The Catholic Historical
Review
NELSON H. MINNICH
Editor
ROBERT TRISCO

JENNIFER PAXTON

Associate Editor

Associate Editor

ELIZABETH FOXWELL
Staff

Editor

Advisory Editors:
DANIEL BORNSTEIN

MAUREEN C. MILLER

Washington University in St. Louis

University of

California, Berkeley

(ex officio)
LIAM M. BROCKEY

STEPHEN SCHLOESSER

Michigan State University

Loyola University Chicago

SIMON DITCHFIELD
University of

JOSEPH M. WHITE

York

The Catholic University of

America

ROBIN DARLING YOUNG
The Catholic University of

America

__________

VOLUME 100

2014
__________

Published Quarterly by
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS
Washington, DC 20064
2014

Table of Contents
ARTICLES:
The “False Chronicles,” Cardinal Cesare Baronio, and Sacred History
in Counter-Reformation Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Katrina B. Olds
1
The Demands of Humanity and Religion: The U.S. Catholic Church, Colonization,
and the Mission to Liberia, 1842–44 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicholas M. Creary
27
Sisterly Advice and Eugenic Education: The Katholische Deutsche
Frauenbund and German Catholic Marriage Counseling in the
1920s and 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anette Lippold
52
Archbishop Francis J. Spellman’s Visit to Wartime Rome . . . . . . . Gerald P. Fogarty
72
French Women and the Global Fight for Faith: Catholic International
Religious Outreach in Turn-of-the-Century France . . . . . . . . . . Emily Machen 292
Popes and Livonia in the First Half of the Thirteenth Century:
Means and Chances to Shape the Periphery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anti Selart 437
“But an Echo”? Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Female
Religious Identity in Seventeenth-Century New France. . . . . . . . . Mary Dunn 459
The First Six Chinese Bishops of Modern Times: A Study in
Church Indigenization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul P. Mariani, S.J. 486
Rev. John J. Burke, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the
American Occupation of Haiti (1915–34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Douglas J. Slawson 514
Pope John Paul II, the Saints, and Communist Poland:
The Papal Pilgrimages of 1979 and 1983 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Ramon Felak 555
The Schoolmaster and the Bishop-Elect: Nicolò Cologno, Cosimo Gheri,
and Catholic Reform in Northeastern Italy, 1530–39 . . . Christopher Carlsmith 671
Transatlantic Connections: American Anti-Catholicism and the
First Vatican Council (1869–70) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Timothy Verhoeven 695
Acción Obrerista: Confessional Labor Organization in the
Spanish Republic (1931–36) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Samuel Pierce 721
Chinese Catholic Visionaries and the Socialist Education
Movement in Shanxi (1963–65) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henrietta Harrison 748
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS:
Why Relationships Matter: Sisters, Bishops, and the History of Catholicism
in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Margaret M. McGuinness

219

DISPUTATIO:
The Origins of the Guadalupe Tradition in Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . Timothy Matovina
A Response to Timothy Matovina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stafford Poole, C.M.
A Response to Stafford Poole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Timothy Matovina

243
271
284

FORUM ESSAY:
Between Pagan and Christian (Christopher P. Jones) . . . . . . . . Robin Darling Young,
David Frankfurter, Robert J. Penella, Jill Harries, Averil Cameron,
and Christopher P. Jones
REVIEW ESSAY:
New Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War: The Gomá Archive William J. Callahan

771

792

REPORT OF THE EDITOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nelson H. Minnich 400
BOOK REVIEWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97, 319, 575, 800
BRIEF NOTICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645, 833
NOTES AND COMMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187, 403, 646, 834
PERIODICAL LITERATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196, 412, 653, 839
OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211, 428, 664, 856

iii

iv

GENERAL INDEX

GENERAL INDEX
Volume 100 (2014)
Compiled by
Orysia Mack

Abbreviations:
autobio.: autobiography
bio.: biography
b.n.: brief notice
contrib.: contributor
FS: Festschrift
introd.: introduction
men.: mentioned
obit.: obituary
rev.: review
trans.: translator

XVth Latin American Conference on
Religion and Ethnicity
Announces theme “Memory, Identity,
and Religious Diversity,” 407
XVII e Siècle
Publishes articles on Pascal, 409
XLII Incontro di Studiosi dell’Antichità
Cristiana
Announces conference on “Povertà e
ricchezza nel Cristianesimo Antico
(I–V sec.),” 404
Abulafia, Anna Sapir
rev. of Deeana Copeland Klepper, 138–
39
Academy of Hungary
Cosponsors conference “Catholics and
the Holy See in the First World
War,” 190
Acción Obrerista
men., 721–47
Adomnán
men., 806–08
Alcuin
bio., 115–16
Alemany, Véronique
La dernière solitaire de Port-Royal:
Survivances jansénistes jusqu’au XX e
siècle, rev., 624–25
Alfani, Guido
Fathers and Godfathers: Spiritual Kinship
in Early-Modern Italy, rev., 367–68
Altermatt, Urs, Jan De Maeyer, and
Franziska Metzger, eds.

Religious Institutes and Catholic Culture in
19th- and 20th-Century Europe, rev.,
826–27
Altman, Ida
rev. of James D. Riley, ed., 181–82
Ambrose of Milan, Bishop and Saint
bio., 586–88
American Academy in Rome
Schedules five-week seminar on medieval
secular and religious movements, 188
American Catholic Historical Association
2014 spring meeting announced, 187
95th Annual Meeting announced, 187
Halecki memorial volume published,
190–91
Presents awards and prizes, 403
Presents research grants, 646
Presidential Address, Margaret M.
McGuinness, 219–42
Anchieta, José de, S.J.
Pope Francis extends liturgical cult to
the universal Church, 403
Anderson, Emma
The Death and Afterlife of the North
American Martyrs, rev., 635–36
Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest
Publishes papers on “Les Cisterciens
dans le Maine et dans l’Ouest au
Moyen Age,” 408
Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum
Publishes papers on “Mission und
Evangelisierung als Thema von
Synoden und Konzilien,” 648, 836

GENERAL INDEX

Anselm, Saint
men., 122–23
Antoninus, Saint
men., 339–40
Aquinas, Thomas, Saint
men., 814–15
Arabeyre, Patrick, and Brigitte BasdevantGaudemet, eds.
Les Clercs et les Princes: Doctrines et
pratiques de l’autorité ecclésiastique à
l’époque moderne, rev., 578–79
Archivum Historiae Pontificiae
Publishes papers on “Tra Parigi e Roma:
L’opera storiografica di Padre Pierre
Blet, S.J. (1918–2009), 649
Arjakovsky, Antoine
The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian
Emigration in Paris and Their
Journal, 1925–1940, rev., 627–28
Arnold, Ellen F.
Negotiating the Landscape: Environment
and Monastic Identity in the
Medieval Ardennes, rev., 113–14
Arribat, Joseph-Auguste, S.D.B., Servant of
God
Pope Francis authorizes decree of heroic
virtues of Arribat, 834
Asche, Matthias, Werner Buchholz, and
Anton Schindling, eds.
Die baltischen Lande im Zeitalter der
Reformation und Konfessionalisierung.
Teile 1–4: Livland, Estland, Ösel,
Ingermanland, Kurland und Lettgallen.
Stadt, Land und Konfession 1500–
1721, rev., 143–45
Augustine of Hippo, Bishop and Saint
bio., 323–24
men., 105–06, 324–25
Augustinian Order
men., 153–54
Australian and New Zealand Association of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Schedules tenth biennial conference, 835
Avella, Steven
Receives 2013 Vatican II Award for
distinguished service to the priesthood, 192
Badisches Landesmuseum
Sponsors exhibition “1414–1418
Weltereignis des Mittelalters,” 834
Bamji, Alexandra, Geert H. Janssen, and
Mary Laven, eds.
The Ashgate Research Companion to the
Counter-Reformation, rev., 607–09
Barbierato, Federico
rev. of Thomas F. Mayer, 154–55

v

Barker, John W.
rev. of Henry Maguire and Robert S.
Nelson, eds., 129–31
Barnes, Bernadine
rev. of Anne Dillon, 613–14
Barnes, T. D.
rev. of Massimo Giudetti, 804–05
Barnes, Timothy D., and George Bevan, eds.
The Funerary Speech for John Chrysostom,
rev., 805–06
Baronio, Cesare, Cardinal
men., 1–26
Bartlett, Thomas
rev. of Eamon Darcy and of John
Gibney, 157–59
Bauman, Chad M.
Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in
Hindu India, 1868–1947, rev., 397–98
Baumgartner, Frederic J.
rev. of Arlette Jouanna, 353–55
Baxter, Richard
men., 159–61
Beales, Derek
rev. of Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L.
Lehner, eds., 823–24
Beatrice, Pier Franco
The Transmission of Sin: Augustine and the
Pre-Augustinian Sources, rev., 105–06
Becker, Alfons
Papst Urban II. (1088–1099), Teil 3:
Ideen, Institutionen und Praxis eines
päpstlichen regimen universale, rev.,
592–94
Becker, Marjorie
rev. of Ben Fallaw, 394–95
Becket, Thomas, Archbishop and Saint
men., 122–23
Bede, Venerable, Saint
men., 114–15
Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte Miriam
When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in
the Middle Ages, rev., 589–90
BeDuhn, Jason David
Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, Vol. 2:
Making a “Catholic” Self, 388–401
C.E., rev., 324–25
Beke, Péter
rev. of Péter Tusor, ed., 579–81
Bell, George
men., 379–80
Belloc, Hilaire
men., 625–26
Benedict XVI, Pope
men., 621–22
Papers published on pope’s Porta Fidei,
191

vi

GENERAL INDEX

Benedict, Philip, and Nicolas Fornerod,
eds.
L’Organisation et l’action des églises
réformées de France (1557–1563).
Synodes provinciaux et autres documents,
rev., 349–51
Bergin, Joseph
rev. of Elizabeth C. Tingle, 342–44
men., 353–55
Bériou, Nicole, and Cécile Caby, eds.
Moines et religieux dans la ville (XII e–XV e
siècle), rev., 119–21
Berman, Constance H.
rev. of Emilia Jamroziak, 810–11
rev. of James France, 121–22
Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot and Saint
men., 594–95
Bernard-Maître, Henri, Pierre
Humbertclaude, and Maurice Prunier
Présences occidentales au Japon. Du «siècle
chrétien» à la réouverture du XIXe siècle,
rev., 398–99
Beschet, Paul, S.J.
Mission in Thuringia in the Time of
Nazism, rev., 167–68
Biale, David
rev. of Mitchell B. Merback, 134–35
Bird, Jessalynn, Edward Peters, and James
M. Powell, eds.
Crusade and Christendom: Annotated
Documents in Translation from Innocent
III to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291, rev.,
126–27
Blastic, Michael W., O.F.M.; Jay M.
Hammond; and J. A. Wayne
Hellmann, O.F.M.Conv., eds.
Studies in Early Franciscan Sources. Vol. 1:
The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Letters and Prayers; Vol. 2: The Writings of
Francis of Assisi: Rules, Testament and
Admonitions; Vol. 3: The Writings of
Clare of Assisi: Letters, Form of Life, Testament and Blessing, rev., 127–29
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate
rev. of Tanya Stabler Miller, 816–18
Blumenthal, Uta-Renate
rev. of Alfons Becker, 592–94
Bockhorn, Lee, and Giulietta Bockhorn
trans., Padre Pio under Investigation,
376–78
Bogle, Lori
rev. of R. W. H. Miller, 101–02
Boismenu, Alain-Marie Guynot de, Servant
of God
Pope Francis authorizes decree on heroic
virtues of de Boismenu, 646

Bonaldo, Maria Oliva, Servant of God
Pope Francis declares virtues heroic, 187
Böntert, Stefan
Friedlicher Kreuzzug und fromme Pilger:
Liturgiehistorische Studien zu HeiligLand- Wallfahrt im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Pilgerberichte des späten 19. Jahrhunderts, rev., 622–23
Borromeo, Federico
De cognitionibus quas habent Daemones
liber unus, rev., 341–42
Boston College
Announces conference on “The Problem
of Religion: Faith and Agency in History,” 189
Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies
announces first world congress on
Jesuit studies with theme “Exploring
Jesuit Identity and Distinctiveness in
the History of the Modern World,”
407
Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies
sponsors international symposium on
“Exploring Jesuit Distinctiveness,” 646
Bottegal, Romano, O.C.S.O., Servant of
God
Pope Francis declares virtues heroic, 187
Bottoni, Elena
Scritture dell’anima: Esperienze religiose
femminili nella Toscana del Settecento,
rev., 618–19
Bouchard, Constance B.
rev. of Alice Chapman, 594–95
Bozell, Brent, Jr.
bio., 830–31
Bradshaw, Paul F., and Maxwell E. Johnson
The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution
and Interpretation, rev., 575–76
Brand, Clinton A.
rev. of Alejandro Cifres, ed., 372–74
Brekus, Catherine A., and W. Clark
Gilpin, eds.
American Christianities: A History of
Dominance and Diversity, rev., 174–75
Brendle, Franz
Der Erzkanzler im Religionskrieg: Kurfürst
Anselm Casimir von Mainz, die geistlichen Fürsten und das Reich, 1629 bis
1647, rev., 362–63
Brennan, Sean
Receives ACHA Junior Faculty Research
Grant, 646
Brenner, Elma, Meredith Cohen, and Mary
Franklin-Brown, eds.
Memory and Commemoration in Medieval
Culture, rev., 330–31

GENERAL INDEX

Brepols Publishers
Announces new reference bibliography
Indexreligious, 403
Brocadelli, Lucia
men., 606–07
Bromberg, Sarah
rev. of Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, and
Kathryn A. Smith, eds., 813–14
Brown, Peter
Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the
Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, rev.,
104–05
Bruce, Scott G.
rev. of Ellen F. Arnold, 113–14
Bruckberger, Raymond-Léopold
bio., 165–66
Bruno-Jofre, Rosa
Receives Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council Connection Grant,
838
Buffon, Giuseppe, O.F.M.
rev. of Francesco Castelli, 376–78
Bugni, Chiara
bio., 603–04
Burke, John J.
men., 459–87
Burns, David
The Life and Death of the Radical
Historical Jesus, rev., 639–40
Burns, Robert I., S.J.
men., 332–33
Burr, David
rev. of Nicole Bériou and Cécile Caby,
eds., 119–21
Burson, Jeffrey D., and Ulrich L. Lehner,
eds.
Enlightenment and Catholicism in
Europe: A Transnational History, rev.,
823–24
Butler, Anne M.
Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in
the American West, 1850–1920, rev.,
382–83
Caccia, Francesco di, ed.
De cognitionibus quas habent Daemones
liber unus, rev., 341–42
Cadegan, Una M.
All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print
Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in
Twentieth-Century America, rev., 176–
77
Cahiers de civilization médiéval X e–XII e
siècles
Publishes articles with different ways of
looking at the Middle Ages, 408

vii

Cain, Andrew, ed.
Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: A Commentary
on the Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae,
rev., 106–07
Cajka, Peter
Receives ACHA Graduate Student
Research Grant, 646
Callahan, William J.
New Perspectives on the Spanish Civil
War: The Gomá Archive, Review
Essay, 792–99
Callon, David
rev. of James Emmett Ryan, 173–74
Calvert, Christine
trans., Fathers and Godfathers, 367–68
Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
Sponsors seminar “Leadership and
Christian Formation in the Early
Church,” 188
Cameron, Averil
Between Pagan and Christian, Forum
Essay, 771–91
Campbell, Kenneth L.
Windows into Men’s Souls: Religious
Nonconformity in Tudor and Early
Stuart England, rev., 152–53
Canadian Catholic Historical Association
Announces 81st Annual Meeting with
theme “Borders without Boundaries,”
189–90
Publishes vol. 79 of Historical Studies,
192
Candia, Marcello, Servant of God
Pope Francis authorizes decree of heroic
virtues of Candia, 835
Cannan, Fergus
contrib., Object of Devotion, 137–38
Cannon, Jon, and Beth Williamson, eds.
The Medieval Art, Architecture and History
of Bristol Cathedral: An Enigma
Explored, rev., 123–25
Cardon-Jette, Rosalie, Servant of God
Pope Francis declares heroic virtues of
Institute of the Sisters of Misericorde
foundress, 187
Caravale, Giorgio, and Stefania Pastore, eds.
Intellettuali in esilio. Dall’Inquisizione
romana al fascismo, rev., 615–16
Cardini, Franco
The Companion to Medieval Society, rev.,
808–09
Carinci, Eleonora
rev. of Virginia Cox, 355–56
Carlsmith, Christopher
rev. of Maurizio Sangalli, 366–67
The Schoolmaster and the Bishop-Elect:

viii

GENERAL INDEX

Nicolò Cologno, Cosimo Gheri, and
Catholic Reform in Northeastern
Italy, 1530–39, 671–94
Carmelite Order
men., 99–100
Carmody, Maurice, O.F.M.
rev. of Michael W. Blastic, O.F.M.; Jay
M. Hammond; and J. A. Wayne Hellmann, O.F.M.Conv., eds., 127–29
Carroll, John, S.J., Archbishop
men., 219–42
Carter, Karen E.
rev. of Patrick Arabeyre and Brigitte
Basdevant-Gaudemet, eds., 578–79
Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa de
men., 358–59
Castelli, Francesco
Padre Pio under Investigation: The Secret
Vatican Files, rev., 376–78
Catherine of Siena, Saint
men., 335–37
Catholic University of Leuven
Documentation and Research Center for
Religion, Culture, and Society issues
international newsletter, 646
Ceci, Lucia
L’interesse superiore: Il Vaticano e l’Italia di
Mussolini, rev., 378–79
Cervantes, Fernando, and Andrew Redden,
eds.
Angels, Demons and the New World, rev.,
390–91
Chambers, David
rev. of Brigide Schwarz, 132–34
rev. of Maria Antonietta Visceglia, ed.,
821–22
Champion, Renée
trans., Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal,
1720–1798, 619–21
Chapman, Alice
Sacred Authority and Temporal Power in
the Writings of Bernard of Clairvaux,
rev., 594–95
Chappel, James
rev. of Joachim Kuropka, ed., 628–30
Charles-Edwards, T. M.
rev. of Michael J. Enright, 806–08
Charlemagne
men., 825–27
Chorpenning, Joseph F., O.S.F.S., ed.
Encountering Anew the Familiar: Francis
de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout
Life at 400 Years, rev., 361–62
Chovelon, Bernard, and Bernadette
Chovelon
Bruckberger: L’enfant terrible, rev., 165–66

Church History & Religious Culture
Publishes essays on the Devotio Moderna,
409
Cifres, Alejandro, ed.
La validez de las ordenaciones Anglicanas.
Los documentos de la comisión preparatoria de la bula ‹‹Apostolicæ Curæ››. Tomo
II: Los documentos de 1896, rev., 372–74
Cistercian Order
men., 121–22, 409, 810–11
Claverie, Pierre-Vincent
Honorius III et l’Orient (1216–1227).
Étude et publication de sources inédites
des Archives vaticanes (ASV), rev., 595–
96
Coffman, Elesha J.
The Christian Century and the Rise of the
Protestant Mainline, rev., 384–85
Cohen, Thomas M.
rev. of James E. Wadsworth, 392–94
Coleman, Joyce, Mark Cruse, and Kathryn
A. Smith, eds.
The Social Life of Illumination:
Manuscripts, Images, and Communities
in the Late Middle Ages, rev., 813–14
Collins, David J., S.J.
rev. of Sophie Page, 815–16
Cologno, Nicolò
men., 671–94
Columba, Saint
men., 806–08
Columbia University
Cosponsors workshop in Middle French
paleography, 188
Comerford, Kathleen
rev. of Alexandra Bamji, Geert H.
Janssen, and Mary Laven, eds., 607–09
Concilium Lateranense IV
Conference scheduled to commemorate
the 800th anniversary of the Fourth
Lateran Council, 835
Constance, Council of
Exhibition about, 834
Constantine, Emperor
men., 191, 804–05
Cooper, Tim
John Owen, Richard Baxter and the
Formation of English Nonconformity,
rev., 159–61
Coppa, Frank J.
rev. of Bartolo Gariglio, 621–22
Cordero Molina, Raffaele, Servant of God
Pope Francis declares heroic virtues, 187
Cornelison, Sally J.
Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in
Renaissance Florence, rev., 339–40

GENERAL INDEX

Costambeys, Marios
rev. of Michael McCormick, ed., 325–27
Costigan, Richard F., S.J.
obit., 410–11
Courtenay, William J., and Eric D.
Goddard, eds.
Rotuli Parisienses: Supplications to the Pope
from the University of Paris, Vol. III:
1378– 1394, rev., 337–38
Cox, Virginia
The Prodigious Muse. Women’s Writing in
Counter-Reformation Italy, rev., 355–56
Crane, Richard Francis
rev. of Bernard and Bernadette
Chovelon, 165–66
rev. of Brenna Moore, 374–76
Creary, Nicholas M.
The Demands of Humanity and
Religion: The U.S. Catholic Church,
Colonization, and the Mission to
Liberia, 1842–44, 27–51
Crook, Eugene
trans., Speculum Curatorm, 818–19
Crouch, David
rev. of Elizabeth Gemmill, 333–34
Crusades
men., 118–19, 126–27, 590–91
Cullum, P. H., and Katherine J. Lewis, eds.
Religious Men and Masculine Identity in
the Middle Ages, rev., 328–30
Cunningham, Jack P.
rev. of John Flood, James R. Ginther,
and Joseph W. Goering, eds., 331–32
Cushing, Kathleen G.
rev. of Patricia Ranft, 591–92
Dailey, Alice
The English Martyr from Reformation to
Revolution, rev., 611–13
Dales, Douglas
Alcuin: His Life and Legacy, rev., 115–16
Dall’Aglio, Stefano
Savonarola and Savonarolism, rev., 604–05
Daly, Richard, C.S.C.
Becomes new president of the Texas
Catholic Historical Society, 650
Dameron, George
rev. of Franco Cardini, 808–09
Damian, Peter, Saint
men., 591–92
Damiani, Bruno M.
rev. of Hilaire Kallendorf, 610–11
Darcy, Eamon
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars
of the Three Kingdoms, rev., 157–59
David, Nicetas
The Life of Patriarch Ignatius, rev., 809–10

ix

Davis, David J.
Seeing Faith, Printing Pictures: Religious
Identity during the English Reformation, rev., 148–49
De Hamel, Christopher
rev. of David A. Salomon, 125–26
De la Torre Curiel, José Refugio
Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting
Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855, rev.,
391–92
Delbeke, Maarten
The Art of Religion: Sforza Pallavicino and
Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome, rev.,
365–66
Dellapenna, Joseph W.
rev. of Wolfgang P. Müller, 109–10
Demacopoulos, George E.
The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse
and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity,
rev., 801–03
Dendorfer, Jürgen, and Ralf Lützelschwab,
eds.
Die Kardinäle des Mittelalters und der
Frühen Renaissance, rev., 117–18
Geschichte des Kardinalats im Mittelalter,
rev., 588–89
Des Rochers, Jacques
iconographic researcher, The Sulpicians of
Montreal, 170–71
Desan, Philippe, ed.
Dieu à nostre commerce et société.
Montaigne et la théologie, rev.,
352–53
d’Escures, Ralph, Archbishop
bio., 122–23
Deslandres, Dominique, John A.
Dickenson, and Ollivier Hubert, eds.
The Sulpicians of Montreal: A History of
Power and Discretion 1657–2007, rev.,
170–71
Dillon, Anne
Michelangelo and the English Martyrs,
rev., 613–14
Di Stefano, Andrea
Receives ACHA Junior Faculty Research
Grant, 646
Dohrmann, Natalie B. and Annette
Yoshiko Reed, eds.
Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire:
The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity,
rev., 800–01
Dolan, Frances E.
True Relations: Reading, Literature, and
Evidence in Seventeenth-Century
England, rev., 155–57

x

GENERAL INDEX

Domenico, Roy
Receives ACHA Distinguished
Teaching Award, 401
rev. of Alberto Guasco, 626–27
rev. of Lucia Ceci, 378–79
Dossey, Leslie
Peasant and Empire in Christian North
Africa, rev., 107–09
Drake, Richard
rev. of Wendy Pojmann, 168–69
Drake, Susanna
Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and
Difference in Early Christian Texts,
rev., 584–85
Drexel, Katharine, S.B.S., Saint
men., 219–42
Duffy, Eamon
contrib., Object of Devotion, 137–38
Duffy, John M.
men., 809–10
Dumont, Martin
Le Saint-Siège et l’organisation politiques
des catholiques français aux lendemains
du Ralliement, 1890–1902, rev., 370–71
Dunand, Carine
Des montagnards endiablés: Chasse aux
sorciers dans la vallée de Chamonix
(1458–1462), rev., 341–42
Dunn, Dennis J.
rev. of Antoine Arjakovsky, auth; John
A. Jillions and Michael Plekon, eds.;
trans. Jerry Ryan, 627–28
Dunn, Mary
“But an Echo”? Claude Martin, Marie de
l’Incarnation, and Female Religious
Identity in Seventeenth-Century New
France, 459–85
Dunne, Michael W., and Simon Nolan,
O.Carm., eds.
Richard FitzRalph: His Life, Times and
Thought, rev., 135–36
Edbury, Peter W.
rev. of Pierre-Vincent Claverie, 595–
96
Eisler, Jakob
Das Deutsche Johanniter-Hospiz in
Jerusalem, rev., 161–62
Ekandem, Dominic, Cardinal
men., 184–85
Ellison, Robert H.
rev. of Bob Tennant, 825–26
Emery, Elizabeth
trans., “Martyr to the Truth,” 162–63
Enright, Michael J.
Prophecy and Kingship in Adomnán’s “Life
of Saint Columba,” rev., 806–08

Enwerem, Iheanyi, O.P.
rev. of Cosmas K. O. Nwosuh, 184–85
Erdő, Péter, Cardinal
FS, 579–81
Evangelische Theologie
Publishes articles on quincentenary of
the Reformation, 836
Evers, Alexander
rev. of Leslie Dossey, 107–09
Fabbri, Alessandro
All’indomani del grande Scisma d’Occidente.
Jean Le Fèvre canonista al servizio
dei Valois e il trattato De planctu
bonorum in risposta a Giovanni da
Legnano, rev., 599–600
Fabun, Sean
Receives ACHA Peter Guilday Award, 403
Fallaw, Ben
Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, rev., 394–95
Federici, Corrado
men., 808–09
Fedewa, Marilyn H.
María of Ágreda: Mystical Lady in Blue,
rev., 359–61
Felak, James Ramon
Pope John Paul II, the Saints, and
Communist Poland: The Papal Pilgrimages of 1979 and 1983, 459–88
Ferlan, Claudio
Dentro e fuori le aule: la Compagnia di
Gesù a Gorizia e nell’Austria interna
(secoli XVI–XVII), rev., 351
Ferrer, Vincent, O.P., Saint
men., 819–20
Fincham, Kenneth, and Nicholas Tyacke
Altars Restored: The Changing Face of
English Religious Worship, 1547–c.
1700, rev., 347–48
Finocchiaro, Maurice A.
The Routledge Guidebook to Galileo’s
Dialogue, rev., 617–18
Fisher, Alexander
rev. of Richard Wetzel and Erika
Heitmeyer, 614–15
Fisher, James T.
Receives ACHA Distinguished
Scholarship Award, 403
Fitzgerald, Allan, O.S.A.
rev. of Pier Franco Beatrice, 105–06
Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Susan
The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru,
1943–1989: Transnational Faith
and Transformation, rev., 182–84
FitzRalph, Richard, Bishop
men., 135–36

GENERAL INDEX

Flannery, John M.
The Mission of the Portuguese Augustinians
to Persia and Beyond (1602–1747),
rev., 153–54
Flood, John, James R. Ginther, and Joseph
W. Goering, eds.
Robert Grosseteste and His Intellectual
Milieu: New Editions and Studies, rev.,
331–32
Floor, Willem
rev. of John M. Flannery, 153–54
Flori, Jean
Prêcher la croisade. XI–XIII siècle. Communication et propagande, rev., 590–91
Fogarty, Gerald P.
Archbishop Francis J. Spellman’s Visit to
Wartime Rome, 72–96
Folger Institute
Sponsors seminars on “Narratives of
Conversion in Reformation Europe,
ca. 1550–1700” and “Afterlife of the
Reformation: Embodied Souls and
Their Rivals,” 647
Fondazione per le scienze religiose
Giovanni XXIII
Announces plenary sessions’ theme of
“Arts, Portraits and Representation in
the Reformation Era,” 189
Forbes, Helen Foxhall
rev. of Douglas Dales, 115–16
France, James
Separate but Equal: Cistercian Lay
Brothers, 1120–1350, rev., 121–22
Franchi, Giovannina, Servant of God
Pope Francis assigns status of Miracles,
187
Francis de Sales, Saint
men., 361–62
Franciscan Order
men., 127–29, 131–32, 603–04, 634–35
Frankfurter, David
Between Pagan and Christian, Forum
Essay, 771–91
Fraser, Theodore P.
trans., Mission in Thuringia in the Time of
Nazism, 167–68
Freed, John B.
rev. of Edeltraud Klueting, T.O.Carm.;
Stephan Panzer, O.Carm.; and Andreas
H. Scholten, O.Carm., eds., 99–100
Freedman, Paul
introd., Warrior Neighbours, 332–33
Fudge, Thomas A.
The Memory and Motivation of Jan Hus,
Medieval Priest and Martyr, rev., 338–
39

xi

The Trial of Jan Hus: Medieval Heresy and
Criminal Procedure, rev., 140–41
Fuhl, Vinzenz, C.R.S.A., Servant of God
Pope Francis declares heroic virtues, 187
Fuller, Robert C.
The Body of Faith: A Biological History of
Religion in America, rev., 638–39
Gaetana of the Blessed Sacrament, Superior
General and Servant of God (Carlotta
Fontana)
Pope Francis authorizes decree of heroic
virtues of Gaetana, 834–35
Gagné, John
trans., Savonarola and Savonarolism,
604–05
Galilei, Galileo
The Routledge Guidebook to Galileo’s
Dialogue, rev., 617–18
Galindo, David Rex
rev. of John J. O’Hagan, 634–35
Gallagher, Charles R., David I. Kertzer,
and Alberto Melloni, eds.
Pius XI and America: Proceedings of the
Brown University Conference (Providence, October 2010), rev., 386–90
García y García, Antonio, O.F.M.
obit., 193–94
Gariglio, Bartolo
I cattolici dal Risorgimento a Benedetto
XVI: Un percorso dal Piemonte all’Italia,
rev., 621–22
Garneau, James F.
rev. of Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, 182–
84
Garrigou, Maurice, Servant of God
Pope Francis declares heroic virtues of
French Compassionist, 187
Gatland, Emma
Women from the Golden Legend: Female
Authority in a Medieval Castilian Sanctoral, rev., 139–40
Gemeinhardt, Peter
rev. of Clare Monagle, 811–12
Gemmill, Elizabeth
The Nobility and Ecclesiastical Patronage
in Thirteenth-Century England, rev.,
333–34
George, Timothy
Reading the Scriptures with the Reformers,
rev., 344–45
Germeten, Nicole von
Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race
& Honor in Colonial Cartagena de
Indias, rev., 831–32
Gheri, Cosimo, Bishop-Elect
men., 671–94

xii

GENERAL INDEX

Gibney, John
The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion
in Irish History and Memory, rev., 157–
59
Giemza, Bryan
Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of
the American South, rev., 641–42
Giovanni da Legnano
men., 599–600
Giudetti, Massimo
Costantino e il suo secolo: L’“editto di
Milano” e le religioni, rev., 804–05
Gjerde, Jon
Catholicism and the Shaping of NineteenthCentury America, rev., 637–38
Godwin, Joscelyn
rev. of Daniel Stolzenberg, 363–65
Goodkin, Helen Fairbank
rev. of Francis J. Sypher Jr., 177–78
Grant, Jeanne E.
rev. of Thomas A. Fudge, 338–39
Grant, Robert L.
trans., Ambrose of Milan, 586–88
Green, Ian
rev. of David J. Davis, 148–49
Greene, Robert H.
Bodies Like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics
in Orthodox Russia, rev., 371–72
Greenleaf, Richard E.
The Inquisition in Colonial Latin America:
Selected Writings of Richard E. Greenleaf, rev., 181–82
Grendler, Paul F.
Receives Premio Internazionale Galileo
Galilei, 650
rev. of John Tedeschi, auth.; Giorgio
Caravale and Stefania Pastore, eds.,
615–16
The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga,
and the Jesuits, 1584–1630, rev., 356–57
Gribben, Crawford
rev. of Sarah Rivett, 169–70
Grosseteste, Robert, Bishop
men., 331–32
Guasco, Alberto
Cattolici e fascisti: La Santa Sede e la
politica italiana all’alba del Regime
(1919–1925), rev., 626–27
Guérin, Theodore, Saint
men., 219–42
Gützlaff, Karl F. A.
men., 395–96
Haas, Thomas
Geistliche als Kreuzfahrer. Der Klerus im
Konflikt zwischen Orient und Okzident,
1095–1221, rev., 118–19

Haberkern, Phillip
rev. of Thomas A. Fudge, 140–41
Habsburg, Maximilian von
Catholic and Protestant Translations of the
Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650: From
Late Medieval Classic to Early Modern
Bestseller, rev., 320–21
Hackett, William, S.J.
bio., 185–86
Halecki, Oskar
Memorial volume published, 190–91
Hall, Marcia B., and Tracy E. Cooper, eds.
The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation
Church, rev., 609–10
Halpern, Nikki
trans., The Faith of Remembrance, 581–82
Hancock, Christopher
rev. of Jessie Gregory Lutz, 395–96
Hao Nai, Vicar General
men., 748–70
Harries, Jill
Between Pagan and Christian, Forum
Essay, 771–91
Harrison, Henrietta
Chinese Catholic Visionaries and the
Socialist Education Movement in
Shanxi (1963–65), 748–70
Hayes, Patrick J.
rev. of Paula M. Kane, 828–30
Heesakkers, Chris L.
contrib., Les Livres des procurateurs de la
nation germanique de l’ancienne
Université d’Orléans 1444–1602, 602–
03
Heineman, Kenneth J.
rev. of Timothy Kelly, 180–81
Heitmeyer, Erika
Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder und
Psalmen, 1567: Hymnody of the
Counter- Reformation in Germany, rev.,
614–15
Helding, Michael, Bishop
bio., 146–48
Hailandière, Célestin de la, Bishop
men., 219–42
Henstock, Christopher J.
contrib., 358–59
Heretz, Leonid
rev. of Robert H. Greene, 371–72
Herzig, Tamar
Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman:
Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris,
and the Defense of the Faith, rev., 606–
07
Hess, Rudolf
men., 379–80

GENERAL INDEX

Heyberger, Bernard
Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal, 1720–
1798: A Political and Religious Crisis in
Lebanon, rev., 619–21
Hibbard, Caroline
rev. of Peter Marshall and Geoffrey
Scott, eds., 348–49
Higden, Ranulph
Speculum Curatorm: A Mirror for Curates,
rev., 818–19
Hillis, Gregory K.
rev. of Geza Vermes, 102–03
Hindiyya
bio., 619–21
History Fund of Ohio
Provides grant to restore White Water
Shaker Village, 404
Hollerich, Michael
rev. of Natalie B. Dohrmann and
Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., 800–01
Hollingworth, Miles
Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual
Biography, rev., 323–24
Honorius III, Pope
men., 595–96
Hudon, William V.
rev. of Reinhold C. Mueller and
Gabriella Zarri, eds., 603–04
Hudson, Anne
rev. of Michael W. Dunne and Simon
Nolan, O.Carm., eds., 135–36
Humbertclaude, Pierre
Présences occidentales au Japon. Du «siècle
chrétien» à la réouverture du XIX e siècle,
rev., 398–99
Hus, Jan
bio., 338–39
men., 140–41
Huysegoms, Henri, and Pierre Liesse, eds.
Edmond Pezet: A Priest among Buddhist
Monks in Thailand, rev., 643–44
Hyland, Sabine
rev. of Fernando Cervantes and Andrew
Redden, eds., 390–91
XLII Incontro di Studiosi dell’Antichità
Cristiana
Announces conference on “Povertà e
ricchezza nel Cristianesimo Antico
(I–V sec.),” 404
Ignatius of Loyola, Superior General and
Saint
autobio., 149–50
Ignatius, Patriarch
bio., 809–10
Institut Catholique de la Méditerranée
Sponsors conference on World War I, 190

xiii

International Commission for the Study of
History
World War I conference to discuss role
of military chaplains, 190
International Congress on Medieval Studies
Announces three panels on canon law,
406
International Society of Medieval Canon
Law/Iuris Canonici Medii Aevi
Consociatio
Cosponsors panel “Saints, Heretics, and
Canon Law: Re-thinking the Significance of the Fourth Lateran Council
(1215)” with Hagiography Society,
835
Cosponsors sessions on “Reform and
Renewal” with Leeds Medieval Congress, 835
Irenaeus, Saint
bio., 585–86
Istituto Sangalli per la storia e le culture
religiose
Opens in Florence, 647
Izbicki, Thomas M.
rev. of Alessandro Fabbri, 599–600
Jamroziak, Emilia
The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe,
1090–1500, rev., 810–11
Janauschek, Wilhelm, C.Ss.R., Servant of
God
Pope Francis authorizes decree on heroic
virtues of Janauschek, 646
Jansenism
men., 624–25
Jennings, Margaret
trans., Speculum Curatorm, 818–19
Jerome, Saint
men., 106–07
Jillions, John A., and Michael Plekon, eds.
The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian
Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940, rev., 627–28
John Chrysostom, Archbishop and Saint
men., 805–06
John Paul II, Pope and Saint
men., 459–88
Johnson, Maxwell E.
The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution
and Interpretation, rev., 575–6
Jones, Christopher P.
Between Pagan and Christian, Forum
Essay, 771–91
Jones, David, ed.
Friars’ Tales: Thirteenth-Century
Exempla from the British Isles, rev.,
131–32

xiv

GENERAL INDEX

Jouanna, Arlette
The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre:
The Mysteries of a Crime of State (24
August 1572), rev., 353–55
Journal of Early Modern Europe
Publishes issue on theme of war and
conscience, 836
Journal of Early Modern History
Publishes theme issue on conversion
narratives, 191
Journal of Jesuit Studies
Publishes first volume, 409
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies
Publishes articles on “Devotion and
Intellectual Labor,” 408, 648
Jürjo-Pöltsam, Inna
rev. of Matthias Asche, Werner
Buchholz, and Anton Schindling,
eds., 143–45
Kabala, James S.
Church-State Relations in the Early
American Republic, 1787–1846, rev.,
171–73
Kallendorf, Hilaire
Sins of the Fathers: Moral Economies
in Early Modern Spain, rev.,
610–11
Kamesar, Adam
trans., The Transmission of Sin, 105–06
Kane, Paula M.
Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in
Modern America, rev., 828–30
Kang, S. Deborah, ed.
Catholicism and the Shaping of NineteenthCentury America, rev., 637–38
Katholische Deutsche Frauenbund
men., 52–71
Keen, Ralph
rev. of Peter M. Seidel, 146–48
Kehnel, Annette
rev. of David Jones, ed., 131–32
Keith, Charles
Receives ACHA John Gilmary Shea
Book Prize, 403
Kelly, Daniel
Living on Fire: The Life of Brent Bozell,
Jr., rev., 830–31
Kelly, Timothy
The Transformation of American
Catholicism: The Pittsburgh Laity and
the Second Vatican Council, 1950–1972,
rev., 180–81
Kennelly, Karen M., C.S.J.
Receives ACHA Distinguished Service
to Catholic Studies Award, 403

