the Lyon Jesuits managed to re-create one of their schools in exile
in Bollengo, Italy. Bernard Delpal’s study of Lyon Jesuit work in Lebanon focuses
on their major printing house and their Bibliothèque Orientale in Beirut, both
of which became very influential in spreading not only Catholicism but also
French culture in the Near East. Both Jesuits and anti-Jesuit government officials, as he notes, wanted to advance French civilization there.
In the third part,“Les défis de la modernité,” Lyon Jesuits are shown to have
been prominent in some social and religious controversies. Pierre Vallin, S.J., in
“Les jésuites à Lyon et la question sociale,” offers much specific information on
the involvement of some Jesuits in inspiring activism for social justice from the
mid-nineteenth century on.

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A most interesting and detailed article by Bernard Comte,“Jésuites lyonnais
résistants,” tells of some thirty Jesuits of Lyon who participated in the resistance to Nazi and Vichy rule during World War II. Henri de Lubac was prominent among them. In the longest (twenty-five pages) and most timely study in
the volume, Claude Prudhomme and Oissila Saaïdia tell of Lyon Jesuit work in
the Near East to promote understanding of the Arab Muslim world through
research in Muslim literature and history. Both the French government and the
papacy from Pius IX on supported these efforts. Also most interesting is
Dominique Avon’s article on the Jesuit theological school at Fourvière (Lyon)
which in the 1940’s-1950’s incurred the suspicion of the Vatican. Would that
there were more space here for the names (e.g., again de Lubac) and other
specifics of this regrettable eve-of-Vatican Council II event. Etienne Fouilloux’s
concluding essay on the French Jesuits’ progress in the last two centuries from
anticlerical hostility to general esteem is full of insightful comment.This whole
volume provides a wealth of specific information and very scholarly discussion
of significant people and developments.
Loyola University of Chicago

RICHARD F. COSTIGAN, S.J.

Late Modern Europe
Souverain et Pontife: Recherches prosopographiques sur la Curie Romaine
à l’Âge de la Restauration (1814-1846). By Philippe Boutry. [Collection de
l’École Française de Rome, 300.] (Rome: École Française de Rome. 2002. Pp.
xviii, 785.)
This hefty volume is not for the casual reader. But it provides a wealth of
information for researchers on nearly any subject dealing with the Papacy and
the Roman Curia during the Restoration period of the nineteenth century. As
the title indicates, the Popes of that period were not only pontiffs, but sovereigns as well, princes of the second largest of the pre-unification Italian states.
Boutry’s work provides the reader with a highly detailed study of the Papal
Government of that age, from the restoration of Pius VII in 1814 until the election of Pius IX in 1846. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of the Papal administration, the regime had both spiritual and political aspects, not always clearly
distinguished from one another. One of the most troublesome issues that Pius
IX faced was how to acquit his duties to his secular subjects in the Papal
States, while still maintaining his position as head of the Universal Church.
Boutry sets out to present the details of this intricate organization in two
phases. He portrays the Roman Curia in all its labyrinthine complexity, then
gives a thumbnail biography of each cleric or layman who held one or more
positions in those offices. Although the book appears at first to be just a complicated profile of an outdated bureaucracy, it also provides a fascinating
glimpse of a unique ecclesiastical state which has vanished forever. Although

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this society disappeared less than two centuries ago, the close blending of
Church and State gives it an “other worldly”look to the modern reader. It is also
a pleasant surprise that the author maintains a great deal of clarity in such a
multifaceted study.
In the first section, the author describes the structure of the Papal government, with a capsule explanation of the history and function of each office, as
well as a precise, dated list of all those prelates who served in those offices
during the Restoration period.This section fills about 300 pages. In addition to
the Sacred College of Cardinals, the list includes a large number of
Congregations (permanent and temporary), Tribunals, Curial Secretariats, and
such institutions as the Pontifical Chapel and Pontifical Family.The catalogue
concludes with a detailing of the Legates and Delegates (who were the clerical governors of the civil provinces), and of the thirteen foreign Nunciatures.
It is in this first section that the careful reader will reap the most interesting reward. Some of the Congregations (State, Holy Office, Index, and
Propaganda Fide) are familiar, but others reflect the secular side of the Papal
States. There is a Congregazione di Buon Governo, resulting from a 1588
reform of Sixtus V to provide the communes near Rome with officials who
were more interested in efficient government than political careerism. There
are departments to oversee water supply and road maintenance, as well as the
military administration for the Papal army. There were presidencies to supervise the grain supply and the oil and cooking fats for the city of Rome, which
had more hungry mouths than the local farmers could easily feed.The administrative governors of the State’s twenty-one provinces were all clerics.The five
most important provinces were called Legations, each governed by a Cardinal
Legate.The others were Delegations, governed by a Delegate, who had to be a
bishop.The Pontifical Chapel included the Latin Patriarchs of Constantinople,
Alexandria,Antioch, and Jerusalem. But there were also the Prince Assistants to
the Pontifical Throne, including hereditary members of the Orsini and Colonna
families, as well as the ceremonial Senator of Rome. Finally, there were the
appointments of Apostolic Preacher, always a Capuchin, the Confessor to the
Pontifical Family, always a Servite, and the Sacristan of His Holiness, always an
Augustinian Canon.
In the second section, the author provides a more detailed biographical
portrait of each cardinal, prelate, or curial official who served in any capacity
in those offices.These pages account for the remainder of the book, and contain over 800 personal stories. As mini-biographies, they are not extensive, but
do contain meticulous references to each office the individual ever held.
Among the names are not only future Popes, but major players in the religious
and political struggles which make the Restoration period so fascinating.
Secretaries of State such as Bernetti and Lambruschini rub shoulders with conservative zelanti Cardinals like Altieri and Della Genga, and semi-liberals like
Cardinals Gizzi and Amat, and Monsignor Corboli-Bussi, who supported Pius IX
in his early reforms.

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The fruits of this exhaustive research might be especially useful to illustrate
how the structure and functions of the Curia have changed from that time.There
is a useful index of names for all the curial officials, but the table of contents is
even more helpful as a detailed schematic for the entire work. All things considered, this work is a captivating insight into the final decades of the Papal
States, which played a crucial part in Church History for well over a millennium.
Carmelite Institute
Washington, D.C.

LEOPOLD GLUECKERT, O.CARM.

Monseigneur Duchesne et les Bollandistes: Correspondance. Edited by
Bernard Joassart. [Tabularium hagiographicum, 1.] (Brussels: Société des
Bollandistes. 2002. Pp. 252. €50,00 paperback.)
Scholars of modernism are well aware of Monseigneur Louis Duchesne
(1843-1922), a distinguished historian who introduced a generation of
Catholic scholars in France to the methods and findings of professional history. Less well known to modernist scholars are the Bollandists, Jesuits dedicated to critical hagiography, but they, too, promoted modern historical methods at a time when many in the Catholic world viewed such historical work
with suspicion.
The correspondence between Duchense and the Bollandists that is collected in this volume covers virtually all of Duchesne’s professional life, from
1878, the year after he earned his doctorate, until shortly before his death in
1922. Over these years, he exchanged thirty-five letters with Charles De Smedt
(1831-1911), twenty with Albert Poncelet (1861-1912), and fifty-seven with
Hippolyte Delehaye (1859-1941), as well as a few letters with others, that
remain extant. Unfortunately, parts of the correspondence are lost. For example, the first letter from Duchesne is dated December 29, 1889, eleven years
after the beginning of the exchanges. De Smedt’s sixteen letters to Duchesne
from these years clearly indicate that the correspondence was mutual, and
indeed his first letter implies that Duchesne was the one to initiate contact.
Despite such gaps, the correspondence gathered in this volume allows the
reader to follow Duchesne and his Bollandist friends through the tumultuous
years of the modernist crisis as they faced suspicion and sometimes the condemnation of their efforts by ecclesiastical authorities.
In general, the correspondence reflects the professional interests of the participants, as Joassart notes in the introduction. Duchesne and the various
Bollandists share their reactions to new books and to other scholars, and they
offer suggestions and appraisals about the work that each other is doing. More
interesting to contemporary scholars, however, will be their responses to the
larger ecclesiastical, political, and theological developments of their day, particularly the condemnation of modernism. In his introduction, Joassart draws attention to a letter of November 9, 1907 from Duchesne to Delehaye. In this letter,

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Duchesne distanced himself and Delehaye from (unnamed) modernists on the
one hand and from the papal condemnation of modernism in the encyclical
Pascendi Dominici Gregis on the other. At the same time, Duchesne acknowledged that times were grim and that he and his correspondent were at risk.
In the most touching letters, Duchense and his various correspondents
express their mutual esteem and support. For example, when De Smedt
expressed gratitude to Duchesne for his work on De Smedt’s behalf (in a letter
now lost), Duchesne replied that he was only giving De Smedt his due. After
all, the normally caustic Duchesne asked,“do you not believe that Bollandism
is one of the greatest scientific causes of modern times” (p. 112)? De Smedt
expressed similarly warm respect for Duchesne’s work.
Joassart’s presentation of this correspondence is outstanding. His twentythree-page introduction provides background information for all of the participants in these exchanges, which is particularly helpful in the case of the individual Bollandists who are mostly unfamiliar even to scholars of the period.
The annotations are exhaustive, offering brief biographical sketches of the various figures mentioned in the letters and, where possible, elaborating on otherwise obscure details. As a consequence, the reader can better appreciate the
significance of the scholarly judgments the correspondents shared with each
other. An index of names enables the reader to follow references to individuals of interest. Altogether, then, this collection is a welcome contribution to
contemporary scholarship.
Berry College

HARVEY HILL

Catholic and French Forever. Religious and National Identity in Modern
France. By Joseph F. Byrnes. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 278. $50.00.)
Joseph Byrnes argues that Catholicism has played an essential role in French
self-identity, even during republican periods when state institutions forcibly
erased the nation’s religious past. In the ancien régime, religion was the nation’s
“foundation”; during and after the Revolution it served as “antithesis”; since the
Great War it has been a “parallel force.” Byrnes pursues his argument by means
of seven chapter-long case studies (five previously published) arranged under
three chronological headings: the “Divorce” between nation and religion during
the revolutionary period; the “Defense” of religion from 1802 to 1914 (i.e.,
Concordat to wartime “Sacred Union”); and a postwar “Détente” enduring into
the present. Each chapter stands on its own and may be read as such.The overall narrative is unified by an extended historical overview preceding each of the
three chronological divisions. The combination allows readers to access the
material in different ways: it offers unique micro-histories (some based on rare
archival sources) allowing voices of the time to speak; and, for those who want
or need more, a large narrative arc under which to situate those smaller stories.

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In the first section, titled “Divorce,” the first (and perhaps strongest) chapter presents first-person testimonies of revolutionary-era priests who signed
the constitutional oath, those who later abdicated the priesthood entirely, and
those who in the end retracted their oaths and returned to the fold.“In 1772,”
wrote one abdicator of his ordination,“I was forced to appear before a man
who was dressed as a woman” (p. 30). A second chapter, utilizing documents
expressing the frustration of authorities, argues that revolutionaries’ attempts
to transfer Catholic sensibilities of the “sacred” to festivals of “Reason” and
“Nature” were “completely thwarted” (p. 55). A third chapter highlights
Chateaubriand and Destutt de Tracy as binary prototypes of the conflict
between post revolutionary “neo-Christian intellectuals” and rationalist
Idéologues. In Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity (1802) we have the
first attempt at making “cultural Catholicism” palatable for a non-believing
audience. As with Napoleon himself, although the nation might not practice
religion, France could not be divorced from its religious patrimony.
In the second section, titled “Defense,” chapter four narrates the mid-century invention of Chartres as a pilgrimage destination. It is striking to see just
how political the religious pilgrimage was: a democratized form of travel made
possible by trains and leisure, it was viewed as an act of “public and national
reparation”in expiation for “public and national crimes”such as the Revolution
(p. 96). Chapter five, one of the less successful studies, contrasts the effects of
using (or not using) regional languages for catechesis in Alsace (German) and
Roussillon (Catalan). As Byrnes acknowledges, the decline in Roussillonnais
church practice might have had less to do with linguistic causes than with
social and economic ones (pp. 137, 144).
In the third section, a period of “Détente” is inaugurated by the Third
Republic’s call for a “Sacred Union” (1914) against the German menace.
Chapter six follows two bitterly opposed enemies into the trenches: religious
priests and laicist teachers. Life in deadly close quarters shows each that they
have more in common than they thought. As with the earlier century’s pilgrimages, the language of “reparation”for national sins (used by priests to make
sense of their own “sacrificial” deaths on behalf of the Republic) is striking (p.
160). A seventh chapter, on art historian Émile Mâle, complements the
Chateaubriand chapter ending the “Divorce.”Both writers appealed to France’s
religious artistic past to repair wounds of a preceding bloodbath. Once again,
“cultural Catholicism” became palatable to a non-believing national public,
allowing it to see religion as an integral part of its national identity.
However, ending the study this way leaves the work on unsure footing.
Most of the chapter (twenty-two out of twenty-nine pages) deals with Mâle’s
works published before the war (in 1898 and 1908, i.e., during the bitterest
years of the church-state conflict). If the war’s “union sacrée” (1914) is proposed as the cause that initiated a “détente,” one is left with a conclusion necessarily non-committal: “The political and social détente of World War I and the
cultural reconciliation before and after the war represented a type of resolu-

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tion of the Catholic and secular nationalist struggle. . . ” (p. 209, emphasis
added). One should note that the Act of Separation of church and state (1905)
ended a century-old Concordat (1801-02), not one in effect for “more than two
hundred years” (p. 152). (Note also that Jesuit Father Yves de Montcheuil was
not one of the “liberal, engaged, Catholic theologians” after the war. He was
shot by the Gestapo on 10 August 1944.)
If “détente” denotes a balance of “parallel forces,” is it an accurate way to
describe France today? A recent landmark poll conducted on behalf of the
Catholic daily La Croix found that only 5% of the French population (2.8 million
out of 60 million citizens) attends Mass at least once a month. La Croix attributes much of this collapse in religious practice to a rejection of the encyclical
Humanae Vitae (1968). The cultural Catholicism of Chateaubriand and Mâle
might well have been integrated into French national identity “forever.”However,
if institutional Catholicism has lost the force that once threatened republics, one
is tempted to call the outcome not a détente but rather a defeat.
Boston College

STEPHEN SCHLOESSER

Caritas: un siècle de charité organisée en Alsace. La Fédération de Charité
du Diocèse de Strasbourg 1903-2003. By Catherine Maurer. (Strasbourg:
Éditions du Signe. 2003. Pp. 157. €14,00.)
Works of charity are central to Christianity, and so, accordingly, one might
expect that charity would figure at the center of historical studies of the
Church. Histories of charitable institutions have, in fact, proliferated over the
past generation, but the rationales for these works have not always been apparent. Since history is limitless, the story of an institution should not be
recounted simply because it can be recounted, but because the institution
made a difference in the cumulative history of its home society, culture, and
nation.The subtitle of Caritas is–in English—“a Century of Organized Charity
in Alsace.”A historian might start on the drama of Alsace in the Europe of World
Wars I and II (and, before that, in the era of the Franco-Prussian war) and then
proceed to the charities that responded to the trials of the period. Catherine
Maurer did this in her book, Le Modèle allemand de la charité. Le Caritas de
Guillaume II à Hitler (Strasbourg, 1999). But the present book is really an
album presenting the history of the essentially clerical administration of La
Fédération de Charité—Caritas d’Alsace. Maurer brings the talent of a historian
to bear on a series of administrative records and correspondence in a tribute
to the institution.This work, then, was designed for admirers of the institution
rather than for anyone, historian or interested lay person, who comes with substantive questions about the relationship of religious and national identity, of
institutional progress and cultural products, or of political and religious authority conflicts—although these issues are adverted to along the way. It is a celebration of dedicated priests and nuns, especially of the founder and subsequent head, Father Paul Müller-Simonis, who, coming from wealth himself,

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knew well how to make good use of it. Although internal tensions receive
little attention from Maurer, they probably do not merit anything more. The
year-to-year running of the institution is at the center of the narration here, but
the resourceful reader can see how institutional life was buffeted, and then
interrupted, by World War I and by the later Nazi conquest. As for the charitable works themselves, readers may wish that the Alsatian outreach to North
Africans and other Muslims could be explored for detail and meaning. Printed
on glossy paper, the study benefits from a large number of photos in a series
of unnumbered pages at the end of the volume, which help to offset the dry
statistics necessary to give solidity to the institutional history.
Oklahoma State University

JOSEPH F. BYRNES

The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland,
1750-1850. By Emmet Larkin. (Dublin: Four Courts Press;Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 298. $69.95.)
Professor Emmet Larkin has had a curious place in studies of the history of
modern Irish Catholicism. His most significant contribution has been a pioneering article, published in 1972, on the origins of the exceptional piety of
the twentieth-century Irish. Two generations of religious historians have
debated Larkin’s concept of a “devotional revolution” occurring roughly
between 1850 and 1875, during which the Irish became, for the first time,
“practising Catholics.”Yet Larkin himself has offered no significant further contribution. Instead he has sought to build on the themes set out in a second
early piece, from 1975, in which he analyzed the long-term development of the
Irish political system in terms of the interaction of three entities that he
labelled Church, State, and Nation. Here the years have been less kind. As
detailed research has highlighted the sectional and ambivalent nature of successive nationalist movements in nineteenth-century Ireland, and the multiple
accommodations and ambiguities that characterized the country’s position
within the United Kingdom, the quasi-Hegelian abstractions represented by
Larkin’s “State” and “Nation” have come to seem increasingly irrelevant. Yet
Larkin himself has remained committed to his original design, elaborating it in
no less than seven large volumes devoted to an exhaustive account of the high
political correspondence of bishops and statesmen.
The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church promises, at first sight at
least, to rectify this anomaly. It is the first of two volumes “conceived as history
from the bottom up” (p. x) and intended to complement the political narrative
by examining the Church’s wider role within Irish society.Yet the actual focus
of this first instalment is remarkably narrow. In effect the volume comprises
four essays. Of these the most important traces the emergence of the distinctive
Irish institution of the “station,” whereby priests twice annually visited selected
houses throughout their parishes to celebrate Mass, hear confessions, and
administer communion.The station, Larkin argues convincingly, was essential to

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the pre-Famine Church’s impressive achievement in maintaining some level of
popular belief and practice in the face of a debilitating shortage of manpower
and church accommodation. The other three chapters are considerably more
limited in scope.Two, on the ratio of priests to people and on church building,
are devoted to an exhaustive discussion of already fairly familiar statistics. A
fourth promises a “qualitative analysis”of the lower clergy. In practice, however,
it is devoted mainly to a discussion of the mechanism for appointing bishops.
Larkin’s central argument, that a lay revolt against the Church’s willingness to
grant the British government a say in episcopal appointments weakened deference toward hierarchy, and that the delay in establishing a workable system
promoted clerical faction, has some merit. But it is hard not to feel that the
space devoted to this single issue is a reflection less of its real importance than
of its prominence in the archival record. As for the devotional revolution, we
are offered only two pages on the pattern of church attendance. These suggest
that Larkin has moved away from his original suggestion of a transformation of
religious attitudes to the alternative thesis that what took place was primarily a
shift in the balance between social classes, as death and emigration among the
laboring poor conferred numerical and cultural predominance on an already
fairly pious farming class. But the point is not developed; in particular the crucial boundary between these two supposed social groups is only loosely
sketched. We must hope that the second promised “bottom-up” volume, on the
period 1850-1880, will elaborate on what remains Professor Larkin’s enduring
contribution to the history of Irish Catholicism.
Queen’s University, Belfast

S. J. CONNOLLY

Archbishop Charles Agar: Churchmanship and Politics in Ireland, 17601810. By A. P.W. Malcolmson. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the
United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 2002. Pp. xvi, 678. £60; $75.00.)
Charles Agar (1735-1809) came from a Kilkenny landowning family which
controlled four to five seats in the Irish Parliament. As Bishop of Cloyne (17681779), Archbishop of Cashel (1779-1801), and Archbishop of Dublin (18011809), he was the most prominent political and administrative defender of the
Church of Ireland’s interests in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and
a leading government manager in the Irish House of Lords. After the AngloIrish Union (which he supported on being reassured it would not endanger
Protestant Church interests), he was an influential Irish representative peer at
Westminster (he was created Baron Somerton in 1795 and Earl of Normanton
in 1806). Deeply suspicious of Catholic relief legislation, Agar allegedly first
instilled in George III the theory that royal assent to the admission of Catholics
to parliament would breach the Coronation Oath.
Agar carefully publicized his achievements in his lifetime and left an extensive archive—in the Hampshire Record Office since 1957, heretofore neglected by historians of Ireland. His descendants, however, failed to sponsor a

