Thomas F. X. Noble
President
The American Catholic Historical Association
2012
Photograph by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

The Catholic Historical
Review
VOL. XCIX

APRIL, 2013

No. 2

WHY POPE JOAN?
BY

THOMAS F. X. NOBLE*

For 700 years a tale has been told about an English woman who
was elected pope in the mid-ninth century. Called Pope Joan, she
supposedly was born in Mainz of English parents. Dressed as a
man, she traveled to Athens with a lover, acquired an education,
moved to Rome, impressed the cardinals (who did not know she
was a woman), and was unanimously elected pope.While crossing
the city in a procession she unexpectedly gave birth near the church
of San Clemente, died on the spot, and was buried there. Joan’s
story cannot be traced back to the ninth century. It arose in the thirteenth century and was universally believed until the sixteenth century. In succeeding historical periods the figure of Joan proved
useful to many writers.
Keywords: female clergy, papacy, Pope Joan
I present the story of a woman who never lived but who nevertheless refuses to die. I have been reading, writing, and teaching papal
history for forty years, and I have lost count of how many times I have
been asked by students, colleagues, friends, fellow parishioners, and
out-of-the-blue email correspondents to tell them about Pope Joan.
Enter “Pope Joan” into Google, and nearly 3 million hits result. By contrast, Pope Benedict XVI boasts a robust 33.8 million hits. Still, Joan’s
total is impressive. I certainly did not read them all, but I read quite a
few; they range from the serious and scholarly to the ideological and
*Dr. Noble is professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre
Dame, email: tnoble@nd.edu. He delivered a shortened version of the paper as his presidential address at the ninety-third meeting of the American Catholic Historical
Association in New Orleans on January 5, 2013.

219

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WHY POPE JOAN?

polemical and from the viciously anti-Catholic to the just plain weird.
Enter “Pope Joan,” “Die Päpstin,” “La papesse,” or “la papessa” into
WorldCat, and almost 1100 titles result, including scholarly books,
plays, novels, poems, and films.These numbers suffice in signaling the
magnitude of the problem. No real pope commands anything like this
concerted attention reaching back eight centuries.What I want to discuss is why that should be the case, but space considerations will
require me to be selective.
Here is a bare-bones account of Joan’s story as it came to be known
in the later Middle Ages and has persisted to our own time. A girl was
born to English parents living in Mainz. Perhaps as a late adolescent,
she disguised herself as a man and fled with her lover to study in
Athens. After some time, she went to Rome, was warmly received, was
admired for her learning, and was unanimously elected pope. No one
knew she was a woman until, after a pontificate of two years and
some months, she gave birth to a child while processing from St.
Peter’s to St. John Lateran. She died on the spot, and later papal processions avoided the place. Supposedly a statue of Joan and her offspring was placed near where she died. Subsequently a ritual was
inserted into the papal installation ceremonies to verify that the
newly elected pope was indeed male. Joan’s pontificate was believed
to have followed that of Pope Leo IV who died in 855.1
Only in the central decades of the thirteenth century was Joan’s
story recorded for the first time. Within a short time several further
accounts appeared. In his Universal Metz Chronicle, written around
1255, the Dominican Jean de Mailly included this account:
To be verified: About a certain pope, or rather a popesse, for it was a
woman. Pretending to be a man he was made a notary of the curia on
account of the uprightness of his character, and then cardinal and finally
pope. On a certain day, when he had mounted a horse, he gave birth to a
child and immediately by Roman justice had his feet tied together and was
dragged by the tail of the horse and was stoned by the people for half a
league and where he died, he was buried, and it was written there: Peter,
Father of Fathers, Publish the Parturition of the Popesse. Under him was
instituted the fast of the Four Times, called the fast of the Popesse.2

1

The story has been told many times. For an introduction to the subject, see J. N. D.
Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes (Oxford, 1986), pp. 329–30.
2
Historiae mettensis Monumenta Varia, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH SS 24:514
[=Monumenta Germaniae historica inde ab a. C. 500 usque ad a. 1500, Scriptores,

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221

A few points may be noted right away: In the autograph manuscript
Jean apparently wrote Require (“Confirm”) next to this passage; all of
Jean’s pronouns are in fact masculine; the popesse is not named, does
not have a place of origin, and is not assigned dates.
A few years later another Dominican, Etienne de Bourbon, inserted
a brief notice about the popes into the section on prudence in his
treatise On the Seven Gifts of the Spirit. The question at hand was
prudence in the election of clerics. He says:
An astonishing stroke of audacity, or, rather of insanity, happened around
the year 1100, as is reported in chronicles. A certain educated woman,
learned in the art of writing, assuming male dress and presenting herself as
a man came to Rome and, having been accepted both for her energy and
her learning, was made a notary of the curia, then, with the devil’s help, cardinal and afterwards pope. She became pregnant and gave birth when she
mounted [a horse]. When Roman justice learned of these events, her feet
were tied to the hooves of a horse and she was dragged out of the city; she
was stoned by the people for half a league. She was buried where she died,
and on the stone placed over her [body] this little verse was written:
“Refrain, Father of the Fathers, from Publishing the Parturition of the
Popesse.” Behold to what an abominable end such rash presumption leads.3

This text calls for a few comments. The only “chronicle” to which
Etienne could be referring is that of Jean de Mailly, and yet he alters

vols. 1–32 (Hannover, 1826–1934), vol. 24, p. 514]:“Require de quodam papa vel potius
papissa, quia femina erat, et simulans se esse virum, probitate ingenii factus notarius
curie, deinde cardinalis et tandem papa. Quadam die, cum ascenderet equum, peperit
puerum, et statim Romana iusticia, ligatis pedibus eius, et caudam equi tractus est et a
populo lapidatus per dimidiam leugam, et ubi obit, ibi sepultus fuit, et ibi scriptum est:
Petre, pater patrum, papisse prodito partum. Sub ipso institutum fuit ieiunium
quatuor temporum, et dicitur ieunium papisse.”
3
Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum, ed. Jacobus Echard (Paris, 1719), 1:367:“Accidit
autem mirabilis audacia imo insania circum annum Domini 1100 ut dicitur in chronicis.
Quaedam mulier litterata et in arte nondi [sic; notandi?] edocta, assumpto virili habitu,
et virum se fingens, venit Roman, et tam industria quam letteratura accepta, facta est
notarius curiae, post diabolo procurante cardinalis, post papa. Haec impraegnata cum
ascenderet peperit. Quod cum novisset Romana iustitia, ligatis pedibus ejus ad pedes
equi distracta est extra urbem, et dimidiam leucam a populo lapidate, et ubi fuit mortua
ibi fuit sepulta, et super lapidem super ea positum scriptus est versiculus: Parce pater
patrum papisse prodere partum. Ecce ad quam detestabilem finem ducit tam temeraria
praesumatio.” Alain Boureau discusses the text in The Myth of Pope Joan, trans. Lydia
Cochrane (Chicago, 2001), pp. 117–19. For a fuller discussion see Elisabeth Gössmann,
Mulier Papa: Der Skandal eines weiblichen Papstes, [Archiv für philosophie- und
theologie-geschichtliche Frauenforschung, 5], (Munich, 1994), pp. 24–32.

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WHY POPE JOAN?

Jean’s text in a few respects. Here we have a date—“around 1100”—
and the active participation of the devil.
Between 1265 and 1277 Martin Strebsky produced three recensions of his Chronicle of the Roman Popes and Emperors. A
Dominican usually called Martinus Polonus because he was a high
official in the Polish province of the Order, Martin was a papal chaplain and was appointed bishop of Gniezno but died before taking up
the position. Some skeptics have argued that a later hand interpolated
the account of the popesse into Martin’s third recension, but a century and a half ago Ludwig Weiland demonstrated that the account is
in fact Martin’s.4 Here is what Martin says:
After that Leo [that is, Leo IV], John, an Englishman, born in Mainz, reigned
for two years, seven months, and four days. He died in Rome and the
papacy was vacant for a month. He, as is said, was a woman, and when she
was still a girl she was taken to Athens dressed as a man by a certain lover.
She advanced so much in various branches of knowledge that no one
could be found to equal her. Subsequently she taught the trivium in Rome
and had great teachers as her disciples and auditors. And because her life
and learning were held in high repute in the City, she was elected pope
unanimously. But while pope she was impregnated by her lover. Not knowing the time of her delivery, when she was headed from St. Peter’s to the
Lateran, she gave birth in a narrow passage between the Coliseum and San
Clemente and, after her death, as is reported, she was buried in that very
place. Because the lord pope always avoids that street it is believed by
many that he does this on account of his detestation of that event. He is
not placed in the catalogue of the holy pontiffs on account of the deformity of the female sex as it applied to this matter.5

4
Ludwig Weiland, “Die Chronik des Predigermönches Johannes von Mailly,” Archiv
der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, 12 (1875): 1–78. Weiland studied the works of both Jean de Mailly (in fact, he identified him) and Martinus Polonus.
5
Chronicon Pontificicum et Imperatorum, ed. Ludwig Weiland, MGH SS 22:428:
“Post hunc Leonem Iohannes Anglicus nacione Maguntius sedit annis 2, mensibus 7,
diebus 4, et mortuus est Rome, et cessavit papatus mense 1. His, ut asseritur, femina fuit,
et in puellari etate Athenis ducta a quodam amasio suo in habitu virili, sic in diversiis
scienciis profecit, ut nullus sibi par inveniretur, adeo ut post Rome trivium legens
magnos magistros discipulos et auditores haberet. Et cum in Urbe viat et sciencia
magne opinionis esset, in papam concorditer elegitur. Sed in papatu per suum familiarem impregnatur. Verum tempus partus ignorans, cum de sancto Petro in Lateranum
tenderet, angustiate inter Coliseum et sancti Clementis ecclesiam peperit, et post
mortua ibidem, ut dicitur, sepulta fuit. Et quia domnus papa eandem viam semper obliquat, creditur a plerisque, quod propter detestationem facti hoc faciat. Nec ponitur in
cathalogo sanctorum pontificum propter mulieris sexus quantum ad hoc deformitatem.”

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

223

Martin’s account merits a few more comments than the first two. He
provides a name, John (whence Johanna or Joan); a locale (Mainz); a
date (855 to 858); an English background; and a period of study in
Athens and public teaching in Rome. Martin does not assign John/Joan
any offices in the papal government, does not have John/Joan dragged
through the streets of Rome, and does not mention the gravestone
with the six Ps. Composing his text must have caused Martin some difficulties, because his pronouns slip back and forth between the masculine and the feminine. Finally, it will have been noticed that not one
of these accounts mentions the supposed rite according to which the
pope’s masculinity was confirmed. I shall return to this point.
Martin’s text became the canonical version of the Joan story. His
chronicle survives in hundreds of manuscripts and was translated into
Armenian, Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish.
Literally countless later authors simply appropriated Martin’s version
of the Joan story. Ironically, when various scholars in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries compiled lengthy lists of authors who
attested to the truth of the story, they neglected to mention or else
did not realize that those very authors were merely repeating, often
verbatim, the account of Martin.
A first question that naturally imposes itself is:Where did this story
arise? As previously noted, there are differences among the accounts
of Jean de Mailly, Etienne de Bourbon, and Martinus Polonus, but there
is also a recognizable core of common material. Suffice it to say that
there is not a scrap of evidence from the ninth century bearing upon
Joan; there is no gap in the papal succession between Leo IV and
Benedict III;6 there is a perfectly credible vita of Benedict in the Liber
Pontificalis;7 and there are authentic, datable letters of Benedict.8

For discussion see Boureau, Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 123–28; Gössmann, Mulier Papa,
pp. 33–42; Max Kerner and Klaus Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna: Biographie einer
Legende (Cologne, 2010), pp. 69–84.
6
Raymond Davis shows that Leo IV died on July 17, 855, and that Benedict III was
elected on September 29 of the same year; see The Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes
(Liber Pontificalis), [Translated Texts for Historians], (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 111, 167.
This is a slightly long vacancy in the ninth century but not enough time to accommodate Joan.
7
Liber Pontificalis, ed. L. M. O. Duchesne, [Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises
d’Athènes et de Rome], (repr. Paris, 1981), 2:140–48.
8
See Philippus Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum (repr. Graz, 1956), 1:339–41,
nos. 2663, 2664, 2666–73.

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WHY POPE JOAN?

Some have suggested that a mysterious prophetess named Thiota who
showed up in Mainz in 847 may be behind the story, but this theory
seems highly improbable.9 Centuries later, some writers asserted that
Pope John VIII (872–82), perhaps the figure behind the Joan story, was
“womanly” because he failed to stand up to Patriarch Photius, but
there is no hint of this in any reasonably contemporary source.10
Some point to the tenth century, to the so-called “Pornocracy,” when
Theodora and Marozia had lovers and sons named John who became
popes.11 Not too much can be made of this hypothesis. Pope Leo IX
wrote to Patriarch Michael Keroularios in 1054 and upbraided him for
promoting women and eunuchs in his church.12 It has been argued
that Leo could not have said such a thing if there had been a female
pope, but that is only negative evidence and also reads too much into
Leo’s letter. Fourteenth-century manuscripts of the chronicles of
Marianus Scotus, who died in 1086, and of Sigebert of Gembloux, who
died in 1112, have Joan, but in the oldest manuscripts Joan is, like T. S.
Eliot’s cat Macavity,“not there.”13 Cesare d’Onofrio argues that it is just
as likely that Joan was expunged from early texts as that she was
added to later ones, but his argument has not gained any traction.14 In
his Pantheon of 1190 Godfrey of Viterbo seems to say that “the
popesse Johanna is not numbered,” sans plus. But in this case, once
again, we are dealing with a later interpolation.15 It seems likely that
the story originated in Rome as what would now be called an “urban
legend.”Already in 1830 the colorful Johann Josef Ignaz von Döllinger,
9

On Thiota see Annales Fuldenses, ed. Friedrich Kurze, [MGH, Scriptores in usum
scholarum], (Hannover, 1891), sub anno 447, pp. 36–37. For discussion of her possible
connection with Joan, see Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 57–59.
10
Cesare Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici (Venice, 1711), 10: 465: “Johannem
Octavum Papam fuisse foemineum.”The connection among Baronius, John VIII, Photius,
and Joan was first treated in scholarly fashion by Joseph Hergenröther, Photius,
Patriarch von Constantinopel: sein Leben, seine Schriften und das griechische
Schisma (Regensburg, 1867), p. 394. For further discussion see Gössmann, Mulier
Papa, pp. 143–44, and Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, p. 127.
11
See Cesare d’Onofrio, La papessa Giovanna: Roma e papato tra storia e
leggenda (Rome, 1979), pp. 113, 207; Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp. 103–08; Rosemary
Pardoe and Darroll Pardoe, The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan. The First
Complete Documentation of the Facts behind the Legend (Wellingborough, UK, 1988),
pp. 54–56; Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 140–41.
12
PL 143:744–69, esp. 760 [=Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne,
Series Latina, 217 vols. (Paris, 1841–64), vol. 143, cols. 744–69, esp. 760].
13
Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 69, 120–23, 126–27; Gössmann,
Mulier Papa, pp. 51–53; Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 116, 137.
14
D’Onofrio, La papessa Giovanna, pp. 40–42.
15
Gössmann, Mulier Papa, p. 53; Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, p. 69.

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

225

in Papstfabeln des Mittelalters, attempted to assemble some common
features of the prime versions of the story—the ones referred to
above—to see if he could account for the legend.Although improved
upon in some respects, his account remains fundamental. Döllinger
pointed to the perforated chairs, the stone with the inscription
PPPPPP, the statue of a woman with child allegedly in pontifical garb,
and the detours in the papal procession.16 I will take up these elements one by one.
Around 1290 Geoffroy de Courlon, a Benedictine, and Robert
d’Uzès, a Dominican, first mentioned the famous chair. Here is
Robert’s account of one of his visions:“Then the Spirit took me to the
palace of the Lateran.And there, it put me down in the porch, before
the porphyry seats, where it is said that they verify that the pope is a
man.”17 Probably owing to the papacy’s long absence in Avignon, the
story vanished until 1379, when Johannes of Viktring, after his discussion of Pope Joan, said,“To avoid such an error, as soon as the elected
is seated on the throne of Peter, the least of the deacons touches his
genitals on a chair pierced to that effect.”18 Until 1644, when the
Swedish Lutheran Lars Banck claimed to have witnessed the rite of
verification at the installation of Pope Innocent X, the story was endlessly repeated. In 1406 Jacopo d’Angelo ironically testified to the currency of the story when he insisted that people should cease believing this “senseless madness.”19 In 1479 Bartolommeo Sacchi, better
known as Platina, gave the story a novel turn. He said the newly
elected pope was placed on the sedes stercoraria to demonstrate that
he was only a man and, like other men, had to defecate.20 In fact, as
will be seen in a moment, Platina was confused about the chairs that
were actually used. In the early-sixteenth century several writers, with
grim humor, said that the rite had fallen out of use because recent
popes had so many bastard children that their sex was not in doubt.21
Some said the rite had been introduced by Benedict III, Joan’s supposed successor, but others attributed it to Pope John VIII.
16
Johann Josef Ignaz von Döllinger, Papstfabeln des Mittelalters (Munich, 1830), pp.
32–53.
17
Quoted by Boureau, Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 11–12.
18
Boureau, Myth of Pope Joan, p. 11.
19
Boureau, Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 13–14, 26–29.
20
Bartolomeo Platina, Platynae historici Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum, ed. Giacinto Gaida (Città di Castello, 1932), pp. 151–52.
21
Boureau names Janus Pannonius, Marko Marulić, and Jean-Jacques Boissard; see
Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 23–24.

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WHY POPE JOAN?

This rite, let me emphasize right away, never existed. But its history
can more or less be reconstructed. From at least the late-eighth century popes were installed at St. Peter’s and then traveled across Rome
to take possession of the Lateran. In 1099, on the election of Pope
Paschal II, the chairs are first mentioned as part of the ritual of taking
possession of the Lateran.22 Now, there was on the Lateran porch a
chair, the so-called sedes stercoraria, on which the pope sat briefly
before entering the basilica.This chair was not pierced, and when the
newly elected sat on it, he was addressed as follows:“May he lift up
the poor man from the dust and raise up the poor from the dung and
may he sit with princes and hold the seat of glory.”The point was to
emphasize humility.23 What was new in 1099 was that Paschal sat on
two perforated marble chairs—they were rosso antico, but the later
story always turned them into porphyry—that were placed in front of
the chapel of St. Lawrence in the Lateran complex. One of these is
now in the Vatican, and one is in the Louvre.24 They should not be
confused with the—shall we say,“potty chair”—in the Lateran porch;
it is now in the cloister. The rite came at a troubled time. The
Investiture Controversy had not been resolved. Paschal faced an
antipope.There were republican ideas swirling in Rome.And the religious rites pertaining to making a new pope were now all completed
at St. Peter’s, so the rite of taking possession of the Lateran was basically a secular ceremony symbolizing the pope’s right to rule the city.
Apparently Leo X in 1513 was the last pope to complete this ritual. In
fraught circumstances, then, a modest change to an older rite provoked a playful, parodic story that spread in the way such stories
often do.
The other constituents of Döllinger’s myth kit may be treated more
briefly. First, Joan’s supposed gravestone with the mysterious six Ps.
Wherever this stone was, it vanished centuries ago, and there is no
reason to believe that any of our witnesses to the Joan story had ever
actually seen it.Almost certainly the stone was a plinth for a statue of
Mithras or perhaps for a priest of that cult erected by a devotee.
Mithras was often called “Father of Fathers,” so the Ps probably resolve
as “Have mercy, father of fathers, paid for with his own money” (Parce,
pater patrum, pecunia propria posuit). At some unknown moment
22

Duchesne, ed., Liber Pontificalis, 2:296.
Text quoted and translated from R. Pardoe and D. Pardoe, The Female Pope, pp.
49–52.
24
For a full discussion see Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 72–103.
23

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

227

an anonymous wit gave the reading “Peter, Father of Fathers, Publish
the Parturition of the Popesse,” and the story went into circulation.25
The statue of mother and child might well have been a Madonna
except that it is more likely that we are dealing with an elegantly clad
pagan goddess nursing an infant.There is a fine example in the Vatican
Museum.26 Where this statue actually was located is completely
unknown, although a number of writers said that it was on the street
corner opposite San Clemente. Even Luther claimed that he saw it
when he visited Rome in 1510. Once again, someone in Rome reinterpreted an old statue and connected it with the popesse, and his
gentle mockery turned into a hard historical fact that circulated for
centuries.
Finally, then, the detour in the papal procession from St. Peter’s to
the Lateran. Döllinger realized, and d’Onofrio showed in careful detail,
that the Via San Giovanni in Lateranno basically dead-ended at San
Clemente until early-modern times when it was extended to the
Coliseum. In other words, the papal processions, indeed any traffic,
had to turn either right or left at San Clemente. Typically the route
took a left turn into the Via dei Querceti, later called the Vicus Papisse,
before making a right turn into the Via dei Santi Quattro Coronati.
From the twelfth century processions took a right turn at San
Clemente, almost certainly because of the extremely narrow street to
the left. Once again, some wag connected the dots and spun a story
that the popes always took a detour at San Clemente “because of
detestation of that place.”27
Whether these four slender threads can be wound together in such
a way as to drag the story of the popesse from the early Middle Ages
to the twenty-first century is open to legitimate question. But they are
all we have to go on. Certainly other aspects of the story first put into
words by Jean de Mailly, Etienne de Bourbon, and Martinus Polonus
must have been circulating. The basic story is Roman through and
through, but it is worth recalling that when it was written down it
25

This is Döllinger’s interpretation, which has prevailed.
A century ago Giuseppe Tomassetti proposed that the statue in the Chiaramonte
Gallery of the Vatican Museum might be the very statue long asserted to represent Joan;
see “La statua della papessa Giovanna,” Bolletino della commissione archeologica
comunale di Roma, 35 (1907), 82–95. Be that as it may, it was probably such a statue
that gave rise to the legend.
27
D’Onofrio, La papessa Giovanna, pp. 234–37.
26

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WHY POPE JOAN?

was northern Europeans who put quill to parchment. Plenty of
people went to Rome for lots of reasons. Some of them brought Joan
back with them.
A discussion of some of the many ways in which the Joan story
has been read, used, and misused can benefit from a few more details
concerning the story itself. First of all, her name, Joan. Between 1300
and 1600 she was usually called Johanna, hence Joan, but sometimes
called Agnes, Anna, and Gilberta.28 This suggests that as the story circulated it changed shape even in basic details. Second, why Mainz?
Broadly speaking, for Italians all trouble came from the north, and
most of that trouble came from Germany. The Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation had no capital city. But writers such as Otto of
Freising and the Ligurinus poet said that Mainz was the finest and
most important city in Germany. In the vernacular Charlemagne
cycles that were immensely popular in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, the arch-betrayer Ganelon was count of Mainz, and his
chief supporters were burghers of Mainz.That is not much to go on,
but it is all we have.29 Third, why Athens? The point is that Athens
was an intellectual backwater right through the Middle Ages. I suggest, following on a hint by Döllinger, that Athens became the place
where Joan acquired her learning before coming to Rome as a result
of the idea of the translatio studiorum.30 In a letter Alcuin spoke of
the transfer of learning from Athens to Rome to Aachen.31 By the high
Middle Ages, Paris had displaced Aachen in this discourse, but the
underlying idea that learning had passed from the Greeks to the
Latins, from the pagans to the Christians, and from the Mediterranean
to the North was deeply embedded. In an ironic way, it seems that
Joan was one of the vessels in which that learning was carried.
One final preliminary point about the story is appropriate. From its
first appearance in the late-thirteenth century until the late-sixteenth
century the story was taken to be literally true by virtually everyone.
The one exception is Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, who
discovered that the Hussites referred to Joan and said the matter was

28
Boureau discusses Joan’s various names across the later Middle Ages see The Myth
of Pope Joan, pp. 174–209.
29
To this day, the wisest words on Mainz are Döllinger’s; see Papstfabeln, pp. 47–50.
30
Döllinger, Papstfabeln , pp. 52–53.
31
Alcuin, Ep. 170, Epistolae Karolini aevi, ed. Ernst Dümmler, [MGH, Epistolae 4,
Epistolae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi 2], (Berlin, 1895), p. 279.

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

229

doubtful.32 But he did not pursue it; neither did anyone else. It is
astonishing that refutations did not arise and proliferate, but they did
not. It was only in 1562 that the Augustinian friar Onofrio Panvinio, in
preparing a new edition of Platina’s Lives of the Popes, explicitly
rejected the historicity of Pope Joan.33 Applying the best kinds of
humanist historical, codicological, and philological scholarship, he
demonstrated that a Pope Joan never existed. His arguments are essentially the same as those used today by a competent historian.The generations after Panvinio’s saw further Catholic rejections of Joan’s existence and Protestant arguments to the contrary.34 Ironically, the
historicity of Joan was finally rejected in 1647 by the Amsterdam
Calvinist David Blondel who represented the rationalist side of
reformed Christianity and believed that myth and legend had no place
in any arguments about the Christian past. It is true, however, that
some of Blondel’s co-religionists believed that he had betrayed the
cause.35 With only a few eccentric exceptions, no one has believed in
the historical reality of Pope Joan for about 350 years.
I already called attention to some slight differences of detail in the
earliest accounts of Joan. Embellishments to the story continued
throughout its life, particularly in the three centuries or so after its
first appearance among the Dominicans. I will mention just a few of
the many transformations that appeared. Joan’s parents were rendered as English missionaries to the Continent. This detail doubtless
answered the question of why she was born in Mainz but was English
by nation. In most versions of the story Joan has agency; she acts on
her own volition. But in some versions she succumbs to Satan’s temptations. Usually Joan took on male dress so as to procure the kind of
learning that was denied to women, but in one version her parents
recognized her intelligence and so dressed and raised her as a boy and
sent her to the monastery of Fulda. We saw that Jean de Mailly credited Joan with instituting the Four Fasts—that is, the Ember Days. She
32

Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 221–23, 228; Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp.
61–65, especially good on Hus. See also Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, p.
111.
33
Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp. 120–21; Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 245–49;
Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 123–25.
34
Gössmann ably chronicles these different Catholic-Protestant treatments of Joan
in Mulier Papa, pp. 110–48. See also Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp.
124–30.
35
Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp. 189–95; Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp.
253–54; Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 129–30.

230

WHY POPE JOAN?

did no such thing, but in many places the Ember Days were, contrary
to expectations, times of carnival frolicking. That is probably, again,
how they became connected to Joan. But her liturgical efforts do not
stop there. She was credited with mass prefaces. A book on necromancy was attributed to her. She was believed to have consecrated
bishops and ordained priests. Pier Paolo Vergerio thought she was a
witch. One could go on and on, but the point has been made that Joan
had almost as many lives as people who remembered her.36
Joan’s story was told again and again because she—or, at any rate,
the story about her—was useful; it was a good launching point for
other discussions. Most often the story was polemical in intent.
Sometimes it was carnavalesque, a position that stands somewhere
between fun and furor. Given the huge number of times when Joan
was mentioned by someone,37 I can do no more here than offer a
brief sampling of the kinds of issues in which Joan became embroiled.
Joan’s story emerged among Dominican and Franciscan authors in
the last decades of the thirteenth century. I previously discussed the
primary Dominican authors, but for reasons of space I have omitted
the Franciscans. This was a period when controversy wracked the
orders, when papal decisions for or against positions dear to one
order or the other were causes of joy or consternation and when the
abdication of Celestine V and the election of Boniface VIII called the
legitimacy of the papal office itself into question.This is precisely the
context in which Brian Tierney placed the emergence of the discussion of papal infallibility.38 Joan’s story was a kind of prophetic warning about how a wicked pope could destroy either a religious order
or the Church as a whole. Joan was useful in thinking about the election of 1294: What happens if an ineligible person is duly elected
36
Gössmann, Mulier Papa, is excellent on the embellishments as a component of
the reception history. The Dominicans had already cited satanic influence, but the
Franciscans were especially focused on this issue; see Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin
Johanna, pp. 24, 67, 112–14. Joan’s liturgical and sacramental achievements are discussed by Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, p. 238, and by Kerner and Herbers, Die
Päpstin Johanna, pp. 119–23. On Vergerio’s calling Joan a witch see Boureau, The Myth
of Pope Joan, p. 240.
37
A handy list of all the times that Joan is mentioned appears in Boureau, The Myth
of Pope Joan, pp. 315–22; even so, he omits many figures who appear in Gössmann’s
extraordinary compilation of “receptions.”
38
Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility 1150–1350: A Study on the Concepts
of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages [Studies in the History of
Christian Thought, 6.], Second Impression with Postscript (Leiden, 1988).

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

231

pope? Or what happens if an eligible person is elected but proves
inadequate to the task?39
The removal of the papacy to Avignon and then the Great Schism
intensified these questions.40 For some writers, Joan signified the possibility that electors might make a terrible mistake. But if such a mistake were made and recognized, how might it be remedied? Canonists
expressed strict and rather abstract views on these topics, but theologians viewed them a little differently. William of Ockham brought
the Joan story into the realm of faith and fact. For him, the situation of
a particular pope was never a blemish on the Church, because the
Church was never without its true head, Jesus Christ. Obviously
Ockham’s argument did not warm the hearts of papalists. Nor did the
views of John Wycliff who treated the story of Pope Joan—he called
her Anna—as evidence for the inevitable corruption of the visible
Church.
Humanism brought Joan to the fore in a number of guises. Giovanni
Boccaccio included her among his illustrious women.41 His Joan was
a wicked and audacious woman who, dressed as a man, fled her
father’s house with her lover. After her lover died, she pursued her
studies, eventually becoming pope. Overcome by lust, she became
pregnant, gave birth to a child, and was thrown into a dungeon by the
cardinals. Apart from his embellishments, Boccaccio basically reprises
the late-thirteenth-century views of Jacobus da Voragine who made of
Joan an exemplum of audacious presumption.42 Other humanists
took a different view. In somewhat different ways, writers such as
Martin Le Franc, Bartolommeo Goggio, and Mario Equicola picked up
on Joan’s erudition and made her one of the learned women of the
Renaissance.43 Her pontificate, they said, was divinely willed. Still
39
Helpful discussions appear in Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 109–11,
145–56, and Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 78–84. Perhaps the Pardoes
have it right in saying that the story was told among the friars as a “scurrilous joke”; see
The Female Pope, p. 59.
40
Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp. 56–65; Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 151–56;
Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 78–81, 92–109.
41
Vittorio Zaccaria, ed., De mulieribus claris, [Tutte le Opere di Giovanni
Boccaccio, 10], 2nd ed. (Milan, 1970), pp. 414–19. There is an English translation by
Guido A. Guarino, Concerning Famous Women (New Brunswick, NJ, 1963), pp. 231–33.
42
Da Voragine’s view is discussed with references by Boureau, The Myth of Pope
Joan, pp. 119–22. See also Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp. 42–43.
43
Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 87–88; Gössmann, Mulier Papa,
pp. 78–85.

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WHY POPE JOAN?

other humanists responded to the papacy’s shifting views on humanism and humanists—say, when some popes forbade the teaching of
classical poets or when Paul II abolished the college of abbreviators
and, in the process, cut off some good jobs in the curia—with
scathing, satirical attacks based in different ways on Joan’s story.44
For early Protestant writers the temptation to equate Joan with the
whore of Babylon, with whom they already equated the papacy, was
irresistible. But the Joan story, which Protestant writers affected to
believe until well into the seventeenth century, served other purposes
as well. It called into question the integrity of the Petrine succession
and the validity of holy orders—it will be recalled that Joan was
alleged to have consecrated bishops and ordained priests.45 Dietrich
Schernberg’s play Frau Jutta reveals other Protestant uses of Joan.46
The play was probably written in the later fifteenth century but survives only in the 1565 edition of Hieronymus Tilesius. In the first
place, the play shows the tendency for unrestrained embroidering of
the tale. Sathanas and Spiegelglas plot with Lucifer to capture Joan.
They succeed, and she becomes pope. Passing over some details, one
arrives at a heavenly scene in which Jesus and Mary are discussing
what to do about Joan. Jesus aims to have done with her, but Mary
intercedes and is granted the opportunity to seek Joan’s redemption.
She sends the Archangel Gabriel to plead with Joan to change her
ways. Joan agrees to accept present death instead of eternal damnation. In the second place, there is no priest and no sacramental confession in this version of the story. Joan was useful in an attack on the
sacramental system of the Catholic Church.
Writers in the Enlightenment and later during the French
Revolution were generally not too interested in whether or not Joan
actually existed.47 They tended to treat her and her story as an exam44

Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 29–32.
D’Onofrio, La Papessa Giovanna, pp. 106–21; Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp.
110–38; Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 229–44; Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin
Johanna, pp. 115–23. The English scene has been particularly well treated; see, for
example, Craig M. Rustici, The Afterlife of Pope Joan: Deploying the Popess Legend in
Early Modern England (Ann Arbor, 2006).
46
Dietrich Schernberg, Ein Schoen Spiel von Frau Jutten, ed. Manfred Lemmer,
[Texte des späten Mittelalters und frühen Neuzeit, 14], (Berlin, 1971).
47
Boureau lists seventy-three works that mention Joan written between 1650 and
1815; see The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 325–29. See also Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp.
215–90.
45

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

233

ple of the grotesque religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages. The
Encyclopédie dismissed Joan as an old wives’ tale.Voltaire, in his inimitable fashion, mocked her in his Essai sur les mœurs. The French
Revolution was anticlerical from its inception, but it became specifically antipapal when Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution of the
clergy. In early 1793 three plays appeared in Paris based on the story
of La papesse. As literature, dramatic art, and political polemic, the
plays are as forgettable as their authors: Pierre Léger, August Jean
Baptiste Defauconpret, and Flins des Oliviers.48
As one turns the corner into the nineteenth century, some themes
that had emerged in the telling of the Joan story on the edges of the
Enlightenment began to assert themselves. Joan’s story became
increasingly bawdy and secular. In 1777 Charles Bordès published his
La papesse Jeanne. The story is anticlerical, to be sure, and also
thumbs its nose at certain Enlightenment pretensions—he festooned
his book with notes as if it were a work of scholarship, but for the
most part it is a risqué burlesque. Rome is in tatters when Leo IV dies
from syphilis, “the too bitter fruit of an agreeable error.” A heavenly
assembly debates what to do and sends the Archangel Raphael to
Rome to open a conclave. One group of celestial debaters, holy
women with Monica at their head, persuades St. Peter to urge
Raphael to select Joan.49 In 1801 Théodore Desorgues made sport of
the Joan tradition with his Le pape et le mufti.50 The Turks under
Mufti Ali are besieging Rome where the pope is Azémis, a young
Turkish woman disguised as a man so she can be near her lover,
Azolan, who has become a cardinal. On the whole, the story is a contrived, superficial, but entertaining farce. It is interesting for its
attacks on Christianity as such in place of revolutionary attacks on
the Church and the papacy.
Romanticism appropriated Joan in many ways.The Prussian writer
Achim von Arnim (d. 1831) started with Schernberg’s Frau Jutta and
then twisted the basic elements of the Joan story almost out of recognizable shape. In the end, he turned her into a heroine of the
48
The plays are discussed fully in Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, pp. 250–78, and
in Gössmann, Mulier Papa, pp. 215–90. I have not read them.
49
Charles Bordès, La papesse Jeanne (n.p., 1778). See Boureau, The Myth of Pope
Joan, pp. 261–64.
50
Théodore Desorgues, Le pape et le mufti ou la reconciliation des cultes, in
Théodore Desorgues ou la désorganisation, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris, 1985), pp.
235–73.

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WHY POPE JOAN?

German nation.51 More interesting by far is Emmanuel Rhoides whose
Papissa Johanna appeared in Greek in 1866. The work was quickly
translated into many languages52 but existed in English only in a
bowdlerized version until Lawrence Durrell retranslated it in 1954.53
Rhoides believed fervently in the truth of Joan.The book was banned
in Greece, and its author was excommunicated by the Orthodox
Church.Although embellished in many respects, Rhoides’s tale is recognizably that of Martinus Polonus. Joan displays brilliance in many
areas of knowledge and also has a robust sexual appetite. As in most
tellings, she has a lover but she also conquers an abbot, two bishops,
and a secular official.The book has an anticlerical side, to be sure, but
that is not its central theme. Rhoides’s tale, which sometimes borders
on the salacious, presents a woman who delights in both the quest for
knowledge and the sins of the flesh—two things typically denied to
respectable women.
Joan continued to attract attention in the twentieth century.Three
trends may be observed: scholarly, feminist, and popular approaches.
As previously noted, scholarly approaches to Joan, primarily from
the early-modern period, tended to focus on her historicity. Indeed,
such studies effectively refuted any such possibility. It is true that in
the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, scholars re-entered the
field, but they took a somewhat different approach from that of their
predecessors.
Döllinger’s Papstfabeln makes clear that although he did not
believe that the story was true in any empirical sense, he did not think
the story was artless or pointless. He appreciated that fables, or legends, can have histories as well. In some ways, as we shall see shortly,
Döllinger was ahead of his time.The first modern scholarly treatment
was the 1925 dissertation of Werner Kraft, which examined the literary motifs in the Joan story. His work has had limited influence.54 In
1979 d’Onofrio published a valuable scholarly study, which was partly
51
Arnim did not compose a single work on Joan. Instead, he developed her story
gradually through several of his lengthy and little-known works. Boureau, The Myth of
Pope Joan, pp. 281–87; Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 140–41.
52
Perhaps the best known was the French version of Alfred Jarry, La Papesse Jeanne
(1907; repr. Paris, 1981).
53
Emmanuel Rhoides, Pope Joan: A Romantic Biography (London, 1954).
54
Werner Kraft, Die Päpstin Johanna: Eine motivegeschichtliche Untersuchung
(Frankfurt, 1925).

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

235

an historical exploration and partly a literary investigation.55 In 1985
Joan Morris published an extraordinary book56 that presents itself as
a serious scholarly study, equipped with seemingly learned references, that proves the existence of Pope Joan. Morris’s thesis is that
wicked churchmen expurgated the record, and gullible historians
believed them. In 1988 Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe published a
modest book of no great pretension that has the virtue of laying out
in very basic terms the cases for and against Joan’s historicity.57 They
come down squarely against it. In the same year Alain Boureau published, in French, La papesse Jeanne, which appeared in 2001 in
English translation. Boureau’s book is as brilliantly conceived as it is
perversely organized. It is, by turns, a traditional history, an “experimental” history, an exercise in historical mentalités, and a literary history. The book jumps around thematically and chronologically but
eventually shows how the history of a history reveals much about all
the periods and places in which that history was recounted.The year
1988 was something of an annus mirabilis in the study of Pope Joan,
because in that year there also appeared a “Critical Research Report”
by Klaus Herbers.58 In 1994 Elisabeth Gössmann published a substantial study of the reception history of the Joan story.59 She is particularly interested in the theological implications of the story in all
its various tellings.
More recently critical theory and postmodernism have made contributions to the Joan story. In 2010 Herbers teamed with his eminent German historian colleague, Max Kerner, to produce the
“Biography of a Legend.”60 In most respects Kerner and Herbers add
little to the work of Boureau and Gössmann, but they do take films
and recent novels into account. In one area, however, Kerner and
Herbers offer a fresh perspective by updating an old one.They point
out that ever since Durckheim and Weber, it has been recognized that
reality can be socially constructed.The line between fact and fiction
can be blurred. The figure of Joan represents a female ascent in a
male-dominated ecclesiastical hierarchy; a nonfunctioning papacy or
college of cardinals; a woman who assumed inappropriate roles with
55

D’Onofrio, La papessa Giovanna.
Joan Morris, Pope John VIII, an English Woman: Alias Pope Joan (London, 1985).
57
R. Pardoe and D. Pardoe, The Female Pope.
58
Klaus Herbers, “Die Päpstin Joyhanna: Ein kritischer Forschungsbericht,”
Historisches Jahrbuch, 108 (1988), 174–94.
59
Gössmann, Mulier Papa.
60
Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna.
56

236

WHY POPE JOAN?

cunning and malice; the dangers of learning and cleverness; and a
cautionary tale in discussions of apostolic succession and the legitimacy of the papacy.The myth, legend, or fable arose and reappeared
in times of crisis. Talking about Joan was a way to talk about completely different things. Michael Imhof offered some new perspectives on the legend in 2011 via a brief, beautifully illustrated, and on
the whole conventional, book.61 He thinks that the reason why so
many late-medieval people believed in Joan without question is that
there were so many popular female saints, not least from the religious orders.There were women who were famous, did good deeds,
and were highly educated; at their graves miracles occurred. For
those people, why not a female pope? It is also interesting, Imhof
notes, that virtually all serious treatments of Joan until Gössmann—
he ignores Morris—have been by men.
This brings up a second theme: feminism. None of the pioneer “find
the women” historians turned their attention to Joan, as far as I know.
Feminist scholars and intellectuals have not been much more enthusiastic. It is easy to mock Un pape nommé Jeanne, a bizarre “study”—
I use the scare quotes because the book is spectacularly bad in every
scholarly sense—by Henri Perrodo le Moyne.62 To say that he reads
the evidence selectively would be a major understatement, but one
discerns his real intentions in the book’s last section:“Femmes, Levezvous.” In 1982 Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls debuted in London.To celebrate her appointment as manager of the Top Girls employment
agency, Marlene hosts a dinner party at which several real and imaginary historical figures hold court and, in talking with each other, give
some account of themselves. Joan appears, not very effectively, in act
1. Morris’s book, mentioned above, is a pendant to her The Lady Was
a Bishop: The Hidden History of Women with Clerical Ordination
and the Jurisdiction of Bishops.63 The title pretty much gives away
the book. If there had been powerful, ordained women in the earlier
Middle Ages, why not a pope? The subject is a serious one, and it can
be treated seriously, as was done by Gary Macy.64 But Morris’s work is
bad history and weak feminism. More serious as feminist scholarship

61

Michael Imhof, Die Päpstin Johanna:Wahrheit und Mythos (Petersberg, 2011).
Henri Perrodo le Moyne, Un pape nommé Jeanne (Angers, 1972).
63
Joan Morris, The Lady Was a Bishop: The Hidden History of Women with Clerical
Ordination and the Jurisdiction of Bishops (New York, 1973).
64
Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the
Medieval West (New York, 2007).
62

BY THOMAS F. X. NOBLE

237

is the work of Gössmann.65 She is interested in how the Joan story has
wended its way through centuries of theological discourse about
women, typically about the inferiority of women. For example, the
scholastic embrace of Aristotle brought along the master’s insistence
on defectus naturae. In the end, such thinking, and kindred trains of
thought, have damaged any conceivable case for women’s ordination
and have continuously put women in a disadvantaged position both
in the Church and in the wider society. In serious feminist scholarship, then, Joan herself has not been particularly useful, but the ways
in which she has been discussed are reflective of larger issues and
problems. Gössmann’s massive reception history has a distinctively
feminist character, whereas the reception histories of Boureau and of
Kerner and Herbers do not. Imhof’s book makes some points that
conventional women’s history might make but does not frame its
issues in feminist terms.
Finally, there is the broad realm of public entertainment. In 1925
Bertolt Brecht produced a dramatic sketch that told part of the Joan
story, but there is no evidence that it saw stage or audience.66 In
1931 Clement Wood published a novel that was little more than
dreary anti-Catholicism.67 The book is worthy of the nastiest sixteenth-century Protestant polemics. In 1996 Donna Woolfolk Cross
published a novel that actually gained a very wide readership in
English and then a bit later in French.68 Cross took more liberties
with the basic historical details than one might expect even from an
historical novelist. The book has a consistent undertone of antiCatholicism and treats the subject matter as if it were authentic history. In “Author’s Notes” to a subsequent reprinting, Cross adverted to
the old canard that the Church suppressed the “real” evidence. In
1998 the English journalist Peter Stanford issued a book that is novelistic while purporting to be historical.69 In almost breathless “whodunit” fashion, Stanford reviews the “evidence” and concludes that,
on balance, it supports Joan’s existence.
65
I have referred to Gössmann’s Mulier Papa repeatedly. She later offered a helpful
summary of her major views; see “Was hat die heutige Frau in der Kirche mit der
‘Päpstin Johanna’ zu tun?,” in Formen weiblicher Autortität: Erträge historisch-theologischer Frauenforschung, ed. Anne Jensen and Michaela Sohn-Kronthaler,
[Theologische Frauenforschung in Europa, 17], (Vienna, 2005), pp. 53–84.
66
See Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, p. 291.
67
Clement Wood, The Woman Who Was Pope (New York, 1931).
68
Donna Woolfolk Cross, Pope Joan: A Novel (New York, 1996).
69
Peter Stanford, The Legend of Pope Joan: In Search of the Truth (London, 1998).

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WHY POPE JOAN?

The silver screen also has offered its representations of Pope Joan.
In 1972 Michael Anderson brought out his film Pope Joan (issued in
the United States as The Devil’s Impostor).70 Despite Liv Ullmann’s
creditable performance, the film is leaden and heavy-handed. It leaves
the viewer with the impression that it recounts a true story. In 2009
the German producer Bernd Eichinger issued his film Pope Joan,
directed by Soenke Wortmann and based loosely on Cross’s novel.71
Apart from telling a good story with high production values, the film
has a clear agenda of anti-Catholicism. At the Stella Adler Theater in
Los Angeles, Michael Butler premiered his musical adaptation of the
Joan story.72 Then in 2011 the German composer Dennis Martin
opened his musical adaptation of Cross’s novel in Fulda.73 It is still
being performed in various places in Germany. Joan’s capacity to
attract and entertain audiences seems to know no bounds.
In the end, then, Joan refuses to die because she continues to be
what she has always been: useful. In the later Middle Ages Joan provided various polemicists with a blunt weapon. Protestant writers
fastened upon Joan to bash the Catholic Church, its clergy, and its
sacramental system. For Enlightenment writers Joan typified the backwardness and superstition of the Middle Ages. Romantics saw in Joan
a joyous character that refused to be confined within traditional roles.
Scholars have found Joan useful, in the first instance, for careful textual, philological, and topographical studies and subsequently for
reception history and the history of mentalities. For novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers, Joan has been useful in both implicit and
explicit ventures in anti-Catholicism. So far, feminist writers have
approached but not yet embraced Joan. I confidently predict that in
the years ahead, writers will continually find uses for Johannes
Anglicus.

70
For an excellent discussion see Rustici, The Afterlife of Pope Joan, pp. 153–57. For
film notes see “Index to Film Periodicals Full Text.” Retrieved on December 18, 2012,
from http://fiaf.chadwyck.com.proxy.library.nd.edu/fulltext/pageimage.do?id=005/
p337-1972.
71
See notes in Variety Nov. 16, 2009, 27–34.The film received scholarly assessment
in Kerner and Herbers, Die Päpstin Johanna, pp. 13–17, and in Imhof, Die Päpstin
Johanna, pp. 78–80. The Wikipedia article “Pope Joan (2009) Film” has a summary and
a useful comparison of Cross’s novel and the film’s presentation.
72
For details on the Butler production see https://www.plays411.net/newsite/
show/play_info.asp?show_id=1819.
73
There is a satisfactory Wikipedia article, “Die Päpstin: Das Musikal.” I have not
attended either musical.

AUT NUMQUID POST ANNOS MILLE QUINGENTOS
DOCENDA EST ECCLESIA CATHOLICA QUOMODO
SACRAE IMAGINES PINGANTUR?
POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE
MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI
BY

RUTH S. NOYES˚

The author attempts, by considering publication data and Gabriele
Paleotti’s failed Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, to contribute to the further nuancing and remapping of the Catholic
Reformation, via analysis of image reform. Evidence suggests that
the Council of Trent, Rome, or the Curia were not perceived as initiating image reform; in fact, by 1600 some Catholic leaders
regarded all three as reformatory failures. Publication data and the
travesty of the Discorso bespeak the initial acentric, reactionary
nature of post–Tridentine image reform, evoking an image of Rome
and the Curia in which dissent held sway, even amongst purported
figureheads of reform.
Keywords: Catholic Reformation; Christian art; Council of Trent;
Paleotti, Cardinal Gabriele
An analysis of publication data and the circumstances of the neverfinished but now-famous Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images) by Gabriele Paleotti,

˚Dr. Noyes is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art, Architecture
& Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the 2013–14 Andrew
W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the
American Academy in Rome, email: ruthsnoyes@yahoo.com. This article began as
part of the author’s PhD dissertation, and a version of it was presented at the 2013
Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America.The author thanks the anonymous reviewers of The Catholic Historical Review and editor Nelson H. Minnich for
their comments on this article, as well as Professor Stephen J. Campbell for early
feedback and the anonymous reviewer of Renaissance Quarterly who suggested
submitting this material to CHR.

239

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

then archbishop of Bologna,1 can shed further light on the Catholic
Reformation, following in the footsteps of Paolo Prodi and Simon
Ditchfield.2 The story of the Discorso and its broader circumstances
paints a vividly diverse picture of post–Tridentine image reform
within the Church and across Italy as inherently multilateral and fractured, with Rome and the Curia divided into factions that placed even
purported figureheads of reform at odds.3 The evidence considered
herein suggests that the papal city and the Curia itself were subject to
Catholic communal “localities”—religious orders and congregations
such as the Oratorians and Jesuits—and intercurial factions embroiled
in their own “process of feedback and arbitration,” hermeneutically on
par with geographically peripheral localities such as Piacenza and
Bologna.4 Indeed, Trent’s immediate, first-generation implementation
occurred at the local level, with the pontiff and the Curia as ultimate
exegetists and enforcers.5 However, some frustrated reformers like
1

See, most recently, Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images,
trans.William McCuaig (Los Angeles, 2012).
2
See Simon Ditchfield, “Thinking with the Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early
Modern World,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 552–84; Simon Ditchfield, “Tridentine
Worship and the Cult of Saints,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol.VI: Reform
and Expansion, 1500–1600, ed. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (New York, 2007), pp. 201–24;
and Paolo Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), 2 vols., [Edizioni di Storia
e Letteratura, Uomini e dottrine, 7, 12], (Rome, 1959–67); Paolo Prodi, “Ricerche sulla
teorica delle arti figurative nella riforma cattolica,” Archivio italiano per la storia della
pietà, IV (1965), 121–212; reprinted as Ricerca sulla teorica delle arti figurative nella
Riforma Cattolica (Bologna, 1984); Holger Steinemann, Eine Bildtheorie zwischen
Repräsentation und Wirkung: Kardinal Gabriele Paleottis “Discorso intorno alle
imagini sacre e profane” (1582) (New York, 2006); Ilaria Bianchi, La politica delle
immagini nell’età della Controriforma: Gabriele Paleotti teorico e committente
(Bologna, 2008).
3
For a similar synopsis, see Simon Ditchfield, “‘Coping with the beati moderni’:
Canonization Procedure in the Aftermath of the Council of Trent,” in Ite Infiammate
Omnia: Selected Historical Papers from Conferences Held at Loyola and Rome in
2006, ed.Thomas M. McCoog (Rome, 2010), pp. 413–39, here p. 414.
4
Dermot Fenlon, “Rewiring the Circuit: Campi’s Reformation,” [Review of Liturgy,
Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation
of the Particular by Simon Ditchfield], The Catholic Historical Review, 83 (1997),
275–80, here 275. On tension within the Curia, see Ditchfield, “Thinking with the
Saints,” pp. 577–78.
5
Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London, 1990),
2:774–76 (decree on images), 798 (what to do if implementation problems occur); for
the bull Benedictus Deus of January 26, 1564, see Sacrorum conciliorum nova et
amplissima collectio, ed. Giovanni Domenico Mansi, Jean-Baptiste Martin, and Louis
Petit (Paris, 1902), Tomus 33, cols. 215D–219A, 217AB (ordered local ordinaries to
implement the decrees), 217D (forbad any commentaries on the decrees and mandated

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241

Paleotti were discouraged by what they perceived as not only a lack
of comprehensive reform but also a lack of corresponding curial
reform effort in Rome. By 1600, increasingly assertive members of
the Curia began exercising an acentric, reactionary prerogative, sometimes appropriating and repromulgating isolated, local reforms (such
as seizing upon certain of Paleotti’s demands for increased iconographic regulation); sometimes denouncing implicit or explicit criticisms of curial policy or practice; and sometimes censuring isolated
reform activities outright, even when generated by members of the
Curia. By 1600, the Master of the Sacred Palace mandated that he must
approve every printed image before publication.6 Concurrent to the
Clementine Curia’s increased regulation of all kinds of printed images
through the occasionally conflicting powers of the Congregation of
the Index and the Master of the Sacred Palace, the pope and various
congregations also devoted greater scrutiny and censorial activity to
broader regulation of all sacred images, printed or otherwise.7 The
argument and evidence presented here may refute the interpretation
that post-Tridentine ecclesiastics, including those in the Curia, shared
the view that “Rome had begun that reform, only Rome could ‘save’
it”8; or the implicit model of post-Tridentine reform, whereby a
“center-periphery” paradigm is eschewed, yet still posits Rome as
source.9 In the case of image reform, discord, not consensus, seems to

that any questions regarding their interpretation or implementation should be brought
directly to the pope for a resolution). Hereafter, this collection is cited as Mansi et al.,
Sacrorum conciliorum.
6
On the history of the Master of the Sacred Palace, see Raymond Creytens, “Le
‘Studium Romanae Curiae’ et le Maître du Sacré Palais,” Archivum Fratrum
Praedicatorum, 12 (1942), 5–83; Ruth Noyes, “On the Fringes of Center: Disputed
Hagiographic Imagery and the Crisis over the Beati moderni in Rome ca. 1600,”
Renaissance Quarterly, 64 (2011), 800–46.
7
On exchanges c. 1600 between producers of images and the Curia—necessitated
by the increasing control, albeit irregular and bureaucratic, exerted by the latter upon
the former—see Eckhard Leuschner,“The Papal Printing Privilege,” Print Quarterly, 15
(1998), 359–70; Eckhard Leuschner, “Censorship and the Market: Antonio Tempesta’s
‘New’ Subjects in the Context of Roman Printmaking ca. 1600,” in The Art Market in
Italy (15th–17th Centuries), ed. Marcello Fantoni and Louisa Chevalier Matthew
(Modena, 2003), pp. 65–74; Eckhard Leuschner, Antonio Tempesta: ein Bahnbrecher
des römischen Barock und seine europäische Wirkung (Petersberg, 2005), pp.
204–18; Christopher Witcombe, “Christopher Plantin’s Papal Privileges: Documents in
the Vatican Archives,” De Gulden Passer, 69 (1991), 133–45.
8
Fenlon,“Rewiring the Circuit,” p. 276.
9
Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria
Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (New York, 1995), pp. 8–11.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

FIGURE 1. Location of treatise publication.

have been the order of the day.10 This may beg the following questions: If the ostensible center of post-Tridentine reform, constituted
by the spatial and theo-political territory of the Roman Curia, is in fact
composed of multiple fractured factions, can a center be said to exist?
In addition, if the conventional centralized paradigm of postTridentine reform is imploded, what sort of interpretive model should
scholars employ? Can Rome and the Curia be regarded as having
precedence, without centrality? These are larger disciplinary questions that only can be partially addressed here.
Attesting to the anxiety and consequence that religious and artistic
constituencies attached to image-related issues left unresolved by
Trent is a veritable explosion of treatises on art theory and reform
published during the years that followed the council (see appendix A
and figure 1).11
10

Ditchfield,“Tridentine Worship,” pp. 204, 211.
Not all works listed dealt exclusively with sacred image reforms, but nearly all
treated the topic in some way. On images and the visual arts in Roberto Bellarmino’s
Disputationes and Cesare Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici, respectively, see Gustavo
Galeotta, “Genesi, sviluppo e fortuna delle Controversiae di Roberto Bellarmino,” in
Bellarmino e la Controriforma.Atti del simposio internazionale di studi. Sora 15–18
Ottobre 1986, ed. Romeo de Maio, Agostino Borromeo, Luigi Gulia, Georg Lutz, and Aldo
Mazzacane (Sora, 1990), pp. 3–48;Valeria de Laurentiis,“Immagini ed arte in Bellarmino,”
in de Maio et al., eds., Bellarmino e la Controriforma, pp. 579–608; Daniela
Campanelli, “Le arti negli ‘Annales,’” in Baronio e l’arte, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi Sora 10–13 Ottobre 1984, ed. Romeo de Maio, Agostino Borromeo,
11

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243

FIGURE 2. Publication of treatises per year.

An apparent lacuna in the printing of these texts appears from 1601
through the first decade of the Seicento (shown in figure 2) and may
evidence an interruption in (official) production.This may suggest an
application of the papal-curial prerogative in matters of image theory
and policy through the discouragement, if not outright suppression, of
these publications that thrived during the last quarter of the
Cinquecento.This interpretation has some merit, as Pope Clement VIII
began to exert more control over the cult of saints and canonization in
1601/02, increasing oversight over the theological discourse, church
policy, and daily praxis of individuals ranging from Roman cardinals to
Spanish Jesuits.12 Therefore, a similar trend occurring in the intrinsically related cult of images would be consistent; but although the Curia
may have restricted or censured the official circulation of contrary
views on image and related reforms, these voices were not entirely

Luigi Gulia, Georg Lutz, and Aldo Mazzacane (Sora, 1985), pp. 385–408; Stefano Sosti,“Le
fonti per l’arte negli Annales Ecclesiastici di Baronie,” in Romeo de Maio et al., eds,
Baronio e l’arte, pp. 247–60.
12
Giovanni Papa, Le Cause di Canonizzazione nel Primo Periodo della
Congregazione dei Riti: 1588–1634 (Rome, 2001), pp. 16–146; Miguel Gotor, I Beati
del Papa: Santità, Inquisizione e Obbedienza in Età Moderna (Florence, 2002), pp.
127–202; Ruth Noyes,‘‘‘A me toccano masticcare pillole amare’: Rubens, the Oratorians
and the Crisis over the Beati moderni circa 1600: Towards a Revised Geography of the
Catholic Reformation,’’ 2 vols. (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009), I:72–158.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

silenced.13 The disparity between the small number of texts published
in Rome and those printed elsewhere in Italy and northern Europe
merits reflection. Although the group most discussed today includes
works by Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Jan Molanus, St. Carlo Borromeo, and
Paleotti (three of whom published in Italy), more than half of all these
texts were printed outside Italy, as appendix A and figure 1 demonstrate. The fact that surprisingly few of these texts were printed in
Rome, in comparison to the amount published outside the papal city
and Italy, may indicate the difficulties in publishing too close to the
Curia—such publications would have an implied critique that reform
remained to be seen (a failure of the Curia) and that reform was not
exclusive to papal jurisdiction (an undermining of the curial prerogative). It is possible that, under the oversight of the papacy, the Vatican
would not grant permission necessary for the printing in Rome of treatises voicing contrary opinions on image reform.
To confirm the hypothesis that published image reform treatises
constituted implicit criticism of the Curia, a study of Paleotti’s Discorso
intorno alle imagini sacre et profane may be instructive.14 Largely
modeled on Jan Molanus’s De historia SS. imaginibus, the Discorso
was first partially published in 1582 in the vernacular.15 Paleotti
planned a total of five books; he finished only two. In his introductory
address to the reader, Paleotti claimed that he composed the Discorso
as a pastoral project that would be distributed and implemented only
in his Archdiocese of Bologna.16 Borromeo’s Instructionum fabricae
et suppelletilis ecclesiasticis was born of similar circumstances and
concerns;17 like Paleotti, Borromeo offered the disclaimer in his preface that his intended audience was his Archdiocese of Milan.18
13
Hubert Jedin, “Entstehung und Tragweite des trienter Dekrets über die
Bilderverehrung,” Tübinger theologische Quartalschrift, 116 (1935), 143–88, 404–29.
14
Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane diuiso in
cinque libri, (Bologna, 1582); Gabriele Paleotti, De imaginibus sacris, et profanis
(Ingolstadt, 1594); and Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582), ed. Stefano Della Torre and Gian Franco Freguglia (Milan, 2002).
15
Jan Molanus, De historia SS. imaginum et picturarum (Louvain, 1594); Jan
Molanus, Traité des saintes images, trans. François Boespflug, Olivier Christin, and
Benoit Tassel (Paris, 1996).
16
Paleotti, Discourso itorno (1582), p. 2; Prodi, “Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p.
147.
17
Giovanni Scavizzi, The Controversy on Images from Calvin to Baronius,
[Toronto Studies in Religion, 14], (New York, 1992), p. 124.
18
Carlo Borromeo, Instructionum fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiastica (1577),
trans. Massimo Marinelli (Milan, 2000), p. 4.

BY RUTH S. NOYES

245

Bologna’s particular status as part of the Papal States merits consideration in this context. Paleotti actively maintained his prerogative
against that of the papal legate by instituting parallel reforms, and
Paleotti’s isolated Bolognese measures entered into a dialogue with
curial reforms that were neither one-directional nor unilateral.19 His
reforms, including the publication and circulation of the Discorso,
acknowledged, criticized, and undercut the precedence and effectiveness of “Rome” in post-Tridentine matters within his archdiocese.20 His struggles with Rome regarding jurisdiction and the
enforcement of Trent would drive Paleotti to write “that matters here
[in Bologna] of our church, both material and spiritual, are just as in
the beginning, as if the Council had never taken place.”21 Paleotti’s
ultimate relocation to Rome, where he would write De tollendis
imaginum abusibus novissima consideratio (discussed below),
may have been part of his “defensive approach” to attempt to force
Rome to implement stricter reforms, by bringing the fight, so to
speak, to the Curia.22
By virtue of its composer’s ostensible diocesan proviso, the
Discorso subliminally inverted curial primacy and implied the lack of
unilateralism or clear central authority within not only the Catholic
Church but also the Papal States and the Curia, while destabilizing the
model of non-antagonistic dialogic reform. Paleotti thus possibly
aimed to undermine subtly, or imply the inadequacy of, Pope Pius IV’s
bull Benedictus Deus of January 26, 1564 (but issued June 30) that
confirmed and ordered implementation of all Tridentine decrees as
well as prohibited their interpretation or alterations without involvement of the pontiff.23 Paleotti likewise meant to recall his previous
membership in the Congregation of the Council, instituted in 1564 by
Pius IV to oversee the Tridentine implementation (although difficult
cases had to be referred to the pope), as well as to cast that body as
19
After Pius V’s bull of June 5, 1568, decreed that university students must pass an
exam and swear an oath to the Church, that same year Paleotti required that priests pass
an exam in his presence and under Jesuit supervision. Anton Boschloo, Annibale
Carracci in Bologna. Visible Reality in Art after the Council of Trent, 2 vols. (The
Hague, 1974), 1:104,111.
20
Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls (New York, 1987), pp.
123–56.
21
Prodi, The Papal Prince, p. 132.
22
Prodi, The Papal Prince, p. 133.
23
Pius IV,“Bull Benedictus Deus of January 26, 1564,”Bullarium Romanum (Vatican
City, 1564), IV:168–69 and Mansi et al., Sacrorum conciliorum 33:215D–219A.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

powerless.24 In turn, the papacy may have regarded the Discorso as a
provocative foray into the interpretation of Trent, although one mitigated by its author’s early membership in the Congregation of the
Council, as was the case for Borromeo (first appointed leader of the
same Congregation) and his analogous Instructionum.
A year before printing the vernacular edition, Paleotti stipulated that
the Discorso was not even to be sold.25 Underscoring the professed
self-restricted scope of his treatise, he added the rider—one that
expressed a veritable manifesto of post-Tridentine regionalism that
defined, for the bishops and cardinals charged with executing the
decrees of 1563, the project of Catholic reform:“whence he may not
prescribe law to other places, as he does not intend to tax the customs
of others, or to be the censor of their differing practices.”26 When, as
early as 1582, his editor objected to a treatise only “for the utility of his
own diocese,” Paleotti articulated his intention to limit distribution so
as not to appear overly critical of practices common in Rome and thus
avoid criticism or censure from Roman factions “for the sake of modesty and to avoid contesting various Roman customs.”27
The publication of Paleotti’s still-unfinished 1594 Latin edition in
the German city of Ingolstadt rather than an Italian city may be revealing. In a letter dated August 26, 1595, scholar Marco Velsero wrote to
Paleotti’s secretary of the reception of de imaginibus “in these lands”
and urged that a different individual complete the last three books.28
Several days later, a letter to Paleotti from the papal nuncio in Cologne
stated that shops had sold out of the cardinal’s treatise, expressed
24

Fiorenzo Romita,“Le origini della Sacra Congregazione del Concilio,” in La Sacra
Congregazione del Concilio. Quarto Centenario dalla Fondazione (1564–1964).
Studi e ricerche (Vatican City, 1964), pp. 13–50. In the early days of the Congregation,
Paleotti functioned as an adviser on canonical matters, not as a cardinal member. See
Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), 2 vols. [Uomini e dottrine, 7, 12],
(Rome, 1959–67), I:208; II:444.
25
“Onde si come egli non può prescrivere legge a gli altri luoghi, così non intende
manco di tassare i costumi loro, o fare il censore delle usanze, che essi servano differenti da queste”: Letter dated June 1581 in Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 146.
26
Paleotti, Discourso itorno (1582), 1v; Prodi, “Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p.
147n1. According to Prodi, pages 1–4 are the only pages not carried over to the Latin
translation of 1594.
27
“Si era detto per più modestia et per fugir le contese di varie usanze che si servano in Roma”: Letter dated June 17, 1580, in Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p.
146; also Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, 2:535n32.
28
Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 179.