Kertzer, David I.
The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History
of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in
Europe, rev., 630–32
Kilcullen, John, John Scott, Jan Ballweg,
and Volker Leppin, eds.
William of Ockham. Dialogus. Part 2. Part
3, Tract 1, rev., 334–35
Killen, Patricia O’Connell
rev. of Anne M. Butler, 382–83
Kilroy, Gerard
rev. of Alice Dailey, 611–13
Kim, Sebastian
rev. of Chad M. Bauman, 397–98
Kircher, Athanasius
men., 363–65
Klaiber, Jeffrey L., S.J.
obit., 650–52
Klepper, Deeana Copeland
The Insight of Unbelievers. Nicholas of
Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish
Text in the Later Middle Ages, rev.,
138–39
Klueting, Edeltraud, T.O.Carm.; Stephan
Panzer, O.Carm.; and Andreas H.
Scholten, O.Carm., eds.
Monasticon Carmelitanum: Die Klöster des
Karmelitenordens (O. Carm.) in
Deutschland von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart, rev., 99–100
Kouam, Thierry
rev. of William J. Courtenay and Eric D.
Goddard, eds., 337–38
Koziol, Geoffrey
rev. of Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak,
589–90
Kramer, Heinrich, “Institoris”
men., 606–07
Kselman, Thomas
rev. of Martin Dumont, 370–71
Kulikowski, Michael
rev. of Peter Brown, 104–05
Kuropka, Joachim, ed.
Grenzen des katholischen Milieus.
Stabilität und Gefährdung katholischer
Milieus in der Endphase der Weimarer
Republik und der NS-Zeit, rev., 628–30
Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval
Canon Law
Sponsors panel on “Medieval Canon
Law and Social Issues,” 835
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of
the Americas
Publishes papers on Herbert Gutman’s
essay “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement,” 649

GENERAL INDEX

Lamm, Julia A., ed.
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to
Christian Mysticism, rev., 97–98
Lateran University
Announces conference to commemorate
the 800th anniversary of the Fourth
Lateran Council, 190
Laval, François de
Pope Francis extends liturgical cult to
the universal Church, 403
Lantzer, Jason S.
rev. of Elesha J. Coffman, 384–85
Lapomarda, Vincent A., S.J.
rev. of Paul Beschet, S.J., 167–68
Lappin, Anthony John
rev. of Emma Gatland, 139–40
Larsen, Kevin S.
rev. of Nathan Wachtel, 581–82
Le Fèvre, Jean
men., 599–600
Leisentrit, Johann
men., 614–15
Leon, Sharon M.
An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle
with Eugenics, rev., 179–80
“Lendület” Church History Research
Institute, Hungarian Academy of
Sciences/Péter Pázmany Catholic
University
Hosts international workshop “The
Papacy and the Local Churches
(16th–20th Centuries),” 188
Lieu, Judith M.
rev. of Susanna Drake, 584–85
Lindberg, Carter
rev. of Douglas H. Shantz, 100–01
Lippold, Anette
Sisterly Advice and Eugenic Education:
The Katholische Deutsche Frauenbund and German Catholic Marriage
Counseling in the 1920s and 1930s,
52–71
Lombardo, Paul A.
rev. of Sharon M. Leon, 179–80
Lopez Novoa, Saturnino, Servant of God
Pope Francis authorizes decree of heroic
virtues of cofounder of the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly, 834
Louth, Andrew
rev. of Nicetas David, 809–10
Loyola University of Chicago
Museum of Art sponsors exhibition
“Crossings and Dwellings: Restored
Jesuits, Women Religious, American
Experience, 1814–2014,” 834

xv

Ludovico da Casoria, O.F.M., Blessed
(Arcangelo Palmentieri)
Pope Francis authorizes decree
concerning miracles for founder of
Congregation of Franciscan Sisters of
St. Elizabeth, 646
Luongo, F. Thomas
rev. of Jane Tylus, 335–37
Lutz, Jessie Gregory
Opening China: Karl F. A. Gützlaff and
Sino-Western Relations, 1827–1852,
rev., 395–96
Luxford, Julian M.
rev. of Paul Williamson, ed., 137–38
Lyon, Eileen Groth
rev. of Peter Raina, ed., 379–80
Machen, Emily
French Women and the Global Fight for
Faith: Catholic International Religious Outreach in Turn-of-the-Century France, 292–318
MacLean, Katie
rev. of Marilyn H. Fedewa, 359–61
Maggi, Armando
rev. of Carine Dunand, 341–42
rev. of Federico Borromeo, 341–42
Maguire, Henry, and Robert S. Nelson,
eds.
San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of
Venice, rev., 129–31
Mannard, Joseph G.
rev. of Margaret M. McGuinness, 380–
82
Marak, Andrae M., and Laura
Tuennerman
At the Border of Empires: The Tohono
O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation,
1880–1934, rev., 383–84
María of Ágreda
bio., 359–61
Mariani, Paul P., S.J.
The First Six Chinese Bishops of
Modern Times: A Study in Church
Indigenization, 459–86
Marie de l’Incarnation, O.S.U. (Marie
Guyart)
men., 459–85
Pope Francis extends liturgical cult to
the universal Church, 403
Marina, Areli
Receives ACHA Howard R. Marraro
Book Prize, 403
Maritain, Raïssa
men., 374–76
Marotti, Arthur F.
rev. of Frances E. Dolan, 155–57

xvi

GENERAL INDEX

Marques de Araújo, Joaquim
bio., 392–94
Marquet, Christophe, ed.
Présences occidentales au Japon. Du «siècle
chrétien» à la réouverture du XIX e siècle,
rev., 398–99
Marritt, Stephen
rev. of Jean Truax, 122–23
Marshall, Peter, and Geoffrey Scott, eds.
Catholic Gentry in English Society: The
Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation, rev., 348–49
Marsilius of Padua
men., 598–99
Martin, Claude
men., 459–85
Martin, Dennis D.
rev. of Maximilian von Habsburg,
320–21
Martin, Jessica, and Alec Ryrie, eds.
Private and Domestic Devotion in Early
Modern Britain, rev., 141–43
Marton, Marcell Boldizar, O.C.D., Servant
of God
Pope Francis declares heroic virtues, 187
Mary Veronica of the Passion, O.C.D.,
Servant of God (Sophie Leeves)
Pope Francis authorizes decree of heroic
virtues of the Sisters of the Apostolic
Carmel foundress, 834
Maryknoll missionaries
men., 182–84
Maryks, Robert A.
rev. of Claudio Ferlan, 351
Mathisen, Robert R.
rev. of Catherine A. Brekus and W.
Clark Gilpin, eds., 174–75
Matovina, Timothy
The Origins of the Guadalupe Tradition
in Mexico, Disputatio, 243–70
A Response to Stafford Poole,
Disputatio, 284–91
Maurer, Catherine
La ville charitable: Les oeuvres sociales
catholiques en France et en Allemagne au
XIX e siècle, rev., 163–64
Mayer, Thomas F.
The Roman Inquisition. A Papal
Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of
Galileo, rev., 154–55
Mayer, Wendy
rev. of Timothy D. Barnes and George
Bevan, eds., 805–06
McCahill, Elizabeth
Reviving the Eternal City: Rome and the
Papal Court, 1420–1447, rev., 600–01

McCloud, Sean
rev. of David Burns, 639–40
McCormick, Michael, ed.
Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land:
Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of
a Mediterranean Church between
Antiquity and the Middle Ages, rev.,
325–27
McDougall, Roseanne, S.H.C.J.
rev. of Eric G. Tenbus, 368–70
McEwan, Bonnie G.
rev. of Christopher M. Stojanowski,
827–28
McGinness, Frederick
rev. of Emily Michelson, 145–46
McGoldrick, Terence
rev. of Joseph F. Chorpenning, O.S.F.S.,
ed., 361–62
McGrath, David
trans., The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y
Mendoza, 358–59
McGuinness, Margaret M.
Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in
America, rev., 380–82
rev. of Barbra Mann Wall, 642–43
Why Relationships Matter: Sisters,
Bishops, and the History of Catholicism in the United States, Presidential
Address, 219–42
McManamon, John M., S.J.
The Texts and Contexts of Ignatius Loyola’s
“Autobiography,” rev., 149–50
Mélanges de Science Religieuse
Publishes articles on “Aspects de la
religion dans la littérature américaine,”
409–10
Publishes articles on “Les médias
confessionnels et la prise de pouvoir
d’Adolf Hitler en 1933,” 837
Menke, Martin
rev. of Stefan Böntert, 622–23
Merback, Mitchell B.
Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory
and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle
Shrines of Germany and Austria, rev.,
134–35
Merz, Daniel
rev. of James Monti, 327–28
Mezzini, Orsola, Servant of God
Pope Francis declares virtues heroic,
187
Michelangelo
men., 613–14
Michelson, Emily
The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation
Italy, rev., 145–46

GENERAL INDEX

Miller, R. W. H.
One Firm Anchor: The Church and the
Merchant Seafarer, an Introductory History, rev., 101–02
Miller, Tanya Stabler
The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender,
Patronage, and Spiritual Authority, rev.,
816–18
Minnich, Nelson H.
Report of the Editor, 400–02
Misner, Barbara, S.C.S.C.
obit., 194–95
Misner, Paul
rev. of Catherine Maurer, 163–64
rev. of Urs Altermatt, Jan De Maeyer,
and Franziska Metzger, eds., 826–27
Molony, John
rev. of Brenda Niall, 185–86
Monagle, Clare
Orthodoxy and Controversy in TwelfthCentury Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s Sentences and the Development
of Theology, rev., 811–12
Montaigne, Michel de
men., 352–53
Monter, William
rev. of François Soyer, 822–23
Monti, James
A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages, rev., 327–28
Moore, Brenna
Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure
of Suffering, and the French Catholic
Revival (1905–1944), rev., 374–76
Moreno-Riaño, Gerson
rev. of Vasileios Syros, 598–99
Mueller, Reinhold C., and Gabriella Zarri,
eds.
La Vita e i Sermoni di Chiara Bugni
Clarissa Veneziana (1471–1514), rev.,
603–4
Müller, Wolfgang P.
The Criminalization of Abortion in the
West: Its Origins in Medieval Law,
rev., 109–10
Murphy, Paul V.
rev. of Paul F. Grendler, 356–57
Murray, Alan V.
rev. of Thomas Haas, 118–19
Mussolini, Benito
men., 630–32
Neil, Bronwen
rev. of Andrew Cain, ed., 106–07
Newberry Library
Accepting applications for short-term
fellowships, 187

xvii

Center for Renaissance Studies sponsors
symposium on “Latin America in the
Early Colonial Period,” 647
Newhauser, Richard G., and Susan J.
Ridyard, eds.
Sin in Medieval and Early Modern
Culture: The Tradition of the Seven
Deadly Sins, rev., 576–78
Niall, Brenda
The Riddle of Father Hackett: A Life in
Ireland and Australia, rev., 185–86
Nicholas of Lyra
men., 138–39
Nichols, Aidan, O.P.
rev. of Denys Turner, 814–15
Nicholson, Helen J.
rev. of Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters,
and James M. Powell, eds., 126–27
Nicolotti, Andrea
Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di
Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda,
and I Templari e la Sindone: storia di
un falso, rev., 319–20
Ngei Ko Lat, Isidoro, Servant of God
Pope Francis assigns status of martyr to
Ngei Ko Lat, 187
Nold, Patrick
rev. of John Kilcullen, John Scott, Jan
Ballweg, and Volker Leppin, eds.,
334–35
rev. of Jürgen Dendorfer and Ralf
Lützelschwab, eds., 588–89
Noll, Mark, and David Bebbington, eds.
The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism:
The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott,
rev., 582–83
Notre-Dame-de-Québec parish
Celebrates 350th anniversary of its
foundation, 834
Nwosuh, Cosmas, K. O.
Cardinal Dominic Ekandem and the
Growth of the Catholic Church in
Nigeria, rev., 184–85
O’Brien, William P.
rev. of Véronique Alemany, 624–25
O’Connor, James, Bishop
men., 219–42
O’Daly, Gerard
rev. of Miles Hollingworth, 323–24
O’Hagan, John J.
Lands Never Trodden: The Franciscans
and the California Missions, rev., 634–
35
Ökumenische Rundschau
Publishes articles on the Second Vatican
Council, 837–38

xviii

GENERAL INDEX

Olds, Katrina B.
The “False Chronicles,” Cardinal Cesare
Baronio, and Sacred History in
Counter-Reformation Spain,
1–26
Order of the Knights of Saint John
(Johanniter)
men., 161–62
Ott, John S., and Trpimir Vedriš, eds.
Saintly Bishops and Bishops’ Saints, rev.,
111–12
Our Lady of Guadalupe
men., 243–70, 271–83, 284–91
Owen, John
men., 159–61
Page, Sophie
Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit
Interests, and Occult Approaches to
the Medieval Universe, rev., 815–16
Pallavicino, Pietro Sforza, Cardinal
men., 365–66
Palmer, Andrew N.
rev. of Andrea Nicolotti, 319–20
Parrott, David
rev. of Franz Brendle, 362–63
Parvis, Sara, and Paul Foster, eds.
Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy, rev., 585–
86
Pasini, Cesare
Ambrose of Milan: Deeds and Thoughts of a
Bishop, rev., 586–88
Pattenden, Miles
Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in CounterReformation Rome, rev., 150–52
Pearce, Joseph
rev. of James V. Schall, S.J., 625–26
Pearson, Timothy G.
rev. of Emma Anderson, 635–36
Penella, Robert J.
Between Pagan and Christian, Forum
Essay, 771–91
Pentcheva, Bissera
rev. of Walter D. Ray, 112–13
Perkinson, Stephen
contrib., 137–38
Perry, Mary Elizabeth, ed.
Warrior Neighbours: Crusader Valencia in
Its International Context. Collected
Essays of Father Robert I. Burns, SJ,
rev., 332–33
Persico, Elena da, Servant of God
Pope Francis authorizes decree of heroic
virtues of foundress of the Secular
Institute of the Daughters of the
Queen of the Apostles, 834

Peter Lombard
men., 811–12
Peter, Saint
men., 801–03
Peterson, David S.
rev. of Sally J. Cornelison, 339–40
Pezet, Edmond
men., 643–44
Phan, Peter C.
rev. of Henri Huysegoms and Pierre
Liesse, eds., 643–44
Phillips, Sean
Receives ACHA Graduate Student
Research Grant, 646
Pierce, Samuel
Acción Obrerista: Confessional Labor
Organization in the Spanish Republic
(1931–36), 721–47
Pio, Padre (Pio da Pietrelcina)
men., 376–78
Pius IV, Pope
men., 150–52
Pius XI, Pope
men., 386–90, 630–32
Pojmann, Wendy
Italian Women and International Cold
War Politics, 1944–1968, rev.,
168–69
Pontifical Commission for Historical
Sciences
Announces international conference to
commemorate the 50th anniversity of
the closing of the Second Vatican
Council, 190
Pontificia Università della Santa Croce
Announces international conference to
commemorate the centenary of the
birth of Monsignor Alvaro del
Portillo, 189
Poole, Stafford, C.M.
A Response to Timothy Matovina,
Disputatio, 271–83
Porter-Szűcs, Brian
Faith and Fatherland. Catholicism,
Modernity, and Poland, rev., 164–65
Portnykh, Valentin L.
rev. of Jean Flori, 590–91
Posner, David M.
rev. of Philippe Desan, ed., 352–53
Prudlo, Donald S.
rev. of P. H. Cullum and Katherine J.
Lewis, eds., 328–30
Prunier, Maurice
Présences occidentales au Japon. Du «siècle
chrétien» à la réouverture du XIX e siècle,
rev., 398–99

GENERAL INDEX

Puglisi, Catherine R.
rev. of Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E.
Cooper, eds., 609–10
Questier, Michael C.
rev. of Francis Young, 321–22
Quinlan, Kieran
rev. of Bryan Giemza, 641–42
Radding, Cynthia
rev. of José Refugio De la Torre Curiel,
391–92
Raina, Peter, ed.
Bishop George Bell: House of Lords Speeches
and Correspondence with Rudolf Hess,
rev., 379–80
Ranft, Patricia
The Theology of Peter Damian: “Let Your
Life Always Serve as a Witness,” rev.,
591–92
Ray, Walter D.
Tasting Heaven on Earth: Worship in
Sixth-Century Constantinople, rev.,
112–13
Redmond, Jennifer
rev. of Aenne Werner-Leggett, 633–34
Redworth, Glyn, ed.
The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y
Mendoza, rev., 358–59
Reilly, Bernard F.
rev. of Mary Elizabeth Perry, ed.,
332–33
Reinhard, Wolfgang
rev. of Miles Pattenden, 150–52
Rensink, Brenden W.
rev. of Andrae M. Marak and Laura
Tuennerman, 383–84
Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France
Publishes issue to commemorate the
bicentenary of the birth of Frédéric
Ozanam, 837
Rhodes, Elizabeth
rev. of Glyn Redworth, ed., 358–59
Richardson, Carol M.
rev. of Elizabeth McCahill, 600–01
Ridderikhoff, Cornelia M., and Hilde de
Ridder-Symoens, eds.
Les Livres des procurateurs de la nation
germanique de l’ancienne Université
d’Orléans 1444–1602. Troisième Livre
des procurateurs de la nation germanique
de l’ancienne Université d’Orléans
1567–1587. Texte des rapports des
procurateurs, rev., 602–03
Riley, James D., ed.
The Inquisition in Colonial Latin America:
Selected Writings of Richard E. Greenleaf, rev., 181–82

xix

Rivata, Orsola Maria, Servant of God
Pope Francis declares heroic virtues of
Rivata, 187
Rivett, Sarah
The Science of the Soul in Colonial New
England, rev., 169–70
Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa
Publishes articles on “Città di Maria:
Tradizioni civiche e devozioni tra
medioevo ed età moderna,” 836
Römische Quartalschrift
Publishes papers on the theme “Der
Untergang des Kirchenstaates und
Solidaritätsaktionen aus dem Rheinland und aus Westfalen (1860–1870),”
192
Ronconi, Amato, Blessed
Pope Francis authorizes decree
concerning miracles of Ronconi, 646
Rule, Paul
rev. of Henri Bernard-Maître, Pierre
Humbertclaude, and Maurice Prunier,
398–99
Rumble, Alexander R., ed.
Leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Church: From
Bede and Stigand, rev., 114–15
Ryan, James Emmett
Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in
Literary Culture, 1844–1931, rev.,
173–74
Ryan, Jerry
trans., The Way, 627–28
Ryan, Patrick, Archbishop
men., 219–42
Saint Louis University
Panel on “Dispensing Mercy” at Second
Annual Symposium on Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 406
Salomon, David A.
An Introduction to the Glossa Ordinaria
as Medieval Hypertext, rev.,
125–26
Sandberg, Brian
rev. of Philip Benedict and Nicolas
Fornerod, eds., 349–51
Sangalli, Maurizio
Le smanie per l’educazione: Gli scolopi a
Venezia tra Sei e Settecento, rev., 366–
67
Sangha, Laura
rev. of Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie,
eds., 141–43
Il Santo
Publishes papers on “Crocifissi lignei a
Venezia e nei territory della
Serenissima, 1350–1500,” 191

xx

GENERAL INDEX

Savonarola, Girolamo, O.P.
men., 604–05
Schall, James V., S.J.
Remembering Belloc, rev., 625–26
Schlereth, Eric R.
rev. of James S. Kabala, 171–73
Schneider, Gregory L.
rev. of Daniel Kelly, 830–31
Schultenover, David G., S.J.
rev. of C. J. T. Talar, ed., 162–63
Schutte, Anne Jacobson
rev. of Elena Bottoni, 618–19
Schwarz, Brigide
Kurienuniversität und stadtrömische
Universität von ca. 1300 bis 1471, rev.,
132–34
Scott, Amanda
Receives ACHA John Tracy Ellis
Outstanding Dissertation Award, 403
Seidel, Peter M.
Michael Helding (1506–1561): Ein Bischof
im Dienst von Kirche und Reich, rev.,
146–48
Seitz, John C.
rev. of Robert C. Fuller, 638–39
Selart, Anti
Popes and Livonia in the First Half of
the Thirteenth Century: Means and
Chances to Shape the Periphery, 437–
58
Seton, Elizabeth Ann, Saint
men., 219–42
Shantz, Douglas H.
An Introduction to German Pietism:
Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of
Modern Europe, rev., 100–101
Shaw, Christine
rev. of Jürgen Dendorfer and Ralf
Lützelschwab, eds., 117–18
Shea, William R.
rev. of Maurice A. Finocchiaro, 617–18
Shroud of Turin
men., 319–20
Simpson, Patricia, C.N.D.
rev. of Dominique Deslandres, John A.
Dickenson, and Ollivier Hubert, eds.,
170–71
Slawson, Douglas J.
Rev. John J. Burke, the National
Catholic Welfare Conference, and the
American Occupation of Haiti (1915–
34), 459–87
Sluhovsky, Moshe
rev. of John M. McManamon, S.J., 149–50
Smith, William Bradford
rev. of Joel Van Amberg, 345–47

Smithies, Andrew
men., 809–10
Smoller, Laura Ackerman
The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The
Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, rev.,
819–20
Society for Italian Historical Studies
Announces panel on Italy and World
War I at AHA conference, 406
Society of Jesus
men., 351, 356–57, 407, 409, 646, 834
Society of Saint Sulpice
men., 170–71
Sowerby, Richard
rev. of Alexander R. Rumble, ed., 114–
15
Soyer, François
Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early
Modern Spain and Its Empire: Francisco
de Torrejoncillo and the Centinela
contra Judios (1674), rev., 822–23
Sparr, Arnold
rev. of Una M. Cadegan, 176–77
Spellman, Francis J., Archbishop and
Cardinal
men., 72–96
Spicer, Kevin P., C.S.C.
rev. of Charles R. Gallagher, David I.
Kertzer, and Alberto Melloni, eds.,
386–90
Spierling, Karen E.
rev. of Guido Alfani, 367–68
Stanford, Charlotte A.
rev. of Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen,
and Mary Franklin-Brown, eds., 330–
31
Stanley, Brian
The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism:
The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott,
rev., 582–83
Stigand
men., 114–15
Stojanowski, Christopher M.
Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples:
Historical and Evolutionary Dimensions
of Intracemetery Bioarchaeology in
Spanish Florida, rev., 827–28
Stolzenberg, Daniel
Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and
the Secrets of Antiquity, rev., 363–65
Sullivan, Thomas, O.S.B.
rev. of Cornelia M. Ridderikhoff and Hilde
de Ridder-Symoens, eds., 602–03
Svelmoe, William
rev. of Brian Stanley, 582–83

GENERAL INDEX

Swanson, R. N.
Indulgences in Late Medieval England:
Passports to Paradise?, rev., 596–98
Sypher, Francis J. Jr.
Strangers & Pilgrims: A Centennial
History of the Layman’s Club of the
Cathedral Church of St. John the
Divine, rev., 177–78
Syros, Vasileios
Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of
Ancient and Medieval Traditions of
Political Thought, rev., 598–99
Tabbernee, William
rev. of Sara Parvis and Paul Foster, eds.,
585–86
Talar, C. J. T., ed. and trans.
“Martyr to the Truth”: The Autobiography
of Joseph Turmel, rev., 162–63
Tavuzzi, Michael, O.P.
rev. of Tamar Herzig, 606–07
Tedeschi, John
Intellettuali in esilio. Dall’Inquisizione
romana al fascismo, rev., 615–16
Tenbus, Eric G.
English Catholics and the Education of the
Poor, 1847–1902, rev., 368–70
Tennant, Bob
Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching
and the Church of England
Missionary Societies, 1760–1870, rev.,
825–26
Tentler, Thomas
rev. of Richard G. Newhauser and Susan
J. Ridyard, eds., 576–78
Terpstra, Nicholas
rev. of Stefano Dall’Aglio, 604–05
Teske, Roland J., S.J.
rev. of Jason David BeDuhn, 324–25
Theobald of Bec, Archbishop
bio., 122–23
Theologie und Glaube
Publishes papers on “Hitler und die
Religion,” 649
Thomas, Arvind
rev. of Ranulph Higden, 818–19
Thorn, Sister
men., 828–30
Throckmortons of Coughton
men., 348–49
Thurlby, Malcolm
rev. of Jon Cannon and Beth
Williamson, eds., 123–25
Tibau, Maria Rosa Teresa, Servant of God
Pope Francis declares virtues heroic of
the Religious of St. Joseph of Girona
foundress, 187

xxi

Tingle, Elizabeth C.
Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–
1720, rev., 342–44
Torrejoncillo, Francisco de
men., 822–23
Truax, Jean
Archbishops Ralph d’Escures, William of Corbeil and Theobald of Bec. Heirs of Anselm
and Ancestors of Becket, rev., 122–23
Trueman, Carl R.
rev. of Tim Cooper, 159–61
Tuennerman, Laura
At the Border of Empires: The Tohono
O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation,
1880–1934, rev., 383–84
Turmel, Joseph
autobio., 162–63
Turner, Denys
Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait, rev., 814–15
Tusor, Péter, ed.
Hungary and the Holy See of Rome (Sources
and Perspectives): Studies in Honor of
Cardinal Erdő, rev., 579–81
Twinam, Ann
rev. of Nicole von Germeten, 831–32
Twomey, Carolyn
Receives ACHA Graduate Student
Research Grant, 646
Tyacke, Nicholas
Altars Restored: The Changing Face of
English Religious Worship, 1547–c.
1700, rev., 347–48
Tylus, Jane
Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Culture, and the Signs of Others, rev., 335–37
Umstadt, Anselm Casimir Wambold von,
Archbishop
men., 362–63
Urban II, Pope
men., 592–94
U.S. Catholic Historian
Publishes theme issue on “West Coast
Catholicism,” 410
Publishes “The Twentieth Century” in
series on U.S. Catholics and the
Bible, 649
Publishes articles on Catholics of
Eastern rites, 838
Publishes issue on the process of conversion to Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 838
Van Amberg, Joel
A Real Presence: Religious and Social
Dynamics of the Eucharistic Conflicts in
Early Modern Augsburg, 1520–1530,
rev., 345–47

xxii

GENERAL INDEX

Van Dam, Raymond
rev. of John S. Ott and Trpimir Vedriš,
eds., 111–12
Van Leeuwen, Richard
rev. of Bernard Heyberger, 619–21
Vargas, Michael
rev. of Laura Ackerman Smoller, 819–20
Ventresca, Robert A.
rev. of David I. Kertzer, 630–32
Vergara, Mario, Servant of God
Pope Francis assigns status of martyr to
Vergara, 187
Verhoeven, Timothy
Transatlantic Connections: American
Anti-Catholicism and the First Vatican Council (1869–70), 695–720
Vermes, Geza
Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to
Nicaea, rev., 102–03
Viçoso, Antonio Fereira, C.M., Servant of
God
Pope Francis authorizes decree of heroic
virtues of Viçoso, 834
Vincentian Heritage
Announces digital-only format, 403–04
Visceglia, Maria Antonietta, ed.
Papato e politica internazionale nella prima
età moderna, rev., 821–22
Vivens Homo
Publishes papers on the Second Vatican
Council and the churches of Tuscany,
649–50
Wachtel, Nathan
The Faith of Remembrance: Marrano
Labyrinths, rev., 581–82
Wadsworth, James E.
In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques
de Araújo: A Comissário in the Age
of Inquisitional Decline, rev., 392–94
Wall, Barbra Mann
American Catholic Hospitals: A Century of
Changing Markets and Missions, rev.,
642–43
Walsh, Michael J.
b.n. of Alan J. Koman, 645
Wang Shiwei, O.F.M., Superior
men., 748–70
Watt, Steven
trans., The Sulpicians of Montreal, 170–71
Webster, Tom
rev. of Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas
Tyacke, 347–48
rev. of Kenneth L. Campbell, 152–53

Weeks, Theodore R.
rev. of Brian Porter-Szűcs, 164–65
Werner-Leggett, Aenne
Being Mary? Irish Catholic Immigrant
Women and Home and Community
Building in Harold Hill Essex 1947–
1970, rev., 633–34
Wetzel, Richard, and Erika Heitmeyer
Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder und
Psalmen, 1567: Hymnody of
the Counter-Reformation in Germany,
rev., 614–15
Whitford, David M.
rev. of Timothy George, 344–45
Wilken, Robert Louis
rev. of George E. Demacopoulos, 801–
03
William of Corbeil, Archbishop
bio., 122–23
William of Ockham
men., 334–35
Williams, Michael Stuart
rev. of Cesare Pasini, 586–88
Williams, Robert
rev. of Maarten Delbeke, 365–66
Williamson, Paul, ed.
Object of Devotion: Medieval English
Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria
and Albert Museum, rev., 137–38
Witczak, Michael G.
rev. of Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E.
Johnson, 575–76
Wittberg, Patricia, S.C.
b.n. of Meg Wilkes Karraker, 833
Wooding, Lucy
rev. of R. N. Swanson, 596–98
Woods, Richard, O.P.
rev. of Julia A. Lamm, ed., 97–98
Yocum, Sandra
rev. of Jon Gjerde, 637–38
Yonke, Eric
rev. of Jakob Eisler, 161–62
Young, Francis
English Catholics and the Supernatural,
1553–1829, rev., 321–22
Young, Robin Darling, David Frankfurter,
Robert J. Penella, Jill Harries, Averil
Cameron, and Christopher P. Jones
Between Pagan and Christian, Forum
Essay, 771–91

THE CATHOLIC
HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOL. 100

AUTUMN, 2014

NO. 4

The Schoolmaster and the Bishop-Elect:
Nicolò Cologno, Cosimo Gheri, and
Catholic Reform in Northeastern Italy, 1530–39
CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH*
This essay examines the efforts of schoolmaster Nicolò Cologno (c.
1511–1602) of Bergamo and Bishop-Elect Cosimo Gheri of Fano
(1513–37) to provide education and pastoral care to those under their
supervision, particularly in 1536–37 when they worked together. Both
men received an excellent classical education and were fervent in their
desire to promote Catholic reform, albeit in different ways. The content
of the education of the bishop-elect’s three younger siblings, together
with that of several other boys from the aristocracy, can be gleaned from
correspondence to and from Cologno and Gheri during this period.
Keywords: Beccadelli, Lodovico, Archbishop; Cologno, Nicolò;
Gheri, Cosimo, Bishop-Elect; Della Casa, Giovanni, Archbishop; Catholic Reform

I

n spring 1536, a young schoolmaster arrived in the Paduan house of a
similarly young bishop-elect to take up a position as a tutor to the
bishop-elect’s three younger brothers. Both the bishop-elect, Cosimo
Gheri (1513–37), and the schoolmaster, Nicolò Cologno (c. 1511–1602),
had received an extensive classical education in their respective hometowns
of Pistoia and Bergamo. Both men were ardent in their Catholic faith, and
both served the Catholic Church through different ecclesiastical offices.
*Dr. Carlsmith is professor in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, email: Christopher_Carlsmith@uml.edu. Preliminary versions of this essay
were given at the “Early Modern Catholicism” seminar at Oxford University in June 2013,
graciously organized by Nick Davidson and Clare Copeland; and at a seminar sponsored by
the Stanford University Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies in January 2014, for
which the author thanks Kathryn Starkey and Paula Findlen.

671

672

THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

For a period of eighteen months, they worked together to train the bishopelect’s younger siblings and other elite boys in a curriculum that combined
Greco-Roman history and literature with the precepts of Catholic religion.
Their efforts to blend humanism and Catholicism in the classroom were
hardly new; such efforts had been flourishing for more than a century in
Italy and would soon provide the foundation for schooling offered by the
Jesuits and other religious orders. Yet the partnership of Cologno and
Gheri merits closer study for several reasons.
First, humanist and Catholic educational programs in Italy had been
vying for supremacy during the previous 100 years; humanism’s success in
the fifteenth century at reshaping the Latinate curriculum and at explicating classical texts in new ways was matched in the early to mid-sixteenth
century by the dynamic response of Catholic religious orders, Schools of
Christian Doctrine, and other initiatives. Cologno and Gheri embody this
tension; more important, they demonstrate a successful effort to blend secular texts and sacred ends. Second, the efforts of the bishop-elect and the
schoolmaster illuminate clearly the texts and methodology preferred by
Italian elites for the instruction of their children, as well as the critical
importance of identifying a proper tutor. Third, their joint efforts took
place during a decisive moment in European religious and intellectual history, when many believed that Protestants and Catholics might still be
reunited. Although Cologno and Gheri did not participate directly in the
major debates or councils of the time (e.g., Regensburg in 1541 or Trent
in 1545), they were clearly preoccupied with the religious issues of the day.
Schoolmasters and prelates across Europe were struggling to find religious
compromise; the efforts of Italian reformers, to whom Cologno and Gheri
were close, seemed to be a promising avenue for religious concord. Finally,
the two men present a stark contrast in their geographical and socioeconomic origins: Cologno was a largely unknown figure from the outskirts of
the Venetian Empire who grew up in poverty, whereas Gheri was the scion
of a noble Tuscan family and the center of a prominent circle of churchmen and reformers. Despite such different backgrounds, Cologno and
Gheri found common ground in their pedagogical and pastoral achievements. The actions of Cologno and Gheri thus represent not just an idyllic
moment in the early history of the Catholic Reformation but also a lens
through which we can see some broader educational, religious, and intellectual themes at the end of the Italian Renaissance.
This essay focuses principally upon the period between March 1536 and
September 1537 when Cologno and Gheri worked together at Padua and
Fano. The correspondence that circulated through Gheri’s circle at Padua

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

673

and beyond reveals the lessons offered by Cologno to the boys as well as the
growing friendship between the two men.1 That happy era ceased abruptly
in late September 1537 with Gheri’s unexpected death, probably at the
hands of Pier Luigi Farnese (1503–47), Pope Paul III’s unscrupulous
nephew. Bereft of his patron, Cologno was forced to return to Bergamo.
There he would enjoy an illustrious, if largely unknown, career of six decades
as a teacher, author, canon, priest, administrator, and superintendent, topped
off by an appointment as professor of moral philosophy in Padua.
Cologno’s career exemplifies a number of important elements about
education in sixteenth-century Italy. These include the diversity of educational options available even in provincial towns, the essential role of confraternities as school patrons, the institutional cooperation evident in support of schools (e.g., joint appointments or shared classroom space), and
the triumph of humanist methodology in many regions.2 Yet Cologno’s
career is important for reasons beyond classroom practice and pedagogical
innovation. Most obviously, Cologno’s career demonstrates the resurgence
of the Catholic Church as a provider of education in the sixteenth century.
Diocesan seminaries, catechism schools, Jesuit academies, Somaschan
orphanages—in these ways and many more, the Catholic Church demonstrated great vigor and creativity in the face of Protestant reform and
humanist challenges. In the single figure of Cologno are many of these
diverse efforts to train the hearts and minds of the next generation.
Similar vigor is evident in Gheri’s efforts to be responsive to the needs
of his diocese by promoting local reform and serving as a model bishopelect. Although he was guilty of absenteeism during his first six years in his
position, owing to his studies in Padua and Bologna, Gheri consciously
1. The most important correspondence is that between Lodovico Beccadelli and
Cosimo Gheri in Lodovico Beccadelli, Monumenti di varia letteratura tratti dai manoscritti di
Monsignor Lodovico Beccadelli arcivescovo di Ragusa, ed. Giambattista Morandi (Bologna,
1797; repr. Farnborough, UK, 1967), 3 vols. All references to Beccadelli’s Monumenti in this
essay are to volume 1. Other relevant published correspondence includes Pietro Bembo, Opere
(Venice, 1729), 4 tomes (letters are in t. 3–4), about which see C. H. Clough, “A Portion of
Pietro Bembo’s Epistolario,” Bodleian Library Review, 8 (1967–72), 26–40; and Giovanni
Della Casa, Opere (Venice, 1752), 3 vols. (letters in t. 2). Unpublished correspondence among
many of these men, especially Bembo, Beccadelli, Della Casa, Priuli, and Carlo Gualteruzzi,
is conserved in three manuscripts at Oxford University: Bodleian Library, Mss. Ital. c. 23, c.
24, and c. 25, which mss. the author has seen only briefly.
2. On these themes in Italian education, see, for example, Christopher Carlsmith, A
Renaissance Education: Schooling in Bergamo and the Venetian Republic, 1500–1650 (Toronto,
2010), and Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600
(Baltimore, 1989).