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biography, and Agar’s historical reputation was left to the criticisms of his political opponents, taken up and magnified by Victorian moralizers; he is thus usually seen as oppressing his country for political advancement, alienating diocesan property to enrich his family, and allowing the medieval cathedral on the
Rock of Cashel to fall into ruin.
Dr. Malcolmson draws on his unrivalled knowledge of eighteenth-century
Irish archives to challenge this assessment.This is not so much a conventional
biography as a series of interlocking essays – on Agar’s family connections, his
diocesan activities, his role in the Irish administration at a time of war and
rebellion. Through extensive comparisons with the careers and attitudes of
other contemporary bishops, it becomes a cumulative study of the Church of
Ireland in the eighteenth century.
Malcolmson emphasizes that while Agar is remembered as a politician, he
thought of himself as a churchman first and foremost. In this role Agar showed
himself a capable administrator, legislator, and man of business, who far outshone his episcopal contemporaries.The accusation that Agar enriched himself
by alienating diocesan lands is wildly exaggerated (it derives from a lease
which unquestionably involved conflict of interest, but involved financial risk
and profited succeeding Cashel bishops as well as Agar’s descendants; Agar
made his fortune on the stock market, unlike some asset-stripping episcopal
contemporaries).The medieval Cashel cathedral had been irretrievably ruined
by previous bishops;Agar, who was a scholar possessed of considerable musical and architectural taste, was zealous in building churches (including a
replacement cathedral) and glebe-houses, enforcing clerical residence, and
conducting visitations.While he did engage in nepotism (exhorting the beneficiaries to higher standards of conduct, with mixed results) and was lukewarm though apparently sincere in his religious sentiments, Malcolmson
robustly and convincingly argues that by the standards of his time he was a
“gentle reformer” who sought to reallocate the resources of the church to promote greater efficiency while minimizing reliance on state aid (since this
brought increased dependence on an Irish landed elite notoriously suspicious
of clerical aggrandizement).
Malcolmson argues that the eighteenth-century Church of Ireland was
fatally hindered by the extra-ecclesiastical responsibilities incurred by its place
in the system of government, by its financial system (which devoted the bulk
of resources to funding individuals rather than institutions, and encouraged
suspicions about financial malpractice), and by successive administrations’
appointments of politically-reliable English-born bishops over Irish clergy. (He
provides scathing vignettes of some colleagues and rivals, such as Archbishop
Robinson of Armagh—now revered for his building-work in Armagh city, but
presented here as a peevish valetudinarian primarily concerned with enriching his relatives.) Malcolmson suggests that if Agar had not been passed over
for the sees of Dublin (in 1778) and Armagh (in 1794 and 1800), he might have
provided his church with the energetic and effective Irish leadership it failed

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to achieve until the early nineteenth century, and adjusted better to the challenges of the nineteenth century. No student of eighteenth- (and to a lesser
extent nineteenth-century Ireland) can ignore this provocative book.
Dictionary of Irish Biography

PATRICK MAUME

Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan
McClelland. Edited by Sheridan Gilley. [Catholic Record Society
Publication, Monograph Series,Vol. 7.] (Rochester, New York: Boydell Press.
2005. Pp. xviii, 387. $80.00.)
This volume of sixteen essays, honoring Vincent Alan McClelland, Emeritus
Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Hull, who is internationally known for his writings on education, as well as on Victorians, especially
Cardinal Manning, appropriately reflects these dual interests of the honoree.
The first four essays consider various aspects of Manning’s life and ministry:
his ambivalent attitude toward the Education Act of 1870 (Jeffrey von Arx), his
pastoral attentiveness both to the sick, personified by Priscilla Maurice (18101854), sister of the Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice (Peter Erb),
and to the repentant in the person of Virginia Crawford (1862-1948), a socialite
divorcée (Robin Gard), as well as Manning’s promotion to the episcopate of a
reluctant protégé, Henry O’Callaghan (1827-1904), who speedily resigned as
Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle (Leo Gooch).The next two essays survey the
work of religious communities: Randal Lythgoe (1793-1855) and the Jesuits in
Victorian England and Wales (Maurice Whitehead) and the “partnership” of
Benedictines with the British Empire and in the United States (Aidan Bellenger).
An interlude is then provided by a well-documented, but rather stream-of-facts,
account of “Varieties of Modern Scottish Catholic Conservatism” in the twentieth-century—the one essay that seems tangential to the Victorian theme
(Bernard Aspinwall).
No collection of Victoriana would be complete without a bit of religious
controversy—in this case the horrendous outcry over a reportedly “imprisoned” Polish nun, Sister Barbara Ubryk (1817-1891), who became a cause
célèbre in the British press (Rene Kollar). More conventional studies are provided by the biographical sketch of the historian Bernard Ward (1857-1920),
long-time president of St. Edmund’s College, Ware, and short-time Bishop of
Brentwood (Stewart Foster) and an examination of “conversion” in nineteenthand twentieth-century English literature (Joseph Pearce). Of special theological interest is an essay that proposes a thematic correlation between the “interdependence” of the sciences in Newman’s Idea of a University with a similar
ecclesiological “interdependence,” first between the ecclesia docens and the
ecclesia discens in his “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” and
secondly between the triple offices—Prophetical, Priestly, Regal—in his 1877
preface to the Via Media of the Anglican Church (Wulstan Peterburs).

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A bicentenary appraisal of the educational work of Thomas Arnold (17951842), the well- known Headmaster of Rugby (David Newsome), is followed by
a discussion of Tractarian involvement in national education (1838-1843),
which provides an often overlooked background to Newman’s “Tamworth
Reading Room” (1841) and Idea of a University (James Pereiro). Two companion portraits of influential but lesser-known educators follow: the work of
Henry Kingsmill Moore (1853-1943) on behalf of the schools of the Church of
Ireland (Susan Parkes) and the role of John Scott (1792-1868) in the development of the Wesleyan educational system.
The finale is a lengthy and extensively documented discussion of “the controversial use of the Caroline Divines in the Victorian Church of England,”
which shows that both Tractarians and Evangelicals were prone to selectivity
in their appeal to seventeenth-century Anglican theologians, whose theology
in fact possessed a “deep-seated ambiguity” (Peter Nockles). A list of selected
publications of the honoree and an index complete this testimonial collection
that has a wide ambit of articles, which, while varied in content, have the merit
of being well researched and well written and so help expand the horizon of
Victorian studies.
The Catholic University of America

JOHN T. FORD

Der Begriff des Politischen in der russisch-orthodoxen Tradition. Zum
Verhältnis von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft in Rußland. By Konstantin
Kostjuk. [Politik- und Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Görres-Gesellschaft, Band 24.] (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.
2005. Pp. 409. €55.00 paperback.)
Kostjuk’s ambitious goal is “the analysis of the specific political understanding of the Russian Orthodox cultural crisis” in post-Soviet Russia’s “transition
from the premodern to the modern social order” (p. 12).The book, originally a
dissertation for the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, builds on the
author’s extensive earlier sociological, political, and philosophical studies of
contemporary Russian Orthodoxy,but now from a broad historical perspective.
The first part of the book is a chronological survey of key ideas of church,
state, and society from classical antiquity and the Old and New Testaments
through the Church Fathers and the Byzantine Empire, to Russia from Kievan
times until the present. Part 2 covers the same ground using systematic philosophical and theological categories, such as the image of man, the idea of freedom, the church and the world, the Byzantine concept of symphony, what the
author calls the “theology of total power,” and sobornost’, a uniquely Russian
concept denoting at once community, unity, and universality. Parts 1 and 2 provide the basis for an extensive analysis in Part 3 of the Russian Orthodox
Church’s stance in the post-Soviet era, particularly as expressed in its Social
Doctrine, officially adopted after extensive discussion in the summer of 2000.

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Some comparisons are made with Western thinkers such as Augustine,Aquinas,
and Montesquieu.
Kostjuk’s broad historical perspective is impressive, and he effectively
shows how Orthodoxy’s ideas and attitudes were influenced by the political
context, for example, how in Byzantium and Russia, church thought followed
Eusebius of Caesarea’s dictum that “the one God, the one king in heaven, the
one royal Nomos and Logos corresponds to the one king on earth” (p. 225), or
how the church’s exclusion from the secular sphere after Peter the Great
shaped the course of religious thought.
In addition to explaining the political implications of such key concepts as
tradition, symphony, kenosis, and sobornost’, Kostjuk clearly summarizes the
thought of a wide range of figures, from Church Fathers like John Chrysostom
and Gregory of Nyssa, to such Russian churchmen as Joseph of Volokolamsk
and Feofan Prokopovich, nineteenth century Slavophiles, religious philosophers like Nikolai Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov, and, more recently, Fathers
Aleksandr Men’ and Aleksandr Schmemann. Presenting the material first
chronologically, then systematically, entails, however, some repetition and
means that the reader must look for the ideas of, say,Vladimir Solov’ev in several different sections.
Kostjuk argues that the Russian Orthodox Church should reject rigid traditionalism and its historical deference to state authority and instead endorse
such positive features of modern society as individual rights, the rule of law,
and civil society, much as the Roman Catholic Church did in the Second
Vatican Council. Liberal thinkers like Bulgakov and Solov’ev and the concept
of sobornost’, according to Kostjuk, provide a basis for the church to play an
effective role today. He is hopeful that the 2000 Social Doctrine, with its comprehensive, and on the whole, openminded, analysis of politics and social
issues, even a qualified endorsement of the right of resistance, can offer the
“church a way into modernity” (p. 359).
Kostjuk’s emphasis on ideas and concepts sometimes leads to questionable
historical conclusions.While Alexander I’s policies can be described as “mystical” and “universalist,” they were not primarily “Masonic”(p. 84).To claim that
“thanks to the influence of the Slavophils,” Russia in 1880 was on the verge of
a representative monarchy greatly exaggerates their impact. Nor did they
“inspire . . . the Russian, Slavic oriented foreign policy in the Balkans”(p. 246).
Also, are church-state relations in today’s Russia really comparable to those in
France, as he claims on page 346, since religion has some public role in the
former but is totally excluded in the latter?
The book includes extensive footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography,
particularly of recent Russian and German studies.While such important terms
as sobornost’, derzhavnost’, mir, and bogochelovechestvo are carefully defined
and discussed in the text, a glossary would have been helpful.

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This thoughtful and comprehensive survey of the Russian Orthodox
Church’s political thought is particularly valuable as the church seeks its
proper role in post-Soviet Russia and the world while remaining faithful to its
tradition.
Saint Louis University

DANIEL L. SCHLAFLY, JR.

Edith Stein: The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite. Authorized and revised
biography by her Prioress Sister Teresia Renata Posselt, O.C.D; edited by
Susanne M. Batzdorff, Josephine Koeppel, and John Sullivan. (Washington,
D.C.: ICS Publications. 2005. Pp. xx, 372. $15.95 paperback.)
In this new edition of the Reminiscences of Prioress Teresia Renata Posselt
of the Cologne Carmel concerning Edith Stein, which she decided to write
because of her shock at Stein’s cruel death in the Shoah and the destruction
of Europe’s Jews, Edith Stein’s niece, the author Susanne M. Batzdorff, translated the first six chapters of Posselt’s memoir into English.
Father John Sullivan, Director of the Institute of Carmelite Studies in
Washington, D.C., translated Chapters 7-12. He dealt mainly with Edith Stein’s
philosophy. Sister Josephine Koeppel, who long ago opened an Edith–SteinCenter in her Carmel in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, has become best known in
Edith Stein research in Europe through her valuable translation of Life in a
Jewish Family. She translated Chapters 14-21 of this book.This new edition differs from the earlier one in two important ways: First, the chapters are recast
in a text that follows Posselt’s German original more closely; second, the biographical data are amplified by notes, commentaries, and bibliographic information. A detailed chronology of Edith Stein’s life, photographs of her times,
and maps of the major locations she visited have been included. Gleanings
offer comments and background information, and errors and misunderstandings have been corrected.Where passages have been removed, they are cited
in the “take-outs,” and the reasons for such alterations are explained. Examples
of Koeppel’s sober analyses are that Edith Stein lived in the so-called parental
home on Michaelisstrasse only since 1910, since her mother, an able businesswoman in Breslau, frequently moved her residence in response to the growth
of her flourishing lumber business. Prior to World War I, independent enterprise flourished as did the advancement of women. These trends were
destroyed for the most part through the inability of the German emperor
William II and Hitler. Edith Stein once mentioned that her mother experienced
some trouble in her married life, but such things were not generally talked
about at that time.Therefore, the translators omitted Posselt’s description of a
“very happy marriage with Siegfried Stein.”
When I met Josephine Koeppel in Germany, I was amazed at her American
independence with which she investigated all over Europe. For me she was a
ray of hope in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, for which Edith Stein

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and people like Teresia Renata Posselt helped to create a theological and spiritual basis.
On pages 347-353 passages are listed which could lead to misunderstandings, e.g. the religious philosopher Erich Przywara (who was not a Nazi) says
that Edith Stein “did not look Jewish.” Bibliographic footnotes and commentaries are meant to counter such ambiguities or explain them for today’s readers, for example:“The Jews crucified Jesus, therefore they must now wander
like Ahasver all over the world.” Or such comments as “Edith Stein was very
modest, something that was not usually the case with Jewish women.” Such
prejudices paralyzed many Germans, so that during the Nazi period they were
hardly able to rescue their threatened fellow citizens. Such anti-Judaisms are
omitted from the text but cited in the so-called “Take-Outs.”
What was it that connected Posselt with Edith Stein in friendship? Surely
the fact that both lost loved ones in World War I; surely that they were not sufficiently recognized as highly gifted, professionally active women in the
German society of their time. Only the research of Theresa Wobbe, sociologist
at the University of Erfurt, who investigated more closely the relationship of
Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein, has shed new light on this topic. Many
women in the Weimar Republic longed for an independent existence as
women in a free democratic state, but their hopes were blocked for thirty
years by Stalinism and National Socialism.
When I entered the partly destroyed Carmel in Cologne in 1953, my fellow
novice Ilse Becker and I were drawn to the Order by reading Posselt’s book
about the fate of Edith Stein. We both were privileged to experience the
Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Due to the efforts of Pope John XXIII, it
developed into a reform council and addressed many concerns of Edith Stein,
such as the greater spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood within the Church,
respect for other churches, respect for the Jewish people, for Israel.
Teresia Renata Posselt said to me:“We Sisters have noticed that, after World
War II, the churches did not ask about Edith Stein, but rather her Jewish relatives and friends, scattered throughout the world, her former colleagues, many
of whom were not religious.They first posed the worried question, `Where is
our beloved, revered Edith Stein?’”
Edith Stein not only enriched philosophy as a thinker, she not only advised
many people as a highly qualified letter writer. She also contributed as a
woman to the renewal of the Church through her clear discernment and her
unbiased honest humanity which she learned particularly from her Jewish
family and culture.
Edith Stein was admitted to Carmel in 1933 in order to participate in establishing a new foundation in Breslau. But neither Posselt nor Linke, the subprioress, ever considered letting her go.

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Teresia Renata Posselt had the personality, the competence, to depict a fate
such as that of Edith Stein, the philosopher, in writing and thus make it known
worldwide.
Every page of this book shows something of the love and intelligence of Edith
Stein, her friendship with notable people such as Archabbot Raphael Walzer,Vicar
General Schwind, Speyer, Adolf Reinach, Anne Reinach-Stettenheimer, Hedwig
Conrad-Martius, and many young students and colleagues, especially her last contacts with Dr. Meirowsky, the sisters Annemarie and Elfriede Goldschmidt, the
Portuguese Sister Judith Mendez da Costa, and others.
These remembrances made concrete by Posselt were very important, especially in the postwar period, when, especially in Germany, but also in Europe,
awareness of the crimes against the Jews was largely suppressed.The manner
in which Posselt collected the documents concerning the last days of Edith
Stein’s suffering allows us to sense the terrible reality much stronger than any
purely objective analysis of the deportations and gassings. Posselt’s personal
consternation that a human being whom she loved had to suffocate in the
gruesome environment of Auschwitz at the hand of the Nazis can move people
even today to take greater responsibility for politics and Church.
Edith Stein Karmel, Tübingen

WALTRAUD HERBSTRITH

Pie XII: Diplomate et Pasteur. By Philippe Chenaux. (Paris: Les éditions du
Cerf. 2003. Pp. 462. €28 paperback.)
Chenaux was on the spot when the Vatican archives rendered accessible to
researchers its holdings concerning relations with Germany during the pontificate of Pope Pius XI (1922-1939). Since the person most concerned with
Vatican relations with Germany was Eugenio Pacelli, first as nuncio in Munich
and Berlin, then as Pietro Gasparri’s successor as Secretary of State, these
archives enabled Chenaux to write the first rigorously scholarly biography of
Pius XII, as the book cover boasts. It has one notable advantage over the many
treatments of Pius XII and the Shoah: it alone to date can put the silence of
Pius XII in the context of his earlier and later years, his formation, experiences,
and conduct of office behind and around that silence.
The epilogue states the thesis about the two roles named in the subtitle,
“diplomat and pastor.” By training and experience a diplomat, with his pastoral
orientation sidelined, he confronted the impotence of diplomacy as Hitler prepared his invasions. As pope, then, from 1939, he turned more to the pastoral
mode of protecting his flock as best he could, in Rome and elsewhere under
Nazi rule. He did this without abandoning for some time the policy of “impartiality” which he had imbibed as Benedict XV’s envoy during World War I. He
did not conceive his pastoral duties as broadly as Pius XI had, however, and in
effect was willing to forgo moral denunciations for the sake of a more press-

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ing salus animarum (p. 413). Only the war years brought him to opt for a
Western victory, though he feared it would favor the Soviets as well.
A chapter (pp. 267-304) is devoted to the “Jewish question” and his silence
in regard to the “final solution.” This may seem like short shrift, but actually
Chenaux seems to cover all the relevant bases, except that he does not wonder
more about the failure of Pius to come back to the calamity after the war.
When Jacques Maritain asked him to reprove anti-Semitic killings in Catholic
Poland after the Nazis left, the pope told him that he had deplored all such acts
in 1945, addressing a delegation of deported Jews who had come to thank him
for his wartime aid. Chenaux asks, “The pontiff had the feeling that he had
done his duty, but did he have much idea of the extent of the tragedy suffered
by the Jewish people and above all of the possible partial responsibility of the
Church in the unleashing of the Nazi horrors?” Postwar conditions and the
imperative of defending Western civilization from Communism, it would seem,
“dictated other priorities” (p. 304). Was he suffering any pangs of conscience
for not having spoken out for Poland before the war? “The least one can say is
that defending the territorial integrity of Poland did not figure among the aims
of the Holy See’s peace policy in the waning days of August 1939” (p. 237).
Chenaux acknowledges the quality of historical research on the pope’s
silence by such historians as Michael Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, Giovanni Miccoli,
and Renato Moro. Beyond this prevailing question that besets the process for
the pope’s beatification, Chenaux lays out a wealth of information on the official life of Eugenio Pacelli in all its many ramifications and puts many an
episode in a new light. This handsome volume is not a personal or spiritual
biography, but a valuable account, based in large part on archival research, that
in all likelihood will stand alone as such for a number of years.1
Marquette University, Emeritus

PAUL MISNER

Un Diplomatico Vaticano fra Dopoguerra e Dialogo: Mons. Mario Cagna
(1911–1986). Edited by Alberto Melloni and Maurilio Guasco. [Santa Sede
e Politica nel Novecento, 1.] (Bologna: Società Editrice il Mulino. 2003. Pp.
xii, 389. €32.00 paperback.)
This book consists of seven scholarly articles, two memorials, an archival
list, and twenty-nine primary documents intended to illustrate the context of
the life and career of Archbishop Mario Cagna as a Vatican diplomat. Cagna was
born in Lu in Piedmont in 1911, was ordained in 1934, and studied at the
Gregoriana before entering the papal diplomatic service in 1937. After short
1
Readers of The Catholic Historical Review will note with chagrin that it is dubbed
The Historical Catholic Review (HCR) and that Cardinal Stritch becomes “Stricht” (p.
376).