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247

booksellers’ intentions to purchase additional copies at the Frankfurt
fair, and indicated the treatise’s usefulness in a debate between (presumably) a Catholic and a Protestant.29 Paleotti’s preface to the reader
opened with two of the central Tridentine pronouncements on sacred
images; nearly two decades after the conclusion of Trent, Paleotti still
considered the decrees not only fundamental for any discussion of
images but also unaddressed by those charged with their implementation.Was his implicit audience actually Rome and the Curia? Despite
his proviso that the treatise applied only to the audience of a single
diocese, he took steps to circulate the text among a wider readership—he submitted draft versions to members of the Curia as early as
1578, sent a copy to Borromeo as soon as the first two books were
printed in 1581, and engaged a printer of the Latin edition who was
outside of Italy.30 Paleotti’s regional disclaimer reflected the intricacies and inherent delicacy of post–Tridentine image reforms. His proviso was part of necessary church diplomacy, as Bologna occupied a
particular place vis-à-vis the papacy. Paleotti’s publication of the
Discorso and statement about its ostensible restricted scope reaffirmed Trent’s reformatory charge to bishops and asserted his authority in the face of the Bolognese papal legate. Further, Paleotti’s recognition of the sensitivity of the Discorso for the Curia is perhaps
indicated by the archbishop’s decision to publish both editions of the
treatise outside Rome; in contrast, Luigi Zanetti published both editions of Paleotti’s 1597 treatise de Bono Senectutis in Rome.31
Paleotti’s Discorso was published in one vernacular edition
(Bologna, 1582) and one Latin edition (Ingolstadt, 1594).32 It was not
republished until the mid-twentieth century.33 In contrast, six editions
of Molanus’s De picturis (from which Paleotti largely borrowed) were
published from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (Louvain,
1570, 1594, 1771; Antwerp and Douai, 1617; Lyon, 1619). Although it
29
Nunzio in Cologne (probably Ottavio Mirto Frangipani) to Paleotti, August 31,
1595; Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 179n2.
30
For recent discussion on the Discorso’s impact, see Steinemann, Eine Bildtheorie,
pp. 45–49.
31
Gabriele Paleotti, De bono senectvtis (Rome, 1595); De bono senectvtis, 2nd ed.
(Antwerp, 1598); Libro del Bene della Vecchiezza, 3rd vernacular ed. (Rome, 1597).
32
Borromeo and Paleotti borrowed each other’s copies of De picturis as other
copies were not available for purchase; on April 22, 1579, Paleotti wrote Borromeo that
he had found another copy and no longer needed to borrow Borromeo’s. Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, 2:531n15.
33
Paola Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del cinquecento, 3 vols. (Bari, 1961), 2:116–517.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

seems clear that Paleotti addressed his treatise to an audience beyond
his diocese,“there were only a few people,” as Boschloo noted,“. . . who
had an opportunity to become acquainted personally with the text of
the Discorso.”34 Although some contemporaries read and responded
to Paleotti’s treatise, written “by churchmen for churchmen,” they did
not consider the Discorso as the principal text on image reform nor
concurred with its opinions and criticisms. In addition, the text’s
restricted readership did not broadly represent contemporary culture.35 Prodi, Paleotti’s definitive biographer, claims that the success of
this incomplete text does not indicate the actual effect during its own
time, but rather reflects interest by art historians of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, who tend to cite it frequently and superficially.36
The present-day fame of the Discorso as a product of recent historiography may be attributed to its availability in the vernacular and in
English translation or to its brevity in comparison to the work of
Molanus, and that which Paleotti intended to complete but did not.37
Thus, the practical, or actual, impact of the Discorso and similar
treatises remains to be seen, as does Paleotti’s practical relationship to
the theoretical framework of artistic reform, as enunciated in his writings. In other words, it is important to examine how (or if) the theoretical reform and writings of Paleotti and his contemporaries related
to their artistic milieu and their own artistic practice. In 1579, when
a draft of the Discorso was circulating in Bologna, the Bolognese artist
Agostino Carracci dedicated to Paleotti a sacred image of a typology
that Paleotti’s text would condemn. At the same time, Carracci produced a series of lascivious engravings censured by Clement VIII and
his cousin, Ludovico Carracci, created the Madonna dei Bargellini
altarpiece that portrayed venerable saints with the faces of contemporary donors.38 Echoing Borromeo’s Instructionum,39 Paleotti’s Discorso
condemned this latter practice—dubbed “allegorical portraiture” by
Edgar Wind.40 The practice was rampant in post-Tridentine art that
34

Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna, 1:144, 152.
Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome,
1565–1610 (Toronto, 2003), p. 15.
36
Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, 2:527.
37
Paleotti, Discorso intorno (2002), p. xxvi.
38
Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna, 2:238n26.
39
Borromeo, Instructionum fabricae, p. 70.
40
Paleotti, Discorso intorno (2002), p. 163; Edgar Wind, “Studies in Allegorical
Portraiture,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtuald Institutes, 1:138–53; Noyes, “A me
toccano masticcare pillole amare,” 1:149–58, 247–336.
35

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249

had high-ranking clerical patrons such as Cardinal Ferdinando de’
Medici,41 Pope Gregory XIII,42 and the Jesuit community at the Gesù
(the latter censured by Clement VIII during his apostolic visit).43
These examples suggest that Paleotti’s Discorso and similar treatises
reflected an awareness of contemporary concerns and trends regarding the production, consumption, and cult of images and that such
texts may not have greatly affected the production of sacred images
per se.These circumstances belie the Discorso’s ultimate didactic and
regulatory effectiveness, yet show its author’s acuity regarding
post–Tridentine image production.44
But in Rome, there were mixed reactions to Paleotti’s ideas, perhaps confirming his concern that his image reform efforts would be
perceived as a criticism of “various Roman customs.” Paleotti’s efforts
in 1595–96 to prepare a complete Latin edition produced a new preface and letter of presentation to Clement VIII, evidence—in Paleotti’s
view—of the Curia’s lack of success in defining and implementing
image reforms in the thirty-odd years following Trent and to the relative ineffectiveness of the Discorso. Yet he sent neither preface nor
letter to the pope.45 Paleotti composed his final work, the unpublished treatise De tollendis imaginum abusibus novissima consideratio, in summer 1596, a year before his death.46 Circulated amongst
41
Ferdinando Boyer,“Lavori di Jacopo Zucchi in Roma,” in Roma. Rivista di studi e
di vita romana, 9 (Rome, 1931), pp. 7–10; Anna Calcagno, Jacopo Zucchi e la sua
opera in Roma (Rome, 1932), pp. 133–37; Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici,
3 vols. (Florence, 1983), 2:735–36; Antonio Vannugli, “Giacomo Boncompagni duca di
Sora e il suo ritratto da Scipione Pulzone,” Prospettiva, 61 (1991), 54–66; Noyes,“A me
toccano masticcare,” 1:305–06.
42
Marcantonio Ciappi, Compendio delle heroiche, et gloriose attieni, et santa vita
di papa Greg. XIII (Rome, 1596), pp. 3–4; Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori scultori
et architetti (Rome, 1642), pp. 32–33.
43
An altarpiece depicting the archangels with the faces of Jesuit founders; in Rome,
Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Fondo Gesuitico 545, fol. 8v; Rome, Archivio
Segreto Vaticano, Misc. Arm. VII 3, fol. 69v; Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori, p. 54; Bailey,
Between Renaissance and Baroque, pp. 357–58n235. On the Clementine apostolic
visits, see Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5551, fols. 55–56; Diego
Beggiao, La visita pastorale di Clemente VIII (1592–1600): aspetti di riforma postTridentina a Roma (Rome, 1978).
44
Compare, for example, Paleotti’s treatment of armi delle famiglie in Barocchi,
Trattati d’arte, 3:620, 658.
45
Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” pp. 180–81. No documentary evidence survives of a second vernacular edition.
46
Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 181. For the complete text of De tollendis
imaginum abusibus novissima consideratio, see Prodi, “Ricerche sulla teorica
[1965],” pp. 194–208, and Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), pp. 94–110.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

certain cardinals, prelates, and members of the papal court,47 De tollendis called for the redress of “the abuse of images” and solicited
comments from its elite readership.48 As a final gesture, De tollendis
explicated the sublimated message, implicit audience, and unspoken
dialogic function of the earlier Discorso.
Paleotti suspected that his call for a renewal of Tridentine image
reform would fall on deaf ears in Rome.49 De tollendis’s nine questions
demanded reform of widely diffused abuses pervading sacred imagery,
charged bishops to carry out this reform, and claimed that most ecclesiastic authorities had only repeated the Tridentine decree and issued
generic proclamations of professed image reform without effect.50
Positive respondents to Paleotti’s pronouncements included Serafino
Olivier Razali, dean of the Rota (the increasingly conservative juridical
body that assisted the Congregazione dei Beati charged with considering and passing judgment on the causa of individual candidates for
canonization); Francisco Peña, uditore of the Rota (also a member of
the Inquisition); and Jesuit cardinal Roberto Bellarmino.51 Tellingly,
Peña and Bellarmino, who concurred regarding De tollendis, subsequently would disagree over cultic manifestations around the figures
of the Beati moderni, including devotional imagery.52 The two post47

It remains to be ascertained whether Clement VIII saw De tollendis.
Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 194.
49
Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 181.
50
Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), p. 80.
51
Prodi, “Ricercha sulla teorica [1965],” pp. 181, 183. Other positive respondants
included Dominican Pedro Juan Zaragoca de Heredia (then Socius of the Master of the
Sacred Palace), Claudio Aquaviva, Ottaviano Paravicino, Ascanio Colonna, Domenico
Pinello, Simone Tagliavia d’Aragona, Marcantonio Maffa, and Ascanio Persio. Prodi,
Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), pp. 80–82.
52
On Peña’s adversarial relations with Bellarmino concerning the cults of the Beati
moderni, see their exchange in Roberto Bellarmino, De controversiis christianae fidei
adversus huius temporis haereticos (Venice, 1599), t. II, lib. I, cap. X, coll. 739–40;
Brevis responsio [likely Francisco Peña], s.d. [December 1602], Rome, Biblioteca
Vallicelliana (hereafter referred to as BV), MS H14, fols. 370r–72v; Rome, Biblioteca
Angelica (hereafter referred to as BA), MS 909, fols. 80r–81r; Rome, Biblioteca
Casanatense (hereafter referred to as BC), MS 2107, fols. 425r–27v; Roberto Bellarmino,
Responsio Cardinalis Bellarmini, BA, MS 909, fols. 132r–35r. Secondary literature on
Peña’s opposition includes Vittorio Frajese, “Regno ecclesiastico e stato moderno. La
controversie tra Francisco Pena e Roberto Bellarmino sull’esenzione dei chierici,”
Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo Germanico di Trento, 14 (1988), 273–339; Peter
Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index
(Leiden, 2000), pp. 90–99; Giovanni Papa, Le cause di canonizzazione nel primo periodo della Congregazione dei riti: 1588–1634 (Rome, 2001), pp. 59–60; Miguel Gotor,
“La fabbrica dei santi: la riforma urbaniana e il modello tridentino,” in Storia d’Italia.
48

BY RUTH S. NOYES

251

Tridentine reformers staged an antagonistic dialogue through a series
of manuscript treatises debating the appropriate curial oversight and
suppression of proto-cults.53 Their agreement in 1596 and discord
three years later over correlated, counter-reformational issues demonstrate the volatile mutability of first-generation reforms and intercurial
conflict of the post-Tridentine era.
Not all readers responded favorably to Paleotti’s assertion of continued abuse; tacit condemnation of what he viewed as Roman mispractices; or attribution of abuses to the broader Church.54 Silvio
Antoniano (1540–1603), who would be elevated to cardinal by
Clement VIII in 1598, penned the harshest rebuttal.55 This rebuke is
particularly noteworthy given the previous cordial relationship
between Antoniano and Paleotti.
Antoniano and Paleotti corresponded in the 1580s on orthodox
Assumption iconography for an altarpiece commission overseen by
Antoniano and again in 1595 regarding imagery for the frontispiece of
Paleotti’s De bono senectutis, printed in Rome that year.56 They first
exchanged letters in 1583. Paleotti deferred to Bolognese scholar Carlo
Sigonio, then stated that precisely because the Assumption was
“doubted by some” and lacked any “canonical scriptural source” (especially inclusion of the Apostles), the “time-honored tradition of the Holy
Church” should be followed.57 Their concession to Catholic convention in the service of Marian cultic continuity reflects the post-

Annali 16. Roma. La città del papa.Vita civile e religiosa dal Giubileo di Bonifacio
VIII al Giubileo di Papa Wojtyla, ed. Luigi Fiorani and Adriano Prosperi (Turin, 2000),
pp. 677–727, here pp. 699–701; Miguel Gotor, I beati del papa: santità, inquisizione e
obbedienza in età moderna (Rome, 2002), pp. 138–48.
53
BV, MS H14, fols. 370r–77v and 386r–89r ; BA, MS 909, fols.80r–81r and 132r–35r;
BC, MS 2107, fols. 420r–22r and 425r–27r; Papa, Le cause, pp. 59–60. See also Noyes,“A
me toccano masticcare,” 1:33, 47–49.
54
On the success, or the lack thereof, of Paleotti’s final treatise, see Prodi, Ricerca
sulla teorica (1984), p. 85.
55
On Antoniano, see DBI, 3:511–16; Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 184n1;
and Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), pp. 71–87; Elisabetta Patrizi, Silvio Antoniano.
Un umanista ed educatore nell’età del rinnovamento cattolico (1540–1603), 3 vols.
(Macerata, 2010).
56
On their correspondence, see Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” pp. 191–93;
Prodi., Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), pp. 91–93; and Patrizi, Silvio Antoniano, 2:78–786.
57
Paleotti, letter to Antoniano dated April 27, 1583; in Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica
(1984), pp. 91–93. For recent theoretical discussion of this exchange, see Steinemann,
Eine Bildtheorie, pp. 158–72.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

Tridentine tension between “historical reliability” and “continuity with
tradition,”58 and echoes contemporaneous reforms of the Roman
Breviary according to the ultimate criterion, “continuity of cult.”59
Antoniano, concurring with Paleotti’s recommendation, remarked that
at any rate, the agreed-upon iconography could be seen “in paintings
throughout Rome.”60 His revealing comment problematizes and counterbalances Paleotti’s assertion regarding his Discorso that he wished
“to avoid contesting various Roman customs” and perhaps indicates
the already diverging views of the two men, even at this early point in
their exchange, of the reformatory status of “Roman customs” in the
broader discussion surrounding post–Tridentine image reforms.61
Antoniano and Paleotti subsequently corresponded in 1595 on the
topic of appropriate, scripturally-derived iconographies for the titlepage illustration of Paleotti’s De bono senectutis, published in Rome
later that year.62 Following discussion of suitable thematic imagery,
Paleotti had several designs sketched out.63 However, just before the
text went to press in late August-September 1595, Paleotti—apparently without consulting Antoniano—changed the frontispiece to a
full-page, bust-length, engraved portrait of the Oratorian founder
Filippo Neri (Paleotti’s confessor),64 who had died in May and whose
canonization proceeding had formally opened on August 2.65 Paleotti
suggested in his prologue that he conceived of this early Philippine
58
Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna, 1:145. Steinemann describes this as
“verisimilitudo versus decorum”; see Eine Bildtheorie, p. 172.
59
Fenlon,“Rewiring the Circuit,” p. 277.
60
Antoniano to Paleotti, April 13, 1583; in Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), pp.
91–93.
61
Letter dated June 17, 1580, in Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 146; see also
Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, 2:535n32.
62
On their correspondence, see Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), pp. 91–93;
Alessandro Zuccari, “Le immagini per il De bono senectutis di Gabriele Paleotti e
un’ipotesi su Philips e Theodoor Galle,” in Studi di Storia dell’Arte in onore di Denis
Mahon, ed. Maria Grazia Bernardini, Silvia Danesi Squarzina, and Claudio Strinati (Milan,
2000), pp. 57–68, here pp. 62–65.
63
Drawn from biblical texts ranging from Exodus and Psalms to Deuteronomy,
Judges, John, and Revelation, motifs included the palm tree and the twenty-four elders
of the Apocalypse. Scriptural sources included Exodus 3:2–5, Psalm 33:9, Canticles
1:5–6 and 7:9, Deuteronomy 31:8, Judges 14:14, John 1:46, and Revelation 4:3–4. In
Zuccari,“Le immagini per il De bono senectutis,” pp. 57–68.
64
Prodi, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, p. 570n14.
65
Inscribed:“R. PATER PHILIPPVS NERIVS FLORENTINVS AETATIS SVAE ANN. LXXX.
OBIIT ROMAE. MDLXCV.” See Zuccari, “Le immagini per il De bono senectutis,” pp.
57–68.

BY RUTH S. NOYES

253

FIGURE 3. Oratorian founder Filippo Neri.

likeness as similar to a saint’s portrait and intended it to promulgate
the Oratorian’s fama di santità.66 The sanctifying and propagandizing
functions of the De bono Philippine portrait were ostensibly confirmed by its concurrent circulation in certain copies of De bono with
the epithet “R. PATER” substituted by “BEATUS,” although Pope Paul V
did not beatify Neri until May 25, 1615 (see figure 3). Regarding saints’
portraits, Paleotti had resorted to prevarication in the Discorso, contrary to his theorizing contemporaries Molanus,67 Domenico
Anfossi,68 and Borromeo69:
66
The 1600 vernacular edition, in Zuccari,“Le immagini per il De bono senectutis,”
p. 60.
67
Molanus, Traité des saintes images, p. 82r.
68
Domenico Anfossi, De sacrarum Reliquiarum Cultu, Veneratione, Translatione,
atque Identitatae Brevis, sed utilis Tractatio, studio, et opera M. R.V. D. D. Dominici
Anfossii Patritii Tabiensis, et Canonici Papiensis (Brescia, 1610), pp. 192–93.
69
Borromeo, Instructionum fabricae, pp. 70, 72.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

great attention needs be paid to the choice of those persons who are portrayed as saints, that they be true saints approved by the universal consensus of the Holy Church, and not at the suggestion or indication of
others; be careful that they at least number among the Blesseds, and
accepted and held to be so by all publicly, and accompany their images
with a note regarding the beatification that is the reason for the devotion
owed to them.70

Despite the earlier cordiality between the two men, it is clear that
Antoniano saw the state of image reform quite differently in 1596, and
he checked neither his objections to Paleotti’s views nor his defense
of the Church. His is actually an irate rejoinder to De tollendis:
What is this, in the name of heaven! No mystery, no sacred history, no
image of any saint is painted without abuses! Or perhaps after 1500 years
the Catholic Church has to teach the proper way for sacred images to be
painted? While I do not deny that some improper uses have been introduced, but not so many, nor in so many places: the Church’s general practice is good.71

The opposing views of Paleotti and Antoniano illustrate not only
the tension between the post-Tridentine preservation and reform of
Catholic traditions and conventions but also “Paleotti’s difficult position between tradition and renewal.”72 These circumstances further
complicate—or nuance—our understanding of Paleotti’s personal
and practical artistic choices.
The Antoniano-Paleotti split also may have signaled wider divisions
within the Church over image reform. A significant event is the
70

“Innanzitutto ci sembra importante il dover fare molta attenzione nello scegliere
le persone che vengono ritratte come santi, che siano cioè santi veri e approvati dal
consenso universale della Santa Chiesa, e non per propria suggestione o per indicazione di altri; si faccia attenzione a che siano almeno persone annoverate fra i Beati,
e accettate e ritenute tali da tutti pubblicamente, e si accompagni la loro immagine con
note circa la beatitudine che è motivo della devozione loro dovuta, come diremo
altrove.” Paleotti, Discorso intorno (2002), pp. 161–63. It is interesting to speculate if
Paleotti’s lack of consultation with Antoniano could have soured the latter’s attitude
toward the archbishop and thus colored his view of Paleotti’s De tollendis.
71
“Quid hoc est obsecro! Nullum mysterium, nulla sacra historia, nullius Sancti imago
sine abusu depicta est! Aut numquid post annos mille quingentos docenda est Ecclesia
Catholica quomodo sacrae imagines pingantur? Non nego irrepsisse abusus aliquos, sed
non ita multi, neque adeo multis in locis: consuetudo universalis Ecclesiae recta est.”
Prodi,“Ricerche sulla teorica [1965],” p. 184. For the entire text, see Prodi,“Ricerche sulla
teorica [1965],” pp. 209–12; and Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica (1984), pp. 111–14.
72
Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna, 1:145.

BY RUTH S. NOYES

255

Oratorian Congregation’s reproduction of Paleotti’s image of Neri in
single-sheet format in 1600. With the image the congregation
included the word Beatus and a saint’s nimbus (see figure 3); this
image was cited at Neri’s canonization twenty-five years later.73
Neri’s followers—observing tradition in aggressively promoting
their cultic champion—were in fact historically exceptional in delineating and breaching new, universal Catholic boundaries. At the
second meeting in 1602 of the future Congregazione dei Beati, convened to exert papal oversight of the precocious Beati moderni
cults, Clement VIII circulated a document condemning unsanctioned
use of the appellation Beato and citing the twenty-fifth session of the
Council of Trent.74 Contemporaneously, an Oratorian contingent
defended the tradition of images of noncanonized individuals that
bore the word Beato (“tit.o Beati”),75 citing Trent and naming examples of such imagery in Rome, because “the custom of the Church”
that “has the force of law” could be best “understood from the practice of Rome, which is the head and teacher of the other
[churches].”76 Thus promoters of the precocious Philippine cult and
propagators of other Beati moderni cults found that they had gone
virtually overnight from pioneers of a seemingly glorious frontier to
outsiders of the liminal territory they had unwittingly helped circumscribe. In early Seicento Rome—the apparent center of the supposed
Catholic counter-reform—the figures of the Beati moderni constituted a hermeneutical periphery, demarcated and defended against
the curial prerogative by ostensible counter-reformers. For Roman
beholders after 1602, Beati moderni imagery, rather than presenting
73
“Gabriel Paleottus in libro, quem scripsit de bono senectutis, Philippum, adhuc
viventem, tanquam verum eximiae sanctitatis, atque virtutem omnium exemplar proposverit....” Bulla Canonizationis...Romae, Ex Typographia Ruerendae Camerae
Apostolicase./M.DC.XXVI, 16; the example examined is bound in BV, MS O.23, fol. 76v.
See also Prodi, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, 570n14.
74
“An in hac materia locum habeant, quae decernuntur Sacra Tridentina Synodo
Sessione 25. de Veneratione Sanctorum, & Sacris Reliquiis, praesertim in eo genere,
ne insolita Imago ponatur in Ecclesiis, nisi approbata ab Episcopo,” in Benedetto XIV.
De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione. 2 vols. (Prato, 1839),
2:71.
75
BV, MS H.14, fols. 364r–365v; BAV, Barb. lat., fol. 2810; BA, MS 909, fols. 102r–v;
Benedetto XIV, 2:58–59. See also Papa, Le Cause di Canonizzazione, pp. 55, 58–59;
Ursula König-Nordhoff, Ignatius von Loyola: Studien zur Entwicklung einer neuen
Heiligen-Ikonographie im Rahem einer Kanonisationskampagne um 1600 (Berlin,
1982), pp. 32–33.
76
BV, MS H.14, fol. 364r.

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POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

“exemplary figures for the guidance of the faithful,”77 would have conveyed a subversive connotation.
The array of texts presented here, including those representing
Paleotti’s reformist efforts, embodies an acentric, reactionary model of
reform. Under this model, the Council of Trent first defined a vague
theory of image reform, which then developed through clusters of
efforts. These efforts—discrete, although not necessarily mutually
exclusive or isolated78—mostly occurred outside of Rome. The pope
and the Curia thereafter reacted to image reform theories and practices with suppression, appropriation, adaptation, and reissue in the
form of universal church regulatory policy.79 Inconsistency and discord, both individual and institutional, characterized these processes
of reform.

77

Klaus Krüger, “Authenticity and Fiction: On the Pictorial Construction of Inner
Presence in Early Modern Italy,” in Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Reindert L. Falkenburg,Walter S. Melion,
and Todd M. Richardson [Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation, 1],
(Turnhout, 2007), pp. 37–69, here p. 50.
78
For a similar estimation on a global scale, see Simon Ditchfield,“Decentering the
Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World,” Archiv für
Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History, 101 (2010), 186–208, here
191.
79
Eckhard Leuschner, Antonio Tempesta: ein Bahnbrecher des römischen Barock
und seine europäische Wirkung (Petersberg, 2005), p. 214; Giuseppe Alberigo,“Carlo
Borromeo between Two Models of Bishop,” in San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform
and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, ed. John M.
Headley and John B.Tomaro (Washington, DC, 1988), pp. 250–63, here p. 258.

257

BY RUTH S. NOYES

APPENDIX A. Published treatises on art theory and reform
(in chronological order)
Author

Title

Place, Publisher Date

Giovanni Andrea Trattato de la emulazione
Gilio
che il demonio ha fatto a
Dio,ne l’adorazione, ne
sacrifici, & ne le altre cose
appartenenti alla divinità

Venice,Appresso
Francesco
de’ Franceschi

1563

Giovanni Andrea Due dialoghi
Gilio

Camerino,
Antonio Gioioso

1564

René Benoist

Traicté catholique des
images, et du vray visage
d’icelles ... Auec deux petits
traictez d’icelles, l’vn fait ...
par... Theodore, Abbe des
Studites, et l’autre prins
des oeuvres de sainct
Damascene. Le tout fait,
& mis en François par
René Benoist ...

Paris, Chez
Nicolas Chesneau

1564

René Benoist

Response a ceux qui
appellent idolâres les
chrestiens et vray
adorateurs …

Paris

1564

Nicholas
Harpsfeld and
Alanus Copus

Dialogi sex contro svmmi
Pontificatvs, Monasticae
vitae, sanctorvm, sacrarvm
imaginvm oppvgnatores
et Psevdo-martyres

Antwerp,
ex officina
Christophori
Plantini ...

1566

Nicholas Sanders A Treatise of the Images of
Louvain
Christ and His Saints: and
that it is unlaufull to breake
them and lauful to honour
them …

1567

Onofrio Panvinio Onvphrii Panvinii Veronensis ... XXVII. Pontificvm
maximorvm elogia et
imagines accuratissime
ad uiuum aeneis typeis
delineatae

Rome,Ant.
Lafrerij Formeis

1568

René Benoist

Paris,Thomas
Belot

1568

Discours de l’histoire du
miracle des ardents ... avec
un petit traicté des
processions des Chrestiens

258

POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

APPENDIX A. (continued)
Author

Title

Place, Publisher Date

Giulio Castellani De imaginibus et miraculis
sanctorum libri tres

Bologna,Typis
Alexandri Benacii

1569

Nicholas Sanders De Typica et honoraria
sacrarum imaginum
Adoratione libri duo

Louvain, Apud I.
Foulerum

1569

Jan Molanus

De pictvris et imaginibvs
sacris liber vnvs: tractans
de vitandis circa eas
abusibus, & de earundem
significationibus. Eiusdem
responsio quodlibetia, ad
tres quaestiones, quae
versa pagina indicantur

Louvain, Apud
Hieronymum
Wellaeum

1570,
1581

Carlo Borromeo

Instructionum fabricae et
suppelletilis ecclesiasticis
libri duo

Milan, apud
Pacificum
Pontium, typographum ...
Cardinalis S.
Praxedis
Archiepiscopi

1577

Wilhelm
Lindanus

De fugiendis nostri seculi
idolis (Apologia Ecclesiae
Christi Iesu Catholicae,
quod idola non colit, neque
meretrix est illa Babylonica

Cologne, apud
Maternum
Cholinum …

1580

Bologna, Benacci

1582

Raffaello
Borghini

Il Riposo di Raffaello
Florence,
Borghini, in cui della pittura appresso Giorgio
e della scultura si favella,
Marescotti
de’ più illustri pittori e
scultori e delle più famose
opere loro si fa menzione; e
le cose principii appartenenti
a dette arti si insegnano

1584

Giovanni Paolo
Lomazzo

Trattato dell’arte della
pittura

1584

Giovanni Paolo
Lomazzo

Trattato dell’arte della
pittvra, scoltvra, et
architettvra

Milan, Appresso
Paolo Gottardo
Pontio
Milan, P. G. Pontio

Gabriele Paleotti Discorso intorno alle
imagini sacre et profane:
diviso in cinque libri

1585

259

BY RUTH S. NOYES

APPENDIX A. (continued)
Author

Title

Place, Publisher Date

Romano Alberti

Trattato della nobilta della
Rome, Francesco
pittura: composto ad instantia Zannetti
della venerabil’compagnia
di S. Luca et nobil’ Academia
delli pittori di Roma

1585

Simone Maioli

Pro defensione sacrarum
imaginum adversus Iconomachos libri seu Centuriae
sexdecim

Rome, in aedibus
populi romani

1585

Giovanni Battista De’ veri precetti della pittvra
Armenini
di M. Gio. Battista Armenini
da Faenza libri tre. : Ne’ quali
con bell’ordine d’vtili, &
buoni auertimenti, per chi
desidera in essa farsi con
prestezza eccellente, si dimostrano i modi principali del
disegnare, & del dipignere,
& di fare le pitture, che si
conuengono alle conditioni
de’ luoghi, & delle persone

Ravenna, Apresso
Francesco
Tebaldini, ad
instantia di
Tomaso Pasini
Libraro in
Bologna

1587

René Benoist

Advertissement du moyen
par lequel tous troubles et
diférens de ce temps, seront
assopis et ostez. Par M. M. R.
Benoist ...

Paris, Par Iehan
Boudin

1587

Giovanni Paolo
Lomazzo

Idea del tempio della
pittura

Milan, per Paolo
Gottardo Pontio

1590

Gregorio
Comanini

Il Figino, overo del fine
Mantua, Per
della Pittura. Dialogo ... ove Francesco
quistionandosi se’l fine
Osanna …
della pittura sia l’utile overo
il diletto, si tratta dell’ uso
di quella nel Christianesimo.
Et si mostra, qual sia imitator
più perfetto & che più diletti,
il Píttore, overo il Poeta

Francesco
Bocchi

Opera di M. Francesco
Bocchi sopra l’imagine
miracolosa della santissima
Nunziata di Fiorenza ...

Florence,
Michelangelo
Sermartelli

1591

1592

260

POST–TRIDENTINE IMAGE REFORM AND THE MYTH OF GABRIELE PALEOTTI

APPENDIX A. (continued)
Author

Title

Gabriele Paleotti De imaginibus sacris, et
profanis: illustriss. et
reverendiss

Place, Publisher Date
Ingolstadii,
Ex Officina
Typographica
Davidis Sartorii

1594

Antonio
Possevino

Antonij Posseuini Societatis Lyon, Apud
Iesu Tractatio de poësi &
Ioannem
pictura ethnica, humana,
Pillehotte …
& fabulosa collata cum vera,
honesta, & sacra: adiectus
est in hac editione nouus
index, qui omnia notatu
digna complectitur

1594

Jan Molanus

De historia SS. imaginum et
picturarum: pro vero earum
vsu contra abusus. Libri IV

Louvain, Apud
Ioannem
Bogardum

1594

Costantino
Ghini

Dell’Immagini Sacre:
dialoghi del R.P.D. Constantino Ghini da Siena ...

Siena, Nella
stamperia di
Luca Bonetti

1595

René Benoist

Advertissement au peuple
catholique de la France: du
moyen par lequel tous
troubles seront assoupis

Lyon

1596

Louis Richeôme

Trois discours pour la
religion catholique, des
miracles, des saincts, &
des images

Bordeaux,
S. Millanges

1597

Ludwig Erhard
and Sebastian
Heiss, eds.

Disputatio theologica de
cultu et invocatione
sanctorum, ac veneratione
sacrarum reliquiarum,
atque Imaginum . . .

Munich, Henricus
München

1601

Louis Richeôme

Tableaux sacrez des figures
mystiques du très-auguste
sacrifice et sacrement de
l’Eucharistie, De Diez, à la
tres chrestienne royne de
France et de Navarre Marie
de Medicis

Paris, Laurens
Sonnius

1601

261

BY RUTH S. NOYES

APPENDIX A. (continued)
Author

Title

Place, Publisher Date

Domenico
Anfossi

De sacrarum reliquarum
Cultu, Veneratione, Translatione, atque Identitate
Brevis, sed utilis Tractatio,
studio, et opera M.R.V.D.D.
Dominici Anfossii Patrii
Tabiensis, et Canonici
Papiensis …

Brescia, Ex
Typographia
Sabbij

1610

Louis Richeôme

La peinture spirituelle, ou,
l’art d’admirer, aimer et
louer Dieu en toutes ses
oeuvres, et tirer de toutes
profit saluterre . . .

Lyon, Pierre
Rigaud

1611

Jan Molanus

De historia SS. imaginum
et picturarum pro vero
earum usu contra abusus.
Libri IIII

Douai, Gerardus
Pinchon, ex
typogr. Petri
Auroi.

1617

Jan Molanus

D. Ioannis Molani ... De
historia SS. imaginum et
picturarum pro vero earum
usu contra abusus. Libri IIII

Antwerp,Apud
G. Bellerum

1617

Jan Molanus

D. Ioannis Molani ... De
Lyon, Sumptibus
historia SS. imaginum et
Laurentii Durand
picturarum : pro vero earum
usu contra abusus, liber III

Federico
Borromeo

De pictura sacra: libri due

Jan Molanus

De historia SS. imaginum et Louvain,Typis
picturarum, pro vero earum Academicis
usu contra abusus, libri
quatuor: Ejusdem Oratio de
agnis dei, et alia quaedam . . .

Milan

1619

1624
1771

PHILOSEMITISM UNDER A DARKENING SKY:
JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL
(1900–45)
BY

BRENNA MOORE*

The work of Charles Péguy (1873–1914), Léon Bloy (1846–1917),
and especially Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960) provides insight
regarding the relationship between French Jews and Catholics in
the early-twentieth century. The author argues that these writers
sought an alternative to both the secular laïcité respect for Jews that
depended on suppressing Jewish particularity as a prelude to citizenship and the classic Christian contempt of Judaism. They created a highly aesthetic and imaginative philosemitic alternative
that advocated the unity between Jews and Christians, and occasionally supported resistance to antisemitism. Yet these thinkers
also employed essentialized images, emphasizing Jewish suffering
and advocated, in some cases, conversions to Christianity.
Keywords: Bloy, Léon; French Catholic Revival; Jewish-Catholic relations; Maritain, Raïssa; Péguy, Charles
In May 1925, the German Jewish writer Joseph Roth wrote a rapturous letter from Paris to his editor and friend, Benno Reifenberg, in
Germany.“Here,”he wrote,“Catholicism is at its worldliest.”He explained
in an essay, “Catholicism is a cosmopolitan religion that embraces all
peoples.”In particular,Roth assured Reifenberg,Parisian Catholicism was
nothing less than a “European expression of universal Jewishness.”1 Roth
•Brenna Moore is an assistant professor in the Department of Theology at Fordham
University, email: brmoore@fordham.edu.The author would like to thank John Seitz; Mara
Willard; Stephen Schloesser, S.J.; and Richard Francis Crane for their helpful feedback on
this essay.The author also is grateful to Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., and Lucy Blyskal, C.S.J.,
who generously enabled a writing retreat where an earlier version of this essay was completed. Unless otherwise noted, translations in this essay are provided by the author.
1
“Worldliest,” “European expression”: Quoted in Michael Hofmann, Introduction,
Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925–1939, trans. Hofmann
(New York, 2004), pp. 11–24, here p. 18. “Cosmopolitan religion”: Joseph Roth,
“Avignon,” in Report from a Parisian Paradise, pp. 97–109, here p. 99.

262

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263

did not convert, but spent much of his life pursuing the realization of
Jewish-Catholic cosmopolitan religiosity. As his biographer put it, he
held a deeply desired equation—“Catholicism ≈ Judaism.” For Roth,
this strange and vague formula did not erase the traditions’ differences
entirely, as evidenced by the arrangement of not one, but two, funerals for himself—one Catholic, one Jewish.2
Roth was one among many Jewish émigrés who had become
deeply attracted to Catholic Christianity while living in France in the
interwar period. Even before the interbellum years, the Catholic
Church had experienced an unprecedented revival in Paris, where
Roth had been on assignment.3 If Jews saw something universal, or
even Jewish, in Catholicism, French Catholics themselves began thinking anew about Judaism in these years. Charles Péguy contended that
Jews force Catholics to look “inside themselves” and discover what
they are missing, and mused on the tenuous bond between members
of the two faiths:“So similar, so different; such enemies, such friends;
such strangers, so much penetrated by one another, so intertwined; so
allied and so loyal; so opposite and so conjoined.”4 Jews and Catholics
alike articulated a cautiously optimistic, if ambivalent, desire to make
sense of one another in new ways.
This essay examines how these early-twentieth-century experiments in Paris prepared the way for transformations within the
Catholic theological imagination.The Shoah is often seen as the terrible, shameful catalyst for Christian revisions of the theology of contempt for Judaism, which partially bore fruit with the promulgation of
the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate (1965). But the French
intellectuals associated with the Catholic revival pursued a new
understanding of Jews and Judaism not after the Holocaust, but at a
much earlier point in the twentieth century. This community’s passionate and occasionally astonishing writings reflected not only on
2

Hofmann, Introduction, p. 18.
On the revival, see Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernity in
Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto, 2005); Philippe Chenaux, Entre Maurras et
Maritain: Une Génération intellectuelle catholique 1920–1930 (Paris, 1999); Étienne
Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté: la pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II 1914–1962 (Paris, 1998); and Frédéric Gugelot, La Conversion
des intellectuels au catholicisme en France, (1885–1935) (Paris, 1998).
4
Charles Péguy, “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne,” in
Oeuvres en prose complètes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1992), 2:1446–51. Quoted in Annette
Aronowicz, Jews and Christians on Time and Eternity: Charles Péguy’s Portrait of
Bernard-Lazare (Palo Alto, CA, 1998), p. 3.
3

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

the symbolic representation of the people of Israel in theology but
also on the historical situation of persecuted Jews in the twentieth
century, particularly during the Alfred Dreyfus affair (1894–1901),
during the antisemitism of the 1930s, and during the Shoah.
Furthermore, Nostra Aetate did not, and perhaps could not, capture
the experimental and far-reaching character of these explorations in
the French context, asserting not just tolerance but a kind of unity
between the two traditions. It is this radicalism—and, of course, the
ambivalence—of such assertions that is explored in this essay.
In doing so, John Connelly’s recent, extraordinary analysis is
extended; as Connelly notes, without the pivotal figures from
Germany and Austria, “The Catholic Church would never have
‘thought its way’ out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism.”5 By
focusing on the key French figures, new details about the story of
prewar Catholic philosemitism emerge: the uniquely French assertion
of the idealization of the trope of “Jewish suffering,” as a grounds for
Christian-Jewish unity, along with the emphasis on Christianity’s debt
to Judaism.These themes may be unpacked through a focus on three
main protagonists: Léon Bloy (1846–1917), Charles Péguy
(1873–1914), and Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960, see figure 1). Maritain
was a leader of an internationalist community that endeavored to construct a theory of the relationship between Jews and Christians. Her
texts Histoire d’Abraham (1935) and the two-volume Les grandes
amitiés (1941, 1944) aim to establish what she called the living bond
between the two traditions. To understand Maritain’s predecessors
and influences, the discussion begins with a brief exploration of the
assumptions and strategies for thinking about Jews and Judaism that
appear in the works of her mentors Bloy and Péguy. Both Péguy and
Bloy broke new ground at the turn of the century—albeit charting
territory that was deeply ambivalent and sometimes problematic—
steering the course for subsequent developments in philosemitism
for Catholics.
The works of Bloy, Péguy, and Maritain are worth exploration
because their rationales are illustrative not simply of the “good”
philosemitism against “bad” anti-Judaism, but their ideas, as historian
Richard Crane recently explained, illustrate the conflicts, tensions,
and constraints at the heart of French Christian thinking on this
5

John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on
the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 287.

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265

FIGURE 1. Raïssa Maritain, c. 1934. Photograph courtesy of the Jacques
Maritain Papers, Jacques Maritain Center, University of Notre Dame.

issue.6 Individuals such as Bloy, Péguy, and Maritain resist simple
appraisal; they fit uneasily into contemporary notions of religious tolerance. Bloy scorned politics as a means to reduce the suffering of
Jews, and his theology is deeply entangled with essentialized images
of Jews of the worst sort. In addition to Bloy, Péguy’s courageous
philosemitism also harbors troubling essentialist notions of Judaism;
and Maritain, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, forthrightly advocated
Jewish conversion to Christianity like her godfather Bloy. Certainly, to
reawaken these revivalists is not to discover finally a uniformly safe
or liberative Catholic position on Judaism. The analysis that follows
aims to untangle the ambivalence of these philosemitic endeavors
and track how these revivalists’ thinking underwent significant revisions in the years before the Shoah.
Yet, despite the imperfections of these ideas and practices, this
community tried to wrest the conventional, long-standing anti-Jewish
discourse from the Christian imagination and create a more tolerant
6

Richard Francis Crane, The Passion of Israel: Jacques Maritain, Catholic
Conscience, and the Holocaust (Scranton, PA, 2010).

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

alternative. Theirs were early experiments to validate Judaism and
Jews for their religion, rather than adopt the negative construction of
Judaism that predominated in Christian thinking.7 Despite their problematic aspects, they nonetheless exerted a force that at least cracked
the massive edifice of Catholic antisemitism in France (indeed, an edifice so massive that Julie Kalman’s recent work suggests that
Catholicism and contempt for Judaism were largely synonymous for
most of modern French history 8). On this issue, these thinkers were
consistently daring aesthetically and attacked a difficult theological
and political issue head on.Yet the prescience of the French Catholic
revivalists in this respect is balanced, if not tragically overwhelmed, by
the extent to which their labors were so vulnerable. Indeed, the eventual failure of Catholicism in 1940–45 to pursue these early prewar
attempts at universalism and philosemitism would evoke outrage in
the twilight years of late-modern Catholicism’s golden age.This topic
therefore presents us with an ideal moment to consider the opportunities and limits, as well as the risks and rewards, for “thinking with”
the French Catholic revivalists.
Finally, this community’s ideas on Judaism are worth retrieving
because their concern with unity amid difference remains with us.
Now, as then, relating Judaism to unity is fraught with risk; those who
are unified often are required to submit to a particular normative
order. In the case of Jews, unification with gentile society often
meant full assimilation or conversion as well as the stark eradication
of Jewish difference. In French political and social thought, there is
a long-standing tradition identifying secular humanism as the only
viable source of human unity and progress. As Ruth Harris and others
have shown, the secular underpinnings of French laicité animate
republican universalism as well as a sometimes fanatical intolerance
of organized religion.9 Yet modern France also has harbored a robust

7
For a good historical precedent see Thomas A. Kselman, “The Bautain Circle and
Catholic-Jewish Relations in Modern France,” The Catholic Historical Review, 92
(2006), 177–96.
8
Julie Kalman, Rethinking Anti-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century France (New
York, 2010). See also Connelly, From Enemy to Brother, pp. 11–35.
9
Ruth Harris, “How the Dreyfus Affair Explains Sarkozy’s Burqua Ban,” Foreign
Policy, May 12, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/
12/how_the_dreyfus_affair_explains_sarkozy_s_burqa_ban; Harris, Dreyfus: Politics,
Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York, 2010); Philip Nord, The
Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 106–10.

BY BRENNA MOORE

267

counter-tradition critiquing the assumptions operative in these
claims. The French Catholic revival sits squarely within this field of
critique.This community’s thinking on Jews was an explicit attempt
to develop a notion of common humanity outside the confines of
secular republicanism. If we can cautiously revisit the leading figures
of this counter-tradition, we may gain broader resources for articulating and limning what binds us together as humans outside purely
secular discourse.10
“Dripping with the Word of God”: Charles Péguy’s Juifs
Bloy and Péguy wrote at the turn of the century, when antisemitism was a broadly accepted moral and political outlook in
France.11 Even those who defended Jews such as Dreyfus could do so
by claiming that one could respect Jews as citizens and need not like
anything about Jewish particularity.12 In complex and divergent ways,
both Péguy and Bloy sought to challenge the classical Christian view
of Jews as recalcitrant sinners, but they refused to see them in terms
of republican, secular universalism. An elusive figure who defies easy
categorization, Péguy was a poet, socialist, journalist, and atheist who
returned to the Catholicism of his youth as an adult. Péguy was an
ardent Dreyfusard, yet he was critical of French republicans who, on
account of Dreyfus and Catholic antisemitism, sought to make French
politics avowedly secular.Throughout his life, Péguy maintained a dual
interest in the plight of Jews and the revival of a place for religion in
the modern world.This twofold outlook consolidated a similar set of
interests among the men and women who gathered at his famous Left
Bank bookshop in the early 1900s, a site of both robust philosemitism
and the critique of Parisian anticlericalism.13
Péguy’s writings on Jews and Judaism are scattered throughout his
vast corpus, but his ideas are most fully developed in his famous
10
Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies, ed.
Hent de Vries (New York, 2006), pp. 494–526.
11
Pierre Birnbaum shows how the Dreyfus Affair exposed long-standing, widely held
antisemitic sentiments that circulated in cities, small towns, and rural communities
throughout France; see The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, trans. Jane
Marie Todd (New York, 2003). See also William I. Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism
in Europe before the Holocaust (New York, 2003).
12
James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York, 2001),
pp. 459–60;Aronowicz, Jews and Christians, pp. 30–34.
13
Phyllis Stock, “Students Versus the University in Pre–World War Paris,” French
Historical Studies, 7 (1971), 93–101.

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

essay “Notre jeunesse,” published in 1910. This work is Péguy’s nostalgic reminiscence of the early Dreyfus movement, when its followers embodied mystique—charity and passionate commitment no
matter the cost—before the struggle denigrated into mere politique.
Much of the essay provides a lengthy posthumous portrait of the
Jewish writer Bernard Lazare, Péguy’s friend and, in his view, the
early movement’s prophet. Péguy uses his reflections on Dreyfus and
Lazare to include larger reflections on Jewish-Christian relations,
introducing two of the most enduring themes of the philosemitic
French Catholic imagination: the unity of Christians and Jews, and
the Jew as the ideal sufferer.These would be the central philosemitic
conceptual tools used and transformed by thinkers such as Raïssa
Maritain one generation later.
“Antisemites,” Péguy writes in the essay, “speak of Jews. I warn
you that I am about to say something shocking: Antisemites do not
know the Jews [boldface type in original].They speak about them,
but they don’t know them.”14 To find out who the Jews “really are,”
Péguy counters negative generalizations with florid, even romantic,
generalizations of his own, grounded both in the uniqueness of Jews
and their commonality with Christians. Through his portrait of
Lazare and other Jews he had known for “twenty years,” Péguy challenged longstanding Christian and secular anxieties about them.
Against the stereotype of the wealthy merchant who usurps
France’s financial assets, Péguy depicts Lazare as a Jewish writer
raised in an impoverished ghetto, whose deep sense of solidarity
and duty compelled him to dedicate his life to the well-being of the
multitude of Jews living in the ghettos of Romania, Poland, Russia,
and France. Péguy’s text moves to make a general claim about the
solidarity between Jews like Dreyfus and Lazare, and Christians who
are struggling in the modern world: “What I see,” Péguy wrote, “is
that Jews and Christians together, poor Jews and poor Christians, we
make a living as best as we can, generally poorly, in this bitch of a

14

“Les antisémites parlent des juifs. Je préviens que je vais dire une énormité: Les
anti-sémites ne connaissent point les juifs. Ils en parlent, mais ils ne les connaissent point.” Charles Péguy, “Notre jeunesse,” in Oeuvres en prose, 1909–1914 (Paris,
1957), pp. 513–688, here pp. 628–29, emphasis in original. In addition to Harris’s
Dreyfus, two excellent readings of Péguy on Jews and Judaism can be found in Annette
Aronowicz, Jews and Christians on Time and Eternity: Charles Péguy’s Portrait of
Bernard-Lazare (Palo Alto, CA, 1998); and Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew:
Politics and Identity in French Postwar Thought (Chicago, 2010), pp. 25–66.

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life, in this bitch, this poor wretch of a modern society.”15 This dark
view of modernity propelled Péguy toward the language of unity.
The shared suffering of Jewish and Catholic men and women underwrites a kind of class solidarity, forged at the level of common
humanity and suffering under modern capitalism.
As Péguy had explained in 1905, modern people are “afraid of
blows,” but anyone who willingly endures suffering, “whoever he
may be, the beggar along the roads, the miserable blind man, and the
man crushed” is the one who, despite appearances,“holds the upper
hand, orders the course of the conversation, commands the situation.”16 Occasionally Péguy saw Jews and Christians united in their
capacity to suffer, and although some Jews cower before danger like
everyone else, there was no community who endured suffering as
did Péguy’s Jews. On the Jewish body there is no place “upon which
there is not an ancient pain, an old bruise, an old contusion, a dull
pain, the memory of dull pain, a scar, a wound.”17 Péguy draws here
on longstanding Christian, secular, literary, aesthetic, and mystical
discourses circulating in France that came together in a shared idealization of images of suffering and affliction.18 For Péguy and other
philosemitic revivalists, the Jew was the embodied articulation of
this (abject) ideal.19
Péguy’s valorization of suffering allowed him to assert the holiness
even of secular, assimilated Jews like Lazare. He imagined him on his
deathbed:

15
“[N]ous gagnons notre vie comme nous pouvons, généralement mal, dans cette
chienne de vie, dans cette chienne, dans cette gueuse de société moderne”: Péguy,
“Notre jeunesse,” p. 630.
16
“… quel qu’il soit, qui que ce soit, que ce soit le mendiant errant au long des
routes, que ce soit l’aveugle misérable, que ce soit le proscrit…. toujours c’est le suppliant qui en réalité tient le dessus, qui tient le haut du dialogue, le haut de la situation”:
Charles Péguy,“Les suppliants parallèles” [1905], in Oeuvres en prose complètes (Paris,
1988), 2:869–935.
17
“Il n’a pas sur la peau un point qui ne soit pas douloureux, où il n’y ait un ancien
bleu, une ancienne contusion, une douleur sourde, la mémoire d’une douleur sourde”:
Péguy,“Notre jeunesse,” p. 590.
18
For more on suffering in the French Catholic Revival, see Brenna Moore, Sacred
Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival
(Notre Dame, 2012); D. E. Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood:Women, Catholicism, and the
Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970 (Ithaca, NY, 2004).
19
For a fascinating discussion of the trope of Jewish abjection and marginalization
in later twentieth-century French thought, see Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew.

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

That atheist, that professional atheist, that official atheist, in whom
resounded, with unbelievable power, with unbelievable gentleness, the
eternal word. I still see him in his bed, that atheist dripping with the word
of God. Even in death, the whole weight of his people bore down on his
shoulders.20

In Péguy’s hands, Lazare’s suffering overcame his atheism to sanctify
the man to God. Jews like Lazare make good on the most highly
prized values of French Catholicism: souffrance. Through this,
Péguy, along with Bloy, planted the seeds for one of the most persistent, and obviously ambivalent, aspects of the revivalists on Jews
and Judaism.
In some places, Péguy’s vivid notion of a wounded Jewry remained
stubbornly ahistorical, an essential aspect of Jewish identity rather
than something that can be traced historically and politically.Yet, for
Péguy, this symbol functioned paradoxically. Despite the allure of the
symbol of Jewish suffering, Péguy worked tirelessly to improve their
condition around the world. He was an ardent Dreyfusard, and it was
not only their abjection: Péguy wrote at length about the superiority
of Jewish literacy tradition in comparison with that of Catholicism,
and as his reflections of Lazare make clear, he did not want to erase
difference, neither through assimilation nor conversion. Many Jews
were attracted to Péguy for his interest in Jewish particularity; as
many have noted, Péguy was unique in countering turn-of-the-century
antisemitism with the affirmation of Jews as Jews, even as Péguy trafficked in the realm of essentialism and ahistoricism. It is no surprise,
therefore, that many of the Jewish intellectuals circulating through
Péguy’s bookshop, like the writer Julien Benda and the young intellectual Raïssa Maritain who met him in 1901, saw Péguy’s
philosemitism as an attractive alternative to the secular assimilationist
ideology of most leftist political thought. Raised in an atmosphere of
pressure for assimilation into French republicanism, many European
Jews had become alienated from religion or were raised with a very
tenuous, sometimes only nominal, understanding of it.21 Péguy and
other revivalists push back against secular assimilation by seeing
20
“Cet athée, ce professionnellement athée, cet officiellement athée en qui retentissait, avec une force, avec une douceur incroyable, la parole éternelle. . . . cet athée ruisselant de la parole de Dieu. Dans la mort même tout le poids de son peuple lui pesait
aux épaules”: Péguy,“Notre jeunesse,” p. 632.
21
Michael Weingrad, “Juifs Imaginaires,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary
History, 21 (2001), 255–76, here 260.

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Jewish particularity in terms of heroism and suffering, characteristics
that can unite them with Christians, without conversion, into the
realm of mystique and revolution. Péguy, for his Jewish friends,“rediscovered in them the Judaism they seemed to no longer remember,” as
one of his French biographers noted.22
“Their Very Abjection Is a Divine Sign”:
Léon Bloy’s Symbolic Jews
Working within a shared cultural circuit, Bloy amplified and radicalized the suffering-centered philosemitism of Péguy and created a
more deeply ambivalent and highly aesthetic reading of Judaism. His
vivid, transgressive writing on a host of topics has endeared him to
some Jewish and Catholic readers across the ideological spectrum,
but his deep entanglements with Jewish stereotypes have earned him
the scorn of many more. For France’s leading scholar of antisemitism,
Bloy’s writings on Judaism have understandably earned the reputation
as “ravings” that “fed the fantasies” of even the most proactive and
vociferous antisemites.23 The violence of Bloy’s rhetoric has to be
faced openly. Yet Bloy also—perhaps oddly—fits within a broader
genealogy of French philosemitism for his emphasis on Christian
Jewish unity and his reiterations of the trope of Jewish suffering, a
trope that would later be taken up by influential philosemites like
Raïssa Maritain, as a counterforce to the stereotype of the wealthy
Jewish capitalist. Bloy is worth examining because his work crystallizes the daring, symbolism characteristic of the Catholic revival as
well as its darker, more pernicious dimensions.
Bloy, whose work appeared between 1885 and 1917, was a controversial anti-bourgeois novelist who attracted the attention of many
intellectuals in Paris. Bloy’s ideas on Jews and Judaism matured
throughout his life in crucial ways, but his longest writings on this
22

Lazare Prajs, Péguy et Israel (Paris, 1970), p. 36. Quoted in Aronowicz, Jews and
Christians, p. 150.
23
Pierre Birnbaum, “Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the rue Copernic: Jews at the
Heart of French History,” in Realms of Memory, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D.
Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 1996) 1: 379–425, here 412. For two
competing interpretations of Bloy on antisemitism see Philippe Chenaux,“Léon Bloy et
sa postérité,” in Juifs et Chrétiens: Entre Ignorance, Hostilité et Rapprochement
(1898–1998), ed.Annette Becker, Danielle Delmaire, and Frédéric Gugelot (Lille, 2002),
pp. 47–58; Michel Fourcade, “Maritain face au réveil de l’antisémitisme (1933–1939),”
Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 41 (2001), 3–51.

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theme can found an early book, Le salut par les juifs (Salvation by
the Jews), published in 1892. Le Salut par les juifs is a chaotic book;
Bloy’s frenzied prose contributes to the lack of scholarly consensus as
to whether he was an antisemite or—like Péguy—an early, if imperfect, philo-Semite who aimed to dismantle the classic Christian contempt of Judaism.
Le Salut begins with a polemic against the handbook of French
antisemitism, Eduard Drumont’s La France Juive.24 Bloy claims to
“déclare la guerre” on Drumont’s nightmarish ramblings, but in his
effort to subvert prevailing antisemitic racism in terms of Christian
eschatology, he mimics Drumont’s manic prose and re-energizes a set
of powerful antisemitic tropes. Bloy’s Jews “wander the earth, without
a vocation”“crawling” like vermin “along the Danube, Poland, Russia,
Germany, Holland, in France itself.” They are the “Orphan People,”
“condemned.”The Jews have “murdered the Word.”25 These myths of
the Jews as a God-killing people and their fate of eternal wandering
are old, anti-Jewish clichés. But the image of the wandering Jew in particular gained a new traction in the nineteenth century precisely
because of nationalism and the notion that all real individuals
belonged to a people and their land. Jews did not have a land; as wanderers, they hence were never actually citizens.26 For Bloy, the Jew in
Le salut was the rejected embodiment of misery and homelessness,
the lost stranger.
For Bloy, Jewish wandering and particularity was not proof of their
recalcitrance. It was a sign of their holiness and their assimilation into
a Christianity also marked by suffering and united with Judaism.“The
very abjectness of that Race,” he writes,“is a divine Sign, the very manifest sign of the constant lingering of the Holy Spirit over these men
so scorned.”27 Elsewhere he names “a sort of identity” between Israel
and the Holy Spirit to illustrate the alliance between the people of
Israel—rootless and cast aside—and God.28 Even further, he endows
24

Léon Bloy, Le salut par les juifs (Paris, 1906), p. 2.
Bloy, Le salut par les juifs: “errer sans vocation sur la terre,” p. 34;“grouiller le long
du Danube, en Pologne, en Russie, en Allemagne, en Hollande, en France même,” p. 19;
“Peuple Orphelin condamné,” p. 32;“les Juifs ayant égorgé le Verbe fait chair,” p. 35.
26
Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, p. 31–35.
27
“La abjection même de cette Race est une Signe divin, le signe très manifest de la
permanence de l’Esprit-Saint sur ces hommes si méprisés[.]” Léon Bloy, Le vieux de la
montagne (Paris, 1919), p. 305.
28
Bloy Le salut par les juifs, p. 116.
25

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the Holy Spirit with the classic markers of Jewish particularity: the
Paraclete not only identifies with the wandering Jews but also wanders.29 It is Jews and the Jewish Christ, the orphan and “leper king,”
from whom we learn that the markers of rootlessness and suffering
are not to be scorned but are the marks of holiness itself.
This way of sanctifying Jewish particularity follows from Bloy’s
doctrine of a God who is at home with “the dead, the dying, and the
wounded” on earth, and at one with the protagonists of Bloy’s
books—impoverished individuals, those who are insane, widows,
prostitutes, Jews, and children.30 Bloy’s emphasis on the alliance
between the marginal Jew and Holy Spirit suits his doctrine of God,
who is found only in “the outcast, the starving, the beggar, the lunatic,
the desperate”—those who suffer on the margins.31 Bloy exhibits
what historian Samuel Moyn has called the “cultural code” of
philosemitism that relies upon antisemitic discourse and symbols in
the putative service of Jews so as to dismiss, reject, or reverse the evaluation of stereotypes against them, “flirting with the taboo” of antisemitism in unstable ways.32
To understand why Bloy would rely so heavily upon this troubling
strategy requires an acknowledgment of Bloy’s debts to the decadent
literary movement in fin-de-siècle France. Authors like Bloy affiliated
with decadence rebelled against the seeming optimism of bourgeois
modernity, highlighting and idealizing those cultural symbols most
denigrated by the liberalism of the laïcité. For decadents, middle-class
mentalities were tepid and mediocre, but also could be relentlessly
cruel for those they left on the margins of society. Decadents glorified
and elicited in grisly detail the figures shunned or ignored by others.33
The indecorous lifestyles of the prostitute, the Jew, the degenerate, the
sick, and the female hystérique were vividly depicted in decadent
novels as a means of subverting modern liberal ideals and making vis29

“ce Paraclet errant”: Bloy, Le salut par les juifs, p. 114.
“Des morts, des agonisants, des blessés”: Léon Bloy, Le désespéré (Paris, 1886),
p. 310.
31
Quoted in Giovanni Dotoli, Autobiographie de la douleur: Léon Bloy, écrivain et
critique (Paris, 1998), p. 110.
32
Samuel Moyn, “Antisemitism, Philosemitism, and the Rise of Holocaust Memory,”
Patterns of Prejudice, 43 (2009), 1–16.
33
Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Stephen
Schloesser, “From ‘Spiritual Naturalism’ to ‘Psychical Naturalism’: Catholic Decadence,
Lutheran Munch, and Madone Mystérique,” in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol, and
Expression, ed. Jeffrey Howe (Boston, 2001), pp. 75–110.
30

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

ible those typically cast aside. In the late-nineteenth-century, a group
of Catholic writers that included Bloy and his one-time friend, J. K.
Huysmans, drew upon the decadent reversals of bourgeois values and
brought them into explicit conversation with Catholic symbols of the
supernatural. Like his friend and mentor Barbey d’Aurevilly
(1808–89), Bloy sought to shock the literary and Catholic middle class
through the embrace of the shadow side of modernity.
In a strategy somewhat akin to that of Péguy, Bloy’s deeply ambivalent philosemitism relied upon Jewish particularity—their suffering
and abjection—that could be accommodated by a marginal, antibourgeois Christianity, but in his case, it was a model of Christian absorption of Judaism. Bloy framed Christianity as fundamentally Jewish,
because such a formulation reclaimed the religion’s marginal roots.
Bloy relished in Nietzsche’s accusations of Christianity as the religion
of the Jewish underclass:
People forget, or rather do not want to know, that our God made man is a
Jew, the Jew of Jews by nature, the Lion of Judah; that His Mother is a
Jewess, the flower of the Jewish Race; that all His Ancestors were Jews;
that the Apostles were Jews, as well as the Prophets; finally that our holy
Liturgy is entirely drawn from the Jewish books.