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

decided in autumn 1536 that he must reside in his own diocese.3 The two
men also demonstrate the sometimes slippery line that existed between
heterodoxy and orthodoxy, as when Cologno, along with other cathedral
canons, was caught up in the twin trials in the 1540s of Vittore Soranzo,
bishop of Bergamo (1500–58), on suspicion of heresy, or when Gheri corresponded with men later deemed to be “suspicious.”4 The figure of
Cologno, in particular, illustrates how a schoolmaster could veer from suspected heretic to staunch defender of the Catholic Reformation—and find
himself in trouble in both instances.5
Owing to his noble ancestry and infamous death, Gheri has received
considerable scrutiny from scholars past and present. That careful attention
began immediately with then-monsignor Lodovico Beccadelli, Gheri’s
mentor and later his testamentary executor (1501–72, see figure 1), who
authored a short biography of Gheri and preserved much of their mutual
correspondence.6 Gheri’s contemporaries and later historians singled him
out for his piety and his learning.7 Surprisingly, no comprehensive biogra3. Letter from Cosimo Gheri to Benedetto Ramberti (August 31, 1536), wherein Gheri
states that he had been “persuaso da vecchi pensieri et da nuove occorrentie” (persuaded by old
thoughts and new needs) to return to Fano; quoted in Antonella Giusti, “Gheri, Cosimo,”
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (hereafter DBI) (Rome, 1960–), 53:645–49, here 647.
4. Massimo Firpo, Vittore Soranzo vescovo ed eretico: riforma della Chiesa e Inquisizione
nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Rome, 2006), p. 400; Massimo Firpo and Sergio Pagano, I Processi
Inquisitoriali di Vittore Soranzo (1550–1558): edizione critica, 2 vols. [Collectanea Archivi Vaticani, 53], (Vatican City, 2004), pp. 995–96.
5. Bernard Frischer, “‘Rezeptionsgeschichte and Interpretation’: The Quarrel of Antonio Riccoboni and Nicolò Cologno about the Structure of Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica,’” in
Zeitgenosse Horaz, ed. Helmut Krasser and Ernst A. Schmidt (Tübingen, 1996), pp. 68–116,
and Christopher Carlsmith, “L’identità di Nicolò Cologno, maestro di grammatica a Bergamo nel Cinquecento,” Atti dell’Ateneo di Bergamo, 73 (2009–10), 177–90.
6. Beccadelli, Monumenti, pp. 175–96, biography of Gheri, composed January 1, 1537;
ibid., pp. 196–338, letters to/from Gheri. On Beccadelli, see Giuseppe Alberigo, “Beccadelli,
Ludovico,” in DBI, 7:407–13, which includes bibliography through 1970. The author has not
yet seen the recent dissertation of Tanja Trska, “Lodovico Beccadelli and Visual Arts” (PhD
diss., Scuola Normale di Pisa, 2014), nor the thesis of Camilla Russell, “The Debate over
Episcopal Residence in the Writing of Ludovico Beccadelli, Bishop, Humanist, and
Reformer, 1501–72” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Melbourne, 1998). Descended from a noble
Bolognese family, Beccadelli later became papal nuncio to Venice and archbishop of Ragusa.
Alberigo claims that in 1529–30, after mentoring young Cosimo Gheri in Bologna, Beccadelli accompanied Gheri to Padua where the two shared a residence until 1534. This assertion
contradicts a letter of Giovanni Della Casa; see Della Casa, Opere, 2:240 (October 27, 1530).
7. For three examples among many, see the letter of Pietro Bembo to Filippo Gheri
(Cosimo’s brother) on January 6, 1538, in Bembo, Opere, 3:287, citing the “incomparabile
virtù” of “quel buono e santo giovane Mons. lo Vescovo vostro fratello”; or Bembo’s letter
observing that the figure of Gheri in Padua was “non solo amato ma anche riverito da tutta

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

675

FIGURE 1. Ludovico Beccadelli. Image from Edward Walmsley, Physiognomical
Portraits, vol. 1 (London, 1822) [p. 32].

phy or monograph has yet been written about Gheri. However, Gheri’s
martyrdom—for that is how it came to be seen by many—provided fodder
for English Protestants who wished to extol the depravity of the pope and
his family. The story of Gheri’s death appeared in Storia fiorentina by
Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) and was repeated by notable figures of the
day, including Pier Paolo Vergerio (1498–1565), who later was summoned
to Rome to account for his role in the dissemination of this story.8 Other
historians denied that the assault ever occurred or blamed Gheri’s death on
malaria. As Anne Schutte has noted in her analysis of Italian Catholic
reform in the first half of the sixteenth century, “A surprising amount of
scholarly attention has been paid to the story about Pier Lugi Farnese and
questa città” (quoted in Giusti, “Gheri, Cosimo,” p. 646), or the account of Benedetto Varchi,
Storia fiorentina, ed. Lelio Arbib (Florence, 1844, 2003), p. 372: “Era messer Cosimo Gheri
da Pistoia vescovo di Fano d’età d’anni ventiquattro, ma di tanta cognizione delle buone lettere così greche, come latine e toscane, e di tal santità di costumi, ch’era meravigliosa e quasi
incredibile. Trovavasi questo giovane, esercitato nelle Scritture sacre, ed in somma più tosto
divino che umano, alla cura del suo vescovado, dove pieno di zelo e di carità faceva ogni giorno
di molte buone e sante opere.”
8. Varchi, Storia fiorentina, pp. 371–76; on Vergerio, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, Pier
Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva, 1977), pp. 190–92.

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

the Bishop of Fano.”9 Gheri’s brief life and calamitous death are thus both
well-documented events.
By contrast, despite the longevity of his teaching career in Bergamo
and the notoriety of his career-ending debate with a professional colleague
at the University of Padua, the figure of Cologno has languished in obscurity. He does not appear in the Dizioniario Biografico degli Italiani nor in
the surveys of Paul Grendler or Robert Black about education in the Italian
Renaissance.10 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chroniclers like
Donato Calvi and Barnaba Vaerini duly noted Cologno’s achievements,
but nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians of Bergamo such as Bortolo Belotti, Giuseppe Locatelli, and Lelio Pagani have largely ignored
Cologno.11 Historians of higher education mention Cologno in passing,
but here, too, he rarely receives more than a sentence or two.12 Bernard
Frischer’s excellent article describes Cologno’s 1591 debate with professor
Antonio Riccoboni in some detail, but Frischer ridicules Cologno’s earlier
career as “dismal” and his lack of renown as “well-deserved.”13 More
recently, Carlsmith has explored the question of Cologno’s identity and

9. A brief summary of the historiography on this issue is included in Schutte, Pier
Paolo Vergerio, p. 190n9.
10. Grendler, Schooling; Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, UK, 2001).
11. Donato Calvi, Scena letteraria de gli scrittori bergamaschi aperta all’curiosità dei suoi
concittadini . . . (Bergamo, 1664), pp. 411–13; Biblioteca Civica di Bergamo “Angelo Mai”
(hereafter BCBg), Archivio del Comune, MMB 309, Barnaba Vaerini, Gli Scrittori di Bergamo, vol. 2 (“C–F”), fols. 158–62; Bortolo Belotti, Storia di Bergamo e dei Bergamaschi, 3 vols.
(Bergamo, 1940; repr. Bergamo, 1989, in 9 vols.), 2:282, 284, 289, 299; Giuseppe Locatelli,
“L’istruzione a Bergamo e la Misericordia Maggiore,” Bergomum: Bollettino della Civica Biblioteca di Bergamo, 4 (1910), 57–169, here 93–94; Lelio Pagani, ed., L’Ateneo dall’età napoleonica all’unità d’Italia: storia e documenti della cultura di Bergamo (Bergamo, 2001). Although
Calvi, Vaerini, and others prior to 1800 mention only one schoolteacher by the name of
Nicolò Cologno, Locatelli and Belotti started a scholarly trend in claiming two eponymous
schoolteachers were in the city at the same time. Providing substantial evidence in support of
the view that there was just one teacher in Bergamo with the name Nicolò Cologno are
Frischer, “Rezeptiongeschichte,” and Carlsmith, “L’identità di Nicolò Cologno.”
12. Antonio Poppi, “Il problema della filosofia morale nella scuola padovana del Rinascimento: Platonismo e Aristotelismo nella definizione del metodo dell’Etica,” in Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance [De Pétrarque à Descartes, XXXII] (Paris, 1976), pp. 103–46, here p. 108;
David A. Lines, Aristotle’s “Ethics” in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650) (Leiden, 2002),
pp. 106, 254–55, 440; Paul Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2002).
p. 401; and Antonio Iurilli, Orazio nella letteratura italiana: Commentatori, traduttori, editori
italiani di Quinto Orazio Flacco dal XV al XVIII secolo (Rome, 2004), pp. 56–57, 256–59.
13. Frischer, “‘Rezeptionsgeschichte,” p. 82. Frischer published most of the same material in idem, “Horace and the End of Renaissance Humanism in Italy: Quarrels, Religious

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

677

documented Cologno’s multiple achievements as a teacher in Bergamo,
particularly when it came to teaching the Roman poet Horace.14 Nevertheless, there is much more to be said about this provincial schoolmaster who
taught longer than any other teacher in Renaissance Italy and who had a
career that illuminates many of the important intellectual and ecclesiastical
changes of that era.15 In particular, the formative era of the mid-1530s and
Cologno’s collaboration with Gheri have been almost completely ignored.
Cologno and Gheri in Padua
Gheri arrived in Padua in autumn 1530 to commence his studies at the
university.16 Born to an influential noble family in Pistoia in 1513, he had
received a first-class humanist education, probably under the domestic
tutor Raffaele da Scarperia, whom Gheri remembered fondly as “a man of
good letters, good behavior, and honorable character, who devoted eight
full years to my care.”17 Gheri was also tutored by his uncle, Gregorio
(Gori) Gheri (1470–1528), secretary to Lorenzo de’ Medici and an intimate of the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII.18 From 1530–36 the
younger Gheri studied letters and philosophy in Padua under the direction
of professors Lazzaro Bonamico (1477–1552), Nicolò Leonico Tomeo
(1456–1531), and Benedetto Lampridio (1478–1540). In summer 1535,
Correctness, Nationalism, and Academic Protectionism,” Arethusa, 28 (1995), 265–88, but
his 1996 article contains more thorough documentation.
14. Carlsmith, “L’identità di Nicolò Cologno”; idem, “A Roman Poet in the Venetian
Republic: The Reception of Horace in Sixteenth-Century Bergamo,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 44 (2013), 393–415; idem, A Renaissance Education, s.v. “Cologno, Nicolò.”
15. Other instructors in Italy taught for long periods of time, but none matched the
extraordinary duration of Cologno’s career. For example, Guarino Guarini (1374–1460)
taught for about forty years as a humanist schoolmaster prior to becoming a university lecturer
in Ferrara in 1442. In Siena, Giovanni di Ser Buccio di Spoleto was magistro de scuola from
1396–1446 (fifty years); in Venice, Iohannes Antonius a Saraceno was a sixty-seven-year-old
layman who claimed to have taught reading, writing, and math for fifty-four years. See
Grendler, Schooling, pp. 56, 63–66, 127; and Peter Denley, Teachers and Schools in Siena,
1357–1500 (Siena, 2007), pp. 18–19.
16. Della Casa welcomed Gheri to Padua in late October 1530, offering suggestions
about finding a place to stay and condolences on Gheri’s recent malady. Della Casa, Opere,
2:240 (October 27, 1530). Gheri appears on December 9, 1530, in the Acta Graduum as a student and witness at the doctoral ceremony of Alessandro Zilioli, as noted in Acta graduum academicorum Gymnasii Patavini ab anno 1500, ed. Elda Martelozzo Forin, vol. 3, no. 2 (Padua,
1970), no. 1691, p. 189.
17. Letter from Cosimo Gheri to the cathedral chapter of Fano, November 1529, as
cited in V. Bartoccetti, “Cosimo Gheri di Fano (con nuovi documenti) 1528–1537,” Studia
Picena, II (1926), 153–208, here 196.
18. On Gregorio Gheri, see Antonella Giusti, “Gheri, Gregorio,” DBI, 53:653–57.

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

FIGURE 2. Giovanni Della Casa. Image from Opere di Monsignor Giovanni Della
Casa, vol 1. (Milan, 1806), frontispiece.

Gheri wrote to Beccadelli that he had been reading Aristotle, Xenophon,
and Horace with a friend from Bologna.19 A few days earlier, he had
received a letter from Giovanni Della Casa (figure 2), offering thoughts on
how to best interpret Aesop, Horace, and Aristophanes.20 A year later
(1536), Gheri responded to Cardinal Reginald Pole (figure 3) that he
could not take up Pole’s request to write a biography of Cardinal John
Fisher of England because “he was too busy reading Aristotle.”21 In June
19. Beccadelli, Monumenti, 199, letter IV (August 10, 1535): “Questa mattina . . . levatomi per studiare Aristotele come soglio. . . . M. Scipione [Scipione Bianchini of Bologna],
et io, abbiamo già divorato il primo degli Apomnimoneumni [= Apomnemoneumata in Greek,
Commentarii in Latin, or Memorabilia in English] di Xenofonte et non so quante Ode d’Horatio, le quali mi dilettano sopra modo. Per questo mese non studierò troppo Cicerone, perchè
il dì dopo desinare sono occupato con Messer Scipione intorno a questi libri, che vi ho detto,
et la mattina non mi voglio avvezzar a torla ad Aristotele.”
20. Della Casa, Opere, 2:252 (August 5, 1535).
21. Cited in Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet, [Cambridge Studies
in Early Modern British History], (Cambridge, UK, 2000), p. 66.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

679

FIGURE 3. Cardinal Reginald Pole. Engraving by J. W. Cook. From Popes and
Other Churchmen: Twenty Portraits (London, 1825). Wellcome Library, London.

1537 Gheri received a letter from Pietro Carnesecchi (1508–67) about
reading Plutarch.22 In addition, Gheri corresponded and visited frequently
in Padua with a wide array of distinguished men, including bibliophile
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547); ambassador Benedetto Ramberti (1503–46);
and Galeazzo Florimonte, then bishop of Aquino (1484–1565).
Gheri’s ecclesiastical career began in February 1524, when Goro
Gheri renounced the bishopric of Fano so he could bestow it on his
teenage nephew. By August 1525, Cosimo had joined his uncle in Bologna
where the latter had been nominated governor of the city and vice-legate
of the Romagna.23 Cosimo began to carry out limited episcopal duties only
after the death of his uncle in 1528, and he was formally presented to the
commune of Fano as its bishop-elect on April 12, 1530. Despite the obvi22. Letter from Pietro Carnesecchi to Cosimo Gheri (June 2, 1537), Bodleian Library,
Ms. Ital., c. 24.
23. Giusti, “Gheri, Cosimo,” p. 645; Goro Gheri had been invested as bishop-elect of
Fano in 1518 by Leo X. Goro renounced the bishop’s seat on February 17, 1524, but Pope
Clement VII did not confirm Cosimo as administrator until January 24, 1530. Instead, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga was named administrator until Cosimo was named administrator in
1530. See Konrad Eubel, Hierarchia catholica, 2nd ed. (Munster, 1923), III:194.

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

ous nepotism in his appointment to the episcopate, as well as the blatant
disregard of a minimum age of thirty for a bishop, Cosimo seems to have
been attentive to the needs of the diocese. During his minority and his
years in Padua, he utilized a series of vicars and his procurator, the philologist Carlo Gualteruzzi (1500–77), to carry out diocesan business.
Gheri was influenced by the short treatise De officio viri boni et probi
episcopi (On the Office of a Good Man and Upright Bishop), written by
Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542) in 1517.24 Contarini was in Venice from
1530 to 1535, precisely the same period when Gheri was in Padua; Contarini also served as one of three Riformatori dello Studio of the university,
and the two men shared many friends in common as well as the exchange
of correspondence. Usually titled De officio episcopi (The Office of a
Bishop), this treatise describes the formation of the ideal bishop and the
duties of his office.25 Ironically, Contarini wrote De officio episcopi for
another underage bishop, Pietro Lippomano (1504–48), appointed in
1516 to succeed his uncle to the bishopric of Bergamo. Contarini makes
no specific reference to the flouting of the minimum age for a bishop;
instead, he describes moral and philosophical issues, educational ideas, and
specific suggestions for a young bishop’s daily life.26 As Elizabeth Gleason
has noted, the treatise does not explore weightier issues such as the nature
of episcopal power or practical issues such as diocesan administration.
However, the treatise does reflect upon the development of a morally-principled Christian man and the chief virtues to be prized in his formation.27
Contarini believed that an upright and moral bishop could make a substantial difference, and he emphasized this aspect more than communal action
or institutional reform.
It is uncertain precisely when Cologno first arrived in Padua. It is
known that, like Gheri, he received an excellent education in Latin, prob24. In November 1533 Gheri’s friend, Galeazzo Florimonte, who was then serving the
reformist bishop of Verona, Matteo Maria Giberti, referred to the libretto of Contarini; and
in 1534 Florimonte again urged Gheri to remember the homily of S. Giovanni Crisostomo
for those who wished to be a good bishop (Giusti, “Gheri, Cosimo,” p. 646).
25. For an English translation and useful introduction, see The Office of a Bishop: De
Officio Viri Boni et Probi Episcopi, introd., trans., and ed. John Patrick Donnelly (Milwaukee,
2002). See also Gigliola Fragnito, “Cultura umanistica e riforma religiosa: il ‘De officio boni
viri ac probi episcopi’ di Gasparo Contarini,” Studi veneziani, 11 (1969), 75–198. On the
figure of Contarini, see Gigliola Fragnito, “Contarini, Gasparo,” DBI, 28:72–92; the best
biography of Contarini is Elizabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform
(Berkeley, 1993), esp. pp. 93–98 on the De officio episcopi.
26. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, p. 93.
27. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, p. 95.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

681

ably in Bergamo with the schoolmaster Giovita Ravizza (1476–1553).28 It
seems reasonable to assume that, like Gheri, Cologno studied at Padua in
the late 1520s or the early 1530s, but no trace of him has been discovered
thus far in the Acta Graduum (Graduation Acts) there, nor is there any
trace of Cologno in the records of a powerful confraternity that frequently
offered scholarships and housing to students from Bergamo at the university in Padua.29 An early reference by Gheri notes that Cologno “has been
at home only a little in his life” and implied that he had come to Padua
from Venice, so perhaps Cologno had some other occupation or form of
study in Venice itself.30
In any case, it is known that Gheri and Cologno met in March 1536,
for Gheri detailed the encounter in a letter from Padua, addressed to Luigi
(Alvise) Priuli and Beccadelli. The twenty-three-year-old bishop-elect
described his initial impressions of Cologno thus:
I have solved the problem of finding a teacher for our boys in a manner
consistent with your advice. . . . This is a certain Nicolò Cologno of
Bergamo, 25 years old. Rhamberti31 [sic] endured many days learning

28. Vaerini states that Cologno “completed his studies in the schools of the city”; see
Gli Scrittori di Bergamo, fol. 158. Giovita Ravizza taught in Bergamo from 1508–23, during
which time he wrote his pedagogical treatise De liberis publice ad humanitatem informandis
[On Public Education of Children Toward the Humanities], after which he taught in
Vicenza and then Venice. On Ravizza’s career, see Luigi Boldrini, Della vita e degli scritti di
Messer Giovita Rapicio (Verona, 1903); Grendler, Schooling, pp. 64–66. On the content and
complicated history of Ravizza’s pedagogical treatise, see Carlsmith, A Renaissance Education,
pp. 42–48.
29. On the scholarships offered by the Misericordia Maggiore of Bergamo, see Carlsmith, A Renaissance Education, pp. 80–84; on the Paduan College, idem, pp. 99–110. No
trace of Cologno appears in the Acta Graduum. Nor is there any trace of a Nicolò Cologno (or
Nicolaus Colonius) in the large database of Italian students (ASFE, or Amore Scientiae Facti
Sunt Exules) compiled by Gian Paolo Brizzi and Andrea Daltri, available at http://
asfe.unibo.it, accessed June 10, 2013. The absence of a laurea is very curious; one wonders
how Cologno’s long career was possible without a university degree and especially how he
secured an appointment at the University of Padua in 1591. Perhaps he received a degree
from a count palatine or from another university; the most likely explanation seems to be that
the record of his degree has been lost in the notarial archives of Padua. It should be noted
that—despite six years of intensive study in Padua—neither Contarini nor Gheri ultimately
took a degree from the university.
30. On Cologno’s time away from Bergamo, see notes 41–42. However, no trace of
Cologno appears in Richard Palmer, The Studio of Venice and Its Graduates in the Sixteenth
Century (Padua, 1983).
31. Benedetto Ramberti (1503–46) was a colleague of Gheri’s in Padua in 1536 and a
correspondent with Cologno in November of that same year. A Venetian secretary and
ambassador who served as a “cultural diplomat” for Venice, he traveled widely to amass a

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT
about his character, and ultimately found nothing but good in him. From
what I have seen of his Greek and Latin, I judge that he is without peer
and even better than Pietro [the previous tutor] in those languages. I have
promised him three scudi per month, and God willing he will continue
until God sends us someone new. Although Rhamberti says all good
things about him, I have protested, cautioning that these are not bonds
that one dissolves easily or with pleasure.32

It is clear from Gheri’s correspondence that he needed a tutor to teach
a group of young boys in the bishop-elect’s residence. These boys included
Gheri’s younger brothers Vincenzo, Filippo, and Giovanni, who had likely
arrived in Padua immediately after their father’s death in mid-August
1534, when Gheri took charge of his brothers, mother, and sister.33 Also
present were Goro, the son of Gualteruzzi; Pandolfo Rucellai, son of Luigi
Rucellai and nephew of Della Casa (1503–56); and Girolamo, nephew of
Priuli (1471–1560?). Pandolfo arrived at Gheri’s house in spring 1535 or
1536; according to a letter from Della Casa to Gheri:
Pandolfo left here on Palm Sunday and will perhaps arrive along with this
letter or shortly thereafter. I have told him that he comes to serve you, and
to learn not only his letters but also proper behavior and courtesy.34

Later Bembo would tutor Goro Gualteruzzi; indeed, the renowned cardinal wrote a letter in 1544 to one of the Riformatori of the University of
collection of inscriptions, including trips to Albania and Constantinople in 1534, from which
he published the lively Libri tre delle cose de’ Turchi (Venice, 1539) that forecast the military
buildup of the Ottoman Empire several decades later. Ramberti succeeded Bembo as librarian
of S. Marco (i.e., the Marciana Library) in 1543 and participated in the publication of a new
catalog of the library’s collection in 1545.
32. Beccadelli, Monumenti, pp. 249–50, letter XXIII (March 10, 1536): “Havea risoluto
la cosa del Maestro per li nostri Putti non molto diversamente dal consiglio vostro: perciòcche
ho tolto persona mediocre, et nella quale mi sarà integro in tenerla, et non tenerla a mio
modo. Questi è un M. Nicolo Colonio da Bergamo di 25 anni, et del quale il Rhamberti finalmente non ha trovato altro che bene. Io per quanto ho visto da alcune sue [e]pistole mezzo
greche, et latine f[acci]o guidicio, che sia senza comparatione più innanzi di Pietro in quelle
lingue. Hogli promesso tre scudi il mese; et cosi piacendo a Dio, servirommene finche Dio ci
dia miglior ventura, benche il Rhamberti ne dica tutti li beni; ma io, a cautela ho fatto li protesti, che questi non sono parentadi che non si dissolvino a comodo, et piacer delle parti.”
33. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 186.
34. Della Casa, Opere, 2:250 (April 3, 1535): “Pandolfo partì di qui la domenica dell’oliva, e sarà forse con V.S. insieme con la presente, o poco dapoi: io gli ho detto, che viene per
servire V. S. e per imparare non solo lettere, ma costumi buoni, ed anco gentili, la quale
comodità datagli da me e da noi altri, saria di pari prezzo alla roba di suo padre.” Note that
the year of the letter is written as 1536, but given the letter’s context and its location between
two other letters from spring 1535, is likely 1535 instead.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

683

Padua urging that young Goro be granted his doctorate and later found
Goro a house in Rome when the young man started a job at the Curia.35
Della Casa wrote extensively to Gheri and Beccadelli about Pandolfo who,
despite his uncle’s best efforts, was clearly more interested in gambling
than in his studies. These young boys represented the top echelon of Italian society; their fathers and uncles moved in high circles of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The network of support (or better, patronage) among these
powerful men is clearly evident as they assisted each other in the pursuit of
education and employment for their children.
The boys followed a traditional classical curriculum, including Virgil’s
Eclogues and Aeneid, Cicero’s Letters, and the plays of Euripides. Two of the
boys were also studying the works of Homer, which was an unusual addition.36 Gheri himself tutored the older boys occasionally, and his letters
demonstrate his protracted engagement with the education of all the boys.
Both Gualteruzzi and Della Casa wrote frequently to Gheri and Beccadelli;
usually the letters pertain to ecclesiastical business or financial affairs, but
references to the boys’ education pop up surprisingly often. For example, in
July 1535 Della Casa expressed to Gheri his pleasure at the arrival of a
recent unnamed guest who would be teaching eloquence to Pandolfo and
the other boys.37 In February 1536 Della Casa offered condolences to Gheri
about the anticipated arrival of still more children and the potential adverse
consequences for the bishop-elect: “I am sorry that you will soon lose use of
your villa on account of the children, if indeed that comes to pass.”38 Six
years later Della Casa wrote to Beccadelli about the importance of finding
the right kind of teacher for his nephew, Annibale, with an emphasis upon
the desired balance between severity and enthusiasm in the instructor:
35. Bembo, Opere, tome 3, vol. 2:133 (Bembo to Niccolo Tiepolo, September 13,
1544); see also another letter from Bembo to G. B. Rannusio, the schoolmaster in Venice,
regarding placement of Carlo Gualteruzzi’s younger son, Orazio, in school: ibid., 124 (March
13, 1546), and 125 (April 3, 1546). Both are briefly summarized in Carol Kidwell, Pietro
Bembo: Lover, Linguist, Cardinal (Montreal, 2004), pp. 368–69.
36. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 210, letter VIII (n.d. but written prior to Cologno’s arrival): “Dovete haver inteso di molti libri che mi recitorono a mente sulla giunta mia: Philippo
et Goro due d’Omero, et un di Virgilio, et a quel di Virgilio hebbero ancho compagno Vincentio, il qual recitò con Pandolfo tutta la Buccolica, et 130 versi di Euripide; certo mi paiono
tutti buoni, et il Maestro migliore, dico ne’ costumi, [perchè] nelle lettere non ha quel peculio
[sic] ch’ io desidererei, ma suplisce con diligenza, et per li piccoli è perfetto. Con li grandi mi
sono messo io a veder l’Epistole di Cicerone.”
37. Della Casa, Opere, 2:251 (July 5, 1535). Presumably this was Cologno’s predecessor,
referred to elsewhere as Pietro.
38. Della Casa, Opere, 2:253 (February 4, 1536): “Mi dispiace che V.S. sia privata della
villa per conto de’fanciulli, se così sarà.”

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT
My nephew Annibale Rucellai, of whom I spoke to you upon your departure from here, has been in Bologna for a while, as I told you, and [has
been] very comfortable there on account of the kindness of those good
men, but it is now necessary that you take up part, or even most, of the
burden of finding him a teacher, who will be with him in the house of
Messer Lorenzo; he [the teacher] will look after Pandolfo’s letters, and
his behavior, in which [Pandolfo] has been lacking, as I already
recounted to you. [The teacher] must be strict, because our boy is not
accustomed to any kind of obedience; and he must be of excellent intelligence, and of great enthusiasm, so as to convince [Pandolfo] to study,
and to slow down [his misbehavior?] a bit. . . . I hope that amongst all
your other duties you can make time to find such a person.39

Gheri’s letter of early March 1536 had made clear that he harbored
reservations about Cologno’s suitability for the position of household tutor.
In particular, Gheri was concerned that “these are not bonds that one dissolves easily or with pleasure.”40 Ten days after Cologno’s arrival, Gheri
wrote a follow-up letter in which he expressed admiration for the proposed
tutor’s intellectual and linguistic gifts but balanced that praise with his misgivings about Cologno’s suitability for the position within the household:
As I wrote to you in my previous letter, on the fifteenth of this month I
hired a teacher from Venice,41 although with some hesitation because
these are bonds not easily broken. Now that he has arrived, he is more a
man and knows his letters more than that previous one; and despite being
from Bergamo, he has excellent language skills, because he has been at
home only a little in his life. I tell you sincerely that although I do not
believe myself to have been negligent in this education of the boys, nevertheless I am not entirely satisfied [with Cologno]; in his care of the
household, while there is no untidiness or excess of any kind, nevertheless

39. Della Casa, Opere, 2:257 (April 27, 1542), letter XXVIII: “Annibale Rucellai mio
nipote, del quale vi parlai alla vostra partita di qua, lungamente viene a Bologna, com’io vi
dissi, e comodamente per la bontà di quelli gentiluomini tanto amorevoli, e cortesi, ma
bisogna, che voi ancora pigliate parte di questo peso, anzi la principal parte, che è di provedergli d’uno maestro, che stia con esso lui nella casa medesima di M. Lorenzo, ed abbia cura
di lui così nelle lettere, come nei costumi, nei quali è alquanto trascorso, come ancora vi dissi:
e vol essere persona severa, perchè il putto è poco usato ad alcuna obbedienza; e bene di
buonissimo ingegno, e di spirito grande, tale che se si può volgerlo agli studj, e frenarlo un
poco, spero che sia di molto contento a suo padre, e a me, che non lo amo manco che figliuolo.
Vi prego che con tutte le vostre occupazioni pigliate fatica di trovar una persona accomodata
a questo. . . .”
40. Beccadelli, Monumenti, pp. 249–50, letter XXIII (March 10, 1536).
41. It is not clear why Cologno would have been in Venice in 1535, although Gheri’s
subsequent comment that Cologno had been in Bergamo “only a little” may offer some clue.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

685

to me he does not seem to be a worthy man, the kind which I should hire
and which you desire.42

The allusion to Cologno as not a “worthy man” is frustratingly vague;
it may intimate something about Cologno’s social status or his possible lack
of a university degree. Or perhaps Gheri saw something in Cologno that
he mistrusted, but was unable or unwilling to put it into words.
Over the course of the next fifteen months, Gheri wrote frequently of
Cologno’s activities with the boys and of his role within the household.43
Cologno’s devotion to his pupils and to his Catholic faith slowly convinced
Gheri of the tutor’s merit. In early December 1536, for example, Gheri
wrote that “these boys are behaving very well, and Filippo not only is studious and eager to learn but is beginning to be more serious and wise.”44
By the end of that month, Gheri would write:
[t]he boys are learning, and what is most pleasing to me, they have finally
gone to confession; I have had excellent reports of their behavior and of
their religion from their confessor. Messer Nicolò does his duty and he
himself demonstrates the important principle of Religion.45

42. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 253, letter XXIV (March 27, 1536): “Vi scrissi per l’ultima mia, come a quindici di questo havea da venir un pedante da Venetia, ch’io havea tolto
con pretesto, che questi non erano parentadi, che non si potessero dissolvere al piacere de
contrahenti. Or esso è venuto, è più huomo, e sà più lettere che l’altro, et benchè sia Bergamasco, ha buonissima lingua, perche non è stato se non pochissimo a Casa sua. . . . Dico
certo ex animo perche advenga che non mi pare d’essere stato negligente in questa [a Greek
word here, translated by Beccadelli as “educazione di fanciulli”] nondimeno no mi satisfo a
pieno a un buon pezzo, come anche nella cura della casa, nella quale, comeche non sia intravenuto disordine alcuno, tuttavia a me non pare d’esser valent’huomo, quello ch’io dovrei, et
voi desiderate.”
43. Beccadelli, Monumenti, pp. 252, 264, 265, 268, 274, 279, 280, 284, 291, 293, 295,
298, 300, 303, 305, 310, 327, 329, 331, 332, 334. Gheri traveled regularly to Padua, Fano,
and Pistoia; from October 1535 to August 1536 he was in Padua; in September 1536 he
returned to Pistoia for his sister’s wedding. From October 1536 onward he resided in Fano,
with regular trips to a villa at Predalbino (in the Bolognese Appenines) for fresh air and otio
studiorum. To judge from Gheri’s letters, Cologno was nearly always at his side as tutor, companion, and secretary.
44. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 264, letter XXVIII (December 4, 1536): “Questi Fanciulli si portono benissimo, et Filippo oltra l’esser studioso, et lo imparar volentieri, comincia
ad esser grave, et savio.”
45. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 268, letter XXIV (December 29, 1536): “Li putti imparano, et quod mihi gratissimum est, ultimamente che si sono confessati; ho havuta ottima relatione de’ costumi, et della Religion loro dal Confessore. M. Nicolo fa il debito, et mostra in
se principio non piccolo di Religione.”

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

In March 1537, exactly a year after Cologno had entered his employ, Gheri
described the tutor as “very good, and worthy of being deeply loved.”46 Later
that month he noted that Cologno “was improving every day, [and was]
both calm and discreet, and deeply devoted.”47 Furthermore, Cologno “was
giving him great hope” in reflecting upon his own charitable and religious
obligations. Gheri went on to note that their extended conversations were
both fruitful and pleasurable. Finally, Cologno was especially valuable in
curbing the bad habits of the bishop-elect’s young relation, Giovanni;
Cologno had even convinced his young charge to find and return a sum of
money that had mysteriously disappeared. Gheri praised Cologno as
“exhibiting great care” in his supervision of the boys and lauded him as ever
more successful in bringing out a proper respect for God.48 These comments describe Cologno’s character and religiosity more than his pedagogical skills. It was precisely in this period that Cologno—encouraged by
Gheri and the circle of intelligent churchmen that surrounded him—
appears to have first developed his evangelical passion. In any case, by spring
1537, Cologno had clearly found a secure position in this noble household.
Gheri’s own spiritual awakening is revealed over the course of the
1530s. It was clearly evident in a letter of April 1536 from Federico Fregoso
(1480–1541) to Bembo about Fregoso’s confidence that Gheri would honor
the greater part of those episcopal responsibilities that were too often neglected.49 Fregoso repeated his confidence in Gheri when the two met during
a pastoral visitation in Gubbio at Easter 1536, at which time Fregoso
encouraged Gheri to organize his studies so as to have “lessons both in doc-

46. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 284, letter XXXIV (March 3, 1537): “M. Nicolo, s’ io
non m’inganno [è] molto buono, et degno d’essere amato extraordinariamente.”
47. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 291, letter XXXVI (March 13, 1537): “M. Nicolo vi
saluta assai, et amorevolmente, il quale riesce ogni dì migliore, et quieto, et discreto, et molto
devoto.”
48. Beccadelli, Monumenti, pp. 295–96, letter XXXX (April 2, 1537): “Non voglio
tacervi in questo ragionamento di carità, come il nostro M. Nicolo mi dà grandissima speranza d’haver ad esser tale, che noi saremo sforzati ad amarlo sommamente: gusta le cose d’Iddio, et parmi che da senno desideri la gratia sua. A me comincia ad essere di gran piacere, et
frutto la conversatione sua, et li ragionamenti c’havemo insieme, oltra che egli mi è uno
instrumento, il quale uso obliquamente per ritener Gioanni a freno, senza che Gioanni se ne
accorga; il quale pure ultimamente credea per mezzo di M. Nicolo . . . . Sed longa sunt ambages,
longa historia. Basta che un conto di danari, il quale egli mi havea male reso, et mancavano
parecchi Scudi, poi per mezzo di M. Nicolo si è ben reso, et ritrovati li danari. A questi putti
usa assai diligenza, et ella per quanto vedo per usare ogni dì maggiore, perciocche si moverà
per rispetto non mio, ma d’Iddio.”
49. Letter from Fregoso to Bembo, April 1536, in Lettere . . . a P. Bembo, vol. 4, no. 5,
as cited in Giusti, “Gheri, Cosimo,” p. 647.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

687

trine and in piety.”50 Gheri expressed his own pleasure at how his spiritual
understanding had expanded due to his conversations with Cologno.
In addition to supervising the boys and discussing matters of faith with
Gheri, Cologno had specific pedagogical responsibilities. In early February
1537, for example, two of his students (Pandolfo and Vincenzo) recited
1200 lines from Euripides’s play Hecuba without a single error. Gheri noted
that such an achievement “sprang not only from the boys’ own talent but
from the extraordinary diligence of their teacher,” Cologno.51 Several
months later young Filippo Gheri composed an original poem in both
Greek and Latin to be sent to Rome, an exercise that received praise for its
elegant prose style not only from Gheri but also from Della Casa and the
philologist Gualteruzzi.52 During summer 1537, Gheri once again noted
Cologno’s outstanding ability to bring forth the best in his young charges:
There are those two young boys, who recently recited Book Five of Virgil
[the Aeneid] in the old style without making a single mistake; truthfully,
it happened more because of the diligence of Messer Nicolò than of the
boys, as Pandolfo continues to exhibit difficulty in learning anything by
memory. Filippo behaves much better up there [in Brettine] than down
here [in Fano]. Concerning Messer Nicolò I cannot say [enough] how he
accomplishes remarkable tasks in the ways of God, and truly, Messer
Lodovico [Priuli], I would not know how to wish for either more modesty or more thoroughness than exist in that young man.53

Subsequent evidence confirms this felicitous interlude in Cologno’s
life. An autobiographical poem written by Cologno twenty-five years later
attests that this was one of the happiest periods in Cologno’s career. Ded-

50. Oxford University, Bodleian Library, Mss. Ital. c. 24, fol. 251r.
51. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 279, letter XXXII (“prima domenica di Quaresima del
1537”): “Pandolfo et Vincentio nostri, quod te gavisurum certo scio, hanno hiersera l’altra l’uno
. . . recitata l’Hecuba d’Euripide che è piu di 1200 versi, senza errare parola nessuna nè l’una
nè l’altro . . . il che nasce non solo dallo ingegno loro, ma dalla molta diligenza del Maestro.”
52. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 327, letter XXXXIX (July 6, 1537).
53. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 329, letter XXXXIX (July 6, 1537): “Gli sono que’ duo
putti piccoli, li quali pure ultimamente hanno recitato il V di Virgilio, pure alla usanza vecchia
di nonne fallar parola alcuna; il che in vero per non l’ingannare, accade più per la diligenza di
M. Nicolo, che per la loro, et anchora Pandolfo serva di quella sua durezza dello imparare a
mente. Filippo la sù si porta molto meglio che quagiù. Di M. Nicolo non parlo, che fa processi
mirabilii nella via d’Iddio, et veramente, M. Lodovico, io non saprei desiderare nè più modestia, nè più diligenza, che sia in quel giovine.” Brettine was the site of the bishop-elect’s villa
in the countryside; Fano was the seat of the bishopric. Gheri also used a villa in Pradalbino,
near Bologna.