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postings to Holland and Peru, he was assigned as the secretary to the apostolic
nunciature to Italy between 1949 and 1962. Between 1962 and 1966, while the
Second Vatican Council was in session, Cagna served as internuncio in Japan,
being named pro-nuncio in 1966 just before his departure. He returned to
Europe to become one of the facilitators of the new Vatican Ostpolitik as apostolic delegate to Yugoslavia. In 1970, after the restoration of diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and the Holy See, he was appointed apostolic nuncio
in Yugoslavia, becoming the first postwar nuncio in eastern Europe. In 1976,
he transferred to Vienna as apostolic nuncio to Austria, where he served until
his retirement because of ill health in 1984. He died in 1986.
The articles explain the context of the various periods in Cagna’s life and
career. Bruno Ferrero explores the history of the parish of Lu in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries to determine why that parish produced a large
number of clerical vocations, concluding that it was due to the effectiveness
of the lay organizations, rather than to the inspiration of the clergy. Gianni
LaBella discusses the situation in Peru in the 1940s and the impact on the
Catholic Church of the replacement of a conservative government by a liberal
secular government. Augusto d’Angelo writes of the apostolic nunciature in
Italy under Archbishop Francesco Borgoncini Duca, the first nuncio, indicating
that the preferred route for any business transpiring between Italy and the
Holy See during the 1950s and the 1960s was between the Italian ambassador
to the Holy See and officials in the Vatican Secretariat of State.The nunciature
to Italy, consequently, had very little work to do. Nicla Buonasorte has studied
the unique situation of the Catholic Church in Japan, where that church was
very much in a minority and had to coexist with Shintoism and Buddhism to
the extent that some Catholics practiced all three religions.
The last three articles deal with Vatican Ostpolitik. Andrea Riccardi offers
a summary history of the relationship between the Holy See and the Soviet
Union from the papacy of Benedict XV to that of Paul VI. After John XXIII had
initiated an opening to the east, Paul VI continued this Ostpolitik through
negotiations with the governments of eastern Europe in spite of the fact that
these negotiations produced few benefits for the Church. Luigi Bianco writes
of the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and the
Vatican following the signature of the Protocol of 1966, which had been negotiated by Monsignor Agostino Casaroli as one of his first initiatives in the area
of Ostpolitik. Bianco also describes the work of Cagna as the first nuncio.
Alberto Melloni, in looking at “Ostpolitik and its Men,” indicates that the
Catholic Church was seriously divided over the program of Ostpolitik, with
many of the opponents of that policy being found among the churchmen of
eastern Europe and with many being willing to criticize the apparent doggedness with which the policy was followed by Paul VI in spite of minimal results.
In their own right, the articles are well conceived and valuable contributions to our knowledge, especially d’Angelo’s work on the Italian nunciature,

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Riccardi’s effective summation of the development of Ostpolitik, and Melloni’s
discussion of church opposition to Ostpolitik. What, however, seems to be
missing from virtually all the articles is any discussion of the personality,
career, and role of Mario Cagna. Cagna’s work is, in fact, really only mentioned
at any length by Bianco in his article on Yugoslavia, and even there he provides
little analysis of Cagna’s personal impact on the course of history, quoting
instead from speeches, such as the one that Cagna made in presenting his
diplomatic credentials to President Tito, which is hardly a source of personal
revelation.The reader finishes the book wondering why and how Cagna rose
as he did in the Vatican diplomatic service and what influence, if any, he had
on the course of events. The two memorials included deal with his time as
nuncio to Austria and are laudatory reminiscences provided by friends. The
documents also come from his time in Austria and include the texts of homilies, radio messages, and New Year’s addresses to the President of Austria.
By providing a study of the context for Mario Cagna’s life and career without examining his life and influence, the editors leave this reader completely
puzzled.Without developing any explanation of the significance of Cagna’s life
and career, the individual articles are isolated studies of various topics without
any apparent linking device or rationale. Instead of providing readers with a
“life and times” of Archbishop Cagna, this book gives us only the “times” and
none of the “life.”
PETER C. KENT

University of New Brunswick
American

The Old Religion in a New World. The History of North American
Christianity. By Mark A. Noll. (Grand Rapids, Michigan:William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co. 2002. Pp. xii, 340. $24.00 paperback.)
Finding out about a book on how European religion fared in the New
World, one can safely expect a “must read” if the author is the one authority on
evangelical Protestantism and has also published widely on American religious
history as on the history of Christianity in general–and the reader will not be
disappointed in his expectations.
What sets the book apart is the emphasis on what is American about religion in America to begin with but also the combination of comprehensive narrative and analytically reasoned treatment of such recurrent if not perennial
issues like church-state relations, concepts of pluralism, or the relation, if any,
of religious practice and theology.
The first one of these characteristics makes for good reading, because it
focuses the story Noll is providing, whereas the second one leads to a book

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divided or two books in one. The author was aware of this risk and took it
deliberately. He “divided” the book as he says between some chapters “offering
a sketch of developments in a specific historical period and others attempting
a more general interpretation of a major theme or circumstance.”
Therefore, one can read seven of the twelve chapters (jumping one that is
interspersed and ignoring four others that follow) as a comprehensive but nevertheless wide-ranging description of how the old European forms of
Christianity developed in and adjusted to America. One effortlessly follows the
author from the period of colonization through the era of national formation
that already showed distinctly American religious forms, the nineteenth century, when the Protestant influence peaked, the interwar period of the last century that saw the first cultural wars between Protestant fundamentalism and
modernism, to the 1960’s when Protestantism at first looked more like “a very
rough general category for non-Catholic Christians than a cohesive religious
force,”and finally the years since, which witnessed “a shifting balance of power
among the churches, several new movements of spiritual renewal, and increasing antagonism with some secular elements in the broader culture.”
Then there are the other chapters on the “Separation of Church and State”
or on “Theology”which Noll may have set aside because he felt they would not
lend themselves to the same easy, flowing narrative style, because he was relying more on and referring to the work of other scholars or for whatever undisclosed reason.
In fact these chapters provide excellent summaries of specialized literature
and could serve as an introduction to the research on specific issues. They
show a remarkable range of knowledge which, for example, allows Noll to
summarize Philip Gleason’s in-depth study on Catholic higher education and
intellectuality in a few strokes of a brush.
But the same can be said of the way in which Noll summarizes Nathan
Hatch’s work in one of the historical chapters, when he is dealing with “The
American Revolution.” On one hand Noll’s whole book, in the more historical
chapters as well as in the others, is so much a masterly condensation of all the
relevant literature, that any author not mentioned must feel bad and on the
other hand the more theoretical chapters are also written in very accessible
style.
In short the subdivision fails to convince, but even this is a minor deficiency in this eminently learned, lucid, and enlightening book.
Universität Bayreuth

MICHAEL ZOELLER

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The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New
Mexico. By Michael P. Carroll. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press. 2002. Pp. vii, 260. $45.00.)
A gifted, lucid writer and a great narrator of fiction, the Canadian sociologist Michael Carroll takes a revisionist orientation in examining an often misunderstood group, the Penitente Brotherhood of New Mexico. Notoriously
characterized for “public flagellation,” the Penitente Brotherhood’s practices
have been sensationalized, objectified, and labeled deviant. Revisiting history
by using secondary sources of data, Carroll presents the Penitentes anew; a
final chapter is devoted to a psychoanalytic interpretation of masculinity,
repressed desire, and angst among the Brotherhood.
While most researchers acknowledge that the Penitente Brotherhood, a
community of Hispano men who gathered based on common religious interests, arose out of the lack of priests in the Southwest during the 1800’s, Carroll
challenges this finding. Carroll asserts the emergence of Penitente activities
reflect a search for patriarchal authority in response to changes brought about
by Bourbon Reforms. In this vein, he contradicts the long-standing view that
the Penitente Brotherhood either emerged as a product of Spanish Catholic
settlers or was a carryover of the Franciscan Third Order. Suggesting the
Penitente Brotherhood spontaneously emerged from economic and social
changes, this compelling political-economic perspective contradicts existing
literature, and boldly claims that Penitente rituals were not deeply religiously
motivated and further, that Penitentes were not particularly religious at all.
Carroll claims that moral guilt has prevented other researchers from attaining
the same finding.
Perhaps the biggest shocker in the colorful text comes toward the end.
Carroll warns readers prior to embarking on that final chapter: “Anyone for
whom a good cigar is always and under all circumstances only a good cigar
might want to skip the next chapter. . .” (p. 188). Here, Michael Carroll suggests
that what fuels the behaviors of the Penitente Brotherhood is a latent homoerotic urge, and that Padre Jesus is the paternal figure in the Freudian analysis
of oedipal guilt and rage.The perspective recalls Carroll’s theoretical addiction
(evidenced by Carroll’s former books): psychoanalytic interpretations of religiosity. Given that Carroll makes such suggestions of those Penitentes from
generations past, and does not utilize primary sources of data to support such
assertions, his ideas can only be interpreted anecdotally, as they are both nonverifiable and lacking substantiation. Carroll acknowledges this limitation and
also states,“. . . I am not suggesting that Penitente males were predisposed to
overt forms of homosexual behavior involving genital penetration” (p. 205).
Presenting his interpretation as “a story” (akin to “ethnographic fictions”
popular among some contemporary cultural anthropologists), Carroll’s
approach refreshes the literature. In this case, however, and different from

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other contemporary scholarly writing which attempts to hear the perspective
of the subaltern, the Penitente Brotherhood has no voice in the text. Given the
lack of empirical evidence, and reliance on conjecture, the story reads as flamboyant melodrama. The consequence of such a textual approach positions the
Penitente Brotherhood as a monolith, in precisely the same exoticized terms
Michael Carroll claims to challenge in the Epilogue.
University of San Diego

MICHELLE MADSEN CAMACHO

The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. By Timothy J. Meagher. [The
Columbia Guides to American History and Cultures.] (New York: Columbia
University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 398. $47.50.)
The distinguished historian of Irish America Timothy Meagher has produced
the first ethnic volume in the Columbia guides to American history. This volume
is divided into five parts. The first examines the history of Irish America chronologically from colonial times to the present. In part two Meagher examines separately four major themes in Irish American history,respectively,gender and family,
politics, nationalism, and race. The final three sections are a descriptive list of
“people, organizations, events, and themes,” a detailed chronology, and an annotated bibliography. In the process, Meagher and his research assistants, Henry
Meagher, Joseph Turrini, Mary Elizabeth Fraser Connolly, and W. John Shepherd,
have produced a succinct and a valuable synopsis of the Irish American experience which will be a must for the shelves of all those interested in the subject.
Meagher, however, moves beyond a mere synopsis to produce a very analytical account.This book is full of analysis, interpretation, and historiography. In the
introduction he describes the historiography of Irish America, but also puts the
Irish American story in the context of various ethnic theories. He dismisses the
traditional model of counting immigrant versus natives traits “on some measuring
stick of assimilation” and concludes that “plotting the changes in Irish American
culture, therefore, is a messy business” (p. 9). The danger is that it becomes so
“messy,” because of the variance in Irish origins,religion,and region of settlement,
that one may ask whether there is such a thing as “Irish America” at all? Meagher
avoids this pitfall by acknowledging the commonalities in Irish American history.
For example, he correctly accepts the “Scotch-Irish” as part of the story, even
though their Irishness was sometimes very ambiguous. In the chronological section one sees similar themes emerging among the various groups of Irish in
America.Through the generations then one can see their continued interest in
Ireland, their participation at the lower and middle parts of the American economy, and their active involvement in American politics. Meagher highlights the
exceptions to these rules, such as the new immigrants of the 1980’s’ disdain for
traditional Irish American politics, but he still recognizes these usual themes.
Meagher recognizes this reality more explicitly in the second section, where
he has a chapter devoted to Irish nationalism in America and one on the Irish in

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American politics. From the United Irishmen to NORAID and from the Paxton
Boys to the Daley machine the Irish have shown a keen interest in Irish and
American politics respectively. But, he also acknowledges other less noticed
themes. His chapter on gender and family is very important, not only because of
his fine description of its historiography, but also because he highlights how
much more needs to be done on the subject.Similarly,his chapter on the Irish and
race is comprehensive in its examination. Here, in particular, Meagher provides a
very sharp analysis of the whiteness debate and challenges what he describes as
“the [axiomatic] notion that the non-white Irish became white” (p. 216).
Part three on people, events, and so forth is also excellent. Meagher and his
assistants cover all the major figures and events, but also include less familiar
Irish Americans such as Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, who emigrated to North
America from County Cork in 1841. Although it is difficult to criticize such a
comprehensive section, the one glaring omission here is Bishop John England,
who although mentioned in one chapter, does not receive a biographical
sketch. Indeed to broaden this criticism, Meagher could have had a whole section dedicated specifically to the Irish involvement in organized religion in the
United States, an area, like politics, where Irish engagement continued across
generations and denominations. Nonetheless, this work will take its place
among studies by historians such as Kevin Kenny, Lawrence McCaffrey, and
Kerby Miller as the first references given to those who ask for recommendations on the best histories of the Irish in America.
College of Charleston

DAVID T. GLEESON

All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the
Episcopal Church. By Michael Bourgeois. [Studies in Anglican History.]
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2004. Pp. 299. $34.95.)
A graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary, where he was a classmate of
Phillips Brooks, Henry Codman Potter (1835-1908) was rector of Grace
Church, in New York City, from 1868 to 1883, and then bishop in the Episcopal
diocese of New York from 1883 to the end of his life, serving the last 21 years
as diocesan. His father was Alonzo Potter, the third bishop of Pennsylvania.
Henry Potter is known for transforming Grace Church—widely regarded at the
time as the most fashionable Episcopal parish in Manhattan—into an early
example of an “institutional church.” He built Grace House in 1877 as a headquarters for mission programs on behalf of the residents—mostly Germans—
who lived in the surrounding neighborhoods. Soon Grace House was recognized as a vital social center, and its programs were carried on and developed
by Potter’s successor,William Reed Huntington. Henry Potter is also known as
a representative of the Broad Church movement and as an advocate of the
social gospel. He supported the Church Association for the Advancement of
the Interests of Labor (CAIL), labor unions and the fair arbitration of labor disputes, and better living and working conditions for laborers.

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Bourgeois focuses on Potter as a representative of those Episcopal leaders
who prodded the white establishment toward a greater social awareness
during the years from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great
War. He sees Potter as a nineteenth-century evangelical liberal who “helped to
institutionalize the social gospel within the Episcopal Church” (p. 21). Potter’s
theological liberalism was reflected in his acceptance of the higher criticism
of the Bible and specifically in his ordination of the controversial biblical
scholar Charles A. Briggs, who, as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in
New York, had fallen afoul of that institution’s conservative board of directors.
This book, the eighth volume in the distinguished series Studies in Anglican
History, sponsored by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, is based
on Michael Bourgeois’s doctoral dissertation. It is not a biography of H. C.
Potter but an analysis of his moderately progressive social views on such
topics as labor, international and domestic politics, temperance, and women.
Regrettably, this book’s origins as a doctoral thesis are all too apparent. The
writing is wooden, repetitive, devoid of any sense of rhythm or style.The paragraphs are long and tedious. The indented quotations are long (like many of
the author’s sentences) and too numerous. Some background statements are
of questionable value:“The conflict over slavery reached its peak in the Civil
War. . .” (p. 5). Sometimes when one is reading the main text it is hard to know
who is uttering the words of a particular quotation, and even the endnote may
provide little help in identifying the author of the quoted statement (e.g., p.
28, n. 11). Some word choices are infelicitous: e.g.,“utilize” (p. 88). This book
would have benefited from more careful editing.
A chore to get through, this study does not overflow with compensatory
rewards. A better approach would have been to take the dissertation and use it
as the basis of a fully fleshed-out biography: one that offered an engaging
account of this man’s personal and professional story—its problems, its motivations, its trials and triumphs.Thereby some life could have been injected into the
narrative, even some drama, and the book would consist of more than the quoting and analysis of a bishop’s statements, which, then as always, tend to be too
bland and general to really bite. In this book there is no rhythm at all; instead, the
sound of the prose becomes a constant thrum, like that of heavy machinery.
Hood College

DAVID HEIN

To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. By
Stanley M. Hordes. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv,
348. $39.50.)
More than twenty years ago, historian Stanley Hordes announced to the
press and media that a substantial number of “secret-” or crypto-Jews who fled
the Spanish Inquisition were among the founders of today’s New Mexican
Hispano community. His doctoral work of 1980 had previously compiled and
organized existing documentation of a tragically ill-fated Portuguese crypto-

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Jewish settlement in Old Mexico, from ca. 1500 to the mid-1600’s. His book on
New Mexico therefore has merit in its opening chapters, but only to the extent
that he repeats his dissertation. It falls from grace in (1) conflation of America’s
indisputably Portuguese crypto-Jews with the indisputably Spanish founders
of New Mexico, (2) egregious misrepresentation of work that disconfirms him,
and (3) mislabeling of twentieth- century Adventist, Apostolic, and “Messianic”
Protestant folkways (e.g., six-pointed stars on cemetery crosses, Saturday
observance of the Sabbath, giving Old Testament names to children, etc.) as
both “colonial” and “crypto-Jewish.”
Hordes’ historical violation of scholarship norms led to a first disconfirmation in 1996 (the article won First Prize for best publication by a graduate student from The American Folklore Society); the work was subsequently developed into a doctoral dissertation at The Folklore Institute at Indiana University,
2001. Hordes’ pseudo-ethnographic claims have also been disconfirmed in the
new edition of the Encyclopedia of American Folklife (in press for 2006), and
most recently, in an article I was asked to write for Patterns of Prejudice (in
press for 2006) concerning his pseudo-scientific use of disease as a Jewish
ethnic marker, published as an appendix in this book.
To grasp the extent to which the book distorts New Mexico’s historical, cultural, and genetic heritage, it is important to note that claims of crypto-Jewish
descent preceded Hordes in the region, surfacing circa 1975 when previous
claims to descent from Spanish conquistadors were finally disconfirmed. Claims
to a prestige lineage—whether Spanish, or crypto-Jewish—have historically
been used to assert an overvalued line of white ancestral descent throughout the
multiracial Spanish Americas, a preferred phenotypical line of ancestry assumed
in New Mexico for all conquistadors (and all Jews), but not for all Hispanos.
Hence, when local claims of aristocratic white descent were disconfirmed, the
notion of unbroken descent from (ostensibly monogamous white) Spanish Jews,
hiding out among the neighbors, became the best, and perhaps the last, means
of denying non-white admixture and restoring a local prestige lineage.
Hordes’ 1980 arrival as a Jewish State Historian excited a spate of rumor,
gossip, and hearsay surrounding “crypto-Jewish” (and therefore, ostensibly
white) folkways. He thereby announced that a substantial number of Hispanos
were in fact descended from crypto-Jews, their origins effectively forgotten. A
physically small but vocally large group of Hispanos, their memories thus
“restored,”came forward to claim publicly the new prestige lineage. A similarly
small and vocal group of academics—none of whom is a folklore specialist—
also came forward to endorse the highly celebrated folk canon.
Except for greatly fortuitous timing, it is unlikely that this book of 2005
would ever have seen the light of print.That is, in January of 2006, Sutton et
alii, out of Stanford University, published the first biogenetic study of New
Mexican Hispanos in Annals of Human Biology, 33, no.1, pp. 100-111. This
study found that for all relevant Y-chromosome markers, paternal ancestry of

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New Mexican Hispanos is identical (except for 2.2 percent American Indian
admixture) to that observed in modern, post-exilic Spain, and is highly significantly different from that of all Jewish populations, including Iberian Jews. Had
Hordes’ claims been based on solid research, there would be a higher rate of
Iberian Jewish ancestry in New Mexico, reflecting a component of post-exilic
Jews among the region’s Spanish settlers. The evidence from New Mexican
Hispano males is unequivocal; Hordes’ claims are refuted by the genetic profile
of this population.
The unsuspecting reader will certainly be misled by this book—not only on
the history, culture, and genetic heritage of Spanish New Mexico, but on the
nature and practice of scholarship norms.
Case Western Reserve University