Bloy believed this recognition could subvert modern antisemitism:“So
then how is one to express the enormity of the outrage and of the
blasphemy that consists in vilifying the Jewish Race?”34 In a way, this
subverted the prevailing antisemitic narrative of Catholics (in which
Jews were too cosmopolitan, modern, and untraditional) as well as
that of the laïcité (in which Jewish particularism was something that
had to be overcome and absorbed into universal citizenship).
Although Péguy and Bloy both aimed to articulate the bonds
between Jews and Christians through the idiom of suffering, Péguy
crucially did not require Jewish conversion or assimilation. True
Christianity, as Bloy described it, would renew contact with its abject
Jewish roots, but true Judaism was ultimately destined for the Church.
The combination of these contradictory claims—the recasting of anti34
“On oublie ou plutôt on ne veut pas savoir que notre Dieu fait homme est un juif,
le juif par excellence de nature, le Lion de Juda; que sa Mère est une juive, la fleur de la
Race juive: que tous ses Ancêtres ont été des juifs; que les Apôtres ont été des juifs, aussi
bien que tous les Prophètes; enfin que notre Liturgie sacrée tout entière est puisée dans
les livres juifs. Dès lors comment exprimer l’énormité de l’outrage et du blasphème qui
consiste à vilipender la Race juive?”: Bloy, Le vieux de la montagne, p. 303.

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semitic tropes as holy and the positing of the Jews’ conversion as an
eschatological requirement—animated the potential antisemitism and
violence of Bloy’s rhetoric.
For all of his outrage against modern antisemitism, Bloy did not have
Péguy’s faith in politics to ameliorate the situation for Jews or anyone
else. Although Bloy’s writings were meant to evoke reader outrage,
moral indignation, and sympathy, the origin of Jewish suffering, in his
view, was not political or historical, but rather was fundamental to
Jewish identity and salvation history. According to Bloy, humanitarians
only think, like most Dreyfusards, “in terms of human means. All we
hear about are leagues, congresses, elections, etc. . . . to my mind this is
vain and profoundly stupid.”35 He believed in acts of charity and kindness, but wanted to depict the reality of Jewish suffering in vivid, symbolic detail that could be hurled at the bourgeoisie as an aesthetic
invective. Jews appear in his text as vessels to communicate perversion
and inversion, not as real people. Unlike Péguy, he knew few actual
Jewish men and women.The fascinating exception is his goddaughter,
Raïssa (Oumançoff) Maritain, whom he met in 1905. He hoped to convert her to Christianity only a month after their meeting.36
“Unity, Continuity, and Perfect Harmony”:
Raïssa Maritain’s Two Faiths
Maritain’s upbringing was typical of the Jews in this setting. Born
in Russia in 1883, she had fled with her family from the Jewish
pogroms, arriving in France when she was ten years old.37 Her family
settled into a large and fairly well-established community of Russian
Jews in Paris. According to an early 1909 essay, Maritain did not
receive formal religious education as a child, although she knew of
the struggles of Jewish people around the world.38 Attuned to the
35
“. . . pensent presque tous à des moyens humains. On n’entend parler que de
ligues, de congrès, d’élections, etc. A mes yeux tout cela est vain et profondément stupide”: Bloy, Le vieux de la montagne, p. 302. For more on Bloy and Dreyfus, see Richard
Griffiths, The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and Its Aftermath
(New York, 1991), pp. 142–53.
36
Léon Bloy, Mon Journal (Paris, 1956), p. 267.
37
For two extensive treatments of Raïssa Maritain in English, see Moore, Sacred
Dread; Judith Suther, Raïssa Maritain: Pilgrim, Poet, Exile (New York, 1990).
38
“Enfant j’entendis beaucoup parler du peuple juif, mais je ne reçus pour ainsi dire
pas d’instruction religieuse”: Raïssa Maritain, “Récit de ma conversion,” in Jacques
Maritain and Raïssa Maritain, Oeuvres complétes (Paris, 1982–2000), XV:827–37, here
p. 827.

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

norms of the Russian intelligentsia, Russian Jews often emigrated to
France for the education of their children, placed less emphasis on
religious observance than other immigrants, and aligned with radical
Russian politics.39
After Bloy met Maritain, the nominalism of her Judaism did not prevent Bloy from making this factor, along with her gender, her defining
characteristic.40 Bloy isolated and celebrated the aspect of Maritain’s
identity that he had already decided was abject, strangely powerful,
and crucially united with Christianity.“The delightful little Jew,” Bloy
mused in summer 1905,“in whom we already see a Christian.”41 Bloy’s
view of the ultimate unity of Judaism and Christianity was one that
was not a partnership of equals, but rather was a supercession of
Judaism by the Church, a Church that was still in some respects—at
least ideally—abject, antibourgeois, and Jewish. Conversion, accordingly, was essential. Maritain thanked Bloy for making possible her
arrival at Christianity. She wrote in 1909 that, thanks to Bloy,“where I
would have been afraid of finding struggles and opposition, yet I
experienced with true joy only unity, continuity and perfect harmony” between Judaism and the Catholic Church.42 In fact, Maritain
did not see her Jewishness dissolved by her Christianity, but she saw
herself as a Jew in the Catholic Church who still was very much a part
of the people of Israel. She and her new husband, Jacques Maritain,
were baptized in Paris on June 11, 1906, with Bloy serving as their
godfather.
For Maritain, as with other assimilated Jews in Péguy’s community,
Bloy’s philosophy may have been a rare representation of Judaism as
a religious system. The construction of Maritain’s conception of
Judaism makes sense given her background—anti-Jewish violence led
to her family’s flight to France, where citizenship meant assimilation.
At age twenty-two, she knew almost nothing about Judaism and little
about Catholicism.43 Bloy’s contempt for all things bourgeois
appealed to Maritain’s leftist background.
39

Paula E. Hyman, Jews in Modern France (Berkeley, CA, 1998), pp. 122–23.
Bloy, Mon Journal, p. 267.
41
“la délicieuse petite juive en qui nous voyons déjà une chrétienne”: Bloy, Lettres à
ses filleuls (Paris, 1922), p. 166.
42
“Là où j’aurais craint de trouver lutte et opposition, je ne vis à ma grande joie
qu’unité, continuité, harmonie parfaite”: R. Maritain,“Récit de ma conversion,” p. 834.
43
For more on this widespread nominal understanding of Judaism, see Weingrad,
“Juifs Imaginaires,” p. 260.
40

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277

Like Péguy, other assimilated Jewish intellectuals of the left would find
something oddly appealing about Bloy,particularly for his vivid,evocative
rage against modernity. In 1924, after reading the “splendid exegesis” of
Bloy’s satirical Exégèses des lieux communs, Walter Benjamin claimed,“a
more embittered critique, or rather satire, of the bourgeois could hardly
have been written.”44 Later, Emmanuel Levinas cited Bloy’s “admirably
bold” vision of femininity in Lettres à sa Fiancée.45 Franz Kafka also
admired Bloy, reporting that he “possesses a fire that brings to mind the
ardor of the prophets—an even greater ardor, I should say.”46 As with
Maritain, Lazare, and Julien Benda, many nonobservant Jewish men and
women were attracted to revivalists like Bloy and Péguy and were
thereby drawn into a particular kind of antibourgeois Catholic
philosemitism in early-twentieth-century France. Some would journey to
conversion, like Maritain, whereas others would remain at the borderlands of the two traditions, like Roth. Many of these assimilated Jews
would not receive these Catholic philosemitic imaginings passively, but
would enter into the discourse,use the tools at hand,and intervene in this
“Catholic” conversation reimagining of the boundaries between
Christianity and Judaism.This would be precisely the work of Maritain.
“The Ardor of Both Faiths”: Maritain and the Early Years
of the Russian-Jewish-Catholic Salon at Meudon
After her mentors Péguy and Bloy had died, Maritain gradually
emerged as a leader in an experimental community of religious seekers who frequented the salon established by herself and her husband.47 The Maritains’ salon at Meudon, located just outside Paris,
thrived from 1923 until 1939 and hosted an unpredictable cast of
artists and philosophers. Exiled Russians, homosexuals, wavering
Catholics, clergy, Protestants, and Jews took the train to Meudon in
interwar France.“The Maritains,” one such pilgrim remembered,“had
a tremendous power of attraction, and magnets draw everything.”48
44

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), trans. and ed. Manfred R.
Jacobson (Chicago, 1994), p. 250.
45
Emmanuel Levinas, “From Existence to Ethics,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán
Hand (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 9–125, here p. 49.
46
Kafka’s letter to a friend, quoted in Alberto Manguel, Black Water: The Book of
Fantastic Literature (New York, 1984), p. 90.
47
Nora Possenti,“Au foyer de Meudon,” Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 51 (Dec. 2005),
11–31; Jean–Luc Barré, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, trans.
Bernard Doering (Notre Dame, 1999).
48
Maurice Sachs, Witches Sabbath, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1964), p. 109.

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

Jewish men and women such as Marc and Bella Chagall held a
particularly prominent presence in this salon. Many more in the
Maritains’ circle were Jewish near-converts or converts to
Catholicism.49 The Maritains’ 1906 conversion laid a foundation for
many of the interwar baptisms in Paris, and some people in France
had even speculated that the Maritains were conspiring with the
diocese to bring the faithless into the fold.50 Well-known names
among this group included Russian composers Arthur Lourié and
Nicholas Nabakov, Polish sculptor Marek Szwarc,51 Egyptian-born
historian of religion Jean de Menasce,52 Egyptian writer Georges
Cattaui, German journalist Roland Hill, Polish theater critic Jan Kott,
French writer Max Jacob, priest-poet Jean-Pierre Altermann, and
essayist René Schwob.
On the one hand, the prominent presence of Jewish intellectuals
and Jewish converts at the Maritains’ salon merely reflected what was
happening in interwar Paris. By 1920, Paris had become one of the
largest Jewish centers in the world, and the Jewish population in the
city doubled between the turn of the century and 1930.53 In addition,
Meudon had become a magnet for Russian Jews, which was attractive
to Maritain.The Maritains’ home drew countless numbers of Russian
émigré Jews, largely because the “Russian-Jewish” atmosphere was a
welcome familiarity.54
For Meudon guests interested in issues of Judaism and Christianity,
Maritain was, as one friend remembered, the “luminous center of this
circle.”55 Although less outgoing and robust than her husband, her lay49

Frédéric Gugelot, “Le Temps des Convertis: Signe et Trace de la Modernité
Religieuse Au Début du XXe Siècle,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 47, no.
119 (2002), 45–64, here 54. Esther Benbassa has shown that from 1917 through 1939
in Paris, 769 Jews converted to Catholicism; see Benbassa, The Jews of France:A History
of Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, 1999), p. 157.
50
Gugelot, La Conversion des Intellectuels; Sachs, Witches Sabbath, p. 111.
51
For details on Szwarc, see Jean–Louis Andral and Sophie Krebs, L’école de Paris
1904–1929, la part de l’Autre (Paris, 2000), p. 363.
52
Philippe Gignoux and Ahmad Tafazzoli, eds., Mémorial Jean de Menasce (Louvain,
1974).
53
Benbassa, The Jews of France, p. 148–49.
54
Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Immigration
1919–1939 (New York, 1999), pp. 140–41; Dennis Dunn, The Catholic Church in
Russia: Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars (Burlington,VT, 2004), p. 80.
55
“le centre lumineux de ce cercle”: Pierre van der Meer de Walcheren, Rencontres:
Léon Bloy, Raïssa Maritain, Christine et Pieterke (Paris, 1961), pp. 110–13.

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ered identity proved irresistible. One émigré convert described
Maritain as a woman “of Jewish descent and born in Russia,” who had
“retained her native tongue and culture. She was therefore most helpful to me.” But Maritain provided more than comfort. The same convert recalled that she was both “firmly rooted in her race” and a “pioneer of Judeo-Christian relations. No one had a deeper insight than
she into the mystery of Israel.”56 Another convert from Poland wrote
with a similar emphasis: “If ever in my lifetime I have met a saint, it
was Raïssa. Born into a Hassidic family . . . she had converted to
Catholicism as a young girl, but she had retained the ardor of both
faiths.”57 Maurice Sachs, who would be ushered by Maritain into the
Church, saw her through the prism of Bloy: “Raïssa Maritain was a
Jewess and it is to her that the admirable work of Léon Bloy is dedicated: Le Salut par les Juifs.” Sachs mused:
To me, she seemed what the holy Jewish women of the early Christian age
must have been: beautiful, the burning brightness of her race, but
reserved, loving, all spirit. . . . She was truly one of those Jewesses consumed by the mystic flame, whose soul was a vertical line from earth to
heaven.58

Sachs’s quixotic, even Orientalist, rendering of the juive femme resurrects Bloy’s initial impressions.59
Maritain’s supposed doubleness repeated itself in the faith of the
Meudon converts who often viewed themselves not as true converts
but as creative combiners of Judaism and Christianity. For example,
the case of Szwarc, who had emigrated with his wife from Poland to
Paris, is illustrative.The two were (secretly) baptized Catholic in 1919
after meeting the Maritains. They raised their daughter, the writer
Tereska Torres, as what they called a “Juive-chrétienne.” As an adult,
Torres wrote at length about this unusual upbringing, nourished in
the salons of the Maritains and Stanislas Fumet, who also was married
to a Jewish convert.60 Torres recalled:
56
Helene Iswolski, Light before Dusk: A Russian Catholic in France (New York,
1942), p. 179.
57
Jan Kott, Still Alive: An Autobiographical Essay, trans. Jadwiga Kosicka (New
Haven, 1994), p. 20.
58
Sachs, Witches Sabbath, p. 33.
59
For more on the theme of gender and philosemitism, see Nadia Valman, “Bad
Jew/Good Jewess,” in Philosemitism in History, ed. Jonathan Karp (New York, 2011),
pp. 149–69.
60
Tereska Torres, Le Choix (Paris, 2002); Torres, The Converts (New York, 1970).

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

I was Jewish. This was something I knew very deeply. I could be as
French and Catholic as any other girl in my school, but it didn’t change
the fact that I was also Jewish. . . . I was a Sephardic, Jewish, Polish,
Catholic, French girl! I felt much richer than those other children who
were only one thing, “Jewish,” or at most, two things, “French and
Catholic.”61

Torres recalls that they saw themselves as “a new tribe of Jews of the
Catholic religion.”62 Another vivid definition is evident in Joseph
Roth’s self-understanding in 1928.“I am a Frenchman from the East,”
he wrote, “a humanist, a rationalist with religion, a Catholic with a
Jewish brain, a real revolutionary.”63 Similarly, Maritain would come
to describe herself as a “Jew who became a Christian,” who still considered herself part of the Jewish community.64 Likewise, many interwar Jewish converts or near converts did not see themselves severing ties with their tradition completely. Maritain often evoked “a new
Christendom” with “ecumenical dimensions,” thus signaling her generation’s hope for a new kind of internationalism and openness.65
In the early Meudon years, Maritain had not yet offered as much
engaged theological reflection on what exactly this optimistic, experimental Christian-Jewish unity actually entailed as she would in the
1930s. In some places, Jewish identity seemed biological (blood and
racial inheritance) and therefore easily accommodated by
Christianity, the religion. Elsewhere, the simple messianic destiny of
Judaism to Christianity undergirded their hopes for Jewish-Christian
unity. Further still, there was also the perceived hope for the unity of
all people—Orthodox, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim—around ideals seen
as were radical and antibourgeois, accommodated by Parisian
61

Torres, The Converts, p. 126.
Torres, The Converts, p. 78.
63
Joseph Roth, quoted in The German–Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary
Texts 1794–1993, ed. Richie Robertson (New York, 1999), p. 265.
64
Considering herself among the “juifs qui deviennent chrétiens,” Maritain describes
becoming increasingly knowledgeable about Judaism through Christianity, in which “il
comprend sa grandeur” of the Jewish people and becomes proud to belong to them.
Raïssa Maritain, “À propos du Christianisme de Henri Bergson,” in J. Maritain and R.
Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XIV:1145–55, here 1146–47.
65
“de dimension oecuménique, et une nouvelle chrétienté”: R. Maritain,“Léon Bloy
et le Révélateur du Globe,” in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres completes,
XIV:1097–110, here 1109. Dunn argues that among the 150 Russian émigrés who converted to Catholicism in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s (from Judaism but also from the
Orthodox Church or atheism), it was a common hope that a new era of internationalism was bound to Catholicism. See Dunn, The Catholic Church in Russia, p. 80.
62

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Catholicism. Maritain, by this point, had not yet published her theological works, and her correspondence with the Jewish converts at
Meudon in the 1920s is dominated by the concern that all seekers—
Jews and non-Jews alike—must develop an interior life nourished by
contemplation, to push against the secular assimiliationist pull of
French culture. To her godson, the Jewish convert Sachs, she urged
him to find space in his life for silence and prayer, and he was baptized on August 25, 1925.66 Conversions to Catholicism among those
who considered themselves déjudaisés (such as Sachs or even
Maritain herself) signal less from one stable tradition to another;
rather, it is more a yearning for an aesthetic, exotic tradition that
would counter the offerings of secularisms.67
The Maritains’ salon was a place where religious texts and traditions could ground a new epistemological and religious community, forged as an alternative to laicized universal citizenship. This
oddly gave Jews like Maritain and other nonobservant Jewish converts a way to actually discover religion and, ultimately, even a particular kind of Christian Judaism. Maritain herself symbolized the
changes that were possible. But by the 1930s, these efforts at unity
with often only a nominal understanding of Judaism would seem
gravely insufficient. More would be needed. By the 1930s, Maritain
stepped out from the shadows to publish her first intellectual
analysis of the lien vivant. The new decade required much more
serious reflection.
Philosemitism in the Context of the Gathering Storm of the
Thirties: Maritain’s Histoire d’Abraham
If the 1920s marked unbounded optimism about the capacities of
Parisian Catholicism to accommodate Judaism, the 1930s, for the Jews
and philosemitic Christians, were ominous and ill-at-ease.68 Jacques’s
66
Letter dated August 11, 1925, in Maurice Sachs, Jacques Maritain, and Raïssa
Maritain, Correspondance Maurice Sachs et Jacques et Raïssa Maritain 1925–1939
(Paris, 2004), p. 60.
67
For more on this theme—particularly the critiques of it from the Jewish community in Paris—see the excellent article by Joël Sebban,“Être juif et chrétien: La question
juive et les intellectuels catholiques français issus du judaïsme (1898–1940),” Archives
Juives, 44 (2011), 102–22.
68
Vicky Caron, The Path to Vichy: Antisemitism in France in the 1930s, Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, [Occasional Papers
Series], (Washington, DC, 2005). Ralph Schor, L’Antisémitisme en France pendant les
années trente (Brussels, 1992).

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international travels along with the religious and ethnic diversity of
the Meudon community gave the Maritains a unique perspective on
European political developments.They understood earlier than most
the increasing severity of European antisemitism as it gained ascendency. Their friendship with several members of the German clergy
alerted them to the existence by 1933 of the Dachau concentration
camp, which housed some of these priests in addition to German
Jews.69 By 1934, the news of antisemitism’s escalation was beginning
to be felt inside France. That year Mein Kampf was translated into
French and the notion that Jews were “inassimilable” began to resurface in Paris.70 In 1935, the Nazi Party passed the Nuremberg Laws
that deprived German Jews of citizenship, creating thousands of
refugees at France’s borders. Many voices in France urged that the
Jewish refugees be denied entrance.71 Scholars such as Vicky Caron
have argued that these escalations of French antisemitism in the
1930s were not merely an importation from Germany, but were also
native to France, drawing energy from larger anxieties about foreigners due to increasing economic woes.72 The Maritains were unequivocal in resisting such calls.
Consequently, philosemitic Catholics began to mine more robust
theological resources to understand Judaism, explicate the connections between the two traditions, and move beyond a mere assertion
of unity. Bloy and Péguy had laid the foundation for articulating unity
in the face of antisemitism, and Maritain took it further. In 1931,
Georges Bernanos published the antisemitic Le grand peur des bienpensants celebrating Eduard Drumont. Maritain responded to
Bernanos with a letter arguing that, despite Bernanos’s claims to the
contrary, neither Mary nor Jesus are “outside their race.” She insisted
on the Jewishness of both the Old and New Testaments, which had
“furnished the Church with its prophets, and its evangelists.”73 This
was one of Maritain’s first responses to the antisemitism within her
Catholic milieu—a fairly mild rejoinder that would intensify in the
coming years. (Roth condemned Bernanos’s book with more forthcoming rage: “He wanted to exterminate the Jews. . . . So much
Catholic faith for the devil, and so much principle for nothing! So
69

Jean-Luc Barré, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, p. 145.
Benbassa, The Jews of France, p. 179.
71
Benbassa, The Jews of France, p. 88.
72
Caron, The Path to Vichy, pp. 5–15.
73
Cited in Bernard Doering, “The Jewish Question,” in Jacques Maritain and the
French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame, 1983), p. 146.
70

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much heroism for cowardice! So much insight for blindness: what a
sorry waste of a life!”74)
In 1935, Maritain began her book Histoire d’Abraham. This book
moves from the Book of Genesis to the Pauline letters to highlight the
living bond between the Old and New Testaments. In Maritain’s
hands, the notion of unity is multivalent, bringing to the surface both
the opportunities and the constraints faced by Catholics as they tried
to forge new understandings of Judaism.75 In this work, Maritain
places the figure of Abraham at the center, claiming that the patriarch
unites the Old and New Testaments.76 In subtle ways, Maritain’s treatment of Abraham breaks down the theological underpinnings of two
typical Christian anti-Jewish invectives: its putative legalism and moral
degeneracy/infancy in comparison with Christianity.
She begins by addressing the puzzling presence of immorality in
Genesis—the lies and infidelity, the incest and violence. Maritain
wants to avoid using these unsavory scenes as proof of the superiority of Christian morality, but does not wish to sweep them under the
rug. Of the lie Jacob told in Genesis, she writes,“St. Augustine said:‘It
is not a lie; it is a mystery.’ Let us have the courage to say: It is without
doubt a mystery, but it is also a lie.”77 Genesis, she argues, makes clear
that faith is different from the “regime of morality”; the protagonists
in the Hebrew scriptures are not models of ethics but theological
faith.78 To this end, Maritain limns the story of Abraham and Isaac with
particular care and passion, presenting Abraham as the archetypal
model of faithfulness. According to Maritain, Abraham’s faith during
the “nuit obscure” of God’s terrible demand was a faith most radical
and pure. It was “naked, arid,” stripped of consolations, and purged of
everyday models of norms. Of Genesis 22, she writes:
All this happened at night, for next it is said that “early in the morning”
Abraham arose. It was the night of his agony.The night in which the mere
man in him died. The night of a transfiguration! . . . The Abraham who

74

Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise, p. 207.
Raïssa Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham ou La Sainteté dans l’état de nature, in J.
Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XIV:568–617.
76
“Il unit l’un à l’autre les deux Testaments”: R. Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham, p. 591.
77
“Saint Augustin a dit, parlant du mensonge de Rébecca: ‘Ce n’est pas un . . .’ Osons
dire: c’est sans doute un mystère, mais c’est aussi un mensonge”: R. Maritain, Histoire
d’Abraham, p. 569.
78
“le régime de la morale”: R. Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham, p. 569.
75

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

went to bed in the evening was not the same Abraham who arose “early in
the morning.”. . . He believed, and in his faith he began to die. He died to
his happy life, to his abundant life according to the flesh. He died to the
light of his simple thoughts, to his too natural thoughts, to his still too
simple knowledge of good and evil. In that great darkness, his faith grew
greater yet, and its roots struck ever deeper into his soul. And with his son
Isaac,Abraham gave to God the very soul of his life and of his joy; he consented to the destruction of all his hope.79

In Histoire d’Abraham, Abraham’s apophatic faith is a dark faith torn
of comforts—of human concepts of good and bad, even happiness—
and is reminiscent of the aesthetics and spirituality of Bloy. Certainly,
immorality is present in these stories, but the figures are operating in
a different, almost mystical, realm. Maritain links Abraham with other
figures, both Jewish and Christian. As with Abraham, Maritain wrote,
“so, too, with Mary in the Annunciation; with Joseph in his dream; to
the apostles, called one by one to believe in the mission of Christ; to
Joan of Arc, charged with the temporal salvation of a people. In each
instance,” Maritain insisted, “the act of faith is stripped of all visible
assistance and is carried out in anguish of conscience.”80 The unity
here is a community of faithful Jews and Christians who have gone
through the dark night—mystical suffering unites these figures. In this
panoply of heroes, the Jews Abraham and Joseph do not merely prefigure more traditional Christian heroes such as Mary and St. Joan of
Arc. She listed her saints side by side, out of temporal order.This cluster of Christian and Jewish figures together subverted the expected
linear progression from Judaism to Christianity. Here Jewish figures do
not submissively bow down to the demands of Christianity.They actualize Christianity’s most radical goals.

79

R. Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham, p. 597. “Ceci se passait la nuit, puisqu’il est dit
ensuite:‘Abraham se leva de bon matin,’ Ce fut la nuit d’agonie d’Abraham. La nuit d’une
mort d’homme. La nuit d’une transfiguration. . . Ce n’est pas le même Abraham qui s’était couché la veille et qui ‘se leva de bon matin’. . . Il a cru, et dans sa foi il a commence
de mourir. Il meurt à sa vie heureuse, à sa vie comblée selon la chair. Il meurt à la lumière
de ses pensées simples, à ses pensées trop naturelles, à la trop simple connaissance qu’il
a encore du bien et du mal. Et dans ces plus grandes ténèbres sa foi a pris ses plus grands
accroissements. Elle s’est enracinée plus profondément dans son âme. . . . Avec son fils
Isaac,Abraham donne à Dieu l’âme de sa vie et de sa joie, il consent à la destruction de
toute son espérance.”
80
“ainsi à Marie, dans l’Annonciation; à saint Joseph, dans le songe; ainsi aux Apôtres,
appelés, un à un, à croire à la mission du Christ; à Jeanne d’Arc, charge du salut temporel
d’un people. . . En tous ces cas l’acte de foi est dépourvu de tout secours visible, et s’accomplit dans l’angoisse de la conscience”: R. Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham, p. 596.

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With careful attention to Abraham’s inner life, Maritain subverted
traditional Christian readings of Judaism as legalistic. Martian explicitly took on this ancient charge in Histoire d’Abraham, arguing that
legalism is “not a temptation of Jews qua Jews.”“Any community,” she
insisted,“which holds in honor the law of God risks falling victim to
it.”81 “[F]reedom and love,” she says, are at the foundation of Law, and
this is not Christianity’s gift to Judaism, but is at the heart of Jewish
scriptures themselves.As she notes:
[F]or St. Thomas, no less for St. Paul, the Old Law too is spiritual.
Expounding on St. Paul’s “We know that the law is Spiritual” (Romans
7:14), St.Thomas writes in his commentary to Romans (VII, 3):“We know,”
we who are wise in divine things,“that the Law, that is the Old Law, is spiritual.” It is spiritual for it is concordant with the spirit of man, for the
Psalmist says:“The Law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul.”82

Maritain’s analysis must be understood as a robust political and theological defense of Judaism as a faith that generates, rather than constrains, ethical and spiritual interiority.
In Histoire d’Abraham Maritain’s prose is that of a controlled theologian or exegete, a sparse style that could hardly clash more with
her godfather’s epithets, blazing though his books, or Péguy’s yearning for the radical, passionate mystique of Dreyfusards. But their
stamp is unmistakable. Bloy’s commitment to the sheer Jewishness of
Christianity, and their fundamental unity—something “most do not
want to know”—resurfaced in Maritain as an ethically and politically
valuable concept in the face of antisemitism. Without Péguy and
Bloy’s rejection of antisemitism as a blasphemy, Maritain could
scarcely have articulated this cry against the emerging horrors in
Europe. Unlike Maritain, however, Péguy and Bloy did not have to
worry about their rhetoric fanning the flames of antisemitic violence,
nor be concerned about becoming a physical target, as neither man
was of Jewish origin.
At the time she wrote, Maritain was a part of an emerging community of European scholars learning Hebrew, becoming acquainted
with the richness of Jewish scripture and tradition, and articulating
the bonds between the two traditions. Just as Maritain’s Jesuit
81

“tout communauté qui—avec raison—tient en honneur la loi de Dieu risqué d’en
être victime”: R. Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham, p. 583n8.
82
English translation of this footnote provided by Raïssa Maritain, printed alongside
the original French. R. Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham, p. 615n10.

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

acquaintance Henri de Lubac would argue in his 1938 classic
Catholicisme, Christianity could be revitalized through contact with
its roots in the Hebrew Bible.83 For de Lubac’s Catholicisme, this
meant the return to the predominantly social notion of salvation history, which, for de Lubac, was a thoroughly Jewish concept. The
“ressourcement” impulse was a return then not only to patristic
sources but also to the Hebrew Bible, a move incomprehensible outside the political climate of the late 1930s.84
It is interesting to ponder the potential effects had this theology
enjoyed a more prominent presence in the 1930s. Spiritual unification
with Jewish souls—in the inner forms of faith—could have been a
powerful rejoinder and claim to universalism. For example, one of the
most reiterated Nazi tactics was the insistence on Jewish irreducible
difference, which included a difference of soul and spirit.The notorious 1939 Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude, for example, overlaid
footage of Jews in the Lódź Ghetto with images of rodents to show
that Jews “differ from us in body, but especially in soul.”85 Bloy and
Péguy, in their own puzzling and ambivalent ways, had rejected such
fears through proclaiming the unity of Christians and Jews. Maritain
carried this forward, building a philosemitic version of Christianity
that leaned positively toward the genuine embrace of Jewish political
dignity and spiritual value.The emphasis on shared suffering between
Jews and Catholics (based on mystical experience, as for Maritain; or
class, as for Péguy; or the suffering Jewish Christ, as for Bloy) is a
counter-narrative to the most widely held antisemitic trope in France
in the 1930s: the Jew as the wealthy, capitalistic foreigner usurping
French financial assets.86
“The Face of the World Shrivels Up”
As Raïssa published Histoire d’Abraham in 1935, Jacques’s work
also turned to public pronouncements against antisemitism, and not
83
Henri de Lubac, Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris, 1938), trans.
as Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard
and Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco, 1988).
84
For an excellent overview of la nouvelle théologie, see Jürgen Mettepenningen,
Nouvelle Théologie: New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II
(London, 2010).
85
Richard S. Levy, ed., Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and
Persecution, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA, 2005), 1:229, emphasis in original.
86
Caron, The Path to Vichy.

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all French Catholics agreed with their philosemitic project.87 On
September 24, 1937, Jacques confided in his notebook that Father
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the couple’s old friend, was
very worked-up against me … It seems that Raïssa and Véra [Raïssa’s sister]
are being implicated as dragging me along by their influence. (Russian
Jewesses, are they not?) This puts me in a black rage, which I do not hide.88

More pernicious and racist accusations were hurled at Jacques; his wife
was devastated. Not only were some of her co-religionists attacking her
as a spiritual and a racial pollutant, but perhaps even worse, very few
Catholics publicly rallied to her defense. She painfully described this
betrayal in racial and theological terms. On April 9, 1938, she wrote to
her friends Pierre and Christine Van der Meer de Walcheren expressing
shock that her Jewish background was the target of insults to Jacques
and that their world—once full of friends at Meudon—had now shriveled down to just a handful of loyal defenders.89
Although Maritain had spent much of the 1930s retrieving the religious resources of Judaism, this letter makes clear that, amid the crises
and despair of the late 1930s, Judaism, for Maritain, also is about biological inheritance.Yet biology and religion may have come together
for Maritain, who wrote in her journal in 1939:
Finished Shalom Asch’s beautiful, astounding book: Le Juif aux Psaumes,
on the morals and spirituality of Hassidism, in Poland in the middle of the
nineteenth century. My maternal grandfather was a Hassid too. And my
father’s father was a great ascetic. I have all of that behind me.90

It seems as if the blood/religion distinction was never fully disentangled for Maritain, who worked with both conceptual tools at hand.
87
For more on Jacques Maritain and the Jewish question see Crane, The Passion of
Israel; Robert Royal, ed., Jacques Maritain and the Jews (Mishawaka, IN, 1994); Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, “Jacques Maritain et les Juifs: Réflections sur un parcours,” in Maritain,
L’impossible antisémitisme (Paris, 2003), pp. 7–67, here p. 63.
88
Jacques Maritain, Notebooks (Notre Dame, 1984), p. 169.
89
Letter dated April 9, 1938, from Raïssa Maritain to Pierre and Christine van der
Meer de Walcheren, in Le repentir: Déclaration de l’Église de France (Paris, 1997), pp.
38–41.
90
“Terminé la lecture du livres très beau, bouleversant, de Schalom Ash: Le Juif aux
Psaumes, sur les mœurs et la spiritualité des Hassidim, en Pologne, au milieu du XIXe
siècle. Mon grand-père maternel était aussi in Hassid. Et le père de mon père était un
grand ascète. Il y a tout cela derrière moi”: Raïssa Maritain, Journal de Raïssa, in J.
Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XV:407.

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

Two weeks after her pained letter to the Van der Meer de
Walcherens, she admitted feelings of utter isolation and despair to the
Swiss theologian Charles Journet.91 But her pain extended past personal hurt to include broader existential reflections.Thinking of those
who tried to evade the reality of the late interwar period’s escalating
darkness, Maritain offered a critique in 1938: “The time of childish
things is over, the time of playing games, of make-believe, of eloquence, of acting ‘as if.’”92 Did the Jewish-Christian experiments of the
1920s seem naïve? A few months later, she repudiated the duplicity
around her, arguing that reality had trumped illusions.“Every word of
consolation,” she wrote,“seems a lie.”93
Seeking Unity as a Political Act: Les Grandes Amitiés
(1940–45)
By December 1939, the situation had so deteriorated that the
Maritains took advantage of Jacques’s lecture tour in North America
and sought refuge there.94 In spring 1942, along with forty other
European Catholic exiles, Jacques and Raïssa signed and published
the manifesto Devant la Crise Mondiale: Manifeste de Catholiques
Européens Séjournant en Amérique denouncing totalitarianism and
antisemitism as incompatible with the gospel.95 Raïssa did not share in
her husband’s many North American friendships, and she spoke little
English. She spent much of the exile secluded in her apartment, devastated. In a letter to Journet shortly after they arrived, she confessed,
“Here we’re breathing depleted air, insufficient for us to really live. I see
myself,” she wrote,“as if in a dream.”96 The dream was certainly a night91

Letter dated April 23, 1938, in Jacques Maritain and Charles Journet,
Correspondance Journet–Maritain, ed. René Mougel (Paris, 2006), 1:702.
92
“Fini le temps des enfantillages, des jeux, des comédies, de l’eloquence, des
comme si”: R. Maritain, Journal de Raïssa, in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XV:397.
93
“Tout parole de consolation paraît mensonge”: R. Maritain, Journal de Raïssa, in J.
Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XV:398.
94
Michael Fourcade, “Jacques Maritain et l’Europe en exil, 1940–1945,” Cahiers
Jacques Maritain, 28 (June 1994), 5–32; René Mougel, “Les années de New York,
1940–1945,” Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 16–17 (April 1988), 7–28, here 9–10.
95
Devant la Crise Mondiale: Manifest de Catholiques Européens séjournant en
Amérique (New York, 1942).
96
“[N]ous respirons nous respirons ici un air raréfié, insuffisant à nous faire vivre
réellement. Moi-même je me vois vivre comme dans un songe.” Letter dated January 24,
1940, from Raïssa Maritain to Charles Journet, in J. Maritain and Journet,
Correspondance Journet–Maritain, pp. 42–44.

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mare. Soon she would learn that several friends had been handed over
to the Gestapo. Among them were Raïssa’s goddaughter, Babet Jacob;
Babet’s eighty-year-old mother; and her younger brother. Babet and her
mother later died in the gas chamber in Buchenwald; her brother was
shot.The elder brother of her close friends, Jean and Suzanne Marx, also
was deported and killed. She confessed to Journet that she could not
stop thinking about those suffering in the concentration camps: “Do
you think, Charles, that this could be the wrath of God? Is your heart
not completely submerged in sorrow? Forgive me.”97
From this point until her death in 1960, Maritain traversed a
darker interior field. She continued to pursue reflections on Judaism,
but in a more mournful, elegiac register. During the war years,
Maritain published a handful of chilling lamentation poems, which
provide a stark glimpse into her spiritual life during the Shoah. She
wrote in 1943:
Let me speak from the madness
that seizes my soul
Our days are evil, infested with hell…
Four million Jews—and more—have suffered death
without consolation.
Those who are left are promised to the slaughter.98

The pathos of Maritain’s poetry during the war communicates an
overpowering grief as she watched her Meudon circle’s evanescent
efforts to articulate the bond between Jews and Catholics disintegrate
in the face of unfurling violence:
Israel was led to the butchery
They were tracked down like fowl
In the streets of towns and villages
The Gardens of France
Women with their children they would not give up
Hurled themselves from the windows.99

97
“Faut-il croire que c’est vraiment le temps de la colère de Dieu?. . . Votre cœur
n’est-il pas déjà submergé de douleur?”: R. Maritain, in J. Maritain and Journet,
Correspondance Journet–Maritain, p. 44.
98
Raïssa Maritain, “Deus Excelsus Terribilis,” Commonweal, September 29, 1944,
563–66. English translation by Raïssa Maritain. Reprinted in a revised, slightly condensed version in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XV:625.
99
R. Maritain,“Deus Excelsus,” pp. 625–31.

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

In addition to her poetry, Maritain began to write her memoirs in
1940 during her exile, just two weeks after the German occupation of
France.100 The first volume appeared in French in 1941 with the Éditions de la Maison Française publishing house, and her American
friend Julie Kernan helped Maritain translate the volume into English,
which appeared in 1942 as We Have Been Friends Together.101
Maritain’s enthusiastic reception by readers in France and the United
States encouraged her to persist, and the second volume appeared
simultaneously in English and French in 1944, under the new title Les
aventures de la grâce (Adventures in Grace). Both volumes eventually were translated into Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Japanese,
and Chinese. New editions were issued throughout the 1950s, then
posthumously in the 1960s and 1974.102
When Maritain started Les grandes amitiés, the despair at leaving
her home at Meudon, the isolation of exile, and the shattering news of
Vichy and the antisemitic violence plunged Maritain into the vast field
of memory.“Life for me,” she wrote in the preface,“draws to a close. In
the present, I do not feel that I am present. I turn my thoughts toward
the past and toward the future. Toward the future hidden in God.”103
Much more than a narrative description of her own history, Les
grandes amitiés seizes upon memories of her past that “flash up” in a
“moment of danger” (to use Benjamin’s description of history, penned
just months before Maritain embarked on her memory-works).104 If
the hegemonic narrative of Jews in 1940–44 was one of Jewish inassimilability and pollution, she countered this through a carefully
crafted depiction of Russian-Jewish culture that she had known as a
child. Curiously, although Maritain had claimed in a 1909 essay that
she learned very little about Judaism as a child, long-buried memories
100

For the reception history of Les grandes amitiés, see Élodie Chapelle,“La réception des Grandes Amitiés de Raïssa Maritain” (PhD diss., Université de Paris IV
Sorbonne, 2003). Part of this dissertation is published in “La réception des Grandes
Amitiés,” Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 48 (June 2004), 38–67.
101
Éditions de la Maison Française was a New York publisher specializing in the publication of works by the numerous French war exiles in the United States.
102
For publication information on the various translations of Les grandes amitiés,
see “Bibliographie Générale,” in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes,
XV:876–77, 884–86.
103
“Au présent qui me rest je ne me sense pas présente. Je tourne ma pensée vers le
passé et vers l’avenir. Vers l’avenir caché en Dieu.” R. Maritain, Les grandes amitiés, in
J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XIV:625–26.
104
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), pp. 253–64, here p. 255.

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of the piety of her Jewish household in Russia, are suddenly awakened
in Les grandes amitiés. Her memories come in richly detailed flashes,
radiating with religious and sensory detail. She writes of childhood
memories of Passover:
But the most impressive feast was that of the Passover. . . . Night was falling,
and the bitter herbs were eaten; then prayer began. Filled with the mystery
of this Passover, I was charged with asking, in Hebrew, questions to which
my grandfather replied by the recitation of the biblical narrative and the
explanation of the rites of the Pascal night. . . . Then came the climax of the
sacred night: the passage of the Angel. All the cups were filled with red
wine, strong and sweet, the almost liturgical savor of which I have never
rediscovered in any wine, even in the wines of France. The Angel of the
Lord was to drink from the largest cup, filled with this noble wine—the
Angel of the Lord who on that night visited the homes of the Jews. All the
lights were extinguished, and in a silence heavy with adoration and fear,
the Angel was given time for his passage. Then the candles were all lighted
again, the supper was quickly finished, and everyone went to rest—conscious of having taken part in a great action.105

In another context, these offerings of everyday, personal images of
childhood awe and family life might have been banal. But in 1940–44
they played a powerful role in humanizing Jewish culture and
making it seem both beautiful and strangely recognizable to her
largely Roman Catholic readership. The warm glow she casts over
this period in her life heightens the scandal of contemporary antisemitic violence.
In another example, Maritain’s description of the Jewish practices
of her grandfathers could be easily comprehended, even admired, by
her Roman Catholic readership. Her paternal Jewish grandfather
became a great ascetic whose discipline echoed that of the saints:“He
105
“Mais la fête la plus impressionnante était celle de Pâques. . . . La nuit tombait, on
goûtait aux herbes amères, les prières commençaient. Toute pénétrée du mystère de
cette Pâque j’étais chargée de poser en hébreu les questions auxquelles mon grandpère répondait par le déroulement du récit biblique et l’explication des rites de la nuit
pascale. . . .Alors arrivait le point culminant de cette nuit sacrée: le passage de l’Angel.
On remplissait toutes les coupes d’un vin rouge, doux et fort, dont je n’ai jamais
retrouvé la saveur comme liturgique en aucun autre vin, même de France.A la coupe la
plus grande, remplie de ce beau vin, devait goûter l’Ange de Dieu qui cette nuit-là visitait les maisons des Juifs. On éteignait toutes les lumières et dans le silence lourd d’adoration et de crainte on laissait à l’Ange le temps de passer. Puis, les flambeaux rallumés,
on terminait rapidement le souper, et chacun allait à son repos—conscient d’avoir participé à une grande action.” R. Maritain, Les grandes amitiés, in J. Maritain and R.
Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XIV:637–38.

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astonished us all by his mortifications; he ate only dry bread rubbed
with a little onion and he drank only water. He slept in the courtyard,
and indeed on the ground, until winter came.”106 Her maternal grandfather’s Hassidic mysticism came to life. Catholic readers, Maritain
surely hoped, could relate easily to these stories of ascetic sainthood
and a rich liturgical sensorium. Her memoirs consisted of memories
“seized” from the dominant narrative of anti-Jewish propaganda and
unified in religious rhythms familiar to her Catholic readers.They revitalized her earlier efforts at Catholic philosemitism and its spiritual
solidarity with Christianity. Like Péguy’s portrait of Lazare, she
reframed it the context of the personal.
If humanizing Judaism as a counter to Nazi propaganda was one of
Maritain’s goals in Les grandes amitiés, she also resurrected the
image of the “suffering Jew” she had learned from Péguy and Bloy. In
volume 2 of Les grandes amitiés (1944) she described Bloy on his
deathbed and chose to resurrect Bloy’s final words and writings on
the image of the suffering Jew, Christologically interpreted. Maritain
revitalized Bloy’s inversions: “[Jews] bled with Jesus. They were
stabbed with His wounds, they were parched with His thirst. . . .”107
The text continues for several pages on this theme, with Maritain
using her memories of her godfather’s words to connect the Holy
Spirit, the suffering Jesus, and Jews into an “unspeakable community
of suffering.”108 She cites Bloy’s reading of the Jewish poet Maurice
Rosenfeld on the question of Jewish sorrow and wounds: “A Jewish
tear, a tear of blood. A tear of gall, of brain, and of blood. It tasted of
persecution, misfortune, pogroms.” If the contemporary significance
of 1944 was lost on readers, Maritain added a footnote, the only direct
allusion to the Holocaust in the memoir. She cited the New York Post
on August 3, 1944, claiming that the Nazis have exterminated 6 million
Jews.109 Their suffering could be related to the suffering-centered
106
“Il nous étonnait tous par ses mortifications: il ne mangeait que du pain sec frotté
d’oignon, ne buvait que de l’eau. Il dormait dans la cour à même le sol jusqu’à l’hiver”:
R. Maritain, Les grandes amitiés, in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes,
XIV:630.
107
“On saignait avec Jésus, on était criblé de ses plaies, on agonisait de sa soif”: R.
Maritain, Les grandes amitiés, in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes,
XIV:736.
108
“indicible communauté de souffrances”: R. Maritain, Les grandes amitiés, in J.
Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XIV:745.
109
“une larme juive, une larme de sang . . . Une larme de fiel, de cerveau et de sang”:
R. Maritain, Les grandes amitiés, in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes,
XIV:1057–59.

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Catholicism of the French Catholic revival, Jews and Christians finding unity in the suffering, Jewish Christ.Through this theological narrative, Maritain articulated what was happening during the Shoah as
it occurred in 1944, something that few people could not or would
not do until many years later.110
Soon after the publication of the first volume of Les grandes amitiés, Maritain began to receive letters from European and North
American Catholics. In 1941, Canadian priest Maurice Pierquin wrote
to her:
I have just read and enjoyed your great work, Les Grandes Amitiés, What
an impression! Today I am 61 years old and voilà your book, delivers salvation . . . And above all you knew how to speak to my heart and open my
intelligence. … I was not an anti-Semite, but there was in me a certain
repulsion. I have overcome it, thanks to you, and for that I thank you. I can
even confess to you that the blindfolds have been removed, I can see more
clearly the ardent light leads me to a haven, and eliminates all the garbage
deposited in me since my childhood.111

Similarly, another Catholic priest made confessions to this Jewish convert, writing in 1947 to report that Maritain’s book “exorcised the
antisemitism” out of him once and for all.112 Another Frenchman,
Robert Leclerq, wrote that reading Bloy earlier in his life had helped
him see the error of antisemitism, but Maritain’s exegesis of Bloy’s
position on the Jews had helped him understand Bloy more deeply.
“Before knowing your godfather,” he wrote to her, “I was in the sad
110
Tony Judt, “From the House of the Dead: An Essay on European Memory,” in
Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), pp. 803–34.
111
“Je viens de lire et de savourer votre ouvrage ‘Les Grandes Amitiés,’ Quelle impression! Que de bien va-t-il faire? Je voudrais que cet ouvrage puisse pénétrer dans tous les
presbytères et à la lecture, arrête les prêtres dans leur campagne anti-sémite.
Aujourd’hui j’ai 61 ans et voilà votre livre, delivre sauveur. . . . Et surtout vous avez su
parler à mon coeur et overt mon intelligence. Que de discussions avec un de mes amis
admirateur de votre mari, au sujet des Juifs. Je n’étais pas anti-sémite, mail il y avait en
moi une certaine répulsion. Je suis vaincu grâce à vous et je vous en remercie. Même je
peux vous l’avouer, les bandeaux étant ôtés, je vois plus clair, une lumière ardente me
conduisant au port et éliminant toutes les scories déposées en moi depuis mon
enfance.Telle est la Vérité, je tenais à vous la communiquer et veuillez m’en excuser.”
Maritain archives, Kolbsheim, France (hereafter referred to as MAK), unpublished letter
dated December 13, 1941, to Raïssa Maritain from Reverend Maurice Pierquin, n.p.,
Canada, emphasis in original.
112
“exorciser cet antisémistisme”: Unpublished letter dated May 4, 1947, to Raïssa
Maritain from Père Pressoir, MAK.

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phase of Drumont. By his Salut, Bloy had shown me my mistake, a
mistake, which I understood it by reading him, was wretched.”113
Other Catholic writers picked up Maritain’s gestures toward a
vision of cosmopolitan Catholicism. In a 1944 review, Graham Greene
commented on the theme of Jewish and Catholic unity in Maritain’s
depictions of Jewish liturgy:“In her narrative, we can feel all the time
the texture of events and observe how Marioupol [in Russia] and
Montmartre are cut from the same cloth.” Greene continued, “We
remember a papal reminder that Christians are ‘spiritual Semites.’The
smell of the Crimean apples and the taste of the paschal wine merge
into Montmartre incense.”114
Yet of course, part of Maritain’s memoirs was about her conversion
as a Jew, the conversions of her parents, and the conversions of other
Jewish men and women. The Judaism, beloved and sacred, is pulled
irresistibly, inevitably, into this cosmopolitan Parisian Catholicism of
the revival. This, too, trespassed into real life. One American reader
wrote to her in 1944:
Well, I shall pray that a way may be shown to you how to help the great
cause of the conversion of the Jews in the United States.The most beautiful description of your parents’ conversion to the Church remains
imprinted on my mind and may it become a symbol of our hope.115

Similarly a Frenchwoman wrote to Maritain:
Like you, Madam, I always thought that Catholicism is the completion of
the Jewish religion. But tell me, do you see an end to the persecutions? In
these long years of suffering, I have stopped searching for a solution to this
atrocious problem.116

The wide-ranging nature of the responses illuminates the opportunities and limits, the creativity and the constraints, of the French
Catholic revivalists on Jews and Judaism.

113

“j’en étais au triste stade de Drumont . . . c’est par vous que j’ai découvert la folie
de mes aberrations passées.” Unpublished letter dated February 10, 1956, to Raïssa
Maritain from Robert Leclercq, n.p., MAK.
114
Graham Greene,“The Maritains,” The New Statesman and Nation, September 9,
1944, 173, MAK.
115
Unpublished letter dated November 17, 1941, to Raïssa Maritain from J.
Wilberforce, New York, MAK.
116
Undated letter to Raïssa Maritain from Matisia Maroni, n.p., MAK.

BY BRENNA MOORE

295

Legacy
At least three decades prior to Pope Pius XI’s 1938 “spiritually we
are all Semites” claim and Humani Generis Unitas, the 1939 lost
encyclical on racism and antisemitism, nonordained Catholics were
theorizing the epistemological and theological entailments of a closer
relationship among Catholics and Jews.117 Humani Generis Unitas
was never published, but its contents suggest the pope’s intention to
promulgate a robust Catholic rejoinder to Nazism. Reading this text
today, however, highlights the poor condition of Church teaching on
Judaism in the 1930s, as the Church remained alert to the “spiritual
dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls.”118
The French Catholic revivalists explored in this essay rejected this
theology out of hand, and some had been laboring for an alternative
for nearly thirty years. On Jews and Judaism, Raïssa Maritain both
drew and departed from her early mentors. Péguy’s deeply philosemitic, romantic portrait of his Jewish friends as a tactic to counter
antisemitism and as a way to unify Jews to Christians stood behind
Maritain’s own personal portraits in Les grandes amitiés. Bloy’s insistence on the Jewishness of Christianity as a counter to antisemitism
prompted Maritain’s theologically vibrant reading of Judaism in
Histoire d’Abraham. All depended upon the idiom of suffering to
unite Jews and Christians, although Maritain’s exegetical writings
also aimed to dismantle anti-Jewish slander about legalism and
immorality. For these thinkers, the unity animated an ideal community of the most radical and committed Jews and Catholics who
embodied Péguy’s mystique, Bloy’s marginal abjection, and
Maritain’s mystical transfiguration.Yet for all of the prescience of the
French Catholic revivalists, Judaism too often moves irresistibly
toward a cosmopolitan, apophatic Catholicism. One must ask if this
project can be fully disentangled from the Christian refusal over
2000 years to see Jews as qua Jews in terms other than potential converts or obstinate sinners.119
117
For the importance of the papacy in shaping people’s beliefs, see Frank Coppa,
The Papacy, the Jews, and the Holocaust (Washington, DC, 2006).
118
James Bernauer, “The Holocaust and the Church’s Search for Forgiveness,” A
Presentation at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, Boston College,
October 30, 2002. Retrieved from http://www.bc.edu/research/cjl/meta-elements/
texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/bernauer.htm
119
See Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, “Rejet identitaire et quête de ‘spiritualité’: Raïssa
Maritain, Edith Stein, Simone Weil,” in L’Europe et les juifs, ed. Esther Benbassa and

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JUDAISM IN THE FRENCH CATHOLIC REVIVAL (1900–45)

As for the converts and near-converts such as Maritain, Roth,
Sachs, and so many others, although some scholars see the pull that
Parisian Catholicism exerted on Jews primarily in terms of selfloathing and an expulsion of Judaism from their identities, the
sources discussed reveal a more complicated story.120 At the height
of this movement, Catholicism for some represented a chance to integrate Judaism into a universalized Christianity, a vision of a nouveau
christianisme that offered a chance for assimilation into a unified
community based on ethical and—more important—religious ideals
that were distinct from the assimilationist goals of the laicized
French state.121
One of the more complicated and ambivalent legacies of the
French Catholic revival shared by Péguy, Bloy, and Maritain is the
symbol of the suffering Jew. Jewish suffering could be accommodated
by the suffering-centered theological imagination of the French
Catholic revival. It was a rejoinder to the stereotype of the wealthy
merchant, and it was effective in provoking a reimagining of the
boundaries between Christianity and Judaism.The deep sympathy for
those who suffer is expressed in prose that is emotionally rich and
politically daring. At the time when Bloy and Péguy wrote, Jewish
abjection was symbolic but also, in the wake of Dreyfus, reflected history. Bloy always insisted that among the ills of modernity, most moderns wore a “frightful mask” to avert their eyes from darker truths and,
in this case, the reality of Jewish suffering. Maritain’s use of the suffering Jew in her memoirs also may have worked to similar ends—the
use of ambivalent symbols make visible a historical reality in 1940–44.
The Maritains found this refusal to see, name, and struggle against the
violence of 1940–44 as it occurred among the most shocking of the
atrocities. Of the 6 million eventually massacred, Raïssa wrote in 1945,
“so little is said.”122

Pierre Gisel (Geneva, 2002), pp. 141–65; Jacques Berlinerblau, “On Philo-Semitism,”
Occasional Papers on Jewish Civilization, Jewish Thought, Philosophy (Washington,
DC, 2007).
120
See Judith Morganroth Schneider,“Max Jacob Juif,” The French Review, 63 (1989),
78–87.
121
For a helpful discussion of conversion, see Guari Viswanathan, Outside the Fold:
Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998).
122
“…pour parler des six millions de massacres dont on parle si peu”: R. Maritain,
Journal de Raïssa, in J. Maritain and R. Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, XV:436.

BY BRENNA MOORE

297

Yet the very symbol of the suffering Jew can provoke an essentialized image of Jews and Judaism.123 Loss and suffering do not define
Jewish identity, although they describe so many experiences.
Catholics valorized Jewish affliction, lifted it up, and presented it
vividly to readers, rather than historically analyzed it with any precision.We need to acknowledge the ways in which this community has
suffered and also the ways they have thrived, which would entail
greater historical attentiveness to the differences and complexities of
Jewish history and cultures. But historicizing Jewish experiences—
along with their equally complex counterpart, Christians—would dissolve the highly aesthetic, theological symbols used to ground unity,
risking the draining of their imaginative power. In this risky, imaginative endeavor, these revivalists aimed to do something new and did so,
even if their labors were vulnerable and unbelievably fragile.

123

Michael Weingrad, “Jews (in Theory): Representations of Judaism, Anti-Semitism,
and the Holocaust in Postmodern French Thought,” Judaism, 45 (1996), 79–98.

“KIND OF A SECULAR SACRAMENT”:
FATHER GENO BARONI, MONSIGNOR JOHN J. EGAN,
AND THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY
BY

ROBERT BAUMAN*

The author argues that social activist Catholic priests such as John
J. Egan and Geno Baroni created a Catholic War on Poverty through
Catholic civil rights organizations that included the National
Catholic Conference of Interracial Justice and the development of
community antipoverty organizations. Informed by the theology
and social teachings of the Second Vatican Council, Egan, Baroni,
and others saw the national War on Poverty as an extension of the
civil rights movement.Their efforts led to the eventual formation of
the Campaign for Human Development, the Catholic Church’s official antipoverty organization that continues to fight poverty in the
twenty-first century.
Keywords: Baroni, Geno; Black Manifesto; Campaign for Human
Development; Egan, Msgr. John J.;War on Poverty
Historical scholarship of the War on Poverty has flowered in recent
years after decades of historians’ collective neglect. Studies by several
scholars have challenged the way that historians have thought and
written about the War on Poverty, particularly in terms of race and
gender. In addition, some of that scholarship has sought to expand
scholars’ thinking about the time frame of the War on Poverty. Most
scholars who have written about the War on Poverty discuss its
beginnings in the early 1960s and its end in the mid to late 1970s.
Some scholars, however, have argued that the War on Poverty has
endured to the present day. Borrowing from the term the long civil
*Dr. Bauman is associate professor of history at Washington State University, TriCities, email: rbauman@tricity.wsu.edu. Research support for this project was provided
by the Cushwa Center for American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame and
the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at The Catholic
University of America.

298

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

299

rights movement coined by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, a few of these
scholars have used the term the long war on poverty to describe
antipoverty efforts that continued beyond the 1970s.1
One aspect of the War on Poverty that has been little explored to
this point, despite this flowering of historical scholarship, is the central role of religion. Scholars such as James Findlay and David
Chappell have deftly explored the fundamental role of religion in the
civil rights movement.2 In addition, scholars like John McGreevy
have examined the complex relationship between Catholicism and
the black freedom movement.3 However, the equally vital role of religion in the War on Poverty has remained unexamined for the most
part. Some exceptions to this scholarly void include Kenneth
Heineman’s 2003 article in The Historian on Catholic social activism
and the War on Poverty in Pittsburgh, and Susan Ashmore’s 2003
essay on Catholic antipoverty efforts in Mobile, Alabama.4 The
author’s intention is to build on the work of Heineman and Ashmore
by exploring the development of a national Catholic War on Poverty,
from its beginnings in the National Catholic Conference for
Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) through its maturation in the Catholic
Campaign for Human Development (CHD). The essay will explore
the Catholic War on Poverty in part through the careers of two
1
For examples of this recent scholarship, see Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars’
Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston, 2005);
Rhonda Y.Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against
Urban Inequality (New York, 2004);Thomas J. Kiffmeyer, Reformers to Radicals: The
Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (Lexington, KY, 2008); William S.
Clayson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights
Movement in Texas (Austin, 2010); Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry It On: The War
on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1972 (Athens, GA,
2008); and Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A.
(Norman, OK, 2008).
2
See James Findlay Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of
Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York, 1993); and David
Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the End of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2004).
3
John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the
Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996); and McGreevy, Catholicism and
American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003).
4
Kenneth J. Heineman,“Model City:The War on Poverty, Race Relations, and Catholic
Social Activism in 1960s Pittsburgh,” The Historian, 65 (2003), 867–900; Susan
Youngblood Ashmore,“More than a Head Start:The War on Poverty, Catholic Charities,
and Civil Rights in Mobile, Alabama,1965–1970,” in The New Deal and Beyond: Social
Welfare in the South since 1930, ed. Elna C. Green (Athens, GA, 2003), pp. 196–238.

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THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

priests: Geno Baroni and John J. Egan. Baroni and Egan were the two
most significant of a group of activist clerics dubbed by one scholar
as “community organization priests.”5 In the process of exploring the
activism of Baroni and Egan, issues can be addressed such as the connections between the civil rights/black power movements and the
War on Poverty; the influence of an evolving Catholic theology on
Baroni, Egan, and the organizations they created; the ways in which
Catholic social activism and the War on Poverty intertwined; and the
implications of a Catholic War on Poverty for the relationship
between church and state in American society.
America’s War on Poverty began officially when President Lyndon
Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act on August 20, 1964.
The act created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which
provided federal funds to community action agencies that fought
poverty at the local level. Community action was the key strategy of
the legislation—communities were to include “maximum feasible participation of the poor” in their local antipoverty wars. The ideas of
inclusion and empowerment of the poor were the most controversial
aspects of the War on Poverty and key elements for the involvement
of Catholic social activists in antipoverty efforts.
Catholic social activists formed the National Catholic Conference
for Interracial Justice in 1960 as a way to bring together the Catholic
interracial councils (CICs) created by liberal Catholics in major cities
such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, and Los Angeles in the 1930s
and 1940s. John LaFarge, S.J., had formed the first Catholic interracial
council in New York in May 1934 following an ideological division
within the Federated Colored Catholics between those who wanted
to focus on black identity and those, like LaFarge, who promoted
interracialism.Arguing that racism was a sin, Catholic interracial councils particularly focused on segregation in schools—both public and
Catholic. Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of future President John F.
Kennedy and later the leader of the War on Poverty as the head of the
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), joined the Chicago CIC in
the early 1950s; by the mid-1950s, he was chairman of the board of
that organization and president of the Chicago school board. In those
positions, Shriver was especially able to address the issue of segregated schools.The success of the Chicago CIC in challenging officially
5

Lawrence J. Engel, “The Influence of Saul Alinsky on the Campaign for Human
Development,” Theological Studies, 59 (1998), 636–61, here 646.

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

301

sanctioned school segregation in Chicago led to a 1958 meeting in
that city of more than 400 delegates representing thirty-six CICs
nationwide who pledged to work to end discrimination. LaFarge gave
the keynote address at that formative conference, arguing that “the
teaching of interracial justice was firmly grounded in Church doctrine.” That meeting eventually resulted in the creation of the NCCIJ
in 1960 with Mathew H. Ahmann, a sociologist and civil rights activist,
as executive director. Headquartered in Chicago with a field office in
New Orleans, the NCCIJ promoted itself as working “to end racial discrimination and prejudice and to foster interracial justice in all areas
of life.” Led by such prominent liberals as Shriver, the NCCIJ was at the
forefront of connecting civil rights activism to the Church by supporting open housing and civil rights legislation as well as organizing
the National Conference on Religion and Race in January 1963 that
featured the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as keynote speaker.The
NCCIJ also was centrally involved in the March on Washington later
that year—its leaders were among those who met with President
Kennedy following the march—and the march to Montgomery in
1965. By the mid-1960s, Catholic interracialists had become central
participants in the civil rights movement.6
Leaders of the NCCIJ argued for civil rights legislation from a moral
perspective—racism, discrimination, and segregation were sins or
immoral actions against people who were God’s creations. Essentially
the members of the NCCIJ thought and acted as theological neo-abolitionists, arguing that the United States needed to purge itself of the
immorality of racism and segregation as well as create an interracial,
socially just society. In addition to their involvement in the civil rights
movement, NCCIJ activists fought in, and used similar arguments to
support, Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Geno Baroni—pastor of an inner-city parish in Washington, DC; an
NCCIJ leader and civil rights activist; and a participant in the March
on Washington and the later Meredith March against Fear—told a
6

“To end racial discrimination”: Martin A. Zielinski,“Working for Interracial Justice:
The Catholic Interracial Council of New York, 1934–1964,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 7
(1988), 233–62, here 234, 250. See also Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame
Archives (hereafter referred to as UNDA), NCCIJ press release, n.d., Geno C. Baroni
Papers (hereafter referred to as CBRN) 6/01;“History of NCCIJ,”1978, National Assembly
of Religious Women (U.S.) Records (hereafter referred to as CARW) 11/01, UNDA; Scott
Stossel, Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver (Washington, DC, 2004), pp.
121–29; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, pp. 86, 148.