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

icated to Gheri’s memory, the 1561 poem mentions a series of important
cardinals and bishops with whom Cologno was apparently able to fraternize, even if he himself may have remained on the margins of such rarefied
society.
How happy and pleasing to me were those days, O’ Gheri, when I
chanced to live with you—indeed that, that was truly deserving to be
called life: Toil or Death, . . . you beware lest you think anyone could be
better or more brilliant than was that godlike youth, the late Bishop of
Fano! Both [Alvise] Priuli and [Reginald] Pole reverenced him as a
friend; he was honored by most learned [Pietro] Bembo, whom no age
surpasses and no age may ever match: at that time the famous city had
such great heroes. I rejoice to have lived then. If perchance I have anything of value, I seized it then from his golden gatherings.54

Gheri’s own letters made repeated references to these important men
and demonstrate that he was in frequent contact with Pole, Contarini,
Della Casa, Bembo, Priuli, Soranzo, Beccadelli, and other ecclesiastical
and lay figures. Gheri’s contemporary, the Lucchese scholar and poet
Bernardino Daniello (1500–65), described such “golden gatherings” in
Gheri’s household in the 1530s as “a company of wise and most judicious

54. Frischer, “Rezeptiongeschicte,” p. 83; the translation here is his. Frischer graciously
shared with the author the Latin text of the poem, which appeared at the conclusion of
Cologno’s treatise on how to read Horace: Nicolaus Colonius, Quinti Horatii Flacci Methodus
de Arte Poetica (Bergamo, 1587), pp. 57–60, here p. 58:
Ad Federiucm Cornelius, cum esset Episcopus Bergomi
Me, patre amisso puerili aetate abeunte
Fors vestra in patria variarum divite rerum
Esse iubet, locus atque aetas custodis egentem
Molli nequitiae adiunxissent, ni proba mater
Paupertas, inopem victum pepulisset ad artes,
Queis ego consulerem melius famaeque, famique:
Hinc Graeci haud ignarum sermonisque Latini
Urbs Patavi suscepti, felicissima, & o mi
Quam gratissima tempora, cum me vivere tecum
Contigit o Gerie, illa etenim vita illa vocanda est:
Haec labor aut mors, quicquid te sine contigit aut
In terris esse, aut continget, tu cave quicquam
Candidius potuisse putes meliusque videri
Dius quam iuvenis fuit ille, & Episcopus olim
Fani Fortunae; hunc Priolusque & Polus amicum
Par, cui nil ulla anteferat, nil comparet aetas
Hunc venerabatur Bembus doctissimus; istos
Heroas nam tunc urbs illa illustris huius congressibus aureis.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

689

men” who debated the crucial issues of the day for both Church and state.55
In spring and summer 1536, for example, Pole visited Gheri and Priuli
precisely when he was conceptualizing his treatise De Unitate.56 In 1537
Contarini, now elevated to cardinal (in 1535) and bishop of Belluno (in
1536), was chairing the commission that drew up the recommendations in
Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia (Counsel on Reforming the Church) for
Paul III. In late summer 1537 Cologno even began to serve as secretary for
Gheri when the latter fell ill, writing correspondence on his behalf.57
Given the extent to which Gheri was involved with idealistic Catholic
reformers in the 1530s, it is reasonable to assume that Cologno absorbed
at least some of their reformist message. Indeed, Gheri’s repeated comments about Cologno’s “devotion” and “modesty” suggest that the two
young men shared a moral vision for the Church. Cologno was thus
exposed to some of the key players in the spirituali movement at a formative time in his life.58 Confirmation of this hypothesis about Cologno’s
spiritual awakening is found in another of Gheri’s letters. In early April
1537 Gheri described how a mutual friend, an English priest named Giorgio,59 helped light the spark of Cologno’s religiosity:

55. Bernardino Daniello, Della poetica (1536) (repr. Rome, 2003), pp. 10–13, cited by
Giusti, “Gheri, Cosimo,” p. 646a: “una brigata di dotti e molto giudiciosi uomini.” Daniello
moved from Lucca to Venice where he knew Bembo, Ramberti, and their circle; in addition
to Della Poetica (1536), he wrote a potentially plagiarized commentary on Dante (1568), a
commentary on Petrarch (1541, repr. 1549), and a translation of Virgil’s Georgics (1545). See
M. Rafaella De Grammatica, “Bernardino, Daniello,” DBI 32:608–10; and Deborah Parker,
Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1993), esp. pp. 109–23.
56. Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 39.
57. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 334, letter XXXXXI (“il dì della Madonna” [15th]
d’Agosto 1537): “Se voi harete lette le lettere ch’io vi ho fatto scrivere da M. Nicolo. . . .”
58. The Spirituali were Italian “evangelicals” in the first half of the sixteenth century
who sought peaceful internal reform. They proposed individual spiritual renewal, careful
study of scripture, and justification by faith. Prominent members included Gasparo Contarini, Jacopo Sadoleto, Reginald Pole, and Vittoria Colonna. They were persecuted in the
1550s, especially by Paul IV (r. 1555–59). See Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge, UK, 1972).
59. Elsewhere in Gheri’s letters there are repeated references to a “Giorgio Inglese”
who visited Gheri’s household between March and July 1537, where he preached about the
letters of St. Paul and counseled Gheri. This English priest has been identified as both
George Bucker (Giorgius Buchareus) and Adam Damplip; he claimed to have celebrated
Mass for Cardinal Fisher and worked hard to win the affection of Gheri, Pole, and Priuli.
Gheri later offered to obtain absolution for him after Bucker had murdered a servant in
Rome. Bucker was ultimately executed in Calais in 1543 for heresy and treason; he is discussed at some length in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, pp. 418–22, which calls him “a blessed
and innocent martyr.” In addition to Giusti, “Gheri, Cosimo,” pp. 48–49, see Thomas F.

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT
Giorgio, [a friend] of [Alvise] Priuli[,] has played an important role in
helping me to uncover more clearly the good soul of Messer Nicolò,
because even if at first he [i.e., Cologno] seemed modest and without
vices, nevertheless he did not inspire me, and he was not eager to speak
freely of spiritual matters. Now that Giorgio has arrived, and is both
reading [aloud] the letters of St. Paul and making excellent arguments
about the activities of that Holy Bishop, he has inspired M. Nicolò
and rekindled the tiny flames, and has given to me greater occasion to
know him.60

Sadly for Cologno, his young patron died on September 24, 1537, at
the age of only twenty-four. The cause of Gheri’s death remains in dispute.
Although some sources claimed the cause was merely a fever, others maintained that Gheri was brutally raped and subsequently poisoned by Farnese, a military commander within the Papal States.61 Gheri’s mentor and
biographer Beccadelli was uncharacteristically terse on the matter, as were
Bembo and Pole.62 In his Storia fiorentina, Varchi cited reliable sources
(perhaps Beccadelli himself) in pointing the finger at Farnese. As Thomas
Mayer has observed, given that Varchi may have known Gheri and was a
practicing homosexual who had been repeatedly accused of rape, he would
have had an interest in the cause of Gheri’s demise yet would be unlikely
to draw attention to himself by raising such an allegation unless convinced

Mayer, “Bucker, George” (d. 1543), in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford,
2004), n.p., http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/69188 (accessed November 3, 2009);
and Anne Overell, “An English Friendship and Italian Reform: Richard Morison and
Michael Throckmorton, 1532–1538,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57 (2006), 478–93, here
486, for more on the English Giorgio, including additional bibliography.
60. Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 296, letter XXXX (April 2, 1537): “Giorgio del Prioli è
stato non picccola causa a farmi scoprire meglio questo buono animo di M. Nicolo, perciòcche
di prima ancorche non mi paresse se non modesto, et senza vitio, nondimeno non mi dava
cosi seco, et non ardiva di parlare liberamente delle cose spirituali. Ora venne questo Giorgio,
il quale parte leggendo le epistole di S. Paolo, et parte facendoci bellissimi ragionamenti delle
cose di quel Santo Vescovo, ha desto in M. Nicolo, et racceso i buoni ignicoli, che havea, et
a me dato occasione di conoscergli.”
61. According to Frischer, “Rezeptiongeschichte,” p. 83, Gheri died of Tertian fever;
but see Varchi, Storia fiorentina, 2:268–70, which blames Pier Luigi Farnese for rape and
poison in late summer 1537. Overell, “An English Friendship,” pp. 484–88, offers a judicious
review of the evidence and further bibliography, as well as Mayer, Reginald Pole, pp. 71–72.
See also R. Massignan, “Pier Luigi Farnese e il vescovo di Fano,” Atti e memorie della R. Deputazione di storia patria per le provincie delle Marche, new ser., II (1905), 249–304; and G. B.
Parks, “The Pier Luigi Farnese Scandal. An English Report,” Renaissance News, 15 (1962),
193–200, who says the whole story was clearly a fabrication.
62. Beccadelli, Monumenti, pp. 190–96; additional bibliography is provided in Mayer,
Reginald Pole, pp. 71–72.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

691

of its truth.63 Regardless of the cause of Gheri’s death, the English Protestant propaganda machine quickly exploited the story as a way to criticize
the wickedness of the pope and his family. The tragic and unexpected
death of Gheri must have turned Cologno’s world upside down, particularly because of the scandal associated with the bishop-elect’s passing.
With the disintegration of the bishop-elect’s household and thus the
schoolmaster’s livelihood, it is not clear where Cologno headed next. A
letter written just two weeks after Gheri’s death by Benedetto Ramberti to
Filippo Gheri and his brothers suggests that Cologno may have already
departed.64 Filippo and Vincenzo Gheri were apparently sent to Rome to
be in the service of Pole and Contarini. Given Cologno’s apparent affection for these boys and the presence of Cologno’s uncle, Hieronymo, in
Rome,65 Cologno may have transferred to Rome as well. The Bergamobased Dominican Barnaba Vaerini wrote in 1790 that
because of the purity of his lifestyle and the fame of his religiosity,
[Cologno] was called to Rome by Cardinal Reginald Pole, who elected
him as his secretary. Having served him for several months, he [Cologno]
resigned in order to return to his home city.66

However, none of the scholarly biographies of Pole mention the employment of Cologno in 1538 nor is there any mention of Cologno in Pole’s
voluminous five-volume correspondence.67 In addition, Cologno never
63. Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 71.
64. Frischer, “Rezeptiongeschichte,” p. 84n44. The letter from Ramberti is dated
October 7, 1537.
65. In December 1536 Gheri asked Beccadelli if the latter could determine whether
Cologno’s uncle, Hieronymo, was in Rome at that time (Beccadelli, Monumenti, p. 265, letter
XXVIII [December 4, 1536]). Hieronymo (Girolamo) Cologno was a notary active in Bergamo from 1539–89; numerous members of the Cologno family were notaries in Bergamo,
although not the schoolmaster Nicolò.
66. Vaerini, Gli Scrittori di Bergamo, fol. 158: “Per la purità dei suoi costumi, e per la
fama della sua dottrina nel 1538 fu chiamato a Roma dal Cardinale Reginaldo Pole, che lo
elesse a suo Segretario. Servitolo per alcuni mesi, si licenziò, ritornando in Patria” in 1539.
67. No mention of Cologno appears in the biographies of Pole written by Mayer
(2000), Simonicelli (1977), Schenk (1950), or Haile (1910), nor is Cologno mentioned in The
Correspondence of Reginald Pole, ed. Thomas F. Mayer (Aldershot, UK, 2002–08), 4 vols. thus
far. The author is grateful to Mayer (who died in January 2014) for checking the index of the
fifth and final volume, which will be the biographical companion for Europe outside the
British Isles, in advance of its publication. Mayer’s suggestion (Mayer, Reginald Pole, 442–51)
that Pole was a homosexual and perhaps a pederast casts a different light upon Cologno’s possible employment for the cardinal—but again, firm evidence has not yet come to light of
Cologno’s presence in Rome in 1538.

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THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

alluded to working for Pole or even to being in Rome. Vaerini’s account is
based at least in part on the diary of the chronicler Marco Beretta (d.
1549), whose Diario describes events as he witnessed them in the city and
countryside of Bergamo from 1500 to 1543. Beretta noted in 1539 that
Cologno “was a young man skilled in Greek and Latin, who had listened
to many wise men in Venice, Padua, and Rome.”68 Unfortunately, Beretta
says nothing more about Cologno’s training nor does he explain why
Cologno might have been in Rome or Venice. Thus skepticism must greet
the theory of Cologno’s presence in Rome with Pole; a more likely scenario
is that he drifted back to Bergamo in 1538–39. In any case, Cologno’s subsequent devotion to training young acolytes for the Church and his lifelong
loyalty to Catholicism may be traced, at least in part, to his close association with Gheri and the circle of reformers who surrounded him.69
The rest of Cologno’s career can be briefly summarized. He began
teaching “humanities and good letters” for the city of Bergamo in 1539. By
1550, he had become a deacon and a canon of the cathedral of S. Alessandro. For the next four decades he offered instruction in virtually every setting available in a provincial city like Bergamo. In addition to tutoring
wealthy students privately in his house, he accepted a joint appointment
from the city and bishop in 1556, collaborated with the bishop to found a
diocesan seminary in 1564, directed a private academy in 1566, was maestro
principale for the city as well as for the confraternity of the Misericordia
Maggiore (MIA) in 1574, and supervised the MIA’s Academy of Clerics
(Accademia dei Chierici) in the late 1580s where he oversaw the education
of aspiring priests. During this time he also held a benefice from a local
church, corresponded with other humanists and religious, and published a

68. BCBg, ‘Angelo Mai,’ Ms. MMB 323, Marco Beretta, Diario, fol. 148r (prev. fol.
135): “adolescens etatis . . . . [blank] grece et latine doctus, que Venetiis, Padue, Rome, plures
doctissimos viros audivit, pulcherrima, et docta praelectione habita.” In 1574 Beretta was
glowingly described by the humanist and Latin poet Giovanni Bressani (1489–1560) in a
posthumous work called Tumuli as a man of “acuti iudicii, elegantis ingenii, exquisitissimae
doctrinae vir” (a man of acute judgment, elegant genius, most exquisite learning).
69. But see Firpo, Vittore Soranzo vescovo ed eretico, p. 400, who quotes from the 1557
letter of Giovan Battista Brugnatelli accusing Cologno and other canons of Bergamo’s cathedral chapter of indulging in heresy in the house of the medical doctor Girolamo Barille, with
the complicity of Soranzo. It must be noted, however, that Brugnatelli—whom Firpo
describes as the “longa manus del Sant’Ufficio romano” (the long hand of the Roman Holy
Office, p. 327) and who had been appointed vicar in that year specifically to keep watch over
Soranzo after a lengthy trial—saw heretics everywhere in Bergamo, as his frequent letters to
the Holy Office attest. No other evidence of Cologno’s interest in Protestant ideas has been
uncovered.

CHRISTOPHER CARLSMITH

693

grammar textbook (1576, repr. 1582) and a treatise on Horace (1587). In
1591 he was appointed professor of moral philosophy at the University of
Padua, where he exchanged Latin treatises and angry words with a jealous
rival. His tenure there was brief and by all accounts unhappy, owing to a
combination of professional rivalry, disrespectful students, religious conflict,
and perhaps ill health. By 1594, he had retired to Bergamo. He published a
commentary on Aristotle in 1601 and died in Bergamo in spring 1602.
Conclusion
The 1530s was a critical decade for Italy. From ecclesiastical reform
and Mannerist art to scientific advances, political state-building, and new
literary genres, this period witnessed a series of important developments.
The schoolmaster Nicolò Cologno and the bishop-elect Cosimo Gheri
were relatively minor figures in the broader sweep of sixteenth-century Italian history, but their contributions in pedagogy and pastoral care should not
be overlooked. Individually they contributed to their respective dioceses and
towns in diverse ways; collectively they trained (albeit only briefly) some of
the future leaders of Italy. Their devotion to classical education and
Catholic piety is representative of at least two broad themes that define the
sixteenth century: namely, the twin triumphs of humanist education and
Catholic orthodoxy. These two movements are often defined in opposition
to one another and with good reason. Yet as the examples of Cologno and
Gheri make clear, they could also work together. This effort to combine
secular and sacred learning is also evident in Contarini’s De officio episcopi;
Contarini recognized the tensions between Christian principles and secular
learning, and he “expressed reservations regarding the effects of a humanist
education on the moral development of the young,” but he never condemned classical texts or humanist treatises across the board.70
Cologno and Gheri shared many similarities in terms of education,
linguistic training, and intellectual interests. These common interests were
disseminated to Gheri’s younger siblings and the other boys resident in
Gheri’s villa, along with a healthy dose of religious instruction, during the
eighteen months that Cologno and Gheri were together. Gheri’s unexpected death brought that happy experiment to an abrupt end in September 1537. Gheri’s religious vocation seems never to have been in doubt;
from a very young age it was clear to all that he was destined for a lucrative
career in the Catholic Church. His network of contacts stood him in good

70. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, p. 96.

694

THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE BISHOP-ELECT

stead throughout his career. Cologno, on the other hand, was cut from different cloth and had to make his way in the world without the advantages
conferred upon Gheri. Nevertheless, Cologno’s own religiosity and his
later status as a cleric are worthy of note. His propensity to work for religiously oriented institutions such as the Academy of Clerics and the Seminary in Bergamo support the contention that he took his Catholicism seriously and wished to support the development of young clerics in service to
the Church. Cologno’s success as a teacher mirrors the broader achievement of the Catholic Church during and after Trent to reclaim its position
of primacy in educating youth through the creation of seminaries, catechism schools, Schools of Christian Doctrine, and new religious orders of
men and women devoted to teaching. In Cologno’s case, his clerical status
was probably a decisive factor in awarding him the professorship of moral
philosophy in 1591. In summary, Cologno and Gheri represent some of
the key achievements of the Catholic Church in the 1530s, especially its
efforts to train young children and to sharpen its message against potential
Lutherans.

Transatlantic Connections:
American Anti-Catholicism and the
First Vatican Council (1869–70)
TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN*
This article investigates the hostile U.S. reaction to the First Vatican
Council (1869–70) and the doctrine of papal infallibility. For opponents of the Church, the Council Fathers could either make peace with
the modern age or, by dogmatizing infallibility, reject progressive
principles. Throughout the controversy, Americans closely monitored
European developments; read translations of European polemics; and
rapturously welcomed a former French friar, Charles Jean Marie
Loyson (known as Father Hyacinthe), whose act of rebellion against
the Vatican seemed to signal a second Reformation. These events evoke
a history of anti-Catholicism in the United States that is less parochial
and more sensitive to transnational connections.
Keywords: anti-Catholicism, Father Hyacinthe, First Vatican
Council, papal infallibility

O

ne of the most exciting developments in historical scholarship over
the last two decades has been the emergence of transnational history.
Historians in a range of fields have looked beyond the nation to investigate
the cross-border movement of ideas, people, and goods in the modern era.1
In the United States, where a deeply entrenched belief in national exceptionalism has favored historical narratives that emphasize difference rather

*Dr. Verhoeven is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, email: tim.verhoeven@
monash.edu.
1. David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History, 79 (1992), 432–62; Ian
Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical
Review, 96 (1991), 1031–55; Joyce Appleby, “Recovering America’s Historical Diversity:
Beyond Exceptionalism,” Journal of American History, 79 (1992), 419–31; “The Nation and
Beyond: A Special Issue. Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History, 86 (1999); Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American
Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, 1998), pp.
21–40; Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002).

695

696

TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

than exchange, the originality of the transnational approach has been particularly striking. Historians have offered a fresh reading of pivotal American reform movements, from feminism to social progressivism to temperance, by exploring their connection to a broader North Atlantic network.2
Recent histories of American Catholicism have adopted a similar
approach. Explicitly rejecting the parochialism of previous scholarship,
Peter R. D’Agostino and John T. McGreevy have investigated the transAtlantic linkages that profoundly shaped the attitudes and identity of
American Catholics.3
One subject that is yet to benefit from a transnational approach, however, is anti-Catholicism. Historians have interpreted anti-Catholicism
within different conceptual frameworks, but these varied approaches share,
almost without exception, a rigid focus on domestic circumstances. Early
interpretations sought out factors that were unique to the American past.
Anti-Catholicism was thus seen as having been encoded in the national
psyche with the Puritan settlement of the nation, a lurking prejudice that,
in the presence of large-scale Catholic immigration, burst into nativist hostility.4 In a related interpretation, anti-Catholicism is understood as an
outgrowth of an entrenched American propensity to see sinister forces
conspiring against the nation.5 More recent works have moved away from

2. Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of
Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington, 1999); Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The
First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); Daniel T. Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Ian Tyrrell,
Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International
Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991); Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010).
3. Peter R. D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the
Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003). See also Ronald A. Binzley, “Ganganelli’s Disaffected Children: The Suppressed English Jesuit Province and the Shaping of American
Catholicism, 1762–1817” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2011), which
explores the powerful role of English ex-Jesuits in shaping the American Church.
4. The classic study is Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (New
York, 1938). On anti-Catholicism in the Revolutionary era, see Francis D. Cogliano, No
King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT, 1995). For
anti-Catholicism as an expression of nativism, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York, 1965).
5. Richard Hofstader, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New
York, 1965); David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Countersubversion: An Analysis of AntiMasonic, Anti-Catholic and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review,
47 (1960), 205–24; David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New
Right in American History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988).

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

697

the stress on irrational fears and fantasies. In Jenny Franchot’s landmark
work, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism,
the author argues that anti-Catholicism was a powerful tool in the cultivation of a national identity defined in terms of Protestant allegiance. The
specter of Rome, she contends, was wielded by Protestant elites in an effort
to smooth over divisions within their faith as well as within the nation.
Whatever their differences, all Americans could unite in opposition to the
Catholic Other.6 The emergence of gender history has further deepened
our understanding of the origins and power of anti-Catholic feeling in
nineteenth-century America. Historians have argued strongly that antiCatholic feeling was driven as much by a perceived threat to cherished
gender ideals and the sanctity of the home as by the fear of political subversion.7 Despite their originality, however, these approaches have
remained fixed within a national frame.
A handful of scholars have situated American anti-Catholicism in a
broader narrative field. Susan M. Griffin’s Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth
Century Fiction offers a comparative analysis of depictions of the Church in
American and British novels.8 Marjule Anne Drury argues that opposition to
Catholicism functioned in a similar manner in Great Britain, the United
States, and Germany. In all three nations, the depiction of Catholicism as
hierarchical, authoritarian, and backward served to throw into relief the
opposing virtues of Protestantism. These virtues, notably the respect for personal liberty and the encouragement of individual initiative, were in turn
understood as the basis of their economic and social advantage over majority-

6. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism
(Berkeley, 1994).
7. Barbara Welter, “From Maria Monk to Paul Blanchard,” in Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn (New York,
1987), pp. 43–71; Daniel A. Cohen, “The Respectability of Rebecca Reed: Genteel Womanhood and Sectarian Conflict in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic, 16 (1996),
419–61; Susan M. Griffin, “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s
Tale,” PMLA, 111 (1996), 93–107; Tracey Fessenden, “The Convent, the Brothel, and the
Protestant Woman’s Sphere,” Signs, 25 (2000), 451–78; Marie Anne Pagliarini, “The Pure
American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature
in Antebellum America,” Religion and American Culture, 9 (1999), 97–128; C. Walker Gollar,
“The Alleged Abduction of Milly McPherson and Catholic Recruitment of Presbyterian
Girls,” Church History, 65 (1996), 596–608.
8. Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York,
2004). John T. McGreevy highlights the role of European controversies such as the Spanish
Civil War in inflaming anti-Catholic feeling in the United States in “Thinking on One’s
Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928–1960,” Journal of American
History, 84 (1997), 97–131.

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

Catholic nations such as Spain and Italy.9 Yet overall, scholars have missed
the opportunity to investigate the international dimension of American antiCatholicism. Franchot’s Roads to Rome typifies this failing. Although conceding that one of the features of anti-Catholic discourse was “its ability to cross
national, class, and ethnic boundaries,” her analysis fails to explore the manner
in which American anti-Catholics drew on foreign polemics or understood
themselves to be part of an international crusade.10 Her narrative, like so
many others, comes to a halt at the borders of the nation.
Studies of American anti-Catholicism have thus been marked by an
insularity that is both frustrating and puzzling. Anti-Catholicism would
seem ideally suited to a transnational approach. To begin with, the imagined nature of the enemy prompted a willingness to look beyond national
borders. In particular, the belief that the Church operated on the same
sinister principles wherever it spread fostered a global mind-set amongst
its opponents. Roman Catholicism’s identity, in this view, had been
forged in the Middle Ages when a ruthless and ambitious papacy had
overthrown the egalitarian and communal spirit of the primitive Church.
The Church that was forged by this papal despotism was a medieval
monolith with no space for national variation. In 1869, a writer in
Putnam’s argued that the American Church was no different in spirit or
ambition to the French, Spanish, or Italian. Instead, it was subject to the
same “trans-Atlantic formulas and precedents.” The Church was not “one
thing in Naples and another in New York.” Everywhere, it was a medieval
remnant. “The Church in America today,” the author concluded, “is as
the Church in Rome in the sixteenth century.”11 The logical conclusion
was that the battle against such a Church was unlikely to be won on
national soil alone.
Catholicism’s alleged imperviousness to variations of time or space
also enhanced the credibility of foreign polemics. If it were true that the
convent followed the same rules wherever it was implanted, or that the

9. Marjule Anne Drury, “Anti-Catholicism in Germany, Britain, and the United
States: A Review and Critique of Recent Scholarship,” Church History, 70 (2001), 98–131. On
the importance of anti-Catholicism for British national identity, see Linda Colley, Britons:
Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 2009), pp. 20–25, 46–47.
10. Franchot, Roads to Rome, p. xx. On the influence of Mexico, John C. Pinheiro,
“‘Extending the Light and Blessings of the Purer Faith’: Anti-Catholic Sentiment among
American Soldiers in the U.S.-Mexican War,” Journal of Popular Culture, 35 (2001), 129–52.
11. “Our Unestablished Church,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature,
Science and Art, December 1869, pp. 708–09.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

699

Society of Jesus obeyed the same set of instructions wherever it expanded,
then exposés originating from England, France, Italy, or Germany were
just as valuable as those from home. Those in the United States opposed
to Catholicism thus eagerly absorbed European denunciations of
Catholic institutions. Aided by the lack of copyright restrictions for
much of the nineteenth century, these foreign works flowed into the
United States.
The consensus that the Church was an international institution also
meant that anti-Catholics paid close attention to developments abroad.
To a degree underestimated by historians, hostility to the Church in the
United States was nourished by controversies that had their origin not
in New York or Boston but in Rome. This is particularly evident during
the papacy of Pius IX (1846–78). Over these three decades, a wave of
papal initiatives, from the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854)
to the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the Dogma of Papal Infallibility
(1870), stimulated an international backlash in which Americans were
active participants. This was also the era that witnessed scandals like the
Mortara Affair. In 1858 an international outcry ensued when a young
Jewish boy was removed from his family in Bologna on the grounds that
he had been secretly baptized as a Catholic.12 Protestant Americans
were as furious as their counterparts abroad. The abolitionist Theodore
Parker, writing in the midst of the scandal, described the pope as an
“ugly customer” and imagined taking him “by the scruff of the neck” if
he ever tried again to “wickedly scare a Jewish baby in his cradle.”13 At
the same time, the ongoing controversy over the Papal States drew
attention to the Vatican’s temporal ambitions. The Church’s refusal to
cede sovereignty to a nationalist movement espousing the modern doctrines of democracy and liberty was seen in the United States as confirmation of its theocratic ambition.14
This article investigates the hostile reaction in America to the greatest
international controversy during the papacy of Pius IX: the doctrine of
papal infallibility that was discussed at the First Vatican Council (1869–
70). Both Catholics and Protestants considered the First Vatican Council
as one of the great religious events of the age. The Catholic intellectual

12. David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York, 1997).
13. John Weiss, ed., Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (New York, 1864),
2:305. On the American reaction, see Bertram Wallace Korn, The American Reaction to the
Mortara Case (Cincinnati, 1957).
14. See D’Agostino, Rome in America, pp. 38–39.

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

Orestes A. Brownson described the Council as the “great fact of the nineteenth century.”15 The author and social reformer Charles Eliot Norton
wrote to his mother that it was certainly “a great historic event” that would
“have a large place in the history of the next generation.”16 The poet
William Cullen Bryant thought that the Council would “occupy the attention not only of the religious but the secular public.”17 The Council would
be of “extraordinary interest,” declared one newspaper, to “all peoples
under Christian influence.”18
Historians of the American Church have long been aware of the
Council’s significance. Several studies exist of the attitudes of the participating American bishops.19 But scholars of anti-Catholicism have largely
ignored the Council. The most comprehensive study remains an unpublished doctoral dissertation written in 1941.20 This lack of attention to the
Council characterizes even analyses that profess to take a broad view of
anti-Catholic sentiment. In his perceptive study of Catholic and American
notions of freedom, John McGreevy explores the role of international
events such as the Spanish Civil War and the Second Vatican Council.
The First Vatican Council, however, is given almost no attention.21
This article has two major aims. First, it argues that the First Vatican
Council was a significant moment in the history of American antiCatholicism. For opponents of the Church, the Council exposed the fundamental divide between Catholicism and the key tenets of modernity. In
its organization, mode of operation, and outcome, the Council was stark
proof that the Church was a hierarchical, intolerant, and above all retrogressive force. These were not new accusations. But the brazenness with
15. Cited in Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane
(Grand Rapids, 2004), p. 300.
16. Charles Eliot Norton, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (New York, 1913), 1:381.
17. Bryant to Leonice M. S. Moulton, December 10, 1869, in The Letters of William
Cullen Bryant, ed. Thomas G. Voss (New York, 1992), 5: 347.
18. “The Ecumenical Council,” Daily Evening Bulletin [San Francisco], October 5,
1869, 2. On the Council, see Roger Aubert, Vatican I (Paris, 1964); E. E. Y. Hales, The First
Vatican Council (Houston, 1962); Cuthbert Butler, The Vatican Council, 1869-1870, based on
Bishop Ullathorne’s Letters (Westminster, 1962).
19. William L. Portier, Isaac Hecker and the First Vatican Council (Lewiston, NY, 1985);
James J. Hennesey, The First Council of the Vatican: The American Experience (New York,
1963).
20. Ryan J. Beiser, “The Vatican Council and the American Secular Newspapers, 1869–
1870” (PhD diss., The Catholic University of America, 1941). See also James H. Smylie,
“American Protestants Interpret Vatican Council I,” Church History, 38 (1969), 459–74.
21. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, p. 103.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

701

which the Vatican appeared to have announced its rejection of liberal ideas
and processes shocked even the most prejudiced observers. Rome, as the
American Presbyterian Review warned, has “declared herself.” Never before,
the writer continued, had the Vatican openly expressed such an “attitude
of manifest conflict with the best elements of modern civilization.”22 The
divorce between the Church and the age appeared, in the wake of the
Council, complete.
Second, it is argued here that the reaction to the Council brings into
view what Ian Tyrrell has called “the complicated dialectic between the
national and the transnational.”23 Some commentators saw the Council
and its outcome through the prism of American democracy. The most
contentious aspect of the Council, the doctrine of papal infallibility, was in
this view incompatible with the particular brand of republicanism that had
taken root in the United States. But this was not the dominant response.
Most of the hostile commentary on the Council appealed not to a uniquely
American model of democracy, but to a set of principles that spanned the
Atlantic and that were labeled simply as modern civilization. In attacking
the Council, Americans invoked progressive norms that they saw as jointly
held by all the leading nations of the world.
The analysis here of the reaction to the Council begins in the last
months of 1869, as American commentators were speculating feverishly
about its purpose, and ends with the vote on papal infallibility in July 1870.
In those months, those Americans opposed to Catholicism made no secret
of their immersion in historical forces larger than the United States.
Because of a new transatlantic cable, American observers could follow
developments in Europe closely. Foreign accounts of opposition to infallibility were quickly translated and published. The strength of these transatlantic connections was starkly demonstrated in October 1869, when the
arrival in New York of one of the leading opponents of infallibility, a
former French friar known as Father Hyacinthe, created a public sensation.
In the face of an enemy whose ambition and reach eclipsed national borders, American opponents to Catholicism willingly joined an international
crusade.

22. E. H. Gillett, “Art. III—Papal Infallibility and the 19th Century,” The American
Presbyterian Review, new ser., 2 (1870), 636–58, here 654.
23. Tyrrell, Reforming the World, p. 7.

702

TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

The Problem of Infallibility
On June 26, 1867, Pope Pius IX publicly announced his decision to
convene an ecumenical council, the first of its kind since the close of the
Council of Trent in 1563. The following year, the Bull of Convocation
(Aeterni Patris) stated that a Council was needed to respond to the growing
threat to faith and morals posed by modern society, and set the opening
date as December 8, 1869. Invitations were extended to 1050 prelates
across the globe, as well as to the bishops of Orthodox, Protestant, and
other non-Catholic churches.
In the months before the opening, the secular and Protestant press published a stream of editorials and articles about the Council. Many commentators interpreted the Council as a crucial juncture for the Vatican: either it
would embrace the spirit of the times, or seal its breach with the core principles of modern civilization. As the Boston Daily Evening Bulletin argued,
the Council would either devise a “progressive platform,” or the Church
would “continue to regard as heresies the opinions that form the basis and
inspiration of modern society.”24 In August 1869, the New York Herald similarly portrayed the Council as a moment of decision for the Vatican. If the
Church “reconciles science with Scripture” and “harmonizes faith with
reason,” the newspaper declared, it could yet be a force for progress in the
world. Alternatively, if the Council showed that the Vatican had “learned
nothing since the days of Galileo,” Catholicism would inevitably decline.25
The fear that the Council might reject the modern age stemmed from
its presumed goals. The first was the transformation into dogma of the
1864 Quanta Cura encyclical and its accompanying Syllabus of Errors. In
that Syllabus, Pope Pius IX appeared to declare anathema many of the key
developments of the modern age, from the separation of church and state
to freedom of conscience and expression. Of the eighty propositions that
the Syllabus condemned, the last was the most controversial: “That the
Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms
with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” In 1864, the response
from large sections of American society had been scathing. In a reaction
that was typical, the New York Times labeled the Syllabus the “last protest
of the representative of the Middle Ages against the spirit of the Nineteenth Century.”26 In 1869, many observers interpreted the Council as
designed to dogmatize the Syllabus. That, the Nation declared, was the

24. “The Ecumenical Council,” Daily Evening Bulletin, October 5, 1869, 2.
25. “The Approaching Catholic Council,” New York Herald, August 15, 1869, 6.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

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“real nature of the occasion” and gave a summary of its contents to impress
the point.27 Some papers went further by reprinting the entire text.28 For
much of the secular press, the forthcoming Council would thus witness the
curious sight of the Catholic Church prosecuting the modern era. There
seemed little doubt about the outcome. The Council would surely rule, the
Nation informed its readers, the “state of society which existed in the tenth
century superior to that which exists in the nineteenth.”29
The main point of controversy over the forthcoming Council was not
the Syllabus, however, but the definition of papal infallibility. The very
idea of an infallible mortal struck many commentators as preposterous. But
to claim that the papacy could be considered in this way was even more
bizarre. “When the moral character of many of the long line of occupants
of the Papal Chair is considered,” according to the Albion, “the attempt to
designate their utterances as infallible becomes not only absurd but blasphemous.”30 Some papers reprinted a French article listing the number of
popes deposed, murdered, or declared heretical. Even the American presidents, one paper noted, had a better track record.31 To prove the doctrine’s
absurdity, Americans looked abroad, particularly to the Papal States. The
New Englander and Yale Review engaged in a debate with the Catholic
World over the morality of majority-Catholic compared to majorityProtestant nations. Wielding an array of statistics, the Review argued that
crime and illegitimacy rates were far higher in Catholic nations, whereas
levels of education and prosperity were lower. But it was the administration
of the Papal States that provided the most compelling evidence. The
murder rate there, the Review announced, stood at 113 per million of population. The equivalent figure in Protestant England was four. “A very
frightful exhibit,” the Review concluded, “for an infallible ruler!”32
Infallibility was also understood as a violation of a key principle of any
democratic society, the right of free discussion. As Elizabeth A. Fenton
observes, Protestant Americans depicted infallibility “not so much as the

26. “The Pope’s Letter,” New York Times, January 21, 1865, 4.
27. “The Oecumenical Council,” Nation, October 7, 1869, 287.
28. For example, “The Papal Syllabus,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, November 4, 1869, 3.
29. “The Oecumenical Council,” Nation.
30. “The Ecumenical Council and Papal Infalibility,” The Albion, A Journal of News,
Politics and Literature, January 8, 1870, 24.
31. “Papal Infallibility, a Record of the Popes of Rome,” Cleveland Daily Herald,
November 19, 1869, 4.
32. “Article V—Moral Results of the Romish System,” New Englander and Yale
Review, January 1870, 101–25, here 123.

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

power to speak as the power to silence.”33 The claim to be free from error,
in this view, precluded any expression of dissenting views. The Council’s
rules of operation seemed to encapsulate this intolerance. The pope was
left to decide which questions could be put to the Council for discussion.
These discussions, in turn, were closed to the public and reporters. All of
this was designed, critics alleged, to reinforce papal dominance. The “initiative in everything,” the New York Times alleged, “belongs to the Pope
alone.”34 Such rules also gave rise to a suspicion that the Council’s purpose
was merely to endorse a series of decrees that had already been determined.
The aim of the Council, one paper reported, was “not to devise and discuss
questions and points of belief, but to promulgate and establish those
already determined on by His Holiness the Pope.”35
Another objection to infallibility centered on one of the most enduring
claims against Catholicism, namely, that it sought temporal as well as spiritual
sovereignty. “That Church and State should still be one,” as the New York
Herald reminded its readers, “is still a dogma dear to Rome.”36 In 1869–70,
domestic controversies were feeding this perception. In Ohio, the Church’s
determined effort to have the Protestant King James Bible removed from
classrooms and to win funding for its parochial schools had created a storm of
controversy. In seeking state money, the Church had shown its contempt,
critics alleged, for the principle of church-state separation.37 Papal infallibility
was seen as another tool with which the Vatican sought to enshrine its primacy over secular government. Emboldened by such an assertion of its
authority, the Vatican, critics feared, would attempt to meddle even more
aggressively in the affairs of government. Such fears were reinforced by the
statements of leading Catholic figures in the United States. In April 1870,
Brownson affirmed that the ultimate allegiance of any Catholic lay with
divine rather than secular authority. The pope, he continued, was “the highest
authority . . . for saying what the law of God does or does not forbid.”38
This issue gave opponents of Catholicism the opportunity to appeal to a
principle that some regarded as pre-eminently American, the separation of

33. Elisabeth A. Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in
Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New York, 2011), p. 127.
34. “The Ecumenical Council,” New York Times, November 5, 1869, 1.
35. Daily Central City Register, October 20, 1869, 1.
36. “The Approaching Catholic Council,” New York Herald, August 15, 1869, 6.
37. On the Ohio controversy, see Steven K. Green, The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash that Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine (New York, 2012).
38. Cited in Carey, Orestes A. Brownson, p. 309.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

705

church and state. The editors of The Nation, for example, argued that
although American institutions were largely “a development of European
ideas,” the United States had made one original contribution to the “science
of politics” by formally enshrining a separation of church and state in its constitution.39 But such appeals to national uniqueness were matched by an
equally strong awareness that America was not the only nation to discern in
infallibility a threat to secular authority. As much of the American public was
aware, the implications of infallibility for church-state relations were of great
concern to the European powers. The British premier, William Gladstone,
was known to be hostile. The position of the French government, whose
troops maintained the pope’s temporal power, was particularly important. In
a move that was widely reported in America, Gaston-Robert, marquis de
Banneville and French ambassador to the Papal States, was instructed to warn
the Vatican that any dogmatization of the Syllabus might lead the French
government to reassess the maintenance of the French garrison at Rome.40
American observers paid close attention to these protests in Europe.
The North American and United States Gazette asserted that “the monarchs
and liberal statesmen of Europe will do their utmost to thwart the schemes
of the Pope.”41 More significantly, many commentators challenged the
notion that the separation of the religious and the temporal was a uniquely
American idea. Although the United States was ahead of other nations in
enacting it constitutionally, this was a principle to which all advanced
nations adhered. “There is scarcely,” one journal claimed, “a country in
Europe . . . that does not hold the State to be independent in its functions
of all interference from the Church.”42 For proof, many commentators
cited the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland, a measure that passed
the British parliament in June 1869.43
The majority of hostile commentators thus appealed not to a peculiarly American set of principles, but to a conception of modern civilization
that overlapped the leading nations of the West. As we have seen, opponents of infallibility sprinkled their attacks with terms such as “the nine39. “A Word More About Church and State,” Nation, August 19, 1869, 146. On separation as an American principle, see Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State
(Cambridge, MA, 2002).
40. “Pio Nono’s Omen for Napoleon,” New York Herald, April 2, 1870, 3.
41. “The Ecumenical Council,” North American and United States Gazette, December
10, 1869, 2. .
42. Rev. Dr. Keatinge, “The Œcumenical Council,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art, March 12, 1870, 300–02, here 301.
43. “A Word More About Church and State,” p, 146.