JUDITH S. NEULANDER

The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson. Volume VI: Life by Communion, 1842.
Edited by Patrick W. Carey. [Marquette Studies in Theology, No. 46.]
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 2005. Pp. iv, 532. $47.00 paperback.)
This is the sixth in Patrick Carey’s projected seven-volume collection of
Orestes A. Brownson’s Early Works. The first volume appeared in 2000 (see
ante 87 [July, 2001], 530-531.) All but the last of this volume’s twelve selections
were published in 1842, two years before Brownson was received into the
Catholic Church on October 20, 1844. Carey takes the title Life by
Communion from a philosophical doctrine of the French socialist Pierre
Leroux (1797-1871).
As Brownson explained life by communion in the volume’s central essay,
“Leroux on Humanity,” “the ME can never manifest itself, that is live, save in
communion with the NOT-ME” (p. 276). This “metaphysical principle” helped
Brownson to think his way out of the subjectivism of modern philosophy.
Brownson’s language—he speaks of the subject and object as “so to speak soldered together, or amalgamated as the acid and the alkali in the formation of
neutral salt” (p. 254)—suggests that he may not have been entirely successful
in dissolving modern philosophy’s subject-object dichotomy. Nevertheless, life
by communion incited in him “a theological revolution” (p. 189) that restored
him “to the great household of believers,” (p. 276), “touched his heart,” and
instilled in him “a love [for preaching] I never felt before” (p. 216).
Such is the language of religious conversion and Carey’s fifty-four-page
introduction argues that, during 1842, Brownson experienced a real religious
conversion, one that he later explained as a discovery of God’s freedom.This
conversion enabled him to turn Leroux’s life by communion to his own theological purposes and transcend the naturalism and subjectivism of
Transcendental and Unitarian theology.The selections in this volume, arranged
chronologically, take the reader through Brownson’s intellectual and religious

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odyssey from Transcendental theology to a kind of Romantic traditionalist theology that enabled him to save and reaffirm both the supernatural character of
special providence and the ordinary workings of human nature understood
according to life by communion. Carey’s introduction, an expansion of
Chapter 4 of his recent biography of Brownson, offers the reader an excellent
guide. “The Mediatorial Life,” Brownson’s open letter to William Ellery
Channing, and “Theodore Parker’s Discourse” are the most theologically substantive of these essays, but in other essays Brownson applies life by communion to politics and society as well.
Brownson’s son, Henry, reluctantly included some of these essays in his edition of Brownson’s Works, four in a volume he entitled Heterodox Writings.
Nevertheless, Carey’s introduction, his arrangement of the essays, detailed editorial footnotes, and twenty-page index of names and subjects illustrate why this
series belongs in all libraries with serious collections in the area of American religious history.This volume is particularly valuable.Not only does it make available
key contributions of an often neglected participant in the debates of New
England theology in the 1830’s and 1840’s, but it also gives the reader a sometimes touching glimpse into an expansive and brilliant Christian soul.
University of Dayton

WILLIAM L. PORTIER

Vale of Tears. New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. Edited by Edward
J. Blum and W. Scott Poole. (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press. 2005.
Pp. ix, 265. $49.95 clothbound; $25.00 paperback.)
In a series of twelve essays, Edward Blum and Scott Poole have presented
various aspects of social religion and belief in the American Southland following the dismantling of Reconstruction in 1877.The focus is on religion as institution, culture, and religious thought. The major themes are (1) the religious
basis of violence and race, sexuality, and segregation; (2) the religious thought
and racism in the oppression of American blacks both North and South; (3)
religious rhetoric and moral reform in the political arena; (4) Post-reconstruction thought in the Catholic South; and (5) religion and religious cultures
during Reconstruction and beyond.
The articles present the framework of violence like the mythological framework of the Ku Klux Klan. The religious sentiment is Protestant. Politics and
political power are dominated by religion and religious rhetoric.The authors
present many of the well-known and lesser-known demagogues who were
clerical leaders in the late nineteenth century.
On the other hand, David Gleeson in his article on the Catholic Church,
both South and North, looks at the emancipation of the slaves. Prior to the
Civil War, the Catholic Church was in many cases Southern in sentiment. After
the war, the Church was paternalistic and inept toward the freed slaves.

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Augustin Verot, bishop of Savannah and Vicar Apostolic of Florida and a passionate supporter of the South, had called for a new and sanitized slave system.
With a complete reversal after the war, he called for the bishops to follow the
lead of the Roman Curia and create a nationwide bishop or vicar to care for
the spiritual needs and evangelization of four million freed slaves. In a handwritten document in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, never published or made public, the bishops in the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore
laid aside the Roman proposal after an angry discussion in an extraordinary
session in 1866.Verot, almost alone, called for its adoption and related his plans
for education for the former slaves in his diocese.
Kent McConnell in his article “Betwixt and Between” uses the cemetery at
Mount Saint Mary’s College near Emmitsburg, Maryland, as a geographical
marker of Catholic sentiment by the Union and Confederate troops buried
there some thirty miles from Gettysburg.The cemetery can be seen as a text
revealing the feelings and sentiments of the priests, seminarians, students, and
sisters in this small enclave in Maryland.
Regrettably one section of the Catholic community in the South has been
overlooked. Stephen Ochs has written in A Black Patriot and a White Priest
(Louisiana State University Press, 2000), the story of the Louisiana Native Guards.
At the beginning of the Civil War, the Native Guards—free people of color
successors of the black militia of the Spanish Regime—were mustered into the
Confederate Forces. With the fall of New Orleans in 1862, the Confederate
army withdrew; but the Native Guards remained and joined the Federal troops
under General Benjamin Butler, forming three regiments of Louisiana Native
Guards. These troops, French in language, Catholic in religion, mostly free
people of color and a few slaves formed the first black troops in the Union
Army. On May 27, 1863,André Cailloux, captain of a company in the first regiment, led his troops in the assault on the Confederate stronghold of Port
Hudson, where he and the ranks of black troops were mowed down, and the
remnants of the company were forced to withdraw. Unlike the white soldiers,
the bodies of Captain André Cailloux and the other black soldiers were forcibly
left on the field of battle for over thirty days. Despised and rejected by the
white Catholics, including the priests in New Orleans, the black soldiers were
buried without Catholic services. One priest in New Orleans, Claude Pascal
Maistre, originally from France, an abolitionist, censured by Archbishop JeanMarie Odin, officiated at the funeral. From this same black Catholic community
another voice emerged after Reconstruction. Adolphe Plessy, an Afro-Creole,
was arrested for refusal to enter the segregated railroad car on the train from
New Orleans to Covington, June 7, 1892. The case ended up in the Supreme
Court. In 1896 the judgment of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson
upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation as long as the accommodations were “separate but equal.” From this same milieu, black and Catholic,
Sister Bernard Deggs of the Sisters of the Holy Family wrote down (1894-96)
how God had worked in her community when he called them to use an aban-

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doned house, one time a holding place for slaves, now used for the working of
the community, a place “to expiate the crimes that had been committed there.”
(No Cross, No Crown. Black Nuns in Nineteenth-century New Orleans, eds.
Virginia Meacham Gould and Charles Nolan. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001.) To expiate the sins and crimes of slavery is a sentiment peculiarly
Catholic and at the same time truly black.
St Meinrad Archabbey

CYPRIAN DAVIS, O.S.B.

Thomas Merton: Prophet of Renewal. By John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO.
(Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 2005. Pp. xii, 132.)
A wise person once said: “When the student is ready, the teacher will
appear.” A basic theme of Merton: Prophet of Renewal is the timeliness of
Merton’s appearance on the monastic and ecclesial scene in the mid-twentieth
century. It was a providential moment in the history of the Church and of the
Cistercian Order, marking the end of a four-hundred-year era dominated by the
spirit and theology of the Council of Trent with its tendency toward rigidity,
legalism, clericalism, and defensiveness. It ushered in a new era: that of the
Second Vatican Council. The Council witnessed a development in the life of
the Church unparalleled in modern history. It was a pastoral Council seeking
to update the Church and make the Gospel of Jesus Christ once again an influential force in a world that seemed to be leaving it behind. Thomas Merton
embraced the Council wholeheartedly and, in his concern to see its directives
implemented, placed at the service of his monastic Order and the Church his
considerable gifts as a writer and a spiritual guide. His wisdom and insights
helped many people (maybe more lay people than monks?) to grasp the crucial importance of the renovation envisioned by the Council: new ways of
thinking and speaking about Christian Faith and the way we live it.
The eight chapters of this book represent the published version of eight
conferences that Dom John Eudes gave to a Cistercian monastery in France in
the late summer of 2000.The book leaves no doubt of the strong conviction
Merton had that he was called by God to the prophetic role. His mission was
to open up “new horizons for an old journey,” as he expressed it in No Man Is
An Island. It was an “old journey,” for it respected the past, but it also searched
for new horizons that would make that past grow and mature through living
dialogue with the issues and concerns of contemporary life.
While written for monks, this is a book that reaches far beyond a monastic
audience. Dom John Eudes makes clear that Merton’s reflection on renewal of
monastic life spills over into an understanding of the renewal that is needed in
the Church.“[Merton] has had a large effect beyond the cloister and continues
to fill an important reforming function in regard to the whole Church” (p. 13).
Merton once described himself—in a letter to Pope John XXIII—as “a progressive with a deep respect and love for tradition.” Authentic tradition, he

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believed, must be faithful to the wisdom handed down to us, yet at the same
time open to the insights and intuitions of the contemporary world.
If there was a wonderful timeliness in Merton’s appearing on history’s
screen, I would want to add that there is a certain timeliness about the appearance of Thomas Merton: Prophet of Renewal. It is now nearly forty years since
Merton’s death and nearly sixty since his best-selling autobiography appeared.
Over those years much has been written about Gethsemani’s famous monk,
too much, perhaps. Some of it is good; a lot of it mediocre. Dom John Eudes’s
book deserves a hearty welcome.Without question it belongs among the best.
It abounds in refreshing insights into Merton that emerged from the author’s
relationship to Merton, first as one of his students, then as a fellow-monk, and
finally as a collaborator in evaluating the young men who came seeking admission to the monastery. In the light of that unique relationship, this book offers
helpful hints for getting the most out of reading Merton’s writings. It is not that
he writes of new topics.The themes he discusses (the writer, the reformer, the
prophet, the contemplative self, the self-giving love so essential to contemplative living) are themes familiar to anyone with some acquaintance with
Merton’s writings. What Dom John Eudes has done is to place such familiar
themes in new contexts that yield new understandings. It is a book that
enables us to appreciate Merton’s creative contribution to a much-needed and
long overdue renewal of the Cistercian tradition as well as the tradition of the
Roman Catholic Church.This book deserves a wide readership.
WILLIAM H. SHANNON

Nazareth College
Rochester, New York

Canadian
Michael Power: The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian
Frontier. By Mark G. McGowan. [McGill-Queen’s University Studies in the
History of Religion, Series Two, Vol. 27.] (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. 2005. Pp. xvii, 382. Can. $49.95.)
Mark McGowan grabs and holds the attention of his audience, from beginning to end, in this important biography of Michael Power, first bishop of
Toronto, Ontario. Born in Halifax in 1804, Power went to Montreal and Quebec
City for studies. He never returned to work in Halifax but, ordained at twentytwo, stayed in the Montreal region. His education and early ministry gave him
experience and knowledge of French such that, at age thirty-seven, he was
nominated bishop of the newly-created diocese in 1841. Ontario was pioneer
territory when Power was consecrated. Despite the lack of personnel,
resources, and the basic amenities of life, Power accomplished a great deal in
a mere six years, as McGowan reports. It is no surprise that he was universally
mourned at his untimely death in 1847, resulting from typhus contracted
while caring for sick diocesans.

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Presenting the story, McGowan serves the local and national Church but
also a much larger audience, as this really is a “Life and Times” biography.
McGowan gives the reader a picture of the man who was devout in faith, loyal
to the Church and Magisterium, and rigorous in application of church law,
while utterly pastoral, a tireless worker, truly humble and far-reaching in his
thinking and planning for the nascent diocese.
Just as important, McGowan paints a larger picture giving context to
Power’s story. From his background in Nova Scotia, to the province of Quebec,
to Ontario, McGowan provides a picture of the Church with its various
accomplishments, tensions, and “growing pains.” This was when Canada was
moving toward nationhood, with the colony itself experiencing “growing
pains”as a result of imperial rule and tensions leading to various rebellions.The
universal Church figures prominently through Power’s loyalty to the pope and
with the influence that ultramontanism had in Quebec and on Power himself.
Such things and more allow the reader to see the man and the environment
that shaped him. McGowan makes it eminently possible for the historian to
gain the significance of events by seeing them in their context. Further, as he
did in his earlier work, The Waning of the Green (1999), he weaves together
the institutional, sociological, and popular history, giving a complete picture.
Among other benefits, the reader will find maps, illustrations, and tables.These
will appeal to all who appreciate a good biography. For other researchers,
there are a useful index and copious notes. It is difficult to find any work with
footnotes these days, since publishers have a penchant for saving space and
money! However, these notes are easy to follow, being set out in a manner that
makes them accessible merely by using a second bookmark.
A few errors are found: McGowan makes reference to the Penal Laws which
were used to persecute Catholics in the British empire, stating they were
implemented by the Stuarts in 1701 (p. 15), but which began much earlier
under Elizabeth I in 1560. The Stuarts made things worse, for sure, with the
plantations of Ulster and Connaught (1603-1649) during which time many
Catholics lost their homes and land there. Two other errors reflect Vatican II
theology before its time. Power was not ordained to the episcopacy, but rather
consecrated a bishop (pp. 137, 186). He uses both terms, but “ordination”
reflects a more developed theology of Orders not seen in the nineteenth or
early twentieth centuries.The same would be true of reference to the Easter
Triduum (p. 241). “Triduum” would only surface in the reforms of Vatican II.
These are minor in the face of the whole work.
Dr. McGowan provides not only a great story, but a wonderful resource for
students of religious and secular history alike, in and outside of Canada. This
work should be found in every library attached to universities, colleges, and
seminaries.
St. Peter’s Seminary
London, Ontario

JOHN P. COMISKEY

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Eternal Memory! Father Achiel Delaere (1868-1939): The First Eastern Rite
Redemptorist and Canada’s Ukrainian Catholic Church. By Jozef De Vocht,
CSSR.Translated by Christian Roy. (Yorkton, Saskatchewan: Gravelbooks, distributed by Laverdure & Associates. 2005. Pp. xxvii, 325. Can. $29.95.)
In 2006, the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Redemptorists) celebrates the centenary of its Eastern Rite branch.This is due almost single-handedly
to the tenacity of Achiel Delaere, who was born in Belgium in 1868, professed
his vows in the Redemptorist Congregation in 1889, and was ordained a priest
in 1896. Desirous of being a missionary in Western Canada, he began studies of
Slovak and later Polish to equip himself to serve the many immigrants. Soon after
his arrival in 1899, he realized that the Ukrainian immigrants were in greater
need of spiritual support and pastoral care than the Polish.
His pastoral zeal led him to seek special dispensation to study and work in
the Ukrainian-Slavonic rite, celebrating his first divine liturgy in 1906. Realizing
his inadequacy in caring for these members of the Church, he encouraged his
Congregation to send more missionaries who could assist in the work and eventually petitioned Rome for the establishment of a Ukrainian eparchy in Canada.
All the while he battled with Orthodox priests, false priests, and strident
Protestants intent on winning the hearts and minds of these Catholics in order to
break their ties with Rome. In this tense climate, he suffered abuse from the
detractors, misunderstanding from the people he attempted to serve, as well as
difficulties within the Congregation that had him move in and out of positions of
responsibility, often to his chagrin and disappointment. In the end, the eparchy
grew and prevailed, the Orthodox returned to their own flocks, the “sheep-stealing”renegades and Protestants faded away,and Delaere’s work prospered.Delaere
died a much-beloved and appreciated priest, working to the end, in 1939.
It is to the credit of another Redemptorist from Belgium, Jozef De Vocht,
that this story has seen the light of day. A contemporary of Delaere, De Vocht
wished to show the decisive influence that Delaere had on the Ukrainian
Catholic Church in Canada (p.xxi). De Vocht leaves an edifying testimonial to
Delaere’s courage and fidelity, and to the many faithful and priests who worked
with him allowing this rite to thrive outside Ukraine. De Vocht lavishes praise
on these pioneers and, when heaping scorn on those who were hostile to
Delaere, he does not mince words.
This current translation is very readable, making a wonderful story but also
giving insight into the history of the Church in Western Canada.There are an
overview of Delaere’s life, an index and fifty illustrations, mostly photographs
of the main characters in the story. If there is any problem for a historian, it is
the lack of notes or citations of any primary documents. De Vocht quotes
extensively from letters and reports (nicely shaded in the current edition)
found in the archives of the Flemish Redemptorists; so it would not be impossible to find the actual sources—perhaps a future project for a student to
research and record. The publisher does provide a list of sources for further

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reading on the subject, but none less than fifty years old. The publisher has
done a great service to make this volume possible.
St. Peter’s Seminary
London, Ontario

JOHN P. COMISKEY

The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970. By Michael
Gauvreau. [McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion.] (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 501. Can. $85.00.)
At this time, several scholars in Quebec are researching the cultural development that led to the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960’s. In their Sortir de
la ‘grande noirceur’ E.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren and in her
L’Affaire silicose Suzanne Clavette focus on the resistance to the conservative
provincial government and the struggles for social justice initiated by Catholic
activists in the name of the Church’s social teaching.These authors argue that
the social democracy introduced by the Quiet Revolution was prepared by
social struggles carried on by Catholic organizations beginning in the 1930’s.
In his new book, Michael Gauvreau does something quite different. Social
justice issues do not interest him. He focuses on the cultural transformation of
Quebec society, by which he means changes in the structure and ethos of the
family. He argues that the family is the institution where humans learn to be
members of society, respect authority, discover their social roles as men and
women, and work selflessly for the common good. Gauvreau’s social analysis
reminds me of the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frédéric
LePlay, who saw in the family the principal institution sustaining society and
who argued that the destabilization of the family produced by the French
Revolution threatens the well-being of France.
In his first four chapters, Gauvreau documents that specialized Catholic
Action in Quebec, beginning in the 1930’s, undermined the traditional understanding of the family, produced a conflict between generations, young and old,
weakened the sense of authority and democratized the relations between family
members.The new emphasis, which Gauvreau attributes in part to the influence
of French “personalism,” fostered the search for personal happiness. Gauvreau
assigns some of the blame for this development to Pius XI’s encyclical Casti connubii of 1930 which—despite the condemnation of birth control—weakened
the institution of the family by shifting the emphasis from social reproduction to
personal fulfillment, thus eroticizing the relation between the spouses.
In chapter 5, on marriage in the 1960’s, the author changes his tone. The
values fostered by a minority movement in the 1930’s now define the dominant culture. Gauvreau argues that the women, whose erotic desire had been
stimulated by Catholic Action, personalism, and the Church’s teaching, now
sought personal happiness in married life and therefore refused to accept Paul
VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae of 1968, which condemned the use of the birth

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control pill. Here the author accuses the ecclesiastical leadership of internal
inconsistency and holds it responsible for the massive exodus of women from
the Church of Quebec.
Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the efforts of the Church to exercise a public
function in the new pluralistic society—a topic of universal interest that preoccupied Vatican Council II. The author focuses especially on Quebec’s new
school system. He argues that the secular society and the Church arrived at a
viable compromise between 1960 and 1965, but that in the subsequent five
years, the liberal idea of the State as directly responsible for the well-being of
the citizens minimized the Church’s role in the educational system and thus
fostered the secularization of Quebec society.
This is a fascinating book that will provoke many debates. Readers will be
surprised by the author’s barbed writing style: he seems to be angry with the
new ideas that emerged in Roman Catholicism.The reader wonders why the
author never offers an adequate account of Emmanuel Mounier’s personalism
and why he interprets a renewal movement in the Church as elitist, fostering
heroic behavior and contempt for the masses. Gauvreau fails to notice that the
interpretation of Catholicism that arrived in Quebec from France was one of
the main theological currents that influenced Vatican Council II. He offers quotations from speakers in Quebec without recognizing that they are citing texts
from the Vatican Council.
Gauvreau’s definition of culture is too narrow. He never mentions that the
Quiet Revolution produced conditions that allowed Quebecers to work and
do business in their own mother tongue, a change with important cultural consequences. Nor does he recognize a point made repeatedly by John Paul II that
the organization of labor, the place where people spend most of their energies, has a profound effect on the culture of society. I have argued in my own
writing that the Quiet Revolution was a major cultural event, a social phenomenon called “effervescence” in the sociology of Émile Durkheim. To this
lived experience Gauvreau makes no reference at all.
Still, I regard Gauvreau’s book as an important contribution to the study of
Catholicism in Quebec because his work draws upon reports, reviews, bulletins, newspapers, and archival material until now neglected by historians. His
book is also important because it will provoke new research and many interesting responses.
McGill University (Emeritus)