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THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

Washington Post reporter that social issues such as poverty, civil
rights, jobs, and housing were “moral issues” and were “the proper and
vital business of the church.” Baroni claimed that a split had developed in the Catholic Church between the middle class and the
poor—as the move of middle-class Catholics out of the city had
helped sever the religious connection between the social classes.
Baroni argued that affluent, middle-class Catholics did not see
“poverty, housing, civil rights as moral issues.” For Baroni, it was a
“great scandal … that the church has lost the poor. … And if we are
not the church of the poor, we are in trouble.”7
Baroni, an outspoken advocate for African Americans and impoverished ethnic whites, stands as a prime example of Catholic clerical
social activism in the twentieth century. Born in Pennsylvania in 1930
as the son of an Italian immigrant coal miner, Baroni graduated from
Mount St. Mary’s College and Seminary prior to his ordination as a
Catholic priest in 1956. He served in working-class parishes of ethnic
whites in Pennsylvania until his excitement about the civil rights
movement led him to request an assignment to Sts. Paul and Augustine
Parish in Washington, DC, in 1960. It was during his tenure at Sts. Paul
and Augustine that he spearheaded the civil rights and antipoverty
efforts of NCCIJ and became one of the leading voices of Catholic
social justice activism.8
Baroni published a number of articles in religious journals
expounding on the theology behind Catholic involvement in the civil
rights movement and the fight against poverty as well as the practical
implications of those beliefs. In the article “The Church and the War
on Poverty,” Baroni explained the fundamental significance of the
Second Vatican Council to the expanding involvement of Catholic
priests and parishes in social justice causes. Baroni argued that the
Second Vatican Council urged Catholics to take on the cause of the
poor and underprivileged as its own. For Baroni and other Catholics,
the juncture of the Council with the civil rights movement and
antipoverty efforts was profound. According to the Council, the
Church most resembled Christ when it revealed “a predilection for
the poor, the outcast, the injured, and the despised.” In testimony to
the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for the District of
7

Phil Casey,“Social Ills Held Moral Issues,” Washington Post, September 10, 1966, D1.
Lawrence M. O’Rourke, Geno: The Life and Mission of Geno Baroni (New York,
1991).
8

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

303

Columbia, Baroni expounded on this argument, saying that “religion
must provide a voice for the poor of the community.” Thus, for Baroni,
participation in a government program intent on aiding the poor was
not optional, but was a requirement for those Catholics who desired
to be more like Christ.9
But how to implement the theology of the Council? How to use
the War on Poverty for the Church’s ends? For Baroni, the answer was
the parish. Baroni argued that since the parish was “traditionally the
central force in the Church’s network of bringing spiritual and material support to the person of the culture of poverty” and was an integral part of the local community, it could play a significant role in the
War on Poverty. Through activist antipoverty efforts, inner-city
parishes could “demonstrate a new relationship to the poor in the
community.”10
Catholics could exhibit that new relationship to the poor through
the creation of a parish neighborhood center. The center, housed in
parish buildings, would provide assistance to the poor through community education, housing referral, employment services, health and
welfare referral services, and a “community action volunteer program”
aimed at bringing in volunteers “from middle income and suburban
parishes who are anxious to participate in an active program that
promises assistance to the less fortunate.” Baroni argued that the volunteering of the more fortunate to help the poor “underlies the essential commitment of the laity to the war on poverty.”11
In addition, Baroni posited that the parish center could become “a
vital force” in the creation of community action programs that he
clearly saw as central to the War on Poverty and essentially as an
extension of the civil rights movement. For Baroni, the community
action aspect of the War on Poverty represented “a new phase in the
civil rights struggle—a switchover from a decade in which the concentration was on breaking down legal barriers to one in which the
excluded seek genuine equality in jobs, education, and housing.” In
9
Geno Baroni,“The Church and the War on Poverty,” The American Ecclesiastical
Review, 153 (1965), 184–97, here 185; Engel, “The Influence of Saul Alinsky,” p. 640;
Father Geno Baroni Testimony to the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for the
District of Columbia—Hearings on Appropriations for the District of Columbia’s Public
Welfare Department, 1965, Baroni Papers, CBRN 3/05, UNDA.
10
Baroni,“The Church and the War on Poverty,” p. 184.
11
Baroni,“The Church and the War on Poverty,” pp. 186–90.

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THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

addition to shifting its focus to economic issues, this phase of the
extended civil rights movement, as Baroni understood it, would give
the poor of the city the power to solve their own problems. It means
giving them a collective voice to be heard when their garbage is not
picked up, when the landlords cheat them, and when their elected officials
refuse to listen to them.12

For Baroni, then, the community action aspect of the War on Poverty
continued the democratization of the civil rights movement and
empowered the poor.
Baroni saw the War on Poverty as an extension of the civil rights
movement in part because he saw a direct connection between
poverty and racism. In another publication, “The Church and the
Inner City,” Baroni asserted that poverty and racism were dual sins in
American society. He argued that although racism was “a radical distortion of the relationship between man’s body and his social life,”
poverty was “a radical distortion of the relationship between man
and the goods that he needs for social life.” In addition, Baroni maintained that
to deny men goods, property, the means to sustain life, is to deny them the
right to participate in creation. . . . The poverty of the exploited is a denial
of their spiritual function in the world, which is to participate with Him in
creation. As racism denies man’s bodily integrity, poverty denies his spiritual integrity.

It was a Christian’s duty, then, to work to expunge poverty and racism
from society.13
Although community action programs would aid and empower
the poor, they also would provide a venue for individual Catholics
to live out their faith. The War on Poverty provided a vehicle for
Baroni to continue his activism, his efforts at social justice, and his
attempts to be more like Christ. Indeed, Baroni noted that “many of
12
Baroni,“The Church and the War on Poverty,” pp. 192–93. Notably, as an inner-city
priest, Baroni clearly saw the War on Poverty and community action as geared primarily
toward urban African Americans. He never mentions the possibility that rural parishioners might be able to use community action as well.This thinking also reflected his
view that the War on Poverty was an extension of the civil rights movement.
13
Geno Baroni, “The Church and the Inner City,” n.d., Baroni Papers, CBRN 3/5,
UNDA.

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

305

the same priests and ministers so recently involved in the struggle
for civil rights now find themselves brought together to assist in
developing community action programs in our poor center city
neighborhoods.”14
But Baroni also recognized that not all priests and ministers saw
themselves as activists. Indeed, in a 1966 article, Baroni noted “a serious division of views” at a joint meeting in 1965 of the NCCIJ and the
National Catholic Social Action Conference (NCSAC) between those
priests who wanted “the church to play its customary role as guardian
of the past” and those clergy who insisted “that the Church should
play a more direct role in social change.” Baroni acknowledged that
these different approaches had always been present among priests,
but he argued that
recently a strong and young group of clergy within the Church have
gained momentum because of their involvement in the civil rights movement. . . . At any gathering of clergy, there seems to be a clear demarcation
between those who have participated in direct action and those who
have not.

That experience in civil rights direct action led many priests, including Baroni, to advocate for parish-level involvement in community
action and the War on Poverty.15
Baroni wrote this article from experience. He had already established a parish neighborhood center at Sts. Paul and Augustine, complete with a volunteer program, employment services, job opportunity workshops, a credit union, and a summer youth educational and
job training program. Indeed, Baroni had established the neighborhood center, employment services program, and summer youth program in 1963, prior to the creation of the federal legislation establishing the OEO. Thus, Baroni and members of his parish were already
fighting their own Catholic war on poverty prior to the federal government declaring one.16
The NCCIJ in which Baroni was active had begun its antipoverty
efforts prior to 1964 as well. By the mid-1960s, it had become the
14

Baroni,“The Church and the War on Poverty,” p. 191.
Geno Baroni,“Inner City Initiatives,” Community, September 1966, 8.
16
Baroni,“The Church and the War on Poverty,” pp. 187–88; “A Little War on Poverty,”
Christianity Today, June 19, 1964, 36–37.
15

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THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

center of the Catholic antipoverty campaign. The theme of the 1963
NCCIJ Convention—“Poverty, Race and Religion: Challenge to a
Catholic Community”—reflected its commitment to both achieving
civil rights and an end to poverty.The theme of the 1965 NCCIJ convention in Omaha,“Poverty’s Challenge to Interracial Action,” continued NCCIJ’s work on the dual fronts of race and poverty.The conference theme and the resolutions passed by the delegates
demonstrated the connection made by the NCCIJ between the civil
rights movement and the War on Poverty.The prelude to the conference resolutions highlighted this racialized conceptualization of
poverty:
if it is not painfully obvious in 1965 that poverty and racial tensions are
inextricably intertwined we affirm it again: at every turn in their unending
struggle for participation in the responsibilities and the benefits of the free
society, Negroes, Indians, and the Spanish-speaking feel the effects of generations of weakening destitution.17

The NCCIJ believed antipoverty efforts needed to be multiracial to
reflect the diversity of the American people and the poverty that
informed the experiences of many of America’s minority groups. In
America, poverty was not just a story of black and white.18
NCCIJ members, like Baroni, also clearly viewed the War on Poverty
as an extension of the democratization of the civil rights movement.
It supported the federal government’s antipoverty efforts, but also
criticized its “defects and omissions.” The War on Poverty’s key defect,
according to the NCCIJ, was a lack of participation by the poor at key
levels of most community action programs. Indeed, the second resolution passed at the convention called for OEO director Shriver—
who, as noted earlier, was a founding member of the NCCIJ—“to take
prompt and realistic steps to insist on genuine participation in the
decision-making process by poor persons in every War on Poverty
program.” NCCIJ members believed that democratic participation in
the War on Poverty was the primary way for the civil rights movement to continue. As a result, the NCCIJ concluded its conference
17
NCCIJ Commitment newsletter, Sept.–Oct. 1963, Reynold Hillenbrand Papers,
CMRH 29/29; “The Human Face of Poverty: A Challenge to Interracial Action—
Resolutions Adopted by the Delegates to the Convention of the NCCIJ,” August 1965,
Baroni Papers, CBRN 6/01, both UNDA.
18
For more on multiracialism and the War on Poverty, see Bauman, Race and the War
on Poverty.

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

307

report recommending that “the church dedicate its resources primarily to the poor of all races.”19
Baroni and other NCCIJ members continued their support of the
War on Poverty as the terminology of the civil rights movement
shifted to the slogan “black power.” The NCCIJ sustained its support
of the movement both ideologically and practically through backing
the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO).
Formed in early 1967, IFCO sought to coordinate the efforts of religious organizations in supporting community action programs, arguing that there were “limits on the degree to which Federal and city
governments can support community action programs.” IFCO’s top
priority, according to its bylaws, was “to implement common programs and strategy among religious groups for the development of
community organizations among the poor … as part of the urban mission, ministry and program of such religious groups.” In August 1967,
NCCIJ joined the board of the newly formed IFCO. At the same time,
it issued a policy statement that addressed common misunderstandings about the meaning of black power, arguing that civil rights
groups “which are predominantly Negro in membership are in fact
black power organizations dedicated to full citizenship and full partnership in our society for all men.”20 That same month, the NCCIJ
board, with Baroni and Egan playing key roles, passed a resolution calling on
the white community to accept the primary responsibility for the presence and atmosphere of violence found in the cities of our country….We
resolve that funds be used positively to alleviate poverty and build self-sufficient communities…. We resolve that the Church support the efforts of
the Negro, Puerto Rican, Mexican American and other minorities to attain
necessary power to achieve political, social and economic equality.21

Early the following year, the NCCIJ celebrated black power, arguing
that “the terms of the struggle for racial justice and equity” were “hap19

“The Human Face of Poverty: A Challenge to Interracial Action—Resolutions
Adopted by the Delegates to the Convention of the NCCIJ,”August 1965, Baroni Papers,
CBRN 6/01, UNDA.
20
Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of NCCIJ,August 20, 1967, CBRN
29/01, UNDA; Report of Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization, March
16, 1967, CBRN 27/02, UNDA; Steven V. Roberts,“Religious Groups Join to Help Poor,”
New York Times, May 11, 1967, 29.
21
NCCIJ Board Resolution–August 18, 1967, CBRN 29/01, UNDA.

308

THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

pily being dictated by the Negro community itself.” It also maintained
that “the primary task” of the NCCIJ was “in the white community …
and the white church.”As a result, the NCCIJ looked for ways to direct
“white resources to the … requests of the Black community.” One
demonstration of NCCIJ’s support of black power was through its creation of a Department of Urban Services that became the organization’s institutional and financial link to IFCO.22
NCCIJ’s relationship with and commitment to IFCO was challenged following the issuing of the Black Manifesto in 1969. In April
1969, James Forman, the former executive secretary of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the director of United
Black Appeal, issued his Black Manifesto at the National Black
Economic Development Conference. It condemned American institutions for slavery and racism and demanded $500 million in reparations from churches and synagogues for their participation in what
Forman termed “the most vicious, racist system in the world.” Forman
and Lucius Walker, the executive director of IFCO, posited that any
reparations should be donated to black community organizations
through IFCO.23
Responses to the Black Manifesto by the Catholic Church and its
affiliated organizations ranged from outright rejection to hesitant support. At the first NCCIJ convention following the Black Manifesto, the
NCCIJ elected its first black chairman,Walter Hubbard. In addition, the
convention passed a resolution supporting reparations to minorities
and maintained that “while the language of the Black Manifesto and
the political philosophy of some of its backers might be abrasive …
Christians cannot hide behind the smoke screen of distasteful rhetoric to mask our criminal tolerance of racism.” Walker spoke at the
NCCIJ conference, urging the organization to encourage Catholics to
understand the importance of reparations to African Americans.
Walker suggested that individual parishes raise at least $1000 to help
fund black community organizations.24
22

“NCCIJ Report of the Executive Director–February 1968,” CBRN 35/08, UNDA.
Philadelphia, Presbyterian Historical Society,“Black Manifesto,” National Council of
Churches Records, Records of the General Secretary, Series III, R.H. Edwin Espy,
1963–1973, RG4, Box 34, Folder 15.
24
In addition to Walker’s talk, the NCCIJ program also featured presentations by Rev.
Jesse Jackson of Operation Breadbasket; Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers; and
Arthur Fletcher, assistant secretary of labor and an architect of affirmative action. On
the resolution, see the NCCIJ Commitment newsletter, Sept.–Oct. 1969, Reynold
23

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

309

In fall 1969, the NCCIJ formed the National Catholic Committee on
Reparations with the National Association of Laymen.This reparations
committee, which included Baroni, promoted the notion of reparations to Catholic parishes throughout the nation and also worked to
obtain funds for IFCO projects. In addition, the reparations committee
wrote the position paper “A Catholic Position on Reparations.” In the
paper presented to the National Council of Catholic Bishops (NCCB),
the committee called the Black Manifesto a “profoundly prophetic
event” that provided Catholics with not only an opportunity “to correct past and continuing injustice” but also to “renew the American
Church.” The paper further argued that commitment of funds to IFCO
projects would not only benefit black urban communities but also
reorient “Church priorities to re-emphasize her role of concern and
service for the poor and oppressed.”25
The ideology of black power evident in IFCO and the NCCIJ position paper also infused the development of black nationalist Catholic
organizations in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, black Catholics
formed the Council of Catholic Negro Laymen, which a year later
became the Council of Black Catholic Laymen. Also in 1968, in what
one scholar has called “a milestone in the history of the black
Catholic community,” black clergy formed the National Black
Catholic Clergy Caucus (NBCCC) at a meeting of the Catholic Clergy
Conference on the Interracial Apostolate that had the theme “Black
Power and the White Church.”At its first meeting, the NBCCC issued
a statement arguing that the American Catholic Church was “primarily a white racist institution” and demanded the hiring of more black
priests, the training of white priests working in black communities,
and the inclusion of black clergy in decision making at the diocesan
level. The same year, black women religious created the National
Black Sisters Conference (NBSC) to address the needs of African
American Catholics and “to confront individual and institutional
racism and injustice found in society and in the Church.”Two years
later, in 1970, lay Catholics formed the National Black Lay Catholic
Caucus. These organizations, to one degree or other, espoused the

Hillenbrand Papers, PMRH 136/09, UNDA. See also Washington, DC,American Catholic
History Research Center and University Archives, The Catholic University of America
(hereafter referred to as ACUA), NCCIJ press release, August 8, 1969, and “NCCIJ 1969
National Convention” program, George Gilmary Higgins Papers, Box 162, Folder 8.
25
James T. Harris Jr., Executive Director, NCCIJ to Councils and Commissions,
November 7, 1969, Higgins Papers, Box 162, Folder 8, ACUA.

310

THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

ideas of self-definition and community control that formed the core
of IFCO’s message.26
The individual Catholic who provided the most significant support
for IFCO was Monsignor John J. (Jack) Egan. A colleague of Baroni’s
who also served as a leading voice of Catholic social activism, Egan
was a major advocate for Catholic involvement in the War on Poverty
and a prominent community organizer. Born in New York in 1916 to
Irish immigrant parents, Egan and his family moved to Chicago when
he was a young boy. Chicago and the Catholic Church became Egan’s
true passions. Egan attended DePaul University and St. Mary of the
Lake Seminary in Chicago and served as a priest in several Chicago
parishes. Egan’s involvement in social action began during his seminary studies with Monsignor Reynold Hillenbrand, who had formed
the Young Christian Workers movement geared toward economic and
social activism. Hillenbrand’s theology was informed by the idea of
the laity as equal members of the Mystical Body of Christ, a notion
that led its followers to work toward the democratization of the
church and society. For Hillenbrand and Egan, racism divided that
mystical body. Egan’s involvement in and commitment to community
organization began in earnest when he met Saul Alinsky in 1954.The
famed organizer of the Back of the Yards Chicago neighborhood and
founder of the Industrial Areas foundation connected with Egan’s
own commitment to the dignity of each human being.Their meeting
brought Egan into community organizing and led to a friendship that
lasted until Alinsky’s death in 1972. In 1957, Egan became Alinsky’s
first priest intern.Alinsky trained Egan in the dynamics of power, leadership development, and “the skills of democratic organization.”27

26

“A milestone”: Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., The History of Black Catholics in the United
States (New York, 1990), p. 258. For the NBCCC statement, see “A Statement of the Black
Catholic Clergy Caucus, April 18, 1968,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History,
1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S.Wilmore and James H. Cone (New York, 1979), p. 322. On the
NBSC, see “Brief History of the National Black Sisters Conference,” August 1977, CARW
15/11, UNDA. See also Davis, “God of Our Weary Years: Black Catholics in American
Catholic History,” in Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States, ed.
Diana L. Hayes and Cyprian Davis (New York, 1998), pp. 17–46; and Ronald L. Sharps,
“Black Catholics in the United States: A Historical Chronology,” U.S. Catholic Historian,
12 (1994), 119–41.
27
“Democratic organization”: Engel,“The Influence of Saul Alinsky,” p. 646. See also
Margery Frisbie, An Alley in Chicago: The Ministry of a City Priest (Kansas City, 1991);
and Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black
Urban America (New York, 2009), p. 120.

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

311

Egan’s first foray into community organizing came with the Latin
American Committee of the Woodlawn Organization (TWO)—the
community organization started by Alinsky in the Back of the Yards
neighborhood—and in canvassing black neighborhoods in the south
side of Chicago to determine the effect on black residents of the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway. In the process, with the support of Cardinal Samuel Stritch, Egan established the first diocesan
Office of Urban Affairs in the nation and “gave community-organizing
a Catholic mantle of credibility … and articulated the theological
premises for church involvement in community organization.”Those
experiences led him into further involvement in social justice,
including participation in the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965
as well as establishment of housing and employment campaigns in
Chicago. Indeed, his activism against urban renewal in Chicago created enemies. For example, Egan’s 1966 appointment as pastor of
Presentation in the all-black neighborhood of Lawndale actually was
an attempt to silence him by Cardinal John Patrick Cody, the new
archbishop of Chicago and no fan of “troublemakers” who advocated
for social justice. Rather than heeding such a signal from Cody, Egan
helped form the Contract Buyers of Lawndale that challenged unfair
housing contracts.28
Egan’s efforts on behalf of community organizing occurred outside
of Chicago as well, despite Cody’s opposition. In February 1966, Egan
spoke at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC,
on the topic of Saul Alinsky and community organization. Baroni had
helped arrange Egan’s address and wrote a memo to Patrick O’Boyle,
the longtime archbishop of Washington, outlining the significance of
Egan’s address and the need to establish and support community
organizations in the district. Baroni wrote O’Boyle,“the serious question of the role of the priest and the parish in community organizations needs urgently to be discussed.”29
Egan’s involvement in civil rights and antipoverty community
organizations seemed natural, as he, like Baroni, saw the War on
28
“Catholic mantle”: Engel,“The Influence of Saul Alinsky,” p. 646. For an extended,
detailed discussion of Cody’s battles with Egan and other activist priests in Chicago, see
Charles W. Dahm, Power and Authority in the Catholic Church (Notre Dame, 1981).
See also Frisbie, An Alley in Chicago, pp. 80–110, 179–81; Satter, Family Properties, pp.
123–46, 233–44; and Tim Unsworth, “Chicago’s Jack Egan, Jack Egan’s Chicago,”
America, March 19, 1994, 6–9.
29
Baroni to O’Boyle, February 10, 1966, CBRN 16/04, UNDA.

312

THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

Poverty as an extension of the social justice goals of civil rights. For
Egan, community organization was almost a holy method of ministry,
as he noted, a “kind of secular sacrament … [through which] the weak
can get power to make their lives whole.” Egan connected this sanctity of community organization to Catholic involvement in IFCO.30
For Egan, IFCO represented a way for socially activist Catholic
priests to become involved in a national antipoverty community
organization. In March 1967, Egan, Baroni, and other priests formed
the Catholic Committee of Community Organization (CCOO) to provide the official Catholic link to IFCO.The roots of CCOO lay primarily in the establishment of diocesan offices of urban affairs in the late
1950s and early 1960s, and in the experiences of priests working in
civil rights and community antipoverty projects. Egan and Baroni
were chosen to represent CCOO on the IFCO board. After the July
1967 IFCO board meeting, Egan wrote to Baroni that the “enthusiasm
… was evident and the national response to IFCO has been somewhat
overwhelming.” Egan later wrote Emil Seliga, his friend and colleague
at NCCIJ, that the NCCIJ needed “to decide how we can substantially
help IFCO.” Later that year, the CCOO changed the name of the organization to the Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry (CCUM) to
reflect the wider scope of their work.The members of CCUM “were
at the forefront of Catholic activism and had experience in organizations focused on self-determination: community organizations, economic development organizations … housing initiatives, and neighborhood associations.” For Egan, CCUM was a way to continue work
in community organizing after he accepted a position at the
University of Notre Dame and to provide “ministry to the ministers,
ministry to those empowering the poor.” The CCUM served essentially as a network for priests, community organizers, and others interested in addressing causes of social justice. It held a four-week program every summer where, according to Egan, it trained “a whole
generation of priests, Sisters, and lay people” in community organization. The group developed urban ministry programs in dioceses; created the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (headed by Baroni);
and helped create the Campaign for Human Development, the
Catholic Church’s official antipoverty program.31
30

Frisbie, An Alley in Chicago, pp. 235–36.
“Enthusiasm … was evident”: Egan to Baroni, July 13, 1967, CBRN 27/02, UNDA.
“Help IFCO”: Milwaukee, Marquette University Archives, Egan to Seliga, October 6,
1967, Series 15, Box 1, NCCIJ Records.“At the forefront”: Engel,“The Influence of Saul
31

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

313

The Campaign for Human Development stemmed from the Urban
Task Force of the United States Catholic Conference (USCC).The task
force, which had been created in summer 1968 and was headed by
Baroni, included Egan and other CCUM members. Seeking ways to
coordinate diocesan antipoverty efforts in urban centers, to address
Forman’s Black Manifesto, and to consider the role of Catholic black
power organizations, the task force convened in Cumbermeare,
Canada, in August 1969. At Cumbermeare, the task force created the
“Catholic Crusade against Poverty.” Knowing that many Protestant
denominations had committed funds to Forman’s National Black
Economic Development Conference, whereas the Catholic Church
had not taken similar action, the task force proposed a Church commitment of $50 million for community organizations of
white and minority poor to develop economic strength and political
power in their own communities [and] self-help funds for voter registration … seed money to develop non-profit housing corporations, community-run schools, minority-owned cooperatives and credit unions, capital
for industrial development and job training programs.

In other words, this body of social activist priests recommended that the
Catholic Church create its own war on poverty,based on the antipoverty
and urban community organizing experiences of Baroni, Egan, NCCIJ,
CCUM, IFCO, and NBCCC and spurred by the Black Manifesto.32
Baroni and the Urban Task Force then took the resolution to the
November 1969 meeting of the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops.The bishops discussed Baroni’s proposal in smaller sessions at
the meeting. From those sessions, the bishops identified two priority
courses of action: the “education of the total Catholic community in
terms of a more generous, sympathetic and Christ-like attitude toward
the poor and minority groups; and to establish a special poverty collection.” The final resolution approved by the bishops stated:

Alinsky,” p. 648.“Ministry to the ministers”: Egan, quoted in Frisbie, An Alley in Chicago,
p. 243. See also Frisbie, An Alley in Chicago, pp. 236–38, 241–44;“Catholic Committee
on Urban Ministry” flyer, n.d., CARW 11/02, UNDA; Letter from Msgr. John Egan to
Father Geno Baroni, April 28, 1967, and Minutes of Community Organization Meeting,
April 25, 1967, CBRN 27/02, UNDA; and John J. Egan, Peggy Roach, and Philip J. Murnion,
“Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry: Ministry to the Ministers,” Review of Religious
Research, 20 (1979), 279–81.
32
“Resolution on the Crusade against Poverty,” Baroni Papers, CBRN 13/6, UNDA;
Engel,“The Influence of Saul Alinsky,” pp. 649–53.

314

THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

There is an evident need for funds designated to be used for organized
groups of white and minority poor to develop economic strength and
political power in their own communities. … Therefore, be it resolved that
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops establish a National Catholic
Crusade Against Poverty.

Clearly, the Black Manifesto’s demands for reparations from religious
institutions through contributions to economic development in impoverished minority communities had profoundly influenced the bishops.33
Over the next year, the NCCB plotted strategy for its antipoverty
campaign. In March 1970, a memo from Baroni and the Urban Task
Force to Bishop Joseph Bernardin recommended that the USCC
Crusade against Poverty focus on educating Catholics on the extent of
the problem in the United States and providing funds to community
organizations. The task force argued that the crusade “could be a
national conduit of funds for self-help development projects … to
develop economic power and organization among groups living in
poverty and dependence.”34
In November 1970, CCUM met prior to the NCCB annual meeting.
Egan reported to Bernardin that the CCUM “support[ed] and strongly
endorse[d]” the bishops’ antipoverty campaign. Egan added that the
bishops’ action had “given renewed hope to many in the Church and
a new promise to the poor.”A few days later, on November 16, 1970,
the NCCB adopted the Resolution of the Campaign for Human
Development (the new name for its antipoverty campaign). The official Catholic War on Poverty had begun. In the fifty years since its
inception, the CHD has provided more than $300 million in grants for
projects in community organization and economic development to
community and faith-based antipoverty organizations as well as prepared numerous priests, nuns, and low-income individuals to address
poverty in their communities.35
33

Minutes of the Seventh General Meeting of the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops, November 10–14, 1969; and “Resolution on the Crusade against Poverty,”
Baroni Papers, CBRN 13/64, UNDA. See also Engel, “The Influence of Saul Alinsky,” p.
657.
34
Memo from USCC Task Force to Bishop Bernardin, March 7, 1970, Baroni Papers,
CBRN 13/64, UNDA.
35
Egan to Bernardin, November 12, 1970, Urban Task Force Papers, United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops, ACUA; Engel, “The Influence of Saul Alinsky,” pp.
660–61; Catholic Campaign for Human Development Web site, http://www.usccb.org/
cchd/

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

315

Many of the organizations funded by CHD over the years are “heirs
to the legacy of Saul Alinsky.” They are community or faith-based
groups that have pursued agendas related to housing, jobs, education,
and health. CHD-funded groups have challenged redlining practices in
real estate, brought attention to low rates of child support enforcement, helped clean up toxic waste dumps in low-income neighborhoods, and advocated for increased access to health care for the poor.
An early group funded by the CHD was the Contract Buyers League,
the antihousing discrimination organization formed by Egan in
Chicago. Eventually, the league evolved into the Gamaliel Foundation,
a faith-based antipoverty organization with affiliates across the United
States. The CHD approach is evident in terming its grantees “poor
empowerment groups” and advocating in its literature “a hand up, not
a handout”—the same slogan used by the OEO when the federal government’s War on Poverty began in 1964.36
The establishment and continued presence of the CHD and its
sponsored programs demonstrates that the War on Poverty did not
end in the 1970s. Indeed, it continues today largely through community and faith-based antipoverty organizations that often are funded
by the CHD or have personnel trained by the CHD and other religious
groups. It also suggests that America’s War on Poverty has a wider
spectrum than the government sector. Indeed, many of the groups
receiving funds from the CHD have received or continue to receive
funds from federal, state, and/or local governments. In other words,
America’s War against Poverty reflects the nation’s evolving relationships of public and private institutions. An example is President
Barack Obama’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood
Partnerships, an expansion of an office created by President George
W. Bush. Obama had worked for a faith-based antipoverty organization in Chicago (the Developing Communities Project of the Calumet
Community Religious Conference that has the slogan “Christ
Organizing in the Midst of Community”).The president noted that the
office’s top priority would be “making community groups an integral
part of our economic recovery and poverty a burden fewer have to
bear.…” Further reflecting the coalescence of church and state,
Obama appointed Joshua DuBois, a twenty-six-year-old Pentecostal
minister, to lead the office.Thus, this office exemplifies the continued
36
John D. McCarthy and Jim Castelli,“Working for Justice:The Campaign for Human
Development and Poor Empowerment Groups,” Draft Report, The Catholic University
of America, Life Cycle Institute, November 1994, ACUA.

316

THE CATHOLIC WAR ON POVERTY

development of a public/private antipoverty effort launched during
the 1960s.37
The office also underscores the significant relationship between
the evolving, long civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. The
careers of priests like Baroni and Egan demonstrate the connection
between the movement and antipoverty efforts that was clear to
social activists. To them, the War on Poverty, particularly community
action, was an extension of the democratizing efforts of the civil
rights movement. In addition, their involvement and leadership in
groups such as the NCCIJ, CCCUM, and IFCO, combined with their
experience in community organization, informed their understanding
of the connection between race and poverty. The development of
these Catholic civil rights and antipoverty groups also reflects the
changing nature of the long civil rights movement. Beginning with
the NCCIJ, an organization focused on race relations, Baroni and Egan
moved to groups such as CCUM and IFCO, influenced by the increasing emphasis on black power and spurred by Forman’s Black
Manifesto. By the late 1960s, the community groups that Baroni, Egan,
and their fellow clergy sought to serve were highly influenced by the
ideas of self-definition and community control of the black power
movement. In many ways, the eventual creation of the CHD was the
Church’s response to Forman’s Black Manifesto and the increasing
focus on economic power at the community level.
The significant involvement and leadership of Baroni and Egan in
the Catholic Church’s antipoverty efforts reflects a number of influences, including their experiences as urban priests, their theology, and
their belief in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.With a theology that emphasized the centrality of the Church’s commitment to
the poor, the sanctity of each individual, and a desire to emulate
Christ, a cadre of socially active priests (including Baroni and Egan)
spearheaded Catholic efforts for civil rights and against poverty.
Indeed, both Baroni and Egan continued their work in social justice
via community organizing well into the 1970s.
After thirteen years at the University of Notre Dame, Egan returned
to Chicago and established several antipoverty organizations, including the Chicago Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. Beginning in
37

“President Creates Faith-Based Office,”Associated Press, February 13, 2009; Barack
Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, 2004).

BY ROBERT BAUMAN

317

1999, Egan began a campaign against the payday loan industry, which
used astronomical interest rates to take advantage of low-wage workers who often were black or Latino. After Egan’s death in 2001 at age
eighty-four, the organization was renamed the Monsignor John Egan
Campaign for Payday Loan Reform. In 2005, the Illinois General
Assembly passed the Egan Payday Loan Reform Act, which created significant regulations for the payday loan industry.
Baroni founded the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs
(NCUEA) in 1970 in response to the Kerner Commission’s conclusion
that white ethnic racism had played an important role in urban violence in the late 1960s. Reflecting the influence of the War on Poverty
and the black power movement, NCUEA emphasized self-determination and community control as well as nurtured grassroots leadership
in white ethnic urban areas; the aim was to challenge government
agencies on issues related to jobs, income, and education. Baroni
served as assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development
during the administration of President Jimmy Carter—the highest federal office ever held by a Catholic priest—and then returned to
NCUEA in the early 1980s. He died of abdominal cancer in 1984 at age
fifty-three. Monsignor George G. Higgins, former director of the
National Catholic Welfare Conference, eulogized him as “one of the
most innovative and most effective Catholic social actionists of his
generation.” Building on the efforts of Egan and Baroni, the organizations that they served in the 1960s and 1970s—NCCIJ, CCUM, IFCO,
and particularly CHD—continue fighting racism and poverty in the
twenty-first century, demonstrating the continuity of a long Catholic
War on Poverty.38

38

For Higgins’s eulogy, see Higgins Papers, Box 4, Folder 1, ACUA. See also Satter,
Family Properties, pp. 380–81.

BOOK REVIEWS
________
General and Miscellaneous
Art, Faith and Place in East Anglia: From Prehistory to the Present. Edited
by T. A. Heslop, Elizabeth Mellings, and Margit Thøfner. (Rochester, NY:
Boydell and Brewer. 2012. Pp. xvi, 352. $80.00. ISBN 978-1-84383-744-2.)
East Anglia is an ill-defined region on the east coast of England, sticking out
into the North Sea. Like many places in a similar situation—Cornwall, at the
southwest corner of England, springs to mind, as does Brittany, in northwest
France—East Anglia has tended to evolve its own culture and to draw its influences from across the water rather than from its inland neighbors. Before the
nineteenth century, after all, it was usually easier and quicker to get to places
by sea than by land, and East Anglia has always been in the front line when it
came to invasions, whether defending the coast from Germanic pirates in the
third century, or providing the bases for bombing raids on Germany in the
twentieth. Trade across the North Sea was important for England for many
centuries and brought with it language, customs, and buildings not always
found elsewhere in the country: the use of the Old Norse word gate to mean
street, for example, and the abundance of churches with round towers, now
generally thought to be following models from northern Europe. Such regions
also tend to have their favorite saints.The prevalence of churches dedicated
to St. Margaret of Antioch is discussed in this volume, and Ethelbert,
Etheldreda, and Edmund are popular locals who achieved sainthood.
Paganism, too, is liable to continue in regions far removed from the center
long after it has been suppressed elsewhere.
This wide-ranging volume comprises twenty chapters examining the relationship between sacred works of art (mostly but not exclusively Christian)
and the location in which they were made or used. The examples include
Roman and Anglo-Saxon artifacts, medieval wall paintings and stained glass,
nineteenth-century church buildings, and twentieth-century war memorials;
most readers of this journal will find something here to interest them. But in
one important respect the volume is not so wide-ranging after all.The region
of East Anglia is nowhere defined (nor is there a general map, to help those
unfamiliar with the area), but by the end of the introduction it is clear that
what is meant is the area covered by the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk; various other definitions of East Anglia (for example, the present Roman Catholic
diocese of that name, not to mention the Anglo-Saxon kingdom) include
Cambridgeshire. In fact, fourteen of the twenty chapters deal exclusively with
Norfolk, including Norwich.
318

BOOK REVIEWS

319

This is not altogether surprising, as the three editors are from the School
of World Art Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, and the origin of the
volume is the research project “Icon: 2000 Years of Art and Belief in Norfolk.”
Unfortunately, no information is provided about the other seventeen contributors, beyond the fact that they “range from professional scholars to enthusiasts and from the devout to the openly atheist” (p. 3).
The book is well produced and illustrated, and it is a pleasant surprise to
find footnotes as opposed to endnotes, as well as a comprehensive bibliography. It is a shame that as much trouble was not taken with the index, which
is virtually useless. Quite apart from the mistakes it contains, it seems to have
been compiled without a logical system.Worst of all, in a book about “place,”
it indexes only a tiny proportion of the places mentioned.
Great Totham, Essex, United Kingdom

JAMES BETTLEY

Jerusalem in the North: Denmark and the Baltic Crusades, 1100–1522. By
Ane L. Bysted, Carsten Selch Jensen, Kurt Villads Jensen, and John H. Lind.
[Outremer: Studies in the Crusades and the Latin East, Vol. 1.] (Turnhout:
Brepols Publishers. 2012. Pp. xiv, 393. €75,00. ISBN 978-2-503-52325-5.)
The subject of the present volume is the Danish involvement in the crusades in northeastern Europe that traditionally have been perceived to begin
with the Wendish crusade of 1147 and to have continued with the Baltic crusades of the late-twelfth century and later. These were aimed at conquering
and converting the lands on the eastern and southern coast of the Baltic Sea.
The campaigns in northeastern Europe have been the subject of a number of
scholarly works. Until recently the most notable book in English was arguably
Eric Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades (Minneapo-lis, 1980), but since
the late 1990s a great deal of research has been published in English. There
has, however, been very little research on the Danish involvement in the crusading movement since Paul Riant’s Expéditions et pèlerinages des
Scandinaves en Terre Sainte au temps des croisades (Paris, 1865).That is not
to say that twentieth-century historians working on the Danish Middle Ages
completely ignored the crusades, but most scholars mentioned the Danish
crusading activity only briefly and often ascribed it to local economic and
political concerns, thus weakening the links between the Danish expeditions
and the cross-European crusading movement.
That is convincingly challenged by the authors of the present volume, who
highlight the exchange of ideas between the Danish realm and the rest of
Latin Christendom as well as the complexity of the motivations of the crusaders. The volume, which is a translation of the Danish book Danske
korstog—krig og mission i Østersøen (2nd ed., Copenhagen, 2004), opens
with a brief historiographical survey.The remainder of the book is dedicated
to a thorough discussion of the Baltic crusades and the Danish engagement
in these campaigns, including themes such as the funding of the crusades, the

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militarization of society, and the role of the military orders and the mendicants. It focuses on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—namely, the period
up to the Treaty of Stensby (1238), which secured the Danish king control
over northern Estonia (chapters II–XII). The authors go on to discuss the
Danish rule of Estonia up to 1346 and the Danish crusades of the late Middle
Ages (chapters XIII–XVIII).
The authors present numerous new interpretations that are the results of
extensive source studies. Many of these will undoubtedly stimulate future discussions about the Danish involvement in the crusading movement—indeed,
some have already attracted highly relevant criticism from other historians
working on the Danish medieval material; among the disputed issues are the
nature of the Confraternities of St. Knud and the character of the Danish campaigns against the Wends in the twelfth century. A key point is the matter of
the definition of crusade.The authors briefly discuss the long-ranging debate
on this issue (chapter I), but it is not made entirely clear where they stand on
this matter. They take a very inclusive approach, in which a great number of
expeditions are labeled as crusades and many medieval Danish developments
and institutions are seen as related to crusading ideas. They include not only
expeditions that are crusades in the “inclusivist” sense (“wars that were conducted with papal consent against the enemies of the church, which granted
participants an indulgence for their sins,” p. 13) but also those campaigns and
institutions that may have been related to ideas about holy war or defense of
the faith, apparently favoring a “generalist” approach. The authors do not, however, address the way we may determine whether a campaign or institution
indeed was influenced by such ideas. Nor do they argue for the fruitfulness of
their approach, thus depriving the reader of what might have been a most
interesting contribution to the debate about the understanding of crusades.
Nevertheless, the volume provides a stimulating and accessible survey of
the Danish involvement in the Baltic crusades and will be useful to students
and scholars interested in the history of the Baltic crusades and the
Scandinavian kingdoms of the Middle Ages.
Aalborg University, Denmark

IBEN FONNESBERG-SCHMIDT

French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600. By
Virginia Reinburg. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. xiv,
297. $99.00. ISBN 978-1-107-00721-5.)
For decades, books of hours have been a focus of research into later
medieval art and religion; as the most popular book of private devotion
during the period covered by this volume, and surviving in greater numbers,
they provide a rich quarry from which to mine.
The present volume is divided into two parts.“A Social History of the Book
of Hours” describes the book as an object within society, addressing its pop-

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ularity, the effect of the invention of printing, its role within a family, the implication of its primarily Latin content to owners whose Latin may have been
very limited, its relation to liturgical books, and especially as “an archive of
prayer” (p. 236, see also pp.131–32, 135, 137). The second part, “An
Ethnography of Prayer,” analyzes prayer as an activity—asserting that it is both
“speech” and “rite” (pp. 4, 132; chapter 4)—in order to offer a new lexicon for
the activity of prayer in this era” (p. 4).
A problem for any book that aims to cover a large topic is that it may have
to make generalizations that are only partially true and simplifications that
may mislead; clearly, a generalization that might be true for 1575 often will
not be true for 1425. Two centuries is a long period to cover, but the book of
hours is a pan-European phenomenon, not just a French one; so if one is going
to make sweeping generalizations it is hard to justify the use of arbitrary geographical boundaries. Especially interesting or surprising statements are inadequately substantiated and often contradicted later. A case in point is that “an
oldest son could expect to receive the family’s book of hours at the death of
his parents” (p. 57), yet many examples are provided (for example, pp. 54, 65,
66, 74, 75) of such books passing to female relatives or to others outside the
family. Unconvincing was the repeated assertion that books of hours were
“family” possessions (chapter 2 and elsewhere); even if a book contains the
heraldry of a married couple or a depiction of a whole family, this does not
mean that it was actually used or possessed by more than one person.
Another problem is that the intended reader apparently has no knowledge
of medieval manuscripts, iconography, or religion; every chapter has observations that read as statements of the obvious.To list just one example of many:
"Many of these prayer books have not survived into the twenty-first century”
(p. 60).A reader with such a lack of background knowledge would be better
served by reading Roger Wieck’s Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in
Medieval Art and Life (New York, 1988), to which Reinburg contributed a
chapter; Wieck’s Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and
Renaissance Art (New York, 1997); and Eamon Duffy’s Marking the Hours:
English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (New Haven, 2007). These relatively inexpensive books have innumerably more reproductions than the
volume under review and cover a wider geographical and chronological
range in more detail.What the present volume offers that these books do not
is an interpretation of prayer as an activity and a means of classifying types of
prayer; much of the second part of the book depends upon what can be
gleaned from the text of prayers. (These prayers are usually given in English
translation, without the original text, which is understandable in a book
aimed at a general readership, but inappropriate for an expensive book from
a university press).This reviewer found this analysis to suffer from the same
problems of oversimplification and generalization as marred the first half of
the book.
London, United Kingdom

PETER KIDD

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Renovatio et Unitas—Nikolaus von Kues als Reformer. Theorie und Praxis
der reformatio im 15. Jahrhundert. Edited by Thomas Frank and Norbert
Winkler. [Berliner Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitforschung, Band 13.]
(Göttingen:V & R unipress, an imprint of Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2012.
Pp. 253. ISBN 978-3-89971-962-8.)
This volume originated in a February 2011 workshop and a fall 2011 conference at the Free University at Berlin.The authors attempted to bridge the
gap between philosophical and historical perspectives, between vita activa
and contemplativa in Nicholas of Cusa and in the context of his writings situated between the medieval and early-modern eras. The result is ten contributions on various aspects of renovatio, unitas, and reformatio.The emphasis is on the concrete reform initiatives with reflection on the theoretical
implications of reformatio.The introduction points out the shift from reformatio as personal improvement in the earlier Middle Ages (see Gerhart
Ladner’s The Idea of Reform, Cambridge, MA, 1959) to the later ideas of structural-social change and the Janus perspective of looking back to a golden age
and forward to the wrath of God to come unless reform occurred. For Cusa,
there were conceptual reform, personal renewal, and the process of ridding
institutions of abuses. In the last part of his life after the collapse of the
Council of Basel and external reform, Cusa turned more to interior reform.
The first study by Hans Gerhard Senger puts Cusa’s dilemma in the context of the controversies with the Hussites—the issue of unity versus
renewal/reform—and this Bohemian question stayed with Cusa for the last
thirty years of his life. For him, the truth of the Church ontologically was
rooted in its unity. Interestingly, he wrote on renovation in his sermons but
not in his other writings. Renovatio could never be a valid ground for breaking unity, and so reform was not an issue if division then occurred.
Isabelle Mandrella treats reform dealings and speculative thought in Cusa,
who had been asked for guidance by the monks at Tegernsee. It took him
thirty years to finish his tract De Beryllo, and his De docta ignorantia presents in a highly theoretical and abstract manner his thoughts on the active
and contemplative life; freedom; and the concepts of the new, obedience, and
the one and the many while referring to the story of Martha and Mary. For
Cusa,“the many” is always unstable, and so unity is the norm for the thinker
and reformer. He looks at the striving for knowledge and truth as a dynamic
and always renewed process, and so one must be open to the new to reach a
better understanding. Man is called to go beyond the here and now of self-will
to the true freedom of God’s will.
Norbert Winkler’s discussion of the link of Cusa to Meister Eckhart is centered in the Christological concerns that arose about Eckhart. In a dense and
complex analysis Winkler explores some facets of this story: Eckhart’s condemnation in 1329, the role of the ideas of Albertus Magnus, the tension

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between the Aristotelian worldview and neo-Platonist/Hermetic thought, the
influence of Tauler and Suso, and discussions on formal analogy and the idea
of participation. He presents seeing and knowing as one and the same for
Eckhart and Cusa, and it is God’s seeing that holds the creature in its being,
whereas for Cusa, the human only sees through a glass darkly. For mankind,
Christ is the teacher of complete wisdom, for he alone is fully the homo divinus. For Eckhart and Cusa, the real enemy to be conquered is that self-love
that is opposed to love of God and of the other.
For Thomas Leinkauf, Cusa, unlike later figures, did not see himself as a
reformer, since he did not desire to throw out the old. He expressed Greek
ideas as ones changed by Judeo-Christian thought—in God, possible being
and actual being are absolutely in one; God was the basic ground of all being.
He followed Ss.Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in his thoughts on potentia
absoluta Dei and potentia ordinata Dei. For Cusa, God’s Posset stands over
against all created Sein—the realm of potential, of capability. Man is, however,
like God in that man is the former or maker of himself. Cusa explores a
number of ways of looking at this idea such as the paradigm of painter or
sculptor.
The remaining essays are a series of concrete historical instances.Thomas
Izbicki treats Cusa as a preacher of reform. When Cusa attended an imperial
diet to advocate for Pope Eugenius IV against the Council of Basel, he preached
a lengthy oration at Frankfurt to seek support for the pope and composed a
letter to Rodrigo Sanchez de Arevalo. He pushed the idea of coming closer to
St. Peter as the way of bringing peace and reform.After this, Cusa was invited
to Trier for a visitation and delivered an address on the roles of a visitor and a
canon. Canons were to desert the world to become blessed in the Kingdom,
to follow the vision and become conformed to Christ. In 1446 Cusa preached
at Mainz and developed the language of delegation and legation; a legate was
to follow the model of Christ, who was his father’s legate.
Thomas Woelki points out that in his career, Cusa had many dealings with
the mendicants and has been seen as very strict in these, but was he their
enemy? Cusa, like Gerson, can be seen as part of the secular clergy of his day.
In his treatises Cusa mostly cited older canon law in regard to regular clergy
rather than more recent decretals when he had to deal with divisions and disputes with the regular clergy. In 1451–52 he faced the mendicants in
Nuremberg and also handled a dispute in Trier on the power of a bishop to
reform religious (Cusa favored this), and the example was followed in Mainz
and subsequently in Cologne.The question of the mendicants and their privileges arose at the papal Curia and led to canonistic discussion. A key question was posed—who would decide who was fitting and approved for a position? The mendicants stated that this fell under the papal purview (as
Johannes Andraea had said in the Glossa Ordinaria, whereas Cardinal
Francesco Zabarella and Archbishop Niccolò Tedeschi assigned this role to

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the local bishop). Cusa also faced a dispute between local pastors and the
mendicants over confessional rights.
Jürgen Dendorfer takes up the “Reformatio Generalis” that Cusa based on
conciliar calls for reform.This work by Cusa, written in early 1459, ran parallel to Pope Pius II’s call for curial reform that year, reinforced by the pope’s
later formation of a reform commission and his issuance of a papal bull on
reform before his death in 1465. Dendorfer looks at the connections between
these events and documents as well as their link with the reform decrees of
Basel some twenty years earlier. For him, the reform of the Curia and the
reform consilium of Cusa (who wanted reform to start at the Curia) were
rooted in the decrees of Constance and Basel. A key question was whether
the pope was bound to rule with the consent of the cardinals. In addition,
Dendorfer compares a contemporary writer on reform, Domenico
de’Domenichi, with the ideas of Pius II and Cusa.
Thomas Frank looks at another instance of Cusa on reform—the question
of the Hospitallers at Orvieto—and shows the complexity of this issue for
Cusa and others. Gisela Naegle examines Cusa and several of his contemporaries from the perspective of their role in reform of the Empire. Finally,
Florian Hamann considers the issue of reform in the Western Church and the
East as well as the relations of Christians and Muslims during a time when
Islamic expansionism was seen as very threatening. What in particular did
Cusa think and write about Islam in that era? How tolerant and ecumenical
was he in reality? What about his contemporaries—Pius II, Torquemade,
George of Trebizon? What was the response to their proposals and ideas?
How did personal conflicts affect attempts to have confrontation on the level
of ideas rather than on the battlefield? How new was this?
This collection of studies ranges far and wide over important questions for
that time and today.The essays raise many issues and problems that deserve
careful reading, reflection, and study.
State University of New York at Fredonia

THOMAS E. MORRISSEY

Ancient
Augustine and Catholic Christianization: The Catholicization of Roman
Africa, 391–408. By Horace E. Six-Means. [Patristic Studies,Vol. 10.] (New
York: Peter Lang. 2011. Pp. viii, 215. $77.95. ISBN 978-1-4331-0804-4.)
This book presents St. Augustine as the primary force behind efforts to
make Roman North Africa Catholic (as opposed to pagan or Christian of a
non-Catholic kind). Six-Means employs the (to this reviewer, unhelpful) term
spin doctor to describe Augustine’s role as Africa’s arbiter of all things
Catholic, whether they are in the realm of rhetoric, law, or theology. Despite

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the author’s insistence that Augustine worked in concert with his episcopal
colleagues, we actually see very little of them in this book.Augustine is indisputably the star of the show.Although the book initially seems to have as its
ambition an explanation for Catholicism’s ultimate dominance over all other
forms of belief, it quickly settles into a discussion focusing mostly on the
Donatists.The dates of investigation (391 to 408) aid in pushing the narrative
in this direction, but do not necessarily force its hand. Although 391 is understandable for commencing a study (it is the year Augustine was ordained as a
priest), 408 is problematic. In this year Stilicho was executed. Six-Means
believes that with Stilicho’s death came a “chill” in the fruitful relationship
that the Catholics in Africa had cultivated with the imperial court while
Stilicho enjoyed power. This is oversimplification. The book all but ignores
what is happening in Africa itself. Real and sustained resistance by administrators in Africa (of whatever level) to imperial support for “Catholicization”
places Augustine’s assumed role (and Six-Means’s thesis) in jeopardy. The date
of 408 also feels somewhat arbitrary, for although this is largely a book about
Augustine’s relationship with the Donatists, the cut-off date enables the
author to avoid analysis of the 411 Conference and its aftermath, which, in
fact, could have lent support to Six-Means’s arguments.
There are a number of bright spots in this volume.The author does a good
job tracing Augustine’s intellectual evolution as he transforms himself from a
professional rhetor associating with the elite of the empire to a Catholic
bishop who must care for all people’s spiritual well-being.The best part of the
book is a discussion of Augustine’s use of Genesis 22:18 (on the blessed seed
of Abraham) to argue for a Catholic universality. Six-Means articulates well
how Augustine adopts the Genesis passage, filtered through St. Paul as well as
Tyconius, to make a sustained argument against real and perceived notions of
Donatist purity and separatism.
The book also raises many interesting and important questions.What were
the intellectual influences on Augustine? How did Augustine’s knowledge and
understanding of the self translate into action and activity as a bishop? What,
for Augustine, constituted the relationship between rhetoric and theology?
How did Augustine persuade the people of North Africa to embrace Catholic
Christianity? The answers given, however, are largely unsatisfactory for two
basic reasons. First, the author is hesitant to strike out on his own, preferring
to present problems and their possible solutions as already adumbrated by
well-known contributors to the fields of Augustinian and late-antique studies.
The work of Peter Brown, William H. C. Frend, Henry Chadwick, Averil
Cameron, J. Patout Burns, and Ramsay MacMullen is very well represented.
Second, the narrative follows a perplexing trajectory.The author will present
a crucial and tantalizing problem, thereby elevating the reader’s expectations
to pleasing heights, but then the same reader must immediately descend into
very basic introductory material, which probably is meant to provide context
for the question just raised, but it only interrupts the flow. When Six-Means

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eventually returns to the question at hand, very often he inserts block quotes
from the primary (or even scholarly) sources with little explanation or interpretation.We then proceed right on to the next issue wherein this same kind
of interpretive approach is repeated.The exciting rises, precipitous falls, and
sudden shifts can make for an uneasy and, in the end, frustrating read.
University of Georgia

ERIKA T. HERMANOWICZ

Christ Circumcised. A Study in Early Christian History and Difference. By
Andrew S. Jacobs. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.]
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2012. Pp. xii, 314. $75.00.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4397-0.)
Discussion of ancient Christianity has become increasingly concerned
with the idea of identity. In a reaction against older discussions of the subject,
scholars, influenced by recent theoretical models that have their origins in
postmodernity, have emphasized the diversity of the early Christian movement and the constructed character of the identities promoted by individual
Christians, including those who came to be associated with the “orthodox.” In
the discussion of the construction of such identities, much significance has
been attached to the role of the “other” and to the related idea of boundary
formation and exclusion. The book under review emerges out of these concerns, but critiques what it terms the prevailing “socioanthropological model
of boundary formation and exclusion” (p. 4) in favor of an approach, based
upon psychoanalysis, in which the self is a partially realized fantasy from
which the other is never completely separated:“In this understanding of personhood, the ‘other’ is for the ‘self’ simultaneously an object of identification
and distinction” (p. 12). Such a view of identity will be used to articulate
Christian understandings of Judaism, in particular as these were refracted
through the idea of Jesus’s circumcision.
In this learned and wide-ranging book, Andrew S. Jacobs covers a bevy of
subjects.The book is set against the overarching background of Rome and its
Empire, in which Jacobs sees questions of difference and their incorporation
as central to Roman identity and shows how Roman understanding of circumcision in some ways embodied these ideas. Jacobs writes authoritatively
on a range of Christian texts that have traditionally been described as adversus Judaeos, showing how their engagement with the circumcision of Christ
“simultaneously rejects and reinscribes its originary Jewishness” (p. 12),
noting also how the dialogical form that some of these texts take also implies
a more blurred and complex understanding of Christian identity. Chapters
follow on heresiological writing, again emphasizing a similar point about the
capacity for those who are supposedly excluding to reabsorb contents of the
ideas of those they are opposing (here introducing Julia Kristeva’s idea of the
“abject” in which rejection and absorption of the other are brought together
and the question of identity rendered ambiguous) and on St. Epiphanius’s dis-

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cussion of the Ebionites. In the latter, Jacobs makes clear how the bishop of
Salamis—in opposing Ebionite justification for using the rite of circumcision
by reference to Jesus’s own practice—retains and internalizes ideas of difference, ideas that are severely tested by the cross-dressing “Jewish-Christian”
sect (“Orthodox Christianity subversively mirrors the hybridity of Jewish
Christianity” [p. 118]). The final two chapters deal with Christian exegetical
engagement with the subject of Christ’s circumcision and with the introduction in the sixth century of the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision, viewed against
a variety of interpretations. In a lengthy conclusion, which is much more than
a summary of the book, Jacobs introduces the idea of “passing,” in which he
shows, inter alia, how the circumcised Christ could pass both as a Jew and a
male, arguing that it was Jesus’s paradoxical and contradictory mark that can
be used as an emblem for engaging with the complex and interlocking
Christian identity.
This is a stimulating and thoughtful book at whose qualities this review can
only hint. Amongst many other things, it builds upon and develops ideas that
have been advocated in the so-called “ways that never parted” school, which
argues for a much more nuanced understanding of Jewish and Christian separation. Some, whose level of theoretical sophistication is a few registers below
that of Jacobs (this is a book with a considerable amount of theoretical freight,
but articulated with clarity), might argue he has given eloquent theoretical
expression to the view that Christians in rejecting Judaism, however understood, were inevitably forced to appropriate and reinterpret aspects of it if
they wished to retain their connection with what they termed the old
covenant. Jacobs is wise to this view and rejects a more defensive reading of
the varied literature examined by his book, preferring to see the strategies he
so skillfully describes as inevitable elements of identity formation.
Peterhouse, University of Cambridge

JAMES CARLETON PAGET

Rom und Mailand in der Spätantike: Repräsentationen städtischer Räume
in Literatur, Architektur und Kunst. Edited by Therese Fuhrer. [Topoi.
Berlin Studies of the Ancient World, Vol. 4.] (Boston: Walter De Gruyter,
2012. Pp. xx, 448. $124.00. ISBN 978-3-11-022213-5.)
Recent years have seen an impressive amount of research on the lateantique city of Rome, a general growth of interest in late-antique capitals, and
a flourishing of work on late-antique urbanism in general. Until very recently
what had been lacking was work looking at late antique (capital) cities in
properly comparative perspective so this volume, the first to focus directly on
Rome and Milan together, is bound to be welcome. This edited collection
stems from a May 2009 conference in Berlin and features the work of both
historians and archaeologists. Because space does not permit detailed discussion of all sixteen chapters, this review will aim at a broad overview of the
volume and its strengths and weaknesses.

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After a brief introduction the volume is divided into four parts. The first
looks at the city and (and without) the emperor. Here the focus is primarily
material, looking at the topography and archaeology of the two cities.
Inevitably, the focus is primarily on Rome, due to the vastly more extensive
ancient remains surviving from this city. This section includes a useful
account by Vincent Jolivet and Claire Sotinel of the early-fifth-century imperial palace recently excavated at the Villa Medici, the so-called Domus
Pinciana. Part 2, consisting of only two chapters, focuses on literary representations of the two cities, in imperial panegyric (Rome and Milan), and in
the writings of Ammianus Marcellinus (Rome alone). Part 3, which focuses
exclusively on Rome, looks at the currently fashionable concept of the (lateantique) city as “Erinnerungslandschaft” (landscape of memory), focusing on
both literary texts (including Macrobius, Prudentius, Sidonius Apollinaris, and
Servius) and topography (including the Roman Forum, Forum of Augustus,
and the Lupercal). Finally, the last and longest section of the book explores
the late-antique city in Christian discourse, with chapters again focusing on
topography and text alike.
As can be seen, certain key themes and interests tie this volume
together, other than the focus on Rome and Milan. Both the importance of
rhetoric, and the ideological as well as physical significance of topography
and topographical change, are notably prominent, as is to be expected from
recent scholarship. Bishops are key figures in the late-antique city—the
towering figure of St. Ambrose is unsurprisingly prominent in several discussions of Milan, whereas St. Damasus is the subject of a lengthy and useful
reconsideration by Neil McLynn (the sole chapter in the volume written in
English, rather than German). Direct juxtaposition—or indeed, comparison—of Rome and Milan within individual chapters is rare, which is perhaps to be expected considering the huge differences between the two
cities. Several chapters do a good job of getting beyond the limitations of
the literary and archaeological evidence available for Milan, including
Claudia Tiersch’s chapter, which looks at the evidence for Christian Milan in
the fourth century.Therese Fuhrer, meanwhile, in another interesting chapter, looks at the interaction of text and built space in our picture of lateantique Milan.
Scholars interested in Rome and Milan in late antiquity will undoubtedly
find much of interest. This reviewer feels that, with a little more editorial
input, the volume could have been rather more than the sum of its parts.The
presence of an index locorum, as well as a general index, is to be welcomed.
However, a combined bibliography would have been more convenient for the
reader, and a more substantive, referenced introduction also would have
added to the utility of the volume as a larger contribution to the history of
imperial capitals in late antiquity.
University of Edinburgh

LUCY GRIG

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Medieval
Unmarriages:Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages. By Ruth
Mazo Karras. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. 2012. Pp. vi, 283. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-812-24420-5.)
Ruth Mazo Karras coins the term unmarriage to denote heterosexual
partnerships that did not amount to legitimate marriage. She prefers that term
to quasi-marital union, because the latter “assumes marriage as the model
that other unions only approached, an assumption I did not wish to make” (p.
8). Nevertheless, most of the book is devoted to normative issues and to contemporaneous perceptions of the differences between legitimate and illegitimate unions.
The book is organized thematically, albeit with a chronological drift.
Discussion of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages occurs mainly in the
first two of the four chapters, whereas the last two focus on the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. In chapter 1, Karras considers ecclesiastical efforts to
demarcate between valid and invalid unions, which she traces from the
heightened sense of marriage as a religious institution in the fourth century
to the full articulation of a canon law of marriage emphasizing consent in the
twelfth. In chapter 2, Karras considers unequal partnerships, especially those
between a free man and a slave, but including those in which a class disparity was not a fatal impediment in law yet fulfilled cultural expectations for
premarital or extramarital unions. Karras reviews sexual relationships in the
various forms of slavery that persisted in various parts of Europe during the
central Middle Ages. It was a surprise not to find Pope Hadrian IV’s decretal
Dignum est (1155) mentioned in Karras’s brief survey of servility in the
canon law of marriage (pp. 81–82). It was the culmination of a canonical
effort based on Galatians 3:28 to make status irrelevant to the sacrament of
marriage. In chapter 3, Karras focuses on priests’ sexual partnerships, which
were necessarily invalid after holy orders had become a diriment impediment
in the twelfth century. Just as a servile concubine was not a mulier honesta
in late antiquity, so a priest’s concubine was despised as his whore in
medieval polemics. In the final chapter, Karras considers couples who could
have married but chose not to do so. Here, as also in some sections of chapter 3, Karras draws extensively on records of the archdeacon’s officiality in
Paris during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Karras aims throughout the book to consider unmarriages from the
woman’s point of view, although she concedes in conclusion “how little we
know” about it (p. 210). Every chapter includes vignettes of particular women
in relation to the chapter’s themes. For example, in chapter 3, on “Priests and
Their Partners,” Karras writes about Katharina Shütz Zell, the wife of a
Lutheran priest who wrote a pamphlet defending her husband’s decision to
marry. In the same chapter, Karras reviews a convoluted legal opinion by the

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French civil jurist Gui Pape (d. 1487), which centered on the rights of a
priest’s concubine or mistress, Antonia, and of their son after the priest’s
death. Karras says little about the legal instability of invalid unions, in contrast
to the permanence of marriage in Western theology and canon law. The term
matrimonium ratum connoted permanence as well as validity, and the insecurity of invalid unions was surely their chief disadvantage for women.
The book is salutary insofar as it reminds us that celibacy and marriage
were de facto not the only alternatives in the Middle Ages, but does it amount
to more than the sum of its parts? Karras proposes “to analyze pair bonds
without privileging marriage, while still recognizing that medieval people
did, in fact, privilege marriage” (p. 5). But can one examine how marriage was
privileged without privileging marriage? And is a merely privative category,
such as unmarriage, a fit subject for coherent study and argument?
Emory University

PHILIP L. REYNOLDS

La Visitation dans l’art: Orient et Occident, V e–XVI e siècle. By Anne Marie
Velu. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf. 2012. Pp. 218. €33,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2204-09658-4.)
In this handsome book, entirely printed on coated stock and lavishly illustrated (99 figures, 27 of them in color),Anne Marie Velu aims to understand a
specific development in the iconography of the Visitation in the late-medieval
West.To the scene in which Mary, having been informed by the angel Gabriel
of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy, meets and often embraces the future
mother of John the Baptist, artists often added the two unborn children, portrayed either in the bubble of their mothers’ transparent wombs or as hovering in radiating mandorlas in front of them. The space given by Velu to basic
overviews of topics such as the rise of the image in early Christianity suggests
that she wants her findings to be accessible to a wide audience of general
(and perhaps pious) readers interested in medieval art and religion. After a
brief introduction explaining that her conclusions arise from a series of fiftysix visual examples in a wide range of media and diverse geographical
origin—every image of her subject that she found—she begins with chapters
on narrative and liturgical sources. For the texts explicitly including the
unborn children, she relies on the Protoevangelium of James, the
Meditationes vitae Christi, and the female mystics of the fourteenth century.
An exploration of the many manifestations and developments of this scene in
later medieval Latin and vernacular narratives such as lives of Mary and Jesus,
as well as the most likely avenues for its widespread distribution, would have
filled a gap in Velu’s source study. The chapter on cult and liturgy briefly
traces the introduction of the feast of the Visitation in Eastern and Western
Christianity, and describes the places of the Visitation in The Little Office of
the Virgin, the central text in Books of Hours, as well as in various cycles of
prayers that eventuated in the rosary.