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

FIGURE 1. “I am infallible.” Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, October 9, 1869. Courtesy Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library.

teenth century,” the “progressive era,” and “enlightened society.” A similar
message emerged from cartoonists. Thomas Nast’s image (see figure 1) of
that great symbol of modernity, the train—marked “progress” and the
“nineteenth century”—bearing down on a stubborn Pius IX, captured this
sentiment. The Church was a medieval obstacle, the image suggested, not
only in America but in all nations that had adopted the core tenets—science, technology, democracy—of the modern era.
The Prospect of Schism
American opponents of infallibility were also keenly aware that their
own misgivings were shared across the Atlantic. This sense of connectedness to transatlantic developments became clear in speculation about a
schism. The definition of infallibility was, as American commentators
knew, highly contentious within the Catholic episcopacy. A key question
was whether infallibility lay in the papacy or in the Church as a whole. The
staunchest advocates of papal authority, the Ultramontanes, believed in a
papal infallibility independent of the bishops and church councils. Against

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

707

them stood bishops such as Félix Dupanloup of Orléans, who argued that
infallibility was rather an attribute of the Church assembled in council. A
pastoral letter in which Dupanloup expressed his reservations concerning
infallibility was widely reported; one British journal, in an article subsequently reprinted in the United States, described the letter as “in every way
remarkable and deserving of attention.”44 A related controversy was jurisdictional. Dupanloup and his supporters accepted the primacy of the
papacy, but nonetheless argued that the episcopacy should have a voice in
questions of faith and administration. This reflected the Gallican spirit of
the French Church, under which papal power was to some extent
restrained by episcopal power. For the Ultramontanes, in contrast, all
power flowed outward from the Holy See.45
Anticipating a hostile reaction on the part of governments and opponents of the Church, other bishops argued that, even if true, a definition of
papal infallibility was inopportune. Cardinal John Henry Newman was one
leading English Catholic who feared the hostile reaction to any dogmatization of personal infallibility. In a letter to Bishop Ullathorne published in the
American press in April 1870, Newman regretted the difficulties that any
declaration of infallibility would create and condemned the “aggressive insolent faction” forcing it on the Church.46 To the satisfaction of many Americans, then, the much-vaunted unity of the Church seemed to be fracturing.
44. “Bishop Dupanloup on Papal Infallability,” Littell’s Living Age, January 15, 1870,
139–41, here 139. For other reports of Dupanloup’s letters, see “The Catholic Ecumenical
Council at Rome,” New York Times, July 25, 1869, 4; “The Ecumenical Council: Another
Letter from the Bishop of Orleans,” New York Times, November 17, 1869, 1. On Dupanloup,
see Margaret O’Gara, Triumph in Defeat: Infallibility, Vatican I, and the French Minority Bishops (Washington, DC, 1988); Jean-Rémy Palanque, Catholiques libéraux et gallicans en France
face au Concile du Vatican, 1867–1870 (Aix-en-Provence, 1962). On the controversy over
infallibility, August Hasler, How the Pope Became Infallible: Pius IX and the Politics of Persuasion (New York, 1981); Richard F. Costigan, The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: A Study in the Background of Vatican I (Washington, DC, 2005). For medieval debates over
infallibility, see Brian Tierney, Rights, Laws and Infallibility in Medieval Thought (Aldershot,
UK, 1997).
45. The best account of the clash between Ultramontanes and Gallicans is Austin
Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848–1853
(Oxford, 1986).
46. The letter was dated January 28, 1870, and appeared in, for example, the Chicago
Tribune of April 21, 1870. On Newman, see Kenneth L. Parker and Michael J. G. Pahls, eds.,
Authority, Dogma, and History: The Role of the Oxford Movement Converts in the Papal Infallibility Debates (Palo Alto, 2009); Paul Misner, Papacy and Development: Newman and the Primacy of the Pope (Leiden, 2006); John R. Page, What Will Dr. Newman Do? John Henry
Newman and Papal Infallibility, 1865–1875 (Collegeville, MN, 1994); and Frederick J.
Cwiekowski, The English Bishops and the First Vatican Council (Louvain, 1971).

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

But if a rebellion against infallibility were to occur, who would take
the lead? Some expressed the hope that the American bishops would
demonstrate their republican virtues by spearheading a revolt. Confirmation of the American opposition came from abroad. In January 1870, a
collection of letters written by one of the leaders of French Protestantism, Edmond de Pressensé, to an unnamed American friend was
published in New York. The letters recounted Pressensé’s firsthand
observations of the preparations for the Council, as well as his assessment
of the extent and nature of opposition. The American bishops, he
announced from Rome, were hostile to any doctrine that appeared to justify mixing temporal and spiritual power.47 Several newspapers reprinted
a report from France that fifty American bishops stood behind Dupanloup.48 The New York Herald was confident that the American bishops
would be “true to the fundamental principles on which our free institutions are based.”49 Other commentators were less sure about the prospect
of an American-led revolt. Some newspapers reported that the Americans were deeply conservative. In one theory, this was a reflection of the
position of the American Church. Decades of warding off the enlightened spirit of republicanism, the Cleveland Daily Herald argued, had
made the Church in the United States fiercely and instinctively resistant
to innovation. For this reason, the bishops were likely to uphold the
“most extreme doctrines of the papacy.”50
Many commentators placed more faith in European dissenters. Dupanloup—described by one American paper as “one of the most able, sensible,
and liberal Romish prelates of France”—was seen as a formidable opponent
of Ultramontane ambition.51 Two other French bishops were also cited as
leaders of the resistance: Georges Darboy, archbishop of Paris, and HenriLouis-Charles Maret, titular bishop of Sura. Although not translated into
English, Maret’s two-volume Du concile générale et de la paix religieuse, a
defense of Gallican autonomy within the Church, was widely praised in the

47. Edmond de Pressensé, Rome and Italy at the Opening of the Œcumenical Council,
Depicted in Twelve Letters Written from Rome to a Gentleman in America (New York, 1870), p.
169. James Hennesey argues that the majority of American bishops were at least inopportunists. See American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States
(New York, 1981), p. 169.
48. “Diplomacy Towards Rome: Platform of the Bishops,” New York Herald, October
4, 1869, 7; “Foreign,” Atlanta Constitution, October 10, 1869, 4.
49. “The Approaching Catholic Council,” New York Herald, August 15, 1869, 6.
50. Cleveland Daily Herald, December 29, 1869, 2.
51. “The Vaticinations of the Vatican,” Independent [New York], July 29, 1869, 4.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

709

United States.52 Opposition in Germany seemed even more promising. There,
in September 1869, fourteen German bishops meeting at Fulda openly
declared themselves to be inopportunists. The German liberals, the North
American Gazette reported, “seem to be the best organized and the most resolute.”53 The extent of German opposition was made clear in The Pope and the
Council, a German-language work that was translated and published in the
United States in 1869. Although appearing under the pseudonym Janus, many
reviewers were aware of the author’s identity: Ignaz Döllinger, provost of St.
Cajetan and professor of church history at Munich. In the book, Döllinger
argued that absolute papal control over the traditional prerogatives of the episcopacy was alien to the practices of the early Church. Infallibility, he alleged,
was a Jesuit concoction based largely on forged church documents.54
Döllinger’s work had an enormous impact on English and American
readers. A host of American journals drew on the book’s detailed theological arguments to bolster their case against infallibility. The book, the North
American Review declared, was “one of the most remarkable events of the
day.” Not since the days of the Reformation, the review continued, had the
world seen a more damaging assault on the Church.55 Many reviewers
seized on one of the book’s central claims: that the argument for infallibility
was based on fraud.56 The book, one reviewer in Putnam’s alleged, revealed
the whole system of papal absolutism to have been built exclusively on a
“long series of deliberate forgeries of historical documents.”57 But it was the
theological detail that made the book so valuable to critics of the Council.
The learning that underlay the book, according to the New Englander and
Yale Review, was “as accurate as it is ample.” The manner in which the
papacy was attempting to strip the Church of any remaining liberties was
depicted, the Review concluded, “with a truthful and unsparing hand.”58

52. Keatinge, “Œcumenical Council,” p. 301; a long account of French opposition was
reprinted from the British Quarterly in the Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, new ser.,
10, no.6 (1869), 641–57.
53. North American and United States Gazette, September 7, 1869, 2; “The Catholic
Council,” October 26, 1869, 2.
54. Janus [Ignaz Döllinger], The Pope and the Council (New York, 1869), pp. 46–48.
55. “Critical Notices: Janus’s The Pope and the Council,” North American Review, April
1870, 438.
56. “The Council: Why It Was Called and What It May Do,” Nation, December 30,
1869, 581.
57. “Literature at Home: The Pope and the Council,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, February 1870, 257.
58. “Notices of New Books: The Pope and the Council. By Janus,” New Englander and
Yale Review, January 1870, 180–81, here 180.

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

Rather than resting their hopes for a schism on American bishops, the
majority of commentators looked to a broader racial alliance. According to
the Nation, the Council would be a contest between the Latin and the
Anglo-Saxon races. The American, English, and German bishops, aided
to some degree by the French, would resist infallibility as a radical
encroachment on their liberties. Against this coalition of “Teutonic” bishops stood the “Latin world,” a race seen as predisposed to servitude and
cloaked in ignorance, but unfortunately in a majority at the Council. The
Latin bishops outnumbered the Teutonic, the Nation reported, by three to
one. The outcome would be clear. Those “whose political and social training is most defective” would have the majority voice.59 The brightest and
most sophisticated intellects at the Council, in turn, were doomed to be
outmuscled by a cohort of Latins who were ignorant of science, history,
and the world outside the Church.60
The Arrival of Father Hyacinthe
The intensity of the transatlantic connections generated by the Council was emphatically demonstrated by the acclaim that greeted a former
French Carmelite friar when he arrived in New York (see figure 2). When
the Pereire docked on October 7, 1869, passenger Charles Jean Marie
Loyson (known as Father Hyacinthe) was no doubt astounded by his
enthusiastic reception. Several journalists boarded the ship in an attempt to
nab the first interview, and many more waited at the dock as part of a large
crowd of well-wishers. The fact that nobody knew what he looked like perhaps helped Hyacinthe to evade the attention and reach his hotel on Fifth
Avenue without incident. But the curiosity only increased. The hotel was
bombarded with requests for interviews, most written, as the Times
reported, in “elaborately bad French.”61 Over the next weeks, public interest in the former French friar hardly abated. His portrait appeared in
Mathew Brady’s gallery, translations of his sermons and writings were
rushed into print, and journalists monitored his every move. “Every step,”
one paper reported three weeks after his arrival, “every motion, every casual
expression, everything that he has eaten and drunk, everything that he has
read, every person whom he has seen, is set forth every morning in some
of our city journals.”62

59. “The Oecumenical Council and the Protestants,” Nation, December 2, 1869, 476.
60. Lyman Abbott, “Pio Nono and His Councilors,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
December 1870, 14–30, here 22.
61. “The Preacher Monk,” New York Times, October 19, 1869, 1.
62. Evening Telegraph [Philadelphia], October 22, 1869, 6.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

711

FIGURE 2. Hyacinthe Loyson, from Loyson, My Last Will and Testament (London,
1895), frontispiece. Photograph by Pierre Petit, Paris.

Hyacinthe’s celebrity sprang from the controversy over the approaching Vatican Council. In a letter to his superior dated September 20, 1869,
Hyacinthe resigned from his Carmelite order in protest at the Ultramontane tendency within the Church. In particular, he denounced what he
termed the “divorce as impious, as it is insensate . . . between the Church,
which is our eternal mother, and the society of the nineteenth century, of
which we are the temporal children, and towards which we also have
duties and regards.”63 Hyacinthe’s letter of resignation was published first
in France, then across Europe and the United States, and created a sensation. In the midst of all the speculation about a possible schism, his bold
protest appeared a harbinger of a second Reformation. In the eyes of
many Americans, the man who disembarked in New York was not simply

63. The letter appeared in full in newspapers such as the New York Times, New York
Herald, Boston Advertiser, and Milwaukee Herald. For a review of Hyacinthe’s career, see
Lucienne Portier, Christianisme, églises et religions. Le dossier Hyacinthe Loyson (Louvain-laNeuve, 1982). For a more detailed account of his visit to the United States, see Timothy Verhoeven, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century
(New York, 2010), pp. 1–5, 166–72.

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

a disaffected friar, but a modern Martin Luther. His acquaintance John
Bigelow, a former American consul in Paris, declared in Putnam’s that
“[s]ince Luther there has been no such signal revolt against the authority
of the Romish Hierarchy.”64 The New York Herald thought that the name
Hyacinthe might prove “as great a name as that of Luther.”65 Protestant
journals were even more hopeful. “We could wish that this remarkable
man,” the Congregationalist and Boston Recorder announced, “might prove
to be another Luther, the rising star of another reformation in the Church
of Rome.”66
Many Americans, therefore, saw Hyacinthe as the herald of the
coming schism within the Catholic Church. In the illustration titled “The
Flower of the Flock Leaving the Fold” (see figure 3), Nast depicted
Hyacinthe as the sheep who leaves the pen, ignoring the shepherd Pius IX
and his impotent gestures of fury. But would the bishops follow? Here,
opinion was divided. The New York Tribune evoked the “stirring effect
which the letter of Hyacinthe has produced” on the minds of wavering
bishops. His influence, the newspaper stated, was sure to be pronounced
on the French and German bishops.67 But such speculation was often qualified by references to the Vatican’s terrifying disciplinary power. For the
Boston Daily Advertiser, “fear and a sentiment of loyalty” would restrain
many from joining Hyacinthe.68
Part of the difficulty of assessing Hyacinthe’s influence was the uncertainty surrounding his stance toward the Church. Some assessed his protest
as a call to reform the Church rather than abandon it. “He aims,” wrote one
newspaper, “only at accomplishing a reform without producing a disrupture.”69 In his letter of resignation, he had pleaded for a Church more in
tune with the age, more tolerant of dissent, and more welcoming toward
other Christian churches. He had not, however, formally broken with
Catholicism. Although he did not dress in clerical garb, several newspapers
noted that he carried his breviary with him at all times. Few found any evidence of an impending conversion to Protestantism. “He has really no more

64. John Bigelow, “Father Hyacinthe and His Church,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of
American Literature, Science and Art, January 1870, 96–114, here 112.
65. “The Ecumenical Council: Trouble in the Church,” New York Herald, September
24, 1869, 4.
66. Congregationalist and Boston Recorder, September 30, 1869, 4.
67. “Father Hyacinthe,” New York Tribune, October 19, 1869, 1.
68. Boston Daily Advertiser, October 7, 1869, 2.
69. “Father Hyacinthe,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 6, 1869, 123.

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713

FIGURE 3. “The flower of the flock leaving the fold.” Thomas Nast, Harper’s
Weekly, October 30, 1869. Courtesy Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

sympathy with the Protestant religion,” the New York Tribune declared,
“than the Emperor of China.”70 Others thought, however, that his breach
with the Church was unlikely to be repaired and that he would have no
other choice but to embrace Protestantism. The famous preacher Henry
Ward Beecher, who met Hyacinthe on two occasions, saw no future for him
in a Church so hostile to dissent. “He will be cast out,” Beecher predicted,
“with the intense alacrity with which a firebrand would be smothered and
thrown out of a powder magazine.”71 Reports of his impending excommunication circulated throughout his visit. But other commentators thought
that converting to Protestantism would rob Hyacinthe of his appeal; he
would become, in this view, just another of the defrocked priests who carved
out careers as anti-Catholic orators. The Nation urged him to avoid the
“snares laid for him by noisy and foolish Protestants” and remain a Roman
70. “Interviewing,” New York Tribune, October 21, 1869, 4.
71. “Father Hyacinthe,” Lowell Daily Citizen and News, November 20, 1969, 2.

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TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

Catholic. Otherwise, the journal concluded, he would prove himself a
“charlatan,” and his fame would quickly fade.72
For all of this speculation, Americans were not granted access to
Hyacinthe’s thoughts on these questions. During his U.S. visit, Hyacinthe
traveled to Boston and New Haven; stayed for several days at the summer
house of Bigelow, and met prominent figures such as the poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, the scientist Louis Agassiz, the historian Charles
Francis Adams, Massachusetts governor William Claflin, and the author
and lawyer Richard Henry Dana. But he gave few interviews and only one
public speech—an address before the French Benevolent Society in New
York on December 9. Here again, he called for a Church reconciled with
modernity, notably progress, the “great thought of the age.”73 At the same
time, he refrained from declaring his own position in relation to the Vatican. Nevertheless, his audience continued to see a religious rebel. One of
those present, the poet William Cullen Bryant, later wrote that any reference to the abuses of Catholicism was “clapped vehemently.”74
Just as mysterious to American observers was Hyacinthe’s reason for
visiting the United States. Most assumed that he sought a period of respite
from the turmoil surrounding the approaching Council; some others preferred to believe that he wished to observe firsthand the great Protestant
republic that had enshrined religious liberty. Hyacinthe’s journals, however,
reveal the true cause.75 At perhaps the most dramatic moment of his life, he
had come to negotiate a business matter on behalf of Emilie Meriman, an
American widow who had converted to Catholicism under his guidance in
1868 and would later become his wife. This is not to say that he took no
interest in Protestantism. He attended a Quaker service with the wife of
Bigelow, as well as a Thanksgiving Day service delivered by Congregational
minister Leonard Woolsey Bacon. But although he admired the simplicity
and purity of the services that he witnessed, his journals make clear that he
could never fully embrace the Protestant faith. Protestantism, he wrote, had
been forged in the sixteenth century and could never shed the stamp of its
origins. The task of erecting a church at one with the spirit of the age could
only fall to Catholicism, but a Catholicism stripped of Ultramontane influ-

72. “The Week,” Nation, October 28, 1869, 355.
73. “Father Hyacinthe’s Address,” Boston Daily Advertiser, December 11, 1869, 4.
74. Bryant to Leonice M. S. Moulton, December 10, 1869, in Voss, ed., Letters 5:347.
75. Bibliothèque de Genève (hereafter BG), Geneva, Switzerland, unpublished journal,
Charles Loyson Papers. The period covering Hyacinthe’s visit to the United States is contained in M.S. fr 2862 and 2863. All translations are the author’s.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

715

ence. “I have not hated the Catholic Church,” he wrote in his journal on
November 16, 1869. “I have not attacked nor repudiated it in itself, only its
abuses.”76 Hyacinthe’s vision was thus of a purified Catholicism to which all
in the modern era could rally.
The Vote on Infallibility
Hyacinthe left the United States on December 11, 1869, just days after
the opening of the Council received extensive coverage. Observers were
impressed by the magnificence of the ceremony. De Pressensé described the
sight as the assembled bishops entered St Peters, their “ecclesiastical costumes” blended “in an often picaresque variety.”77 George Ripley, the correspondent of the New York Tribune, was similarly struck by the color and
variety of costumes on display. The ecclesiastical and military costumes of
“every imaginable fashion and color,” he wrote, “dazzled the eye.” Monks
enveloped entirely in black hoods, as well as bare-legged friars and bishops
adorned in gold, marched before a crowd so large that every space of the
immense basilica was occupied.78 Lyman Abbott described brilliant costumes of “silver tissue,” “Tyrian purple wrought with gold and precious
stones,” and Pius IX himself cloaked in white satin and gold.79 Another
American to witness the opening was Henry James. Although he was less
florid, he, too, described the ceremony, as “immensely picturesque.”80
But such praise for the visual spectacle of the Mass was intended to
underline the superficial nature of Catholic ritual. Catholicism, these
accounts suggested, was a religion of the senses rather than the intellect, a
stage production designed to entrance the uneducated or the weak of mind.
This was a long-standing accusation. A decade before the Council,
Theodore Parker witnessed an ornate ceremonial procession in Rome.
After describing the splendid state-carriages and the rich costume of the
pope, Parker came to the hollow core of Catholicism. Rather than a true
religion, Catholicism was “nothing but a show” and the pope “a puppet, his
life a ceremony.”81 But in its scale and grandeur, the Council offered an
unprecedented demonstration of the dangerously seductive appeal of
76. “Je n’ai point haï l’Eglise Catholique. Je ne l’ai point attaquée, ni niée en elle-même,
mais dans ses abus!” Charles Loyson Papers, MS fr 2863, BG, p. 531.
77. Pressensé, Rome and Italy, p. 277.
78. “The Œcumenical Council,” New York Tribune, December 30, 1869, 1.
79. Abbott, “Pio Nono,” p. 17.
80. Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, eds., The Complete Letters of Henry James,
1855–1872 (Lincoln, 2006), 2:241.
81. Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, p. 378.

716

TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

Catholicism. As de Pressensé argued in his letters to America, the Mass
was the climax of a strategy employed by a church that “speaks to the
senses and fascinates them in order the more easily to subdue the understanding and the will.”82 James, too, followed his observations on the aesthetic quality of the Mass with the admission that he was “sick unto death
of priests and churches.” What he seemed to long for was a dose of rigorous New England intellectualism. “Their ‘picturesqueness,’” he continued,
“ends by making you want to go strongly into political economy or the
New England school system.”83
Following the opening of the Council, a lack of information hampered
commentary. Discussions were closed to the public and press, and the bishops were sworn to secrecy. As James recorded after meeting Ripley in
Rome, “He is here as a reporter on the Council but finds himself rather
balked, I fancy, by the governmental incommunicativeness.”84 Even the
Catholic World was forced to concede that it had not obtained a “glimpse
behind the curtain that veils the Council.”85 It was not until July, when the
bishops cast their votes regarding two Constitutions proposed to the Council, that extensive coverage was resumed. Both were overwhelmingly
approved. Only one American bishop, Edward Fitzgerald of Little Rock,
voted against the Constitution that included the definition of papal infallibility.86 The vast majority of the opponents of infallibility had already left
Rome when the vote was taken. The definition of papal infallibility disappointed many Ultramontanes, who had hoped that all of the pope’s proclamations would be covered. In fact, as defined at the Council, the pope
would only be infallible when speaking ex cathedra—that is, when proclaiming a solemn doctrine of faith. The Syllabus of Errors was not declared an
infallible document. Discussion of other controversial questions, notably the
relationship between church and state, was then precluded by the outbreak
of the Franco-Prussian war, which forced the Council to adjourn.
In some quarters, infallibility was understood as an attack on specifically American principles. The North American Gazette, for example, con82. Pressensé, Rome and Italy, p. 299.
83. Walker and Zacharias, eds., Complete Letters of Henry James, 2:241.
84. Ibid, 2:226. On James and Catholicism, see Edwin Sill Fussell, The Catholic Side of
Henry James (New York, 1993).
85. “The Vatican Council, Number Four,” Catholic World, May 1870, 270–82, here
272–73.
86. The American bishops returned home, according to Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “with a
new apologetic burden to bear in democratic America.” A Religious History of the American
People (New Haven, 1972), p. 826.

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

717

cluded that an infallible papacy was “totally irreconcilable with the whole
spirit of our free institutions.”87 But for the most part, the vote on infallibility was seen as violating the core beliefs of advanced peoples everywhere.
The vote was a stunning rebuff, according to one newspaper, to “nineteenth-century intelligence and progress.”88 Furthermore, there was a conviction that the gulf between the Church and nineteenth-century civilization could no longer be bridged. The depiction of a backward and medieval
Church was not new. But many commentators suggested that any chance,
however slim, of the Church reconciling itself with the tenets of modernity
was now formally and publically buried. The formal adoption of papal
infallibility, the New York Tribune concluded, “sharpens and intensifies”
the antagonism between the Church and the world. There now existed a
“Chinese wall between the world of modern progressive thought and the
Roman Catholic Church.”89
The other great lesson of the Council was that Catholicism had no
space for national variation. Here the failure of the American bishops to
take a firm stand against infallibility was highly significant. In submitting so
meekly, the American bishops had demonstrated one of the defining traits
of the Church—namely, its imperviousness to national context. There was
no question of Catholicism absorbing the spirit of republican liberty that
prevailed in the United States. Instead, the controlling hand of Rome was
everywhere dominant. Before the Council, one critic wrote, it was widely
supposed that the American bishops would reject “any doctrine or measure
contrary to the principles upon which our Constitution is founded.”90 Now
it was clear that there was no such thing in the Church as “two moral standards and two religious measures, one for the Old and the other for the
New World.”91 After the Council, the Church appeared more intent than
ever on uprooting modern principles wherever they were found. For its
opponents, this was perhaps the Council’s most significant lesson. As
Samuel Weed Barnum argued, “The Roman Catholic Church is the same
as in America as in Ireland and in Spain and in Rome . . . it never changes.”92

87. “The Papal Deity,” North American Gazette, July 22, 1870, 2.
88. “Infallibility,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 30, 1870, 306.
89. “Infallibility—What It Does and Does Not Mean,” New York Tribune, July 16,
1870, 4.
90. J. B. Torricelli, “American Bishops and Papal Infallibility,” Old and New, 2 (1870),
30–33, here 30.
91. Ibid, p. 33.
92. Samuel Weed Barnum, Romanism as It Is: An Exposition of the Roman Catholic
System (Hartford, 1871), p. 710, emphasis in original.

718

TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

Conclusion
In his history of American Catholicism, Patrick W. Carey describes
the First Vatican Council as “somewhat of a turning point.” In its wake, he
argues, Catholicism in the United States adopted a stronger Ultramontane
cast.93 It can be argued that the Council was also a key moment for antiCatholicism. Many of the charges leveled at the Church had been made
before. But the boldness of the Vatican in affirming principles that seemed
fundamentally at odds with modern beliefs, as well as the utter defeat of
liberal Catholics like Dupanloup, were understood as significant developments. After the Council, the Church’s divorce from the modern age
seemed, to many Americans, both complete and insurmountable.
The definition of infallibility that emerged from the Council would
continue to be condemned in the United States and abroad. In 1874,
Gladstone won a large American audience for a pamphlet attacking infallibility as a violation of church-state separation.94 The historian and popular lecturer John Fiske described a belief in infallibility as a marker of an
inferior civilization. The progress of civilization, he argued, had weakened
the blind arrogance and instinct for domination that underlay a belief in
infallibility. Such a doctrine, he concluded, was held only by “the bigot and
the savage.”95 Many of the leading figures in the controversy remained in
public view. Father Hyacinthe’s breach with the Vatican was sealed by his
marriage in 1872, but he continued to dream of a reformed Church. In
1883 Hyacinthe, now known as Charles Loyson, obtained authorization
from the French state for what was called the Gallican Catholic Church in
the Rue d’Arras, Paris. Among its doctrines was a rejection of papal infallibility.96 Although never recapturing the star status that he enjoyed in
1869, he remained a familiar figure to educated Americans. Many visitors
to Paris, including Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, went
to hear him preach.
The hostile reaction to the First Vatican Council also deserves close
attention because it demonstrates the transatlantic network linking oppo-

93. Patrick W. Carey, Catholics in America: A History (Westport, CT, 2004), p. 53.
94. W. E. Gladstone, The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political
Expostulation (New York, 1874).
95. John Fiske, Excursions of an Evolutionist (Boston, 1884), p. 238.
96. The records are held at the Archives Nationales, Paris, in Series F19 6069. On
Hyacinthe’s later career, see Albert Houtin, Le Père Hyacinthe. Réformateur Catholique 1869–
1893 (Paris, 1922).

TIMOTHY VERHOEVEN

719

nents of the Church. Far from isolating itself from outside forces and influences, American anti-Catholicism was enmeshed in analogous movements
abroad. In combating an enemy that seemed so appallingly indifferent to
national borders, anti-Catholics looked abroad for inspiration and for support, and freely admitted that the fate of their nation was intertwined with
that of others. Such an approach need not discount entirely claims to
national uniqueness. Those opposed to Catholicism in the United States
regularly proclaimed that the Vatican had targeted their nation specifically
as a key battleground. But as the reaction to the First Vatican Council suggests, many Americans saw the struggle with the Church in global terms.
The platform on which opponents to Catholicism constructed their case
against the Church was a cosmopolitan set of principles related to democracy, liberalism, and rationalism. The United States was certainly at the
forefront of these principles, but it was not, as many Americans in the
nineteenth century recognized, the only nation to have embraced them.
Broadening our perspective in this way brings into view a host of neglected events and actors. The First Vatican Council and the visit of Father
Hyacinthe are but two examples. Another is the Mortara Affair of 1858,
an international scandal that appeared to demonstrate the Church’s intolerance, as well as its contempt for the sanctity of the family. In 1869,
Americans joined with commentators abroad in denouncing the Catholic
convent as a site of incarceration and abuse after the discovery of a nun
named Barbara Ubryk in Austrian Gallicia. Ubryk, according to the press,
had been held captive in a tiny cell for twenty-one years. Alongside this
sensitivity to international events was a thriving cross-border trade in literature. Americans were avid readers of a range of foreign attacks on
Catholicism, emanating both from majority-Protestant and majorityCatholic nations. The French historian Jules Michelet’s attack on the
confessional, first translated and published in the United States in 1845
under the title Spiritual Direction and Auricular Confession, is one example,
but many others could be cited. Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné’s fourvolume History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, an unsparing
attack on papal domination, was distributed by the American Tract Society and won a huge American readership. Attacks on the Jesuits such as
the Frenchman Eugène Sue’s Le juif errant (1844–45) and the German
Karl Spindler’s Der Jesuit (1829) were also translated and published to
great acclaim in America.
There is ample scope, then, to investigate the connections between
American anti-Catholicism and analogous movements abroad. In the
nineteenth century, opponents of the Church in the United States were

720

TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS

tied to their counterparts abroad by what Daniel T. Rodgers aptly calls a
“web of both rivalry and exchange.”97 To a large degree, this was a function
of the imagined nature of the Church itself. It was difficult to ignore the
cross-border scope of the problem posed by Catholicism in the face of
international controversies such as the First Vatican Council. Nineteenthcentury Americans understood something that recent historians have perhaps forgotten: that the battle against the Church could not be, and indeed
was not, played out in national isolation.

97. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, p. 5.

Acción Obrerista:
Confessional Labor Organization in the
Spanish Republic, 1931–36
SAMUEL PIERCE*
During Spain’s Second Republic, Catholic political activists formed
Acción Obrerista, a confessional political party for members of the
working class. Its leaders aligned themselves with the largest Catholic
political organization of the Republic. Many workers viewed Acción
Obrerista as a tool used by employers to weaken the working class, and
many middle-class Catholics wanted more control over the workingclass movement. Acción Obrerista’s failure to allay these suspicions
stunted its growth, and the Catholic movement replaced it with a nonpolitical labor movement. Its failure helped discredit confessional labor
organization in Spain.
Keywords: anticlericalism, Catholic labor movements, Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, political Catholicism,
social Catholicism

I

n September 1931, Catholic labor organizers Dimas Madariaga, Rafael
Sanz de Diego, and José Ramón Otero met to organize the creation of a
“great party of manual and intellectual workers.”1 This meeting led to the
establishment of a labor union, the Coalición Española de Trabajadores
(CET) and a confessional political party to represent the interests of Catholic
workers, Acción Obrerista. This organization would become the official
working-class party of the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas
(CEDA), the largest political faction of Spain’s Second Republic as well as

*Dr. Pierce is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina Aiken,
email: samuel.pierce@usca.edu. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Society
for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies annual meeting. The author would like to
thank George Esenwein, Tim Rees, Thomas Gallant, the late Robert Zieger, Elizabeth Van
Meer, Geraldine Nichols, Zane Segle, and Marc Pierce for their helpful comments on early
drafts, as well as the two anonymous readers from The Catholic Historical Review, whose suggestions prompted significant improvements to the article.
1. El Castellano, September 26, 1931, 1; José Monge Bernal, Acción Popular: Estudios de
biología política (Madrid, 1936), p. 315.

721

722

CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

the only confessional Catholic political party. Due to its adherence to social
Catholic doctrine, its close ties to the church hierarchy, and its refusal to
endorse direct action to address labor abuses, Acción Obrerista failed to amass
a major following among the left-leaning working class and is ultimately an
example of the weakness of the Catholic labor movement in Spain.
Much has been written about the CEDA and its youth organization,
the Juventud de Acción Popular (JAP), but this article examines the obstacles faced by Acción Obrerista, a “working-class” political party that
allowed nonworkers to serve on its councils, urged workers to be patient,
and opposed class conflict, yet classified itself as a right-of-center, nonviolent, antirevolutionary party advocating social justice. Despite a general
belief among its adherents that the majority of Spanish workers would
prefer a movement rooted in social Catholic doctrine, Acción Obrerista
grew from 40,000 to approximately 80,000 members during its four-year
existence.2 This rate was so disappointing that the scholar José Ramón
Montero once called the party “‘Acción Obrerista: a national political party
that was no more than an autonomous section of the CEDA.’ And an
autonomous section, I might add, among the least important of the confederal party.”3 From the perspective of the CEDA’s history, this might be

2. Ideas, January 4, 1934, 2; Seville, Archivo Manuel Giménez Fernández, Hemeroteca
Municipal de Sevilla (hereafter AGF), Jorge Cera to Manuel Giménez Fernández, February
25, 1936, B-XIII/36; Alfonso Braojos Garrido and Leandro Álvarez Rey, Manuel Giménez
Fernández (1896–1968): Epistolario político (Seville, 2000), pp. 178–79. These numbers represent, respectively, 5 percent and just under 10 percent of the total membership of the CEDA.
The 40,000 number is taken from the party’s official newspaper; the second is from a private
letter written from an AO leader to Manuel Giménez Fernández, an important leader in the
CEDA at the national level. Determining the level of worker participation in the CEDA was
complicated further by the occasional competition between AP and AO in recruiting workers.
3. José Ramón Montero, La CEDA: el catolicismo social y político en la II República
(Madrid, 1977), 1:747: “‘Acción Obrerista: un partido político que no pasó de ser una sección
autónoma de la CEDA’. Y una sección autónoma, por añadidura, de las menos importantes
del partido confederal.” Studies of the CEDA’s regional affiliations are inconsistent in their
level of discussion on AO. Leandro Alvarez Rey and Rafael Quirosa-Cheyrouze y Muñoz do
discuss AO to some degree, but Mary Vincent’s study of Catholicism in Salamanca during
the Republic, along with Luis Miguel Moreno Fernández’s study of Acción Popular in
Murcia, make no mention of Acción Obrerista. See Leandro Álvarez Rey, La derecha en la II
República: Sevilla, 1931–1936 (Seville, 1993); Rafael Quirosa-Cheyrouze y Muñoz, Católicos,
monárquicos y fascistas en Almería durante la II República (Almería, 1998); Luís Miguel Moreno
Fernández, Acción Popular Murciana: La derecha confesional en Murcia durante la II República
(Murcia, 1987); Mary Vincent, Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic: Religion and Politics
in Salamanca, 1930–1936 (Oxford, 1996). Most studies of Spanish labor movements dismiss
AO, with the exception of Domingo Benavides, El fracaso social del catolicismo española. Arboleya-Martínez 1870–1951 (Barcelona, 1973).

SAMUEL PIERCE

723

true, but Acción Obrerista was the only attempt to create an independent
political party, instead of a syndicate, for Catholic workers during the
Second Republic. Acción Obrerista faced serious obstacles not just within
the labor movement but also within the CEDA itself, as many of the confederation’s leaders refused to allow an independent worker movement
within its ranks. As the CEDA was divided into factions of barely
reformed monarchists and proto-Christian Democrats (among others), its
very structure helped undermine the efforts of its working-class affiliate.
Clericalism and Anticlericalism in Pre-Republic
Spanish Labor Movements
The Spanish labor movement developed later than in most other western European countries, but once underway, it was more revolutionary
than left-wing movements in many western European states.4 Initial reactions to industrialization in Spain included machine-breaking and other
protests, often in conjunction with anticlerical activities. Workers flocked
to left-wing labor movements largely because these promised to fight
(often literally) to protect the interests of workers, as the late-nineteenth
century surge in strikes and violence attests.5 The Spanish government
relaxed restrictions on labor organization after the Revolution of 1868,
opening the door to anarchism and socialism.6 The anticlericalism of these
groups was less a question of religion than of political and social power,
and it is distinguished from bourgeois anticlericalism by its reliance on
socioeconomic factors for justification. Pablo Iglesias, the father of Spanish
socialism, wrote in 1902 that “for a true socialist the principal enemy is not
clericalism but capitalism.” The Church, he said, had “become, more or
less voluntarily, . . . a powerful auxiliary for the exploiting classes.”7 Because

4. See, for example, Paul Heywood, “The Labour Movement in Spain before 1914,” in
Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914, ed. Dick Geary (New York, 1989), pp.
231–65.
5. For a brief discussion of early labor movements, see Benjamin Martin, The Agony of
Modernization: Labor and Industrialization in Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 69–71.
6. George Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain,
1868–1898 (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 162–63.
7. José Alvarez Junco, “El anticlericalismo en el movimiento obrero,” in Octubre 1934.
Cincuenta años para la reflexión (Madrid, 1985), pp. 283–300, here p. 286: “Para un verdadero
socialista el enemigo principal no es el clericalismo sino el capitalismo.” “...ha venido a ser, más
o menos volutariamente ... un poderoso auxiliar de las clases explotadores.” For a comparison of
socialist and anarchist anticlericalism, see Manuel Suárez Cortina, “Anticlericalismo, religión y
política durante la Restauración,” in El anticlericalismo español contemporáneo, ed. Emilio La
Parra López and Manuel Suárez Cortina (Madrid, 1998), pp. 127–210, here pp. 172–80.