GREGORY BAUM

Lonergan’s Quest:A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight. By William A.
Mathews. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2005. Pp. x, 564. $100.00.)
Mathews, a Jesuit philosopher at the Milltown Institute, Dublin, offers an
intellectual biography of his Canadian fellow-Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (19041984) through the publication in 1957 of the latter’s Insight: A Study of

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Human Understanding. In Mathews’ account the Kantian mind-reality problematic first grasped Lonergan’s attention in the course of his philosophic
training at Heythrop in 1926. Upon his return to Toronto to teach high school,
however, the experience of the Depression diverted him to questions of economic theory that eventuated, fourteen years later, in a manuscript of which,
Mathews remarks, “few, to date, have made sense” (p. 53) and to which
Lonergan would return much later, in his declining years. Meanwhile
Lonergan’s arrival in Rome in 1933 to complete the seminary course in theology vividly impressed on him the need for a philosophy of history that could
account for the collapse of European culture at the hands of Stalin, Hitler, and
Mussolini. His superiors decided that Lonergan should stay on in Rome for doctoral studies in theology, not philosophy, in preparation for a teaching post at
the Gregorianum, but events supervened to force Lonergan’s abrupt return to
Canada in 1940 with his thesis on St. Thomas’ developing thought on grace
undefended.That investigation had, however, awakened for him the question
of method in theology. Once back in Canada a light teaching load allowed
Lonergan to plunge into a six-year study of Aquinas with the Kantian problematic in mind, the results of which he further developed in preparing
courses on “Thought and Reality” and then “Intelligence and Reality” for the
Thomas More Institute in Toronto.
The reception of the latter moved Lonergan to begin writing Insight, and
Mathews devotes the second half of his study to the composition and publication of this work, a process that, on his account, comprised four movements.
Lonergan spent two years writing a protoversion of the work, which he then
reworked into what would be the central section (chapters 9-13) of the final
product, devoted to articulating the positions on cognitional structure, being,
and objectivity with which he resolved the Kantian problematic. These constitute the horizon for the analysis of the subject-object relation in mathematics, the natural sciences, and common sense that he undertakes in chapters 18, and they underpin the considerations of metaphysics and its method, ethics,
and religion with which Lonergan, with his long-delayed Roman assignment
now impending, hastened to conclude the work. That conclusion, of course,
would itself prove to be but a steppingstone, a way station toward the publication of Method in Theology after another decade and a half of arduous
research and reflection.
Given the nature of his subject, the bulk of Mathews’ narrative is perforce
occupied by analytic summaries of what Lonergan wrote, books he read,
courses he took, and courses he gave. In these Mathews proves himself an
astute, not uncritical reader and a highly skilled pedagogue from whom no student of Lonergan’s thought will fail to learn. At the same time these works-incontext provide the data for Mathews’ chief interest, namely, the intellectual
desire that evoked them, the course of its unfolding, and the term at which
what he conceives as Lonergan’s vision quest arrived. His narrative gives full
recognition to the role of the contingent and fortuitous (fate/providence) in
the development it traces. Still, focused austerely on an intellectual biography,

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and with invaluable result, Mathews leaves to others the further project of
fleshing that venture out in the broader drama of Lonergan’s life.
The Catholic University of America

WILLIAM P. LOEWE

Latin American
Natural and Moral History of the Indies. By José de Acosta. Edited by Jane E.
Mangan, with an Introduction and Commentary by Walter D. Mignolo.
Translated by Frances López-Morillas. [Chronicles of the New World Order.
Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução.] (Durham and
London: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. xxviii, 535. $74.95 cloth; $24.95
paperback.)
The first edition of José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies,
in the author’s native Spanish, was published in Seville in 1590. It is a compact
and elegant volume, conjoining discussion of the natural history of the New
World, the “works of God” in Acosta’s words, with a discussion of human history,
“the works of free will.” The book was an immediate success, and several more
Spanish editions soon followed, along with translations into Italian, Latin, French,
Dutch, and English. Excerpts appeared in the ninth volume of Theodore De Bry’s
celebrated America (Frankfurt,1601). Among the several early modern historians
and scholars who discussed the History the best-known would seem to be the
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), and the book remained influential until the eighteenth century and beyond. The revised version of the English translation of 1604
that was published in 1880 by the Hakluyt Society signaled the dawn of Latin
American studies as we know them today, and has in its turn been reprinted several times. But despite the book’s fame, the translation by Frances López-Morillas
is the first modern translation into English. It is beautifully done, a felicitous combination of translating accurately and idiomatically, while also giving the reader
some sense of Acosta’s stylistic idiosyncrasies and of his simple, straightforward
immediacy. Among the scholarly editions of the Spanish text of the Historia, the
most important remains that by Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico, 1940).
O’Gorman’s identifications of the biblical, Greek, Roman, patristic, and later texts
that Acosta cited have therefore been incorporated into this translation as footnotes. In addition, throughout the text of the Historia Jane E. Mangan has added
explanatory notes dealing with Central American and Andean history, archaeology, and anthropology, and with Acosta’s own cultural world. In places, these
notes amount to a full-scale commentary that even experts will find helpful. For
students, the notes are likely to prove invaluable for years to come. The History
is pervaded by a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, Acosta found much to
love and admire in New World nature and culture. On the other hand, he thought
that Amerindian religions were the work of the devil and had to be replaced by
Christianity, the sooner the better. At another level, he found the strangeness and
difference of the New World and its people appealing and admirable, while yet

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viewing the European past as the yardstick of all human achievement. Mangan
regularly draws attention to these dichotomies and finds Acosta wanting in his
ability to understand and appreciate American nature and culture in their own
right and on their own terms (see e.g.pp.45,89,133 with 221,336,349,etc.).This
theme occupies center stage in the introduction and concluding commentary by
Walter Mignolo, who encourages the reader to peruse Acosta’s text for “what is
constantly absent and silenced in the narrative, that is,Amerindians’ descriptions
and conceptualizations of their lives” (p. xxvii; further, pp. 467 ff.). By way of
explaining what Acosta should have known and written, Mignolo refers to the
work of scholars of our own time as exemplifying an “episteme”that does greater
justice—as he sees it—to “Amerindian intellectuals.” Perhaps. But it is difficult to
get away from the conclusion that Mignolo accuses Acosta of the very sin he commits himself, that is, of imposing his own form of enquiry and understanding not
only on the readers of his own time, on us, but also on the Andean and Central
American indigenous peoples of the past whose cause he endeavors to defend.
Seeing that this new translation is likely to be consulted for years to come,
I add some suggestions for a revised edition.Tumbes is in Peru, not Ecuador (p.
65). One might regret that the opportunity was not taken to update and
expand O’Gorman’s notes on the classical, biblical, and patristic sources Acosta
cited by referring to the relevant recent editions and translations, e.g. p. 257,
where mention of Brian Copenhaver’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum
(Cambridge, 1992) would help the reader. Elsewhere, the relevant editions and
translations especially of patristic texts, which are not always easy to find
could usefully be cited. Acosta’s departure from Peru is described misleadingly
on page 145 and elsewhere; see correspondence on this topic in Monumenta
Peruana II-III ed. A. de Egaña (Rome, 1958-1961).
University of Notre Dame

SABINE MACCORMACK

Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish America: A Comparative Study of the
Impact of Environmental, Economic, Political, and Socio-Cultural
Variations on the Missions in the Río de la Plata Region and on the
Northern Frontier of New Spain. By Robert H. Jackson. (Scottsdale,
Arizona: Pentacle Press. 2005. Pp. xxii, 568. $44.95.)
This ambitious books sets out to provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on
mission history in the Río de la Plata (present-day Argentina, Uruguay, and
Paraguay) and on New Spain’s northern frontier (northern Mexico and the southwestern United States). The basis of this study is the work of other scholars,
Jackson’s own considerable contribution to the historiography of the mission
experience, and his examination of archival materials not used in earlier studies.
This work in set squarely in the context of historical ecology and demonstrates how the experience of particular missions was influenced by the natural environment in which they operated.This meant that missions established
among indigenous peoples, who traditionally had no fixed settlements but

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were gathered together and taught environmentally inappropriate agricultural
techniques, were destined to struggle or fail. In the desert of northern New
Spain, this was a common occurrence.
In order to Christianize the native peoples of the more remote areas of the
New World, the Spanish government and the Catholic Church pursued a policy
of relocating indigenous populations at newly created communities, variously
called doctrinas, misiones, or reducciones, or they founded missions at established populations centers.This book uses a comparative analysis of the activities of missionaries from various groups within the Catholic Church, such as
the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans, in two distinct geographical areas. In
comparing mission work in the Río de la Plata with what took place in northern New Spain, the emphasis is placed on Alta and Baja California. This concentration permits a thorough comparison between the adaptations that
Jesuits made in arid Baja California and the more favorable environmental conditions their brethren in the Río de la Plata enjoyed.
One of the driving forces of this study, and indeed of much of the author’s
published research, is demographics. Chapter 5 presents demographic data
and analysis from both study areas and draws interesting conclusions about
how population dynamics varied in Río de la Plata and northern New Spain
and about the implications of these differences for the success of the mission
program. Native populations on the northern frontier suffered catastrophic
decline as a result of epidemic disease and other health issues. In the Río de la
Plata region, by contrast, indigenous populations generally did not face disastrous, unrecoverable losses. Jackson convincingly argues that congregating
small populations of hunter-gatherers into missions disrupted the social order
and exposed them to greater risk of the spread of disease.The small size of the
population made recovery less likely. In the Río de la Plata, the reducciones
included many more people, and the Jesuits pursued a less disruptive policy
that preserved existing social structures.
Pentacle Press, which owns California Missions Resource Center, has targeted this book at the university undergraduate, general reader, or traveler to
mission sites. Certainly the specialist will not find much new in this work, but
it is a very useful synthesis of current scholarship on mission history. Readers
familiar with the author’s more clearly scholarly work will note the absence of
anticlericalism that features in many of his earlier mission studies directed at
the academic audience. Although he correctly points out the detrimental
effects of missionization among Native Americans, the tone is measured. An
optional CD-ROM that is with PowerPoint presentation is available from the
publisher for an additional $12.00 and is described as being for personal study
or classroom use.The CD promises to deliver high resolution copies of maps
and photographs used in the book.This would be a definite improvement on
the modest production values of the printed illustrations.
New Mexico State University, Las Cruces

RICK HENDRICKS

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Conferences, Meetings, Lectures
On October 13-14, 2006 the Thirty-Third Annual Saint Louis Conference on
Manuscripts was held at the Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri. Among
the panels of papers were “Outside the Book of Hours: Alternative Forms of
Devotion in Manuscript Illumination ca. 1300,” “The Bible in the Thirteenth
Century: Beyond the Paris Bible,” and “New Studies in Byzantine Illuminated
Manuscripts.” For more information, please consult http://www.slu.edu/
libraries/vfl/events.htm.
On October 19, 2006 a conference was held in the Aula des Schlosses of the
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster on the theme “The Return of
Religions? Position Finding and Open-Minded Questions/Wiederkehr der
Religionen? Standortbestimmung und Fragehorizonte.” The speakers were
drawn from the fields of church history, the press, television, law, business, politics, banking, and pastoral care. For more information, please see fboz.unimuenster.de/mnkg/ .
On November 20-22, 2006 at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in
Milan a series of lectures were presented by a group of prominent professors
from France: Bernard Dompnier,“Per una storia culturale della pietà cattolica”;
Louis Châtellier, “Cristianesimo e scienza nell’età moderna (XVI—inizio XIX
secolo)”; and Nicole Lemaître, Bernard Dompnier, Daniel-Odon Hurel, and JeanLouis Quantin,“Religione, cultura, società: il clero in epoca moderna.”
On November 24-25, 2006 the Accademia di San Carlo held a Dies
Academicus at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan on the theme “Milano borromaica, atelier culturale della Controriforma.”Among the papers given were:
“Produzione e circolazione delle edizioni bibliche” by Edoardo Barbieri; “La
Bible dans le monachisme bénédictin en France à l’époque moderne” by Odon
Hurel,“Filologia e teologia: i testi patristici nelle controversie religiose del XVI
e XVII secolo” by Jean-Louis Quantin; “La tradizione teologica milanese tra
Cinque e Seicento” by Franco Buzzi;“La formazione ecclesiastica dei seminari
e dei collegi di istruzione” by Simona Negruzzo;“La formation des prêtres en
France dans la première modernité (XVIe–XVIIe siècles)” by Nicole Lemaître;
“Le modèle milanais et le monde rhénan” by Louis Châtellier;“La ‘filosofia cristiana’ di Valier e la scuola borromaica” by Marzia Giuliani;“Caratteri della predicazione in età federiciana” by Erminia Ardissino;“‘Il Predicatore’ di Francesco
Panigarola” by Rita Bramante;“Cornelio Musso, vescovo e predicatore frances-

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cano dell’età conciliare” by Maria Teresa Girardi;“La via ‘devota.’ Doni mistici e
carisimi intorno a Isabella Berinzaga e Achille Gagliardi” by Sabrina Stroppa,
“Letteratura devota tra Carlo e Federico”by Claudia di Filippo; and “‘Chi sei tu?’
Imparare ad essere cristiani: la produzione catechistica in età borromaica” by
Miriam Turrini.
On November 27-29, 2006 an international conference was held in the
Konuk Evi building at the “Aya Sofya” Hotel in Istanbul on the theme “ Modes of
Communication between Rome and Constantinople through the Centuries.”
Among the papers given were “The Roman Apocrisiarii at Constantinople” by
Robert Markus;“The Concilium Quinisextum:A Case Study of Communication
at the End of the Seventh Century” by Heinz Ohme; “The Correspondence
between Hadrian and Tarasius”by Erich Lamberz;“Unity in Peril:The Issue of the
Cyrilomethodian Mission” by Charalambos Papastathis;“The Communication of
the Thrones in the Twelfth Century” by Constantine Pitsakis; “The RomanByzantine Relationship in the Register of Innocent III” by Werner Maleczek;
“Modes of Communication in the Palaeologan Era” by Symeon Paschalidis;
“Roman Initiatives for Contacts between Constantinople and Rome in the XIII
and XIV Centuries” by Luca Pieralli;“The Orthodox Presence at the Councils of
Constance and Pavia-Siena” by Walter Brandmüller;“The East Meets the West in
Ferrara and Florence” by Evangelos Chrysos;“Modes of Dogmatic Discourse at
Ferrara and Florence” by Alexandros Alexakis; “Contacts between the Two
Thrones in the Early Ottoman Time” by Kreiton Chrysochoidis, and
“Experiencing the Meetings of Popes and Patriarchs in Recent Times.” For further information, please contact pcss@scienstor.va.
From November 29 to December 1, 2006 a conference was held in Rome
sponsored by the German Historical Institute and the University of Zurich on
the papal idea of the liturgy over the centuries. For more information, please
see http://www.dhi-roma.it/.
On December 2, 2006 the Twentieth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance
Conference was held at Barnard College in New York with the theme “War and
Peace in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”Among the papers presented were:
“Jerusalem and Jihad: 1100-1300” by Carole Hillenbrand; “The Sacredness of
Violence:Why Even Artists in the Middle Ages Supported the Death Penalty” by
Samuel Edgerton; and “Reconsidering the Evidence for the Peace of God, ca. 9701036” by Thomas Head.There was also a panel on the Saint Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre with papers by François Rigolot, Kathleen Long, and Jan Miernowski.
On December 11-12, 2006, on the occasion of the publication of the five
hundredth volume (Cyprien de Cathage: L’unité de l’Église) in the series
Sources Chrétiennes, a conference entitled “Les patrologues humanistes du
XXe siècle” was held in various places in Rome: the Cultural Center Saint-Louis
de France, the Pontificia Università Gregoriana, and the office of La Civilità
Cattolica. Among the speakers were: cardinals Walter Kasper, Paul Poupard,
and Georges-Marie Cottier; bishops Claude Dagens (Angoulême) and Vincenzo

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225

Paglia (Terni-Narni-Amelia); and professors Aimable Musoni, S.D.B., Michel
Fédou, S.J., Monique Alexandre, Theresia Hainthaler, Luis Ladaria, S.J., Paolo
Siniscalco, Enrico dal Covolo, S.D.B., Angelo Di Berardino, Jean-Noël Guinot,
Emanuela Prinzivalli, Giovanni Maria Vian, and Sergio Zincone. For further information, please see http://www..saintlouisdefrance.it/I-patrologi-umanisti.html.
On February 16–18, 2007 the annual conference of the California Mission
Studies Association will be held at Mission Dolores. For further information
about the conference, please consult www.ca-missions.org or email
chochenyo@aol.com.
On April 9-13, 2007 an international conference is scheduled to be held on
Corfù with the theme “Motivi e strutture di divisioni ecclesiali.” Four panels are
envisioned with the titles:“Da Calcedonia (451) a Costantinopoli II (553),”“La
Cristianità medievale (orientale e occidentale): Medioevo,” “Cristianesimo
diviso: età moderna,” and “L’Europa dei tempi moderni e contemporanei.” For
further information, please contact the Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche
at pcss@scienstor.va.
On May 3-5, 2007 the XXXVI Incontro di Studiosi dell’Antichità Cristiana
will be held at the Agustinianum Istituto Patristico in Rome with the theme
“Motivi e forme della poesia cristiana antica tra Scrittura e Tradizione classica.” The conference organizers seek the proposal of papers treating such
themes as the poetic genera (autobiography, medleys, elegies, epigraphy,
metric epistles, hymn writing, biblical paraphrase, hagiography, didactic and
moral poetry and theology), Christian poetry examined from its origins and
developments and in their medieval and Byzantine outcomes, individual
poetic personalities, the analysis of programmatic and poetic declarations,
and a review of recent literature. Proposals should have been sent by
December 15, 2006 to incontri@aug.org.
On May 10-17, 2007 an international conference on “Christianity, Culture,
and Moral Value” to be held in Kostroma, Russia is in the planning stages. For
further information, please contact the Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche
at pcss@scienstor.va.
The seventy-fourth annual meeting of the Canadian Catholic Historical
Association will be held at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon on
May 28-29, 2007. The theme of the meeting is “Bridging Communities.”
Proposals for papers and entire sessions are invited and should be sent by email by January 31 to the program committee: Linda Wicks (lwicks@csj-to.ca);
Heidi MacDonald (heidi.macdonald@uleth.ca); and Peter Meehan
(peter.meehan@senecac.on.ca).
On June 2-24, 2007 an annual conference will be held at the Marriott
Westfields Conference Center in Reston,Virginia sponsored by the Society for
Historians of American Foreign Relations.The conference organizers are seek-

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ing papers in all areas of diplomatic history, foreign relations, and international
studies. Special funding to help cover travel expenses is available to qualified
graduate students.To be given full consideration, proposals should have been
sent by December 15, 2006 to the conference organizer, Douglas Little at Clark
University, email SHAFR2007@clark.edu.
On November 24-27, 2007 an international conference will be held in
Vienna with the theme “The Ottoman Turks in Eastern Europe and in the
Balkans: Expansion, Presence, and Heritage (XIV – XX Centuries).”Among the
topics to be treated are: chronology and stages, effects on the administrativeinstitutional level, effects on the religious level (conversions to Islam, conservation of Christian identity), political and diplomatic aspects, military aspects
(in treatises and in the effected reality), the image of the Christian in testimony
of the Turks (literature, iconography, etc.), the image of the Turk in Christian
texts (literature, iconography, etc.), the Islamic community, the Christian community, relations among Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, and Muslims, and other
topics. For further information, please contact the Pontificio Comitato di
Scienze Storiche at pcss@scienstor.va.
On April 10-13, 2008 a conference will be held on “Sacred Violence in Early
North America” to be sponsored by Yale University and Omohundro Institute
of Early American History and Culture.The papers will treat how violence was
sacralized in seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century North America among
Europeans,Africans, and Native Americans and how religious beliefs and practices were used to mitigate and redirect violence in less destructive channels.
The conference organizers are soliciting paper proposals that address such
questions as the role of religion in colonial wars, the legal prosecution of heterodox beliefs and practices, the creative uses of violence within religious cultures, the destruction of religious objects, buildings, or communal sites, the violent reordering of cosmologies, the role of print in fostering or mitigating
religious violence, theologies of pain and suffering in cultural context, the psychological rupturing of notions of self and other in the act of conversion, etc.
Written proposals together with a curriculum vitae should be sent to Kim
Foley at kawahl@wm.edu using the subject line “Religion and Violence
Conference” and questions may be sent to Christopher Grasso at
cdgrass@wm.edu.
On August 3-9, 2008 the Thirteenth International Congress of Medieval
Canon Law will be held in Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary with the theme
“Eastern Influence in the West.” The conference organizers are interested in
receiving proposals for papers that address such issues as the direct or indirect
influence of the Eastern ecclesiastical discipline on the Western canonical collections and the scholarly interpretation of this, councils and local ecclesiastical law, ecclesiastical institutions, and canon law as “jus sacrum.” For further
information, please contact Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem, Kánonjogi
Posztgraduális Intézet, 1088 Budapest, Szentkirályi u. 28, Hungary; tel. (36)
1-429-7217.