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Chapter 3 begins the study of visual motifs: the embrace of the two
women and Elizabeth kneeling. The detail of hand gestures opens the next
chapter, followed by considerations of secondary characters and of the space
in which the two women meet.The chapter then turns to the inclusion of the
divine: the Trinity and angels. In chapter 5,Velu focuses on her central subject:
images of the Visitation that either suggest or actually delineate the unborn
children. Efforts to understand these images take her to medieval attitudes
toward pregnancy and the embryo, and specifically to the drawings of fetuses
in scientific books. A search for origins leads her to ask whether this image
was created in the East or the West, which she answers with ideas of interpenetration or entanglement.
Chapter 6 locates the impetus for Visitations with visible children in the
mystic spirituality and devotional practices (such as Jesus dolls and cradles)
of the beguines and other female religious, especially German and Flemish
mysticism, relying heavily on the scholarship of Jeffrey Hamburger to do so.
Such images appear in a range of media and a variety of milieux and are concentrated in the fifteenth century.The last chapter articulates the thesis that
appears to have motivated this project—that Annunciation and Visitation
often form a closely interlinked pair because together they visualize the mystery of the Incarnation, thus meeting the need to see that was compelling in
the late Middle Ages. A brief conclusion treats the demise of this image under
the strictures of the Council of Trent as interpreted by Johannes Molanus.
One might regret that Velu neither took great advantage of the many studies
of the medieval female body published in recent years, nor exploited the theorized work of feminist medievalists on Marian imagery. Yet, different
approaches serve different audiences, and many who would not read those
books will enjoy and learn from hers.
Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

PAMELA SHEINGORN

The Politics of Identity in Visigothic Spain: Religion and Power in the
Histories of Isidore of Seville. By Jamie Wood. [Brill’s Series on the Early
Middle Ages,Vol. 21.] Boston: Brill. 2012. Pp. xii, 275. $151.00. ISBN 978-9004-20990-9.)
The florid title of this book conceals more than it reveals of its author’s
purposes, which involve the comparison of all the writings of Isidore that
have any bearing on history.These consist primarily of short historical narratives of different kinds, but also include considerations of the nature and purpose of history in such seemingly nonhistorical texts as the Etymologiae.
Such an approach, embracing the full range of these texts, is revealing, especially of reasons for the marked differences between the two versions of both
St. Isidore of Seville’s Chronicle and his histories of the Goths, Vandals, and
Sueves.The explanations given for such variations depend upon an a priori
view of Isidore as both principal ideologue and spokesman for the Gothic

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monarchy, and as the dominant figure in the Spanish church of his day.
Although such an interpretation of his political role and of his purposes in his
historical writings is long established, it requires more challenge than it
encounters here.
Academics subscribe too easily to the assumption that those who have left
us writings were more influential in their lifetimes than those that have not.
This is certainly not justified in the case of Isidore. Could he from Seville have
exerted more influence on the successive royal courts in Toledo than the
bishops of that city, who included Heladius (615–33), a former provincial governor and vir illustrissimus aulae regiae? Isidore himself appears in this
book largely in intellectual isolation, devising historical narratives aimed
mainly at pleasing his royal “patrons.” No attention is given to the powerful
African influence on his thinking and on the Spanish church of his time, and
the author is not well versed in theological issues, not least the Three
Chapters Controversy. Isidore’s judgments on former kings based on their
treatment of ”the poor” are taken literally, although in reality this can only
have reflected their donations to the Church. Direct contact between monarchs and “the poor,” however defined, were exceedingly rare in any period.
Similarly, we are told that, in his aim of elevating the new Gothic order, all
Romans were apparently branded as heretics by Isidore because of the theological views of a handful of emperors, although the wider context of the
nature and evolution of Roman, Gothic (not Visigothic), and Hispanic identities in the post-imperial kingdoms of Spain is left unexplored.
Despite such omissions and debatable interpretations, there are many
highly commendable features of the book, including its conception. There
also is a good discussion of the differences between the views of Ss. Isidore
and Augustine on the Six Ages of the World, and of the idea and practice of
brevitas in Isidore’s historical work. Particularly interesting is the revelation
of his increased emphasis on the virtues of joint rule in the second versions
of his Chronicle and Historia Gothorum, both dating to the mid-620s, when
Suinthila had associated his young son Riccimir as notional co-ruler.
Stylistically the book can suffer from its origin as a thesis, laboring under
an excess of signposting. Each of its four main chapters is introduced by up
to three pages of description of its intended content and ends with a similar
section repeating the conclusions reached. A final ten pages effectively
repeats all of these individual sets of conclusions, leaving the reader
exhausted by this authorial nannying. Additionally, Jamie Wood is overaddicted to anachronistic metaphors, as in “the episcopal juggernaut had a
wide turning circle” and “an ideology which had been in a research and development phase” (pp. 134–35). It is to be hoped that he will take his work on
Isidore further and fill out some of the areas not fully or entirely convincingly
explored here.
University of Edinburgh

ROGER COLLINS

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Gateway to Heaven: Marian Doctrine and Devotion, Image and Typology
in the Patristic and Medieval Periods, Vol. 1: Doctrine and Devotion. By
Brian K. Reynolds. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press. 2012. Pp. viii, 415.
$39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-56548-449-8.)
This is an excellent book that should be owned by anyone interested in
the history of Marian doctrine and devotion, and it is terrific that New City
Press has now made it so easily and affordably available.The book was originally published under the title Porta Paradisi (Taipei, 2009), and it was long
extremely difficult to acquire. This was most unfortunate, since Gateway to
Heaven surpasses Hilda Graef’s excellent earlier survey of Marian theology
and piety in early Christianity and the medieval West, Mary: A History of
Doctrine and Devotion (New York, 1963); however, Graef’s volume still
remains valuable especially for its broader chronological scope and for its
superior attention to post-Patristic developments in the Byzantine world.
The work is presented as the first volume of a two-volume study, although
it is not clear when the second volume will be issued.This first volume concentrates, as the title indicates, on the development of Marian doctrine and
devotion, whereas the second will consider the history of Mary’s various
“attributes” and—something that will be most welcome—the history of
Marian typology. In the present volume, the focus lies decidedly more on the
development of Marian doctrine than devotion, an emphasis that the author
explains in the light of the fact that several recent studies have appeared on
the history of Marian piety. Nevertheless, the author’s contribution to this
topic also is significant.
Gateway to Heaven is primarily a work of synthesis that combines the
most recent scholarship with a thematic and chronological survey of Marian
literature from early and medieval Western Christianity. The chapters are
organized around the following topics: (1) Divine Motherhood; (2) Virginity;
(3) Mary Co-Redemptrix: Remote Co-Operation; (4) Intercession, Mediation
and Devotion; (5) Mary Co-Redemptrix: Immediate Co-Operation; (6) the
Assumption; and (7) the Immaculate Conception. Each topic is explored first
during the Patristic period, proceeding in chronological fashion and noting
developments in both Greek and Latin literature (as well as in works by a few
important Syriac writers such as Ephrem and Jacob of Serug). Reynolds limits
the Patristic period to the beginning of the eighth century, at which point he
abandons the Christian East.The sections on the medieval period then begin
with the Carolingian period and conclude with the beginning of the fourteenth century. The reasoning given for these limits is that by these points
Marian doctrine and devotion had reached their peaks in East and West
respectively.
This volume is especially valuable for the numerous translations that it
provides from the primary sources, many of which have not otherwise been

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translated into English.The presentation of these sources according to topic
and chronology in the context of the most recent scholarship marks an
invaluable contribution to Marian studies. No less important is the care with
which Reynolds notes the development of Marian piety in the medieval West
in relation to earlier precedents from the East—such connections are often
overlooked in much scholarship on Mary in the Middle Ages. Likewise,
Reynolds is to be commended for resisting and correcting the tendency of
much Roman Catholic scholarship to read later doctrinal developments in the
West (i.e., the Immaculate Conception; Immediate Co-Operation) back into
the Greek Patristic sources. The main shortcoming of the work, however, is
that many of its translations appear to derive from the Italian collection by
Georges Gharib, Testi mariani del primo Millennio (Rome, 1989), rather
than from the original languages. One also wishes that more attention had
been given to later Byzantine writers, and there also is a fair amount of repetition among and within the various chapters (e.g., the same passage from
Romanos is cited on p. 335 and then again as if it were something new on p.
338). Nevertheless, for the periods that it covers, this book is the best survey
of Marian doctrine and devotion currently available.
University of Oregon

STEPHEN J. SHOEMAKER

The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: The
West Frankish Kingdom (840–987). By Geoffrey Koziol. [Utrecht Studies
in Medieval Literacy, 19.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2012. Pp. xx, 661. €100,00.
ISBN 978-2-503-53595-1.)
After reading Geoffrey Koziol’s latest book, this reviewer would like to
turn to the audience, especially his French colleagues, and exclaim, voici, une
merveilleuse histoire de la France ou plutôt de la Francia occidentalis de
840 à 987—although this remark would only correspond to its subtitle.This
work represents the author’s passionate plea for the relevance of diplomatics
and Urkundenforschung in contemporary medieval studies. For a great many
scholars, this plea is not really new, as their training encompassed the use of
formal diplomatics as well as charters for writing full-fledged history in the
vein of Marc Bloch’s ogre of the fairy tale. So any historian of what is now
Austria or Bavaria in the early-medieval period would be at a loss without
charters. But Koziol’s endeavor is not one of “reinventing the wheel.” Instead,
this book builds a bridge between medievalists who understand the importance of charters and diplomas and those who do not.
Koziol’s book offers some fine observations such as those discussing the
reason for the lack of the libri confraternitatum or libri memoriales in
Western Francia (see, for example, pp. 270, 332) and the role of the placita
(see esp. pp. 340–43, 347).To settle disputes amicably, placita often served as
performative acts (to use the author’s concept). More often than not, two litigants stood up in court after they had been assigned the roles of winner and

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loser well in advance. Sometimes they functioned in favor of a third person
(called complacitatio).The winner could even belong to the lower strata of
society, who for some reason had found the support of high-ranking dignitaries or even the king. Koziol rightly points out that these procedures did not
necessarily prove an “even-handed Carolingian justice” (p. 347).These placita
must not, however, be considered as “sham courts”; instead, the necessary
ritual was really performed and the symbols applied represented something
real to the participants.Above all, any royal diploma could be impeached; the
verdict of a placitum was unimpeachable. The author also well portrays
Charles III’s use of diplomas, which displayed his endangered and finally
diminishing royal power. The most beautiful Carolingian diplomas were
issued by his chancery especially at the beginning of his reign.
Koziol has produced a great book, although it is unfortunate that three historians rather different in age, scope, and vision have been lumped under the
label sceptical diplomatists (p. 484n96). Readers may recall that the author
wrote the earlier book Begging, Pardon, and Favor. Ritual and Political
Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1992). It is to be hoped that
another two decades will not pass before Koziol’s next installment appears.
University of Vienna

HERWIG WOLFRAM

The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-leStreet Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19. By Karen Louise
Jolly. [Text and Context.] (Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2012. Pp.
xxvi, 410. $99.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1181-6.)
Visually humble and weathered from extensive use, Durham Cathedral
Library, MS A.IV.19 is the oldest extant English collectar (sets of prayers and
readings for the eight services of the Divine Office). Written somewhere in
southern England c. 900, it had by the third quarter of the tenth century
passed into the possession of the Community of St. Cuthbert at Chester-leStreet (Co. Durham), where it was augmented by at least six scribes. The original Latin text was supplied with a word-for-word gloss in Old English, and
extensive supplements (further hymns, psalms, and collects, along with various lists and notes) were copied onto new quires. A colophon associated
with four of the added collects reveals that this particular page was written
on August 10, 970, by Aldred, the community’s provost—an individual best
known for glossing the Lindisfarne Gospels and supplying them with the
colophon that is the key document for their localization.
Given that the text of DCL A.IV.19 was fully published in 1927, that the
manuscript was reproduced in complete facsimile (with a detailed introduction) in 1969, and that a new edition of its collectar section was produced in
1992, one might perhaps wonder whether the volume merited further monographic treatment.Yet the present study shows how much more of value can

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be elicited by a holistic interrogation of the substantial Northumbrian additions. After a general introduction to the history, nature, and setting of the
community at Chester-le-Street (chapter 1), Jolly provides a detailed reassessment of Aldred and his two colophons (chapter 2) and then a thorough examination of all the later scribes represented in A.IV.19 and their interrelationships (chapter 3). The implications of the nature of the scribal work and of
the textual content for both the devotional (chapter 4) and the intellectual
(chapter 5) life of the community at Chester-le-Street are then explored.
Finally, chapter 6 teases out the inferences that may be drawn from this material about the community’s pedagogy, learning, and spirituality more generally.
Appended to and underpinning the analysis are detailed tables of the structure and content of the manuscript, plus editions of the material in the quires
that were added at Chester-le-Street (pp. 217–359).
Jolly’s investigation of the codicology is meticulous, her analysis of the
texts sensitive, and her assessment of the quality and purpose of the work
sympathetic: she reasonably takes a very favorable view of Aldred’s abilities
and contributions in particular. If her discussion of the physical structure of
the additions is occasionally difficult to follow (even for a reader who knows
the manuscript fairly well), her analysis of the gloss is pellucid (a welcome
contrast to the dense articles by A. S. C. Ross that have until recently dominated the bibliography on the subject). Equally, even if more could perhaps
have been made of the other manuscripts that are known to have been at
Chester-le-Street in the tenth century, the decision to focus on the additions
to this one book is wholly defensible, not least in view of their status as
uniquely important witnesses to Northumbrian culture from a period that is
otherwise dominated by manuscripts produced in southern England.
Balancing rigorous analysis of the evidence of the additions with a realistic
attempt to empathize with the aims and assumptions of those who produced
them, Jolly’s insightful study shows how part of a single key manuscript can
indeed be a window through which to perceive the beliefs, culture, and
observances of a distant community and its relationship to a wider world.
Durham University

RICHARD GAMESON

The War on Heresy. By R. I. Moore. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press. 2012. Pp. xvi, 378. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-06582-6.)
This is an important book, and one that will generate much debate. In the
last twenty years the study of medieval heresy in Western Europe has evolved
radically. Historians have reread the sources with a more critical eye, with a
greater sensitivity to the concerns, goals, and preconceptions of the authors
of these texts, and with greater attention to their interrelationships.The result
has been a dramatic questioning of most of our standard understanding of the
subject.The results of this research, however, have remained in the pages of
specialist monographs and journal articles. R. I. Moore, whose work has done

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much to spur this reconsideration, has in this volume produced the first synthetic overview of heresy that is thoroughly steeped in this new scholarship.
Moore’s subject is not so much heresy in and of itself. Indeed, he is very
skeptical that heresy, in the sense of organized groups that consciously challenged commonly received doctrines of the Catholic faith, actually existed.
Instead, the real subject of the book is the process by which the leaders, lay
and clerical, of Western Europe came to believe that heresy, both organized
and doctrinally coherent, existed and constituted a major threat to the wellbeing of society.
For Moore, heresy is something that was very much constructed in the
eyes of those who sought to repress it. In his interpretation the religious life
of Europe in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries was characterized by
a great variety of spiritual currents. Many of these were expressions of the traditional Christianity of small-scale peasant communities. Others reflected the
complex reforming currents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the
only the process of the labeling of some of these by church authorities that
made them “heretical.”
For Moore, the war on heresy, which began in earnest in the twelfth century, was part of a revolution from above.The construction of the notion that
the Christian church was beset by a widespread, unified, and organized challenge, together with the mobilization of means to repress it, was part of the
ruling elites’ efforts to subordinate local societies to centralized governmental institutions and elite cultural norms.To wage this disciplinary offensive the
ruling strata devised a variety of mechanisms, two of which Moore sees as
key. One was the juridical technique of inquisition, which “had a formidable
capacity to break down the instinctive resistance of small communities to the
demands of outsiders.”The other was the fashioning of a set of discourses that
“could readily provide a basis for demonizing the defence of local customs or
the expression of particular grievances as manifestations of universal conspiracies that menaced human society and divine order” (p. 329).
This is a persuasive, and attractive, argument. It has, however, one great
stumbling block: the set of practices and beliefs called by historians, rather
unhelpfully, Catharism. If any of the religious movements of the Middle Ages
can be classified as heretical, then certainly it was this one, with its dualist theology of two gods, one evil and one good, and its counter-church organization, complete with bishops, deacons, and sacraments. Moore endorses the
position, most zealously advanced by Mark Pegg, that Catharism is, and was,
largely a myth of the inquisitors and modern historians. Moore has many interesting things to say on this problem, but some readers may think that the
effort to “deconstruct” this particular heresy has gone too far.
The War on Heresy is one of the most stimulating books on the subject of
heresy to be published in the last few decades. Its readers may not be con-

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vinced by every aspect of Moore’s argument, but they will agree that he has
succeeded in demonstrating that the struggle against heresy, whether reality
or chimaera, played a central role in shaping European civilization.
University of California, Irvine

JAMES GIVEN

Pope Urban II’s Council of Piacenza: March 1–7, 1095. By Robert
Somerville. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 151. $110.00.
ISBN 978-0-19-925859-8.)
Robert Somerville began his scholarly career with a study of Pope Urban
II’s game-changing council at Clermont in November 1095. Since that first
study, Urban has never been far from his thoughts. He has published an
extraordinarily thorough study of Urban’s Council of Melfi that took place
in 1089 (New York, 1996) and has now published an equally splendid study
of Urban’s council on Italian soil in spring 1095 that preceded his journey
to Clermont.
The canons promulgated by the councils of the Latin Church until the
Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 present varied and always difficult problems.
For reasons that no one has yet explained and probably never will, the conciliar canons were not preserved and circulated in a papally approved and
authenticated document.As Somerville has written in this and earlier books,
the canons were usually—but not invariably, as far as we know—read out
during the last session of the council. Was each canon delivered on an individual piece of parchment, or were all the canons written out on a single
sheet? There is evidence for the first presumption that would explain why the
transmission of the canons was so serendipitous. The participants did not
have a neatly ordered set of canons to carry back home on a single page, but,
if they were interested, a sheaf of canons that invited confusion, losses, and
lack of uniformity.
The question is further complicated by the content of the canons. At the
end of his study, Somerville discusses Urban’s last council in Rome in April
1099. The death of Adhémar of Le Puy, the papal legate in the Holy Land
appointed by Urban to guide the crusade, raised great concerns about
whether the crusade would be a success.The crusade became an issue for the
council. Urban was a reformer, and he also wished to repeat his earlier reform
canons that he had promulgated at Melfi and Piacenza. Somerville points out
that Urban reissued canons 1–13 from Piacenza and 2, 3, 5, and 7 from Melfi
again at Rome. One could imagine that the participants of those earlier councils would not have been interested in canons with which they were already
familiar and would not have bothered to collect them.This repetition of previously issued canons at church councils was a common feature of conciliar
work until the thirteenth century.

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Somerville’s contribution to conciliar history in this book is his careful and
detailed exploration of the manuscript tradition of Piacenza’s canons and his
edition, translation, and commentary on them. In chapter 4 he lays out the
rich manuscript tradition—thirty-six manuscripts contain canons from
Piacenza—and also the canons’ transmission in the canonical collections
where they lived on for centuries. Somerville points out that Gratian included
almost all of the canons in his Decretum, and through Gratian they were normative texts of canon law until 1917. He writes,“With the extensive absorption into canon law collections . . . the fortuna of texts from Piacenza is a very
impressive phenomenon.”
Somerville’s careful scholarship is even more impressive. He has meticulously edited the canons of Clermont, Melfi, and Piacenza. Unless new manuscripts are discovered, his work will definitive for a very long time. He has
given Urban’s conciliar activity a firm and secure place in conciliar history.
The Catholic University of America

KENNETH PENNINGTON

The Mortgage of the Past. Reshaping the Ancient Political Inheritance. By
Francis Oakley. The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin
Middle Ages, Vol. 2. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2012. Pp. xv, 171.
$55.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17633-9.)
This second volume of Francis Oakley’s impressive trilogy on the emergence of Western political thought deals with three main topics—churchstate relations, the recovery of ancient philosophy, and the medieval idea of
representation.These apparently disparate themes all reflect some underlying
ideas that characterize Oakley’s work.
The book opens with the Investiture Contest of the late-eleventh century,
a struggle that began when a reformed papacy challenged the then taken-forgranted right of the emperor to appoint bishops throughout his realm. The
reformers quoted ancient laws referring to the election of bishops in the early
Church, but the laws took on a new significance when they were applied to
bishops who now were not just shepherds of a Christian flock but often great
feudal lords holding large estates from the emperor.When the emperor resisted the pope’s demands, a long struggle ensued that finally ended in a compromise. Its principal results, Oakley notes, were a diminishing of royal sacrality and the establishment of two structures of government, ecclesiastical and
secular, each limiting the power of the other.
Oakley next presents a series of chapters on “recuperating the past” (p.
42). He explains how medieval scholars could learn from ancient philosophers that the phenomena of the physical universe could be explained by
natural causation without any direct divine intervention and how this might
lead to an awareness that the world of the political, too, was something nat-

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ural to man. But the author also insists that the revival of ancient ideas was
not just a passive rediscovery; rather, the ideas underwent a “transformational
reinterpretation” (p. 43) when they were assimilated into a medieval
Christian culture.
Oakley finally turns to a quite different theme, the development of the
idea of representation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here, the argument revolves around two phrases of Roman law: plena potestas and quod
omnes tangit.This language had no constitutional significance in its original
ancient context. But, building on earlier work of Gaines Post, Oakley shows
how, when the language was assimilated into the canon law of the twelfth
century, it was “profoundly reshaped”(p. 147) and eventually came to be
accepted as defining principles of public law relating to the summoning of
elected representatives, first to church councils, then by a sort of osmosis to
secular assemblies.
The topics covered deal with quite different issues but, as previously suggested, they can all be seen as exemplifications of a common approach that
characterizes Oakley’s work. The author is persistently concerned with the
tensions and interplay between ecclesiastical and secular government and,
equally important, with the tensions and interplay between the medieval
world of thought and ideas revived from the past. These concerns were all
evident in the material we have considered. In each case, ancient ideas were
reshaped when they were applied to the realities of medieval society; then
the changed ideas in their new form helped to reshape the medieval reality.
Oakley’s work helps us to understand how this whole complex process could
be a source of the progressive change that would finally lead to a form of
modern political thought.
Oakley has undertaken a highly ambitious project, one that calls for much
erudition and not a little courage. Although we still await his final volume, it
already seems clear that the completed opus will be an outstanding work of
historical synthesis, ambitiously conceived and brilliantly executed.
Cornell University (Emeritus)

BRIAN TIERNEY

The Great Beginning of Cîteaux: A Narrative of the Beginning of the
Cistercian Order—The Exordium Magnum of Conrad of Eberbach.
Translated by Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., and Paul Savage; edited by E. Rozanne
Elder. [Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 72.] (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian
Publications/Liturgical Press. 2012. Pp. xxx, 614. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-87907172-1.)
What an unusual pleasure it is to be able to recommend a book unreservedly; yet that is what may be done here. The foreword by Brian Patrick
McGuire, the preface by Sister Benedicta Ward, the informative introduction

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by Paul Savage, the lucid translation (from difficult Latin), the useful annotations, the glossary, the extensive bibliography, and the four indices (of scriptural references, classical references, patristic and medieval references, and
the general index) are all admirable; Cistercian Publications can only be congratulated for making this important text available to us. The text is the
Exordium Magnum of Conrad of Clairvaux and Eberbach, translated from
the sound critical edition of Bruno Griesser (Rome, 1961).The work consists
of a long series of miracle-stories strung, like pearls, on a historical thread provided primarily by the Exordium Parvum. The stories tell us how the
Cistercian Order originated, how it was rooted in the teachings of Christ himself, how it became guilty of negligentia or “slackness,” and how this situation
was to be remedied. The author was certainly a monk at Clairvaux in the
1170s, but had left—presumably for Eberbach—by 1195. Eberbach, near
Mainz, was the first Germanic daughter-house of Clairvaux and, by Conrad’s
time, the most important Cistercian abbey in the Rhineland. Conrad was
elected abbot in May 1221, but governed the house for only a few months
before his death on September 18 of the same year (see pp. 26–28). He compiled the Exordium Magnum over some three decades, from the 1180s
(when he was still at Clairvaux) to about 1215. It cannot be called an original
work (Conrad’s sources are discussed on pp. 17–24), although the way in
which Conrad assembled his material and drew on oral traditions make it
much more than a simple compendium.
The book is not, of course, history as we understand it today—we are
somewhat reluctant to accept miracle-stories as documentary evidence—but
it was certainly history to a medieval mind. For Conrad, history revealed the
transforming presence of God in human affairs, especially human lives, and
the Exordium Magnum reveals a God who was exceedingly busy. He establishes the tradition of the Common Life; he guides the first monks; he inspires
St. Robert of Molesme to found the New Monastery of Cîteaux; he is ever present to St. Bernard and the early abbots of Clairvaux; he intervenes in the lives
of illiterate laybrothers as well as monks; he reveals the dangers of disobedience, discord, negligence, and a variety of other vices; he shows what needs
to be done to restore the Order to its pristine glory; and he leads the dying to
a blessed death. If, like the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the
Looking-Glass, we can believe six impossible things before breakfast (it just
takes a little practice), Conrad’s compilation takes us into a wonderful world
of miracles, visions, and splendid stories. Even if we cannot emulate the
queen, this excellent translation still provides us with some remarkably entertaining reading and sheds a great deal of light on the Cistercian spirit and the
nature of Cistercian spirituality in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Memorial University of Newfoundland

DAVID N. BELL

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Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint. By André
Vauchez. Translated by Michael F. Cusato. (New Haven: Yale University
Press. 2012. Pp. xvi, 398. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17894-4.)
André Vauchez has written a learned and very readable biography of the
one of the most popular and important saints of the European Middle Ages.
Moreover, Michael Cusato, a prominent scholar of Franciscan studies, has
produced an excellent translation. The first of the four parts of Vauchez’s
book narrates the biography of St. Francis of Assisi, creating a clear and
cogent narrative based on the principal sources, with a reasonable preference for the Legend of the Three Companions. Francis’s life is known almost
exclusively from texts composed by thirteenth-century Franciscan authors:
the provenance and relative importance of each of these texts has produced
much scholarly debate, and Vauchez manages to present these complex traditions in a way that is both clear to novices and will seem fair to specialists—no small feat.
In part 2,Vauchez recounts the “transfiguration” of Francis in the years following his death in 1226, into one of the major saints of the Latin Church: the
canonization by Pope Gregory IX, the construction of the vast basilica that
was to house his relics, and the difficulties of the early Franciscan order in reconciling the radical message of Franciscan poverty with the concrete needs
of a large and growing order. He shows the tensions that this struggle caused
within the order. For Vauchez, as for earlier scholars who have worked on this
material, the institutionalization of the order, although perhaps inevitable, represented a “second death of Francis”: the huge, lavish basilica that was to
become the mother church of the order, in particular, violated the ideal of
poverty that Francis had embodied.
The third part concerns the forging of “myths and images” of the saint. In
a chapter on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Vauchez presents first
the textual traditions, with the emphasis on Franciscan hagiography and the
dispute between spiritual and conventual factions within the order: a story
that has been told many times, here presented succinctly and clearly. A
second section on “Francis in images” is somewhat disappointing. By choosing to treat iconography separately from the texts, he removes it from its context—clearly the Bardi dossal was not produced in the same context, or for
the same audience, as the frescoes in the upper basilica of Assisi. Moreover,
there is a wealth of other iconography that goes unmentioned (as does much
recent work in the field), and (perhaps most disappointing for the general
reader), there is not a single reproduction of any of the images discussed.
Missing from this chapter, as well, is the sense of how Francis and the
Franciscans became a part of the daily life of cities in Italy (and elsewhere in
Europe), in particular through the building of lavish churches in many cities,
with elaborate iconographical programs and chapels financed by rising
urban aristocrats—and where they were often buried. The case of Florence’s

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Santa Croce (studied by Rona Goffen) is a prime example of a phenomenon
repeated throughout Italy and beyond. Another chapter deals with perceptions of Francis from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, with the emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly debate on the different
early sources on Francis (which has come to be known as the “Franciscan
question”).
A final, fourth part is a series of six interesting and thoughtful essays on
different aspects of Francis’s message and mission, with close attention paid
to Francis’s writings. Vauchez’s biography should become the fundamental
one-volume study of Francis, useful to all those who want an introduction
to the rich and complex field of Franciscan studies. Specialists, although
they will find little new, should appreciate the clear and balanced presentation of the many of the major themes in Franciscan studies. Some will be
disappointed that Vauchez treads the well-worn paths of the “Franciscan
question,” focusing on Franciscan hagiography and pontifical sources and
paying little attention to much of the rich recent work in other areas of
Franciscan history.
Université de Nantes

JOHN TOLAN

The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order
1209–1310. By Neslihan Senocak. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2012. Pp. xivi, 276. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5057-0.)
The vexed matter of the appropriateness of theological studies divided the
followers of il poverello d’Assisi from the 1220s and found expression in the
carefully crafted passages in the hagiographical tradition and the expostulations of reformers, including Peter of John Olivi, Iacopone da Todi, Ubertino
da Casale, and Angelo da Clareno. The emergence of the Franciscan Order’s
theological schools forms the basis of this compelling new monograph by a
young scholar: Neslihan Senocak, assistant professor of history at Columbia
University. Senocak brings a sure-footedness and assurance to a question that
has separated historians along partisan lines. For example, some English historians of the order were deemed too sympathetic to the writings of Paul
Sabatier. Similarly, the temptation to interpret Franciscan history along the
lines of the widening rift between the Friars Minor Conventual and the Friars
of the Observant reform has bedevilled historiography. Franciscan apologists,
hagiographers, and chroniclers yoked the pursuit of theological studies to the
ministry of preaching. This apologetic spirit, for example, pervades St.
Bonaventure’s Letter in Response to an Unknown Master. Contemporary
observers were more inclined to view clerical education as an aid to the
friars’ ministry rather than a betrayal of the ideals of St. Francis. Certain forms
of the apostolate demanded significant levels of theological literacy, a feature
that was all the more necessary when friars engaged in dialogue and disputation with heretics in northern Italy and southern France. Senocak deftly

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moves through the early Franciscan history to show that the movement was
gaining in social, ecclesiastical, and academic respectability through the caliber of its novices; this is how Roger Bacon describes the luster that Alexander
of Hales, a wealthy regent master of theology at the University of Paris,
brought to le grand couvent de Cordeliers de Paris about 1236.An air of triumphalism is glimpsed in the accounts of the clothing of scholars, monks,
secular priests, abbots, and bishops. The admission of such distinguished
novices undoubtedly led to hubris on the part of some Franciscan historians
whose proclivity to emphasize the successes achieved by their order was
accentuated by the mendicant controversies, beginning in the 1250s at Paris.
Senocak persuasively shows that the friars recruited graduates capable of filling the senior posts in provinces and custodies.This explanation accords with
the plea for reform launched by Ubertino da Casale, who asserted that the
order was not being well served by an educated elite more familiar with the
university than the hermitage. It is one of the ironies of Franciscan history
that the search for suitably qualified vocations began with the defenestration
of Elias of Cortona, the first minister general to be removed from office by the
pope.The transformation of the order is reflected in the two vitae of Francis
composed by Thomas of Celano. From 1240 the order was led for the first
time by a friar, Haymo of Faversham, who had not met the saint of Assisi.
Moreover, he set a new pattern for the ministers general because he combined priesthood and a university education with the promotion of high standards of evangelical poverty. His successors in the later thirteenth century
were ordained graduates, generally from the University of Paris.
This book teems with good and sensible explanations of the place of theological study in the order.The last part looks at the polemics raging around
the friars’ use of books and the formation of their conventual libraries.
Senocak weighs the reforming views of Ubertino da Casale against the information from the nascent Franciscan libraries; the abuses that he targeted
were real rather than imaginary and were mirrored in the order’s general and
provincial constitutions.This is an excellent book for which Senocak is to be
warmly commended.
St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge

MICHAEL ROBSON

The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles. Edited by Janet Burton and
Karen Stöber. [Medieval Church Studies,Vol. 19.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2011.
Pp. xvii, 514. €130,00. ISBN 978-2-503-53248-6.)
This hefty volume joins twenty-two essays devoted to the most widely dispersed, yet least studied among medieval British religious orders, the regular
canons. As is well known, Augustinian canons were the most ubiquitous
organization under rule in medieval England, where they were joined by the
Premonstratensians and the native double-order (nuns and canons) of St.
Gilbert of Sempringham. Yet, as is equally well known, the historiography

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treating all three orders in their insular context remains depressingly thin.
Why were these groups apparently so popular, and in what activities were
they engaged?
In the main, the answers offered in this volume are somewhat disappointing.The historians here assembled, in their best moments, offer often provocative local narratives, vignettes from individual houses.These fill in, but do not
necessarily qualify or develop, views enunciated long ago by J. C. Dickinson
and A. Hamilton Thompson, or by David Robinson in his informative geographical study of Augustinian houses.Although Anne Mathers-Lawrence pronounces R. W. Southern’s provocative six-page discussion of the order as “no
longer universally accepted” (p. 59n1), virtually all her co-contributors who
mention it rely upon Southern’s account. An opportunity for a productive
debate—did Augustinian houses, particularly after the great burst of wellendowed foundations associated with King Henry I and his court, merely
provide an opportunity for “devotion on the cheap”?—Southern’s proposition—rather goes abegging.
At least part of the problem here is many contributors’ rigorous attentiveness to a legalistically conceived institutional emphasis (and especially an
interest in origins, not development or practice over the long haul). One certainly understands that “historical evidence,” narrowly construed, is documentary and that the most readily documented stages in the life of any religious house concern foundation, acquisition of properties, and domestic
accounts. But it is striking that the most provocative essay in this ensemble,
Julian Luxford’s “The Idol of Origins: Retrospection in Augustinian Art . . .”
(pp. 417–42) opens with an apology for the use of nondocumentary sources
in an assessment of Augustinian interests. Luxford goes on to investigate architectural forms of memory, particularly tombs, in a variety of sites.
Luxford’s thought-provoking study has resonances elsewhere in the
volume, for one prominent skein of discussion here concerns the canons’
engagement with “memory.” Although the Augustinians, from their foundation, were intended to serve those parishes whose churches formed prominent parts of their endowments, parochial service had substantially diminished, if not disappeared, by the late Middle Ages. Instead, a number of authors
here argue, Augustinian houses proved attractive to many communities
because of their engagement in the divine office, particularly—given that all
canons were required to be priests—their capacity to offer memorials for
their benefactors. This proposition is argued most fully in Graham St. John’s
“The Significance of Devotion . . .” (pp. 339–61). Further telling evidence on
this topic appears in Emma Cavell’s “Kinship, Locality, and Benefaction” (pp.
363–85), a demonstration, both amusing and evocative, concerning several
generations of ongoing female benefactions to Wombridge, a small Shropshire
house; and in Andrew Abram’s “Augustinian Canons and the Survival of Cult
Centres in Medieval England” (pp. 79–95).

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Other impressive essays address Augustinians in somewhat different contacts with their social surround. The premier scholar of English schooling,
Nicholas Orme, offers a customarily detailed survey of “The Augustinian
Canons and Education” (pp. 213–32); and another expert, Claire Cross, surveys the varied fates of “The Last Generation of Augustinian Canons in
Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire” (pp. 387–400). At the other end of the chronological spectrum, Janet Burton and Mathers-Lawrence (pp. 41–57, 59–78)
argue that, at least in their initial foundation, some northern Augustinian
houses may have been integral to twelfth-century reform movements. Glyn
Copack’s “‘And then he added canons’. . .” (pp. 291–311) provides an exciting
revisionary account of the archaeology of Sempringham (although the marking of his detailed plates is confusingly out of sequence with the discussion
in the text). Notes 7 and 10 on pages 5–7 will serve to direct interested readers to a variety of trenchant past studies.
Keble College, University of Oxford

RALPH HANNA

The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and
Remembrance. By Guy Geltner. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2012.
Pp. xvi, 188. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-199-63945-8.)
Antifraternalism, criticism of the mendicant friars, is probably most familiar through characters such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Friar John or False Seeming
from the Romance of the Rose. Although scholars have long argued about
how accurately these literary types reflect the lives (and vices) of medieval
friars, that debate has rested largely on evidence drawn from literary sources
and theological polemics of the friars’ opponents within the Church.With this
book, Guy Geltner offers us a new definition of antifraternalism based on a
much broader range of source material.
Geltner divides his study into two parts composed of two chapters each.
Part 1 concentrates on criticisms leveled at the friars by their opponents.
Chapter 1 revisits the traditional antifraternal corpus, the theological and literary sources critical of the friars. By most accounts, at the root of these are
polemics arising from conflicts between secular and mendicant masters at
the University of Paris in the 1250s, especially criticisms of the friars contained in William of St. Amour’s On the Dangers of the Last Times (1256).
Geltner argues that although later antifraternal authors did build on St.
Amour’s exegesis and repeat many of his charges against the friars, his challenge to the very legitimacy of their existence was atypical of most subsequent criticism of the friars that aimed at their reform rather than their eradication. Chapter 2 identifies other sources of antifraternal activity through an
investigation of accounts of violence directed against the friars (gleaned from
court records between the early-thirteenth century and the end of the fourteenth). These reveal a modest yet consistent rate of aggression against the
friars, but no common motivation rooted in antimendicant sentiment derived
from the rhetoric of St. Amour.

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In part 2 Geltner investigates how the friars themselves contributed to the
development of antifraternalism. Chapter 3 concludes, on the basis of evidence drawn from the mendicant orders’ records, that there was some substance behind the polemics of their opponents. The friars did often behave
badly, and given the public nature of their mission, this was cause for scandal.
Chapter 4 then surveys how the friars’ chroniclers portrayed the conflicts and
violent episodes in which the orders were involved. Geltner characterizes this
record as a lachrymose history, which sought to portray the friars as vanguards of the Church by emphasizing the Christological dimension and eschatological significance of their suffering, but, in the process, highlighted their
contentiousness and misconduct.This led the chroniclers to focus on the conflicts at the University of Paris, which are thereby returned to a central position in the history of medieval antifraternalism.
This is a short book, and at times the reader is left wishing for more detail
about the intricate interplay of polemic, violence, deviance, and remembrance
in the development of medieval antifraternalism. In addition, elements of the
first three chapters have already appeared in print elsewhere, and a number
of Geltner’s criticisms of the reigning model of antifraternalism elaborate on
the work of other scholars. But this also is an important book. It provides us
with a significant corrective to an over-reliance on evidence from literary and
theological works in understanding criticisms of the friars in the Middle Ages,
and Geltner’s argument for the contribution of the friars’ own historiography
to the development of the antifraternal tradition offers a whole new perspective on that process. Most important, however, Geltner brings this material together in a call for a comprehensive revision of how we think about
antifraternalism.
Augustana College
Sioux Falls, SD

GEOFFREY DIPPLE

John Mirk’s Festial. Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II.
Edited by Susan Powell. 2 vols. [Early English Text Society, O[riginal]
S[eries] 334 and 335.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2009 and 2011.
Vol. 1: Pp. cxlv, 188; $130.00; ISBN 978-0-19-957849-8. Vol. 2: Pp. 189–690;
$135.00; ISBN 978-0-19-959037-7.)
A first-rate edition of a medieval sermon collection is a blessing for historians, and all the more so when the collection in question is John Mirk’s
Festial. Mirk, an Augustinian canon at Lilleshall Abbey in Shropshire, compiled
this vernacular collection in the late 1380s or 1390s, explaining in his prologue that he designed it for clergy who did not have enough books or education to teach their parishioners about all the major feasts in the church calendar, as they were supposed to do. The market for such a preaching aid must
have been enormous and long-lasting, for the Festial became one of the great
best-sellers of its era. It survives, as a whole or in part, in more than three-

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dozen fifteenth-century manuscripts and was printed more than twenty times
between 1483 and 1532. Priests who used the book may often have supplemented it with other sources, of course, but it is reasonable to infer from its
long popularity that the Festial exerted a formative influence on the preaching in English parish churches for several generations before the Reformation.
Susan Powell’s edition of the Festial reproduces the contents and order of
the earliest and most authoritative of the extant manuscripts. Besides the prologue and a brief opening prayer, the text has seventy-four chapters, sixtyseven of which are sermons for particular days in the Sarum calendar, running
from Advent and St. Andrew (Nov. 30) to St. Katherine (Nov. 25). The occasions covered include the major feasts of Christ and the Virgin Mary, several
dozen widely venerated saints and two local Shrewsbury ones (Alkmund and
Winifrede), All Saints, and All Souls, plus Rogation Days, Ember Days, and all
the Sundays from Septuagesima to the end of Lent. The last seven chapters
are more miscellaneous in character: sermons for the dedication of a church,
a marriage, and a burial, notes on the rules for burial in holy ground, advice
on teaching the Ave Maria, an additional Marian miracle story, and a sermon
that expounds the Paternoster.
Before Powell’s edition, the Festial had been edited in modern times only
by Theodor Erbe, who published a bare-bones version of the text (Mirk’s
Festial: A Collection of Homilies, EETS E.S. 96, London, 1905) and died shortly
thereafter, without completing the introduction and notes he had planned for
a second volume. Powell’s handling of the medieval text itself is more reliable
than Erbe’s, and she supplements it with vast amounts of additional information. Besides describing her own editorial practice, for example, Powell’s
introduction presents the discernible facts about Mirk’s life, the principal
sources of the Festial and the way he uses them, the complex relationships
among the surviving manuscripts, the reasons for choosing British Library MS
Cotton Claudius A.II as the best text, and an expert analysis of the various
scribal hands that contributed to this manuscript. Following the text, Powell
provides nearly 200 pages of explanatory and textual notes, an extensive and
helpful glossary, detailed descriptions and contents of all the Festial manuscripts (appendices I and II), full collations of eight selected portions of
Mirk’s text (appendix III), an analysis of the dialects represented by the three
main hands in the Cotton Claudius manuscript (appendix IV), a reproduction
and transcription of the list of Festa ferianda in the manuscript (appendix V),
and an index of biblical references and allusions (pp. 685–90).
Despite the strengths of Powell’s edition of the Festial, most readers will
find it hard going at first. Like other EETS publications, it is designed primarily as a resource for specialists in Middle English and makes few concessions
to the needs of a wider audience. Although Mirk’s sermons are roughly contemporary with the Canterbury Tales, the language of Cotton Claudius A.II is
further from modern English and much less consistent than that of the best

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Chaucer manuscripts. In accordance with EETS policy, Powell’s edition retains
all of the eccentric scribal spellings in the base manuscript and most of its
Middle English letter forms, normalizing nothing except punctuation and capitalization and emending only the most obvious errors. As a result, readers will
frequently need to consult the glossary and explanatory notes, and may wish
that Powell had made those parts of the apparatus even more helpful and
complete.
Not every aspect of this edition is definitive, of course. With regard to
Mirk’s sources, for example, Powell has almost certainly not had the last word.
Mirk says in his prologue that he drew his material “owt of Legenda Aurea
wyth more addyng to,” and his principal sources probably included not only
the three Powell emphasizes (the Legenda, John Beleth’s Rationale
Divinorum Officiorum, and a Sarum missal) but also at least one breviary or
lectionary for the daily office. One effect of Powell’s fine edition should be to
stimulate wider interest in the Festial and further research on its sources and
many other aspects of the book, its transmission history, and its influence on
the religious culture of late-medieval England.
University of Wisconsin, Madison

SHERRY REAMES

The Late Medieval Church:Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with
Rome. By G. W. Bernard. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2012. $45.00.
ISBN 978-0-300-17997-2.)
G. W. Bernard’s account of the late-medieval English Church is a perplexing endeavor. On the one hand he emphasizes his own long-standing dissatisfaction with the “protestant grand narrative” (p. ix) that saw the Reformation
as the inevitable outcome of the corruption, decadence, and superstition that
were all the late-medieval Church had to offer, and he affirms his broad agreement with the very different view of that Church offered by Eamon Duffy in
The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992). Yet on the other hand he
informs us that it was Duffy’s book itself that provoked his own “rethinking”
of the subject, because he found its analysis left it impossible to explain why
the Reformation happened at all. Bernard’s alternative interpretation, which
he originally set out in a short article about fifteen years ago, offers us “vitality and vulnerability” as a general theory that he hopes will generate vigorous
new debate in the field.
What is perplexing is that there is nothing for this new theory to do.The
suggestion that Duffy’s analysis of the late-medieval church makes the
Reformation seem impossible or inexplicable has often been made, yet it has
never been entirely clear what it means. Duffy’s analysis was the culmination
of a generation of scholarship that exploded the “protestant grand narrative,”
and his explanation of the English Reformation was simple—the latemedieval Church did not totter and fall under its own unstable weight; it was

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in a stable equilibrium until it was pushed over thanks to a stupendous effort
on the part of one of the most powerful kings ever to rule this land—Henry
VIII.This is, when one comes down to it, much the same as the explanation
Bernard himself offers in The King’s Reformation (New Haven, 2005), however much one might demur at his tendency to reduce an extremely complex
set of political maneuvers to a mere act of will on the part of the monarch.
“Vitality and vulnerability” are offered as the solution to a supposed problem.
But it is not clear what the problem is, nor how the solution works.
Bernard repeatedly affirms the “vitality” of the late-medieval church, but is
uncomfortably aware that the focus of his own analysis is “vulnerability.”While
anxiously disavowing any intention of reviving the old narrative of corruption
and decadence, the theory he advances is that the vulnerabilities explain why
the Church did not resist Henry VIII more effectively when the assault of the
1530s was launched.Thus, because pilgrimage could be made to inauthentic
relics or to fraudulent images, and could be undertaken for superstitious or
self-serving reasons, it was “vulnerable” to the kind of critique that Desiderius
Erasmus, Henry VIII’s propagandists, and Protestants leveled against it. But this
explains either nothing or too much. Either the late-medieval Church was
indeed, as A. G. Dickens maintained, a sort of house of cards, that only needed
the lion’s roar to bring it tumbling down; or, as Duffy has persuasively argued,
it was not. Of course, the late-medieval Church had its weaknesses. People
knew that at the time, and not even Duffy has ever sought to argue otherwise.
But either these vulnerabilities are a sufficient cause for the collapse of that
Church, or they are not.That is what The Stripping of the Altars was about.
Although, then, this book fails at the theoretical level, it remains both
interesting and valuable.The brilliant forensic analysis of the Richard Hunne
case with which it opens is the fairest and most thorough ever achieved.
Bernard is in his element here, attacking a conceptually straightforward
question—was Hunne murdered, or did he hang himself?—through a thicket
of contradictory and problematic evidence, to reach a conclusion (suicide)
that runs counter to the verdicts or prejudices of the majority of other scholars who have worked on it: Bernard contra mundum, his favorite situation.
For the rest, the extent of the secondary literature he has laid under tribute
is awe-inspiring, and the book is a mine of information. Nobody could read
it and fail to learn from it.Yet the guiding idea is inadequate to the mass of
material and ultimately detracts from its impact.Vitality and vulnerability are
the wrong lenses, and they prevent the book from vying with Duffy’s in
terms of presenting a coherent view of what the late-medieval English
Church was and what it meant to its members. Bernard’s study aspires to be
“not a coldly efficient synthesis of a mass of particularities but rather an
exploration of the church in the round” (p. x). In the end, though, it is more
the former than the latter.
Queens’ College, University of Cambridge

RICHARD REX

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Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. By Sara
McDougall. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. 2012. Pp. vi, 216. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4398-7.)
In the study of medieval marriage, the English historians have long dominated the field through the sheer volume of research. However, Sara
McDougall’s new book reveals just how wrong it would be to assume that the
approach adopted by the English Church to marriage was the norm. In comparison with the ecclesiastical authorities in Troyes, the medieval English
Church seems positively magnanimous. Fines and whippings three consecutive Sundays in procession around the parish church are a walk in the park
when compared with sentences of imprisonment, even execution, doled out
by the northern French Church to bigamous husbands. McDougall demonstrates the unique approach adopted by the northern French to marriage regulation, prompted in large part by the recurrent disruptions to family life
caused by the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Schism, dynastic struggles, and
episodic plague outbreaks and accompanying famines. Eager to impose order
at the most basic level, the Church clamped down primarily on older men
who engaged in serial marriages, calling on husbands to emulate St. Joseph,
the newly reinvented symbol for male Christian identity.
The strength of McDougall’s fine book lies in its boldness—McDougall
asks us to rethink accepted beliefs about medieval marriage. Although other
scholars have eschewed the term bigamy because the medieval world
reserved the term for married clergymen, McDougall asks us to refocus the
lens on the symbolism of marriage, to understand that a layman who violated
the “order of matrimony” committed the same crime as the bigamous cleric.
Her work also is highly comparative. Drawing on studies from England,
France, Belgium, Geneva, Portugal, and Italy, McDougall offers an incisive perception of the matrimonial concerns leading up to the momentous Council
of Trent (1563), at which the Church reversed its former policy of toleration
for clandestine marriage.
Some of McDougall’s arguments are more compelling than others. In
opposition to works by this reviewer, Philippa Maddern, and others who have
argued that serial monogamy represents the Church’s failure to persuade the
medieval laity of the permanence of marriage, McDougall sees instead that
the Church was too successful. Here, her argument centers on the determination of bigamous men to undergo a second church wedding, despite the
invalidity of the marriage. McDougall interprets preference for a church wedding as respect for the sacramental nature of marriage. Quite simply, this
argument is unconvincing. Since the time of Lateran Council IV, the Church
required couples to have their marriages solemnized and punished them if
they did not do so. Most instances of bigamy prosecuted at court involved bigamous men with second wives who were entirely ignorant of their husbands’
marital past.The bride-to-be and her family had no reason to believe that they

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were breaking the law—so, why would they risk her soul by failing to have
the marriage solemnized as the Church required? Any man would have had
great difficulty in convincing his fiancée that they should begin their lives
together in such a risky fashion, especially in a world where women were
widely recognized as the more pious sex. Furthermore, adhering to the marriage rituals of one’s culture does not necessarily mean that the participants
internalized the ideals behind those rituals.Today, many men and women are
married in the Catholic Church, not because they believe that marriage is a
sacrament, but because their Catholic mothers want them to have a church
wedding. We simply cannot gain insight into medieval mentality through a
required ritual.
Nonetheless, McDougall has written a thought-provoking book that will be
much appreciated by those across the field.
Loyola University New Orleans

SARA M. BUTLER

Early Modern European
The One Thomas More. By Travis Curtright. (Washington, DC: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2012. Pp. ix, 231. $64.95. ISBN 978-0-81321995-0.)
Travis Curtright does a fine job fusing St.Thomas More’s “humanist credo”
and “his later polemical theology” (p. 107). Eamon Duffy and Brendan
Bradshaw, nesting in Curtright’s bibliography, have been on that job, but The
One Thomas More usefully supplements their luminous article-length efforts.
For example, Curtright’s “close reading” of More’s 1518 letter to Oxford has it
propose a “harmony of faith and liberal learning,” soldering the former to the
latter in ways that Alistair Fox famously overlooked (105–11). Fox subscribed
to the “two Mores” thesis, which exaggerated the distance between the Lord
Chancellor who terrorized heretics and the younger, kinder, gentler More
who was at home with humanists. The latter pointed out the insufficiency of
envious, arrogant, ignorant Oxford scholars’ pieties; the former railed against
self-sufficiency (against reformers who thought they could tease meaning
from sacred texts without consulting a tradition of interpretation otherwise
honored always and everywhere in Christendom) as well as against the early
Protestants’ impiety. Bradshaw brilliantly sabotaged Fox’s distinctions in the
1980s. Curtright cinches the case.
As Curtright acknowledges, however, popular perception is now shaped
by two images of More’s obstinacy. Robert Bolt’s often restaged and replayed
A Man for All Seasons has heroic More stubbornly—conscientiously—defend
his right to withhold consent when official policy runs counter to his faith.
Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed novel, Wolf Hall, portrays More as unfeeling and
fanatical. Bolt conjures up his one Thomas More, and Mantel introduces her

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one Thomas More. Neither gets close to the right one—“the real Thomas
More,” Curtright claims, preferring the persistently prudent Christian humanist whose formidable resolve to defend a life of virtue and the Roman Catholic
Church made him appear ruthless to contemporaries and to some historians.
To Curtright, the “commitment to traditional consensus within a visible, historical, and known ecclesiastical discourse connects More’s humanist letters
to his antiheretical tracts” (139).
Without directly dissenting and arguing that More was kind then cruel, or
sensible then superstitious, one could prefer multiple Mores. Most of
Curtright’s contentions come off as quite conventional. The “ironic and subversive ethos in More’s last letters” (176) is obvious to readers who remember the anecdotes sent to Alice Alington.That his history of King Richard III’s
tenure “enacts and undermines” (44) or “enacts and qualifies” (71) ideals
expressed in his political epigrams seems incontestable. And the pervasive
emphasis on piety—in Hythloday’s huffing and puffing, in the Response to
Luther, in More’s Life of Pico, and in More’s life—has long been recognized.
Curtright competently chronicles it all. Cramming that along with the book’s
fresh perspectives on More’s discretion, humanism, Christianity, and politics
into “the one Thomas More” seems conceptually unnecessary and not appreciably less awkward than a doubled-up More. Curtright seems at cross-purposes. His book shows us something of the resourceful self-refashioning that
enabled his subject to wear several hats, often in the same work. But
Curtright’s urge to unify tends to bottle up an impressively versatile sixteenth-century protagonist, who, to this reviewer, kept and keeps subverting,
undermining, and qualifying the efforts of contemporaries and historians to
define and confine him.
University of Richmond

PETER IVER KAUFMAN

Atti del Convegno di Studi Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543). Edited by
Marco Agostini and Giovanna Baldissin Molli. (Cittadella-Padova, Verona:
Biblos Edizioni. 2012. Pp. 216. €25,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-6448-031-2.)
This volume, which is enriched by numerous images, collects the proceedings of the congress that was held at Verona on December 2–3, 2009, to
reassess the figure of the reforming bishop Gian Matteo Giberti in close correlation with the overall experiences of the sixteenth century.
Giberti was invested with major positions in the Roman Curia during the
pontificates of Leo X and Clement VII. However, he was suspected of heterodoxy and was part of the Roman Oratory of Divino Amore. His pro-French
policies did not sit well after the Sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527,
and he also was affected by the new political orientations resulting from the
meeting between the pope and the emperor in Bologna in 1529. He settled in
his Diocese of Verona and became the protagonist of reform plans for the

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Church, ranging from diocesan-level activity to the reconstruction of episcopal authority and leaving an indelible mark on spiritual life.
As emphasized by Danilo Zardin in his Introduzione, the volume shows
the complexity of a leading figure in the policies of the Roman Church and
the construction of the ideal figure of the bishop of the Counter-Reformation,
particularly in his use of pastoral visiting. Giberti’s Constitutiones (Verona,
1542) exerted considerable influence at the Council of Trent as well as in the
work of St. Carlo Borromeo.
Adriano Prosperi, in “Gian Matteo Giberti e la politica della «libertà
d’Italia»,” reminds us of Giberti’s crucial role in the policy that led to the drafting of the League of Cognac and the subsequent failure of the whole plan. He
also is notable as the man who kept the door of the Catholic Church open to
Desiderius Erasmus.
The deep difference between the two often compared reformist bishops—Giberti and Borromeo—is significant. Apart from the diversity and
incomparability of the times in which they lived, a greater difference arises
from their actions as diocesan bishops—the result of a political defeat for
Giberti and the result of a free choice for Borromeo.
Whereas Gabriella Zarri, in “I circoli spirituali femminili della riforma,” discusses the spiritual groups of women in her presentation of the Constitutioni
for the nuns of Giberti, Zardin, in “Gian Matteo Giberti nel contesto europeo,”
takes us back to the European religious and political situation and the contacts with the Protestant Reformation.There are numerous as well as significant contributions on Giberti’s role in fostering artistic production and
Giberti’s relationship with the world of the literati and the humanists such as
Pietro Aretino. New and useful information is supplied on the figure of Tullio
Crispoldi and on Giberti’s influence on the works of Nicolò Ormaneto. As
Zardin underlines, Giberti’s life exemplifies a love for the Scriptures, the
development of biblical studies, a liturgical renewal, and the valorization of
local church institutions gathered around their bishop.
Ultimately, this volume is a useful contribution that provides, thanks to its
numerous as well as diverse papers, an up-to-date and comprehensive summary of Giberti’s work and his role in the broader world of early-sixteenthcentury Europe.
University of Bologna

UMBERTO MAZZONE

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355

The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and
Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus. By Robert Aleksander
Maryks. [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, Vol. 146.]
(Boston: Brill. 2010. Pp. xxxiv, 281. $147.00. ISBN 978-90-04-17981-3.)
The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews is a superb study of the relationship between Jesuits and New Christians—converts from Judaism and
their descendants—during the three generations after the founding of the
Society of Jesus in 1540. It has long been known that many New Christians
joined the Society in the sixteenth century. The opposition that this influx of
New Christians inspired both within and outside the Society, however, is
something of which only a few specialists have been aware until recently.
James W. Reites and Francisco de Borja Medina have written important studies of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s philosemitism and of the divisions within the
Society that developed after Ignatius’s death. Maryks, however, does something that no one has attempted until now—he investigates the genealogical
roots of dozens of sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits. Among
these men were several of the most notable Jesuit intellectuals of the period,
including José de Acosta, Diego Laínez, Juan de Mariana, Jerónimo Nadal, Juan
Alfonso de Polanco, Pedro de Ribadeneira, and Francisco Suárez.
Maryks links his genealogical study to a sophisticated analysis of the various factions that developed within the Society as a result of the debate about
the admission of New Christians. In addition, Maryks analyzes the strong
opposition in court and clerical circles in Spain and Portugal as a whole to
the admission of New Christians in the Society.
The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews provides a profound and convincing analysis—based on extensive archival work—of the conflict between
theory and practice in the Society of Jesus. The Society’s founding documents
called for an inclusive approach to the admissions process. In practice, however, discrimination in the admission of a wide range of minorities—including
not only New Christians but also Asians, Africans, Amerindians, and mestizos—was widespread.
The debate about New Christians hinged on the interpretation, by individual Jesuits, of Ignatius’s intentions. Drawing on their direct contacts with
Ignatius, on their understanding of the Institute of the Society, or on both,
Jesuits on both sides of the debate about New Christians asserted that they
sought to adopt the policy that Ignatius would have adopted had he been
alive in the 1570s, when the debate threatened to produce a schism in the
Society.
The vocal minority in the Society that opposed the admission of New
Christians gained strength at the Third General Congregation in 1573, when
it prevented the election of Polanco to succeed Francisco de Borja as
Superior General. Opponents of Polanco said that they wished to elect the

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first non-Spanish Superior General, but their true goal—to prevent the election of a New Christian—was clear to all the electors. The new Superior
General, Everard Mercurian, removed influential New Christians from their
administrative posts in Rome and ordered them to return to Spain.
At the Fifth General Congregation in 1593, the electors voted to exclude
men of Jewish and Muslim descent from the Society. Acosta cast one of only
two dissenting votes. Maryks provides the most comprehensive analysis to
date of the bitter debate surrounding the passage of the exclusion decree.
Several notable Jesuits, including Ribadeneira and Antonio Possevino (an
Italian who was likely of Jewish descent), mounted an eloquent defense of the
principle of nondiscrimination in general and of the admission of New
Christians in particular. The decree was modified slightly in 1608 to ensure
that investigations of lineages not extend beyond five generations, but it was
not formally rescinded until 1946.
Ironically, as Maryks notes, Mercurian’s marginalization of the New
Christians gave several of these Jesuits—notably Nadal, Polanco, and
Ribadneira—the opportunity to explore interests that they had not previously
had time to pursue. During the next forty years, these men produced a brilliant collection of writings—ranging from history and biography to spiritual
reflections, philosophy, and political theory—that were influential in their
day and that continue to inform our understanding of the Society.
The Catholic University of America

THOMAS M. COHEN

Avventure dell’obbedienza nella Compagnia di Gesù. Teorie e prassi fra
XVI e XIX secolo. Edited by Fernanda Alfieri and Claudio Ferlan. (Bologna:
Società editrice il Mulino. 2012. Pp. 267. €22,00 paperback. ISBN 978-8815-23789-7.)
Jesuit apologists and anti-Jesuit polemicists concur that obedience is the
trademark of the Society of Jesus. Each cites St. Ignatius of Loyola’s exhortation
that Jesuits ought to allow themselves “to be carried and directed by Divine
Providence through the agency of the superior as if he were a lifeless body . . .
or as it were an old man’s staff. . . .”1 Recently historians such as Michela Catto
in La Compagnia divisa: Il dissenso nell’ordine gesuitico tra ‘500 e ‘600
(Brescia, 2009) have been peeking behind the rhetoric of spiritual treatises and
congregational decrees to ascertain “blind obedience” as practiced.
Each article in this collection offers a new, fascinating perspective on a
subject that merits more investigation and discussion. The Society of Jesus
rests on twin pillars: the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions. A sensi1

Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. and ed. George
E. Ganss, S.J. (St. Louis, 1970), pp. 248–49, no. 547.