724

CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

Spain’s late-nineteenth-century government relied on the Catholic Church
as “an essential pillar of the political system, legitimizer of the Restoration
regime,” radical movements believed that attacking the regime’s confessionalism would make it more vulnerable.8
In contrast, Spain’s Catholic labor movement, largely organized by
Catholic priests, tended toward “vertical associationism” and brought workers together with owners, largely emphasizing charity over self-help or
social justice.9 Most Catholic groups before the 1890s emphasized “the
moral and material improvement of workers” but encouraged “the traditional society of simple manners and recognized hierarchies.”10 Feeling
pressed to counteract the growing influence of the First International in
Spain and to limit the impact of the secularizing tendencies of modernization, Catholic labor activists worked with new urgency in the 1870s.11
During the 1890s, the concept of social Catholicism crystallized, in large
part due to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.12 At its core,
the encyclical is an indictment of socialism and an exposition of what Leo
XIII believed was a better method of encouraging “social justice.” The pope
wanted “to move the former [the wealthy] to be generous and the latter
[workers] to be moderate in their desires,” advocating what amounted to a
system of vertical associationism designed to stop interclass violence. He
argued against state-sponsored relief to the poor because he believed that
“no human expedients will ever make up for the devotedness and self sacrifice of Christian charity.” The pope also believed that employers needed to
pay a wage that could “support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner,” but

8. María Pilar Salomón Chéliz, Anticlericalismo en Aragón. Protesta popular y movilización política (1900–1939) (Saragossa, 2002), pp. 13–14.
9. José Andrés-Gallego and Antón M. Pazos, “Cien años (y algo más) de catolicismo
social en España,” in Un siglo de catolicismo social en Europa 1891–1991 (Pamplona, 1993), pp.
1–91, here pp. 51–52; Montero, La CEDA, 1:70–71; Colin Winston, Workers and the Right
in Spain, 1900–1936 (Princeton, 1985), pp. 24–26.
10. Raymond Carr, Spain: 1808–1975, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1982), p. 160; Juan García
Nieto, El sindicalismo cristiano en España: Notas sobre su origen y evolución hasta 1936 (Bilbao,
1960), p. 55; Andrés-Gallego and Pazos, “Cien años,” pp. 31–32, 50–52.
11. García Nieto, Sindicalismo cristiano, p. 27; Martin, Agony, p. 149; Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, p. 23; Andrés-Gallego and Pazos, “Cien años,” pp. 51–52; Julio de la Cueva
Merino, “Clericalismo y movilización católica en la España de la Restauración,” in Clericalismo y asociacionismo católico en España: de la Restauración a la Transición, ed. Julio de la Cueva
Merino and Ángel Luis López Villaverde (Cuenca, 2005), pp. 27–50, here pp. 32–43. Based
on a French reaction to the Paris Commune, Antonio Vicent’s Catholic Workers’ Circles
were the first major initiative, but most shortly devolved into social clubs.
12. Jay Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame, 2002),
pp. 62–63.

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Catholic working-class associations, instead of fighting for better wages,
should “pay special and chief attention to the duties of religion and morality
. . . otherwise they would lose wholly their special character.”13 As a result,
many workers believed the Catholic working-class organizations were
beholden to the bourgeoisie and would not produce real reform.14
The twentieth century brought a new era of labor activism (see table
1). The socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) grew steadily after
1900, expanding from 32,000 members in 1901 to 200,000 at the end of
the 1920s.15 On the right, Jesuit Gabriel Palau created Acción Social Popular, a bourgeois organization that built Catholic unions on the German
model throughout Spain from 1907 to 1916.16 In Castile, Catholic propagandists from the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas
(ACNP) helped develop the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria
(CNCA), a broad federation of agricultural syndicates essentially controlled by large landowners. Although the CNCA did provide “facilities
and expertise” to peasant laborers, Mary Vincent has explained that such
services did more to promote “their traditional way of life” than to improve
their financial situation.17 Catholic workers established the framework for
a large union in Spain when they formed the Confederación Nacional de
Sindicatos Católicos de Obreros (CNSCO) in 1919, representing at most
60,000 workers in 192 individual syndicates.18 This group never truly competed with left-wing labor unions, but during the same year a group of
Carlist workers formed the Sindicatos Libres in direct opposition to the
anarchist Sindicato Único.19 The Libres defined themselves as a coalition
of aconfessional “professional” unions focused on improving working con13. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/
encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html
14. To see how this played out in one region (Asturias), see Adrian Shubert, “El fracaso
del sindicalismo católico en Asturias,” in Octubre 1934. Cincuenta años para la reflexión
(Madrid, 1985), pp. 243–52.
15. Richard Gillespie, Historia del Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Madrid, 1988), p.
46. For fuller explanation of the development of Spanish labor movements before the Second
Republic, see Joseph Harrison, An Economic History of Modern Spain (Manchester, UK, 1978),
pp. 105–24.
16. Andrés-Gallego and Pazos, “Cien años,” pp. 60–61; Winston, Workers and the
Right, pp. 7, 38–45.
17. Mary Vincent, Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic, pp. 125–34.
18. Montero, La CEDA, 1:72. This is a generous estimate. Other scholars place the
figure at closer to 40,000 members. See, for example, Julio Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la
Segunda República 1931–1936 (Madrid, 2002), p. 35.
19. In the sindicato único, all workers joined a single union, rather than separating by
profession. See Benjamin Martin, The Agony of Modernization, pp. 197–98.

726

CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC
TABLE 1. Catholic Labor Organizations Active in 1930s Spain

Organization

Acronym

Description

Asociación Católica
ACNP
Nacional de Propagandistas
(National Catholic
Association of
Propagandists)

Society of influential Spanish lay
Catholics dedicated to the spreading of
Catholic doctrine, incubator of the ideas
that would come to fruition in the form
of AP, the CEDA, Acción Obrerista,
and other parts of the Catholic political
mobilization inspired by Spain’s Second
Republic. Created in 1908 and still active.

Acción Nacional/Acción
Popular (National Action/
Popular Action)

AN/AP

Two names for the first major Catholic
political party in Spain, which agreed to
work within the legal structure of the
Republic and would form the backbone
of the CEDA in 1933. Founded in
1931. Name changed to Acción Popular
in 1932.

AO

Confessional political party for Catholic
workers, allied with the CEDA.
Founded in 1932.

Confederación Española
de Derechas Autónomas
(Spanish Confederation
of Autonomous RightWing Groups)

CEDA

The largest right-wing political alliance
of the Second Republic, which brought
together a variety of Catholic political
movements for the purpose of unified
political action. Founded in 1933 and
disbanded during the Spanish Civil War
in 1937.

Confederación Española
de Sindicatos Obreros
(Spanish Confederation
of Labor Syndicates)

CESO

Nonconfessional confederation of
Catholic labor organizations founded
near the end of the Republic. Founded
in December 1935. Disbanded during
the Spanish Civil War.

Coalición Española de
Trabajadore (Spanish
Coalition of Workers)

CET

Confessional labor union for Catholic
workers, a precursor and partner to
Acción Obrerista. Founded in 1932.

Confederación Nacional
Católico-Agraria
(National CatholicAgrarian Confederation)

CNCA

Broad federation of confessional
agricultural syndicates controlled by
large landowners. Founded in 1917.

Acción Obrerista
(Worker Action)

Confederación Nacional
CNSCO
de Sindicatos Católicos
de Obreros (National
Confederation of Catholic
Labor Syndicates)

National confederation of Spanish
Catholic labor unions most active in the
years prior to the Second Republic.
Founded in 1919. Merged with the
FNT and other groups to form the
CESO in 1935.

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TABLE 1. (continued)
Organization

Acronym

Description

Confederación Nacional
del Trabajo (National
Confederation of Labor)

CNT

Anarchosyndicalist trade union.
Founded in 1910 and still active.

Federación Anarquista
Ibérica (Iberian Anarchist
Federation)

FAI

Elite subgroup of the CNT, founded to
continue clandestine operations during
the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de
Rivera. Established in 1927 and active
through the Republic and Civil War.

Federación Andaluza de
Trabajadores (Andalusian
Federation of Workers)

FAT

Confessional Catholic labor union
established in Seville. Founded in 1934.
Joined the CESO at its founding in 1935.

Federación Española de
Trabajadores (Spanish
Federation of Workers)

FET

Originally founded as a local affiliate of
the CET, the FET rose to national
prominence in 1934 and began competing directly with the CET and CNSCO
for members. Integrated into the CESO
at its founding in 1935.

Frente Nacional de
Trabajo (National Labor
Front)

FNT

Coordinating body that brought
together confessional Catholic labor
groups. Established in the wake of the
Socialist uprising of late 1934. Supplanted by the CESO in late 1935.

Instituto Social Obrero
(Workers’ Social Institute)

ISO

Education group designed to prepare
Catholic labor leaders in syndical
organization, established by Catholic
propagandists linked to Acción
Católica. Founded in 1932.

Juventud de Acción Popular
(Youth of Popular Action)

JAP

Radicalized youth wing of Acción
Popular. Founded in 1932.

Unión General de
Trabajadores (General
Union of Workers)

UGT

Socialist trade union. Founded in 1888
and still active.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

ditions, but as Carolyn Boyd describes them, they were “a tool of the
Employer’s Federation, as adept at assassination and terrorism as the
underground anarchist groups.”20
The establishment of General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship
in 1923 ultimately benefitted the socialists and Sindicatos Libres while
weakening the anarchists and Catholic unions. Part of his plan for Spain’s
renewal included organizing the country’s productive sectors into vertically
integrated “corporations.” After banning the anarchist Confederación
Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), Primo de Rivera allowed the UGT to choose
worker representatives to local settlement committees, an arrangement in
place until 1927.21 During the dictatorship, the Libres enjoyed the protection of General Martínez Anido and grew to rival the UGT’s membership
in 1929.22 Meanwhile, the CNT split, with the more radical elements
forming the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) in 1927.23 After the dictatorship fell, the mythology of its underground struggle against the regime
became a significant asset in attracting new members. Meanwhile, the clerically oriented labor movement failed to take advantage of the opportunity
presented by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. The most significant of the
clerical labor movements, the CNSCO, has been dismissed as “a façade . . .
absolutely unrivaled in its passivity and unimportance” and was truly an
afterthought for most unionizers.24
Although miniscule compared to the socialist, anarchist, and Libre
movements, the CNSCO was the main representative of clerical labor
20. Carolyn P. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain (Chapel Hill, 1979), p. 134;
Andrés-Gallego and Pazos, “Cien años,” p. 59. For more background on the Libres, see José
Manuel Cuenca Toribio, Catolicismo social y político en la España contemporánea (1870–2000)
(Madrid, 2003), pp. 275–85.
21. Richard Herr, An Historical Essay on Modern Spain (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 147–48;
Javier Tusell and Genoveva Queipo de Llano, “The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, 1923–
1931,” in Spanish History since 1808, ed. José Alvarez Junco and Adrian Shubert (New York,
2000), pp. 207–20, here pp. 213–14; Carr, Spain, p. 512; Winston, Workers and the Right, pp.
173–74; Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la Segunda República, pp. 30–31.
22. Eduardo González Calleja, La España de Primo de Rivera. La modernización autoritaria 1923–1930 (Madrid, 2005), pp. 326–28; Winston, Workers and the Right, pp. 108–16,
226–30; García-Nieto, Sindicalismo cristiano, pp. 47–52; Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la
Segunda República, p. 36. The socialist UGT had approximately 235,000 members in 1928.
The Libres had 190,000 members in 1929. Winston’s work focuses on Catalonia, which provided a substantial majority of the membership for the Sindicatos Libres.
23. Tusell and Queipo de Llano, “The Dictatorship,” p. 214.
24. Winston, Workers and the Right, p. 176; Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la Segunda
República, p. 35; González Calleja, La España de Primo de Rivera, p. 327. González Calleja,
for example, dismisses the group with a single sentence.

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organization under the dictatorship and an incubator for Madariaga, who
would lead Acción Obrerista during the Republic.25 During the 1920s, as
the socialists and Sindicatos Libres grew, Madariaga tried to establish a
political party for Catholic workers, but met with only limited success. In
1927 he helped organize Orientación Social to bring the various elements of
the Catholic labor movement together under a “parapolitical” platform, but
the Catholic unions refused to support it. Madariaga believed that the
Catholic syndicates “remain[ed] prisoners to an inconceivable horror
toward politics.”26 He also expressed resentment that his group was not
taken more seriously by Primo de Rivera’s regime.27 In 1930 he admitted
that “a large part of the working class already obeys the dictates of socialism”
and warned that, without immediate action, “the date is not very far off in
which we will see the great majority of workers join this party.”28 He was
right. At the Republic’s founding in 1931, the CNSCO had only about
40,000 members, whereas the socialist UGT boasted nearly 300,000 affiliates.29 A year later, socialism became the largest labor movement in Spain.
Catholic Workers and Party Politics in the Republic
The Second Republic ushered in the first period of truly mass political
mobilization in Spain’s history, and it would allow Madariaga to build
finally the working-class Catholic political party he desired. The monarchy
gave way to a provisional government composed mainly of republicans and
socialists, embodying in part the anticlerical ideals of the left-wing labor
movement. The labor movement was reinvigorated. The reauthorized
CNT counted 800,000 members during summer 1931.30 Membership in
the socialist UGT exploded, exceeding 1 million by the middle of 1932 and

25. Paul Preston calls Madariaga a “so-called social Catholic” who was “in reality, a
hard-liner of Traditionalist views.” Julio Gil Pecharromán links him to Primo de Rivera’s
Unión Patriótica (UP). His public pronouncements do not promote Traditionalism, but he did
belong to UP. See Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Reform, and
Revolution in the Second Republic, 2nd ed. (New York, 1993), p. 61, and Julio Gil Pecharromán,
Conservadores subversivos: la derecha autoritaria alfonsina (1813–1936) (Madrid, 1994), p. 49.
26. Montero, La CEDA, 1:748; José Monge Bernal, Acción Popular: estudios de biología
política (Madrid, 1936), p. 313: “. . . siguen presos de un horror inconcebible a la política.”
27. El Debate, November 26, 1932, 5. See also Ideas, December 7, 1932, 1.
28. Dimas Madariaga, Mirando al campo obrero: El avance socialista y la actuación de los
católicos (Madrid, 1930), p. 7.
29. Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la Segunda República, pp. 193–95; Stanley Payne,
Spain’s First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931–1936 (Madison, WI, 1993), p. 57.
30. Payne, Spain’s First Democracy, pp. 52–54. Anarchists likely participated in the
notorious church burnings of May 1931, and anarchist strikes became increasingly frequent.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

finally surpassing CNT membership.31 The growth of the UGT owed
much to its willingness to eschew violence as a primary tool of negotiation
and its ability to form alliances with more moderate republican groups.
Socialist participation in the provisional government gave it an advantage
in proposing reform measures, playing an important role in the secularization of government and the imposition of new labor regulations. They
were rewarded with the largest single contingent of seats in the Constituent Cortes, which would write the Republic’s constitution and thus
would be in a position to modify Spain’s system of labor relations through
the government’s founding document.
Key reforms implemented by socialist leader Francisco Largo
Caballero as minister of labor in the first months of the Republic regulated
labor relations (arbitration committees established by the jurados mixtos
law), contracts, worker associations, and employment. These had a positive
impact as wages and working conditions improved significantly over the
next two years. But this early legislation also included the términos municipales law, which sought to keep employers from using migrant labor as a
method of lowering local wages but became one of the most despised laws
among right-wing critics of the Republic’s reforms.32 Labor reform took
definite shape in Article 46 of the Republic’s Constitution, which defined
labor as a “social obligation” and promised to “guarantee each worker the
conditions necessary for a dignified existence.” The latter included health
insurance; a minimum wage; paid vacation; and “worker participation in
the direction, administration, and benefits” of corporations. The most radical attempts to enact laws along these lines were rejected in the Cortes, but
overall, they give the impression of a government intent on revolutionizing
labor relations and improving the lot of the average worker.
The Republic also gave birth to the first mass social Catholic political
party in Spanish history. Although caught off guard, Catholic politicians
regrouped and laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the
Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) within two
weeks of the Republic’s inception, led by members of the ACNP connected to Catholic Action.33 Acción Nacional (AN), the first effort, pro-

31. Ibid., p. 57.
32. Ibid., pp. 106–11. The law required employers to seek workers first from the immediate vicinity of their enterprise before hiring any workers from a different municipality
33. For analysis of the conservative disorganization at the beginning of the Republic,
see Shlomo Ben-Ami, The Origins of the Second Republic in Spain (Oxford, 1978), pp. 238–52.
Emilio Grandío Seoane has published a very good explanation of the connection between the

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vided some unity in the Republic’s first elections. Working with Agrarians
and Traditionalists for electoral purposes, AN won only a handful of parliamentary seats in the June 1931 elections, which were dominated by
republican and socialist candidates.34 Within two years, Acción Nacional
grew into Acción Popular (AP) and became the basis for the CEDA—
arguably Spain’s largest single political affiliation—in March 1933. The
CEDA brought together Acción Popular and other regional Catholic
groups under a single umbrella for unified national action. In November
1933, Catholics propelled the CEDA to a plurality in the second national
elections of the Republic, holding mass meetings attended by tens of thousands of supporters. The Republic, therefore, created the impetus to build
something previously unattainable: a confessional political party specifically to pursue the interests of the Spanish Catholic masses.35
Acción Obrerista was conceived in controversy. In July 1931, the president of Acción Nacional, Angel Herrera Oria, urged the establishment of
a “workers’ group” to represent “genuine intellectual and manual workers.”
He argued that AN had a responsibility to help Catholic workers enter Parliament “with true liberty and with real independence” and envisioning that
at least thirty to thirty-five of a predicted 125 to 150 right-wing deputies in
Parliament should represent the working class.36 However, discord over
whether Herrera called for a “workers’ party” or a “workers’ group,” long
remained an important discrepancy over the level of independence this new
group should have.37 As José Ramón Montero points out, the members of
Acción Obrerista “feared finding themselves isolated on a secondary level in
the political dialectic of the Catholic Right,” and its leaders bristled at any
suggestion that it was not an independent and equal party to Acción Pop-

CEDA and Catholic Action. See Emilio Grandío Seoane, “Sobre el ‘apoliticismo.’ CEDA y
Acción Católica: política y religión,” in La Acción Católica en la II República, ed. Feliciano
Montero (Alcalá de Henares, 2008), pp. 89–113.
34. Gil Pecharromán, Historia de la Segunda República, pp. 56–58. Agrarians generally
represented the interests of large landholders opposed to agrarian reform, and the Traditionalists, or Carlists, summed up their goals as “for God, for the Patria, and for the King.”
35. Cuenca Toribio, Catolicismo social y político, pp. 320–21.
36. El Debate, July 14, 1931, 8: “. . . grupo obrero . . .genuinos trabajadores intelectuales
y manuales”; “. . .con libertad verdadera y con independencia real.” Herrera Oria later retired
from politics to join the priesthood, becoming head of Spain’s Catholic Action.
37. Ideas, December 7, 1932, 1; Monge Bernal, Acción Popular, pp. 314–15. Montero
points out that Herrera compared AN to the Belgian Catholic party, which consisted of four
sections: agrarians, syndicalists, the middle class, and business owners. This leads him to
believe that Herrera said “group.” The “party” version of the quote likely originated with
Madariaga. See Montero, La CEDA, 1:748–50.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

ular within the CEDA.38 When Madariaga, Sanz de Diego, and Otero
gathered a few months later to plan the foundation for their movement,
they chose, perhaps unconsciously, to mimic socialist organization by establishing both a political party and a syndical confederation. The Coalición
Española de Trabajadores (CET)—a labor union for “workers of intelligence or muscle, from the city or the country”—was formed in early 1932
and explicitly disavowed any revolutionary intentions.39 It hoped to attract
Spain’s existing Catholic syndicates to the CET and provide unified political action in the accompanying party that was established several months
after the CET. Never as large as its creators hoped, this union focused on
the “professional and economic interests of the proletariat.”40
Acción Obrerista came to life a few months after the CET, although it
suffered a very uneven distribution of members throughout Spain and
struggled financially even in areas with a healthy membership, such as
Castile and the southern provinces.41 Madariaga’s home province of Toledo
was an AO stronghold, where some members were elected to municipal
councils and provided the party’s only real political power.42 In Seville, AO
made a good start when a “group of workers” requested instructions for
forming an AO committee, and “more than one thousand workers of
Osuna” asked Madariaga to visit them.43 Over the next few months, growth
was rapid.44 An assembly reportedly attended by 2000 members officially

38. Montero, La CEDA, 1:753: “. . . temía verse apartada a un plano secundario en la
dialéctica política de la derecha católica.”
39. Ideas, April 1, 1932, 1: “. . . los trabajadores de la inteligencia o del músculo, de la
ciudad o del campo.”
40. Monge Bernal, Acción Popular, pp. 315–16, 357; Ideas, July 1, 1932, 3: “. . . los
intereses profesionales y económicos del proletariado.”
41. Industrialized areas were especially hard on AO’s development. Jorge Cera claimed
a total of only 5000 AO members in Catalonia in early 1936—clearly a disappointment. Jorge
Cera to Manuel Giménez Fernández, February 25, 1936, AGF B-XIII/36.
42. One local group boasted a membership of 800. See El Castellano, May 17, 1935, 1.
AO claimed to have won thirty-one municipal seats throughout Spain, but an article giving
a breakdown mentions only twenty-four. AO won at least sixteen seats in municipalities of
Toledo province, but it is possible that AO won even more seats than that since the party designations given in newspapers were not always fully reliable. See Ideas, May 11, 1933, 3; El
Debate, April 25, 1933, 4–6; El Castellano, April 24, 1933, 1; ibid., April 25, 1933, 1.
43. Ideas, April 6, 1933, 3.
44. Ideas, February 23, 1933, p. 3; ibid., August 24, 1933, p. 6. See also El Correo de
Andalucía, March 21, 1933, 1; ibid., August 3, 1933, 5; ibid., August 24, 1933, 4; El Debate,
March 22, 1933, 5, and March 28, 1933, 2; ABC (Seville), March 28, 1933, 19–20. Several
groups joined wholesale, a process outlined in AO’s statutes. See Monge Bernal, Acción Popular, pp. 333–34.

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constituted AO in Seville in October.45 Within months, AO had built an
impressive array of services such as a Bolsa de Trabajo and a mutualidad to
protect workers in case of unemployment or ill health, as well as a library to
“foster the culture of our companions.”46 They also established a legal service staffed by attorneys belonging to Acción Popular; a “Delegación de Gestiones” that provided a number of services to members; and a sports section
complete with a soccer team, boxing team, cycling team, and track team.47
Yet even with these signs of prosperity, AO Seville faced significant financial problems, which it resolved in part by convincing the archdiocese to
create a special section of Catholic Action to help fund its activities.48 Such
financial problems were not limited to Seville. The party even had to open
a group called “Friends of Acción Obrerista,” funded by members of “various parties,” to afford its newspaper, Ideas.49
AO’s inability to support itself even in a place where it had achieved
some level of growth indicated nationwide struggles. It never developed a
solid support base, and in 1935 the CEDA essentially gave up on AO and
began recruiting workers directly into Acción Popular, funneling these
workers into professional unions without complicating the CEDA’s political organization. This shift was most notable in the shuttering in 1934 of
Ideas, the official mouthpiece for AO, and its replacement in early 1935 by
Trabajo, a freely distributed weekly for Catholic workers that represented
the Instituto Social Obrero, a “school of Christian syndicalism” created by
Angel Herrera Oria in late 1932.50 The change in emphasis and loss of

45. El Correo de Andalucía, October 3, 1933, 1, 8. See also Ideas, October 17, 1933, 3;
ABC (Seville), October 3, 1933, 29–30. El Debate refers to an attendance of “more than a
thousand.” AO’s manifesto was written by the “ex-communist” Manuel Oria, AO Seville’s
unofficial poet.
46. El Correo de Andalucía, March 14, 1934, 7. A Bolsa de Trabajo acted as a labor pool
through which employers could hire politically “trustworthy” workers. A mutualidad was an
insurance system for workers, protecting them from losing wages to sickness or injury.
47. El Correo de Andalucía, March 16, 1934, 7; ibid., March 27, 1934, 12; ibid., April
14, 1934, 6; May 24, 1934; 11; ibid., November 19, 1935, 7; ibid., December 6, 1935, 12;
ibid., December 11, 1935, 6; ibid., December 21, 1935, 6. All AO members and their children
were eligible to participate in these activities.
48. Alvarez Rey, La derecha, p. 353. In essence, they requested the continuation of funding
that had previously been given to the now-defunct Federación Local de Sindicatos Católicos.
49. Ideas, August 24, 1933, 1. In a twist of irony, a functionary of Acción Popular actually handled the funds from this group, rather than letting Acción Obrerista control the
money. Madariaga presents this as a deliberate choice on the part of Acción Obrerista.
50. Benavides, El fracaso social, pp. 643–45; Richard A. H. Robinson, The Origins of
Franco’s Spain: The Right, the Republic, and Revolution 1931–1936 (Pittsburgh, 1970), p.
364n125.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

CEDA support for the mission of AO meant that by early 1936 it faced
collapse, and many of its members abandoned it, including Madariaga, its
founder and president.
The Clericalism of Acción Obrerista
Madariaga considered AO’s primary goal to be “the defense of the
fundamental principles of Christian civilization” as they related to the
working class.51 The encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI heavily influenced
the ideology of Acción Obrerista. Just as the Republic began, Pius XI’s
commemoration of the Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, declared,
“Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of
classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free
competition of forces.” Quadragesimo Anno strongly criticized communism
and posited that even reform-oriented socialism “cannot be reconciled with
the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is
utterly foreign to Christian truth.”52 AO’s program and relevant documents indicate that its goals included the improvement of working conditions generally and the establishment of a corporate structure of labor relations based upon the development of a cross-class alliance between workers
and employers. As the pontiffs had encouraged, AO proclaimed, “Work is
not a humiliating load or a vile merchandise with which a worker is subordinated to a capitalist, but an ethical duty that ennobles and dignifies.”53
The AO Decalogue declared that property ownership was the ultimate
goal of work; that the title of laborer was “as high a patent of nobility as
the most renowned lineage”; that “capital without my labor is nothing, and
that without [capital] my labor would be nothing”; and that the “salvation
of the national economy is found in agriculture.”54 Ofelia Ochoa, a CEDA
leader, reminded her listeners that “God was the first to work.”55 Other
AO speakers and writers made numerous references to Christ the worker,

51. El Castellano, December 10, 1934, 1: “. . . defensa de los principios fundamentales
de la civilización cristiana.”
52. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, May 15, 1931. Retrieved July 28, 2014, from
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_
quadragesimo-anno_en.html.
53. Ideas, April 6, 1933, 1: “. . . el trabajo no es una carga humillante o una vil mercancía con la que se subordina el trabajador al capitalista, sino un deber ético que le ennoblece y dignifica.”
54. Monge Bernal, Acción Popular, pp. 358–59: “. . . de tan alta ejecutoria como el de
más renombrada alcurnia...el capital sin mi trabajo no es nada, y que sin aquél mi trabajo nada
sería ... la salvación de la economía nacional está en la agricultura.”
55. La Unión, April 30, 1934, 15: “Dios fué el primero que trabajó.”

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telling audiences to “see in the curved figure of the worker over the plow
the figure of the Nazarene.”56 For AO, Christ the carpenter personified the
dignity of work.
Not surprisingly, Acción Obrerista advocated class harmony, with an
emphasis on the interdependence of capital and labor, just like the Rerum
Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. Madariaga argued that capital and labor
were inseparable and that neither should feel that it could do without the
other. The Decalogue of the CET declares that the organization is in favor
of a “harmonic understanding between capital and labor, the basis of an
equitable distribution of the benefits of production.”57 Madariaga proclaimed, “Class struggle, we say, no; but we immediately add: ‘War on the
egoisms of all classes that dry the heart and pervert the conscience.’”
Among working-class political parties, AO’s leaders argued, the two main
currents were “error and violence” of the Left and the social justice of the
Right. Madariaga opposed the appeal to violence, but he admitted that real
problems had precipitated the establishment of radical labor movements,
yet he followed the path of early Catholic labor movements by encouraging
not improved working conditions but improved morality among workers as
the solution. He argued, “Justice is born from morality. Morality is
founded in Religion.”58 AO took up this fight as “the right wing of this
great movement [AP] against the anti-patria and the anti-Christ.”59 Its
leaders argued that “those above, those in the middle, and those below, all
have the same things to defend, we have the same duties to fulfill.”60 When
he spoke of the need for a fair salary and social securities, Madariaga told
workers that they could argue about rights only after fulfilling their duty.61
Angel Fernández, president of AO in Seville, believed that socialism had

56. Ideas, October 17, 1933, 3: “. . . ver en la figura curvada del labrador sobre el arado
la figura del Nazareno.” Madariaga’s letter to “Juan Andaluz” also conveys a similar message,
refering to Jesus Christ as the “Obrero Magnífico,” and he evoked the image of Christ the
worker in a speech in Seville in March 1933. See Ideas, September 22, 1933, 6, and El Correo
de Andalucía, March 28, 1933, 5.
57. Ideas, August 24, 1933, 3: “. . . armónica compenetración entre el capital y el trabajo, base de un reparto equitativo de los beneficios de la producción.”
58. El Correo de Andalucía, March 28, 1933, 5: “Esta justicia nace de la moral. La moral
se funda en la Religión.”
59. El Debate, January 14, 1936, emphasis added: “. . . el ala derecha de este gran
movimiento contra la antipatria y el anti-Cristo.”
60. El Correo de Andalucía, March 28, 1933, 7: “. . . los de arriba, los de enmedio y los
de abajo, tenemos las mismas cosas que defender, tenemos los mismos deberes que cumplir.”
See also ABC (Seville) March 28, 1933, 20.
61. C. E. D. A., January 15, 1935, 9.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

triumphed among the working class in nineteenth-century Germany
because capitalists had ignored the bishops’ calls for social justice. An
“antirevolutionary” party, AO preferred class harmony. If workers gave
their full effort, employers would naturally treat them fairly. Failing to do
so, AO’s leaders argued, would open the door to socialism.62
AO had an expansive definition of the term worker. As previously
noted, the CET accepted “laborers of intelligence or muscle, from the city
or the country” into its ranks.63 AO’s manifesto, published almost a year
later, called to
you, workers, who in the factory, and in the office, and in the laboratory,
and in the pit, and in the workshop, and in the store, and in the mines,
and in the seas, work incessantly in the labor of civilization and of
progress.64

At the local level, manual laborers tended to play a prominent role in party
organization.65 In contrast, the national committee included numerous
professionals. Signatories to the original AO manifesto had professions
ranging from linotypist to lawyer and mason to doctor. One of them,
lawyer Eleesbaán Serrano, even claimed working-class status because his
father had worked in the fields.66 Madariaga regularly touted his bona fides
as a former manual laborer and prided himself on continuing his employment as an accountant at a cookie factory, even after election to the
Cortes.67 In the preface to Ramón Ruíz Alonso’s book on corporativism,
the CEDA’s president, José María Gil Robles, lauded the fact that the
author “comes from the workshop.”68 By contrast, AO’s press often
accused socialist leaders of not truly representing workers and of leaving

62. El Correo de Andalucía, May 24, 1934, 9.
63. Ideas, April 1, 1932, 1: “. . . los trabajadores de la inteligencia o del músculo, de la
ciudad o del campo.”
64. Acción Obrerista manifesto, Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia (hereafter
RAH), Fondo Diego Angulo, 11/8987: “Vosotros, Obreros, que en la fábrica, y en la oficina,
y en el laboratorio, y en el tajo, y en el taller, y en la tienda, y en las minas, y en los mares,
laboráis incesantes en la obra de la civilización y del progreso.” Also published in Ideas, February 1, 1933, 8, and Monge Bernal, Acción Popular, pp. 326–31.
65. Quirosa-Cheyrouze, Católicos, pp. 45–46. In Seville, most leaders were manual
workers, and in Almeria skilled workers led the committee.
66. See the Acción Obrerista manifesto, RAH, Fondo Diego Angulo, 11/8987; Ideas,
February 1, 1933, 8. See also El Castellano, February 22, 1933, 1. Serrano had been active in
the Catholic unions for fourteen years.
67. El Castellano, December 10, 1934, 1.
68. Ramón Ruíz Alonso, ¡Corporativismo! (Salamanca, 1937), p. 15: “. . . viene del taller.”

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their working-class occupations to become professional politicians driving
around in fancy cars.69
Tension on Both the Left and the Right
AO provoked hostility from left-wing movements in part because of
its explicitly anti-Marxist, often vituperative, rhetoric. Statements made by
AO and its allies are notable for their vitriol, arguing that Marxism was the
“cause of ruin to those nations that rely on it” and declaring that “socialism
does not build, it destroys, annihilates, only serves to distribute what has
already been created.”70 During the November 1933 elections the Unión de
Derechas, composed of the CEDA (including AO) and other right-wing
groups, based its campaign on the slogan “Vote for the Right! Vote against
Marxism!” It claimed that Marxism had led Russia “to the most despicable
barbarism, without any trace of true civilization” and announced:
WE DECLARE WAR ON MARXISM for its antireligious and materialist spirit; its anti-Spanish character, which obeys orders from foreign
Internationals; and its doctrine of classes that, to tear each other apart, bring
the destruction of the economy and the ruin of workers and employers.71

Three years later, it employed the same scare tactics in its campaign
“Against the Revolution and Its Accomplices,” warning voters that a victory by the left would bring “RUIN, HUNGER, DESTRUCTION,
AND DEATH.”72 As José Otero put it, AO’s leaders believed that “the
workers themselves who have watered the fields with their blood” would be
the primary victims.73
Such rhetoric did not endear AO to left-wing labor unions. As with
other CEDA groups, AO kept track of its “martyrs,” but there is no evi69. El Debate, December 2, 1933, 3.
70. Ideas, April 1, 1932, 1; ibid., May 22, 1932, 3: “. . . causa de la ruina de aquellos
pueblos que en él pusieron su confianza”; “El socialismo no construye, destruye, aniquila, sólo
sirve para distribuirse lo ya creado.”
71. RAH, Fondo Diego Angulo, 11/8987, emphasis in original: “DECLARAMOS
LA GUERRA AL MARXISMO por su espíritu antirreligioso y materialista; su carácter
anti-español, que obedece órdenes de Internacionales extranjeras, y su doctrina de clases, que,
a despedazarse mutuamente, traen la destrucción de la economía y la ruina de obreros y
patronos.”
72. RAH, Fondo Diego Angulo, 11/8989, emphasis in original: “¡Contra la revolución
y sus cómplices!” “RUINA, HAMBRE, DESTRUCCION, Y MUERTE.”
73. El Castellano, March 1, 1934, 2; El Debate, February 27, 1934, 6: “Son los propios
obreros que han regado con su sangre los campos.”

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

dence that members of AO ever initiated violent confrontations or advocated physical violence.74 Significant injuries were rare, but acute violence
struck AO in Seville during autumn 1933, when gunmen killed one
member and injured two others. In October Manuel Terán Rodríguez, one
of AO’s leaders, was shot in the neck, and on election day a month later, a
gunman killed local member Juan Alonso Ferreira and wounded local AO
president Juan Morales Clemente.75 El Correo de Andalucía called the first
attack AO’s “baptism of blood,” proclaiming that “once more revolutionism shows itself as it really is: savage, inhumane, and cowardly” and blaming the violence on left-wing jealousy toward AO.76
Madariaga had written in 1930 that Catholic labor movements
“should defend [their] members’ right to work” not only from the socialists
but also from the employers of the Patronal.77 During the Republic, however, warnings to employers tended to be vague and inconsistent. Language was generally more conciliatory than combative. For example, when
Eugenio Díaz Sánchez, speaking for AO’s youth section, announced that
the section would protect “the most trivial right of the last worker,” he
failed to specify how it might do so.78 Quadragesimo Anno clearly stated
that “strikes and lock-outs are forbidden; if the parties cannot settle their
dispute, public authority intervenes” but failed to describe what would
happen if such recourse failed.79 AO expressed willingness to strike only as
a theoretical last resort to make a problem employer “‘listen to reason,’ or
make him retire from commercial life. These are our possible weapons.
Never aggression, never vengeance for hate, never murder.”80 Angel Fernández, the president of AO in Seville, said AO would never use violence
but would try sticking to official avenues such as government agencies. He

74. Monge Bernal, Acción Popular, pp. 360–61. Monge Bernal listed three members of
AO in his accounting of CEDA “martyrs” (from Seville, Jaen, and Malaga). Examples of violence directed against AO by other groups include an arson attempt at AO’s Madrid headquarters and meeting disruptions. See Ideas, April 6, 1933, 1; C. E. D. A., January 15, 1934, 11.
75. El Correo de Andalucía, October 10, 1933, 5; ibid., November 21, 1933, 3; ibid.,
November 25, 1933, 7; La Unión, October 21, 1933, 11; ibid., November 20, 1933, 8, 10;
ibid., November 21, 1933, 7; ibid., November 22, 1933, 14; Ideas, October 17, 1933, 3.
76. El Correo de Andalucía, October 10, 1933, 1: “Bautizo de sangre”; “Una vez más se
muestra el revolucionarismo tal como es: salvaje, inhumano y cobarde.”
77. Madariaga, Mirando, p. 39: “. . . debe defender el derecho al trabajo de sus asociados.”
78. Ideas, April 6, 1933, 1: “. . . el más leve derecho del último trabajador.”
79. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno.
80. Ideas, September 28, 1933, 6: “. . . ‘entrar en razón’, o hacerle retirarse de la vida
comercial. Estas son nuestras posibles armas. Nunca la agresión, nunca la venganza por odio,
nunca el asesinato.”