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227

Workshops
A workshop in editing philosophical and theological texts of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries will take place at Georgetown University from July 9
to August 3, 2007. It is open to students, graduate and undergraduate, and
others in the early stage of their academic careers who have some skill in
medieval Latin and in paleography; ten to twelve participants will be admitted.
The directors of the workshop will be Dr. Girard Etzkorn and Dr. Gordon
Wilson, distinguished editors whose publications include volumes in the
Opera Omnia of Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.
The deadline for application is February 15, 2007, with final selection and
notification by March 15. Applications should include: (1) a one-page statement indicating how the workshop fits into one’s career goals, including any
present or future projects, and evidence of skill in medieval Latin and paleography (e.g., courses taken or studies with a tutor); and (2) two letters of recommendation to be sent directly to the address below.
The following expenses will be paid by funds from the Martin Chair of
Medieval Philosophy, Georgetown University: air fare, room and board for a
month in a Georgetown University residence hall, and a licensed copy of
Classical Text Editor (a software program for editing texts). In addition participants will receive $100 a week for incidental expenses. They must, however,
supply their own laptop computers.
Topics to be treated include: choosing a project; locating codices: libraries,
archives, and catalogues; the critical edition: text, apparatus of variants, and
apparatus of citations; description and dating of manuscripts; introduction to
Classical Text Editor; establishing a basic working text; stemma codicum: its use
and limits; text collation: common and unique variants. Other topics include:
common paleographical abbreviations in philosophical and theological literature and orthography. In addition, topics of wider interest will be treated, as the
question of literary genre, e.g., ordinary questions and questions de quolibet
and problems peculiar to editing a text distributed by an exemplar in pecia.
Guest speakers will lecture on special topics.
Application materials should be sent to: Mark G. Henninger, S.J., at
mgh7@georgetown.edu or to Neil T. Lewis at lewisn@georgetown.edu.
On June 25 to July 6, 2007 the first of two summer institutes will be held at
the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; the
other at the Collegium Budapest, Hungary, in 2008, on the topic “The Vision
Thing: Studying Divine Intervention,” that is, visionaries or visions, broadly
defined, with social recognition and social consequences. These summer
workshops are sponsored by a consortium of institutes in Europe (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Collegium Budapest, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences)

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and in the United States (Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences of Stanford, Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton, National
Humanities Center of Research Triangle Park, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and
the Russell Sage Foundation of New York). Led by Gábor Klaniczay of Budapest
and William A. Christian, Jr., of Las Palmas, the Canary Islands, a group of twenty
recent (2002 or after) recipients of doctoral degrees and doctoral candidates
studying at European or American institutions of higher learning will study
visions from the viewpoints of anthropology, history, art history, psychology,
and neuroscience, using primary source materials that are studied in their
broader contexts, with attention to their conditionants and their real world
consequences. Funding will cover travel, meals, lodging, and texts for both the
European and American meetings, plus a stipend of €600 for the workshop in
Europe and $600 for that in the United States.The deadline for application is
February 28, 2007 with application forms available online at the National
Humanities Center’s web site: <http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/sias/index.htm>.
Please address inquiries to Richard R. Schramm at rschramm@ga.unc.edu or to
Petria Saleh at petria.saleh@wiko-berlin.de.
Awards
The Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche has announced a competition
for a “journalistic prize” for published articles in newspapers or periodicals of
elevated distribution that appeared between October 31, 2006 and April 30,
2007 and promote the teaching and appreciation of the study of the classical
languages of Greek and Latin as ways to approach the classical and Christian
roots of the countries of the European cultural area. For more information,
please see the web site: http://www.vatican.va/roman curia/pont committees/scienstor/it/default.htm under the heading “Concorsi.”
Archives
The Archives of the Catholic University of America has put at the disposal
of secondary and college teachers and students a web site dedicated to
American Catholic history. It seeks to establish a collaborative network of
Catholic religious orders, diocesan, and college and university archives across
the country in support of this web site and to become the film and video
archives of the Church in America. As part of its educational outreach program, it has developed virtual Catholic history classroom web sites (accessible
through the home page of the archives http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/index.
html) that makes primary documents in Catholic history more accessible to
high school and college teachers. Among the topics treated are: “Catholic
Patriotism on Trial: The Oregon School Case in the 1920s,” “The Federated
Colored Catholics,”“How Much is Enough? Catholics and a Living Wage,” and
“Catholic Responses to Industrialization.” A collection of 111 images dating
from ca. 1927 and ca. 1942-1946 created by the National Catholic Welfare

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229

Conference of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that highlight
the NCWC’s work with veterans of both World Wars I and II are available
online at www.aladin.wrlc.org/dl/.
Exhibition
An exhibition of images, objects, manuscripts, and ephemera that documents the construction of the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin
Mary in Baltimore, the first Catholic cathedral in the United States, designed by
Benjamin Henry Latrobe, opened in Baltimore on November 8, 2006 at the H.
Furlong Baldwin Library Gallery of the Maryland Historical Society, 201 West
Monument Street, Baltimore. The cathedral has recently undergone a major
renovation. For further information, please see www.mdhs.org.
Cause of Saints
By a decree of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes of October 23, 2006
Margaret Occhiena (1788-1856), the mother of Saint John Bosco, was recognized for heroic virtue.Widowed early on, she raised her own two sons and her
youthful brother-in-law and took care of his mother-in-law, and then joined her
son John in his mission among the poor and abandoned boys of Turin.
Although illiterate she was known for her wisdom and became with John the
co-founder of the Salesian family.
For information on the Spanish Jesuit missionary martyrs of Virginia, especially Juan Bautista Segura, who attempted to set up a mission at Ajacán, some
thiry-seven years before the English settlement at Jamestown, please see the
following web sites: http://newsaintswisprov.org/news/julyold.html (“Sainthood sought for slain 16th century Jesuit missionaries); http://newsaints.faithweb.com/year/1571/htm (with engravings of the martyrs); and http://www.
catholicherald.com/cns/jesuits.htm (“Richmond Promotes Cause of Jesuit
Martyrs”).
Publications
The issue of the Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme
Français for July-August-September, 2006 (Volume 152), publishes the papers
presented at a colloquium held at Montpellier on May 15-17, 2003, on the
theme “L’architecture des temples réformés (XVIe –XVIe siècles) en Europe et
notamment en France.”The last of the fourteen articles is “Les conséquences
de la Réforme sur la distribution intérieure des églises catholiques” by Bernard
Chedozeau (pp. 513-519).
Seven articles in the Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in
Trento—Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient

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for 2005 (Volume XXXI) are devoted to the theme “Il dibattito storiografico
sulla figura di Pio XII. Punti di arrivo e problemi aperti,” as follows: Giovanni
Miccoli, “Santa Sede, guerra, e Shoah: una proposta di discussione” (pp. 227259); Philippe Chenaux,“Il cardinale Pacelli e la questione del nazismo dopo
l’enciclica ‘Mit brennender Sorge’ (1937)” (pp. 261-277); Emma Fattorini,“Pio
XI, Mussolini, Hitler e Pacelli (1937-1939)” (pp. 279-317); Anna Foa, “Le due
leggende. Riflessioni sulla storiografia su Pio XII e gli ebrei” (pp. 319-331);
Hubert Wolf,“Pius XII. als Nuntius in Deutschland. Pacellis Schlussrelation vom
November 1929” (pp. 333-353); Heinz Hürten, “Die Briefe Pius’ XII. an die
deutschen Bischöfe zur Kriegszeit. Eine zentrale Quelle für seine
Amtsauffassung?” (pp. 355-365); and Matteo Luigi Napolitano, “I documenti
diplomatici come fonte per il dibattito storiografico su Pio XII” (pp. 367-394).
An abstract in English is printed at the beginning of each article.
The theme of the third issue for 2006 of Erde und Auftrag is “Mönchtum in
Nordamerika.” The following four articles are here published: Joel Rippinger,
O.S.B.,“Pioniere in der Neuen Welt: Benediktiner in Nordamerika von den ersten
Gründungen bis zum 2.Vaticanum”(pp.246-253);Maria Magdalena Zunker,O.S.B.,
“Ein weitverzweigter Baum. Die Gründungen der Benedikterinnen von St.
Walburg/Eichstätt in den Vereinigten Staaten”(pp. 254-264); Ephrem Hollermann,
O.S.B., “Liebe, stark wie der Tod: Benediktinerinnen und Zisterzienserinnen in
Nordamerika” (pp. 265-281); and Hugh Feiss, O.S.B., “Abbruch, Umbruch,
Aufbruch: Mönche in Nordamerika 1965-2005)” (pp. 282-293).
The issue of Istina for April-June, 2006 (Volume LI, Number 2), is devoted to
“Le Métropolite André Szeptyckyj et Vladimir Soloviev, Prophètes de l’unité,” with
the following articles: Patrick de Laubier,“Le Métropolite André Szeptyckyj et l’unité (1900-1914)” (pp. 116-124);Augustyn Babiak,“André Szeptyckyj, Métropolite
ukrainien (1900-1944)” (pp. 125-145);Andrzej Zie˛ba,“André Szeptyckyj. Actualité
et mystère d’un grand prélat ukrainien” (pp. 146-163); Konstantin Sigov,“Vladimir
Soloviev, penseur du Bien” (pp. 164-170); and Vladimir Zielinsky,“L’Antéchrist de
Vladimir Soloviev et l’histoire de la Russie” (pp. 171-179).
The centenary of Römische Quartalschrift für Altertumskunde und
Kirchengeschichte is celebrated in the first two numbers combined of Volume
101 (2006). Following an introduction by the editor, Erwin Gatz, “Zum 100.
Jahrgang der Römischen Quartalschrift,” are articles by Stefan Heid, “Der
christliche Archäologe Joseph Wilpert und das Römische Institut der GörresGesellschaft” (pp. 4-49); Claus Arnold, “Joseph Sauer (1872-1949) in Freiburg
und Rom” (pp. 50-59); Christoph Weber,“Der päpstliche Hausprälat Dr. iur. Dr.
theol. h.c. Paul Maria Baumgarten und das deutsche Rom. Eine Skizze aus dem
goldenen Zeitalter der Archivforschung in der Epoche Leos XIII.” (pp. 60-74);
Erwin Gatz,“Das Römische Institut der Görres-Gesellschaft und die Römische
Quartalschrift von der Auflösung der Gesellschaft durch das NS-Regime (1941)
bis zum Jahre 1975)” (pp. 75-87); Andreas Kraus, “Eine Heimat in Rom.
Erinnerungen eines ehemaligen Stipendiaten” (pp. 88-97); Ernst Dassmann,
“Römische Jahre. Erinnerungen an die Studienzeit im Priesterkolleg am Campo

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231

Santo Teutonico” (pp. 98-112); and Dominik Burkard, “Diözesansynoden und
synodenähnliche Foren sowie Kirchenvolksbegehren der letzten Jahrzehnte in
den deutschsprachigen Ländern” (pp. 113-140).
Two issues of U.S. Catholic Historian have appeared in the last three
months. Angelyn Dries, O.S.F., was the guest editor of the issue for summer,
2006 (Volume 24, Number 3), which has the theme “Missionary Thought and
Experiences in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.”The contributors
and titles are: Paul Kollman, C.S.C., “The Promise of Mission History for U.S.
Catholic History” (pp. 1-18); Robert Carbonneau, C.P.,“Resurrecting the Dead:
Memorial Gravesites and Faith Stories of Twentieth-Century Catholic
Missionaries and Laity in West Hunan, China” (pp. 19-37); David J. Endres,“The
Global Missionary Zeal of an American Apostle: The Early Works of Daniel A.
Lord, S.J., 1922-1929” (pp. 39-54); Frank Hoare, S.S.C., “The Influence of the
Crusade Symbol and War Metaphor on the Motivation and Attitudes of the
Maynooth Mission to China, 1918-1929” (pp. 55-74); Edward T. Brett,“AfricanAmerican Missionaries in Central America: The Sisters of the Holy Family in
Belize” (pp. 75-94); Stephen P. Judd, M.M., “A Journey of Immersion into
Liminality: Forty Years of the Maryknoll Language Institute, Cochabamba,
Bolivia” (pp. 95-110); Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens, “Knowledge Is Not Enough:
Creating a Culture of Social Justice, Dignity, and Human Rights in Guatemala:
Maryknoll Sisters and the Monte María ‘Girls’” (pp. 111-128); Regina Siegfried,
A.S.C.,“‘The Great Mission Work’: The Influence of the China Mission on the
Adorers of the Blood of Christ” (pp. 129-148); Elizabeth Kolmer, A.S.C., “The
Death of Five Adorers of the Blood of Christ and the Changing Meaning of
Martyrdom” (pp. 149-164); and William R. Burrows, “From a Roman Catholic
‘Mission Church’ to a Catholic ‘World Christianity’ Paradigm: A Personal
Pilgrimage” (pp. 165-179).
The issue for fall (Volume 24, Number 4) is focused on “Catholics in the
South” with the following articles: Dennis C. Rousey, “Catholics in the Old
South: Their Population, Institutional Development, and Relations with
Protestants” (pp. 1-21); R. Bentley Anderson, “Pride and Prejudice in New
Orleans: Joseph Fichter’s Southern Parish” (pp. 23-46); Justin D. Poché, “The
Catholic Citizens’ Council: Religion and White Resistance in Post-War
Louisiana” (pp. 47-68); Cecilia A. Moore,“‘To Serve through Compelling Love’:
The Society of Christ the King in Danville,Virginia, 1963” (pp. 83-103); Andrew
S. Moore,“The Beloved Community and the People of God:The Community of
Christ Our Brother in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, 1967-1969”(pp. 105-123); and
Michael Pasquier,“Medjugorje in the American South: Our Lady of Tickfaw and
the Politics of Devotion” (pp. 125-148).
The Società Editrice “Il Ponte Vecchio” (Via Caprera 32, I-47023 Italy; email
ilpontevecchio@libero.it) announced the publication of the Monumenta borromaica, I: L’Archivio di un principe della Chiesa, Le carte segrete di Carlo
Borromeo, edited by Angelo Turchini, that surveys various projects to publish
the epistolary of Saint Charles Borromeo.

232

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Personal Notices
John Conway has recently published a paperback entitled To Saint James—
with Love: Reflections on History and Faith, a collection of essays Dr. Conway
has published in the magazine of his parish, St. James (Anglican) Church in
downtown Vancouver, that is celebrating its 125th anniversary. His book is available through Regent College Bookstore at breimer@regent-college.edu.
The Reverend John W. O’Malley, S.J., has been appointed a university professor of Georgetown University.
James M. O’Toole has been appointed to the Charles I. Clough Chair of
Religious History in the History Department of Boston College.
Msgr. Francis Weber has published another book, The California Missions,
that surveys twenty-one famous mission sites and seeks to answer the most
common questions in a simple and straightforward manner regarding the missions’ founding, legendary friars, missionary activities, and their treatment of
the Native Americans. It is available through Barnes and Noble Bookstores.
Obituary
The Reverend Francis J. Murphy, a priest of the Boston Archdiocese and
Associate Professor Emeritus of the History Department of Boston College,
died of cancer on August 28, in Wellesley Hills. Born in Boston on July 11, 1935,
Father Murphy was a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross. He was
ordained to the priesthood on February 2, 1962. He served in several Boston
parishes, most recently, Sacred Heart in Newton. Since 1986 he was Chaplain
of the Sisters of Charity, Mt. St. Vincent Community, in Wellesley Hills,
Massachusetts.
In 1971 he earned a doctoral degree in European history from The Catholic
University of America, with a dissertation on “French Catholics and the main
tendue.” In 1972 he taught one course in summer school at Boston College,
which so impressed his students and colleagues that he was invited to join the
History Department faculty. Father Murphy soon became one of the most
respected and popular teachers in the department. The main focus of his
teaching was twentieth-century France, but he also offered courses in other
aspects of twentieth-century European history, especially the post-World War
II period. He also enthusiastically taught the freshman Western Civilization
course in every semester, despite the large number (250) of students involved.
He took his teaching duties very seriously, and won a reputation as an enthusiastic and stimulating lecturer. He was deeply concerned for the welfare and
the intellectual development of his students, devoting much time and energy
to counseling them; the corridor outside his office was usually lined with students waiting patiently to have their personal time with Father Murphy.