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tivity to and a discernment of spiritual movements is the goal of the former;
the latter invites Jesuits to a blind obedience to the will of the superior.The
authors investigate conflicts between a subject and his superior. In an article
not in this collection but cited by Sabina Pavone, Antonella Romano suggests
that dissidenza (dissidence, dissent) is inappropriate, because it connotes
explicitly organized opposition to a central power. Instead, she recommends
obbedienza negoziata (negotiated obedience). Besides prescriptions to blind
obedience, the constitutional decree
is not only highly but supremely important for the superior to have complete knowledge of the inclinations and motions of those who are in his
charge . . . [and] thus he may direct them better without placing them
beyond the measure of their capacity in dangers or labors greater than
they could in our Lord endure with a “spirit of love”. . . . (p. 104, no. 92)
This should be neither forgotten nor underestimated. Each Jesuit has the right
to represent to his superior his hopes and aspirations, fears and anxieties, but
the final judgment is the superior’s (p. 117, no. 131). Despite such representation, tension may remain, as individual Jesuits opt for obedience to a power
higher than their superior. In the late-seventeenth century, for example,
French Jesuit provincials claimed obedience to King Louis XIV took precedence over that to the general.The contributors examine various modalities
(variegate modalità) of Jesuit obedience: among others, Tirso González’s
desire to go to the Indies2; Brother Juan de Casasola’s refusal to relinquish a
reliquary of the True Cross; Paolo Segneri’s advocation of probabilism despite
González’s crusade against it; the survival of Jesuits in Russia after Pope
Clement XIV’s Dominus ac Redemptor;Anthony Kohlmann, better known in
American Catholic history for the legal recognition of the seal of confession,
and exorcism.
For some unexplained reason, interest in the theory and practice of
Jesuit obedience remains a quasi-Italian preserve. Perhaps the English translation of articles on the same theme by Silvia Mostaccio, scheduled to
appear in 2014, will encourage Anglophone historians of the Society of
Jesus to venture into this field. Meanwhile, the contributions here provide a
fascinating introduction.
Fordham University

THOMAS M. MCCOOG, S.J.

2
For Tirso’s subsequent problematic career see Jean-Pascal Gay’s Jesuit Civil Wars:
Theology, Politics and Government under Tirso González (1687–1705) (Burlington,
VT, 2012).

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Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany. Edited
by David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Ryan, and David Warren Sabean.
[Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, Vol. 3.)
(Brooklyn, NY: Berghahn Books. 2012. Pp. x, 206. $70.00. ISBN 978-0-85745375-4.)
This collection of essays draws on specialist knowledge to shed light on a
broad theme. Composed of nine essays together with a foreword and an afterword, the purpose of the collection is to examine the issue of conversion in
the German lands in the early-modern period and not only in the sense of
how it was conceived during the age of confessionalization; the authors also
are concerned with how the act or the language of conversion intersected
with other aspects of early-modern life, from notions of identity and boundaries to power politics. Although no single thread ties the contributions
together, the authors seem to share the premise that the traditional spiritual
or theological explanations of conversion theory will no longer suffice to capture the full spectrum of meaning behind a change of faith. There is thus a
turn toward the secular aspects, a shift noted by David M. Luebke in his introduction when he declares that the common concern of the volume lies
“between conversion and the reconfiguring of politics” (p. 3). But this focus
on politics is itself situated in a broader historiographical framework more
interested in coaxing out contexts and contingencies than piecing together
the spiritual biographies of self-professed converts. As Luebke writes,“Taken
together, the contributions to this volume recommend a departure from interpretations of conversion in early modern Europe that stress rupture over continuity and the primacy of individual experience over social and political contingencies” (p. 10).
The volume opens with a contribution by Duane J. Corpis, which makes a
series of etymological and methodological distinctions that run through the
entire volume. Early-modern conversion (conversio) can be understood in
two ways—it can refer to a spiritual change within the individual, a type of
intrareligious conversion that denotes an increase in personal faith or conviction that did not necessarily mean a change in affiliation; and there was
conversion in the interreligious sense, which entailed a switch from one religious community to another. The former implied an increase in spiritual
awareness, the latter the crossing of boundaries. Over the course of the confessional age, as Corpis reveals, there was a shift from the original notion of
intrarelgious conversion—that is, the model of the Pauline metanoia—to the
idea of a change from one church to another, as the various confessional
groupings “had come to see one another as institutionally, theologically, and
historically separate religions” (p. 27). Eric-Oliver Mader takes up this discussion in his study of the different meanings of conversio during the period—
its different theological and philological nuances with the passage of time, its
use by the different confessions (the Lutheran concept, for instance, “was
completely different from the Catholic” [p. 35]), and the historical conse-

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359

quences of these different meanings such as those relating to church politics
or missionary activity. Drawing on the test case of the city of Wesel, Jesse
Spohnholz examines some of these ideas in context. Conversion, as he points
out, might occur for a wide range of reasons, both spiritual and secular; and
indeed it might not occur at all in the strict sense, for in Wesel, which was
“confessionally ambiguous” (p. 51), Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists lived
together in close proximity in something of a “supraconfessional” or “non-dogmatic civic church” (pp. 53, 55) that prompts Spohnholz to question whether
it is correct to use “confessional categories to describe events that took place
during a period when confessions remained undeveloped” (p. 57).
Pluralization raised difficult problems for the authorities, as Ralf-Peter
Fuchs explains in his contribution, as was reflected in the peace treaties of
the age. The post-Reformation scale of religious pluralization was unprecedented in European history, and this meant that conversion raised a new set
of legal and political issues that had to be worked out in the wake of the shifting relations of power. Indeed, the political repercussions of conversion are
the subject of Daniel Riches’s study of diplomatic relations between Sweden
and Brandenburg after the conversion of the Swedish wife of the
Brandenburg ambassador to Stockholm. On the basis of this case of private
conviction, Riches sheds light on the role of public religion in the emerging
absolutist systems of rule and the extent to which confession crossed paths
with sovereignty, identity, and the symbolic and perfomative elements of
princely rule. Alexander Schunka also examines the conversion of a public
figure—in this instance, Elisabeth Christine of Wolfenbüttel—and to similar
ends as well, demonstrating the extent to which religion played a role in
dynastic politics. But Schunka’s case is further complicated by the surrounding discourse of the Irenicism movement at the efforts at Protestant unification, all of which were inflamed by the conversion controversy and demonstrated “the ongoing durability of confessional boundaries well into the
eighteenth century” (p. 113). By looking at the efforts of Frederick William I
to establish confessional flexibility in Brandenburg, Benjamin Marschke dives
even deeper into this issue (and the related association between Preußentum
and Pietismus), although he, too, finds that confessional passions—particularly on the part of the Pietists—worked against mutual tolerance. Lutherans
feared that tolerance was the first step to forced conversion. To be sincere,
conversion had to be private and thus a matter of choice. However, this did
not dissuade Pietist clergymen from overseeing the process—as Jonathan
Strom reveals—by way of hymns, sermons, and Bible readings, to ensure that
the parishioners did not go the way of the radicals. Strom reveals how the
Pietist conversion narratives were “implicated in doctrinal definition and confessional identity” (p. 144), although not all conversion narratives were necessarily tributes to greater piety and faith, as Douglas H. Schantz points out in
his study of the radical thinker Johann Christian Edelmann, who used much
of the same topoi of new birth, providence, and deliverance to chart his conversion from faith to reason.

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Although the individual contributions are specific in their focus and
based on specialist research, much of it archive-based, the volume does leave
the reader with a sense of common purpose. All of the contributions explore
the meaning and significance of conversion in early-modern culture and use
it as a problem, a problematic, or a “prism” (Schunka) for raising broader
questions and illuminating the age.The volume would have profited from a
synthetic overview, either at the beginning or the end, that drew out some
of the parallels between its findings and the work of scholars studying tolerance and conversion in historical settings other than Germany. Recent
studies by Judith Pollmann, Oliver Christin, Thierry Wanegffelen, Benjamin
Kaplan, Keith Luria, and Alexandra Walsham, for instance, raise many of the
same issues and reach similar conclusions and would have provided some
useful contrasts and comparisons. But this is a minor criticism of a first-class
collection of articles full of insight and suggestions for future research. It
deserves a wide readership.
Queen’s University, Belfast

C. SCOTT DIXON

The Sixth Scottish University. The Scots Colleges Abroad: 1575 to 1799. By
Tom McInally. (Boston: Brill. 2012. Pp. xii, 226. $136.00. ISBN 978-9-0042142-6.)
Tom McInally’s welcome study of the Scots Colleges on the continent of
Europe draws on research for his PhD dissertation at the University of
Aberdeen, defended in 2008.The volume builds on previous studies: Maurice
Taylor on the Scots College in Spain (1972); Mark Dilworth on the Scottish
Benedictine monasteries (1974); Brian Halloran on the Scots College, Paris
(1997); and McCluskey (ed.) on the Scots College, Rome (2000).Through such
works and others, the pervading narrative has become a familiar one of colleges that sought—against a background of penuriousness and inconsistent
governance—to prepare priests who would return to tend to the scattered,
discrete Catholic communities of Scotland. This was a task fraught with all
kinds of difficulties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The book has six chapters. After an introductory overview in chapter 1,
chapter 2 outlines the development of the various colleges (at Douai, Paris,
Madrid, and Rome) as well as the so-called Schottenkloster (Benedictine foundations) at Regensburg,Würzburg, and Erfurt. Chapter 3, although titled “The
Education Provided,” actually moves beyond a discussion of the curricula
studied by students to ask broader questions relating to the impact of new
learning and Enlightenment values on the colleges’ alumni. Chapter 4 applies
prosopographical methods in analyzing the geographical backgrounds and
family connections of students. Chapter 5 provides analysis of the future
careers of students—many going on to become Jesuits rather than seculars
returning to the Scottish mission—and a more general (but useful) outline of
the history of the Scottish mission between the aftermath of the Reformation

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(in the 1560s) and 1799. Finally, chapter 6 provides a brief summary of the
book’s principal theses.
What, therefore, does McInally ultimately bring to the field in terms of
those theses? First and foremost, a clue lies in the title of the work itself—he
makes connections between the various institutions. McInally is keen to
make the case for the Scots Colleges as a group to be considered a fullyfledged university.The argument is made most explicitly at various junctures
(pp. 47, 71, 211). Although one may not be entirely convinced by what is
undoubtedly an attractive argument, McInally has put his finger on a key
insight—namely, that the continental Scots Colleges need to be understood
less in isolation and more in broader contexts of connections with each
other and with contemporary scholarly currents. There are certainly standout individuals who merit the attention given them in this book: the first
Historiographer Royal,Thomas Dempster (1579–1625); the architects James
Smith (c. 1645–1731) and James Gibb (1682–1754); and the biblical scholar
and poet Alexander Geddes (1737–1802). These are but three examples of
Scots College alumni whom McInally presents as making an impact on their
wider societies. It is fascinating to learn of the early experiments in electricity by another alumnus, Andreas Gordon, of whom McInally muses that his
lack of recognition in his native country is probably due to the fact that he
was a “Scottish Benedictine monk working in Germany at a time when
Catholicism was outlawed in his own country” (p. 117). Herein lies
McInally’s second major insight.The story of the continental Scots Colleges
still awaits fuller integration into the “general history” of Scotland and
Scottish education in particular. McInally’s conscientiously researched and
engrossing work underlines once again that the Scots Colleges abroad
should no longer be seen as peripheral or tangential to the “core” Scottish
experience. In sum, this is a book deserving of a wide readership amongst
those interested in the development of education and cultural interchange
in early-modern Europe.
University of Glasgow

RAYMOND MCCLUSKEY

Journeys of a Mystic Soul in Poetry and Prose. By Cecilia del Nacimento.
Edited and Translated by Kevin Donnelly and Sandra Sider. [The Other
Voice in Early Modern Europe:The Toronto Series, 18.] (Toronto: Iter, Inc.,
and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2012. Pp. xii, 548.
$37.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-7727-2118-1.)
One of the most fascinating literary currents of the Spanish Renaissance
and Golden Age is that provided by mystical writers. Inspired by the longstanding spiritual tradition of the Middle Ages and energized by the socio-historical milieu of the time and the religious zeal promulgated by the CounterReformation, figures such as Ss.Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross became
living examples of what it means to love God with one’s whole heart and

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mind and soul and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.The articulation of intimacy with God through poetry and prose makes mystical writings a centerpiece of humanistic letters. Partaking in this mysterious itinerarium of faith
with God is a little-known Carmelite nun, Cecilia del Nacimento (1570–1646),
whose work remained in obscurity until the twentieth century when her
manuscripts were first subjected to close critical scrutiny, culminating with
this most informative book at hand.This edition provides a bilingual selection
of poetry and selected prose into English by the nun-author Cecilia.The editorial work is done by Kevin Donnelly, a specialist in colonial Spanish
American studies, and Sandra Sider, whose superb skills as translator have
already been manifested in her insightful rendition of the sonnets of Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz and the poetry of Sappho.The translation of Mother Cecilia’s
prose texts include the “Treatise on the Transformation of the Soul in God,”
one of the earliest expositions of personal spiritual experiences and ideas
regarding mysticism, and the “Treatise on the Union of the Soul in God,” the
earliest extant prose piece written by her. As the editors note, this treatise
provides the most explicit details of how Mother Cecilia’s love imitated a relationship with God that transcended prayer, meditation, fasting, and works of
charity.
The present edition also contains the skillful translation of Cecilia’s “First
Account of God’s Favors,” which departs from the description of the soul’s
spousal relationship with God and focuses on the revelations experienced by
the nun through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, as well as the effects of
her spiritual experiences on several aspects of her life with the sisters in the
convent and the difficulties she faced during the founding of the Discalced
Carmelite convent in Calahorra. Also present in this edition is the translation
of Mother Cecilia’s “Second Account of God’s Favors,” in which one finds
some rather perceptive and thought-provoking references to the importance
of reading and intellectual pursuits.
No scriptural text is as central to Mother Cecilia’s mystic writing as is the
Song of Songs, which explains the reason for the request made by Father
General Esteban de San José that the nun gloss the sixteenth verse of the
second song “Dilectus Meus Mihi, et Ego Illi” (2:16):“He is My Beloved, and I
Am His.” Perceptive is the comment made by the editors of this volume that
in the gloss of this verse, the nun “wished to highlight the role of the feminine
in this discussion of God’s relation to humanity, of how she conceived her
subjectivity in relation to the male-dominated, and at times misogynistic,
structures of religious life” (p. 165). Also part of the present volume are translations of Mother Cecilia’s “Theological Exposition of the Most Holy Virgin,” a
greatly debated issue in early-seventeenth-century Spain, the “Treatise on the
Mysteries of Our Holy Faith,” a reaffirmation of the Church’s creed, and the
“Letters to her Sister Maria and to her Brothers Antonio and Juan.”These are
some of the best examples of the nun’s correspondence showing the profound intellectual and emotional relationships with her siblings.

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The second half of this edition provides a lucid bilingual rendition of
Mother Cecilia’s poetry consisting of ballads, refrains, sonnets, and Christmas
carols, among other poetic compositions. Included in this volume are an
excellent bibliography and a most useful analytical index. As a whole, the
work done by Donnelly and Sider is both timely and significant, for it brings
to life and makes accessible a corpus of mystical writings little known to students of the Spanish Golden Age, as well as places in proper perspective the
role and power of the feminine voice in the literary and spiritual history of
the time. It is a project indeed well done.
The Catholic University of America

BRUNO DAMIANI

Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism. Edited by Lowell
Gallagher. [Clark Memorial Library Series.] (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library. 2012. Pp. x, 342. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-4312-3.)
This reviewer groaned as he began to read the barely comprehensible editorial introduction to this volume: more pretentious, jargon-ridden, English-lit.
theorizing seemed in prospect, with little that is useful to historians of religion.
It is striking how much of the work on early-modern English Catholicism is
now being done in English departments in the United States, probably because
so many of the easily available sources are literary texts of one sort or another,
and archival resources of the kind historians often use are limited (and on the
other side of the Atlantic). For all its achievements, this scholarly effort has
unbalanced our understanding of post-Reformation Catholicism, with its concentration on poetry, hagiography, heroic piety, priests, and the nobility and
gentry—at the expense of conventional practice, social relations, and the
lower social orders. But this groaning reviewer fretted too much—although
ten of the twelve contributors to this collection work in English departments,
most of them can, unusually, write comprehensible English, and some make
serious contributions to historical understanding.
Eleven essays are organized in three sections: three in “Signposts” (on “signature topics”), four in “Poetics” (on Catholic poetry) and four in
“Communities” (on confessional identity). Arthur Marotti looks carefully at
Catholic responses to Protestant attacks on Catholic worship as idolatry, but
finds there is more to say about John Donne and John Milton than Nicholas
Sander and Thomas Harding. It looks as if Catholics gave up trying. Frances
Dolan cleverly analyzes a ponderous official text exposing the Gunpowder
Plot of 1605 and a murder pamphlet from 1681, although it is not clear that
they go together in any helpful way. Holly Crawford Pickett tells the stories of
three “serial converts” (William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and
William Chillingworth) and suggests that they were irenic and ecumenical
rather than hypocrites or shallow time-servers: in these three cases, it looks as

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if she is right, although others are more problematical. Alison Shell sensitively
examines Alabaster’s poetry and prose of conversion in more detail, and
Richard Rambuss defends Richard Crashaw’s style as devotional, intellectual,
and both Anglican and Catholic. Gary Kuchar convincingly characterizes St.
Robert Southwell’s poem on St. Peter’s repentance as an alchemical allegory
of transmutation, and Jennifer Rust presents a canto of Edmund Spenser’s The
Faerie Queene (1590–96) as a response to Southwell’s Marie Magdalens
Funerall Teares (1591).The “Communities” section is more obviously historical. Phebe Jensen shows neatly how traditional and Counter-Reformation
Catholicism interacted in Catholic celebrations of Christmas, using manuscript collections of carols. Susannah Monta offers a thoughtful assessment of
Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and other Catholic texts on holy
living, as patterns of domestic piety that fostered communal identity and were
copied by Protestants. Anne Dillon reconstructs in meticulous detail the piety
and practice of the Confraternity of the Rosary that flourished at Cardigan
House in London between c.1650 and 1678, and Stefania Tutino emphasizes
the Catholic elements of Thomas White’s The Grounds of Obedience and
Government (1655). The editor’s introduction is probably best ignored, but
the eleven other essays all have something useful to say and those by Pickett,
Jensen, and Dillon in particular have real significance for historians of English
Catholicism. It is, therefore, a worthwhile collection. But how can we convince editors in search of a title that “Remapping” and “Redrawing the Map”
have been done to death?
Christ Church, University of Oxford

CHRISTOPHER HAIGH

Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early
Modern England—Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils. Edited by
Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton. [St. Andrews Studies in Reformation
History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xiii, 250. $124.95.
ISBN 978-1-4094-0089-9.)
Quite unusually for a Festschrift, this set of essays really has something to
do with the body of work of the person whose career is being celebrated.
William Sheils, in the later part of his œuvre, was noted in particular for probing, as he put it, the “ecumenicity of the everyday.” Most of these pieces look
at aspects of where the everyday took precedence over and trumped the
polemical divisions which defined post–Reformation English politics.This, of
course, has been a topic of some significance in recent times because of some
scholars’ continuing interest in how one narrates the rise of a tolerant mindset, i.e., as the state became less inclined to persecute people for their religious beliefs. It is certainly possible to show that successive regimes in this
period frequently did not go after people purely because they held this or
that view about doctrine. So the capacity for people to “get along” should not
actually be all that surprising; except, of course, that there were so many occasions when they did not.

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So thoughtful, and really very accomplished, is the introduction (forcefully
reminding the reader how recent postgraduates still are the future of the profession) and so well assembled are the essays that it is difficult in the space of
a short review to do justice to them all.
Alexandra Walsham reprises the literature of practical tolerance among the
godly.The claim is that reformed/evangelical Protestantism in this period had
a considerable capacity for socialization. There is a sense that, all the way
through the period, with a theological and ecclesiological arm, Starbucks
could have done well even in the godlier parts of country.
Peter Marshall produces a cutting-edge essay on one of the more problematical issues of the period, the question of how Catholics who were urged
to separate themselves from their local parish and all its ungodliness could
end up in the churchyard even while the parochial authorities sometimes
tried to keep them out.
Robert Swanson’s “Fissures in the Bedrock” looks at how far the more confessionally explicit difficulties after the Reformation had their analogues in
the period before it—a useful reminder for historians of the Reformation who
tend to think that the world starts in 1558 or 1533. Emma Watson has a chapter on the continuing efficiency of the church courts and concludes that
“both before and after the Reformation, clergymen were accountable to their
congregations” (pp. 113–14). The source base for the essay reminds us that
there is so much more mileage for PhD students in the under-used church
court records of this period.
Andrew Cambers has a brilliant piece on the circulation of libels in
Northampton, a worthy addition to the trail blazed in the recent past by
Alastair Bellany. This refers back also to Sheils’s work on Northamptonshire
Puritanism—one bookend of his career, as it were.The article is in fact about
the two libels that John Lambe denounced in Star Chamber in 1607 as part of
a conformist attempt to “out” Northamptonshire Puritans and is really interesting, because it reveals a coterie of conformists and future Laudians there;
this is, of course, slightly against the grain of the volume, as these people were
definitely not getting along.
Rosamund Oates’s contribution reviews the Challenge controversy and
says, basically, that polemicists could not do anything to (re)confessionalize
the calendar. Peter Lake weighs in with a typically nuanced reading of the
play Sir John Oldcastle. Part of his recent long-term project is to work out the
historical context for what London theatergoers were watching in the lateElizabethan period. This play reverses the tropes and assumptions of
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and essentially it is about anti-Puritanism and its
antitheses. It is also a brilliant evocation of the politics of loyalist Catholicism
in which, of course, Shakespeare himself is often reckoned to have had an
investment. Here we have, among others, Anthony Munday trying to appro-

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priate some of what one might call the center ground of debate about this
issue, constructing a loyalist position that was compatible with moderate
Puritans’ views of themselves.This certainly makes the intellectual and ideological position of the authors of this play a good deal more complex than
one might have thought.
Katy Gibbons recently published a major study on exile Catholicism in the
reign of Elizabeth Tudor, a phenomenon that was arguably crucial, as John
Bossy once argued, in shaping the nature of post-Reformation Catholicism in
England before Tudor rule was extinguished and while France was still racked
by the wars of religion.This is a timely essay on the same area: the impact of
exile and the existence of “plural Catholic identities.”The issue of exile is still
underexplored—what it meant for those who took themselves abroad and
what they thought they would get out of it.Virtually anyone who has had to
endure an intolerably badly run university, for example, and has taken the
opportunity to decamp somewhere else will instinctively know what was at
stake here.
In the chapter that follows, Carroll and Hopper deal with the French fascination with the Quakers, and more specifically an obscure Quaker now
made less obscure. It is a reminder that the Quakers could aspire to the
heights of factional division at least as well as any other group defined by religion in this period. Finally, Simon Jonson provides an account of Blacklowism.
This was a real eye-opener for this reviewer, as the approach adopted here
allows one to see the danger of Blacklow’s (Thomas White’s) teaching to any
kind of Catholic model for the British Isles based on obedience to Rome.
All in all, we have here not so much an account of how under certain circumstances people could muddle along if left in relative peace by those who
always seek to complicate and problematize everything, but why that problematizing process was sometimes difficult to avoid through much of the
early-modern period, even if historians generally cannot agree why.
Queen Mary, University of London

MICHAEL QUESTIER

The Case of Galileo: A Closed Question? By Annibale Fantoli. Translated by
George V. Coyne, S.J. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2012.
Pp. xii, 271. $28.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-02891-6.)
Is Galileo’s trial and condemnation the prime example of the conflict
between science and religion? Was science, which is based on reason and
experiment, bound to clash with religion, which relies on authority and
dogma? How is it that honest inquirers still ask:Why did the Church tried to
silence Galileo? These questions often are raised because the Galileo Affair
was a dramatic incident in the history of the relations between science and
religion. It also was an isolated case. Galileo was a loyal member of the

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Catholic Church, and it never occurred to him to attack the institution to
which he belonged. He was eager to be heard within the Church, and he saw
the rise of the new science as an opportunity for believers to gain a better
insight into the workings of God in nature. He was worried that the Church
might look foolish if it failed to understand the significance of the new
astronomy and rashly condemn Copernicans. Events proved him right, and
the Church took a long time to recover from the blow.
Annibale Fantoli is the distinguished author of Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church (Notre Dame, 1994), and this new book is a
revised and abridged edition for the general public. It is one of the best
accounts of the life and achievements of Galileo, and it is excellently translated by George V. Coyne, who played a major role in the rehabilitation of
Galileo in recent years.The final part of the volume describes the unfolding
of events after the condemnation of Galileo up to the present day. It is the history of a Church that continues to bear the heavy burden of the Galileo Affair
because of its constant preoccupation with saving its good name, while being
unwilling to accept, without shadows of compromise and veiled formulations, its responsibility in acknowledging Galileo’s greatness. His famous
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was put on the Index of
Forbidden Books in 1633, and it was not until the 1835 edition that it was
removed per the order of Pope Gregory XVI. Scholars were still barred from
access to the documents concerning Galileo’s trial in the Secret Vatican
Archives, and an effective liberalization program started only in 1880 with the
new Pope Leo XIII.The most conspicuous result was the publication of all the
material related to Galileo’s trial that appeared in the nineteenth volume of
the national edition of the Works of Galileo that were edited by Antonio
Favaro between 1890 and 1909.
The first pope to publicly and formally acknowledged the responsibility of
the Church was John Paul II. Speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
in 1979, he declared:
I hope that theologians, scholars and historians, animated by a spirit of sincere collaboration, will study the Galileo case more deeply and, in loyal
recognition of wrongs from whatever side they come, will dispel the mistrust that still opposes, in many minds, a fruitful concord between science
and faith, between the church and the world.
The present book is one of the most interesting and important outcomes
of this historical speech. It may not close the Galileo Affair, but the book renders the matter intelligible, and it deserves to be widely read and studied.
Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

WILLIAM R. SHEA

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The Inquisitor in the Hat Shop: Inquisition, Forbidden Books and Unbelief
in Early Modern Venice. By Federico Barbierato. (Farnham, UK/Burlington,
VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xxxiii, 396. $124.95. ISBN 978-1-40943547-1.)
This is a study of unbelief in Venice from the 1640s to the 1740s. It is an
account of various kinds of skepticism, libertinism, atheism, and irreligion
expressed by Venetians and others in so far as they came to the attention of
ecclesiastical and civil authorities.The book is based on extensive reading of
the trials found in the archives of the Venetian Holy Office, including a limited
number of trials from Veneto inquisitions referred to Venice, and, secondarily,
the archives of the Inquisitori dello Stato, the civil magistracy that investigated crimes involving nobles.
Barbierato sees Venice as an open city in which people spoke freely despite
Church and state. Many persons came to Venice from the rest of Italy and
beyond, sometimes fleeing local ecclesiastical and civil authorities. It was not
difficult to obtain prohibited books, as previous scholars have documented.
Venice was an excellent news center, because authors, ambassadors, and
Christian and Jewish merchants came to Venice to exchange and gather information. Those who sought news and ideas did not worry about whether their
sources believed in God. People expressed heterodox ideas in craft shops, barbershops, bookstores, Piazza San Marco, and family gatherings. Barbierato
emphasizes the “virtuoso,” the man who dominates a free-wheeling discussion.
Several forms of unbelief circulated, beginning with denial of the immortality of the soul. Barbierato offers evidence about the circulation of the views
of Cesare Cremonini (d. 1631), professor of philosophy at the University of
Padua for many years. He describes a Father Antonio Rocca (d. 1653), who
denied the immortality of the soul in the philosophy lessons that he delivered
to noblemen, doctors, lawyers, and chemists in his house in Venice.The idea
that religion was invented to control the people circulated; according to a
famous version, Moses, Christ, and Mohammed were three great imposters
invented by rulers.A version of skepticism held that sex between unmarried
people was not a sin. A bastardized form of quietism became unbelief: if a
person was close to God, he possessed enlightenment and could ignore the
commandments of the Church. In the scholarly debate concerning whether
original popular incredulity existed, or learned incredulity trickled down, the
author cautiously takes the side of original popular incredulity. Nevertheless,
much of what he has uncovered looks like popular versions of learned
incredulity.The book concludes with the trials of a circle of men who met in
the house of a hatter to discuss free masonry and much else in the 1730s.
When it convicted, the Venetian Inquisition levied light penalties, the heaviest of which were a few years in prison, usually later shortened. Because it
had to keep in mind the constraints imposed by the state’s jurisdictional
claims, the Inquisition sought to limit unbelief. It did not try to stamp it out.

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The book is based on much archival material and wide reading in secondary sources. The prose is clear, vigorous, and sometimes verbose. Barbierato
provides numerous colorful quotations of people appearing before the
Inquisition in lively English translations. Unfortunately, he does not include
the original Italian in the notes.The bibliography is very extensive, although
the citations do not give pagination for articles in collective volumes or list
translators. This is a good book about unbelief in Venice.
University of Toronto (Emeritus)
and Chapel Hill, NC

PAUL F. GRENDLER

Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a
Seventeenth-Century Catholic Gentleman. By Geoff Baker. [Politics,
Culture and Society in Early Modern England.] (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press. Distrib. Palgrave, New York. 2010. Pp. xiv, 236.
$89.95. ISBN 978-0-7190-8024-1.)
This book offers the first full-length study of the papers of William Blundell
of Little Crosby (1620–98), a Lancashire Catholic gentleman unremarkable for
his career, wealth, or family—but who left us an archive of correspondence
and commonplace books that has few equals in early-modern studies and that
offers not only a rich portrait of an engaging individual but also a window
onto a world.
Geoff Baker first explores Blundell’s social networks of family and
friends, through which he exchanged news, views, and literature and acted
as a Catholic agent and patron. Through them, he also protected himself
from trouble, particularly during the Civil Wars, when he faced sequestration and imprisonment as both a Royalist and a Catholic, but also from the
perennial liability that came from adhering to an illegal religion. The
second half of the book delves into the “approach to the world” illustrated
by Blundell’s commonplace books, largely private collections in which he
copied out (and commented on) works of every genre on every subject
from theology and natural philosophy to dueling. Baker explores how
Blundell combined his commitment as a Catholic believer with his support
for the “new science” movement; his interest in travel writing and ethnography; and his engagement with confessional polemic, which included producing at least one work of his own. Interesting details include Blundell’s
providing the Protestant Edmund Borlase with lists of (Catholic) sources
for Borlase’s work on the history of Ireland, hoping that his own input
would “somewhat allay the spirit which poss[ess]eth his [Borlase’s] party”
(p. 153).
The study has shortcomings. Baker states in his introduction that the
book’s purpose is to consider whether Blundell’s “projected image” of himself as “both a loyal Englishman and a devoted Catholic” was “justified by

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his actions” and private writings (p. 1). The author’s pre-occupation with
this hypothesized dichotomy combines with his anxiety to distance himself from confessional history to produce sometimes simplistic statements.
It is hardly a revelation to find that a Catholic professed loyalty but broke
the laws, since he could not have practiced Catholicism without breaking
a few; similarly, to say that “despite his profession of loyalty” Blundell’s
work of managing money for the English Poor Clare nuns at Rouen “posed
a direct threat to the Protestant regime” (p. 88) rather suggests mid-range
missiles pointed at London mounted on the convent roofs.“Indirect threat
to the Protestant church” would express it better and would invite a more
pertinent discussion of the contested nature of the meaning of loyalty, as
exemplified by Blundell. Again, observing a contradiction between
Blundell’s steadfast Catholic recusancy and his writing lists of apparent
errors in scripture in his commonplace book (pp. 144–45, 162) is less interesting than pursuing the question of how and why Blundell did not see
these as contradictory.
Reading and Politics shines a light on a significant and under-used source,
and it may be hoped that it will point the way for social and cultural historians to exploit the potential of the Blundell papers.
Centre for Catholic Studies
Durham University

LUCY UNDERWOOD

Religion, Magic, and the Origin of Science in Early Modern England. By
John Henry. (Burlington,VT:Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xii, 328. $170.00.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4458-9.)
The essays collected in this book focus on a central issue in the history of
early-modern science: the rise of mechanical philosophy. New philosophers
and scientists such as Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes
claimed that physics could be confined to kinematics—the motions of bodies
and the interactions arising from their motions were all that was required to
explain any set of circumstances. For many authors, however, a strictly
mechanicist kinematics seemed unworkable. Inspired by ideas derived from
theological, magical, and alchemical traditions, many physicists, neo-Platonic
philosophers, chemists, and physicians held that any physical body, or matter
in general, was endowed with “active principles.” The animate nature of the
Earth in William Gilbert’s De magnete, Robert Boyle’s “cosmical qualities,” and
Isaac Newton’s action at a distance are cases in point. Until recently, efforts to
trace the intellectual origins of Newton’s concept of active principles concentrated either on the influence of alchemy or on that of Cambridge
Platonism. However, it was not Newton who reintroduced occult qualities
into natural philosophy. Several exponents of English mechanical philosophy
before him entertained the possibility of unexplained active principles in
matter. In the present volume, John Henry reconstructs a highly interesting

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“prehistory” of Newton’s natural philosophy. Walter Warner (1570–1642/43),
who arrived at his mechanical philosophy by blending elements from
medieval and Renaissance neo-Platonism with ideas from Thomas Harriot and
Galileo, held that all bodies possess an efficient power or virtue. Walter
Charleton, following his mentor Pierre Gassendi, argued that the atoms at
their creation by God are endowed with “internal energy.” Francis Glisson
(Regius professor of physics at Cambridge) wrote an entire treatise on the
“energetic nature of substance.” Also, Boyle did not subscribe to a strictly
mechanicist account of physics, as he acknowledged the need of active principles, and assumed the existence of “aerious, etherial, luminous” spirits in all
mixed bodies. Robert Hooke used inherent vibrations of matter to explain
light and gravity. Thus, Newton’s introduction of active principles in matter
cannot be seen as his major philosophical innovation, as has been usually
assumed in historical studies. However, Newton vigorously rejected Leibniz’s
objection that gravity was an occult quality. Active principles are manifest;
only their causes are occult.
The author further develops his central claim in essays devoted to Henry
More, Boyle, Hooke, and Newton. He shows that the differences between
More and Boyle—apparently allies brought together by common interest in
Cartesianism and the use of mechanical philosophy—were crucial, extending
from their epistemological views to their beliefs about the nature of the
world and of God. Hooke’s matter theory cannot be seen as simply mechanicist: his defense of the magician John Dee, written in 1690 toward the end of
his career, shows a real concern for the importance of natural magic in the
“improving of natural knowledge.“ A close reading of Newton’s frequently
quoted letters to Richard Bentley, apparently excluding the possibility of
action at a distance, shows that Newton’s pronouncements upon gravitational
attraction are consistent with the view that he believed gravity to be a superadded inherent property of bodies that was capable of acting at a distance. In
the final essay, the author argues that the leading figures in the magical tradition (including Girolamo Cardano, Girolamo Fracastoro, Giovan Battista Della
Porta, Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon) turned to the occult not because
they were fools with an occult mentality, but because occult traditions
seemed to offer a source of help to find solutions to problems that the
Aristotelian and Galenic traditions could not resolve.
With this collection, Henry offers a surprising and innovative perspective
on the intellectual history of early-modern Europe with particular attention
to the impact of theology and Christian faith on philosophical and scientific
views of natural reality. Most of the authors discussed here assumed that God
endowed active principles on matter, either directly or else through an all-pervasive immaterial Spirit supposedly acting as the vicarious power of God in
the world.The three essays centered on More reveal the pivotal role of theological ideas in the English debates on psychology and physics. Finally, the
essay on Thomas White and Kenelm Digby sheds new light on the transfor-

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mation of seventeenth-century Peripatetic philosophy and, more generally, on
the role of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in England.
Radboud University, Nijmegen
and Sapienza Università, Rome

LEEN SPRUIT

L’ordre de Prémontré au XVIIIe siècle. Edited by Dominique-Marie Dauzet
and Martine Plouvier. (Bern: Peter Lang. 2011. Pp. viii, 314. $94.95 paperback. ISBN 978-3-0343-1056-7.)
This volume examines the Premonstratensian Order in Europe in the
eighteenth century, and the articles come out of a 2002 conference.The articles, of course, vary in quality, and the long time between the conference and
the publication of the volume means that considerable new scholarship has
been produced in the interim. Nevertheless, there are some important
insights in this volume.The articles here show that this monastic order—the
Order of Canons Regular of Prémontré, founded in the twelfth century and
also known as the Norbertines—continued to be vibrant and active even in
the century of the Enlightenment.The volume reinforces many of the points
made by Derek Beales in Prosperity and Plunder. European Catholic
Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (New York, 2003), from
the perspective of one order. In the eighteenth century the
Premonstratensians were prosperous; they built or renovated their monasteries and promoted traditional piety while also engaging the new intellectual and cultural developments of the age.
The volume presents an overview of the order across Europe, seeking
common developments and reminding the reader of its institutional structure. By the 1700s the leading role of the “mother house” at Premontré in
northeastern France had declined significantly. Houses outside France barely
recognized its primacy within the order, and “general chapters” that drew representatives from across Europe were held only in 1717 and 1738.The order
became more national in its perspectives and interests, with the German,
French, and Belgian houses as particularly important; this volume focuses on
those regions.
The nuanced article by Xavier Lavagne d’Ortigue on the Order in France
explains much of the character of the order in this period. The
Premonstratensians in France were divided into two branches: a “reformist”
branch and a more traditional one. The two branches were not exactly in conflict, although there were differences in emphasis, particularly about how
much (or little) a canon should move from house to house.The order was, in
one sense, quite large, with eighty-four abbeys and ten urban residences.
However, there were only 1200 monks of various kinds in the whole country,
which meant that many houses were quite small. D’Ortigue, just like many
government and church officials in the eighteenth century, considers this

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structure problematic, since monastic houses with few residents suffered disciplinary problems while using resources inefficiently.
Another characteristic of the order was the large number of chanoinescurés in France.These were canons who served as parish priests and did not
usually live in a monastic setting.These men played an important role in local
religious life and seem to have performed their duties with care and dedication, as was increasingly characteristic of parish priests in the eighteenth century. In this way, the order was constantly engaged with secular life and far
from the useless, detached, and materialist monastic orders satirized by
Voltaire and other Enlightenment writers.
Yet at the same time, this volume describes the great baroque complexes
built by the Premonstratensians during the eighteenth century in France,
south Germany, and the Habsburg lands.These building projects, which were
characterized most famously by wonderful libraries in locations such as
Strahov in Bohemia and Schussenried in Upper Swabia, were artistic masterpieces, complete with extensive decoration in the most elaborate style.They
also were hugely expensive and reflected the great wealth accumulated by
the order over the centuries. In demonstrating this wealth so openly, the
Premonstratensians, like all the old orders, were vulnerable to the satires of
the philosophes and to the desire of rapacious monarchs like Joseph II to take
their resources for use in other, more “useful” ways. The French Revolution
and the Napoleonic era then led to the almost total destruction of the order.
This useful volume, which unfortunately does not discuss houses for
women, brings the often neglected history of the Catholic religious orders in
the eighteenth century to life.
MARC R. FORSTER

Connecticut College
Late Modern European

Die Katholische Tübinger Schule: Zur Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung. By
Stefan Warthmann. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 2011. Distrib. David
Brown Book Co., Oakville, CT. Pp. xi, 639. $138.00. ISBN 978-3-315-09856-4.)
This scholarly work is a dissertation done at Tübingen University and, not
surprisingly, exhibits an astounding control of the primary and secondary
sources. In sometimes repetitive detail, Stefan Warthmann explores what is
meant by “school.” Is the school to be defined by the faculty belonging to it?
Is it to be the institutional group supporting the Theologische Quartalschrift?
Is the school to be defined by the direction that it set for theological reflection right into the modern era? Warthmann extensively analyzes the issues
raised by these questions, but selects “direction” as the concept to describe
the school.

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The school itself originated as a vigorous reaction to the Enlightenment
and was nurtured by the romanticism, idealism, and historicism popular in
early-nineteenth-century Germany along with the pastoral theological impetus provided by Johann Michael Sailer. The founders of the school itself were
Johann Sebastian von Drey, who set the romantic, organic, and historical tone
of the theological methodology, which was then reinforced by Johann Adam
Möhler. Other early scholars in this tradition who carried forward the
methodology of “doing theology” were Franz Anton Staudenmaier and Johann
Evangelist von Kuhn; they went beyond the subjectivism of Friedrich
Schleiermacher and were influenced by a Hegelian idealism that could support doctrinal development. For these theologians, doctrine was tied to the
ongoing expressions of the historical Christian communities as they reflected
within their historical contexts.Truth did not change, but rather matured or
unfolded in an organic fashion.
Clearly, such an approach could be viewed by some as potentially endangering the transcendental truth offered by the institutional Church.
Warthmann provides his most significant contribution by stressing how the
scholars in this school’s tradition responded to accusations of infidelity and
influenced other theologians and church historians in France, England, Italy,
Spain, and the United States as they all wrestled with the role of historical
development in the theological enterprise. Such scholars as Cardinal John
Henry Newman; Cardinal Yves Congar, O.P.; Karl Adam; and Josef Rupert
Geiselmann have contributed in a major fashion to the influence of this
school. Warthmann also explicates the contributions of other scholars such
as Karl Werner, Fritz Vigener, and Georges Rouzet. Clearly the school goes
beyond its original institutionalization in Tübingen. The school helped formulate a “direction” that theologians who wanted to embrace modernity
could take.As he explores the school’s influence,Warthmann carefully investigates the general relation of philosophy to theology and so can comment
on the role of neo-Scholasticism as a rival direction. Specific concepts such
as “living tradition,” historically maturing, and the “kingdom of God” model
have permeated the entire Tübingen tradition and have been given new life
through the efforts of Karl Rahner, Cardinal Walter Kasper, and the Second
Vatican Council.
Warthmann has thoroughly studied the birth and continuing life of this
school and has analyzed how it has created generations of conversation partners with those theologians following other directions. He concludes by
stressing how important it is to recognize that unity can be delineated by
embracing the notion of multiplicity. Warthmann’s work is certainly not the
last word in the scholarship stimulated by the worldview formulated by this
school, but his study of this theological direction can help isolate the directions to be pursued by other contemporary scholars.
Boston College

DONALD J. DIETRICH

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Catholiques et Comtois: Liturgie diocésaine et identité régionale au XIXe
siècle. By Vincent Petit. [Histoire religieuse de la France, No. 36.] (Paris: Les
Éditions du Cerf. 2011. Pp. 720. €44,00. ISBN 978-2-204-09395-8.)
After decades of neglect, interest in the French diocesan liturgies of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is slowly but surely growing.
Modern technology and the online sources available to researchers now provide the means for a more systematic scientific study. Part of the responsibility for the neglect of these liturgies is attributable to Abbot Prosper Guéranger
of Solesmes, who treated them with such negative polemical passion in his
writings that he damaged their respectability. Although these diocesan liturgies are not autonomous rites alongside other liturgies of both the Eastern and
Western Churches, they should not be regarded as deviations that were tolerated for the sake of conserving peace and unity within the Church.
The recent change of perspective in historical research means that the
French diocesan liturgies need to be placed both in the context of European
intellectual history and in the political and social conditions of the time. Such
an approach is to be found in the work of Vincent Petit. His examination of
the cultural, social, and religious setting of the liturgy of the Archdiocese of
Besançon has enabled him to show its impact upon the formation of the
Catholic identity of Franche-Comté in the nineteenth century.
The work is divided into three sections, each covering approximately a
quarter of a century: the period leading up to the liturgical controversy, the
period of the return to the Roman liturgy, and the peculiar situation of the
Archdiocese of Besançon. Petit shows that the movement for the return of the
French archdiocese to the unity of the Roman liturgy was facilitated by the
Ultramontane movement, rooted in the teachings of Joseph de Maistre and
Félicité de Lamennais.
In the Archdiocese of Besançon, the presence of influential Ultramontane
clergy such as Emmanuel Bousson, Philippe Gerbet, Thomas Marie Joseph
Gousset, and Jean Marie Doney might have led one to suppose that the
Church in Besançon would have been in the vanguard of reform.Yet despite
such strong pro-Roman influence, the Archdiocese of Besançon was not
swept away by the tide of reforming enthusiasm. More than thirty years were
to pass from the beginning of the “liturgical controversy” before Besançon
renounced its own diocesan books. It was Petit’s desire to know why
Besançon took so long to adopt the Roman books that led him to undertake
his research.
The first part of this book presents an in-depth examination of the background of the province and the Church of the Franche-Comté, especially the
period of the implementation of the reforms of the Council of Trent. Careful
attention is given to the three decades leading up to the appointment of
Jacques-Marie-Adrien Mathieu to the See of Besançon in 1834. Mathieu was an
able administrator, moderate and balanced in his views. He was not an

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Ultramontane, yet was loyal to the See of Rome. Nevertheless, Mathieu refused
to adopt the Roman liturgy in his diocese until a year before his death in 1875.
After the liturgical disputes ended in the majority of the French dioceses,
the controversy continued with a slightly different complexion in the
Archdiocese of Besançon. Several members of the Besançon clergy, who had
read Guéranger’s Institutions Liturgiques (Paris, 1840–51) and the
Instructions issued by those bishops whose dioceses had adopted the Roman
liturgical books, decided on their own initiative to adopt the Roman liturgy.
The second part of Petit’s book is concerned with this problem and the tensions between some of the clergy and their archbishop.The archbishop was
not concerned with his own authority but rather with the legitimate diversity
and identity of a local church that he saw as an important contribution to the
patrimony of the universal Church.
The third section of Petit’s work is concerned with the development of
regional identity and the way it was conditioned by the liturgical and devotional life of its people and the scholarly activity of its clergy.
While leading the general reader into a relatively unknown area of French
ecclesiastical history, this book will bring the reward of opening an interesting dimension of the life and worship of the Church. This work is a timely
reminder to liturgists that the social and historical context of their research
can contribute to a wider understanding of the Church’s liturgical life and
practice. For those who would pursue the matter further, an extensive and
informative bibliography is provided.
Hexham, Northumberland,
United Kingdom

ABBOT CUTHBERT JOHNSON, O.S.B.

Life with a Mission: Cardinal Willem Marinus van Rossum C.Ss.R.
(1854–1932). Edited by Vefie Poels, Theo Salemink, and Hans de Valk.
[Trajecta, Religie, cultuur en samenleving in de Nederlanden/Religion,
Culture and Society in the Low Countries, 19-20.2010–2011.1–2.]
(Nijmegen:Trajecta. 2011. Pp. 240. €19,00 paperback. ISSN 0778-8304; ISBN
978-908-140-9810.)
Roughly a half a dozen non-Italians rose to the top of the Roman Curia in
the first half of the twentieth century. One of them was Cardinal Willem
Marinus van Rossum of the Netherlands. Born in 1854, van Rossum joined the
Redemptorists twenty years later. Specializing in moral theology and canon
law, he was called to Rome in 1895, working with Pietro Gasparri and Eugenio
Pacelli on the codification of canon law between 1904 and 1917. In 1911, he
was made a cardinal, and in 1915 he was appointed Grand Penitentiary,
responsible for deciding such matters as the remission of grave sins as well as
canonical censures such as excommunication, exemptions, and dispensa-

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tions. Three years later, he was made “red pope,” prefect of the missionary
Congregation of De Propaganda Fide. He died in 1932.
These essays/articles are the first steps toward a definitive biography of
van Rossum. Joop Vernojji and Otto S. Lankhorst provide accounts of his early
life, and Eric Corsius discusses the influence of the Redemptorists’ theological tradition on him. An evaluation of van Rossum’s role in the campaign
against modernism during the pontificate of Pius X is offered by Otto Weiss,
and his contribution to the codification of canon law is assessed by Anna
Luisa Casiraghi. Especially useful are the essays on various aspects of van
Rossum’s fourteen-year stint at Propaganda, his contribution to the “postcolonialist” turn taken by missionary policy under Popes Benedict XV and Pius XI
(Claude Prudhomme), his over-optimistic hopes for the conversion of
Scandinavia (Vefie Poels), and the problems of the Catholic missions in what
is now Indonesia (Hans de Valk). Marcel Chappin examines the phenomenon
of international Eucharistic congresses, as van Rossum presided over two of
them:Vienna (1912) and Amsterdam (1924).
There are other gems, like Johann Ickx’s essay on van Rossum’s tenure as
Grand Penitentiary and Monsignor Giuseppe Maria Croce’s essay, “Regards
sur la Curie romaine de 1895 à 1932.” The latter gives an excellent insight into
the transformation of the Roman Curia from what had been the court of an
Ancien Régime monarchy (the Papal States) into a more functional instrument of government of the universal Church. It also suggests that the scandals
recently alluded to in “Vati-leaks” are nothing new. Theo Salemink, in “Cardinal
Willem van Rossum and the Amici Israel (1926–1928):The Conversion of the
Jews and the Debate on Zionism,” casts new light on the bizarre retroscena to
the condemnation of Amici d’Israele1—to wit, the curious relationship
among van Rossum; the Dutch Jewish convert Francisca (originally Sophie)
van Leer; the German Franciscan friar Laetus Himmelreich, who converted
her; and a canon of the order of the Holy Cross, Anton van Asseldonk, who
accompanied van Leer to Palestine to found a “Catholic kibbutz.”
Vefie Poels points out that van Rossum embodied the interface among
three kinds of Catholic milieu—Dutch Catholicism, the Redemptorists, and
the Roman Curia. But she also says,“…we have no clear understanding of van
Rossum’s attitudes towards the main political movements of his time, such as
Fascism, Communism, and the first wave of feminism or suffragettism” (p.
193).The study of these will not only be essential in achieving that definitive
biography but also will broaden our understanding of the culture of the
Roman Curia in van Rossum’s day.
University of Cambridge

1

JOHN POLLARD

See Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich,
trans. Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, MA, 2010).

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Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after
Unification. By Rebecca Ayako Bennette. [Harvard Historical Studies,
Vol.178.] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. xi, 368.
$49.95. ISBN 978-0-674-06563-5.)
Rebecca Ayako Bennette has given us good reason to reconsider the 1870s
in German Catholic history. Her book analyzes Catholic public discourse on
German national identity, bringing contemporary cultural analysis to bear on
the subject. Rather than interpreting the 1870s as a period of Catholic reaction and rejection of the Reich, Bennette argues convincingly that the basis of
Catholic integration is forged in this decade.
Bennette has divided her study into two parts, highlighting her two major
challenges to traditional historiography. Part I is a close chronological analysis
of the Kulturkampf. Here Bennette separates the Kulturkampf into its component parts as a corrective to customary historical shorthand.This allows us
to see more clearly the development of Catholic thought about the nation
after the defeat of Austria in 1866, then through an initial phase of Catholic
integration in 1871–72, and then through the political battles of 1873–75.
Throughout these phases, Catholic journalists and politicians never questioned the core concept of a German Reich, but rather argued that Bismarck’s
policies and the Liberals were leading Germany down an essentially “unGerman” path.
Part II addresses four themes in the Catholic construction of national identity, where Catholic leaders challenged the concepts of the nation of Bismarck
and the Liberals. First, Bennette examines how regionalism was “central” to
the new nation and to the Catholic view of German-ness. Second, German
Catholic writers at least briefly offered a “feminine gendering of the nation”
(p. 13) as an alternative to the Protestant, masculine, and militaristic images.
Third, Bennette examines Catholic attempts to claim German scholarship
(Bildung and Wissenschaft) and attack Liberal bias in the professoriate.
Bennette’s fourth theme is the Catholic vision of a new German epoch.
Through these themes, Catholic writers fashioned their own version of the
“special path”(Sonderweg) for the German nation, one that heralded the New
Imperialism to come and brought true Christian culture to a world threatened by materialist civilization. Catholic writers argued that it was their duty
to fend off the Liberal destruction of true German-ness so that Germany could
embrace its moment in world history and lead in the advancement of
Christian civilization.
Bennette notes that her analysis relies heavily on newspapers, but her
study reaches beyond newspapers into the larger body of Catholic publications and the personal records of Catholic leaders. Newspapers and “confessional” journals, however, present unique challenges for historical research.
Newspapers can provide a “dialogic format,” as Bennette states, in which the
publications both shape public opinion and respond to it.Yet Catholic public

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opinion, especially in the 1870s, is difficult to grasp. Given the Church’s censorship of materials as well as the self-censorship of Catholic writers, we
need to question the dialogic openness of these publications. Bennette comments that roughly half of German Catholics did not vote for the Center
Party.This is a significant fact that suggests a very large portion of Catholics
did not engage in sustained dialogue with writers for Germania, the
Historisch-Politische Blätter, or the Kölnische Volkszeitung.The chasm that
existed, with social elites and their “mass” publications on one side and the
German Catholic population on the other, is still a major problem for historical analysis.
Bennette’s work is nonetheless a masterful study of the Catholic journals
and their vision of Germany in the Kulturkampf era. Her work rightly brings
us to reconsider the problem of Catholic integration in the Kaiserreich and
provides a solid basis for further historical inquiry.
University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point

ERIC YONKE

Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII. By Robert A. Ventresca. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2013. Pp. 405.
$35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-04961-1.)
This is clearly the most extensive biography of Pope Pius XII yet written.
Based on original sources in the Vatican, Rome, Germany, Britain, and the
United States, and written in clear narrative style, it will not totally please
either side in the “Pius Wars.” It does, however, give us greater understanding
of the man at the center of the most turbulent pontificate since the French
Revolution.
Canadian historian Robert A. Ventresca argues that the dispute over Pius
has led us to see the pope as less a man than an institution. His aim is to correct this tendency. This is not an easy thing to do, for inevitably the author has
to answer the troublesome questions that have been asked for years about
Pius, both as man and institution. The most important of these are his problematic relations with Germany, his silence on the Holocaust, and his alleged
connivance in the ratlines that abetted the escape of Nazis and fascists after
1945.
Thus, the book falls into three periods. The first takes up Eugenio Pacelli
as a Roman with a strong sense of family loyalty in a Rome that was undergoing cultural modernization. It carries through to his years in the seminary,
the papal diplomatic corps, as nuncio to Bavaria and Germany, and finally to
his years as papal secretary of state where he faced his most challenging problem in dealing with Nazi Germany. According to Ventresca, the German bishops, who feared Bolshevism and were concerned with political stability,
guided Pacelli’s relations with Germany in a period that dated before the Nazi

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rise to power and ended after their defeat.These bishops counseled restraint
in dealing with Adolf Hitler, and Pacelli adopted their approach. It became the
chief means of Vatican diplomacy during the war—a policy of maintaining
neutrality along with guarded criticism so as to preserve diplomatic relations
with the warring powers. As secretary of state and as pope, he carefully
worded all public statements, for “he simply saw no practicable alternative”
(p. 157). Instead of speaking out forcefully on wartime problems, he favored
allowing bishops on the scene to decide whether to speak out or not.
When the war began shortly after he became pope in 1939, his first concern was to lessen the agony of the Poles under both German and Soviet
domination. Ventresca states that the long-suffering Poles wanted a papal
declaration—“a simple but powerful exposition of the Christian message”—
but instead, because of Pius’s fears of German reaction, they received “the
cerebral casuistry of an academic and the diplomatic propriety of a statesman”(p. 176).
On the central question of the Holocaust, Ventresca uses the published
documents skillfully. He portrays Pius with “a limited ability to perceive the
precise nature of the Nazi war against the Jews” (p. 176) because of his background and training. Pius viewed the attack on the Jews as a political issue
and therefore as not the primary concern of the Church. Notes Ventresca,
His insistence on maintaining the public face of impartiality undermined
the political credibility of the papacy, and worse yet, left the institution vulnerable to the charge that he had failed the test of moral leadership at one
of humanity’s darkest hours. (p. 178)
Ventresca does not give any special insight into the roundup of the Roman
Jews in October 1943, and he does not mention at all the pope’s failure to
condemn the affirmed Catholic Croat Ustasha’s systematic murders of Serbian
Orthodox and Jews during the war—probably the single occasion where the
pope had the greatest opportunity to lessen suffering.
The last third of the book covers the years after the war—a period not sufficiently plumbed by historians—which gives clearer insight into Pius. He had
to craft a message to show that he had clearly condemned Nazi antisemitism,
even though he had not done so, and statements of gratitude from Jewish
leaders helped him to do so. He publicly condemned the communists who
were taking over Eastern Europe, and he became a cold warrior, but at the
same time he indicated to the communist regimes that he was willing to
negotiate with them to protect church interests (which was what he had
done with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy).
One of Pius’s major concerns after 1945 was the reconstruction of
Germany. He came to rely more on his German staff as advisers: Jesuits Ivo
Zeiger, Robert Leiber, and Augustin Bea, as well as his housekeeper, Sister

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Pacalina Lehnert. Viewing the pope’s response to problems after 1945,
Jacques Maritain, the French ambassador to the Holy See, described papal
policy as “surprisingly provincial” (p. 272).
As for the ratlines, Ventresca says that the claim that Pius was involved
“rests on shaky foundations” (p. 268). Despite Pius’s tight control over diplomacy,“there was a disturbing lack of transparency … in the use of relief services” (p. 269), and Nazi sympathizers in the Vatican could take advantage of
this situation.
In many ways,Ventresca argues, the last third of Pius’s life was his greatest
legacy, with his teaching encyclicals and the many comments and observations to the different groups who came to visit him. Whereas some may see
these papal statements as truisms and platitudes,Ventresca disagrees, praising
them for their far-sightedness. He closes by saying, despite his earlier criticisms, that “there is a strong argument to be made that taken as a whole,
[Pius’s] reign over the church was consistent with the moral, pastoral, and
political leadership expected of the Vicar of Christ” (p. 309).
Saint Louis University (Emeritus)

JOSÉ M. SÁNCHEZ

Der Verband katholischer kaufmännischer Vereinigungen Deutschlands
1877–1933. By Veronika Laufen. [Beiträge zur Kirchen- und Kulturgeschichte, Band 22.] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 2011. Pp. 515.
€79,90. ISBN 978-3-631-62053-3.)
This excellent book examines the relationship between labor and
Catholicism in Germany—a subject largely neglected by research until now.
At first, political liberalism dominated commerce in the country. Founded in
Koblenz, the Union of Catholic Commercial Associations brought together
local entities of Catholic businessmen in an umbrella organization through
general meetings at Mainz (1877) and Koblenz (1878). Priests played an eminent role in leading the organization on the local and regional levels, although
the Union was based on the idea of lay apostolate. Its members held a profound loyalty to the Catholic Church, the bishops, and the pope and drew on
Catholic social teaching and the needs of their professional milieu to construct their philosophy. The Union relied on two principles—Catholicism
(Katholizität) and parity (Parität)—thus seeking to unite the white-collar
workers on the one side with the merchants on the other. It unfolded a broad
spectrum of activities, including the publication of twelve periodicals. The
most important was the Union’s magazine, Merkuria. Other initiatives
included life and health insurance, Social Security agencies, savings banks, and
self-supporting recreational facilities. The Union also provided its members
with job opportunities, legal assistance, scholarships, and funds in cases of
economic hardship. A main concern was with the condition of a Catholic
minority in a Protestant-dominated society. The Union’s educational programs

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and professional training initiatives were a way to remove or reduce disadvantages imposed by Catholic inferiority (katholische Inferiorität).
Because of its emphasis on parity, the Union differed from the Christian
trade unions.The latter operated as socially and politically effective pressure
groups, acting only as representative bodies of working-class interests without regard to religious denomination. In contrast, the Catholic merchants’
Christian faith informed a conception of corporatism and an interpretation of
Christian doctrine so that they favored a peaceful agreement of socially distinct or even opposite groups. Such a perspective resulted in the association’s
failure to forge wage agreements. The hardships of the political situation
forced the Union to merge with stronger partners in Christian trade unionism.This group eventually joined with the Association of the German National
Commercial Clerks (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband),
although deep reservations existed about the nationalist and antisemitic tendencies of the latter organization. From 1933 to 1938 (the year of the Union’s
dissolution), the group was reduced to silence, only permitted to conduct
purely religious demonstrations in public.
The study of Veronika Laufen is impressive, offering much valuable and
reliable information. Consulted were publications and archives of the Union
as well as a number of episcopal and town archives.The interpretation of documents is accurate and clearly arranged. A balanced narrative is presented,
offering a clear-cut overview of structural features and chronological developments. Laufen targets the heart of the problems, expressing sympathy for
her subject, but giving an objective analysis. She follows Michael Klöcker in
maintaining that the Catholic bourgeois milieu tended toward “authority.”That
might be true for the commitment of the commercial clerks to their Church,
but this argument has less validity given the obvious achievements of an
autonomous organization in a society that was indifferent or even hostile to
Catholics during the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich.
The addition of a biographical index would have been helpful. Individuals
such as Heinrich Held, Peter Cahensly, Otto Gerig, and Peter Altmeier tend to
receive the most coverage, whereas the other protagonists of the Union are
lesser known.The latter deserve much more attention in current historiography on social Catholicism in Germany.
University of Passau

WINFRIED BECKER

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In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World. Edited by
Owen White and J. P. Daughton. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2012.
Pp. xii, 324. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-539644-7.)
Des missionnaires plongés dans la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: Lettres des
Missions étrangères de Paris. Edited by Paul Christophe. [L’Histoire à vif.]
(Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. 2012. Pp. 367. €27,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2204-09688-1.)
French Catholicism in the modern period is heavily influenced by
church-state tensions, beginning with the attacks of the French Revolution
and culminating in the Law of Separation in 1905. The importance of this
context is unavoidable and is competently considered by scholars of the
period. One aspect of the French Church that has only recently seen
increased scholarly attention is that of French missionary activity. Two
recent works examine the complexities faced by French missionaries in the
light of church-state issues at home as well as other factors, both positive
and negative, that shaped their work.
The first work, In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern
World, is a collection of essays edited by Owen White and J. P. Daughton that
examines the situation of French missionaries across the globe. It contains
twelve original essays that are bookended by an introduction from the editors
and an afterword that compares the French and British missionary experiences.The essays are divided into four parts:Atlantic World; Ottoman Empire,
North Africa, and the Middle East; East and Southeast Asia; and Africa and
Oceania.This wide geographical scope is further augmented by a chronological range that treats topics from the aftermath of the French Revolution
through the mid-twentieth century. It is therefore a work that should be of
interest to many scholars, particularly specialists in non-European areas who
are interested in colonialism, empire, and the possible relationship of missionary activity to these issues.
Several tensions are present in this engaging work, a major theme of which
is that a comprehensive examination of French missionary activity resists any
neat characterizations and indeed often appears shaped primarily by the particulars of unique local situations rather than any overarching forces that
emerged during modern colonial expansion. One tension faced by all missionaries was the relationship between their faith and their country. Were
they first Catholic or French? The answer to this question might appear obvious when posed about those whose work was dedicated to spreading the
gospel, but circumstances sometimes made their primary role murky. For
example, the Lazarist Jean-Baptiste Étienne served as an official representative
of the French government in the Middle East during the 1840s. Furthermore,
to the extent that missionary goals overlapped with or aided the expansion
of empire, government support of the missions often resulted in situations
where the missionaries served dual roles on behalf of the Church and France.