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supported the use of strikes if all else failed, as long as they were supporting
a just cause, were legal, and were backed by public opinion.81
AO never called a strike, however. To do so would have risked alienating business interests aligned with many of the CEDA’s leaders, and
they would not likely have had sufficient strength to win in any case. The
rhetorical commitment to holding employers to account was especially
unconvincing when employers tried to undercut socialist unions by hiring
only members of AO.82 The CEDA confirmed its reputation as anti-labor
in March 1934 when it helped break a graphic arts strike in Madrid precipitated by an attempt by ABC to break its closed shop.83 The confederation also encouraged its wealthy members to hire workers only through the
anti-Marxist bolsas de trabajo.84 Although Acción Popular promised to
expel members who failed in their “social duties” toward employees, this
was intended mainly to prevent workers from violently redressing abuses
on their own.85 There was little worry that AO would follow through on
any of its threats against employers, especially when AO ideologues continued to maintain that they sought “harmony and cordiality between capital and labor.”86 Further undercutting worker efforts to fight employer
abuses, José Monge Bernal thought that workers should avoid even legal
rebellion in their struggle and believed that AO had to ensure that the
working class “stops its unbridled race down the path of folly and prepares
itself to achieve its legitimate aspirations by the only path that can give it
a categorical triumph: by the path of class collaboration.”87 Such state-

81. El Correo de Andalucía, November 6, 1935, 8.
82. Quirosa-Cheyrouze, Católicos, pp. 44–45. In Olula del Río (Almeria), for example,
workers said employers wanted to force them out of the socialist UGT and into AO. Some
employers in Seville province were also accused of forcing potential employees to join the
CEDA as a condition of employment. See Leandro Álvarez Rey “Reforma y contrarreforma
agraria durante la Segunda República: Carmona, 1931–1936,” Carel, V, no. 5 (2007), 2197–
245, here 2215.
83. Preston, The Coming, p. 144; Ruíz Alonso, ¡Corporativismo!, pp. 130–35. Members
of the JAP, the CEDA’s youth section, helped distribute newspapers during the strike. Ruíz
Alonso reveled in his role of strikebreaker.
84. El Debate, May 6, 1934, 1; ibid., June 6, 1934, 5.
85. El Correo de Andalucía, December 16, 1933, 12; ibid., December 22, 1933, 10: “. . .
deberes sociales . . .” There is no record of any actions ever being taken.
86. El Castellano, January 29, 1934, 1: “. . . armonía y cordialidad entre capital y trabajo . . .”
87. El Correo de Andalucía, September 28, 1933, 8: “. . . detenga su desenfrenada carrera
por la senda de la insensatez y se disponga a conquistar sus legítimas aspiraciones por el único
camino que puede darle un categórico triunfo: por el camino de la colaboración de clases.” See
also El Correo de Andalucía, April 17, 1934, 5.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

ments would have unsettled workers who were suspicious of AO’s willingness to challenge employers in a meaningful way and likely harmed efforts
to enlarge the party’s membership rolls. For many, it confirmed what they
had argued all along: the CEDA was an enemy of the working class.
AO’s problems attracting workers and tense relationship with the leftwing labor movement are unsurprising, but AO’s relationship with Acción
Popular was also tendentious. The two groups argued even over the basic
question of whether they were independent yet allied parties or whether
AO was simply a subsection of AP. AP even began recruiting workers into
its own ranks, rather than pushing them to join its worker ally.88 However,
such conflicts varied significantly between provinces. In areas like Madrid
and Toledo, where Madariaga exerted a strong influence over AO organization, the party maintained its fierce independence from AP, whereas
Ideas accused AP of trying “to make our political organization [AO] or
CET Syndicate their own, and even more: some of our affiliates of a certain locality have wavered before the tenacious requirements of the ‘populistas.’”89 In Seville AO was publicly a “section of Acción Popular,” its members voted to become a “social organization contained within the political
discipline of Acción Popular,” and they discussed eliminating AO’s political role entirely.90 In Almería the statutes of AO left open the possibility
that “in cases unforeseen in the statutes, the leadership of Acción Obrerista
would proceed in accordance with that of AP.”91 The relationship between
AO and AP in these areas presents a picture of the working-class affiliate
subordinating itself to the larger party’s interests.
Some CEDA leaders simply distrusted AO. Pedro Armero Manjón,
count of Bustillo and president of Acción Popular in Seville, told Manuel
Giménez Fernández, another AP leader, to ignore Seville’s AO president
88. AP Madrid claimed that its membership had grown by more than 1175 workers
during March and April 1934, including 755 “whose daily wage does not reach 15 pesetas.”
As the February 1936 elections approached, the same committee claimed to enroll sixty to
seventy new members every day, half of whom were workers. See C. E. D. A., May 15, 1934,
14, and El Correo de Andalucía, January 2, 1936, 4.
89. Ideas, June 23, 1934, 8: “. . . hacer suya nuestra organización política o el Sindicato
de la C. E. T., y aún más: que nuestros afiliados de determinada localidad han titubeado ante
los requerimientos tenaces de los ‘populistas’.”
90. El Correo de Andalucía, September 30, 1933, 1; ibid., October 3, 1933, 1, 8; ibid.,
March 14, 1934, 7; Álvarez Rey, La derecha, 353: “. . . sección de Acción Popular . . .”; “. . .
una organización de carácter social encajada dentro de la disciplina política de Acción Popular.”
91. Quirosa-Cheyrouze, Católicos, p. 45: “. . . que en casos no previstos en los estatutos,
la directiva de Acción Obrerista procedería de acuerdo con la de AP.”

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(meaning Angel Fernández), who the count thought did not reflect the
opinion of the rich members of AP. It was important, Bustillo believed, to
keep the “moneyed classes” within AP and convince them “gradually” to
increase wages.92 He did not think AO’s leaders understood Spain’s political environment, just as opponents of female suffrage in 1931 had argued
that women were unprepared for political responsibility, not that they were
inherently incapable. As a result, AP’s leaders adopted a paternalistic attitude toward AO, and there was often talk of cultural initiatives designed
to educate the future leaders of the Catholic syndicates.93 In one typical
example, Mariano Pérez de Ayala used “simple speech so that the explanations he gave easily reached the intelligences of his listeners.”94 This attitude often led the CEDA and its leaders to neglect AO at crucial
moments, sowing seeds of discontent among affiliated workers.
The relationship between the CEDA and AO deteriorated after the
November 1933 elections, which were a disaster for peaceful relations. AO’s
leaders openly expressed betrayal that only two of their choices—Madariaga
and Ruíz Alonso—would appear on the CEDA’s candidate lists. In consequence, the CNSCO urged members to vote for the right-wing coalition
only out of a sense of duty.95 Responding to the rising tension, Gil Robles
urged Acción Popular to carry out a “política obrerista [labor politics]” even
if it meant “sacrificing [some] interests of the conservative classes” so they
could put private land ownership within reach of the working class.96 This
was good election rhetoric, but when Manuel Giménez Fernández
attempted to carry out land reform while minister of agriculture in 1934–
35, the CEDA’s own members frustrated his efforts and ultimately deposed
him from his position.97 Such incidents would increase AO’s suspicion of

92. Pedro Armero Manjón to Manuel Giménez Fernández, September 10, 1935, AGF
B-XV-d/23; Braojos Garrido and Alvarez Rey, Epistolario Político, p. 163: “. . . las clases adineradas. . .”; “. . . evolutivamente . . .”
93. El Correo de Andalucía, October 27, 1934, 12; ibid., October 28, 1934, 12; ibid.,
November 1, 1934, 12. This was also the basic purpose of the Instituto Social Obrero. See
Benavides, El fracaso social, p. 643.
94. El Correo de Andalucía, November 7, 1934, 11: “. . . palabra sencilla para que las
explicaciones que daba llegasen fácilmente a las inteligencias de sus oyentes . . .”
95. El Debate, November 11, 1933, 2; Ideas, January 4, 1934, 1. Their sense of betrayal
was evident in a vitriolic editorial in Ideas that castigated the CEDA for leaving Acción
Obrerista off the election slate in Madrid.
96. El Debate, November 18, 1933, 2: “...sacrificar intereses de las clases conservadoras.”
97. Giménez Fernández was a controversial character within the CEDA. Generally
viewed as the leader of the confederation’s “Christian Democrat” faction, he was minister
of agriculture from October 1934 to April 1935 and worked to implement the Republic’s

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

the confederation’s motives. In late 1934, Madariaga accused Spanish conservatives of paying insufficient attention to workers, and AO’s National
Assembly declared, “The working class is tired of empty talk,” expressing
dismay that the CEDA was not observing “the postulates of social Catholic
Doctrine that the confederal program defends.”98 Madariaga finally threatened to separate AO from the CEDA in October 1935 because the confederation had broken its promises to workers.99
AO did not survive much longer. In late December 1935, Madariaga
publicly aired his grievances toward the “unión de derechas,” which he no
longer supported unconditionally. After strongly implying great displeasure with the CEDA and its allies, he declared, “I am a soldier. I am to do
what they command me. Fight? Rest? The Committee of my party commands. I obey. I have the security that its members will be right.”100
Madariaga’s air of resignation hardly foretold a peaceful conclusion. As
Spain geared up for new elections over the next months, members of AO’s
national committee expressed “bitter disappointment” with the CEDA’s
actions of the previous year. They joined the political coalition forming
“against the revolution and its accomplices” but reserved the right to act
independently to realize their goal of social justice.101 By election day in
February 1936, AO had declined in many regions, and the CEDA’s strategy toward the working class had changed, believing that it should separate
labor unions from direct political action. AO became superfluous and even

agrarian reform measures more effectively. Many conservative members of the CEDA considered him a “white Bolshevik” and helped force him out of his position. Javier Tusell and
José Calvo provide an extensive discussion of Giménez Fernández’s tenure in the ministry.
See Javier Tusell and José Calvo, Manuel Giménez Fernández, precursor de la democracia
española (Seville, 1990), pp. 57–116. For a more concise description of his time as minister
of agriculture, see Edward Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain:
Origins of the Civil War (New Haven, 1970), pp. 347–55.
98. El Correo de Andalucía, March 19, 1935, 1; El Debate, March 16, 1935, and March
19, 1935, 4; C. E. D. A., April 1, 1935, 12: “. . . la clase obrera está cansada de palabrerías . . .”;
“. . . los postulados de la Doctrina social católica que defiende el programa confederal.”
99. El Castellano, October 18, 1935, 1; Carlos Rodríguez López-Brea, “Dos claves de
la política de Acción Popular durante la II República: agrarismo y catolicismo. El Ejemplo de
Toledo,” in Estudios sobre la derecha española contemporánea, ed. Javier Tusell, Julio Gil Pecharromán, and Feliciano Montero (Madrid, 1993), pp. 527–47, here p. 542; Robinson, Origins,
p. 215.
100. El Castellano, December 30, 1935, 1: “Soy un soldado. Lo que me manden he de
hacer. ¿Luchar? ¿Descansar? Manda el Comité de mi partido. Yo obedezco. Tengo la seguridad de que sus componentes acertarán.”
101. El Debate, December 15, 1935, 4: “. . . amarga decepción . . .”; “. . . frente a la revolución y sus cómplices.”

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counterproductive to the CEDA’s plans, which shifted away from direct
political organization to the formation of the Confederación Española de
Sindicatos Obreros (CESO), a federation of professional (aconfessional)
unions formed in 1935.
“Yellow” Syndicalism and the Abandonment of Acción Obrerista
Late 1934 had brought with it a change in the CEDA’s approach to
labor organization. A split occurred within AO as one of its two representatives in the Cortes, Ruíz Alonso, left the party, arguing that “politics poisons the worker” and that creating Catholic unions was more important
than having an independent workers’ political party.102 The CEDA as a
whole appears to have moved in that direction as well, helping explain
Madariaga’s frustration of this period. In the wake of Asturias, the CEDA
and its syndical allies created the Frente Nacional de Trabajo (FNT), which
brought together the CET, CNSCO, Federación Española de Trabajadores (FET), and Federación Andaluza de Trabajadores (FAT) with a
few other small groups.103 The FNT was a coordinating body for independent syndical organizations, tied together by a common acceptance of
Catholic social doctrines, and did not create new syndicates or recruit members itself. The right-wing press told readers that the FNT would protect
workers from “groups that interfere with liberty, put pistols in your hands
and, sprinkling the soul with poison, incite you to destructive action.”104
Scholars generally agree that the FNT and its successor, the CESO, had “a
strict dependency on the CEDA and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.”105

102. El Correo de Andalucía, November 18, 1934, 2: “. . . la política envenena al
obrero . . .” Ruíz Alonso was a frequent target of socialist attacks, but his presence in AO was
much less significant than Madariaga’s. Although he was well known throughout Spain due
to his frequent appearances at CEDA events, he had a very limited impact outside of
Granada. He was a propagandist more than a leader, and he is far more notable for his activities after leaving AO than for anything he did while he belonged to the party.
103. Gil Pecharromán, Historia, p. 193; Benavides, El fracaso social, p. 665. Total membership was approximately 250,000, and individual groups had small numbers of affiliates.
The Federación Andaluza de Trabajadores (FAT) had only 2000 members, for example. See
Trabajo, January 2, 1935, 4.
104. El Castellano, July 30, 1935, 4: “. . . agrupaciones que mediatizan la libertad, ponen
en vuestras manos las pistolas y regando con veneno el alma, os incitan a una actuación
destructiva...”
105. Gil Pecharromán, Historia, p. 193; Preston, The Coming, p. 181: “. . . mantenía
una estrecha dependencia de la CEDA y de la jerarquía eclesiástica.” Paul Preston calls it “the
CEDA’s response to left-wing unionism” and links it to a simultaneous attempt by the
Employer’s Bloc to reduce its members’ dependence on left-wing unions for workers.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

In the FNT’s first year, membership growth was negligible. With a
tone of frustration, the editor of Trabajo told Alberto Martín-Artajo,
president of Catholic Action’s Social Secretariat, in late 1935 that he
believed “[t]he FNT has not gone beyond the terrain of projects to the
level of reality.” He went on to recognize that when it was founded, the
FNT “aspired to a sincere, effective, pure, energetic activity and not to
copy the yellow [amarillista] methods of Catholic traditionalism.” After
a year, however, the FNT’s unity was still very weak, and the CNSCO
was “even willing to quit the FNT” because of FET attempts to steal its
members. The CET had “little strength” but still could exercise “an enormously destructive power” if it combined with the CNSCO against the
FET, and the FET had a “very superficial frame” that depended almost
entirely on a single person. Workers remained suspicious because the
FNT carried the “seal of approval” from Catholic Action, and they worried about external interference in their work. His overall assessment of
the FNT in October 1935 was that it was “a fraud against the working
class that trusts us.” He believed that the leaders of the independent
movements within the FNT wanted Catholic Action “to have faith in
them” and give them “absolute liberty to organize themselves.”106 The
FNT’s secretary, Angel Sabador, said that federation’s members “lack
syndical spirit and education and are a difficult to stabilize, fickle
mass.”107
A widespread belief that the FNT was falling apart led to the founding
of the Confederación Española de Sindicatos Obreros (CESO), which
claimed 276,000 members in 1058 syndicates at its foundation in December 1935.108 Workers were “tired of so many groups and Confederations,”
and the CESO was intended to bring all Catholic working-class organizations together in a single movement.109 The CESO denied that the work-

106. Benavides, El fracaso social, pp. 658–64: “El F. N. T. no ha pasado del terreno de
los proyectos al plano de la realidad”; “. . . aspiraba a una actividad sincera, eficaz, pura, enérgica, y no a copiar los métodos amarillistas del tradicionalismo católico. . .”; “. . . están dispuestos incluso a retirarse del F. N. T. . . .”; “. . . tiene escasa fuerza . . .”; “. . . un enorme
poder destructivo . . .”; “. . .de contextura muy superficial. . .”; “. . . marchamo. . .”; “. . . una
estafa a la clase obrera que confía en nosotros”; “. . . Quieren que se tenga confianza en ellos
y quieren libertad absoluta para organizarse.”
107. Benavides, El fracaso social, p. 666: “. . . carecen de espíritu y de educación sindical
y que es masa voluble de difícil estabilización . . .”
108. Trabajo, December 21, 1935, 1; El Debate, December 19, 1935, 3; ibid., December
21, 1935, 1; Robinson, Origins, p. 215.
109. Benavides, El fracaso social, p. 666: “. . . están cansados de tantos grupos y Confederaciones.”

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ing class was “lost to the cause of social harmony” and argued that even
though hunger had driven many to extremist positions, they could recapture those individuals through education and social justice.110 One of its
leaders proclaimed, “We have been born because we love freedom. We,
who have dignity, do not want to be the instruments of anybody nor will
we ever renounce our freedom, because we are not slaves.”111 Probably the
most important aspect of the CESO’s existence was its explicit rejection of
confessionalism. Although speakers at CESO meetings often defended
Catholic principles of labor organization, the confederation eliminated the
word Catholic from its identity. Padre José Gafo had pushed for even more,
attempting to eliminate all terminology that linked the Confederation to
“church, sacristy, priests, and friars.”112
The working-class movement of the CEDA was collapsing in late
1935 and early 1936. AO’s membership appears to have stagnated while
AP poached workers for its own ranks, and the unions affiliated with the
CESO remained dismally small.113 The CESO’s true membership might
have been substantially lower than its claim of 276,000. Intended to bring
cohesion and unity to the Catholic working-class movement, the CESO
failed in its commission. Former members of the Sindicatos Libres called
its adherents “ultra-tame social lambs . . . more yellow than obrerista.”114
Fundamentally, the CESO was simply disorganized. In March 1936, “the
fusion of the old syndicates with the new ones has not yet been achieved.”
This hinted at a major problem of organization. The federations that
joined together into the CESO were supposed to merge with it and end
their individual activities, but the FET refused to do so, and without a unified central leadership, this was unlikely to happen. The CESO boldly proclaimed, “We prefer democratic and peaceful paths to reform the State in
the sense of more social justice; but if there is no option, nobody will force
us to be communists.” A break with the ISO that spring effectively cut off

110. El Debate, January 25, 1936, 3: “. . . está perdida para la causa de la armonía
social . . .”
111. El Debate, January 7, 1936: “Hemos nacido porque amamos la libertad. Nosotros,
que tenemos dignidad, no queremos ser instrumentos de nadie ni renunciamos nunca a nuestra libertad, porque no somos esclavos.”
112. Benavides, El fracaso social, p. 676: “. . . iglesia, sacristía, a curas y frailes.” See also
Trabajo, January 4, 1936, 3.
113. Quirosa-Cheyrouze, Católicos, p. 46. The largest union in Almería had only fortysix members; of thirty-six members in the union “El Lirio,” twenty belonged to AP and sixteen to AO.
114. Winston, Catholics and the Right, p. 309.

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CONFESSIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION IN THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

a huge source of support for the confederation. When civil war broke out,
the CESO “died begging and fighting among itself for some miserable
funds.”115
As Spain drifted toward civil war, Acción Obrerista collapsed entirely.
During the war, the Catholic labor movement was subsumed into Franco’s
movement, which made confessional political and social actions unnecessary. After the February 1936 elections, Madariaga essentially stepped
down as president. Jorge Cera, president of AO in Barcelona, succinctly
described the dilemma facing his party after the CEDA’s electoral failure
when he wrote to Manuel Giménez Fernández,
Where are we going? With the CEDA or outside of it? The majority of
the mass of workers is in favor of Sr. Giménez [Fernández], but not of
the men of the CEDA, and therefore, request separation. It is lamentable
that those Christian workers have not merited support and that the
CEDA program’s promises to them were not fulfilled.116

Just as many disillusioned members of the JAP, the CEDA’s youth organization, started leaving the party to join extremist groups like the Carlists
and the fascist Falange Española, workers were abandoning Acción
Obrerista. The Civil War, when it broke out in July 1936, brought a definitive end to the confessional labor movement. Acción Obrerista had
already collapsed at the beginning of the war, and in its first weeks
Madariaga was killed in republican territory.117 Ruíz Alonso is well known
for embracing the uprising and leading the party that detained Federico

115. Trabajo, April 18, 1936, 1: “Preferimos los caminos democráticos y pacíficos para
reformar el Estado en sentido de mayor justicia social; pero si no hay opción, nadie nos
obligará a ser comunistas.” See also Benavides, El fracaso social, pp. 669–83. The right-wing
newspaper ABC had collected funds to distribute to right-wing workers recently laid off and
planned to distribute them through the right-wing syndicates.
116. Jorge Cera to Manuel Giménez Fernández, February 25, 1936, AGF B-XIII/36;
Braojos Garrido and Alvarez Rey, Epistolario Político, pp. 178–79: “¿A dónde vamos? ¿Con la
C. E. D. A. o fuera de ella? La mayoría de la masa obrera es partidaria del Sr. Jiménez [sic]
Fernández, pero no de los hombres de la C. E. D. A., y por lo tanto, piden la separación. Es
lamentable que esos obreros cristianos no hayan merecido el apoyo y no se haya cumplido el
programa de la C. E. D. A., que se les había prometido.”
117. Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional, “Testimonio del Secretario de la pieza
segunda del Diario de Sesiones de Cortes de 1 de julio de 1936 relativo a la situación del
campo y certificación del Secretario relativa al asesinato de Dimas Madariaga,” Fuentes Contemporáneos, Causa General, legajo 1514, expedient 29; ABC, July 29, 1936, 33; La Vanguardia, July 29, 1936, 12; ABC (Seville), August 14, 1936, 1; and Preston, The Coming, p.
278. There is some dispute as to whether Madariaga died in a shootout or was murdered.

SAMUEL PIERCE

747

García Lorca.118 In 1938, the CESO itself, which still barely existed, was
“absorbed into the nascent national syndical system” and ceased to exist as
a separate entity.119
In the end, then, the CEDA’s attempts to use confessional syndicalism to attract workers fizzled just as its attempt to establish a confessional
working-class political party had failed. Federico Salmón, a member of the
CEDA and the minister of labor, bluntly described the confederation’s
attempts to attract the working class: “The unions hostile to the classstruggle have not yet generated in workers the conviction that they are
honestly going to defend their rights and interests with independence and
truth.”120 It was a rather simple problem—workers trusted organizations
other than Acción Obrerista to fight for them. Given the relative size of
their memberships, most Spanish workers believed that socialism or anarchism would do more than the Catholic party. Even workers who agreed
with Acción Obrerista’s approach were scared away by its overt confessionalism, as the experience of the FNT indicates. What happened to AO
during the Republic was essentially the same as what had always happened
with confessional labor movements in Spain: most workers identified it
with the employer class, more interested in peaceful relations than social
justice. By the time the movement concluded that it needed to abandon its
confessionalism, it was too late, and the Civil War put an emphatic end to
the experiment.

118. Ian Gibson, El hombre que detuvo a García Lorca: Ramón Ruíz Alonso y la muerte del
poeta (Madrid, 2007), pp. 109–40.
119. Stanley Payne, The Franco Regime 1936–1975 (Madison, WI, 1987), p. 203.
120. Robinson, Origins, p. 215. Translation by Robinson.

Chinese Catholic Visionaries and the Socialist
Education Movement in Shanxi (1963–65)
HENRIETTA HARRISON*
In spring-summer 1965 lay Catholics facing the pressures of the Socialist Education Movement in rural north China began to see visions and
to preach. This article examines these events, their origins in local history, their relationship to the Chinese and international political context, and their interaction with the ongoing campaign that led into the
Cultural Revolution. It argues that local context is crucial in understanding religious repression in the Maoist era and that these events
are important to Catholics in the area today because the memory of
them shapes ongoing relations between Catholics and the state.
Keywords: Catholic visions, China, Cultural Revolution, Shanxi,
Socialist Education Movement

I

n early spring 1965 thousands of Chinese Catholics flocked to a narrow
gully in the hills north of Taiyuan city in north China, where they knelt
in the dark fields night after night, chanting prayers, and hoping to see the
cross that had appeared on the face of a loess cliff. The visions had been
sparked by news of Catholics being forced to apostatize during an ongoing
political campaign known as the Socialist Education Movement or Four
Cleanups (Siqing), and they continued until the militia was sent in to lock
down several predominantly Catholic villages. The scale of these events
was large—the province of Shanxi had around 10,000 Catholics concentrated in 300 villages, and in many of these communities almost every adult
was involved.
This article examines the visions and the preaching that followed to
understand the pressures on Catholics in the China of Mao Zedong and
their interaction with Catholicism. Dramatic visionary movements of this
sort are, by their nature, exceptional events. The experiences that gave rise
to these visions and the government crackdown that followed grew out of

*Dr. Harrison is professor of modern Chinese studies at Oxford University, email: henrietta.harrison@orinst.ox.ac.uk. All translations in this article were provided by the author.

748

HENRIETTA HARRISON

749

a very specific local context: Catholicism in Shanxi had a history stretching
back more than 300 years, and for many Catholics there, to leave their religion was also to renounce family and community—an almost impossible
choice. Moreover, many Catholics lived in poor, rural villages of little
interest to local government, with the result that they had been able to
avoid pressures to leave their religion during earlier campaigns. Finally,
there was the unusual violence of the Four Cleanups campaign in Shanxi,
which was the result of the positioning of the provincial leadership within
factional disputes in the central government. What linked the visions to a
wider social and political context was the preaching that followed, performed mostly by laypeople and women. This preaching featured two main
themes and rejected a central ideology of communist government. The first
was a response to the Four Cleanups, rejecting the goals of rural revolution
and calling on Catholics to return to traditional moral values. The second
responded to the cold war with an apocalyptic vision of the end times that
called on Catholics to return to the Virgin Mary. As a result, when the
state cracked down, workteams and later student Red Guards who were
sent to the villages condemned Catholicism—not because it was a religion,
but because it was foreign and associated with imperialism. Catholics were
not pressed to say that they did not believe in God but rather that Catholicism was a “bad religion” (huai jiao). These events live on today not as
exemplars of a communist political structure (both the Chinese state and
the international context have been transformed since the 1960s and
today’s Chinese government no longer promotes either rural revolution or
a bipolar vision of a cold-war world), but because memories of them continue to shape the way in which Catholics in this area relate to the state.
Because memories of these events are so politically charged, piecing
together what actually happened is a challenge. Catholics tell stories of
visions and persecution to inspire the younger generation and to promote
their successful local evangelism. These stories inspired this research, but
they are often personal, fragmented, and strongly shaped by evangelistic
goals, so that the sequence of events and their relation to state policy is
easily lost. Instead, most of the information in this article is drawn from
records written at the time by branches of the Chinese communist state,
especially Religious Work News (Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun), a classified
journal published in Beijing for cadres engaged in religious work. It also
uses the archives of one of the villages involved, which include files on
individuals and transcriptions of village meetings. These official sources
provide a framework for the order of events and detail of government and
workteam activities. However, they are also deeply problematic because of
their hostility to the events they describe and especially because they were

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CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

created with the working assumption that visions and other supernatural
experiences are impossible. From this perspective, any accounts of these
phenomena must be fraudulent. Therefore, to understand fully what happened, it is essential to combine the written sources with interviews with
participants.1 Working with and between these different sources, it is possible to create a narrative of the visions and the events that followed them.
1. Catholicism in Shanxi
The Catholic villages of central Shanxi mostly predate the great age of
Western imperialism in China, which began with the Opium War in 1838
(see figure 1). They were founded in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, when men who were active in long-distance trade brought new religious practices they encountered in Beijing and Guangzhou back to their
families in this mountainous interior province. The practices spread and
were reinforced by occasional visits from Jesuit missionaries, followed by the
residence of Franciscan missionaries and Chinese priests. The villages at the
center of the 1965 events nearly all date from this early period. In the
hamlet of Changgou, where the visions began, two brothers were ordained
in the 1880s, suggesting that the community had been Catholic for several
generations. The nearest large village, Jianhe, had a Catholic community
first mentioned by missionaries in 1727. When the police cracked down on
the crowds in Changgou, the visions spread to Geliaogou, Honggou, and
Liuhe, all of which were founded as new Catholic villages in the eighteenth
century. Although Italian Franciscan missionaries were a substantial presence in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, there were relatively few new conversions in areas around the old Catholic villages.
Instead, Catholicism was passed down through families, and the Catholic
participants in the 1965 events were almost all born into these old Catholic
villages and connected by a dense web of marriage ties. These bonds facilitated travel between communities to listen to the preachers.2

1. The author conducted interviews on various occasions between 2000 and 2011 with
more than thirty people in Shanxi, Beijing, Italy, and the United States; these interviews
included clergy, laypeople, and non-Catholics. The interviews in Shanxi were conducted in
Chinese. Because of the continuing political sensitivity of this subject in China, the interviews
were not recorded, nor were details noted on the interviewees. Copies of the interview notes
are in the Archives of The Catholic Historical Review, The Catholic University of America
(hereafter cited as Interviews).
2. For Taiyuan and Yuci dioceses, see Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary’s Curse and
Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (Berkeley, 2013); Arnulf Camps and Pat
McCloskey, The Friars Minor in China (1294–1955), Especially the Years 1925–55, Based on

HENRIETTA HARRISON

751

FIGURE 1. Map depicting the location of Catholic villages around Taiyuan, China.

Catholics were also bound together by shared memories of the
Boxer Uprising in 1900 when local militias massacred thousands of
members of their families and communities during China’s struggles to
resist increasing domination by the Western imperial powers. These
events were still part of living memory in the 1960s. They influenced
government perceptions of Catholics as a threat and Catholic fears of
persecution. For Catholics, the memories had been reinforced by the
Franciscans’ promotion of many of those who died as martyrs. In the
1900s two missionaries traveled from village to village and held meetings, collecting the evidence of witnesses about those who had been
given the opportunity to apostatize and had refused at the cost of their
lives. From these accounts involving thousands of martyrs, a small group
the Research of Friars Bernward Willeke and Domenico Gandolfi, OFM (Rome, 1955); Jean
Charbonnier, Guide to the Catholic Church in China (Singapore, 2008), pp. 154–61. For villages, see Qin Geping [秦格平], Taiyuan jiaoqu jianshi [太原教区简史][A Simple History
of Taiyuan Diocese], (Taiyuan, 2008), p. 111; Bernward H. Willeke, ed., “The Report of the
Apostolic Visitation of D. Emmanuele Conforti on the Franciscan Missions in Shansi,
Shensi and Kansu (1798),” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 84, no. 1–2 (1991), pp. 197–
271, here 207. Francesco Garretto, May 8, 1727, Archivio Storico “De Propaganda Fide”
(Rome) Scritture Originale della Congregazione Particolare Indie Orientali e Cina (hereafter
APF SOCP), 33:452; Emmanuele Conforti, August 30, 1799, APF SOCP 69:386.

752

CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

of missionaries and Chinese Catholics were beatified in 1943 (and ultimately canonized in 2000).3
In the early 1950s the communists expelled the missionaries and expropriated church property and institutions, but people in the old Catholic villages remained loyal to their ancestral religion. The Chinese priests in
Taiyuan, which became an archdiocese in 1946, had a long tradition of resistance to the Italian missionaries, who occupied all the senior positions in the
archdiocese, and great hopes for a Chinese church hierarchy. As a result, they
joined the reformed church established by the communists as a body but continued to insist on their loyalty to Rome. A Chinese priest, Hao Nai, was
appointed vicar general by the archdiocese’s Italian Franciscan archbishop,
Domenico Luca Capozi, who was expelled in 1953. Hao Nai was recognized
by the government as ordinary of the archdiocese, but was arrested with a few
of his clergy in the campaign that followed a crackdown on Catholics in
Shanghai in 1955.4 However, the impact of these arrests was felt by the clergy
in Shanxi rather than the laity; West Jianhe parish near Changgou, for example, expanded so rapidly due to industrialization that more than 1000 people
were attending Mass during major festivals, and a resident priest was
appointed for the first time in 1956. Other Catholic villages continued to
have regular prayers organized by the traditional lay leaders known as catechists (huizhang), host Catholic youth groups, offer summer catechism classes
for children, and hold Sunday Mass throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.5
2. The Four Cleanups
William Christian has noted the particular resonance and impact of
apparitions that occurred in the 1940s and 1950s at a time of strong

3. Giovanni Ricci, Il Fratello di una Martire: Memorie del P. Barnaba da Cologna, O.F.M.
Missionario Apostolico in Cina (Torino, 1912), pp. 204–11; “Solemnis declaratio Martyrii Servorum Dei Gregorii Grassi O.F.M. Ep. Orthoniensis, Francisci Fogolla O.F.M. Ep. Bagensis, Antonini Fantosati O.F.M. Ep. Adrahensis et viginti sex sociorum in Sinis, anno 1900,
in odium Fidei interemptorum,” Acta Ordinis Fratrum Minorum, 62 (1943), 13–17.
4. Nicola Cerasa, Breve storia della Missione di Taiyuan Shansi (Rome, 1998); Giovanni
Ricci, Le avventure di un missionario in Cina: Memorie di Mons. Luigi Moccagatta, O.F.M.
Vescovo Titolare di Zenopoli e Vicario Apostolico del San-si (Modena, 1909).
5. Guo Chongxi [郭崇喜], “Taiyuan tianzhujiao shilue” [太原天主教史略] [A Brief
History of Catholicism in Taiyuan], Taiyuan wenshi ziliao [太原文史资料], 17 (1992),
145–254, here 174; Zongjiao gongzuo xuanchuan cailiao [宗教工作宣传材料][Propaganda
Materials for Religious Work] (Taiyuan, 1966) 13:9; Zhao Peicheng [赵培成] et al.,
Xinzhou diqu zongjiao zhi [忻州地区宗教志] [Xinzhou District Religion Gazetteer],
(Taiyuan, 1993), p. 295.

HENRIETTA HARRISON

753

Catholic hostility to communism and fears of a coming nuclear war.6
Similar cold-war fears interacting with China’s internal politics lay
behind the visions in Shanxi. China was surrounded by enemies in an age
of nuclear weapons: the split between the leaders of China and the Soviet
Union was surfacing in the early 1960s, while the United States was rapidly increasing its presence in Vietnam. Domestically the Great Leap
Forward, a campaign of 1958 for radical agricultural and industrial
progress, had led to a catastrophic famine from which Shanxi had not
fully recovered. In China, as elsewhere during the cold war, there was
great fear of traitors and third-columnists. Catholics, regarded by most
Chinese as converts through Western imperialism and followers of an
explicitly anticommunist church, were among many groups that came
under attack.
Spurred by the central government in 1963, the Four Cleanups was
a campaign to clean up corruption by village leaders working in tandem
with opponents of the regime, because they were believed to be a key
cause of the famine. Workteams largely composed of educated urbanites
and county government employees were sent out to investigate village
leaders. When these workteams discovered that leaders had used community property, falsified the accounts, or beaten and abused peasants to
get them to hand over their crops during the famine, the workteams
labeled the leaders “revisionists” and “capitalist roaders” (in other words,
followers of the Soviet Union), attacked them in humiliating sessions of
public criticism, required them to make restitution for what they had
stolen, and removed them from office. In the aftermath of the famine,
feelings ran high. The public sessions became violent, village leaders were
beaten, and some were so badly treated that they committed suicide.
Other meetings were held to inculcate scientific thinking and socialist
morality into villagers, thus remaking them into new communist citizens.
Creators of the movement conceptualized it as a new revolution that
would inculcate ideas of class struggle, empowering and transforming the
poorest villagers, just as Land Reform had when the communists first
came to power.7

6. William A. Christian Jr., “Religious Apparitions and the Cold War in Southern
Europe,” in Religion, Power and Protest in Local Communities: The Northern Shore of the
Mediterranean, ed. Eric R. Wolf (Berlin, 1984), pp. 239–66.
7. Gao Hua [高华], “Da jihuang yu siqing yundong de qiyuan” [大饥荒与四清运动
的起源] [The Great Famine and the Origins of the Four Cleanups Movement], Ershiyi shiji
[二十一世纪] [Twenty-First Century], no. 60 (2000), 55–68; Li Huaiyin, Village China
under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948–2008 (Stanford, 2009), pp. 107–38.

754

CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

In 1964 the Four Cleanups took a special focus on Christian villages
(Protestant as well as Catholic), with the national circulation of a report on
the implementation of the campaign in Zhangzhuangpo, a desperately
poor Catholic village near Jiangzhou in southern Shanxi. The Catholics
there had originally rejected communist ideals. Attempts to mobilize them
to attack their richer neighbors during Land Reform had failed. Since
then, only three of the 611 villagers had joined the party’s organizations
(the Peasants’ Association, Women’s Association, and Youth League).
The members of the Four Cleanups workteam in this village devoted
themselves to changing the situation. For seven months they lived with the
villagers and held endless meetings. They focused their efforts on the most
impoverished villagers: giving them money, explaining the idea of social
class, and pressing them to admit that the Church had exploited them.
Those who conformed were then given science classes about weather and
evolution. The culmination of the workteam’s stay was a seven-hour mass
meeting to attack the parish priest. By the end of the process, ninety of the
villagers had renounced the Church.8
Religious affairs officials in Shanxi held meetings to study the report,
and in November 1964 all priests and nuns working in the central part of
the province were required to attend a study class in Taiyuan, the provincial capital. (This was effectively a form of detention, as the priest and nuns
were confined first in the cathedral compound and later in a Buddhist
temple; they were not released until 1979.9 ) Special workteams focused on
religion were sent out to the Catholic villages, which were supposed to
replicate the Zhangzhuangpo model through months of persuasion. However, in one village that has some documentation of the movement, the
workteam simply gathered the Catholics together and told them that all
heads of families must write letters renouncing the Church in the next
three days.10 This was not a success; one young man announced that “even
if there is a knife at my throat I won’t renounce the religion.”11 No one in
that village did renounce the Church at that point, but the tense atmos8. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun [宗教工作通讯] [Religious Work News], September 3,
1964, 2–11.
9. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, February 13, 1965, 6–10; Qin Geping, Taiyuan jiaoqu
jianshi, pp. 362–64.
10. Tanbai cailiao, February 6, 1966, Shanxi daxue Zhongguo shehuishi yanjiu
zhongxin [Shanxi University Chinese Social History Research Center [山西大学中国社会
史研究中心], hereafter referred to as SD], X dadui danwei hui [X大队单位会] [X Brigade
Unit Committee]. To preserve the confidentiality of these files, many of which relate to people
who are still alive, the name of the village and names of individuals have been omitted.
11. Buchong cailiao, October 5, 1965, SD: 刀子放的脖子上我也不背教

HENRIETTA HARRISON

755

phere created by the Four Cleanups’ demands for Catholics to leave the
Church made subsequent events meaningful.
3. The Visions at Changgou
The visions began the following spring. One day in March 1965, a
man from the entirely Catholic village of Changgou, in the hills just north
of Taiyuan, was working in the fields when he saw, high up on the cliffs
that edged the narrow valley, the shape of a large cross in the soft sandy
rock. The shape is still there and would appear to be the result of natural
processes of erosion rather than any human intervention. Changgou
already had a Four Cleanups workteam in place, made up of cadres from
Taiyuan city. The stage was set for the campaign to intensify, since the village’s Catholic families had become wealthy through coal mining in the
early-twentieth century and three villagers had become priests. With their
religion and their capitalist heritage, these families were just the kind of
people targeted in the Four Cleanups as likely saboteurs and corrupters of
village officials. Moreover, the workteam members were high-ranking officials, who were under huge pressure to obtain results and prove their loyalty to the party. It was in this tense context that the man who first saw the
cross pointed it out to another man working nearby, who then told a relative. They thought that perhaps it was a sign; none of them could have
guessed what would follow.12
The news spread quickly, drawing locals to come and see the cross.
The days were still short, and they came after dark. Soon the arrivals were
from further away: Taiyuan city, the mountains to the north, and the central Shanxi plain south of the city. There were even visitors from Hebei
Province, Inner Mongolia, and the great coastal cities of Tianjin and
Shanghai.13 In the case of one village south of Taiyuan, nearly a fifth of all
the Catholic adults, including almost all the young men, went to Changgou.14 When they arrived, they knelt in the fields at the foot of the cliff,
although some climbed up the opposite side of the gully for a better view.
As the crowd knelt in the dark, the air was full of the rapid rhythmic chanting characteristic of Catholic prayers in this area. Some people ritually
whipped themselves. Then the watchers would begin to see things and
shout out, “Isn’t it Jesus?”, or claim to see the Virgin Mary or an angel.
Many saw nothing, which they ascribed to their own sinfulness. They
12. Qin Geping, Taiyuan jiaoqu jianshi, pp. 111–12; Interviews, pp. 113–15.
13. Shanxi tongzhi [山西通志] [Shanxi Gazetteer], (Beijing, 1997), 46:423.
14. Data compiled from SD.