NOTES AND COMMENTS

233

Like his teaching, his scholarship revolved around twentieth-century
French history. In addition to numerous articles and papers, he published two
monographs.The first was Communists and Catholics in France, 1936-1939:
The Politics of the Outstretched Hand (University of Florida Press, 1989). It
dealt with the policy adopted by the French Communist Party toward
Catholicism in 1936, of the main tendue. This policy was ordered by Stalin,
who, alarmed by the rise of Nazism, directed western Communist parties to
form a Popular Front with other parties to resist it. The French Communist
Party therefore sought to bring Catholics into this policy by offering an “outstretched hand” to them, a startling shift from its former militant hostility.
Father Murphy examined, on the basis of impressively thorough research,
the evolution of this policy, the Catholic response to it, and what effects it may
have had. It is hardly surprising that the attitude of the French hierarchy and
the Vatican was largely negative, since the long-term hostility of French
Communists and the persecution of Catholicism in the Soviet Union suggested, correctly, that the main tendue was simply a temporary tactic, not a
genuine change of attitude. Most French Catholics reacted similarly, though a
few marginal Catholics may have been affected.The policy was therefore a failure, without lasting effects.
His second book appeared in 1998: Père Jacques: Resplendent in Victory
(Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1998). It is the biography of a Carmelite friar,
Father Jacques de Jésus, who became more widely known as “Father Jean,” the
hero of Louis Malle’s film, Au revoir les enfants. Born Lucien-Louis Bunel in
1900, he entered the Carmelite order in 1931. As headmaster of a Carmelite
preparatory school in Avon, he made it a refuge for those fleeing persecution
by the Vichy regime, especially Jews. Though the Nazi occupation of Vichy
France in November, 1942, made his activities far more dangerous, he redoubled his efforts, in particular by finding Catholic families with whom Jews
could be hidden. In January, 1944, he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthhausen. He survived that brutal experience until liberation
in May, 1945, but his health was broken and he died on June 5, 1945. Like his
first book, his second is based on solid research, both published and archival.
Father Murphy was a member of the American Catholic Historical
Association from 1972 until his death. He also belonged to the Society for
Italian Historical Studies, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Western
Society for French History, and the American Historical Association.
A funeral Mass was celebrated in Mt. St. Vincent Chapel in Wellesley on
August 31, 2006. He was a great teacher, a fine scholar, an exemplary priest, and
a good man. He will be greatly missed.
Boston College

ALAN J. REINERMAN

234

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Letters to the Editor
Patrick J. McGeever’s review of my book, Harry, Tom and Father Rice:
Accusation and Betrayal in America’s Cold War in your April 2006 issue (pp.
298-299) misrepresents how I present a key element of the book. Noting that
my uncle, Harry Davenport, went into a steep decline after losing his
Congressional seat in 1950, McGeever comments that the book fails to “shed
some light on why he [Davenport] betrayed his friends or walked away from
his family.The nephew, despite spending much time in bars with his subject,
was too embarrassed to ask.”
McGeever is referring to my conversations with Harry mostly in the late
1960s, often in bars but also at holiday dinners in my home (p. 4). It is true that
at first I was “reluctant” to ask him what had gone wrong during his one term
in Congress (1949-50). As I say on page 4,“How do you ask a man, what caused
you to fall apart?”But I could not have asked him about the first act of betrayal,
his failure to speak up for his friend Tom Quinn when he was subpoenaed to
appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949. I learned
about this incident only in 1999, by which time Harry had been dead for 22
years (p. 12).
A second betrayal of sorts occurred in April 1950 when Harry publicly
denounced one of his principal supporters, the United Electrical Workers (UE),
as a “puppet of Moscow” during the UE’s battle with a rival union to represent
Westinghouse Electric workers. Harry did tell me about this incident in
response to a question, and I later essentially confirmed the story in my
research for the book. Harry turned against the UE because David Lawrence,
the Pittsburgh mayor and Democratic Party boss, made this a condition of continued party support. In retaliation, the UE helped defeat Harry in November
1950 (pp. 190-199).
Why did Harry act as he did? I could not plumb his heart for the deepest
reasons, but I described his troubled boyhood, his craving for the public spotlight and political success, his broken marriage, and his excessive drinking. Is
this not “some light”?
Teaneck, New Jersey

JOHN HOERR

“Mr. Davenport, why did you turn your back on the people who got you
elected to Congress, almost as soon as you arrived there? Was it out of genuine
conviction, or sheer political opportunism? Are you ashamed of what you did?”
“Mr. Davenport, are you a homosexual and was your marriage more or less a
sham that you walked away from when it no longer seemed likely to pay political dividends?”These are some of the lines of questioning that a tough, thorough, independent investigator might have pursued with Harry Davenport in
trying to make sense of his brief political career and subsequent life. Of

NOTES AND COMMENTS

235

course, Davenport might not have responded candidly, or at all. But it’s a pity
such questions were never asked, because the answers just might have
explained, better than references to his troubled childhood, love of the limelight, or alcoholism, why he behaved as he did.
As I said in my review, I found other parts of John Hoerr’s Harry, Tom and
Father Rice quite rewarding, but not the ones dealing with his Uncle Harry. At
the end of the book, Davenport and his motivations remained a mystery to me.
They still do.
Indiana University (Emeritus)

PATRICK J. MCGEEVER

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

General and Miscellaneous
Propheten und Märtyrer im Gedächtnis der Kirche. Zur ökumenischen
Bedeutung von Märtyrern und Heiligen. Lukas Vischer. Ökumenische
Rundschau, 55 (July, 2006), 306-340.
Saints et héros: vies parallèles et psychologies spécifiques. Vassilis Saroglou.
Revue théologique de Louvain, 37 (July-Sept., 2006), 313-341.
Il contributo degli Istituti storici degli Ordini religiosi nella storia della spiritualità. Salvatore Vacca. Laurentianum, 47 (1-2, 2006), 3-50.
El Real Convento de San Agustín de Toledo. Teófilo Viñas Román. La Ciudad de
Dios, CCXIX (May-Aug., 2006), 351-387.
Miracles, Early Modern Science, and Rational Religion. Peter Harrison. Church
History, 75 (Sept., 2006), 493-510.
Ancient
Christentum im Trend. Monotheistische Tendenzen in der späten Antike. Alfons
Fürst. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 9 (3, 2005), 496-523.
Roma Cristiana tra vescovi e presbiteri. Manlio Simonetti. Vetera
Christianorum, 43 (1, 2006), 5-17.
From Jesus to Polycarp: Reflections on the Origins of Christian Martyrdom.
Alessandro Falcetta. Cristianesimo nella Storia, XXVII (Jan., 2006), 67-98.
La persécution oubliée des chrétiens d’Antioche sous Trajan et le martyre
d’Ignace d’Antioche. Étienne Decrept. Revue d’Études Augustiniennes et
Patristiques, 52 (1, 2006), 1-29.
Voluntary Martyrs in the Early Church: Heroes or Heretics? Anthony R. Birley.
Cristianesimo nella Storia, XXVII (Jan., 2006), 99-126.
The Baptistery at Dura-Europos: The Wall Paintings in the Context of Syrian
Baptismal Theology. Dominic E. Serra. Ephemerides Liturgicae, CXX (Jan.Mar., 2006), 67-78.
Sinagogae Iudeorum, fontes persecutionum? Il supposto intervento degli
ebrei nelle persecuzioni anticristiane durante l’Impero Romano. Raúl
González Salinero. Vetera Christianorum, 43 (1, 2006), 93-104.
Behind Benedict: The Passio Juliani et Basilissae. Mark Del Cogliano.
American Benedictine Review, 57 (Sept., 2006), 287-319.
236

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

237

Arius Reconsidered (Part 1). Winrich Löhr. Zeitschrift für Antikes
Christentum, 9 (3, 2005), 524-560.
L’introduction de l’Histoire ecclésiastique d’Eusèbe de Césarée (I, II-IV): étude
génétique, littéraire et rhétorique. Sébastien Morlet. Revue d’Études
Augustiniennes et Patristiques, 52 (1, 2006), 57-95.
Monarchianism and Photinus of Sirmium as the Persistent Heretical Face of the
Fourth Century. D. H. Williams. Harvard Theological Review, 99 (Apr.,
2006), 187-206.
How the Desert Fathers “Meditated.” John Wortley. Greek, Roman, and
Byzantine Studies, 46 (Autumn, 2006), 315-328.
Sur la genèse des libelli miraculorum. Yvette Duval. Revue d’Études
Augustiniennes et Patristiques, 52 (1, 2006), 97-112.
L’Italia tardoantica tra cristianizzazione e formazione delle diocesi. Giorgio
Otranto. Vetera Christianorum, 43 (1, 2006), 19-30.
Intorno all’epigrafe metrica in lode del vescovo Eusebio di Vercelli: note paleografiche e storiche. Marco Aimone. Bollettino Storico-Bibliografico
Subalpino, CIV (1, 2006), 137-200.
Vox Clamantis in Deserto: Rhetoric, Reproach, and the Forging of Ascetic
Authority in Jerome’s Letters from the Syrian Desert. Andrew Cain. Journal
of Theological Studies, 57 (Oct., 2004), 500-525.
Origen, Jerome, and the Senatus Pharisaeorum. Andrew Cain. Latomus, 65
(July-Sept., 2006), 727-734.
À propos de la dispositio dans le projet d’histoire ecclésiastique de Jérôme. Un
cas inaperçu de l’application du schéma biologique. Koen Vanhaegendoren.
Historia, 55 (3, 2006), 344-351.
Ausonius: die Gratiarum actio ad Gratianum imperatorem und «De maiestatis laudibus». Lobrede auf den Herrscher oder auf den Lehrer? Massimo
Lolli. Latomus, 65 (July-Sept., 2006), 707-726.
Eunomian rights to draw testaments in the legislation of 389-399. MichalStachura. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123,
Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 45-62.
Vetustus error extinctus est—Wann wurde das Sarapeion von Alexandria zerstört? Johnannes Hahn. Historia, 55 (3, 2006), 368-383.
Justification by Faith: A Patristic Doctrine. D. H. Williams. Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 57 (Oct., 2006), 649-667.
Recherches augustiniennes des dernières 35 années sur la controverse antidonatiste. Synthèse critique. Innocent Hakizimana. Teresianum, LVII (2, 2006),
335-389.

238

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

How Augustine Shaped Medieval Mysticism. Bernard McGinn. Augustinian
Studies, 37 (1, 2006), 1-26.
Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and the Pelagian Controversy. Geoffrey D. Dunn.
Augustinian Studies, 37 (1, 2006), 63-88.
Intention und Wirkung der antijüdischen Gesetze der Westgoten. Igor
Pochoshajew. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123,
Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 111-146.
Filostorgio e la morte di Costantino il Grande. Marilena Amerise. Historia, 55
(3, 2006), 328-343.
The Second Rule of the Fathers. Terrence Kardong, O.S.B. American
Benedictine Review, 57 (Sept., 2006), 235-248.
El Concilio Ecuménico de Éfeso. Fernando Soto-Hay. Aná Mnesis, XVI (Sept.,
2006), 1-55.
Cyrill von Alexandrien und die Unionsformel von 433 n.Chr.Torsten Krannich.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 9 (3, 2005), 566-583.
Normazione teodosiana «de fide»: la scelta conciliare (aa. 435-449). Elio Dovere.
Vetera Christianorum, 43 (1, 2006), 67-82.
Medieval
La recherche sur les ordres religieux en Allemagne. Chemins parcourus et nouveaux horizons. Gert Melville. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 49 (Apr.June, 2006), 163-174.
The cult of Saint Thecla in Anglo-Saxon England: The problem of Aldhelm’s
sources. Catherine Franc. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library
of Manchester, 86 (Summer, 2004), 39-53.
Die Konzilien des byzantinischen Bilderstreits. Hans Georg Thümmel.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 9 (3, 2005), 455-463.
. . . in die festivitatis: gift-giving, power and the calendar in the Carolingian kingdoms. Dmitri Starostine. Early Medieval Europe, 14 (4, 2006), 465-486.
Die Appendix Dacherianae Mettensis,Benedictus Levita und Hinkmar von Laon.
Gerhard Schmitz.Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123,
Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 147-206.
Notare, Kanzler und Bischöfe am ottonischen Hof. Hartmut Hoffmann.
Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 61 (2, 2005), 435-480.
L’edificio di culto scoperto nei pressi della Cattedrale di Bari. Dorio Ciminale.
Vetera Christianorum, 43 (1, 2006), 117-135.
Constantinopla entre dos milenios.Testimonio de Symeón el Nuevo Teólogo en
sus propios escritos y la “Vita Symeónis” de Nicetas. Consideraciones políticas,sociales y religiosas.Pablo Argárate. Aná Mnesis,XVI (Sept.,2006),57-67.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

239

The hidden apocalypse: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the otherworld. Sharon
Roubach. Journal of Medieval History, 32 (Sept., 2006), 302-314.
Das Martyrologium der Klöster Groß St. Martin und St. Pantaleon in Köln und
St. Symphorian in Metz aus dem frühen 11. Jahrhundert in Textzeugen aus
Irland und Dänemark. Pádraig O Riain. Archiv für Liturgie-Wissenschaft, 47
(2, 2006), 181-214.
,,Das Leben des Königs Wachtang Gorgasali“. Christliche Weltanschauung in
Djuanschers Chronik aus dem 11. Jahrhundert. Aleksandre Tvaradze.
Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 88 (1, 2006), 45-74.
Marmoutier and its Serfs in the Eleventh Century. Paul Fouracre. Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, XV (2005), 29-49.
Neues su Bernold von Konstanz. Oliver Münsch. Zeitschrift der SavignyStiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123, Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 207223.
The Polemical Use of Scripture in the Chronicle of Hugh of Flavigny. Patrick
Healy. Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales, LXXIII (1,
2006), 1-36.
Die Verbrüderung zwischen Cluny und St. Blasien. Joachim Wollasch.
Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 61 (2, 2005), 481-507.
Voluntary Martyrs and Canon Law. The Case of the First Crusaders. James A.
Brundage. Cristianesimo nella Storia, XXVII (Jan., 2006), 143-160.
Post-biblical history of the Jews in Latin chronicles: The case of Hugh of
Fleury’s Historia ecclesiastica. Elisabeth Mégier. Aevum, LXXX (May-Aug.,
2006), 353-376.
Canon Law in the Leges Henrici Primi. Bruce C. Brasington. Zeitschrift der
Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123, Kanonistische Abteilung, 92
(2006), 288-305.
Die zwei Schwerter des Bischofs.Von Kriegsherren und Seelenhirten im Reichsepiskopat der Stauferzeit. Jan Keupp. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 117
(1, 2006), 1-24.
Bernard, Suger, and Henry I’s Crown Jewels. Christopher Norton. Gesta, XLV
(1, 2006), 1-14.
Le moine et le saint roi. La qualité de confesseur dans la Vita Edwardi d’Aelred
de Rievaulx (2). Matthias Lemoine. Collectanea Cisterciensia, 68 (3, 2006),
218-227.
Warum war die Auflösung der Ehe Friedrich Barbarossas und Adelas von
Vohburg möglich? Eduard Hlawitschka. Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung
des Mittelalters, 61 (2, 2005), 509-536.

240

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Spiritualia et Temporalia—Naissance d’un couple. Charles de Miramon.
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123, Kanonistische
Abteilung, 92 (2006), 224-287.
Chanter en polyphonie à Notre-Dame de Paris sous le règne de Philippe
Auguste: un art de la magnificence. Guillaume Gross. Revue Historique,
CCCVIII (July, 2006), 609-634.
La Confessione tra il XII e il XIII Secolo. Teologia e prassi nella legislazione
canonica medievale. Attilio Carpin. Sacra Doctrina, 51 (3-4, 2006), 1-250.
Expectation and unrest among Cistercian lay brothers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Brian Noell. Journal of Medieval History, 32 (Sept.,
2006), 253-274.
I testamenti di Manfredo Oculiblanci, canonico di S. Ambrogio di Milano
(1203). Miriam Rita Tessera. Aevum, LXXX (May-Aug., 2006), 423-455.
Innocenz III. und der Kreuzzug als Instrument im Kampf gegen die Häresie.
Marco Meschini. Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 61 (2,
2005), 537-583.
Francesco d’Assisi. Un santo che giocava con gli animali. Felice Moretti. Il
Santo, XLVI (1-2, 2006), 103-146.
The evolution of Dominican structures of government: terminology, nomenclature and ordo of Dominican provinces. Simon Tugwell, O.P. Archivum
Fratrum Praedicatorum, LXXV (2005), 29-94.
Resecatis superfluis? Raymund von Peñafort und der Liber Extra. Thomas
Wetzstein. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123,
Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 355-391.
Die Extravaganten Gregors IX. und Innozenz’ IV. (1234-1254). Martin Bertram.
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123, Kanonistische
Abteilung, 92 (2006), 1-44.
Synagoga Tumbles, a Rider Triumphs: Clerical Viewers and the Fürstenportal of
Bamberg Cathedral. Nina Rowe. Gesta, XLV (1, 2006), 15-42.
Martirio volontario ed ideologia della Crociata. Formazione e irradiazione dei
modelli francescani a partire dalle matrici altomedievali. Paolo Evangelisti.
Cristianesimo nella Storia, XXVII (Jan., 2006), 161-247.
Le Pulpitarium des frères Prêcheurs. Christian Meyer. Archivum Fratrum
Praedicatorum, LXXV (2005), 5-28.
Why the Bishop of Florence Had to Get Married. Maureen C. Miller. Speculum,
81 (Oct., 2006), 1055-1091.
Art, Prophecy, and Drama in the Choir of Salisbury Cathedral. Matthew M.
Reeve. Religion and the Arts, 10 (2, 2006), 161-190.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

241

Biografia critica di Iacopone da Todi. Silvestro Nessi. Il Santo, XLVI (1-2, 2006),
55-101.
Tunis in 1270: A Case Study of Interfaith Relations in the Late Thirteenth
Century. Michael Lower. International History Review, XXVIII (Sept.,
2006), 504-514.
Un arcivescovo possidente: documenti sulle proprietà terriere di Ottone
Visconti.Francesca Roberta Leoni. Aevum,LXXX (May-Aug.,2006),479-512.
‘Leger est apprendre mes fort est arende’: wool, debt, and the dispersal of
Pipewell Abbey (1280-1330). Adrian R. Bell, Chris Brooks, Paul Dryburgh.
Journal of Medieval History, 32 (Sept., 2006), 187-211.
Der Umfang der Dominikanerprovinz Teutonia im Späteren Mittelalter. Claudia
Heimann. Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, LXXV (2005), 233-257.
Il manoscritto degli Statuti del Capitolo cattedrale di Asti del 1310: edizione.
Elisa Meluccio. Bollettino Storico-Bibliografico Subalpino, CIV (1, 2006),
201-270.
Sur quelques manuscrits concernant la fiscalité pontificale au Portugal.
Stéphane Boissellier. Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 43 (2005), 13-45.
La Regula non Bullata secondo Angelo Clareno: tradizione testuale e rimaneggiamento. Carlo Paolazzi. Aevum, LXXX (May-Aug., 2006), 457-477.
Isabel of Aragon (d. 1336): Model Queen or Model Saint? Iona McCleery.
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57 (Oct., 2006), 668-692.
Requirements of Devout Contemplation:Text and Image for the Poor Clares in
Trecento Pisa. Holly Flora and Arianna Pecorini Cignoni. Gesta, XLV (1,
2006), 61-76.
Voyages d’un prélat festif: un «évêque des Innocents» dans son évêché. Yann
Dahhaoui. Revue Historique, CCCVIII (July, 2006), 677-694.
Baldus als Gutachter für die päpstliche Kurie im Großen Schisma. Helmut G.
Walther. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123,
Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 392-409.
L’associazionismo flagellante fra rivendicazioni identitarie e conformismo. Il
caso di Ivrea (secoli XIV-XV). Laura Gaffuri. Bollettino Storico-Bibliografico
Subalpino, CIV (1, 2006), 5-39.
La restauration de l’unité visible de l’Église au concile de Constance
(1414/1415-1418). J.-Ph. Goudot. Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 128 (Oct.Dec., 2006), 594-612.
Le portrait d’un archevêque: Pey Berland.Vie et carrière d’un clerc bordelaise.
Susanne Wolf. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123,
Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 410-452.