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Charles Lavigerie, cardinal-archbishop of Algiers and founder of the White
Fathers, played a prominent role in the establishment of a protectorate in
Tunisia as well as other African missions founded in conjunction with French
expansion. The editors describe his efforts as a type of synergy that advanced
the interests of both Church and state.
A peaceful cooperation was not always present, however, an unsurprising
fact during a time of anticlericalism and growing French secularization.
Chapters on missionaries in Vietnam and Cameroon demonstrate a clashing
of outlooks that also occurred at times, resulting in government attempts to
thwart missionary goals. Jennifer Dueck’s description of this relationship in
her chapter on Syria and Lebanon during the Mandate Rule as “a combination
of affinity, opportunism and mistrust” (p. 164) is apt for several of the cases
examined in this work.
The contribution of this collection goes beyond the church-state dynamic
and includes examinations of missionary interactions in Muslim lands that
yielded both positive and negative outcomes, and the work of missionaries
beyond the borders of the French empire. Finally, the tensions inherent in the
uneven growth of local churches and the need to train indigenous clergy are
considered during a time when the missions were transitioning into a period
of decolonization. The breadth of In God’s Empire in no way detracts from
its coherence; rather, the particularities of each chapter serve to reinforce the
overall complexity of French missionary activity.
In contrast to this wide-ranging approach, a second work on French missionaries examines a much narrower topic but one that also yields interesting
conclusions. Des missionnaires plongés dans la Grande Guerre: Lettres des
Missions étrangères de Paris, edited by Paul Christophe, traces the reaction
of members of the MEP throughout the course of World War I. Its fifteen chapters are divided into five parts that roughly proceed in chronological order
from the onset of war through its difficult aftermath. Each chapter is organized by region that, in the case of the MEP, was spread across various parts of
Asia. There are several recurring figures throughout the work, and following
the course of an individual’s letters during these turbulent years provides fascinating insight into the outlook of these missionaries.Yet there also are many
people who appear only once, allowing the reader to hear from many priests
and trainees.The editor provides commentary throughout the book that aids
in grouping the letters together and explaining additional context. He also
should be commended for his thorough and meticulous footnotes that provide details on many otherwise obscure names.
The beginning of the war was a galvanizing experience for all citizens of
France, including those missionaries far from home. Despite the tensions
between French Catholics and their government, there was a widespread
sense that the cause was just and that all steps must be taken to defeat the

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Germans. For priests, this raised the possibility of mobilization and service in
the military, a prospect that was not appealing to many who had traveled
great distances and begun the promising work of evangelization. It is interesting to note, therefore, that the letters demonstrate it was ultimately the
support of bishops in missionary territories that first rallied support for the
war effort among missionaries.
The evolution of sentiments expressed during the course of the war is perhaps not altogether unpredictable. The beginning saw a certain level of
excitement among the mobilized who believed in the nobility of their cause
while expecting a short war with a victorious outcome. The leaders of the
missions also were optimistic that they would be able to retain enough missionaries to successfully continue their work. As the war moved along, optimistic expectations were dashed on all fronts—more missionaries were mobilized at an increasingly significant cost to the effectiveness of the missions
and in service of a war effort with no foreseeable ending. Letters increasingly
reflect the longing of priests to return to their missionary lands and the concern of their bishops that any gains were being lost due to insufficient manpower and financial resources.The circulation of news among the MEP contained ever-growing lists of their members who were killed or captured.The
end of the war and return of the missionaries was a welcome development,
but the geopolitical and financial consequences of the war were very harmful for the work of the MEP.
Ultimately this work serves as a firsthand account of the ongoing reactions
of French missionaries to World War I and is of interest to specialists in French
missions, the MEP, or the religious response to the war. Both this work and the
collection edited by White and Daughton shed further light on the contributions of French missionaries throughout the modern world, and the result is
two welcome additions to the existing literature.
Quadrangle Historical Research Foundation
Barto, PA

DANIEL V. FRASCELLA

Jacques Maritain e i diritti umani: Fra totalitarismo, antisemitismo e
decmocrazia (1936–1951). By Daniele Lorenzini. (Brescia: Editrice
Morcelliana. 2012. Pp. 206. €16,50 paperback. ISBN 978-88-372-2566-7.)
This is an historical rather than philosophical investigation of Jacques
Maritain’s political thought, although it should be of interest to anyone who
studies this dimension of Maritain’s work. Lorenzini’s central thesis is that
there is a significant development in Maritain’s political thought with respect
to human rights between Humanisme intégral (Paris, 1936) and his writings
during and after World War II, a development that was probably affected in
some manner by the French philosopher’s collaboration with the Committee
of Catholics for Human Rights in the United States and its review, The Voice
for Human Rights. The earlier development in Maritain’s political thought

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between his support of the French monarchist movement Action Française
and his shift toward a more liberal position is well known. But the later development, treated by Lorenzini in his book, seems not to have received so much
attention.
The book is divided into three chapters.The first chapter treats the history
of the American Committee of Catholics for Human Rights and Maritain’s collaboration with it. The committee, founded in 1939 as the Committee of
Catholics to Fight Anti-Semitism, sought to counter the growing anti-Jewish
tide that was abetted by the radio sermons and periodical Social Justice of
the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin. Two leading committee members and
friends of Maritain, Emmanuel Chapman and Harry McNeill, encouraged his
involvement with the group and asked him to write articles for The Voice.As
Lorenzini details, the committee changed its name to the Committee of
Catholics for Human Rights to emphasize its support for the brotherhood of
men with God as Father and to work for human rights on this basis against
the “new barbarisms” of the day that threatened not only Catholics but also
numerous other social, ethnic, and religious groups. Maritain’s contact and
work with the committee became quite close, given his decision to remain in
the United States during the war.
The second and longest chapter charts the development in Maritain’s
political theory from Humanisme intégral of 1936 to his publications and
speeches on political themes in 1943. Lorenzini notes that in Humanisme
intégral, although Maritain does open the door to a politically defined social
pluralism, he is not yet prepared to defend a human right to practice a nonChristian religion or to follow a non-Christian way of life.The pluralism supported by Maritain in this text is one based on a politically prudent tolerance.
Although Maritain does elaborate a theory of “rights of the human person,” he
avoids the language of “human rights” or the “rights of man” during this
period.The latter language found its way into Maritain’s work for the first time
in 1939, in the draft of “The Conquest of Freedom” (subsequently published
in 1940).According to Lorenzini, behind the lexical difference there was, for
Maritain, a philosophical and theological difference. Talk of the rights of the
human person was linked to the Christian understanding of man as created
by God, whereas the language of human rights and the rights of man was
linked with the secular political theory of the Enlightenment, especially JeanJacques Rousseau. Lorenzini contends that Maritain’s experience with the
committee and of the evil of fascism during the war led him to rethink his
approach to rights and finally to work out a reconciliation in his own thought
between a Christian political vision and the political legacy of the
Enlightenment, a reconciliation made clear by the title of his book Les droits
de l’homme et la loi naturelle (New York, 1942).
The final chapter is an account of Maritain’s work on the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the systematization of his later political

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thought—as it developed after Humanisme intégral—in Man and State
(Chicago, 1951).
Ave Maria University
Ave Maria, FL

JOSEPH G.TRABBIC

The Santa Marija Convoy: Faith and Endurance in Wartime Malta,
1940–1942. By Dennis A. Castillo. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, an
imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. 2012. Pp. ix, 261. $70.00. ISBN 978-07391-2895-4.)
Dennis A. Castillo’s The Santa Marija Convoy: Faith and Endurance in
Wartime Malta. 1940-1942 is an excellent addition to the scholarship on
World War II in Malta.The dominant narrative point of view of this account is
that of the faith of the people and the manner in which the Church, mainly
through parish priests, lived and suffered among the faithful through three
years of the worst aerial bombardment in history.
Castillo’s study delves into the major political context as it appeared just
before war broke out in Malta on June 11, 1940. The tension between the
British government and the pro-Italian nationalists took a turn once Italy
entered the war. Issues of language and allegiance, as well as of the successor
to Archbishop Mauro Caruana—head of the Catholic Church in Malta—came
to the fore. The ongoing machinations between the Stricklands of the
Constitutional Party and the suspicion with which the Holy See and Bishop
Mikiel Gonzi were viewed form an ongoing backdrop to the unfolding narrative that concludes with the confirmation of Gonzi as archbishop in the last
months of the war.
Against the political and strategic background, the highly personal
accounts of individuals are brought to the surface. The roles of faith and
courage are manifested through the dedication of priests, soldiers, and other
brave individuals in the many micro-accounts that Castillo brings together in
the telling of these events. The losses that were endured as the years of
bombings wore the island down to rubble and chased its people into shelters hewn from rock is narrated through many firsthand accounts drawn
from the diaries, memoirs, and interviews with survivors. The amount of
detail provided as Castillo describes one air attack after another brings home
the immense loss of human life; the families torn apart; the loved ones
destroyed and discovered beneath the stone of their houses. After each
attack the reader is given an account of the number of dead and injured; in
addition, Castillo provides the names and the ages of the dead, which personalizes the statistics.
Whereas many accounts focus on the soldiers’ experience, or on the
people and their faith, The Santa Marija Convoy places the experience of
priests—particularly parish priests—at the heroic center of the book. Of

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these, Monsignor Emmanuel Brincat, archpriest of Senglea, stands out in this
work as he did in his life. He stayed with his diminishing flock as Senglea, a
prime target on the shore of the Grand Harbour, was worn down to rubble
and ruin.The lives and deaths of priests, some caught hearing confessions as
the bombs fell and so risked their lives in the performance of their duties (as
occurred at the Sacro Cuor [Sacred Heart] Parish in Sliema), and others who
spurned the safety of the shelters so as to offer comfort to those dying above
ground, are testament to the work of faith in action.
The final section of The Santa Marija Convoy builds up the tension in
much the manner of a thriller. The desperation of an island on the brink of
starvation with only weeks to go before surrender is an indisputably highstakes situation.The drama increases as people begin a novena leading to the
Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on August 15 and a large convoy
leaves Britain with supplies to alleviate the crisis.These circumstances begin
to come together on August 13, when the first merchant ships enter the
Grand Harbour, and end with the August 15 arrival of the battered tanker
Ohio, still carrying its crucial supply of oil in its hold.This turning point of the
war in Malta brings together the courage and heroism of the service personnel, the people, and their prayers in a finale of truly dramatic proportions,
written with a hand that sustains the tension and the wonder of such a convergence of events.
University of Malta

CLARE VASSALLO

Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning. By Massimo Faggioli. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press. 2012. Pp. viii, 199. $14.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8091-4750-2.)
Massimo Faggioli’s intimate knowledge of the historiography of the
Second Vatican Council comes to life in this densely packed work. Before his
move to the United States, he belonged to the team at the (now styled)
Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII at Bologna, led by the
late Giuseppe Alberigo and then by Alberto Melloni, which produced, among
many publications on the Council, the classic five-volume History of Vatican
II. Thereby, and surely assisted by the very rich collection on the Council
within the Fondazione’s library as well as by the numerous conferences on
it that were sponsored there and elsewhere by Alberigo and Melloni, Faggioli
has acquired remarkable knowledge of the primary and secondary sources
relating to the Council as well as of the personalities who have been writing
about it. He has already written extensively on the Council, so the present
work may be considered the crown.
The book’s concern is to appraise the various interpretations of the
Council that took place during it and afterward. The year of publication
(2012) marks the golden jubilee of the Council’s beginning in 1962; so it is an
appropriate time for these reflections. There have already been many publi-

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cations and conferences marking the jubilee, and plenty more are planned for
the next few years—so far with a variety of emphases regarding interpretation but all revealing the Council’s continuing vitality and fascination.Within
this context, Faggioli’s work emphasizes the fierceness of the struggle within
the Council, as the word battle in the title clearly indicates.
The six chapters approach this central theme of struggle in various ways.
Chapter 1 provides a chronological approach, as the titles of the subsections
indicate: “What Vatican II Said about Vatican II (1960–65)”; “Vatican II:
Acknowledged, Received, Refused (1965–80)”; “Vatican II: Celebrated and
Enforced (1980–90)”; “Vatican II: Historicized (1990–2000)”; and “Towards a
New Fight over Vatican II?”. The approach of the other five chapters is thematic, with one major theme treated in each chapter. Chapter 2,“Questioning
the Legitimacy of Vatican II,” examines the topic of legitimacy under the following subheadings: “Opposite Extremisms”; “Vatican II: A Reform Council”;
“The Traditionalists: Opposition and Rejection of the Council”; “The
Lefebvrian Schism and Vatican II”; and “Different Destinies for Vatican II’s
Fringe Groups.” Attention to the smaller or “fringe” groups is welcome; too
often the Council is interpreted only in terms of the simplified categories of
“conservatives” and “progressives.” On the other hand, there is the danger that
the focus on “battle” obscures or minimizes areas of consensus among the
Council participants, including consensus on some issues among participants
who were divided on others: liturgy, missions, exemption (or non-exemption)
of religious orders, and war, for example.
Chapter 3 looks beyond “Beyond Rome,” with perceptive sections on
“Vatican II and Its Ecumenical Appraisal”; the publications “Concilium,
Communio, and Post-Vatican Theology”; “Liberation Theology and Feminist
Theology”; and “Catholic Theology in New Places:Vatican II in Africa,Asia and
Australasia.” Chapter 4 looks at the differing Augustinian and Thomistic
approaches to the Church and the world—an important, albeit somewhat
hidden, underlying theme among the Council members and recently highlighted by Pope Benedict XVI’s appreciation of St.Augustine. Chapter 5,“The
Clash of Narratives,” focuses principally on ecclesiology and liturgy.The final
chapter surveys the broadest themes and looks to the future, as indicated in
its title,“Macro-Issues of the Debate about Vatican II.” An epilogue, extensive
footnotes (pp. 145–85), and the well-arranged bibliography conclude this
excellent and fascinating study.
Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome

NORMAN TANNER, S.J.

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American
Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church. By
Timothy Matovina. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2012. Pp. xvi,
312. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-691-13979-1.)
Timothy Matovina’s Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s
Largest Church follows in the footsteps of previous scholarly endeavors on
Latinos and religion such as the three volumes edited by Jay P. Dolan and Allan
Figueroa Deck (Notre Dame, 1994–97), Recognizing the Latino Resurgence
in U.S. Religions by Ana María Díaz-Stevens and Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo
(Boulder, CO, 1998), and Latinos and the New Immigrant Church by David
A. Badillo (Baltimore, 2006), whose main thrust was to evaluate the Hispanics’
role in the development of U. S. Catholicism while recognizing the Church’s
role in the “Americanization” process.
Matovina is true to the body of literature from Latino sources in adopting
this perspective, although not always successful in expressing the dynamics
in the church-state relationships after the U.S. takeover of Puerto Rico and the
Southwest. He writes, “Mexico remains one of the most staunchly Catholic
nations in terms of the preferred denominational allegiance of its population,
while Puerto Rico . . . is among the most Protestant” (p. 31).Although factual,
the comparison is problematic. Mexico is an independent and sovereign
nation, whereas Puerto Rico is an American colony.To understand post-1898
religion in Puerto Rico, one must understand the nature of the private and
public school systems, control of banks and newspapers, exploitation of natural resources by U.S. business, expulsion of the Spanish clergy and religious
orders, and confiscation of Catholic Church property. Puerto Rico and New
Mexico would make for a better comparison, particularly in terms of
Catholicism’s role in preserving language and cultural identity in the face of
annexation leading to statehood (New Mexico) and the establishment of a
colonial status (Puerto Rico). Puerto Rico’s status as a colony explains why
the birth control pill could be tested there and how the sterilization of an estimated 40 percent of all women of child-bearing age could be accomplished.
This crucial issue led to political and ecclesiastical upheaval for Puerto Rican
Catholics in the 1960s, yet it is not mentioned in this book.
Not surprisingly, Matovina privileges the Mexican American experience.
Consideration is given to the Penitentes as preservers of pre-invasion Catholic
identity in New Mexico but not to Los Hermanos Cheos, the Puerto Rican lay
Catholic preachers who took initiative without episcopal approval to combat
Protestant proselytizing on the island in the early 1900s and later accompanied the migration to Chicago. Mexican American youth movements are highlighted, but the youth apostolic groups of the Northeast that played decisive
roles in the Encuentros Nacionales and the Eucharistic Congress of 1976 in
Philadelphia are not.

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Some of these gaps can be attributed to the author’s decision to treat his
topic thematically, rather than chronologically. Whereas the first chapter
remaps the growing Latino presence within U.S. Catholicism, the following
seven cover issues of integration, Hispanic ministry, parishes and apostolic
movements, leadership, worship and devotion, public Catholicism, and passing on the faith.A six-page epilogue, bearing the name of the book’s subtitle,
summarizes how the Hispanic/Latinos remain loyal to the faith, emphasize
issues of ministry (particularly local-level pastoral programs), and transform
U.S. Catholicism without giving up their cultural values in the process.
Matovina uses multiple sources: national surveys, census data, churchrelated documents, monographs, personal contacts, and narratives.
Unfortunately, citation of these sources is irregular. For instance, the National
Survey of Leadership in Latino Parishes and Congregations (NSLLPC) is alternately referred to as the “PARAL report,”“a 2002 report of the Program for the
Analysis of Religion Among Latinos,” or as a work listed under the name of the
editor. Social science data resulting from survey analysis, however, is a type of
information to be distinguished from a historian’s private interpretation or a
theologian’s hopeful expectation. Bothersome, too, is the use of unreferenced
citations. On page 42, Matovina writes: “One priest lauded his compatriots’
‘simple yet strong piety and trust in God.’”This comment, he says, elicited a
two-month dispute in the national Catholic weekly America; yet he seems to
have felt it was not important to give the priest’s name, the precise time of
the dispute, or dates of publication. Rather than the primary source, Matovina
gives a reference to his previous work. Further, on page 110, Matovina writes
without references:“. . . an observer quipped,‘In the Puerto Rican community
to be a cursillista . . . [a participant in the Cursillo movement] and a Catholic
was almost one and the same.’” The word-for-word but unattributed citation
is found in this reviewer’s Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue (Notre Dame,
1993, p. 110) and is attributed to Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo.The observation
was made after years of active ministry and scholarly analysis, thus representing—rather than a “quip”—a well-thought-out conclusion that was further
explained in Recognizing the Latino Resurgence (pp. 133–37). Finally, the
author seems more conversant with material written by non-Puerto Ricans
more than forty years ago than with the more recent scholarly production of
Puerto Ricans themselves.
These examples do not destroy the value of the book as a general
overview of the Latino Catholic experience that can be useful to seminarians
and students of religion. The annoying lack of precision about primary
sources or systematic research, however, undermines the claim to have presented a comprehensive understanding of Latino presence in U.S. religion.
Admittedly, in the limited space of a 312-page book (250 of text and 62 of
footnotes, bibliography, and index), it is literally impossible to evenly cover
more than twenty-one Hispanic subgroups, each with its own cultural particularities and history of contact with U.S. society.

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Whatever its shortcomings, this volume advances the field of Catholic
studies, undermining the notion that Hispanics are appendages to the
Catholic faith in this country or simply clients to be served. A reader cannot
help but conclude with the author that Latinos are active participants within
U.S. Catholicism, bringing new vigor and a vision for the future.
Union Theological Seminary (Emerita)

ANA MARÍA DÍAZ-STEVENS

The Reverend Jacob Bailey, Maine Loyalist: For God, King, Country, and for
Self. By James S. Leamon. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
2012. Pp. xx, 251. $80.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-1-55849-941-6; $28.95
paperback, ISBN 978-1-55849-942-3.)
Jacob Bailey (1735–1808) was the first Anglican minister to serve a congregation (1760–79) in the District of Maine at Pownalborough (Dresden). A
native of Rowley, Massachusetts, and a talented member of a poor
Congregational Church family, he was supported by the local minister who
aided his admission to Harvard College with the class of 1755. In common
with other eighteenth-century Anglican ministers of the region educated at
Harvard or Yale, he served as a schoolmaster before his conversion and voyage
to London for ordination.
The circumstance surrounding Bailey’s appointment as a missionary of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Pownalborough rather than to a
congregation in a town in Massachusetts or Connecticut is unclear. Perhaps
Sylvester Gardiner—the prominent Boston physician, merchant, and lead
investor of the Kennebeck Proprietors in Pownalborough and an active
Anglican—had petitioned Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London, for the
appointment of a minister to the young settlement. He had undertaken a similar request while a vestryman in 1748 at King’s Chapel in Boston on behalf
of the Reverend Charles Brockwell of Salem.
Two unyielding and personal controversies marked Bailey’s nearly twodecade ministry on the eastern frontier, which were initiated by his Harvard
classmates Charles Cushing (the local sheriff) and Jonathan Bowman (a
judge). The first issue was the effort by the two men to establish a
Congregational Church in the community. Perhaps they reasoned that
because the Congregational Church was established in Massachusetts, it
should be extended to Maine, which was a civil jurisdiction of the Bay Colony.
But the issue also may be interpreted as a lingering and divisive popular link
in the chain of criticism of the Anglican Church that was launched in New
England by Increase Mather in the 1680s and continued in successive
decades by such ecclesiastical leaders as his son Cotton, Jonathan Mayhew,
and the radical politician Samuel Adams. Bailey’s presence renewed the familiar objections to the presence of the Anglican Church, including the use of the
Book of Common Prayer as merely the Roman missal in English, questions

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regarding the essential purpose of the missionaries of the London-based
Society, and the prospect of an appointment of an American bishop.
Pownalborough’s parson was a visible representative of the old order that
prompted New England settlers to flee England in the 1620s and 1630s. But
the changed civil circumstances of the 1770s led to the second contentious
issue in dispute. Because Bailey was a minister of the English Church, he was
a target for disparagement by opponents of imperial policies. The members
of the local Committee of Public Safety authorized by the First Continental
Congress subjected him to examination to determine whether he was a
patriot or Loyalist. Bailey’s vulnerable position was shaped by a sense of moral
duty. On the occasion of his ordination in London, he was required to swear
an oath of loyalty to the supremacy of the Crown and parliament. In the drift
of increasing civil protest, he could not and would not forfeit that obligation.
The diligent parson’s congregation loyally and firmly supported him during
the turbulent proceedings, but finally in 1779 Bailey and his family sought
political refuge in Nova Scotia.
More than two centuries after Bailey’s death in Annapolis, Nova Scotia, an
accomplished scholar of Maine’s early history has deftly revisited Bailey’s life
and career. The foundation of this excellent work is an extraordinary and
extensive cache of Bailey’s personal papers, unpublished essays, and poems
that are deposited in several libraries. It is at once an admirable first-class biography and an informative glimpse of the impact of disruptive affairs on the
lives of individuals who embraced a minority view on civil issues. The book
also is a strong, valuable, and engaging social history of a turbulent period in
Anglo-American history.
Rothermere American Institute
University of Oxford

JAMES B. BELL

Missionaries in Hawai‘i: The Lives of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797–1883.
By Clifford Putney. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2010. Pp.
xiv, 218. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-55849-735-1.)
The nineteenth-century American Protestant mission to the Hawaiian
Islands has been the subject of a wide range of histories seeking to shed light
not only on this evangelical by-product of the Second Great Awakening but
also on the social, political, and economic development of the Hawaiian
Kingdom. Clifford Putney has added to this important discussion of transnational history a new work that offers a detailed look inside the lives of the
missionary couple Peter and Fanny Gulick. The biography aims to offer significant information on these American evangelical agents and their influence
within a foreign land, while addressing historiographical issues within the
field of missiology that have created a problematic paradigm for the study of
missionary families.

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Putney explains the relevance of his book’s subjects by writing,“Of all the
reform-minded families in American history, few were more active than the
Gulicks” (p. 1), and noting the broader family’s 140-year service to foreign missions. Peter and Fanny, the founders of this evangelical clan, arrived in the
Hawaiian Islands in 1828 as members of the third company of Protestant missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
(ABCFM). In addition to the prolific record-keeping that often characterized
these missions, the couple and their extended family produced and retained
a vast collection of personal papers, making them, according to the author,
“one of the best-documented middle-class families in American history” (p. 6).
Putney accesses this material to bring the story of the Gulicks to the reader
with detail, offering vivid description of their lives and their interactions with
a people very foreign to these New Jersey and Connecticut natives.The book
follows the couple through chapters that act as geographic markers of the differing mission stations where the Gulicks were assigned.This serves the overall narrative well, especially when the work allows for rich depictions of the
kuahiwi (mountains), kahawai (rivers), and other natural features of these
areas that were so prominent in the lives of their native inhabitants. Putney’s
significant knowledge concerning the ABCFM and the evangelical movements
of the period lend context to the writing, especially in areas such as when
offering background on the Calvinism that motivated Peter and Fanny.
The book’s sourcing is one of its strengths, but it also raises questions that
are at the fore of a leading, current historiographical issue in nineteenth-century Hawaiian history.The Gulicks lived and worked in a foreign nation amidst
a native population that by the 1860s was nearly fully literate and who produced a prolific collection of writing about their lives, their land, and their
lāhui (nation). During the nineteenth century, there were nearly 100
Hawaiian-language newspapers published in the islands; the first in 1834.This
prolific collection, nearly 125,000 over-sized pages, makes up only a part of
the varied native-language source material available today. Additionally, the
local mission institution to which the Gulicks belonged after 1854, the
‘Ahahui ‘Euanelio o Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Evangelical Association), printed all
reports and records in Hawaiian and in English.The English-language annual
reports, produced for the ABCFM, regularly differed from the native-language
versions, often substantially.Although histories on nineteenth-century Hawai‘i
sourced exclusively from English-language materials have added and will continue to add tremendously to our understanding of the islands of that period,
any text that seeks to shed—as the book’s publisher expresses it—“new light
on the democratization of government, the spread of capitalism, and the privitization of land” without accessing the native-language archive must be clear
about what voice it is offering and what has been left behind.
Putney raises his own important historiographical issue by pointing to the
need for complex, balanced histories of the mission and missionaries that are
neither hagiographic nor strictly condemnatory. In his text, the author does

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not shy away from critiques of the Gulicks; admitting that “their religious zeal
and cultural parochialism acted as blinders, preventing them from seeing
much value in traditional Hawaiian society” (p. 157). Putney also makes note
of the “racist (and now thoroughly discredited)” (p. 9) theory of social
Darwinism to which many within the later mission subscribed. He manages,
however, to portray the couple as complex characters, ones who had steadfastly committed their lives to a cause in which their sincere belief was
unquestionable. Putney’s biography of the Gulicks adds important knowledge
about missionary lives in Hawai‘i to previous understandings. Contextualized
as a view of Hawai‘i from English-language sources, it is a recommended read.
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

RONALD WILLIAMS JR.

Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New
Mexico. By Kathleen Holscher. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2012.
Pp. xii, 260. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-19-978173-7.)
Kathleen Holscher’s book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the
Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico, although burdened with a bulky
title, is a lucid and engaging presentation of a complex event. Hoslcher directs
attention to a bitter New Mexico quarrel that flared between Catholics and
Protestants over the public school employment of sisters garbed in religious
habits. The author argues that in post–World War II society, Americans, with
time to rethink their positions about the separation of church and state, created a watershed moment in long-standing tensions between Protestants and
Catholics. In concert with other postwar cultural transformations, the New
Mexico legal case influenced substantive alterations in national CatholicProtestant relations that persist to modern times.
Drawing on a plethora of Catholic and Protestant primary sources, conducting personal interviews, examining newspapers, and delving deeply into
legal records, trial transcripts, and constitutional law, Holscher crafted an
impressive analytical narrative. Such an assortment of administrative and
political detail with legal interpretations as a dominant theme, suggested a
page-by-page challenge to the reader’s attention. Instead, Holscher produced
a fascinating legal history, weaving into the prose the poignant voices of the
participants.
The six chapters include an explanation of how Catholic sisters came to
be public school teachers in New Mexico villages populated by Hispano families, until an influx of Anglo-Protestants altered the demographics; the attitudes, positive and negative, toward the sisters, as Protestants and Catholics
increased their mutual religious hostility; and a portrait of the curriculum and
atmosphere inside a public classroom overseen by a Catholic sister.The book
then discusses the organized Protestant resistance, led in Dixon, New Mexico,
by Lydia Zellers and at the national level by an organization known commonly

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as the POAU, which pushed the inflammatory phrase “captive schools” to
convey its view of the Catholic threat in public education.The author details
the POAU’s national momentum and the Catholic response, the Protestant distaste for all religious habits, and the 1948 Zellers lawsuit that charged no separation of church and state existed in the Dixon public schools. As Holscher
relates, the resulting painful trial brought students and sisters to the witness
stand in what became in the main a debate on the religious habit, and the
court decision convinced various women’s congregations to close their New
Mexico schools, withdraw from the state, and seek other mission opportunities. All of these events played out against a backdrop of national legal and
pedagogical implications, multisided religious intolerance, and divisive community relationships.
Each of these subjects embraces significant Catholic concerns that apply
directly to religious frictions in modern America. There are, however, two
other reasons why this book is an important addition to Catholic history.
First, it firmly establishes that the western Church contributed some of the
most critical elements in building American Catholicism. Hoslcher moves
western Catholicism away from its “quaint” adobe mission images, placing it
at the center of national debates about religious freedom. Religious Lessons
demonstrates that from the remote Southwest emerged a Catholicism confronting riveting theological and legal questions, absorbing apparent losses,
and regrouping through religious principles to build a stronger professional
place in education.
Second, Catholic sisters appear as articulate advocates for the western
Church and themselves. Conversant with American law, but adhering to their
religious identity, they negotiated taxing relationships in many arenas. The
results of congregational decisions on entire villages led to community void
and personal loss when sisters closed their missions.
This is an outstanding book, one especially for those who doubt the pivotal role of the West in the American Catholic Church or discount the
informed thoughtfulness with which sisters influenced local politics, even as
they strengthened their congregational identity.
Utah State University (Emerita)

ANNE M. BUTLER

Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam
War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left. By Jill K. Gill. (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press. 2011. Pp. xii, 551. $40.00. ISBN 978-087580-443-9.)
Jill K. Gill offers an exhaustively researched, well written, and important
study about the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the fate of the ecu-

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menical movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on its reaction to the
war in Vietnam, Gill provides sharp analysis into the NCC’s antiwar platform
and how this and other theological stances led to a divide between the laity
and leadership, as well as a diminishing of Protestant hegemony in America.
Gill uses vivid and detailed language to illuminate this history. Much as a novelist brings characters to life in the reader’s mind, Gill allows one to see the
history through her careful telling of the story. Long and dense with examples, Gill’s study rightfully places the NCC and ecumenism at the heart of
post–1945 U.S. religious history.
Gill begins with a broad survey of ecumenism from 1908 to 1963, including the 1950 creation of the National Council of Churches.This background
roots her study in the theological framework of ecumenical outreach and
activism that defined the NCC throughout its first three decades. Gill’s solid
grasp of the theology behind the organization and its leaders reveals the fact
that their faith drove their actions. She especially highlights their struggle
against the erroneous assumption that ecumenism meant a gathering of two
or more people from different denominations.As Gill describes:
[ecumenism] emphasizes community over self-interest, peaceful discussion over violence, collaboration over competition, universalism over
exclusivity, the prophetic role of the church to “speak truth to power” over
affirming an oppressive status quo, benevolence over individual acquisition, preaching social justice over mere personal piety, and the separation
of church and state. (p. 5)
This complex theology laid the groundwork for the NCC’s antiwar initiatives during the American phase of the Vietnam War. Robert S. Bilheimer, the
NCC’s director of the Peace Program and International Affairs Commission,
stated that he was not really “an anti-Vietnam War guy” (p. 145) but rather
expressed his ecumenical witness through an antiwar theology. Gill thus
uses the Vietnam War as a way to concentrate on the NCC’s calling during
this era. Through its vast network of national and international politicians
and religious leaders, the NCC often gained firsthand government knowledge about or eyewitness accounts of the atrocities committed in Vietnam
and the wayward turn of U.S. foreign policy as applied to this war. Such
insider information spurred the NCC’s stance, which pushed it theologically
to oppose the war by attempting to unite Christians across the country to
join its prophetic witness.
Yet this goal of unification brought about division within the very denominations that participated in the NCC, as Gill delineates in the NCC’s tension
with the lay/clergy divide. Denominational leaders voiced concern that their
more conservative constituents criticized the NCC’s liberal platforms. The
threat of lost revenue kept even these more liberal leaders from always acting
as the NCC hoped. Gill poignantly explains that this led to a diminished influ-

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ence for the NCC in national affairs by the 1970s, along with Richard M.
Nixon’s courting of the evangelical vote and subsequent shunning of mainline Protestantism because it failed to support him.
Gill concludes with an insightful epilogue that summarizes her findings,
interprets their meaning, and offers ideas for future ecumenism and theologians. Yet calling it an epilogue seems odd, given that it serves more as a conclusion that readers will not want to miss. The treatment of these vital
thoughts as almost an afterthought or optional reading feels awkward.
Nonetheless, Gill provides a new must-read to post–1945 American religious
history that details the triumphs, frustrations, decline, and yet importance of
the mainline, liberal, Protestant establishment in the 1960s and 1970s.
Concordia University Chicago

DAVID E. SETTJE

Latin American
Las palabras del silencio de Santa Rosa de Lima o la poesía visual del
Inefable. By Emilio Ricardo Báez Rivera. (Madrid: Universidad de NavarraIberoamericana; Frankfurt-am-Main:Vervuert. 2012. Pp. 196. €24,00 paperback. ISBN 978-84-8489-650-0 [Iberoamericana]; 978-3-86527-703-9
[Vervuert].)
When Isabel Flores de Oliva (1586–1617) was beatified in 1667 and canonized in 1671, she became America’s first saint, preceding even the archbishop who confirmed her:Toribio de Mogrovejo (1538–1606), who was canonized in 1726.This distinction awarded to a reclusive woman who wore the
habit of the Third Dominican Order created a wave of fervor and regional
pride that reinforced the grip of Catholicism in the New World. Biographies
in several languages began circulating in Europe in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, initiating a long list of books dedicated to eulogize and analyze this penitent figure that grew up and died so distant from the European
Catholic Reformation.The popularity of her image never waned, and she still
attracts countless religious and academic admirers.
St. Rosa de Lima did not write much apart from some now-forgotten
verses.The essential femininity of Rosa defined the means to express her religious beliefs. She followed the most ascetic practices of the day, largely practiced by cloistered women: maceration of her body, prayers, fasting, and acts
of charity. What was her most unusual expression of belief and the subject
studied in this book was a collage she created: the symbolic statement of her
faith expressed in paper and cloth. The themes were the fifteen mercies
received from God, also stated as wounds of the soul ascending via a spiritual
ladder.Two sheets of paper illustrated with the symbolic hearts and her personal calligraphic message were discovered in 1926 and, after thorough
authentication, have become the object of study by several authors.

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399

Emilio Ricardo Báez Rivera’s work offers an intensive interpretation of the
meaning of the emblematic hearts and their message. It is preceded by a thorough review of Rosa’s life, the apostolic processes opened after her death, and
the spiritual climate of the times in Lima and Spain. Rosa escaped the fate of
many who were declared false mystics, possibly owing to her connections
with ecclesiastical figures. She had visionary traits, like dozens of women in
her time, and the author explains her mystic vein within the boundaries of
her visionary experiences. Utilizing semiotic tools to interpret each one of
the details in the collage-holograph, he gives us a meticulous study of each
one of the figures.The morphology of the heart as the receptacle containing
all emotions and venue for receiving and giving the love of God was central
to female mysticism since the late-medieval period. Báez carefully examines
the figures that, in his opinion, condensed the teachings of the Church and
the feelings of a strong believer. Since the unique arrangement of each of the
hearts visually explains the religious message, the author’s task was to expand
the symbolic meaning and context of the tiny figures.This he has done with
a great deal of verve and imaginative prose that often calls on the Song of
Songs to explain the meaning of wounds, lightning, arrow, flames, nails, and
wings in the construction of the collage and the written message of the saint.
By also explaining the use and meaning of emblematic messages in the latemedieval and early-modern periods, the author helps the reader understand
the spiritual inheritance behind Rosa’s emblems. He also makes a strong case
for considering the plastic expression of intense faith a legitimate and innovative venue for the study of faith in periods of intense religious fervor.This
is a well-balanced, appealing, and commendable book that will interest those
studying female spirituality in the early-modern period.
Arizona State University (Emerita)

ASUNCIÓN LAVRIN

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de
Janeiro. By Mariza de Carvalho Soares. Translated by Jerry D. Metz. [Latin
America in Translation.] (Durham: Duke University Press. 2011. Pp. xiii,
321. $84.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8223-5023-1; $23.95 paperback, ISBN
978-0-8223-5040-8.)
In 1994, Mariza de Carvalho Soares uncovered the “Statutes of the
Congregation of the Minas Makii [Mahi] Blacks” in the Brazilian National
Archives, an unusual manuscript that preserved details of the lives of freed
and enslaved Afro-Brazilians in the mid-1700s.That document is at the center
of this newly translated book, in which the historian Soares presents a contextualized analysis of the active “reinterpretation” of their African past undertaken by those residents of colonial slave society. Drawing on further studies
into lay religious brotherhoods, Soares offers valuable insights into interpersonal relationships and identity formation for a small group of Africans in
Brazil and argues for a reconceptualization of ethnicity through “provenience
groups” based on their African origins.

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In the introduction, Soares explains her discovery of the “Mahi
Manuscript” and subsequent research into the brotherhoods formed within
the African slave community. She relates her surprise that a group of “Mahis”
from the so-called Mina Coast of Africa developed an independent understanding of their origins and identity through the Brotherhood of Santo
Elesbão and Santa Efigênia and its subgroups. In Rio de Janeiro, which had a
slave population that included mostly Bantu-speaking Africans from regions
near present-day Angola, further records of the Mina-Mahi Africans were
scarce; Soares scoured baptismal records, marriage records, obituaries, and
even wills to glean evidence for her arguments on the meaning of terms designating ethnicity and origins. In this, she emphasizes the “importance of
Catholicism in the new social configurations” adopted by “those living under
slavery” (p. 13) in colonial Brazil.
In part 1, Soares summarizes the difficult history of the Atlantic slave trade
as the Portuguese expanded their imperial reach down the west coast of
Africa and repeatedly took captive “Minas” from the Bight of Benin. She uses
baptismal records to confirm the growing historical evidence for Mina presence in Rio de Janeiro, but warns that labels used to identify slaves such as
nação (“nation”) and terra (“land of origin”) do not signify a stable ethnicity
or a fixed cultural heritage. Instead, she develops the concept of “provenience
groups” to identify Africans from recognizable cultural regions whose own
efforts both preserved and transformed their religious, social, and personal
identities in their new circumstances.
In part 2, she narrows her focus to the history of Rio de Janeiro and the
lay religious brotherhoods established in the Roman Catholic churches there
for specific African communities. Using slave obituaries, she argues that “religious practice and affiliation” were crucial for both “self-determination” and
“maintenance of provenience groups” (p. 131) among slaves. Founding documents for the Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia and its “Mahi
Congregation” subgroups suggest that their functions exceeded religious
devotion, as members created alliances and kinship within those autonomous
religious spaces.To this end, Soares claims that the Mahi Manuscript may be
the “most important document” (p. 183) for understanding Afro-Brazilian lives
in that era. She completes this book with a new “Postscript” explaining her
conclusions and expanding her account with individual biographies of two
men and one woman from three different Mina subgroups.
This book provides both detailed information on the struggles of the
Minas in Rio de Janeiro and a historical and theoretical framework through
which to understand them. Despite the clarity of the translation, some readers may find this book challenging because of the sheer density of information.That challenge notwithstanding, Soares has written a noteworthy contribution to the study of Africans in colonial slave society.
Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington

CAROLE MYSCOFSKI

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401

Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in
Colonial Mexico. By Mónica Díaz. [First Peoples: New Directions in
Indigenous Studies.] (Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 2010. Pp xvi,
231. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8165-2853-0.)
Colonial Latin American women’s studies have experienced much attention in the last decades, with literary studies that have emphasized the relation of women with mainstream religious institutions (Catholic Church,
Inquisition). Many scholars have provided glimpses into religious women’s
daily lives and expressions of resistance against power (usually male ecclesiastical authorities).This attention has resulted in a significant amount of studies of religious women’s writings in the last thirty years, and new approaches
are needed to expand the canon of this subgenre. In this scholarly context,
Mónica Díaz’s book offers new ways to read “conventual writing” at the same
time that she reflects about theoretical notions that need reformulation
within this genre in at least two directions in literary studies. First, Díaz
approaches conventual writing considering both transatlantic and hemispheric studies that question traditional borders of twentieth-century academic knowledge. Second, Díaz’s overall scholarship examines issues of ethnicity and the fluidity of key concepts such as gender roles and identity,
while looking into the feminine perception of the world as well as the construction of sources of knowledge by female subjects.
The main focus of Indigenous Writings is the textual negotiations of
indigenous women that had to sort out many difficulties to participate in the
convent’s life in colonial New Spain (Mexico). In spite of restrictions and prohibitions stemming from issues of gender, race, and ethnicity, the efforts of the
indigenous nuns studied by Díaz succeeded with the foundation of convents
for Indian women in eighteenth-century Mexico. In this way, one contribution
of Díaz’s book to the field of Latin American colonial women’s studies is the
access given to documents of unknown subjects and to hear their voices and
the expression of their textual agency through their writings.
This book consists of six chapters in addition to an introduction and three
appendixes of documents written in Spanish by Mexican Indian nuns and translated into English by the author.The six chapters are distributed in two distinct
parts. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 examine the social, historical, and political context in
which indigenous nobility of Mexico developed and negotiated their privileges
and positions in Christian spaces during the colonial period. Chapter 1 studies
the conditions that allowed the creation of convents for indigenous women, at
first excluded from them because of their ethnicity. Chapter 2 examines what
Díaz calls “the colonial ideology of difference”(p.15) by which New Spain’s religious discourses debated the creation of such space for indigenous women.
Chapter 3 studies the 1724–62 textual production about the opening of the
Convent of Corpus Christi. With the frame developed by these chapters, Díaz
enters into the analysis of different textual genres: biographies and hagiogra-

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phies of indigenous nuns (chapter 4), sermons addressed to indigenous women
(chapter 5), and letters by indigenous nuns who questioned the admission of
Spanish and criollo nuns in their convent (chapter 6).
In this way, this monograph proposes that indigenous peoples saw convents not as another form of colonial domination but as a way to support their
ethnic autonomy. Díaz takes the notions of “colonial domination” and “colonial
difference” to another level by proposing to look at the formation and transformation of indigenous identities in New Spain and by looking at other initiatives that did not flourish in the official establishment of institutions, but did
reflect on the issues of who is an Indian and why an Indian could not participate in the formation and governance of institutions in colonial Mexico.
Michigan State University

ROCÍO QUISPE-AGNOLI

Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican
Revolution, 1940–1968. By Jason H. Dormady. (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press. 2011. Pp. ix, 206. $28.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-82634951-4.)
Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the
Mexican Revolution, 1940–1968, examines the histories of three religious
communities founded in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution. The book
follows the life of each community’s founding patriarch from early in the century through the 1960s.The author argues that each community attempted its
own restoration of an idealized Christianity, seen as a basic way of life for its
members; in doing so, they charted out a particular and idealized form of
modern citizenship in revolutionary Mexico.Through case studies, Dormady
argues that community building in the context of weak or inconsistent rule
of law can work in different ways: sometimes the victim of a centralizing
state, but also capable of engaging the law, taking advantage of its uneven
dominion, and molding it to fit particularist objectives or ideals.
The material is organized around three case studies and a final interpretive
chapter. The central themes of these studies focus on the origins of each
church; the problems confronted by founders in establishing community; relations with government and ecclesiastical authorities; and those resulting from
the establishment of a religiously grounded community. Chapter 1 reconstructs the history of the Light of the World, an Evangelical Pentecostal church
in Guadalajara. Its history follows the life story of its founding patriarch,
Eusebio Joaquin Gonzalez, known to his faithful as Aaron. Chapter 2 examines
the Mormon-based Fullness of the Kingdom of God Church, established in
Mexico state. Margarito Bautista founded the church and, with it, a community known as New Jerusalem in the small market town of Ozumba. Chapter
3 follows the history of the Our Lady, Help of Christians colony, a Catholic
community established in southern Baja California. Its founder, Salvador

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403

Abascal, led a faction of the conservative lay-Catholic political group known
as the National Synarchist Union and founded a short-lived religious community in the desert. The final chapter ties the three cases together through a
series of overarching themes examining the stress points between local practice and the sphere of law; the absence of law and its effect on religious devotion and citizen’s rights; and the tension between “informal” religious, corporate identity and “formal” secular identities (p. 131). The discussion echoes
James C. Scott’s scholarship on community resistance and work by Gilbert M.
Joseph and Daniel Nugent on state formation. It moves the discussion forward
by placing religiosity in the center of local identities.
Gathering the sources used for this book was a difficult task. These communities were formed at the edge of civil society, resisted publicizing their
inner workings, and left little written testimony. For the Light of the World
church, Dormady made creative use of its official histories. He reconstructed
the story of New Jerusalem through testimonial writing by several community members; his interpretation compared the writing of rival members, and
complemented it with Bautista’s own religious writings. The history of Our
Lady, Help of Christians colony was limited by a paucity of sources.Abascal’s
own autobiography dominates the chapter, complemented to some extent by
sources culled from Mexico’s National Archive. Here, Dormady might have
included histories of Abascal’s rivals—Juan Ignacio Padilla and Antonio Santa
Cruz—as well as Abascal’s own vast writing. Furthermore, the intelligence
community in Washington was familiar with Abascal due to his philo-fascist
views, and it is surprising that Dormady did not follow this line of research.
Despite these minor criticisms, Primitive Revolution is a fascinating read
for historians of Mexico, religion, and utopian societies. It will be popular in
undergraduate classrooms, but scholars should also be interested in its case
studies. The book argues successfully that postrevolutionary Mexico was a
diverse society, and that this ostensibly Catholic nation was host to many
devotions, each deeply invested in citizenship and the politics of revolution.
ROBERT CURLEY

Universidad de Guadalajara
Far Eastern

The Memoirs of Jin Luxian, Vol. 1: Learning and Relearning 1916–1982.
Translated by William Hanbury-Tenison. Introduced by Anthony E. Clark.
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2012. Distrib. Columbia
University Press. Pp. xxii, 296. $28.00 paperback. ISBN 978-988-8139-67-5.)
Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian (1916–2013) is one of the most significant figures in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of
China. Yet his role in the struggles and the revival of the Church in China
remains controversial. Abroad as well as in his home country, he has received

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both strong criticism and praise.This first volume is in part an Apologia pro
Vita Sua by which Jin hopes to dispel “accusations mischievously included”
(p. 3) against him, thereby ceasing to be a sign of contention and turning
instead into a beacon of hope and reconciliation for the Chinese Catholic
Church.
The book is divided into five parts, each composed of several chapters that
deal with the following subjects: Jin’s youth and his family in the Shanghai area;
his life as a seminarian and a young Jesuit from 1932 to 1947; his studies
between 1947 and 1950; his ministry in Shanghai until his arrest in 1955; and
finally the twenty-seven years spent in prisons and re-education camps until his
return to the Diocese of Shanghai in 1982. This chronological order is sprinkled
with many flashbacks and flashforwards as Jin ponders events and persons that
influenced the course of his life.
Apart from his three-year study abroad, Jin’s life was filled with hurtful
experiences. Orphaned at a very young age and ignored by most of his relatives, he persevered in his calling to the priesthood. Subsequently, his obedience to his Jesuit superiors placed him several times in harm’s way. The most
painful blow came during his detention when he learned that his Jesuit confreres had vilified him and branded him a traitor. Yet in the face of all these
adversities, his love for the Jesuit Order remained steadfast.
The last two sections of the book about his return to Shanghai in 1950 and
his years in detention are certainly the most important and revealing. They
shed a complementary and sometime different light on accounts written by
two other Jesuits: Jean Lefeuvre’s eyewitness account, Les enfants dans la
ville, chronique de la vie chrétienne à Shanghai 1949–1955 (Paris, 1956),
and Paul Mariani’s academic study, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and
Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai (Cambridge, MA, 2011;
reviewed ante, 98 [2012], 621–22). Jin writes of the “crimes” he confessed and
how, in the recording that was made, he exhorted the people on the outside
not to oppose the government.This confession, he writes, was not a betrayal
of his loyalty to the Church but just one of the many choices he had to make
in his life, all based on the Jesuit principle “To the greater glory of God.” To
which he adds: “As long as my actions served the greater glory of the Lord, I
went ahead in confidence” (p. 2). It is on the basis of this same principle that
he decided, in 1982, to resume pastoral duties in Shanghai.Time will tell if this
explanation was enough to satisfy his detractors.
The image that emerges from these memoirs is that of a deeply spiritual
clergyman whose faith never wavered. A remarkable thinker well grounded
in his Chinese culture and tradition as well as in the Church doctrine, he finds
complementarities rather than oppositions between the teachings of China’s
ancient sages and those of Christ. As such, he sees himself as walking in the
footsteps of Matteo Ricci.

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One cannot but be amazed by the many vignettes provided by Jin about
significant religious personalities such as Celso Costantini, Teilhard de
Chardin, Henri de Lubac, Hans Küng, Karl Rahner, Lou Tseng-Tsiang, and
Albert Decourtray. The same applies to political figures in the Kuomintang
(KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But the bulk of Jin’s insightful reminiscences concern the Catholic personalities with whom he lived in
Shanghai, like the bishop Kung Pinmei, the Jesuits Yves Henry and Fernand
Lacretelle, and the philanthropist Lo Pahong. Historians should value this
trove of information, although the lack of a comprehensive name index renders the task difficult.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in religion in China.
Beijing Center for Chinese Studies

JEAN-PAUL WIEST

NOTES AND COMMENTS
________
Association News
During its 93rd Annual Meeting held in New Orleans on January 3–6, 2013,
the American Catholic Historical Association announced its academic/scholarly prizewinners at Antoine’s restaurant in the French Quarter on Saturday,
January 5. They included the recipients of the John Gilmary Shea Prize, the
Howard R. Marraro Prize and the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award for 2012.
John Connelly (professor of history, University of California, Berkeley) was
given the John Gilmary Shea Prize for his book From Enemy to Brother: The
Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press). As the Shea committee noted, Connelly has made
a unique contribution with his original and thoroughly researched study of
how and why the Holocaust changed the attitude of the Catholic Church to
the Jewish people and resulted in Nostra Aetate, the declaration of the
Second Vatican Council in 1965 that revolutionized the relationship between
Catholics and Jews. He has demonstrated that this change was due not only
to popular revulsion at the horror of the Holocaust but also was rooted in the
groundwork laid by Catholic scholars in 1930s who were pioneers in combating anti-Judaism within the Catholic Church. Connelly’s book is noteworthy not only for the range and thoroughness of his research and the clarity of
his presentation but also for his dispassionate and nonpolemical approach to
a highly controversial topic.
Anne Jacobson Schutte (professor of history emerita, University of
Virginia) was selected as the 2012 Marraro Prize recipient by the ACHA for
her book By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early
Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). In announcing the
award, the Marraro committee noted that
[i]n a lively text marked by vivid examples, Anne Jacobson Schutte masterfully revises our picture of how religious houses fit into early modern
family dynamics. Men as well as women were forced into vows, often
through a violence shaped by strategy and circumstance that left deep
scars. Schutte carefully lays out the institutional apparatus of the houses
and the legal processes for release from vows, and offers a rich store of
data for further examination.
Benjamin D. Reed (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) received
the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award for “Devotion to Saint Philip Neri in
406

NOTES AND COMMENTS

407

Colonial Mexico City.” The committee members agreed that Reed’s research
on the Oratorians was of exceptional significance. The Oratorians, as he
explained, contributed to “modernizing the role of priests” during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries at a time when modern Catholicism
was experiencing major changes due to the Council of Trent, the Reformation
movements, and the increasing European involvement in the Americas.
According to the committee, his innovative work will provide
the first in-depth history of [one of the] Congregations of the Oratory in
the Spanish Empire. Mr. Reed’s proposal demonstrated several strengths.
His project is thoughtful and well-conceived. He has already completed a
significant amount of research and he communicates his findings clearly
and precisely. The project requires considerable methodological sophistication, which is reflected in work already completed. As historians begin
to study the effects of Vatican II, Mr. Reed’s study of an earlier reform movement will be of considerable interest.
The Reverend Marvin R. O’Connell (professor emeritus of history,
University of Notre Dame) was selected for the Distinguished Scholar Award,
in recognition of his achievements as a master historian of people, movements, and institutions stretching from Rome to St. Paul and from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He launched his scholarly career in 1964
when Yale University Press published his book Thomas Stapleton and the
Counter Reformation. Displaying the remarkable range and versatility that
would be the hallmarks of his scholarly career, O’Connell turned next to The
Oxford Conspirators: A History of the Oxford Movement, 1833–1845 (New
York, 1969). Five years later, he contributed The Counter Reformation,
1559–1610 (New York, 1974) to the famous Rise of Modern Europe series.
Turning next to the American Church and his own Minnesota, O’Connell published John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St. Paul, MN, 1988).
Returning to intellectual history and largely to European concerns, he next
published Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis
(Washington, DC, 1994) and Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart (Grand
Rapids, MI, 1997). In his retirement, O’Connell has published two manuscripts
to date: a complete study of Notre Dame’s founder Edward Sorin (Edward
Sorin, Notre Dame, 2001) and Pilgrims to the Northland: The Archdiocese of
St. Paul, 1840–1962 (Notre Dame, 2009).
The Reverend Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. (professor of church history, St.
Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, as well as history instructor,
Institute of Black Catholic Studies, Xavier University of Louisiana) was presented with the Distinguished Teaching Award. In nominating him for this
teaching award, one of his students wrote that “[w]hat distinguishes Fr.
Cyprian Davis’s teaching technique is his unique ability to teach history
through storytelling in a manner that invites students to enter into and experience the story.” Another nominator echoed those sentiments, commenting

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

that “[w]hat remains etched in my memory and spirit is how he would place
the class in the proper perspective each day,” allowing students to focus on
that which was important: God working in and through history and time.Yet
another student summed up for the nominating committee the reason for
selecting Davis for this honor:“His work has been sheer grace for our Catholic
community.”
Dr. Norman C. Francis (president, Xavier University of Louisiana) was given
the Distinguished Service to Catholic Studies Award for his leadership in fostering the study of the history of Catholicism.This fall, Francis will mark his
45th year as Xavier University president, making him the longest serving president of a U.S. postsecondary institution. Since the mid-1970s Francis and
members of the Xavier University community have made a significant contribution to the study of Roman Catholic history within the African American
context with the founding and nurturing of the Institute for Black Catholic
Studies (IBCS). For approximately forty years, the IBCS has been a center for
the study of the black Catholic experience as well as the locus for preparing
laymen and laywomen, religious, and members of the clergy for more meaningful and effective ministry within the black Catholic community. In 2006,
Francis received the Medal of Freedom by then-President George W. Bush for
his efforts in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
At the ACHA Annual Business Meeting on Friday, January 4, Nelson H.
Minnich (editor, The Catholic Historical Review) read the following report of
Monsignor Robert Trisco (acting editor for 2012), who was unable to attend.
Report of the Editor
I had the honor of serving as acting editor of The Catholic Historical
Review during the last academic year, while the editor, Professor Nelson H.
Minnich, was enjoying a well-merited sabbatical leave from both his teaching
and editing positions. This report, however, covers the calendar year 2012,
which coincided with volume XCVIII of the journal. That volume contains
865 pages in Arabic numerals, thirty pages of preliminary material in Roman
numerals, and twenty-six pages of the index, making a total of 921 pages.This
volume is thirty-eight pages shorter than the previous volume. When the
membership dues in the American Catholic Historical Association were paid
by check or money order, many members added to their payments a contribution for the expansion of the journal. In this way, we received $11,772 in
2005, $4592 in 2006, $5682 in 2007, and $6317 in 2008 (the last year for
which the amount was reported).This substantial support enabled the editors
to add many pages, thus bringing more articles and book reviews to subscribers. Since the dues began to be collected online, this source of assistance
has been eliminated. However, a few subscribers have continued to send in
their contributions; sincere thanks are extended to Professor Paul F. Grendler
(Chapel Hill, NC; University of Toronto emeritus); Dr. David M. Rooney

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409

(Hofstra University); and the Most Reverend Walter James Endyvean (auxiliary
bishop, Archdiocese of Boston) for their generous support. The editors welcome contributions of any size at any time and will use them exclusively for
additional pages.
Published in these 865 pages were eleven articles; one autobiographical
essay by an eminent scholar in the series Journeys in Church History; two
“Forum Essays” with multiple reviewers of a single book; one review article
dealing with four books; the reports from the ninety-second annual meeting
of the Association, reviews of 261 books; fifteen brief notices; and the quarterly sections of “Notes and Comments,” “Periodical Literature,” and “Other
Books Received.”
Of the eleven articles, four are in medieval history (including the ACHA
presidential address delivered in January 2012), two in early-modern European history, two in late-modern European, one in late-modern European and
American history, one in American history, and one in American and Latin
American history.The editor and acting editor remain interested in receiving
more articles on American church history. Of the eleven article authors, five
are Americans, three are Spaniards, one is Canadian, one is Belgian, and one is
Italian.
The 257 book reviews (four of which covered two books) were divided
into the following categories: twenty-three in general and miscellaneous,
eighteen in ancient, seventy-seven in medieval, fifty-seven in early-modern
European, thirty-seven in late-modern European, twenty-eight in American
and Canadian, thirteen in Latin American, three in African, and five in Far
Eastern history. By nationality, 179 of the reviewers were from the United
States; thirty-nine from England; nine from Canada; four from Australia; three
each from Israel, Italy, and Scotland; and one each from Belgium, Brazil,
Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Northern Ireland, Mexico, The
Netherlands, New Zealand, the People’s Republic of China, Poland, Portugal,
Republic of Ireland, Sweden, Taiwan, and Wales. In selecting reviewers, preference is given to qualified members of the Association and then to American
historians, but in many cases it is necessary to turn to experts of other countries.Their collaboration makes the journal truly international in character.
This year, twenty-eight articles were received; the present status is shown
in the following table:

410

NOTES AND COMMENTS

TABLE 1.
Manuscript status
Area
General
Medieval
Modern
European
American
Canadian
Caribbean
Chinese
TOTAL

Under
Accepted Rejected Withdrawn Revision Pending TOTAL
2

1

2
2

1
1

2
4
1

1
1

7

1
9

1

1
1

1
4

3
2

8
9
1
2
3
28

1
2
10

It is expected that many of the articles still under consideration or in the
process of revision will eventually be accepted.
The Catholic Historical Review will reach its centenary in April 2015.The
editor is planning a special issue to mark this milestone; he has invited distinguished scholars to prepare articles evaluating the journal’s contributions
in their respective fields over the past 100 years. In the meantime, the journal
will continue to serve the members of the Association and the entire community of church historians with the material of the highest quality.
ROBERT TRISCO
Acting Editor,Volume XCVIII
Vatican Library
Monsignor Cesare Pasini, prefect of the Apostolic Vatican Library,
announced the availability of the first 256 manuscripts now digitized and
accessible through the Digitized Materials link on the library’s Web site.
Center for Migration Studies Moves to More Accessible Location
in Manhattan
The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) has announced its move from
Staten Island to 27 Carmine Street, New York, NY 10014. Its new address in
Greenwich Village is more easily accessible to researchers.As CMS is a mission
of the Society of Saint Charles-Scalabrinians, a congregation of priests and
brothers dedicated to the care of immigrants, the archive is committed to documenting the immigrant experience. Its collections cover two broad areas.
Many contain personal papers, institutional records, publications, and photographs generated by settled immigrants (mostly Italian Americans) in various

NOTES AND COMMENTS

411

areas of the United States. However, CMS is unique in its documentation of
the experience of migration; several collections were created by agencies
offering care to immigrants passing through Ellis Island or traveling across the
El Paso-Mexico border, or by advocacy groups lobbying Congress on behalf of
immigrants. Since the founding of CMS in 1964, researchers have found endless use for these records. Space at the new location is available for
researchers, with room for computer and scanner use.A project is underway
to post CMS finding guides on the Internet to facilitate planning. Researchers
can reach CMS by email at cms@cmsny.org.
Conferences
The sixth triennial meeting of the Redemptorist History Conference will
take place September 30–October 4, 2013, at the Notre Dame Retreat House
in Canandaigua, New York. Sponsored by the Institute for Redemptorist
Historical Studies of North America, the conference is open to all.
Presentations will highlight Redemptorist preachers, professors, and promoters of healing in the United States and Canada. Among the subjects will be the
priests Francis J. Connell, Louis Hartman, Joseph Manton, Matthew Meehan,
and Francis X. Murphy. Additionally, sessions on the shrines of Quebec’s Ste.
Anne-de-Beaupré and Boston’s Mission Church will be included. Kathleen
Sprows-Cummings (Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism,
University of Notre Dame) will provide a keynote on St. John Neumann.
Further information may be obtained by visiting http://www.redemptorists.com/redemptorist-historical-institute.html.
On November 8, 2013, Georgetown University will host the one-day conference “Trent and Its Impact” to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the close
of the Council of Trent. The speakers are Kenneth Appold (Princeton
Theological Seminary); Laura Benedetti (Georgetown); Tracy Cooper (Temple
University); Simon Ditchfield (York University, UK); Marcia Hall (Temple);
Nelson H. Minnich (The Catholic University of America); John O’Malley, S.J.
(Georgetown); and Jared Wicks, S.J. (Pontifical College Josephinum,
Columbus, OH).The conference will open on November 7 at 4:30 p.m. with
a performance of Palestrina’s “Mass of Pope Marcellus.” The conference is free
and open to the public. Further details will be available on the Georgetown
Web site.
On November 14–15, 2013, the workshop “Christian Democratic Ideology
and Programmatic Development, 1945–2000” will be held in Leuven, Belgium,
with sponsorship by three institutes: KADOC–KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium),
the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (Sankt Augustin-Berlin), and the Istituto Luigi
Sturzo (Rome).Those who wish to present a paper at the conference should
contact Luc Schokkaert at Luc.Schokkaert@kadoc.kuleuven.be.