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PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Maternal mediators: saintly ideals and secular realities in late medieval
Scotland. †Audrey-Beth Fitch. Innes Review, 57 (Spring, 2006), 1-35.
Dalla santificazione della masserizia alla santificazione dell’agricoltura. Gino
Benzoni. Studi Veneziani, XLIX (2005), 61-77.
Afanasii Nikitin: An Orthodox Russian’s Spiritual Voyage in the Dar al-Islam,
1468-1475. Mary Jane Maxwell. Journal of World History, 17 (Sept., 2006),
243-266.
Langue blasphématoire et geste iconoclaste. Blasphèmes et pouvoirs dans la
Terre ferme vénitienne à la fin du Moyen Age. Andrea Martignoni. Studi
Veneziani, XLIX (2005), 79-112.
La première entrée de l’évêque: réflexions sur son origine.Véronique Julerot.
Revue Historique, CCCVIII (July, 2006), 635-675.
Sixteenth Century
Recent Trends in the Study of Christianity in Sixteenth-Century Europe.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Mary Laven, and Eamon Duffy. Renaissance
Quarterly, LIX (Fall, 2006), 697-731.
Machiavelli’s Best Fiend [Alexander VI]. Daniel Pellerin. History of Political
Thought, XXVII (Autumn, 2006), 423-453.
Die Reformation als Grundlage der modernen Welt und des neuzeitlichen
Christentums. Axel von Campenhausen. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung
für Rechtsgeschichte, 123, Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 537-553.
María Villarreal de Loyola, ¿Presenta Hija de Íñigo de Loyola? (los Loyola de la
Rioja del S. XVI). José Martínez de Toda, S.J. Archivum Historicum
Societatis Jesu, LXXV (July-Dec., 2006), 325-360.
Sex and Spirituality in 1500’s Rome: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Martyrdom of
Saint Agatha. Jill Burke. Art Bulletin, LXXXVIII (Sept., 2006), 482-495.
Der Sonntag in der frühen Neuzeit. Michael Maurer. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 88 (1, 2006), 75-100.
Le origini della provincia domenicana di Puglia. Michele Miele, O.P. Archivum
Fratrum Praedicatorum, LXXV (2005), 145-157.
Sacraments and the Church in the Scottish Evangelical Mind 1528-1555. Martin
Holt Dotterweich. Records of the Scottish Church History Society, XXXVI
(2006), 41-71.
Luther on Music. Robin A. Leaver. Lutheran Quarterly, XX (Summer, 2006),
125-145.
The Group of Meaux as first target of Farel and Calvin’s anti-nicodemism. Frans
Pieter van Stam. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, LXVIII (2,
2006), 253-275.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

243

L’Île de Jersey et les protestants français. Michel Monteil. Etudes Théologiques
& Religieuses, 81 (2, 2006), 183-195.
Gli affreschi di Michelangelo nella Cappella Paolina. Peter Conrads Kronenberg. Civiltà Cattolica, 157, III (July 1, 2006), 25-36.
Philip Melanchthon and the Establishment of Confessional Norms. Irene
Dingel. Lutheran Quarterly, XX (Summer, 2006), 146-169.
Una nuova imagine di sant’Ignazio di Loyola. Manuel Ruiz Jurado. Civiltà
Cattolica, 157, III (Aug. 5-19, 2006), 251-260.
Die ‘Dioskuren’ des Jesuitischen Apostolats: Eine Rezeptionsgeschichtliche
Fallstudie zu Franz Xaver und Petrus Canisius. Patrizio Foresta. Archivum
Historicum Societatis Jesu, LXXV (July-Dec., 2006), 361-383.
San Francesco Saverio. Le Lettere, la conversazione, il sogno. Martín M. Morales.
Civiltà Cattolica, 157, III (July 1, 2006), 14-24.
Putting the English Reformation on the Map (The Prothero Lecture). Diarmaid
MacCulloch. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, XV (2005), 75-95.
Recht und Jurisprudenz im reformierten Protestantismus 1550-1650.
Christoph Strohm. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte,
123, Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 453-493.
Nuovi contributi su Pomponio Algieri. Le forme del dissenso ereticale nella
Padova del cinquecento. Silvia Ferretto. Studi Veneziani, XLIX (2005), 129155.
Service and Survival:The clergy in late sixteenth-century Scotland. Margaret H.
B. Sanderson. Records of the Scottish Church History Society, XXXVI
(2006), 73-96.
The Family of Love and Its Enemies. Christopher Carter. Sixteenth Century
Journal, XXXVII (Fall, 2006), 651-672.
Between Nicodemism and ‘honest’ dissimulation: the Society of Jesus in
England. Stefania Tutino. Historical Research, LXXIX (Nov., 2006), 534-533.
Cuestiones sobre comunicación entre cristianos e infieles. Enseñanza de Pedro
de Aragón (1584). Ignacio Jericó Bermejo. Communio, XXXIX (Jan.-June,
2006), 21-55.
Desde Rafael y Miguel Ángel en el Vaticano hasta Tibaldi en la Biblioteca de El
Escorial. Manuel Rincón Álvarez. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXIX (May-Aug.,
2006), 403-448.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Paying for the Privilege: The Management of Public Order and Religious
Pluralism in Two Early Modern Societies. Charles H. Parker. Journal of
World History, 17 (Sept., 2006), 267-296.

244

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Universalwissenschaft, Millenarismus und Zweite Reformation. Dieter Groh
and Birgit Biehler. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 117 (1, 2006), 25-62.
Cause matrimoniali nella documentazione del tribunale della Sacra Romana
Rota (secolo XVII). Simona Feci. Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, XXXI (2005), 189-224.
Immagini, memoria e mito: l’ordine dei serviti e Sarpi nel Seicento. Antonella
Barzazi. Studi Veneziani, L (2005), 115-135.
St. Teresa and Olivares: Patron Sainthood, Royal Favorites, and the Politics of
Plurality in Seventeenth-Century Spain. Erin Kathleen Rowe. Sixteenth
Century Journal, XXXVII (Fall, 2006), 721-737.
Un pouvoir et son exercice: les facultés du cardinal Francesco Barberini, légat
a latere en France en 1625. Clément Pieyre. Archivum Historiae
Pontificiae, 43 (2005), 47-138.
Gli scolopi e la Serenissima: verso il riconoscimento (1630-1730). Maurizio
Sangalli. Studi Veneziani, L (2005), 173-196.
Éditions et éditeurs de Savonarole dans la France d’ancien régime. Bernard
Montagnes, O.P. Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, LXXV (2005), 159-178.
Aspetti della costituzione della memoria archivistica pontificia in età moderna.
Alcune riflessioni in margine a una ricerca. Orietta Filippini. Annali
dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, XXXI (2005), 87-103.
Ireland’s Puritan Revolution: The Emergence of Ulster Presbyterianism
Reconsidered. Robert Armstrong. English Historical Review, CXXI (Sept.,
2006), 1048-1074.
The Covenantal Quietism of Tobias Crisp. David Parnham. Church History, 75
(Sept., 2006), 511-543.
Parlar di riforma per alludere ad altro. Juan de Santo Tomás OP, confessore di
Filippo IV di Spagna, e un tentativo di riforma della vita religiosa (16431644). Orietta Filippini. Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, LXXV (2005),
259-279.
Das Memorandum von 1644 des Metropoliten Petr Mogila. Ernst Christoph
Suttner. Ostkirchliche Studien, 55 (June, 2006), 66-83.
An Unattributed Pamphlet by William Walwyn: New Light on the Prehistory of
the Leveller Movement. David R. Como. Huntington Library Quarterly, 69
(3, 2006), 353-382.
Early Lutheran Attitudes toward Jews. Kenneth G. Appold. Lutheran
Quarterly, XX (Summer, 2006), 170-189.
Der Bericht des Archidiakon Paul von Aleppo über seine Reise nach Moskau in
den Jahren 1652-1656. Karl Christian Felmy. Ostkirchliche Studien, 55
(June, 2006), 50-65.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

245

Metropolitan Puritans and the Varieties of Godly Reform in Inter-regnum
Monmouth. Newton E. Key and Joseph P. Ward. Welsh History Review, 22
(Dec., 2005), 646-672.
Un jumillano arzobispo de Palermo, Juan Lozano o.s.a. (1610-1679). Rogelio
García Mateo. Carthaginensia, XXII (Jan.-June, 2006), 87-101.
From Persecution to Toleration in the West Country, 1672-1692. Stephen A.
Timmons. The Historian, 68 (Fall, 2006), 461-488.
Hesitant Steps: Acceptance of the Gregorian Calendar in Eighteenth-Century
Geneva. Jennifer Powell McNutt. Church History, 75 (Sept., 2006), 544-564.
The Persecution of Thomas Emlyn, 1703-1705. William Gibson. Journal of
Church and State, 48 (Summer, 2006), 525-539.
Maîtriser le territoire alpin à l’heure des Lumières. Le diocèse de Senj-Modruš
en Croatie habsbourgeoise. Revue de l’histoire des religions, 223 (JulySept., 2006), 319-343.
Relazioni settecentesche sui conventi domenicani calabresi. Carlo Longo, O.P.
Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, LXXV (2005), 281-331.
The Rejuvenation and Rejection of Jansenism in History and Historiography:
Recent Literature on Eighteenth-Century Jansenism in French. Dale Van
Kley. French Historical Studies, 29 (Fall, 2006), 649-684.
“Auld Licht, New Licht” and Original Secessionists in Scotland and Ulster.
Richard M. Smith. Records of the Scottish Church History Society, XXXVI
(2006), 97-124.
La breve storia di Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita. La profetessa messianica antoniana
e la sua visione socio-religiosa nel Congo del XVIII secolo. Luca Xodo. Il
Santo, XLVI (1-2, 2006), 149-182.
The strange case of the Turkish and Venetian judges in eighteenth-century
Mani wall paintings. John Chapman. Byzantine and Modern Greek
Studies, 30 (2, 2006), 151-166.
Der Rechtsstatus des Bischöflichen Priesterseminars zu Münster unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Vertretung in Vermögensangelegenheiten.
Manfred Baldus. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 123,
Kanonistische Abteilung, 92 (2006), 494-535.
Una pagina di giurisdizionalismo veneto. La riforma dei Religiosi nella
Serenissima Repubblica nel 1768. Isidoro Liberale Gatti. Il Santo, XLVI (1-2,
2006), 241-260.
Un parroco contro il parrochismo: Giovanni Belotti (1713-1792). Nadia
Ghezzi. Nuova Rivista Storica, XC (May-Aug., 2006), 363-380.
Resistenze corporative al riformismo accentratore vescovile. Il caso della città
di Trento alla fine del Settecento. Maria Teresa Lo Preiato. Annali
dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, XXXI (2005), 133-187.

246

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
The Shaping of Irish Presbyterian Attitudes to Mission, 1780-1840. Andrew
Holmes. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57 (Oct., 2006), 711-737.
A Highland Moderate Minister: The Life and Culture of Rev. John Downie, minister of Urray, 1788-1811. David M. M. Paton. Records of the Scottish Church
History Society, XXXVI (2006), 141-174.
Le Vicaire du Christ en France: de Pie VII en voyage pour le couronnement de
Napoléon 1er. Jean-Marc Ticchi. Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 43 (2005),
139-155.
La réprise d’une mémoire brisée: l’historiographie de la “nouvelle” Compagnie
de Jésus. Robert Danieluk, S.J. Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu, LXXV
(July-Dec., 2006), 269-308.
“Realizing” the Classical Authors: Newman’s Epic Journey in the
Mediterranean. M. Katherine Tillman. Newman Studies Journal, 3 (Fall,
2006), 60-77.
Newman as Theological Tourist, John Ford, C.S.C. Newman Studies Journal, 3
(Fall, 2006), 89-100.
Religious Formation of the Laity at the Catholic University of Ireland. June
Rupert. Newman Studies Journal, 3 (Fall, 2006), 6-15.
Kirchlichkeit als Lebensprogramm. Der Regens, Theologe und Politiker
Christoph Moufang (1817-1890). Martin Klose. Trierer Theologische
Zeitschrift, 115 (4, 2006), 280-302.
Algerian Orphans and Colonial Christianity in Algeria, 1866-1939. Betrand
Taithe. French History, 20 (Sept., 2006), 240-259.
The impetus given to the use of instrumental music in Scottish churches by a
visit of Moody and Sankey to Scotland in 1873-74. Elizabeth P. Thompson.
Records of the Scottish Church History Society, XXXVI (2006), 175-194.
Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central
Tanganyika, ca. 1876-1928. Derek R. Peterson. American Historical
Review, 111 (Oct., 2006), 983-1010.
La diplomazia italiana e la S. Sede durante il pontificato di Leone XIII. Andrea
Ciampani. Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, XCIII (Apr.-June, 2006), 219262.
The Rise and Fall of Archbishop Kohn: Czechs, Germans, and Jews in Turn-ofthe-Century Moravia. Michael L. Miller. Slavic Review, 65 (Fall, 2006), 446474.
Missionarsreligion und säkulare Religion bei Jakob Spieth (1856-1914).Werner
Ustorf. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 117 (1, 2006), 63-84.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

247

Charles Booth, Charity Control, and the London Churches, 1897-1903.Thomas
R. C. Brydon. The Historian, 68 (Fall, 2006), 489-518.
Il modernismo di George Tyrrell e «Il Santo» di Antonio Fogazzaro. Analisi dei
motivi di una condanna. Stefano Visintin. Studia Patavina, LIII (May-Aug.,
2006), 483-501.
Il contributo del Vescovo di Treviso, Andrea Giacinto Longhin, alla redazione
del catechismo di Pio X. Dario Nasilli. Studia Patavina, LIII (May-Aug.,
2006), 503-519.
Light at the End of the World: Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World in New
Zealand, 1906. Geoffrey Troughton. Australian Historical Studies, 37 (Oct.,
2006), 55-71.
Benedicto XV y la crisis socio-política de España. Despachos políticos del
nuncio Ragonesi.Vicente Cárcel Ortí. Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 43
(2005), 157-262.
“We Are Alienating the Splendid Irish Race”: British Catholic Response to the
Irish Conscription Controversy of 1918.Youssef Taouk. Journal of Church
and State, 48 (Summer, 2006), 601-622.
Erzbischof Varfolomej (Remov) und die katholische Kirche. Coelestin Patock.
Ostkirchliche Studien, 55 (June, 2006), 84-93.
La legge Acerbo e la violenza fascista contro i cattolici. Giovanni Sale. Civiltà
Cattolica, 157, II (Apr. 15, 2006), 108-118.
La progettata riforma della legislazione ecclesiastica al tempo di Mussolini.
Giovanni Sale. Civiltà Cattolica, 157, III (Aug. 5-19, 2006), 218-231.
An ‘enigma to their parents’: the founding and aims of the Notre Dame Child
Guidance Clinic, Glasgow. John Stewart. Innes Review, 57 (Spring, 2006),
54-76.
Struggle for Souls: Catholicism and Communism in Twentieth-Century New
Zealand. Nicholas Reid. Australian Historical Studies, 37 (Oct., 2006), 72-88.
The Confrontation Between the Lithuanian Catholic Church and the Soviet
Regime.Vilma Narkuté. New Blackfriars, 87 (Sept., 2006), 456-475.
Inediti del tempo di guerra. Robert Graham (†). Civiltà Cattolica, 157, III (Aug.
5-19, 2006), 261-273.
“The Righteous Among the Nations”: Bonhoeffer,Yad Vashem and the Church.
Mark R. Lindsay. Toronto Journal of Theology, 22 (Spring, 2006), 23-38.
Frank Jägerstätter: il contadino che rifiutò Hitler in nome di Dio. Piersandro
Vanzan. Civiltà Cattolica, 157, II (May 20, 2006), 345-354.
‘There can be no Vacation from God’: Children’s Retreats, Leisure and Social
Change in Poland. Esther Peperkamp. Religion, State & Society, 34 (Sept,
2006), 271-286.

248

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Les relations entre le Cardinal Montini-Paul VI (1897-1978) et le Cardinal
Suenens (1904-1996) pendant le Concile Vatican II. Leo Declerck and Toon
Osaer. Istituto Paolo VI, Notiziario n. 51 (June, 2006), 47-77.
Inventing Ecumenism? Inter-confessional Dialogue in Transylvania, Romania in
the 1960s. Anca Sincan.
,
Religion in Eastern Europe, XXVI (Aug., 2006), 116.
El ambiente moral europeo, según el Cardenal Joseph Ratzinger. José Enrique
Pérez Asensi. Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 43 (2005), 263-293.
American and Canadian
“Sathans inventions and worships”: Two 17th-century clergymen on Native
American religions. Nancy Senior. Studies in Religion, 35 (2, 2006), 271290.
Puritan Sermon Method and Church Government: Solomon Stoddard’s
Rhetorical Legacy. Mark Garrett Longaker. New England Quarterly, LXXIX
(Sept., 2006), 439-460.
A Passage in Established Religion: Dundee Chapel of St. Michael’s Parish,Talbot
County, Maryland. K. Matthew Kinnamont. Maryland Historical Magazine,
101 (Fall, 2006), 271-303.
Thinking Historically about Diversity: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the
Construction of Civic Culture in Early America. Christopher S. Grenda.
Journal of Church and State, 48 (Summer, 2006), 567-600.
“We Wish to Do You Good”: The Quaker Mission to the Oneida Nation, 17901840. Karim M.Tiro. Journal of the Early Republic, 26 (Fall, 2006), 353-376.
The Historic Catholic Cultural Base of the American Southwest: The Spanish
and the Irish. Patrick Foley. Catholic Southwest, 17 (2006), 35-48.
The American Protestant Missionary Schools in Greece in the Nineteenth
Century and Greek Orthodox Education. Polly Thanailaki. Greek Orthodox
Theological Review, 49 (1-2, 2004), 75-87.
Letters from Edward Fenwick, O.P., Bishop of Cincinnati, to Some Jesuits in
England, 1821-1832. Geoffrey Holt, S.J. Archivum Historicum Societatis
Jesu, LXXV (July-Dec., 2006), 309-323.
Father Manuel Rada, Priest and Advocate for New Mexico, 1821-1843. Rick
Hendricks. Catholic Southwest, 17 (2006), 9-33.
Reconsidering Grabau on Ministry and Sacraments. Benjamin T. G. Mayes.
Lutheran Quarterly, XX (Summer, 2006), 190-212.
Greater New York City Area Catholics’ Participation in the Funeral of Abraham
Lincoln. Kenneth J. Zanca. New York History, 87 (Spring, 2006), 173-202.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

249

European Iconography on the Texas Frontier: St. Mary’s Cathedral, Austin: (a)
Gothic Revival and Iconic Glass. Susan Anderson Kerr. (b) Music in Glass:
The St. Cecilia Window. Christopher LeCluyse. Catholic Southwest, 17
(2006), 49-64.
One Blessing After Another: A History of Concordia University Wisconsin.
William R. Cario. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 79 (Summer,
2006), 110-132.
The Retreat and Resurgence of Evangelical Civic Engagement in the Twentieth
Century. Matthew A.Tapie. Restoration Quarterly, 48 (3, 2006), 157-170.
Negotiating Assimilation: Chicago Catholic High Schools’ Pursuit of
Accreditation in the Early Twentieth Century. Ann Marie Ryan. History of
Education Quarterly, 46 (Fall, 2006), 348-381.
The Quiet Crusade: Moody Bible Institute’s Outreach to Public Schools and
the Mainstreaming of Appalachia, 1921-66.Adam Laats. Church History, 75
(Sept., 2006), 565-593.
The Canadian Council of Churches: Its Founding Vision and Early Years, 19441964. Daniel C. Goodwin. Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 41 (Spring,
2004), 147-173.
Christianity, Dissent, and the Cold War: A. J. Muste’s Challenge to Realism and
U.S. Empire. Leilah Danielson. Diplomatic History, 30 (Sept., 2006), 645669.
John Strietelmeier: Witness to His Generation. Richard Baepler. Concordia
Historical Institute Quarterly, 79 (Summer, 2006), 71-109.
A Church Apart: Catholic Desegregation in Newton Grove, North Carolina.
Blake Slonecker. North Carolina Historical Review, LXXXIII (July, 2006),
322-354.
Cooperative Religion in Quebec. Richard Loughweed. Journal of Ecumenical
Studies, 41 (Spring, 2004), 174-204.
Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Last Serious Attempt to Put a
Question on Religion in the United States Census. Kevin M. Schultz. Journal
of American History, 93 (Sept., 2006), 359-384.
Burning Birth Certificates and Atomic Tupperware Parties: Creating the
Antiabortion Movement in the Shadow of the Vietnam War. Richard L.
Hughes. The Historian, 68 (Fall, 2006), 541-558.

Latin American
Lisandro de la Torre y la cuestión religiosa en la Argentina. Héctor Ghiretti.
Revista de Historia Americana y Argentina, XXII (40, 2005), 103-131.

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

Bales, Susan Ridgely. When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First
Communion. (Chapel Hill:The University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp.
xiv, 257. $55.00 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.)
Bergant, Dianne, C.S.A. Israel’s Story: Part One. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical
Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 99. $9.95 paperback.)
Bruce, Susannah Ural. The Harp and the Eagle: Irish Volunteers and the
Union Army, 1861-1865. (New York: New York University Press. 2006. Pp.
xiii, 308. $22.00 paperback; $70.00 clothbound.)
Carrere, Ernest Daniel. Creating a Human World: A New Psychological and
Religious Anthropology in Dialogue with Freud, Heidegger, and
Kierkegaard. (Scranton: University of Scranton Press. [Distributed by the
University of Chicago Press.] 2006. Pp. xxii, 281. $30.00 paperback.)
Chavalas, Mark W. (Ed.). The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in
Translation. (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing. 2006. Pp.
xxii, 445. Paperback.)
Dawson, Christopher. The Movement Towards Christian Unity in the
Nineteenth Century. Edited by Rene Kollar. A Wimmer Memorial Lecture.
(Latrobe, Pa.: Saint Vincent Archabbey Publications. 2006. Pp. 66. $8.75
paperback.) Dawson delivered this lecture in 1960.
Gelpi, Donald L. Closer Walk: Confessions of a U.S. Jesuit Yat. (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 2006. Pp. ix, 418. $49.95
paperback.)
Knirck, Jason K. Imagining Ireland’s Independence: The Debates over the
Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
Inc. 2006. Pp. xii, 202. $24.95 paperback; $72.00 clothbound.)
Lorandini, Cinzia. Famiglia e impresa: I Salvadori di Trento nei secoli XVII e
XVIII. (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2006. Pp. 383. €25,00 paperback.)
Mackey, James P. Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian
Faith and Its Future among Religions. [A Systematic Theology.]. (New York
and London: Continuum. 2006. Pp. xix, 401. $120.00 clothbound; $34.95
paperback.)
Musto, Ronald G. Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the
New Age. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xx, 436. $60.00
clothbound.)

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