412

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Publications
The Internationale Gesellschaft für Konziliengeschichtsforschung held a
symposium in Esztergom, Hungary, on September 16–20, 2010, on the
theme “Akten, Dekrete und Tagebücher als Konzilsquellen.”The papers read
at that meeting have recently been published in two issues of the
Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum for 2010 (vol. 42). In Heft 1, Ralf van
Bühren provides an introduction (pp. 1–6).The other authors and their contributions are Thomas Graumann, “Protokollierung, Aktenerstellung und
Dokumentation am Beispiel des Konzils von Ephesus (431)” (pp. 7–34);
Manuel Mira, “Valoraciones recientes del Sínodo Lateranense del 649” (pp.
35–50); Richard Price,“Aspects of the composition of the Acts of the Lateran
Synod of 649” (pp. 51–58); Heinz Ohme, “Die Quellen des Concilium
Quinisextum (691/2)” (pp. 59–74); Peter Bruns, “Der Melkit Theoodor Abû
Qurra und die Ökumenischen Konzilien” (pp. 75–92); Nelson H. Minnich,
“The Implementation of Lateran V by the Milanese Councils of San Carlo
Borromeo” (pp. 93–102); Gabriel Adriányi, “Die letzte ungarische
Nationalsynode von 1822 und die Protestanten” (pp. 103–18); and Carlo
Pioppi,“Due fonti di storia ecclesiastica a cavallo tra ‘800 e ‘900: il Concilio
Neogranadino del 1868 e quello di Cartagena del 1902 di fronte alle sfide
della modernità” (pp. 119–44). In Heft 2 are the following contributions:
Péter Kardinal Erdö,“Die Diözesansynoden in Ungarn nach der Wende von
1989–1990” (pp. 373–78); Ansgar Frenken, “Darstellende Quellen zum
Konstanzer Konzil: kritische Anmerkungen zum Genus der ‘Tagebücher
Fillastres, Cerretanis und Turres’ und ihres spezifischen Quellenwerts” (pp.
379–402); Johannes Grohe, “Der Traktat De concilio provinciali (1565) des
Felice Peretti (Sixtus V.)” (pp. 403–12); and Ralf van Bühren,“Die Rezeption
kirchlicher Überlieferung durch das Zweite Vatikanum am Beispiel der
Konzilsaussagen über Kunst und Künstler” (pp. 413–30).
The 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) is celebrated
in six articles published in Evangelische Theologie (vol. 72, no. 6, 2012).
Among them are Jan Stievermann, “Der Heidelberger Katechismus in
Nordamerika: Von der Kolonialzeit bis zum Bürgerkrieg” (pp. 432–43) and
Daniel Silliman, “Der Heidelberger Katechismus in Nordamerika: Von
Bürgerkrieg bis heute” (pp. 445–57).
Efemérides Mexicana has devoted its entire issue for May–August 2012
(vol. 30, no. 89) to Don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. It consists of the following eight articles: José Rubén Romero Galván,“Juan de Palafox y los indígenas
novohispanos” (pp. 145–56); Gregorio Bartolomé Martínez,“Política e Iglesia
en tiempo de necesarias reformas” (pp. 157–83); Montserrat Galí Boadella,“La
cathedral palafoxiana: arte, liturgia y política en la cathedral de Puebla (1649)”
(pp. 185–213); Raquel Gutiérrez Estupiñán, “«Por las callejuelas de lo cotidiano». Palafox, anotador de las Cartas de Santa Teresa” (pp. 215–30); Nelly
Sigaut, “El Obispo y sus retratos: La iconografía de don Juan Palafox y

NOTES AND COMMENTS

413

Mendoza” (pp. 231–52); Francisco De Icaza Dufour,“La obra jurídica de Juan
de Palafox” (pp. 253–71); Juan Carlos Casas García, “La visita del Obispo
Palafox a la Universidad novohispana (1644–1645)” (pp. 273–83); and
Ildefonso Moriones,“Íter del Proceso de Beatificación de Juan de Palafox” (pp.
285–324).
In anticipation of the bicentenary of the birth of St. John Bosco,
Itinerarium: Rivista Multidisciplinare dell’Istituto Teologico “San
Tommaso”–Messina (vol. 20, nos. 50–51, 2012) has published five articles
edited by Antonino Romano under the heading “Don Bosco Maestro di speranza per i giovani di tutti i tempi: Saggi in occasione del Bicentenario della
Nascita di San Giovanni Bosco (1815–2015).” Following a “Presentazione” by
Gianni Mazzali (p. 17) are “Gli ultimi giorni di Don Bosco, la sua malatia e la
morte santa dai racconti dei testimoni” by Arthur J. Lenti (p. 19–76; previously
published in English in the Journal of Salesian Studies, 5 [Autumn, 2004]);
“Don Bosco: promozione sociale e santità per i figli del popolo” by Aldo
Giraudo (pp. 77–87);“Don Bosco e la Bibbia. Una «lectio divina» salesiana” by
Morand Wirth (pp. 89–113); “Il dialogo tra Don Bosco e il Ministro Urbano
Rattazzi nel progettare la Società Salesiana” by Bruno Bordignon (pp. 115–36);
and “Le idee pedagogiche del Risorgimento italiano e l’azione educativa di
Giovanni Bosco” by Dario De Salvo (pp. 143–61).
A conference on “La Congregazione Sublacense: Inizi, ideali e attività missionaria” was held in the Abbey of St. Scholastica at Subiaco on October 4–6,
2011.The proceedings of the conference have been published in the first fascicule for 2012 (vol. 54) of Studia Monastica as follows: Francesco G. B.
Trolese, O.S.B.,“Introduzione” (pp. 7–12); Giuseppe Croce,“Cenni sulla politica
missionaria del papato tra Gregorio XVI e Leone XIII (1831–1903)” (pp.
13–27); Gianpaolo Romanato,“Il fenomeno monastico tra soppressioni, espansione missionaria e colonialismo” (pp. 29–41); Giovanni Spinelli,“Il papato e la
centralizzazione monastica nel sec. XIX” (pp. 43–54); Giovanni Lunardi, O.S.B.,
“Lo spirito missionario dell’abate Pietro Casaretto e l’istituzione del collegio
missionario di Sant’Ambrogio” (pp. 55–66); Ambrose Flavell, O.S.B., “Subiaco
Congregation Missionaries and the British Empire in the Nineteenth Century”
(pp. 67–93); Josep Massot Muntaner,“ La experiencia monástica de la provincia española frente al problema misionero: el caso de Nueva Nursia” (pp.
95–113); Cyrill Schäfer,“Ideale monastico e missionarietà dei monaci benedettini tedeschi nel secolo XIX” (pp. 115–29); Ugo Paoli, O.S.B.,“Tentativo di un
progetto missionario in comune tra silvestrini e sublacensi in Sri Lanka” (pp.
131–64); Michele Sciò,“Pieto Casaretto e i monasteri di Subiaco” (pp. 165–78);
F. Trolese,“Confronti tra l’ideale monastico di Ludovico Barbo e quello di Pietro
Casaretto” (pp. 179–97); Jean-Louis Verstrepen, “Dom Guéranger et le Père
Muard: Leurs projets monastiques, ressemblances et divergences” (pp.
199–219); and Ghislain Lafont, “La riforma di Pietro Casaretto in prospettiva
odierna” (pp. 221–29). Abbot Bruno Marin, O.S.B., the president of the
Congregation, has contributed a “Conclusione del convegno” (pp. 231–33).

414

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Part II of the U.S. Catholic Historian’s commemoration of the fiftieth
anniversary of the Second Vatican Council (see ante [January, 2013], p. 199)
appears in the issue for summer 2012 (vol. 30, no. 3), comprising five articles:
Robert F.Trisco,“The U.S. Bishops’ Press Panel at the Second Vatican Council”
(pp. 1–20); Joseph P. Chinnici, O.F.M., “Ecumenism, Civil Rights, and the
Second Vatican Council:The American Experience” (pp. 21–49);Tricia T. Pyne,
“The Archives of the Second Vatican Council Fathers Project: A Report from
the United States” (pp. 51–63); François Weiser,“The Periti of the United States
and the Second Vatican Council: Prosopography of a Group of Theologians”
(pp. 65–91); and Seth Smith,“Implementing Vatican II in Two Rural, Southern
Parishes” (pp. 93–114).
Among the other periodicals that have commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council is Catholica (vol. 66, no. 3, 2012), with contributions by Athanasios Vletsis, “Das II. Vatikanum und die Orthodoxie: ein
Beispeil zur Nachahmung?” (pp. 161–79); Friederike Nüssel, “‘… nicht nur
Anpassung, sondern Aufbruch’? Notizen zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil
aus evangelischer Sicht im Abstand von fünfzig Jahren” (pp. 180–92); and
Markus Iff, “Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil in freikirchlicher Sicht” (pp.
193–212). Another is Theologia, Rivista della Facoltà teologica dell’Italia
Settentrionale (vol. XXXVII, no. 32, September, 2012), with contributions by
Franco Giulio Brambilla,“La ricerca faticosa di una via per il concilio: Giovanni
XXIII e Montini-Paolo VI” (pp. 335–60); Giuseppe Angelini,“L’aggiornamento:
suggestioni e problemi di una formula fortunata” (pp. 361–82); Bruno Seveso,
“Vaticano II. L’indole pastorale” (pp. 383–414); and Giovanni Rota,“Il Concilio
Vaticano II e la Tradizione: I punti nodali di un dibattito” (pp. 415–49).

PERIODICAL LITERATURE
________
General and Miscellaneous
Cosmic Time and the Theological View of World History. Euan Cameron.
Irish Theological Quarterly, 77 (Nov., 2012), 349–64.
The Origins of the Christmas Date: Some Recent Trends in Historical
Research. C. P. E. Nothaft. Church History, 81 (Dec., 2012), 903–11.
The Irish Pilgrim. Irlands Weg in Kirche und Welt. Eine Re-Lektüre. Thomas
Mooren. Laurentianum, 53 (3, 2012), 357–91.
Some notes on the history of the monastery of Saint Francis in Candia, Crete.
Pantelis Charalampakis. Franciscan Studies, 70 (2012), 39–72.
L’iconografia di santa Chiara nella Provincia di Terni. Giuseppe Cassio.
Collectanea Franciscana, 82 (Fasc. 3–4, 2012), 695–726.
Santa Rosa de Viterbo y el cuadro de Bartolomé Esteban Murillo del Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza de Madrid. Documentación histórica e iconográfica.
Alessandro Finzi. Collectanea Franciscana, 82 (Fasc. 3–4, 2012), 727–40.
Teatino: el perfil de un vocablo desgastado entre la apologia y el sarscasmo.
Gabriel Llompart. Regnum Dei, LXVII (Jan.–Dec., 2011), 233–51.
De la vie sainte à la vie saine. Hygiène et sport dans les mouvements de
jeunesse protestants (1890–1914). Arnaud Baubérot. Etudes Théologiques
et Religieuses, 87 (3, 2012), 279–91.
I processi di beatificazione di Raimundo Lullo tra storia e memoria: il
processo di Çepeda 1747. Andrea Maiarelli. Antonianum, LXXXVII
(Oct.–Dec., 2012), 785–98.
El último período de la historia del calendario tridentino: los inicios de su
reforma (1904–1960). José Antonio Goñi Beásoin de Paulorena.
Ephemerides Liturgicae, CXXVI (July–Sept., 2012), 268–320.
Pio XII e la Liturgia. Brunero Gherardini. Divinitas, LV (3, 2012), 391–402.
The Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Liturgical Reform.
Helmut Hoping. Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 42 (2, 2010),
297–316.
Vaticano II: Prospettive ermeneutiche conciliari. Agostino Marchetto.
Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 42 (2, 2010), 351–72.
Vatican II: The History and the Narratives. Massimo Faggioli. Theological
Studies, 73 (Dec., 2012), 749–67.
415

416

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Johannes XXIII. und das Projekt für ein Konzil. Nikolaus Klein, SJ. Theologie
und Glaube, 102 (4, 2012), 474–87.
“Aggiornamento”—”Kennzeichen nur des Konzils? Der spatial turn des
Glaubens durch das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil. Hans-Joachim Sander.
Theologie und Glaube, 102 (4, 2012), 510–25.
Der Dialog zwischen der Römisch-Katholischen und der Altkatholischen
Kirche auf internationaler Ebene (2004–2009). Zdzis law J. Kijas.
Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 102 (July–Sept., 2012), 180–202.
Ancient
Religious Mobility in the Roman Empire. Simon Price. Journal of Roman
Studies, 102 (2012), 1–19.
Christianisierung im Römischen Reich: Überlegungen zum Begriff und zur
Phasenbildung. Hartmut Leppin. Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum, 16
(Jan., 2013), 247–78.
Les “écoles” chrétiennes de Rome,Athènes,Alexandrie et Antioche à l’époque
des Antonins: Remarques sur la circulation des maîtres et de leurs disciples
(1re partie). Bernard Pouderon. Bulletin de Littérature Ecclésiastique,
CXIII (Oct.–Dec., 2012), 385–400.
Le meutre rituel dans la littérature hérésiologique antique (2e–5e s. apr. J.-C.).
Analyse de la christianisation d’un topos.Vincent Mahieu. Revue d’Histoire
Ecclésiastique, 107 (July–Dec., 2012), 801–28.
Martyrs and the Mass:The Interpolation of the Narrative of Institution into the
Anaphora. Maxwell E. Johnson. Worship, 87 (Jan., 2013), 2–22.
The Election of Primian of Carthage: the Beginning of the End of Donatist
Christianity? Matthew Alan Gaumer. Journal of Ancient Christianity, 16
(Jan., 2013), 292–310.
Crucifixion in the West: From Constantine to Recceswinth. John Granger
Cook. Journal of Ancient Christianity, 16 (Jan., 2013), 226–46.
Classification Difficulty: A Case of Athanasius and Hilary. Based upon their
respective De Synodis. Junghoo Kwon. Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 42 (1, 2010), 145–70.
Evagrius and Gregory: Nazianzen or Nyssen? Cappadocian (and Origenian)
Influence on Evagrius Ilaria. L.E. Ramelli. Greek, Roman and Byzantine
Studies, 53 (1, 2013), 117–37.
Epiphanius of Salamis between Church and State: New Perspectives on the
Iconoclastic Fragments. Olga Solovieva. Journal of Ancient Christianity,
16 (Jan., 2013), 344–67.
The Epistolary Correspondence of Saints Jerome and Augustine and the
Expansion of the Rule of Saint Benedict from 66 to 73 Chapters. Gerard
Jacobitz. American Benedictine Review, 63 (Dec., 2012), 384–418.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

417

Bedeutet NEKPOTA⌽⌷⌺ in der Historia Monachorum in Aegypto wirklich
auch Grabräuber? Johannes Diethart and Werner Voight. Byzantinische
Zeitschrift, 104 (2, 2012), 629–32.
Monastic Literacy in John Cassian:Toward a New Sublimity. Rebecca Krawiec.
Church History, 81 (Dec., 2012), 765–95.
La lettera (e gli apoftegmi) di abba Doulas. Antonio Rigo. Analecta Bollandiana, 130 (Dec., 2012), 255–82.
Palladius and the Johannite Schism. Peter Van Nuffelen. Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 64 (Jan., 2013), 1–19.
Innocent I’s Letter to the Bishops of Apulia. Geoffrey D. Dunn. Journal of
Early Christian Studies, 21 (Spring, 2013), 27–41.
The Evolution of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the Pre-Islamic Period: From
Greek to Syriac? Fergus Millar. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 21
(Spring, 2013), 43–92.
La riforma ecclesiastica di Vaxt’ang I Gorgasali, re di Kartli († 502). Gaga
Shurgaia. Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 78 (2, 2012), 393–438.
Sensory Experience and the Women Martyrs of Najran. Richard Barrett.
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 21 (Spring, 2013), 93–109.
Un biblista ed un teologo da riscoprire: Giunilio Africano (VI secolo). Roberto
Spataro. Salesianum, LXXIV (Jan.–Mar., 2012), 33–55.
Pour une relecture de la Vita Caesarii: le rôle politique de l’évêque d’Arles
face aux représentants des royaumes burgonde, wisigothique et ostrogothique. Christine Delaplace. Annales du Midi, 124 (July–Sept., 2012),
309–24.
Abraham le Grand et la réforme du monachisme au Moyen-Orient. Florence
Jullien. Collectanea Cisterciensia, 74 (4, 2012), 373–84.
Medieval
The Angelic Life in Desert and Ladder: John Climacus’s Re-Formulation of
Ascetic Spirituality. Jonathan L. Zecher. Journal of Early Christian
Studies, 21 (Spring, 2013), 111–36.
Nisi fallimur. Anmerkungen zu kaiserlichen Unterzeichnungsformen auf den
Synoden des 7.–9. Jhd.s. Heinz Ohme. Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 42 (2, 2010), 241–90.
Der Tragos des Athos: Eine vom Kaiser unterzeichnete synodal-monastische
Urkunde (Anhang zum Aufsatz Ohme). Christof Rudolf Kraus. Annuarium
Historiae Conciliorum, 42 (2, 2010), 291–96.
“Hoc iudicium creavit omnipotens Deus”. Über die Ritualität von
Gottesurteilen. Racha Kirakosian. Francia, 39 (2012), 263–83.

418

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

La prosopopée au service de la politique pontificale. François Bougard. Revue
d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 98 (July–Dec., 2012), 249–84.
Forging Traditional Liturgy. Exegesis, Mission and Medieval Baptism. Owen M.
Phelan. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 107 (July–Dec., 2012), 830–61.
Waltharius and Carolingian morality: satire and lay values. Rachael Stone.
Early Medieval Europe, 21 (Feb., 2013), 50–70.
Best of Enemies. Jonathan Harris. History Today, 63 (Feb., 2013), 17–24.
On the Founder of the Skripou Church: Literary Trends in the Milieu of
Photius. Oscar Prieto-Domínguez. Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies,
53 (1, 2013), 166–91.
Monastic Recruitment in an Age of Reform: New Evidence for the Flemish
Abbey of Saint-Bertin (10th–12th centuries). Steven Vanderputten. Revue
Bénédictine, 122 (Dec., 2012), 232–51.
Le Codex Stabulensis et la recréation du passé à Stavelot-Malmedy à la fin du
Xe s. Une étude de la valorisation de sources diplomatiques dans l’hagiographie abbatiale. Nicolas Mazeure. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique,
107 (July–Dec. 2012), 863–96.
Enjeux de pouvoir et competition aristocratique en Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse
(fin Xe–milieu XIe siècle). Retour sur les fondations de Saint-Gengulphe et
de Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Florennes. Nicolas Ruffini-Ronzani. Revue
Bénédictine, 122 (Dec., 2012), 294–330.
Un livre d’Évangiles à l’épreuve des sens (ms. Paris,Arsenal, 592). Cécile Voyer.
Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Xe–XIIe Siècles, 55 (Oct.–Dec., 2012),
417–31.
The Two Great Lights: Regnum and Sacerdotium in the Salerno Ivories.
Elizabeth Corey. History of Political Thought, 34 (1, 2013), 1–18.
Textual Diversity and Textual Community in a Monastic Context.The Case of
Eleventh-Century Marchiennes. Tjamke Snijders. Revue d’Histoire
Ecclésiastique, 107 (July–Dec., 2012), 897–929.
Blessing for sale? On the production and distribution of pilgrim mementoes
in Byzantium. Vasiliki Foskolou. Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 105 (1, 2012),
53–84.
Synod decrees of the eleventh century (1025–1081). A classification of the
documents of the Synodos endemousa. Frederick Lauritzen. Byzantinische
Zeitschrift, 105 (1, 2012), 101–16.
El pontificado de Benedicto IX. Gonzalo Fernández. Carthaginensia, XXVIII
(July–Dec, 2012), 441–45.
Anselme de Lucques et la Collection Quesnelliana. Andreï Mitrofanoff.
Cristianesimo nella Storia, 33 (3, 2012), 759–73.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

419

The Last Carolingian Exegete: Pope Urban II, the Weight of Tradition, and the
Christian Reconquest. Matthew Gabriele. Church History, 81 (Dec., 2012),
796–814.
Les Templiers en Bretagne au Moyen Âge: mythes et réalités. Philippe
Josserand. Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, 119 (Oct.–Dec.,
2012), 7–33.
Os Bulhões na conquista de Lisboa aos Mouros. A genealogia de Santo
António. Henrique Pinto Rema. Itinerarium, LVIII (Sept.–Dec., 2012),
519–63.
O cohors milicie floris: un’antifona di Hildegard von Bingen per i dodici
Apostoli. Mario del Franco. Aevum, LXXXVI (May–Aug., 2012), 549–80.
Civil Religion—Metaphysical, Not Political: Nature, Faith and Communal
Order in European Thought, c. 1150–c. 1550. Cary J. Nederman. Journal of
the History of Ideas, 74 (Jan., 2013), 1–22.
Aelred, The Doctor—In What Sense? Ryszard Gron. Downside Review, 130
(Apr., 2012), 41–52.
Tra dispersioni e ritrovamenti: tradizione e conservazione di un privilegio
inedito di Alessandro III (1165). Patrizia Merati. Aevum, LXXXVI
(May–Aug., 2012), 519–33.
Shame, Masculinity, and the Death of Thomas Becket. Hugh M. Thomas.
Speculum, 87 (Oct., 2012), 1050–88.
Rich Pickings from Medieval Pilgrims. Adrian Bell and Richard Dale. History
Today, 63 (Jan., 2013), 30–37.
Redeat nobis quod sacrum est. Una lettera sulla presenza della Sindone in
Atene all’indomani della quarta crociata. Barbara Frale. Aevum, LXXXVI
(May–Aug., 2012), 589–641.
Caritas patriae: l’ordre de la charité et le martyre civil au XIIIe siècle. Alberto
Frigo. Revue des Sciences Religieuses, 87 (Jan., 2013), 21–40.
Francesco e il vescovo Guido I. Felice Accrocca. Miscellanea Francescana,
112 (3–4. 2012), 465–84.
Francesco incontra il sultano: l’inizio di una missione di pace. Studio comparativo delle più antiche fonti. Leonhard Lehmann, OFM Cap. Miscellanea
Francescana, 112 (3–4, 2012), 504–56.
“Mostrerò loro qual è la mia volontà”. Francesco d’Assisi tra governo
dell’Ordine e difesa dell’ideale minoritico. Emil Kumka, OFM Conv.
Miscellanea Francescana, 112 (3–4, 2012), 557–80.
Las Enfermedades de San Francisco de Asís. Maria Cambray i Amenós.
Franciscan Studies, 70 (2012), 1–37.

420

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

La morte di un uomo Cristiano. Gli ultimi anni di vita di Francesco di Assisi.
Pietro Maranesi, OFM Cap. Miscellanea Francescana, 112 (3–4, 2012),
581–99.
Abadologio del monasterio de San Vicente de Salamanca (Siglos XIII–XIX).
Ernesto Zaragoza Pascual. Salmanticensis, LVIII (May–Aug., 2012),
291–379.
L’écriture de Thomas de Celano: une rhétorique de la rupture. Dominique
Poirel. Franciscan Studies, 70 (2012), 73–99.
The Vidi Alterum Angelum Topos in Two Sermons by Guibert of Tournai for
the Feast of St. Francis. Hal Friday. Franciscan Studies, 70 (2012), 101–38.
The Pershore Flores Historiarum: An Unrecognised Chronicle from the
Period of Reform and Rebellion in England, 1258–65. D. A. Carpenter.
English Historical Review, CXXVII (Dec., 2012), 1343–66.
Tres textos hagiográficos medievales sobre la ciudad de Zaragoza y sus santos
Valerio, Vicente y Braulio. Edición y estudio. José Carlos Martín. Analecta
Bollandiana, 130 (Dec., 2012), 315–48.
The battle of Prinitsa in 1263. Juho Wilskman. Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 105
(1, 2012), 167–98.
Das Schisma zwischen Anhängern und Gegnern des Patriarchen Arsenios in
der orthodoxen Kirche von Byzanz (1265–1310). Franz Tinnefeld.
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 105 (1, 2012), 143–66.
Sainte Gertrude, Docteur de la prière de l’Église. Olivier Quenardel.
Collectanea Cisterciensia, 74 (4, 2012), 410–25.
The Boy Bishop and the “Uncanonized Saint”: St. Louis of Anjou and Peter of
John Olivi as Models of Franciscan Spirituality in the Fourteenth Century.
Franciscan Studies, 70 (2012), 247–82.
Ambrosiani incipiunt adventum…: le liturgie ambrosiana e romana a confronto nel sermonario Ambr. A. 12 sup. Silvia Donghi. Aevum, LXXXVI
(May–Aug., 2012), 691–712.
Philipp IV. und die Vernichtung des Templerordens. Eine Neubewertung.
Karl Ubl. Francia, 39 (2012), 69–88.
Un codice curiale nella storia della condanna della Lectura Super Apocalipsim di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi: Il Parigino Latino 713 II. Alberto Forni
and Paolo Vian. Collectanea Franciscana, 82 (Fasc. 3–4, 2012), 563–677.
Inflamed with Seraphic Ardor: Franciscan Learning and Spirituality in the
Fourteenth-Century Irish Pilgrim Account. Malgorzata KrasnodebskaD’Aughton. Franciscan Studies, 70 (2012), 283–312.
Editio princeps of an unedited dogmatic discourse against the Barlaamites by
the patriarch of Constantinople Kallistos I. Constantine D.S. Paidas.
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 105 (1, 2012), 117–30.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

421

Peticionem iustam et consonam rationi maxime: una contesta tra il futuro
Papa Urbano VI e il monastero napoletano di San Gregorio Armeno. Carla
Vetere. Aevum, LXXXVI (May–Aug., 2012), 759–70.
Réformer une abbaye au XVe siècle: l’exemple de Florennes. Xavier Hermand.
Revue Bénédictine, 122 (Dec., 2012), 342–65.
A Plea for Peace: Nicolas de Clamanges and Late Medieval Disorder.
Christopher M. Bellitto. Cristianesimo nella Storia, 33 (3, 2012), 775–94.
Frauen nach Jerusalem. Weibliche Pilger zum Heiligen Grab in den Registern
der Poenitentiaria Apostolica 1439–1479. Arnold and Doris Esch. Archiv
für Kulturgeschichte, 94 (2, 2012), 293–311.
Filarete’s Hilaritas: Claiming Authorship and Status on the Doors of St. Peter’s.
Robert Glass. Art Bulletin, XCIV (Dec., 2012), 548–71.
Ulrich Pfeffel’s Library: Parish Priests, Preachers, and Books in the Fifteenth
Century. Matthew Wranovix. Speculum, 87 (Oct., 2012), 1125–56.
Searching for Women on Mt. Athos: Insights from the Archives of the Holy
Mountain. Alice-Mary Talbot. Speculum, 87 (Oct., 2012), 995–1014.
Sixteenth Century
Richard Guideford’s Pilgrimage: Piety and Cultural Change in Late Fifteenthand Early Sixteenth-Century England. Rob Lutton. History, 98 (Jan., 2013),
41–78.
Public Debt in the Papal States, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century. Donatella
Strangio. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 43 (Spring, 2013), 511–37.
Ruling Christian: Neagoe Basarab and the Beginning of ‘Political ProtoModernity’ in Sixteenth-century Wallachia: A Case Study. Mihai D. Grigore.
Religion, State and Society, 40 (3–4, 2012), 286–300.
Leão X: sucesso ou fracasso? Nelson H. Minnich. Letras, 21 (July–Dec., 2011),
63–83.
Pluralism, Liturgy, and the Paradoxes of Reform:A Reforming Pluralist in Early
Sixteenth-Century Rome. Jennifer Mara DeSilva. Sixteenth Century
Journal, XLIII (Winter, 2012), 1061–78.
Drawings by Michelangelo Anselmi for S. Giovanni Evangelista in Parma.
Elisabetta Fadda. Master Drawings, 50 (Winter, 2012), 507–22.
L’influence de la Réformation sur les liturgies de mariage strasbourgeoises
(1524–1549). Anne-Marie Heitz-Muller. Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie
Religieuses, 92 (Oct.–Dec., 2012), 573–94.
Thomas Müntzer—Irrweg oder Alternative? Plädoyer für eine andere Sicht.
Günter Vogler. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012), 11–40.

422

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Keeping the Conversation Going: Fisher & More and Henry VIII’s intellectual
tyranny. Cecilia Hatt. Moreana, 49 (Dec., 2012), 127–39.
Faith in the Language: Biblical Authority and the Meaning of English in MoreTyndale Polemics. Jamie H. Ferguson. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLIII
(Winter, 2012), 989–1011.
To Sow the Heart: Touch, Spiritual Anatomy, and Image Theory in
Michelangelo’s Noli me tangere. Christian K. Kleinbub. Renaissance
Quarterly, 66 (Spring, 2013), 81–129.
Canterbury as the New Rome: Dispensations and Henry VIII’s Reformation.
Peter D. Clarke. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 64 (Jan., 2013), 20–44.
Der “Schriftaltar”in der Spitalkirche zu Dinkelsbühl—ein Zeugnis lutherischer
Konfessionskultur.Thomas Kaufmann. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte,
103 (2012), 117–48.
Traversing Borders—Defining Boundaries: Cosmopolitan Harmonies and
Confessional Theology in Georg Rhau’s Liturgical Publications. J. Michael
Raley. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLIII (Winter, 2012), 1079–1105.
Sharing Conversations: A Jewish Polemic Against Martin Luther. Debra
Kaplan. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012), 41–63.
Pastoral Care as Protestant Mission: Ministry to the Sick and Suffering in
Evangelical Church Ordinances. Ronald K. Rittgers. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012), 149–81.
“We need Teachers today, not Prophets”: Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Exposition of
Prophecy. Jon Balserak. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012),
92–116.
St. Clare Expelling the Saracens from Assisi: Religious Confrontation in Word
and Image. Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLIII (Fall,
2012), 635–65.
Before the Right to Remain Silent: The Examinations of Anne Askew and
Elizabeth Young. Penelope Geng. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLIII (Fall,
2012), 667–79.
A New Drawing by Vasari for the Sala dei Cento Giorni in the Palazzo della
Cancelleria. Alessandra Baroni. Master Drawings, 50 (Winter, 2012),
495–506.
Heinrich Bullingers Deutung der Türkengefahr und des Islam. Damaris
Grimmsmann. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012), 64–91.
Ulisse Aldrovandi,Antiquities, and the Roman Inquisition. Katherine M. Bentz.
Sixteenth Century Journal, XLIII (Winter, 2012), 963–88.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

423

Elizabeth I’s Former Tutor Reports on the Parliament of 1559: Johannes
Spithovius to the Chancellor of Denmark, 27 February 1559. Simon Adams
and David Scott Gehring. English Historical Review, CXXVIII (Feb. 2013),
35–54.
Where Two Crosses Met: Religious Accommodation between a Reformed
Protestant Community and a Commandery of the Order of Malta (Loudon,
circa 1560–1660). Edwin Bezzina. Church History, 81 (Dec. 2012), 815–51.
Hugenottische Pamphletistik und gelehrtes Wissen: die “Déclaration” des
Louis de Bourbon, prince de Condé (1562). Ein Beitrag zur politischen
Ideengeschichte der Anfangsphase der französischen Religionskriege.
Gabriele Haug-Moritz. Francia, 39 (2012), 115–34.
Castellion et le De imitando Christo de 1563: une pure et pieuse castration.
Max Engammare. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, LXXIV (3,
2012), 465–77.
Religione e mestiere delle armi nella Franca dei primi torbidi religiosi. Il
Pedagogue d’armes del gesuita Emond Auger (1568). Gianclaudio Civale.
Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, LXXIV (3, 2012), 505–33.
Les pompes funèbres des souverains étrangers à Notre-Dame de Paris,
XVIe–XVIIIe siècles. Jean-Marie Le Gall. Revue d’histoire moderen et contemporaine, 59 (July–Sept., 2012), 96–123.
Correspondencia de Pedro Chacón. Primera Parte. Cartas: 1. Chacón a Pedro
Vélez de Guevara (1573). 2. Alvar Gómez de Castro a Chacón (1575).
Commentario introductorio y texto. Juan Francisco Domínguez. La
Ciudad de Dios, CCXXV (Sept.–Dec., 2012), 743–68.
“Noster Theophilus”:The fictitious “printer” whose anti-Jesuit volumes issued
from various presses in Geneva between 1580 and 1589. Bibliothèque
d’Humanisme et Renaissance, LXXIV (3, 2012), 569–91.
St. Robert Bellarmine on the Infallibility of General Councils of the Church.
Christian D. Washburn. Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 42 (1, 2010),
171–92.
Vescovo di città in una diocesi di campagna. Giovanni Battista del Tufo ad
Acerra. Aniello D’Iorio. Regnum Dei, LXVII (Jan.–Dec. 2011), 209–32.
“Un picciolo ramo dell’arbore teatino” tra l’episcopato di terra d’Otranto in
età viceregnale: distribuzione e iconografica incidenza. Paola Nestola.
Regnum Dei, LXVII (Jan–Dec., 2011), 3–58.
Les nominations de maréchaux de France protestants et l’évolution politique
de la monarchie française à l’époque moderne (XVIe–XVIIe siècles). Fadi El
Hage. Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 158
(Oct.–Dec., 2012), 685–701.

424

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

From Lutheranism to Catholicism: The Faith of Anna of Denmark
(1574–1619). Maureen M. Meikle and Helen M. Payne. Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 64 (Jan., 2013), 45–69.
The Date of Easter and Shakespeare’s “Progress of the Stars”: Creed and
Chronometry in the Sixteenth Century. Martin F. Connell. Worship, 87
(Mar., 2013), 130–48.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The Supper at Emmaus at Bowdoin College and Its Association with Adam
Elsheimer. George S. Keyes. Master Drawings, 50 (Winter, 2012), 523–32.
Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Poetics of Blood. David M. Stone. Art
Bulletin, XCIV (Dec., 2012), 572–93.
“Those sanctified places where our Sauiours feete had trode”: Jerusalem in
Early Modern English Travel Narratives. Beatrice Groves. Sixteenth Century
Journal, XLIII (Fall, 2012), 681–700.
Converting souls across cultural borders; Dutch Calvinism and early modern
missionary enterprises. Charles H. Parker. Journal of Global History, 8
(Mar., 2013), 25–49.
Das Sterbebett als normative Schwelle. Der Mensch in der Frühen Neuzeit
zwischen irdischer Normenkonkurrenz und göttlichen Gericht. Hillard
von Thiessen. Historische Zeitschrift, 295 (Dec., 2012), 625–59.
On the Front Lines of Coexistence: Courthézon’s Consistory in the Early
Seventeenth Century. Judith P. Meyer. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLIII
(Winter, 2012), 1037–60.
Ein frühes reformiert-pietistisches Netzwerk in der Kurpfalz in der ersten
Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts. Jan van de Kamp. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012), 182–209.
“Ein verschlagener Geist”: Vorstellungen des Teufels in den Hexenprozessen
der Reichsstadt Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Alison Rowlands. Archiv für
Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012), 210–35.
The Case of Thomas Gataker: Confronting Superstition in SeventeenthCentury England. Diane Willen. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLIII (Fall,
2012), 727–49.
Notizie Historiche (continuazione). Giancarlo Caputi. Archivum Scholarum
Piarum, XXXVI (2012), 3–82.
La grande riforma di Cristina di Borbone (1631–1663). Il conflitto per il controllo dei benefici ecclesiastici. Giorgio Dell’Oro. Cristianesimo nella
Storia, 33 (3, 2012), 795–844.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

425

Jesuit Mnemonics and Topographic Narrative: Evangelicae Historiae
Imagines in Late Ming China (Fuzhou, 1637). Junhyoung Michael Shin.
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 103 (2012), 237–71.
‘Pelagianism’, the Rule of Reason and the ‘pruritus scribendi’. Jansensius’
Sources and the Authority They Are Ascribed. Diana Stanciu. Revue
d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 107 (July–Dec., 2012), 931–65.
La conversion de Richard Crashaw. Vincent Roger. Mélanges de Science
Religieuse, 69 (Oct.–Dec., 2012), 55–68.
The Architecture of verbum: Antônio Vieira’s livro and Diego de Zúñiga. I
Parte. Karl Kottmann. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXV (Sept.–Dec., 2012),
769–801.
Henschen et Papebroch en Toscane, en 1661–1662. Bernard Joassart.
Analecta Bollandiana, 130 (Dec., 2012), 359–425.
The Library Catalogue of the English Benedictine Nuns of Our Lady of Good
Hope. Jan Rhodes. Downside Review, 130 (Apr., 2012), 54–86.
Vincenzo Maria Durazzo, C.R. vescovo di Savona (1683–1722). Gian Luigi
Bruzzone. Regnum Dei, LXVII (Jan.–Dec., 2011), 151–207.
La circulation des huguenots sur les routes du Refuge. Yves Krumenacker.
Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 98 (July–Dec., 2012), 311–27.
Emanzipation von der Theologie? Kirchengeschichte von Gottfried Arnold bis
Franz Overbeck. Martin Wallraff. Theologische Zeitschrift, 68 (3/4, 2012),
194–210.
Regards sur Sainte-Sophie (fin XVIIe–début XIXe siècle): prémices d’une histoire de l’architecture byzantine. Ludovic Bender. Byzantinische
Zeitschrift, 105 (1, 2012), 1–28.
Milão bilíngue: o jesuíta Tommaso Ceva (1648–1737). Emanuele Colombo.
Letras, 21 (July–Dec., 2011), 85–107.
“Un solo e maestoso teatro delle glorie di S. Andrea.” L’apparato per la festa di
solennizzazione di Sant’Andrea Avellino a Cremona. Elena Di Majo.
Regnum Dei, LXVII (Jan.–Dec., 2011), 101–50.
Sacred History and Political Thought: Neapolitan Responses to the Problem of
Sociability after Hobbes. John Robertson. Historical Journal, 56 (Mar.,
2013), 1–29.
Le missioni vincenziane nel Settecento italiano: uno spaccato di vita pugliese.
Giuseppe Lobascio. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXV (Sept.–Dec., 2012),
661–94.
Los Infantes de Coro y El Colegio de S. Leandro 1600–1760 (III). Consuelo
Prats Redondo. Carthaginensia, XXVIII (July–Dec., 2012), 403–39.

426

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Aufklärung und Religionspädagogik. Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Émile—zwischen Exkommunikation und Prophetie. Ermanno Genre. Theologische
Zeitschrift, 68 (3/4, 2012), 277–96.
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
De Lyon aux prisons de France. Les origines des Sœurs de Marie-Joseph pour
les prisons (1795–1852). Louis Faivre d’Arcier. Revue d’Histoire de l’Église
de France, 98 (July–Dec., 2012), 329–53.
Le pragmatism éclairé de Napoléon Bonaparte. Florian Hurard. Le Monde des
Religions, 58 (Mar.–Apr., 2013), 6–11.
Las Cortes de Cádiz y la religión. Victor Manuel Arbeloa Muru. Lumen, LXI
(3–4, 2012), 471–88.
Los agustinos españoles y las Cortes de Cádiz. Mariano Boyano Revilla.
Revista Agustiniana, LIII (May–Aug., 2012), 361–87.
Le pasteur Laurent Cadoret (1770–1861) et une de ses œuvres: l’école du
dimanche de Luneray. Anne Ruolt. Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du
Protestantisme Français, 158 (Oct.–Dec., 2012), 703–41.
Who Was ‘The Deluded Follower of Joanna Southcott’? Millenarianism in Early
Nineteenth-Century England. Philip Lockley. Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 64 (Jan., 2013), 70–95.
German “Worship Wars” and the 1830 Anniversaries of the Augsburg
Confession. Stan M. Landry. Lutheran Quarterly, XXVI (Winter, 2012),
373–94.
Joseph Salvador, le premier historien juif français du christianisme. Joël
Sebban. Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 98 (July–Dec., 2012),
355–71.
P. Pompilio Ma Cassella de Santo Domingo,Vicario General de la Orden de las
Escuelas Pías (1830–1836). Adolfo García-Durán. Archivum Scholarum
Piarum, XXXVI (2012), 173–216.
Nature et foi protestante au XIXe siècle: le Pasteur Émilien Frossard en son
temps (1802–1881). Bertrand Gibert. Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire
du Protestantisme Français, 158 (Oct.–Dec. 2012), 743–69.
“God is our guide! Our cause is just!”The National Chartist Hymn Book and
Victorian Hymnody. Mike Sanders. Victorian Studies, 54 (Summer, 2012),
679–705.
Friedrich Bauer (1812–1874), Hidden Behind the Giant of Neuendettelsau.
Craig L. Nessan. Lutheran Quarterly, XXVI (Winter, 2012), 395–411.
John Henry Newman and Empiricism. Ryan Vilbig. Newman Studies Journal,
9 (Fall, 2012), 13–25.
L’historiographie catholique face au Risorgimento. Daniele Menozzi. Revue
d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 44 (4, 2012), 139–50.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

427

Le Scuole in S. Pantaleo. Il decennio della soppressione (1864–1874). Goffredo
Cianfrocca. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, XXXVI (2012), 83–172.
Die hierarchische Trennung der rumänischen orthodoxen Gläubigen des
Banats von der serbischen orthodoxen Kirche (1864–1918). Paul
Brusanowski. Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 102 (July–Sept.,
2012), 203–25.
La critica “matematica” all’infallibilità pontificia di un cattolico liberale sceso
dal Piemonte in Sicilia. Massimo Naro. Laurentianum, 53 (3, 2012),
325–43.
“Aufklärung” aus Sicht waldensischer Zeitschriften zwischen 1870 und 1914.
Lothar Vogel. Theologische Zeitschrift, 68 (3/4, 2012), 211–32.
Spiritual Pathology: Priests, Physicians, and the Way of All Flesh. Sally
Shuttleworth. Victorian Studies, 54 (Summer, 2012), 625–53.
Melanesian Mission Place Names on Norfolk Island. Joshua Nash. Journal of
Pacific History, 47 (Dec., 2012), 475–89.
The Emergence of Authenticity Talk and the Giving of Accounts: Conversion
as Movement of the Soul in South India, ca. 1900. Rupa Viswanath.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55 (Jan., 2013), 120–41.
Cesare Bazzani a Sant’Andrea della Valle. L’altare di S. Gaetano e la cappella
della Purità. Roberta Porfiri. Regnum Dei, LXVII (Jan–Dec., 2011), 61–99.
The Rawlinson Papers in Downside Abbey Archives. Stephen Bellis. Downside
Review, 130 (Apr., 2012), 1–25.
Anti-Modern without being Non-Modern? Attitudes to Modernity in the
Writings of Nichifor Crainic and Dumitru Staniloae in the Interwar Period.
Nicolai Staab. Religion, State and Society, 40 (3–4, 2012), 316–35.
Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in Louis Massignon’s Appropriation of
Gandhi as a Modern Saint. Christian S. Krokus. Journal of Ecumenical
Studies, 47 (Fall, 2012), 525–40.
Exodus:The Emigration of Southern Irish Protestants During the Irish War of
Independence and the Civil War. Andy Bielenberg. Past & Present, no. 218
(Feb., 2013), 199–233.
‘The doctrine of vicarious punishment’: space, religion and the Belfast
Troubles of 1920–22. Niall Cunningham. Journal of Historical Geography, 40 (Apr., 2013), 52–66.
Modern and Traditional Tendencies in the Religious Thought of the Russian
and Greek Diaspora from the 1920s to the 1960s. Stamatios Gerogiorgakis.
Religion, State and Society, 40 (3–4, 2012), 336–48.
Note sur une lettre inédite de Hô Chi Minh à un pasteur français (8 septembre 1921). Ou l’art de porter la contradiction à l’évangelisation. Pascal
Bourdeaux. Etudes Théologiques et Religieuses, 87 (3, 2012), 293–313.

428

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

La posizione del Primate Hlond nei confronti dei totalitarismi tedesco e sovietico. Stanis law Zimniak. Salesianum, LXXIV (Jan.–Mar., 2012), 57–82.
“La parte dei cattolici nelle presenti lotte.” La Santa Sede, la crisi Matteotti e
l’alleanza popolari-socialisti. Alberto Guasco. Cristanesimo nella Storia,
33 (3, 2012), 845–74.
La passion de l’abbé Bardy. Étienne Fouilloux. Mélanges de Science
Religieuse, 69 (Oct.–Dec., 2012), 29–54.
L’exposition de 1925. Une affirmation de la puissance de l’Église catholique.
Erick Cakpo. Revue des Sciences Religieuses, 87 (Jan., 2013), 41–59.
Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927. Entre histoire de religions et histoire du christianisme. Annelies Lannoy. Revue de l’histoire des religions, 229 (Oct.–Dec.,
2012), 503–26.
Tra conflittualità latenti e tensioni pubbliche. L’autorità vescovile padovana e
il VII Centenario antoniano (1931–1932). Enrico Baruzzo. Il Santo, LII (3,
2012), 369–95.
L’Esposizione internazionale d’arte sacra cristiana moderna di Padova nel
1931–32. Maria Beatrice Gia. Il Santo, LII (3, 2012), 397–433.
Bishop Santiago Sancho on the Conception of a Filipino Missionary Institute.
Michael Layugan, S.V.D. Philippiniana Sacra, XLVIII (Jan.–Apr., 2013),
31–50.
L’influence de l’Église et de l’État dans le mariage pendant le franquisme
(1940–1959). Florentina Rodrigo Paredes. Mélanges de Science Religieuse,
69 (3, 2012), 39–50.
La vida consagrada en Salamanca en la época de Barbado Viejo (1943–1964).
Eduardo Javier Alonso Romo. Salmanticensis, LVIII (May–Aug., 2012),
243–89.
Réformer la Curie romaine? Étienne Fouilloux. Cristanesimo nella Storia, 33
(3, 2012), 875–90.
El Secretariado de los Colegios S.I. de España y su Boletín, Avance. Jorge
García Ocón. Miscelánea Comillas, 70 (July–Dec., 2012), 503–16.
L’évolution politique de l’Église espagnole vue depuis la France (1959–1974).
Álvaro Fleites Marcos. Mélanges de Science Religieuse, 69 (3, 2012), 51–60.
Pastor et auctor. Gli scritti privati di Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli—Giovanni
XXIII. Roberto Regoli. Gregorianum, 93 (4, 2012), 831–56.
Il “diaro conciliare” di Franz Hürth SJ. Alexandra von Teuffenbach.
Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 42 (2, 2010), 317–50.
“La storia tutto vela e tutto svela”. Giovanni XXIII e l’unità d’Italia. Mauro
Velati. Cristanesimo nella Storia, 33 (3, 2012), 891–925.
Le Ministère belge des Affaires étrangères et le concile Vatican II.Vincent Delcorps. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 107 (July–Dec., 2012), 996–1033.

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429

Alla prova del Libero Spirito. Ricordo di Romana Guarnieri. Fabio Milana.
Cristanesimo nella Storia, 33 (3, 2012), 957–74.
American and Canadian
Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-Illinois
Borderlands, 1695–1735. Robert Michael Morrissey. William and Mary
Quarterly, 70 (Jan., 2013), 103–46.
Vital Nature and Vital Piety: Johann Arndt and the Evangelical Vitalism of
Cotton Mather. Brett Malcolm Grainger. Church History, 81 (Dec., 2012),
852–72.
“Good and Kind Benefactors”: British Logwood Merchants and Boston’s
Christ Church. Ross A. Newton. Early American Studies, 11 (Winter,
2013), 15–36.
Trans-Atlantic Anti-Jacobinism: Reaction and Religion. Jonathan Den Hartog.
Early American Studies, 11 (Winter, 2013), 133–45.
Competing Loyalties: Nationality, Church Governance, and the Development
of an American Catholic Identity. Margaret Wilson Gillikin. Early American
Studies, 11 (Winter, 2013), 146–60.
“An Africa of Religious Life”: Fredrika Bremer’s American Faith Journey, 1849–
1851. Alison Twells. Journal of Women’s History, 25 (Spring, 2013), 158–81.
Michael J. Redding and Irish-American Patriotism. Tracy Matthew Melton.
Maryland Historical Magazine, 107 (Fall, 2012), 321–58.
Slavophile Thought and Conceptions of Mission in the Russian North
American Archdiocese, Late 19th–Early 20th Century. John H. Erickson. St
Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 56 (3, 2012), 245–68.
Lars W. Boe (1875–1942). L. DeAne Lagerquist. Lutheran Quarterly, XXVI
(Winter, 2012), 412–40.
Lest We Forget: Ellen Ryan Jolly and the Nuns of the Battlefield Monument.
Kathleen Szpila. American Catholic Studies, 123 (Winter, 2012), 23–43
A Forgotten Chapter in the American Liturgical Movement: Fr Hermann
Joseph Untraut’s Die liturgische Bewegung. Miranda Henry Bennett.
Worship, 87 (Jan., 2013), 23–45.
“Their blood shall not be shed in vain”: American Evangelical Missionaries
and the Search for God and Country in Post-World War II Asia. Sarah
Davenport-Miller. Journal of American History, 99 (Mar., 2013), 1109–32.
A Leavening Force: African American Women and Christian Mission in the
Civil Rights Era. Mary K. Schueneman. Church History, 81 (Dec., 2012),
873–902.

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PERIODICAL LITERATURE

“We are definitely the pioneers of this movement”: The Regis Lay Apostolate
and the origins of Postgraduate Volunteerism, 1949–1972. Christopher
Staysniak. American Catholic Studies, 123 (Winter, 2012), 45–65.
The Cold War Romance of Religious Authenticity: Will Herberg, William F.
Buckley Jr., and the Rise of the New Right. K. Healon Gaston. Journal of
American History, 99 (Mar., 2013), 1133–58.
Latin American
Bodies,Texts, and Translators: Indigenous Breast Milk and the Jesuit Exclusion
of Mestizos in Late Sixteenth-Century Peru. Larissa Brewer-García. Colonial
Latin American Review, 21 (Dec., 2012), 365–90.
Milenarismo na obra profética de Padre Antonio Vieira. Marcus De Martini and
Noeli Dutra Rossato. Letras, 21 (July–Dec., 2011), 171–96.
Encrucijadas poéticas: una colección de villancicos novohispanos en la John
Carter Brown Library. Magdalena Altamirano. Colonial Latin American
Review, 21 (Dec., 2012), 441–56.
Lay Patronage and the Development of Ecclesiastical Property in Spanish
America: The Case of Buenos Aires, 1700–1900. Roberto Di Stefano.
Hispanic American Historical Review, 93 (Feb., 2013), 67–98.
Out of Tlatelolco’s Ruins: Patronage, Devotion, and Natural Disaster at the
Shrine of Our Lady of the Angels, 1745–1781. Paul Ramírez and William B.
Taylor. Hispanic American Historical Review, 93 (Feb., 2013), 33–65.
The Supple Whip: Innovation and Tradition in Mexican Catholicism. Matthew
D. O’Hara. American Historical Review, 117 (Dec., 2012), xvi, 1373–1401.
La Iglesia en Chile: 1800–1840. Las herramientas de la reforma pastoral de
Trento, que permiten enfrentar la crisis política de 1810. Misael Camus
Ibacache. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 107 (July–Dec., 2012), 967–94.
Félix Varela, un sacerdote santo, prócer de las indipendencias americanas (II).
Fidel Gonzáles Fernández. Euntes Docete, LXV (3, 2012), 117–48.
Kolonisation durch Modernisierung: Die Steyler Mission bei den Indianern
Paraguays, 1910–2010. Darius J. Piwowarczyk, SVD. Zeitschrift für
Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft, 96 (3/4, 2012), 255–65.
The Seduction of Revolution: Anticlerical Campaigns against Confession in
Mexico, 1914–1935. Ben Fellaw. Journal of Latin American Studies, 45
(Feb., 2013), 91–120.
Secularización y derechos humanos. Gustavo Morello. Latin American
Research Review, 47 (3, 2012), 62–82.

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED
________
Benadusi, Lorenzo. The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist
Italy. Trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney. (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press. 2012. Pp. xxii, 424. $55.00.)
The Biblical Foundations of the Doctrine of Justification: An Ecumenical
Follow-Up to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2012. Pp. xiv, 129. $21.95 paperback.)
Chenavier, Robert. Simone Weil: Attention to the Real. Trans. Bernard E.
Doering. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2012. Pp. xii, 92.
$20.00 paperback.) Originally published in French in 2009.
Cuchet, Guillaume. Les Voix d’Outre-Tombe: Tables tournantes, spiritisme et
société au XIXe siècle. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil. 2012. Pp. 458. €26,00
paperback.)
Delany, Sheila (Trans. and Introd.). Anti-Saints: The New Golden Legend of
Sylvain Maréchal. (Edmonton, Canada: University of Alberta Press. 2012.
Pp. viii, 174. $34.95 paperback.) Compiled by a radical, rationalist journalist early in the French Revolution, these subversively satirical lives of
women saints were intended to turn their readers away from religion.
DeSilva, Jennifer Mara (Ed.). Episcopal Reform and Politics in Early Modern
Europe. [Early Modern Studies, Vol. 10.] (Kirksville, MO: Truman State
University Press. 2012. Pp. xiv, 226. $44.95 paperback.) Contents: William
V. Hudon,“Foreword:The Local Nature of Episcopal Reform in the Age of
the Council of Trent” (pp. ix–xiv); Jennifer Mara DeSilva, “Introduction: A
Living Example” (pp. 1–25). Part 1: Episcopal Authority: Raymond A. Powell,
“A Hierarchy that Had Fought: Episcopal Promotion during the Reign of
Mary I (1553–58) and the Roots of Episcopal Resistance to the Elizabethan
Religious Settlement” (pp. 26–45); Hans Cools, “Bishops in the Habsburg
Netherlands on the Eve of the Catholic Renewal” (pp. 46–62); Antonella
Perin and John Alexander,“Office and Patronage in Mid-Sixteenth-Century
Tortona” (pp. 63–87). Part 2: Pastoral Practice: Jennifer Mara DeSilva,“The
Absentee Bishop in Residence: Paris de’ Grassi, Bishop of Pesaro, 1513–28”
(pp. 88–109); John Christopoulos,“Papal Authority, Episcopal Reservation,
and Abortion in Sixteenth-Century Italy” (pp. 110–27); Jill Fehleison,
“Ministering to Catholics and Protestants Alike: The Preaching, Polemics,
and Pastoral Care of François de Sales” (pp. 128–46). Part 3: Clerical
Reform: Linder Lierheimer,“Gender, Resistance, and the Limits of Episcopal
Authority: Sébastien Zamet’s Relationship with Nuns, 1615–55” (pp.
147–72); Celeste McNamara, “Challenges to Episcopal Authority in
431

432

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

Seventeenth-Century Padua” (pp. 173–93); Jean-Pascal Gay, “Trials that
Should Have Been: The Question of Judicial Jurisdiction over French
Bishops in the Seventeenth Century and the Self-Narration of the Roman
Inquisition” (pp. 194–214).
Eisenbichler, Konrad. The Sword and the Pen:Women, Politics, and Poetry in
Sixteenth-Century Siena. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
2012. Pp. xiv, 371. $32.00 paperback.)
Fitzgerald, Christina M., and John T. Sebastian (Eds.). The Broadview
Anthology of Medieval Drama. (Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press. 2013. Pp.
xiv, 566. $69.95 paperback.)
Gregory, Jeremy, and Hugh McLeod (Eds.). International Religious Networks.
[Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 14.] (Rochester, NY: Published for the
Ecclesiastical History Society by Boydell and Brewer. 2012. Pp. xxii, 292.
$70.00.) Contents: Christine Walsh,“Medieval Saints’ Cults as International
Networks: The Example of the Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria” (pp.
1–8); Andrew Jotischky, “St Sabas and the Palestinian Monastic Network
under Crusader Rule” (pp. 9–19); Anne J. Duggan, “Religious Networks in
Action:The European Expansion of the Cult of St Thomas of Canterbury”
(pp. 20–43); Damian J. Smith, “Networking to Orthodoxy: The Case of
Durán of Huesca” (pp. 44–54); Keiko Nowacka, “Networks of Ideas,
Networks of Men: Clerical Reform, Parisian Theologians, and the
Movement to Reform Prostitutes in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century
France” (pp. 55–66); Brenda Bolton,“From Frontier to Mission: Networking
by Unlikely Allies in the Church International, 1198–1216” (pp. 67–82);
Barbara Bombi, “An Archival Network: The Teutonic Knights between the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century” (pp. 83–95);Alec Ryrie,“John Knox’s
International Network” (pp. 96–115); Clotilde Prunier, “Scottish Catholic
Correspon-dence Networks in Eighteenth-Century Europe” (p. 116–26);
Jeremy Gregory, “Transatlantic Anglican Networks, c. 1680–c.1770:
Transplanting, Translating and Transforming the Church of England” (pp.
127–42); David Hempton, “International Religious Networks: Methodism
and Popular Protestantism, c. 1750–1850” (pp. 143–64); Dag Thorkildsen,
“Revivalism, Emigration and Religious Networks in Nineteenth-Century
Norway” (pp. 165–82); John Wolffe,“Transatlantic Visitors and Evangelical
Networks, 1829–61” (pp. 183–93); Ian J. Shaw,“An Englishman Abroad:The
International Networks of a Nineteenth-Century Congregationalist” (pp.
194–204); Torstein Jørgensen, “A Female Force Despite Mockery and
Contempt: Women’s Mission Groups in Norway as Social, Religious and
International Network Builders” (pp. 205–14); Cecilia Wejryd, “A Glocal
Knitwork: Sewing Circles in the Church of Sweden as a Global Woman’s
Network” (pp. 215–27); Shin Ahn,“The International Religious Network of
Yun Chi-ho (1865–1965): Mission or Dialogue?” (pp. 228–35); Stuart Mews,
“Global Visions and Patriotic Sentiments: The Rise and Fall of Ecumenical
Reputations, 1890–1922” (pp. 236–47); David M. Thompson, “The

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

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Ecumenical Network, 1920–48”(pp. 248–59);Tine Reeh,“The International
Horizon and the National Crisis: Hal Koch’s International Intellectual
Network, Experience and Influences during the 1930s”(pp. 260–71); Björn
Ryman,“Bureaucratic or Personal Networks? Formation of the Ecumenical
Movement during the Second World War” (pp. 272–82); Mika K.T. Pajunen,
“The Nordic Network shows its Weakness as the Cold War sets in:The Visit
of the Rev.A. Cotter to the Nordic Lutheran Churches of Denmark, Finland,
Norway, and Sweden, 1946” (pp. 283–92).
Hampton, Bryan Adams. Fleshly Tabernacles: Milton and the Incarnational
Poetics of Revolutionary England. (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press. 2012. Pp. x, 374. $40.00 paperback.)
Hanser, Richard. A Noble Treason: The Story of Sophie Scholl and the White
Rose Revolt against Hitler. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 2012. Pp. 297.
$17.95 paperback.) Originally published by Putnam, New York, in 1979.
Harrill, J. Albert. Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman
Context. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. xvi, 207. $24.99
paperback.)
Hayes, Christine. Introduction to the Bible. [Open Yale Courses Series.] (New
Haven:Yale University Press. 2012. Pp. xiv, 430. $18.00 paperback.)
International Theological Commission. Theology Today: Perspectives,
Principles, and Criteria. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of
America Press. 2012. Pp. x, 89. $16.95 paperback.)
Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious
Emotions in Early Modern Germany. (New York: Oxford University Press.
2012. Pp. x, 342. $34.95 paperback.) Originally published in 2010 and
reviewed by Charles G. Nauert, ante, XCVII (2011), 135–37.
Kinney, Angela M. (Ed.). The Vulgate Bible, Vol. V: The Minor Prophetical
Books and Maccabees. Douay-Rheims Translation. Introduction by Swift
Edgar. [Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Vol. 17.] (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. xxxviii, 631. $29.95.)
Kochanski, Halik. The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second
World War. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. xxxii, 734.
$35.00.)
Langan, Jeffrey J. The Influence of the French Revolution on the Lives and
Thought of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Mary
Wollstonecroft, Immanuel Kant, and Pius VI: The End of Conservatism.
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. 2012. Pp. xiv, 158. $49.95 paperback.)
LeBlanc, Jean (Ed.). Dictionnaire biographique des évêques catholiques du
Canada. Les diocèses catholiques canadiens des Églises latine et orientales et leurs évêques; repères chronologiques et biographiques,
1658–2012. 2nd ed. revised and enlarged. (Montréal: Wilson & Lafleur.

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2012. Pp. xxii, 1298. $94.50.) The first edition was published in 2002 and
was reviewed by John P. Comisky, ante, XCII (2006), 704–05.
Leng, Felicity (Ed.). Consecrated Spirits: A Thousand Years of Spiritual
Writings by Women Religious. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2012. Pp. xvii,
288. $18.95 paperback.)
McDonald, Lee Martin. The Formation of the Bible:The Story of the Church’s
Canon. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. 2012. Pp. xiv, 178. $24.95
paperback.)
Megged, Amos, and Stephanie Wood (Eds.). Mesoamerican Memory:
Enduring Systems of Remembrance. (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press. Pp. viii, 320. $55.00.) The tenth of thirteen essays in this collection
is “The 1539 Trial of Don Carlos Ometochtli and the Scramble for Mount
Tlaloc” by León García Garagarza (pp. 193–214).
Morrisson, Cécile (Ed.). Trade and Markets in Byzantium. [Dumbarton Oaks
Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia.] (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection. 2012. Pp. x, 459. $85.00.)
Mulder, John M. (Ed.). Finding God: A Treasury of Conversion Stories. (Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. 2012. Pp. xxii, 396. $22.00
paperback.)
Reich,Adam D. With God on Our Side: The Struggle for Workers’ Rights in a
Catholic Hospital. (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University
Press. 2012. Pp. xxii, 183. $26.00.) An account of the five-year (2004–09)
effort to unionize Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital in California.
Rospocher, Massimo (Ed.). Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics,
Spaces in Early Modern Europe. [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, Contributi 27.] (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2012. Pp.
309. €30,00 paperback.) Among the fourteen essays here published are
“1514, 1516, 1517: The Public Space and its Limits” by Silvana Seidel
Menchi (pp. 191–204), which deals with Desiderius Erasmus and his pamphlet Iulius virulently attacking Pope Julius II, and “The Making of a Public
Issue in Early Modern Europe.The Spanish Inquisition and Public Opinion
in the Netherlands” by Arjan van Dixhoorn (pp. 249–69).
Sibley, Robert C. The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino de Santiago.
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2012. Pp. 184. $23.95.) This is
a well-written personal memoir by a cultured Canadian journalist who
makes many concrete references to places and his experiences along the
camino francés, but with minimal (and sometimes erroneous) historical
and religious understanding.
Thompson, John L. (Ed.). Reformation Commentary on Scripture. Old
Testament I: Genesis I–II. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, an imprint of
InterVarsity Press. Pp. lxx, 389. $50.00.)

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

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Unger, Dominic J., OFM Cap. (Trans. and Annot.). Irenaeus of Lyons: Against
the Heresies, Book 2.With further revisions by John J. Dillon and introduction by Michael Slusser. Book 3:With an introduction and further revision
by Irenaeus M. C. Steenberg. [Ancient Christian Writers, Nos. 65, 64] (New
York/Mahwah, NJ: Newman Press. 2012. Book 2: Pp. xvi, 185; $34.95. Book
3: Pp. x, 245; $39.95.)
Wright, Wendy M. The Lady of the Angels and Her City: A Marian
Pilgrimage. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 247. $19.95
paperback.)