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CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

could only report lists of what others had seen: Jesus on the cross, Mary,
angels, heaven, hell, a priest saying Mass, and a nun kneeling in prayer.15
Of those who reported seeing visions, most saw the cross on the cliff
radiating light, but other people saw much more elaborate and detailed
scenes. In one of the few descriptions recorded at the time, a man said that
he had seen the cross shine and the Virgin Mary appear flashing, with
trumpets sounding and electric lights shining.16 A man who was one of the
Liuhe catechists remembers seeing the Virgin Mary dressed in shining
white walk in a circle and a great fiery pit with wide roads around it. In this
vision, the roads were full of vehicles packed with people; they were drawn
toward the pit and pushed into the fire, leaving only their heads visible.
Another man saw a priest saying Mass. Three balls of light shot quickly
toward the crowd and vanished. Then many little lights, each containing a
tiny figure, came rapidly out toward the onlookers, signifying the real presence of Christ in this visionary Eucharist.17 There are many similarities in
these visions to the traditions of the great Buddhist shrines of the Wutai
Mountains to the north, which have long been known for miraculous lights
and fiery balls.18 But, although a local visual culture shaped the visions of
people, the meaning ascribed to their experiences was shaped by a distinctively Catholic worldview from the nineteenth century. This involved the
Virgin Mary’s arrival in the Last Days to urge repentance and a rejection
of sin so that she might intercede with God to have mercy on the world.
Discussing a series of visions that occurred at Oliveto in Italy in the
1980s, Paolo Apolito argues that mass visionary experiences of this sort are
transformational. They have the power to reconfigure individual personalities, providing a socially acceptable context for dramatic conversion experiences. They also have the power to create connections between strangers
and reinforce previously weak links.19 These all require someone to interpret
the visions and give them meaning. In the absence of the imprisoned
priests, that person was a young woman called Li Zhenxiang who lived in
the small village of Fengshenghe in the hills just west of Taiyuan city, which

15. Huiyi jilu, “Tianzhujiao jiaodai wenti,” September 23, 1965, SD Tianzhujiao
zonghe dang’andai [General Files on Catholics, hereafter noted as Zonghe]; Qin Geping,
Taiyuan jiaoqu jianshi, p. 366; Interviews, pp. 114–16.
16. Tanbai jianju cailiao kapian, June 2, 1966, SD.
17. Interviews, pp. 106, 176–77.
18. Raoul Birnbaum, “Light in the Wutai Mountains,” in The Presence of Light: Divine
Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein (Chicago, 2004), pp. 204–07.
19. Paolo Apolito, Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra: Local Visions and Cosmic
Drama, trans. William A. Christian Jr. (University Park, PA, 1998), pp. 230–32.

HENRIETTA HARRISON

757

was easily accessible from Changgou. She was a vowed virgin, following a
long-standing tradition in Chinese Catholicism. These virgins usually lived
with their natal families, although in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they often went to work in orphanages or as catechists. They
were expected to be able to read and received some religious training, but
their status in the Church was very low, especially after more Chinese
women began to enter religious orders in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, they were active members of their parishes. Li Zhenxiang had been a
member of the Legion of Mary, which was set up by the archdiocese in the
1940s as an explicitly anticommunist organization and was banned by the
communists in 1951. She knew Hao Nai and other leading clergy, but she
looked like an ordinary village woman, wearing a black jacket and her hair
in long braids, and speaking in the simplest language.20
When the workteams asked people what Li Zhenxiang had said, some
stated she had told them to live together in amity and to return anything
they had gained through immoral means (bugongdao). Others said that she
had called on them to pray and told them that God would punish those
who did not pray well.21 Both these themes were in full accord with church
teaching and village morality, but in direct opposition to the Four
Cleanups. The Four Cleanups workteams were trying to inculcate ideas of
social class and class struggle, and were explicitly told to break the widespread ideas that “all believers in the world are one family” and “even
believers you’ve never met are as close as family.”22 They attempted to
accomplish these goals by giving money and other help to the poorest families to win their allegiance. When Li Zhenxiang called on people to return
anything gained through immoral means, people understood her to mean
this aid as well as anything else that could be regarded as stolen. In Liuhe
villagers handed back to the workteam cash, grain, and a great many vegetables.23 In doing so, they rejected the moral order of class struggle, land
reform, women’s right to divorce, and cooperation with state campaigns in
favor of a much more traditional morality tied to the Ten Commandments:
not to steal, commit adultery, or bear false witness by making unproven
allegations. Calling on Catholics to pray was also in direct conflict with the

20. Interviews, pp. 107, 139. For virgins, see R. G. Tiedemann, “Controlling the Virgins: Female Propagators of the Faith and the Catholic Hierarchy in China,” Women’s History
Review, 17 (2008), 501–20.
21. Jibuqingming zai san yue jian, October 4, 1965, SD; Ziwo jiancha, April 28, 1970,
SD.
22. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, January 18, 1964, 11: 天下教徒是一家，人不亲教亲
23. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 16.

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CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

Four Cleanups. Shanxi Catholics have a long tradition of daily chanted
community prayer that had continued through the early 1960s. When the
workteams arrived, they enforced a rule originally issued during the Great
Leap Forward in 1958 that church buildings could be opened and the
church bell rung only if a priest was present. They locked up the churches
or appropriated them for their own meetings.24 Villagers who responded to
Li Zhenxiang’s call to prayer tried to get their churches reopened, gathered
to pray outside the church, or attended prayers in other villages. By praying
together, the Catholics publicly displayed their unity in the face of the
Four Cleanups’ demands for class struggle.
Li Zhenxiang’s preaching had immense appeal—sometimes those who
went to hear her found the courtyard of her home so crowded that they
could not squeeze in.25 Soon other villages were inviting her to preach.
Events reached a crisis when Li Zhenxiang was invited to Liuhe by the man
who had been moved by a dramatic vision of people being dragged down
into hell. When she arrived on the evening of March 31, she stood in front
of the village church loudly demanding that the locked doors be opened. A
crowd packed the church courtyard. Suddenly the great doors swung open,
the church bell rang out, and a lamp shone. People flooded into the building. Miraculously opening doors and tolling bells that mark the presence of
a divinity are classic features of Chinese Buddhist holy sites and characterize
stories from the Wutai Mountains. Soon it was being said that a miracle
had taken place. The news spread quickly, so that while some people went
home to sleep, others flocked to listen and join in the prayers.26
In Liuhe a sizable minority of Catholics had cooperated with the Four
Cleanups, and some had handed in statements renouncing their religion.
Now many of these people, too, were drawn into the crowded church. Li
Zhenxiang sprinkled them with holy water and said prayers to drive out
demons. Then, at some point that night, she led a crowd of several hundred people to the offices of the workteam to give back aid previously
received from the government and demand that their letters of apostasy be

24. Chang Libing [常利兵], “Cong yishi dao saoluan—dui 1965 nian Qingxu xian H
cun tianzhujiaotu de zhengzhi shiying zhi yanjiu” [从仪式到骚乱—对1965年清徐县H村天
主教徒的政治适应之研究] [From Ritual to Riot—Research on the Catholics’ Adaptation
to Government in H Village, Qingxu County, 1965], paper presented at Zhongguo shehuishi
huiyi [中国社会史会议] [China Social History Conference, Taiyuan], (2008), pp. 4–5.
25. Ziwo jiancha, February 3, 1966, SD.
26. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 12; Interviews, pp. 108, 177; Birnbaum, “Light in the Wutai Mountains,” pp. 197–98.

HENRIETTA HARRISON

759

returned. It was a dramatic scene. Accounts at the time claimed that a portrait of Chairman Mao fell to the floor as she entered and that she called
the workteam members devils. People today recall the team leader sweating with fear in the chilly spring night, his hands shaking as he gave up the
letters.27 The next morning, as dawn broke, a Liuhe catechist took up the
parish’s processional cross, and Li Zhenxiang led a noisy pilgrimage of
more than 1000 people to the nearby shrine of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. She was arrested the next day.28 The Changgou and Liuhe parish
priests, who had been confined in the study class in the cathedral, were also
arrested and accused of orchestrating the events. Police warned villagers
that they must not go to Changgou; anyone who did attempt the journey
was stopped, briefly detained, and sent home.29
Li Zhenxiang had channeled the visions into a response to the Four
Cleanups. The workteams called for class struggle, whereas she told
Catholics to live in harmony with their neighbors. The workteams punished village officials who had stolen from the collective or the state,
whereas she called on Catholics to return anything they had acquired as a
result of government policies they felt to be wrong. The workteam called
for Catholics to abandon their religion, whereas she demanded that they
join in community prayers and reclaim their letters of apostasy. Crowds
gathered to listen to her because what she said resonated. She is not
remembered as a great speaker; rather, it is said that for a simple village
woman to say these things at all was a miracle. At the time people called
her a living saint. Her arrest marked the end of the visions at Changgou
and a turning point in the events of that year.
4. The Spread of the Supernatural
Li Zhenxiang’s confrontation with the workteam dramatized the conflict between Catholic identity and the demands of the Four Cleanups, and
the arrests that followed made abundantly clear the personal consequences
of opposing the workteams. For the next three months Catholics continued to experience the supernatural, to gather for prayers and preaching,
and to resist the demands of the workteams, but the nature of the supernatural experiences and the content of the preaching changed. A new kind

27. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 12, 15; Interviews, pp. 102–03; Di
yi ci tianzhujiaotu X jiaodai tianzhujiao fangeming naoshi zaoyao, September 14, 1965, SD.
28. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 12; Geren jiancha, May 7, 1965,
SD; Interviews, p. 177.
29. Qin Geping, Taiyuan jiaoqu jianshi, p. 366; Interviews, p. 123.

760

CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

of seer emerged: young men and women who entered trance states. They,
too, demanded that Catholics repent and return items regarded as obtained
through immoral means, but their focus was on the imminent end of the
world, the powers of the devil, and the need for redemptive suffering.
When Li Zhenxiang was arrested, many people believed that the
end of the world was imminent. Rumors spread that God would punish
mankind, that the sky would be dark for three days and three nights, and
that the world would end.30 A number of new visionaries and preachers
spread these ideas, often deriving their authority from entering into
trance states in a way that was quite new for Catholics in this area. They
were called saints, and officials in charge of the Four Cleanups calculated that this term was applied to seventy-eight people (forty men and
thirty-eight women).31 Many were in their teens or early twenties, and
like most villagers they had little education. Their preaching drew on
the themes propounded by Li Zhenxiang, but added a much stronger
emphasis on their personal experience of the supernatural: their visions
of the Virgin Mary, their ability to see the demons that were lurking all
around, and their inspired knowledge of people’s sins. In preparation for
the end of the world, they called on women to cut their hair and told
Catholics to destroy anything made of plastic and other synthetic products: nylon socks, plastic sheeting, raincoats, rubber-soled sandals, and
cigarette lighters.
One of these new visionaries was a twenty-year-old woman whose baptismal name was Agatha. That spring her mother had died, and she had
married a man from a village with a large Catholic population. According
to her own account, when she heard that there were miracles occurring
nearby, she peered into a storage space for straw and saw little demons and
deer running back and forth. She went on to Liuhe, to the home of a man
who was already seeing visions; on the wall of his house she saw the Virgin
Mary in a manifestation that resembled an image of Our Lady of Mount
Carmel (whose scapular was very popular among Catholics in this area).
The man gave her a strip of white cloth and told her to go home, spread
blessings, and tell Jesus’s sacred words. These tasks seemed impossible since
she was inarticulate, illiterate, and unable to remember the lengthy Catholic
prayers. After she went home two things happened. The first, which is what
she remembers now, was that she began to preach and could recite lengthy

30. Qin Geping, Taiyuan jiaoqu jianshi, p. 366.
31. Zongjiao gongzuo xuanchuan cailiao 14:6.

HENRIETTA HARRISON

761

prayers.32 The second, which was even more striking at the time, was that
she began to enter into trances. Her family and neighbors, who had never
seen such a phenomenon before, had no term for it. When she collapsed,
they said that she had died (sile). After they prayed for her and sprinkled
holy water on her, she recovered. They were concerned that she might be
ill, but were convinced after they took her to an old man who had once been
in the seminary, and he said she was reciting the prayers correctly. For several weeks people came from considerable distances to see her and hear her
preach. She told them to return their unjust gains, live in friendship with
each other, rid themselves of plastic goods, and cut long hair. She also said
that Li Zhenxiang was a saint. She explained that plastic was made from the
bones of the saints and that nylon socks would attract fire (which was
expected to come up from the earth). One woman cut off her braid; another
discarded a plastic schoolbag and a pair of shoe soles. Sometimes, however,
Agatha refused to preach, told people that she could see a devil in the room,
and would then enter a trance. She also continued to see visions: hell as a
place with iron doors and windows to which families who did not pray
would be sent, a crucifix in a bottle of holy water, and the Virgin Mary on
the tower of the village church.33
Agatha’s trances were understood at the time as a kind of spiritual warfare sparked by a demon entering the room alongside a sinner and exorcised
by the sprinkling of holy water. People were convinced that there were
devils all around and that the devil prompted or possessed government
cadres and supporters. They called members of the workteams “demons”
(mogui) and even talked about the currency as “demon money” (guipiaozi).34
A woman who was imprisoned remembers seeing demons with horns and
tails accompanying the prison staff members who were delivering the
food.35 Demonic possession was also a familiar cultural form, especially for
young married women. Indeed, it was a common reason for conversion to
Catholicism, since Catholic priests and catechists were regarded as powerful
exorcists. However, young women in Shanxi who were possessed by
32. Interviews, pp. 179–80; Jiancha jiaodai, September 13, 1966, SD. Agatha’s baptismal name has been used as a pseudonym because she did not enter the published record
and is still alive. Baptismal names are not registered by the church or state and are not used
in daily life.
33. Tanbai cailiao, February 6, 1966, SD; Dayue shi liu yue, December [1965], SD;
Jiaodai, April 15, 1970, SD; Jianchashu, October 1, 1965, SD; X de tanbai jiaodai cailiao,
April 18, [1970], SD; Jianchashu, April 11, 1970, SD; Interviews, pp. 179–80.
34. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 15; X jiang shehuizhuyi jiaoyu,
March 4, 1966, SD Zonghe.
35. Interviews, p. 189.

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CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

demons typically shook violently, and the demon spoke through them,
whereas Agatha was described as “smiling coldly” and then collapsing as if
dead like European Catholic visionaries of the early-twentieth century.
After she collapsed, prayers and holy water revived her, and it was then that
she preached.36 Holy water, which was sprinkled or drunk, was seen as a
powerful way of warding off demons, reflecting both European Catholic
practice and Chinese tradition. People scattered holy water on the possessed, but also on members of workteams and the militia.37
There were many seers, and Agatha was quite typical in the form of
her trances and the content of her preaching, but perhaps the most popular
and widely respected response was provided by a young man in Liuhe village known by his baptismal name of Antony, who combined spiritual
warfare with the Catholic tradition of redemptive suffering. At twenty-six,
he was already older than many of the visionaries, and he was supported
and directed by an elderly catechist. The latter may explain why his visions
and preaching showed a familiarity with a much wider range of Catholic
teaching and practice. He had been named after St. Anthony of Padua, a
Franciscan famous for his conversion of heretics, his miraculous powers,
and his vision of an apparition of the infant Jesus. The young man saw a
vision of the saint in his home and adopted the slogan “to live and even to
die to follow St. Antony.”38 He preached on the Ten Commandments and
the Stations of the Cross. In accordance with the attempts to identify with
the suffering of Jesus promoted by the Italian missionaries, he also wore a
belt to mortify the flesh, whipped himself, and placed hot coals on his bed.
This self-chosen suffering was seen as a powerful weapon in the war
between good and evil, and there were especially severe cases of demonic
possession in the courtyard of his house. Visitors saw monkeys, bats, and
balls of fire, which they exorcized with water from the well that had been
made holy by pouring holy water into it. Antony himself performed exorcisms so dramatic that on one occasion the terrified onlookers began to
wail and cry out to the Virgin Mary for mercy. Demonic possession presented evil as irrational, overpowering, and unavoidable, whereas in exor-

36. For local spirit possession, see letter from Aloysius Moccagatta, Acta Ordinis
Fratrum Minorum, 4 (1885), 24–25. For European trances, see William A. Christian Jr.,
Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 274–94.
37. Shengtu huiyi jilu, August 5, 1965, SD Zonghe; Kongsu: shi shei haisile wo ma? [控
诉：是谁害死了我妈？][Accusation: Who Killed My Mother?], (Taiyuan, 1966), p. 1;
Steve A. Smith, “Local Cadres Confront the Supernatural: The Politics of Holy Water
(Shenshui) in the PRC, 1949–1966,” China Quarterly, 188 (2006), 999–1022.
38. Interviews, p. 109: 舍身致命，跟随圣安多尼

HENRIETTA HARRISON

763

cisms the battle between good and evil was publicly acted out when those
present joined in the prayers.39 This public drama rang true to the villagers,
and one of the most dramatic events took place on May 26 when the police
arrived to arrest Antony. People packed the streets, blocking the police
vehicles. Some climbed onto the trucks and struggled with the police;
others lay down in the road. The police had to fire their guns in the air to
force a way through.40
Even so, new visionaries continued to appear over the next six weeks,
and Catholics continued to travel to hear preachers or gather for prayers.
Some of the largest gatherings were for prayers for rain, as the little that
had occurred failed to assist the province in recovering from the famine
that still continued after the Great Leap Forward.41 Since 1958 annual village pilgrimages to pray for rain at the area’s two major shrines—Mary
Queen of Angels at Bansishan and Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows on the
hill above Dongergou—had been banned, but young men had continued
to go and were tacitly permitted to do so. In July 1965 huge numbers of
Catholics visited these shrines, to pray for rain (as they explained to the
workteams) and to pray to the Virgin Mary for protection in their troubled
times (as they remember now). When rain eventually fell, crowds gathered
to give thanks. At the shrine of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows at Dongergou approximately 5000 Catholics carried the image of the Virgin up the
mountain in procession.42 One of the last visions took place two days later
in Liuhe when a teenage boy called Wang Niuhai was attending to the irrigation of a vegetable patch. When neighbors came to investigate the water
that had overflowed, he was found lying on his back under a tree. His
hands were together as in prayer; his eyes were closed; and he was calling,
“Mary Mother of God! Mary Mother of God!” The neighbors knelt down
beside him and prayed. They could hear him speaking to Mary, who
appeared to be giving him holy water to drink and telling him to pray. He
then described a series of scenes, including a place where people were nailing together crosses for Jesus to carry and a journey to the gates of heaven.

39. Jiancha jiaodai, September 13, 1966, SD; Dayue shi liuyue, December [1965], SD;
Interviews, pp. 103–04, 109; Paolo Apolito, Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra, p.
142–45.
40. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 12, 16; Jiancha jiaodai, September
13, 1966, SD; Interviews, pp. 104, 109.
41. Chang Libing, “Cong yishi dao saoluan,” p. 6; Shanxi tongshi [山西通史] [Shanxi
History], (Taiyuan, 2001), 10:353.
42. Zongjiao gongzuo xuanchuan 2:11; Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965,
12.

764

CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

When the boy’s father heard the news, he fell to his knees in prayer, for
everyone knew now that a major crackdown was inevitable.43
5. The Crackdown
Two days later, on the night of July 15, the 2357 residents of Liuhe
were surrounded by more than 2000 armed militia; 1000 cadres were sent
into the village to check the occupants of each house. Visionaries and 120
people from outside the village were arrested and taken to the police station, which was soon chaotic with people wailing and tired, thirsty children. Everyone was required to provide a written account of their actions,
and most were sent home the next day. Others, however, were taken to the
provincial courts in Taiyuan where they were interrogated night after night
and sometimes tortured with beatings and electric shocks.44 The Shanxi
Communist Party announced that after seven months of reacting to events,
it was now taking the initiative and had “used revolutionary violence to
overpower the enemy.”45
New workteams were sent in, and the crackdown followed a familiar
pattern. For months, there were constant meetings in the Catholic villages.
These initially were huge rallies of 10,000 or even 20,000 people where
some of those arrested earlier in the year would describe their various
crimes and make accusations against the Church. One speaker was a young
man whose mother had died after visiting the Bansishan shrine at the
height of the visions. The family had tried to exorcize her by ritual flagellation on the stomach, heart, and temples. Now the young man accused the
Church of poisoning his mother by making her drink (unboiled) holy
water and then causing him to beat her to death to cover up its negligence.
The proceedings were recorded and played to the Catholics in other villages. In other meetings, those who had taken part were made to re-enact
the best-known miracles such as the opening of the church doors and ringing of the bell at Liuhe (by climbing through a rear window) to show that
they had been faked. There were also exhibitions of damaged plastic items
and nylon socks, the braids cut off by women, holy water, and other objects
associated with the trouble.46 The workteams singled out a small group of
leaders who would be held responsible for what was now labeled a counter43. Interviews, pp. 157–58: 圣母，圣母。
44. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 11–12; Interviews, pp. 178, 187–88.
45. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, November 27, 1965, 2: 用革命的暴力，治服敌人。
46. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, November 27, 1965, 2; December 28, 1965, 13; Kongsu:
shi shei haisile wo ma?

HENRIETTA HARRISON

765

revolutionary movement and pressed other Catholics to reject and
denounce them.
At first there was considerable resistance. People said, “We had no
guns or knives, we didn’t kill anyone or set fire to anything. How can
saying a few prayers have become counter-revolutionary?”47 They refused
to speak in discussion groups, thought the recordings were unreliable, said
that the people confessing on stage were only doing so because they had
been starved in prison, reminded each other that they must not break the
commandment not to bear false witness, and told each other that Li
Zhenxiang was a true saint and had not in fact been captured. Those who
were most vocal, especially if their families had prospered before 1949,
were sent away to study classes often held in the county town. There they
spent their days studying how Catholicism had been brought to China by
imperialism and had turned Chinese people into loyal running dogs of
imperialism. The evenings were spent in criticism sessions where anyone
who did not criticize others would be next to come under attack. Only
those who actively conformed would be allowed to return home.48
Meanwhile, more and more of the visionaries who had been arrested
were brought to the meetings to confess to faking their trances, seducing
and raping women, and cheating people out of their money.49 Catholics
understood the pressures brought to bear on these people; but they had
believed them to be saints, with heroic virtues and supernatural powers,
and now they felt betrayed. The most shocking case was Li Zhenxiang,
who is not discussed by people today; they say only that she was very
wicked. There were, in fact, also visionaries who did not refute their original accounts of divine intervention (like the sixteen-year-old Wang
Niuhai who continued to insist that the Virgin Mary had spoken to him,
despite severe beatings and immense pressure to accuse his father or the
parish priest of prompting him), but these people remained in prisons or
study classes.50 Catholics who attended the meetings saw only those who
incriminated themselves and betrayed others. Other villagers who had
been confident were now less sure. Pressured to say that he had not seen a
vision at Changgou, one man hesitated: “I experienced the miracle but I

47. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 13: 没枪，没刀，没杀人，没放
火，念念经就能成了反革命？！
48. Jiancha, December 14, 1970, SD; Interviews, p. 110.
49. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 14; X tanbai jiaodai, September 27,
1965, SD Zonghe.
50. Interviews, pp. 189–90.

766

CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

didn’t see it. Under the light I sometimes saw it, but it was belief. I said I
saw the Holy Mother . . . but now I realize that there was no miracle.”51
Those who had been enthusiastic supporters of the visions came under particular pressure and were often active in denouncing them. Those who had
been criticized by the seers and accused of having demons had obvious personal reasons for wanting to discredit their accusers. But most of all, people
hated the fact that men and women who had promised so much were now
blackening the name of the Catholic Church, even if their confessions were
extorted and untrue.
By the end of the autumn, almost all the villagers had submitted short,
written statements recounting where they had been since March, admitting that the leaders of the movement had been counter-revolutionaries
using religion as a cloak, or that what they themselves had done was illegal,
and promising that in future they would “obey the Party and Chairman
Mao, work hard at production, labor quietly, and strive to become a Five
Good Points commune member.”52 There were also some who admitted
that Catholicism was a tool of imperialism, but at this stage their numbers
were very few. In the village for which statistics exist, they consisted of a
retired urban worker who had ceased to go to church years earlier after
leaving the village for the city in his teens and an impoverished man who
had migrated to the village as a hired laborer and said that he had converted only to survive.53
The Shanxi Communist Party issued policies aimed at putting down
any remnants of opposition, raising class consciousness among Catholics,
destroying the reputation of the clergy, and winning over the young.54
Repercussions were felt around the country: religious affairs officials were
required to study a report on the events; 912 Catholic villages were especially targeted; and cities set up study classes on class struggle, imperialism,
and scientific atheism for believers.55 In January 1966 the Four Cleanups

51. Huiyi julu, “Tianzhujiao jiaodai wenti,” September 23, 1965, SD Zonghe: 我相售
圣吉。我但没有看过，在灯光下有时就看到了，但就是相信。 我说的看见圣母。。
。我现在认识到是没有圣吉。
52. Jiancha, October 3, 1965, SD: 要听党的话和毛主席的话，努力生产，安息劳动
，争取五好社员。The Five Good Points were being loyal to the nation and commune,
taking part in collective labor, respecting the law, obeying the leadership, working as a team,
and being frugal.
53. X xian X gongshe X cun [October 1965], SD Zonghe; Qingli jieji duiwu geren lüli
dengjibiao, May 1, 1970, SD.
54. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, November 27, 1965, 4.
55. Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, December 28, 1965, 19–20.

HENRIETTA HARRISON

767

Religion Office in Taiyuan also issued a set of textbooks for the workteams
operating in the Catholic villages. The title of the opening volume, which
set the tone for the series, was Catholicism Is a Tool of Imperialist Invasion.
There were volumes based on the writings of Marx and Lenin, anticlerical
works attacking the medieval papacy, and several volumes dealing with
what were perceived as the specific problems of the previous year: When
Catholicism Promotes the Ideas of God, Jesus and the Holy Mother It Is Making
the Laboring People into Cattle and Horses of the Reactionaries; Draw a Clear
Line against the Enemy and Totally Smash the Reactionary Idea that All
Catholics in the World Are One Family; A Criticism of the Catholic Ten Commandments; and The Wicked Activities of the Catholic Clergy in Taiyuan.56
Using these teaching materials, the workteams began to push Catholics to
renounce the Church. This usually took the form of an application to join
the Party’s mass organizations, combined with a declaration that Catholicism was a bad foreign religion. The numbers who agreed to do this
remained very low; in the village for which there are statistics another three
people renounced the Church at this stage. Meanwhile, the workteam had
a great deal of trouble with absenteeism. As the movement wound down,
Catholics skipped meetings and went to visit relatives in other villages.57
The Four Cleanups in the Catholic villages ended in March 1966.
6. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76)
Two months later Beijing announced the start of a major new campaign, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The targets were the
much the same as those of the Four Cleanups, but the campaign was aimed
at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party. In Shanxi the
provincial government, which had close links to the faction under attack,
initially resisted implementing the new campaign until Mao, exasperated
with the slow pace of events, encouraged student Red Guards in Beijing to
travel to exchange revolutionary experiences with Red Guards in other
cities. The first Red Guards from Beijing arrived in Taiyuan on August 12,
1966, and soon thousands were arriving each day.58
Given the events of the previous year, Catholics in Shanxi were both
a natural target for the Red Guards and a convenient distraction for the
provincial government. From August 23 to September 15 the Catholic
56. Zongjiao gongzuo xuanchuan vols. 1–14.
57. Tianzhujiao X, X, X san ren de rutuan shenqingshu, March1966, SD; Zongjiao
gongzuo baogao, March 22, 1966, SD Zonghe.
58. Shanxi tongshi 10:414.

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CHINESE CATHOLIC VISIONARIES

clergy gathered in Taiyuan cathedral were put on display as a living exhibition, and groups of Red Guards arrived in the Catholic villages. Up to
this point there had been considerable violence, but it had been narrowly
targeted and out of sight in police lockups, prisons, and the so-called study
classes. With the arrival of the Red Guards, violence was staged in full
public view. Taken to see the exhibition of the clergy were 600,000
Catholic villagers, local schoolchildren, and others, who watched these
priests, who had been deeply respected by their parishioners, humiliated
and beaten. In the villages ordinary Catholics were badly beaten during
public struggle sessions.59
It was at this point that ordinary villagers finally gave in and wrote
statements denouncing the Church or gave their spoken agreement at
meetings to the statement that Catholicism was a bad religion. In these
highly formulaic written statements people wrote that they were hereditary
Catholics but now understood that “Catholicism is a bad religion, a
Western religion, a landlord religion, an exploitative religion, and a
religion that hurts people” and that it was “a tool of the imperialist invasion
of China.”60 They promised to break with it, obey Chairman Mao, stand
with the broad masses, and work hard. One of the few texts in the archive
that is different comes from a woman who had divorced and then married
a non-Christian. Her letter is a powerful attack on her neighbors for their
attitude to the divorce.61 Unsurprisingly, genuine feelings against the
Church were more likely to be driven by family disputes and personal
unhappiness, rather than imperialist behavior of the missionaries who had
left twenty years earlier. Those who apostatized were then required to
show their commitment in action—local Catholics demolished the
churches most closely associated with the 1965 movement, and many
other churches lost their bell towers.62 The exhibition in Taiyuan ended
when the Red Guards moved on to attack the provincial secretary of the
Communist Party, but activists who had entered village government
during the Four Cleanups and the early months of the Cultural Revolution
continued to be in charge. Thus the pressure on the few individuals in each
village who continued to refuse to denounce the Church was intense.

59. Qin Geping, Taiyuan jiaoqu jianshi, pp. 363–68; Jianchashu, September 9, 1966,
SD.
60. Juexinshu, September 7, 1967, SD: 天主教是坏教，洋教，地主教，剥削教，害
人的教。。。是侵略中国的工具。
61. Quanjia tuijiaoshu, September 1966, SD.
62. Guo Chongxi, “Taiyuan tianzhujiao shilue,” pp. 184, 188, 190, 198–99, 219;
Shanxi tongzhi, pp. 405, 407; Interviews, p. 179.

HENRIETTA HARRISON

769

In 1970 Beijing took control again and allowed large-scale executions
by lower level authorities in an attempt to stabilize the new political order.
Among the large numbers of people killed at this time (most because they
had been on the wrong side of factional struggles) were several Catholics
accused of crimes connected with the visions. Hao Nai and Wang Shiwei,
the Franciscan Superior, were publicly executed in the provincial capital.
Wang is said to have shouted, “Long live Catholicism! Down with Communism!”, as a truck carried him through the crowded main streets of
Taiyuan, until someone leapt up onto the truck and drove a metal gag
through his cheek. There were also quieter executions of ordinary
Catholics who had insisted since their imprisonment in 1965 that Catholicism was a good religion. Many others remained in prison well into the
1970s while their families struggled to survive without them.63
7. Conclusion
After 1966 churches were closed, families prayed together secretly if at
all, and ordinary Catholics did not dare even to eat noodles to celebrate
Christmas; but this is not the whole story. In 1979, when Deng Xiaoping
came to power and government policy toward religion changed, the
Catholic villages were quick to rebuild their churches. Fengshenghe, where
Li had taught, reopened its church in 1980. In Liuhe, where the church had
been razed to the ground, everyone in the village gave money to rebuild it
in the same gothic style, but it would now seat a congregation of 4000. The
new church was completed in 1985.64 Clearly the attempt to teach
Catholics not to believe in religion had failed. Villagers did have the ability
to resist, and the state was unable to impose its will over the long term.
One of the reasons that the state efforts failed is that, although religious repression was extreme, it was intermittent and patchy. In each area
local histories and provincial-level political dynamics shaped the events
that occurred. The story of the Catholic villagers of central Shanxi and
their experiences of the Four Cleanups is a story peculiar to them. It is not
the same as the story of the Catholics of Shanghai who came under much
more intense attack in the early 1950s and have been studied by Paul Mar-

63. Domenico Gandolfi, “Cenni di storia del vicariato apostolico di Taiyuanfu Shansi,
Cina 1930–1953,” Studi Francescani, 84 (1987), 356; Interviews, p. 151: 天主教万岁！打倒
共产主义！
64. Guo Chongxi, “Taiyuan tianzhujiao shilue,” p. 219; Shehui zhuyi chuji jieduan
zongjiao zhuangkuang diaocha baogao xuanji [Selections from the Report of Investigation on
Religion during the Primary Stage of Socialism], (Beijing, 1987), p. 72.

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iani, or of the rural Catholics of the northeastern province of Jilin who
experienced a revivalist movement—apparently similar to that which took
place in Shanxi—a few years earlier.65 Our understanding of what happened has to move beyond a focus on events that occurred on a national
level and especially beyond a focus on the Cultural Revolution, which was
not always the defining moment.
However, memories of what happened in 1965 remain crucial for both
Shanxi’s Catholics and for local government. The stories of the visions and
of those Catholics who consistently resisted demands that they renounce
the Church are now an important part of the evangelism through which
the Church has expanded at a rate not seen since the eighteenth century.
On the other hand, members of the urban elite and local officials who
share the nationalist feelings and secular ideals of the communist state also
remember what happened. For them, the legacy of Catholicism as a bad
religion lives on, as they describe Buddhists as obedient, and Catholics as
problematic and potentially disruptive. Thus the visions of 1965 remain
central to the identity of a new generation of Shanxi Catholics and to their
ongoing relations with the local state.

65. Paul P. Mariani, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist
Shanghai (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Zongjiao gongzuo tongxun, January 18, 1964, pp. 9–13.

Forum Essay
ROBIN DARLING YOUNG, DAVID FRANKFURTER,
ROBERT J. PENELLA, JILL HARRIES, AVERIL CAMERON,
AND CHRISTOPHER P. JONES
Between Pagan and Christian. By Christopher P. Jones. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press. 2014. xv, 207. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-67472520-1.)

INTRODUCTION BY ROBIN DARLING YOUNG
(THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA)
Was there a battle in late antiquity between Christians and pagans?
Ancient ecclesiastical debaters and chroniclers, supported by their scriptures and theology, said so; and many modern historians have agreed.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall erected a tableau of paganism’s combat, struggle,
and protracted death that has encouraged the modern historiography of
dramatic conflict. Like an ancient Civil War, clear battles between Christian and pagan have provided meaning, entertainment—and even the possibility for reenactment in the form of recent Kulturkämpfe.
The very title of Christopher P. Jones’s Between Pagan and Christian
suggests another possible construal of late-ancient religious culture. Jones,
emeritus professor of classics at Harvard, here scrutinizes Christian and
pagan texts and monuments from the reign of Constantine through the
sixth century. His highly distilled, clear, and calm account shows how the
imperial sponsorship of the new, Christian religion still permitted traditional religious practice to continue and allowed double allegiances or
ambiguous loyalties among late-ancient people both illiterate and cultured.
In the West, Jones argues, medieval Christendom emerged only between
the sixth and the eleventh centuries, and carried paganism in its genes; in
the East, only Islam brought paganism to an end.
Jones does not begin his account in the first century, traditionally the
beginning of the pagan-Christian clash. Instead, he arranges his examination with three narrative chapters at the beginning and two at the end of
the book. The five middle chapters discuss topics: the Christian God and
the idolatry of “other divinities” (p. 34); sacrifice, blood, and prayer;
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debate; and conversion. A timeline of engagements discussed in the book
follows an appendix, and the book’s irenic tone reflects Jones’s long
engagement with the subject. Jones’s fascination with the topic began
decades ago, when his attention turned to a set of late-ancient inscriptions
that seemed to evidence neither, or both, Christian and pagan beliefs. His
philologist’s attention to the nuances of language and text allows him to
perceive, in a wide array of written texts and images, the ambiguity and
mingling of pagan and Christian that the late-ancient Mediterranean
world collected, often despite the austerity of episcopal or imperial commands to disentangle.
Chapter 1 begins with an encounter told by that most cosmopolitan of
New Testament writings, the Book of Acts. Jones uses the exemplary story
in Acts 17 to illustrate that the first interaction between Christianity and
paganism happened during St. Paul’s missionary journey to Greece. The
Acts of the Apostles records Paul’s speech on the Areopagus as an effort to
show that an aspect of the Athenians’ own devotion pointed toward the
belief in one God and allowed for the recognition of the resurrection as its
proof. If this speech actually occurred, then Paul may have been the origin
of the idea that the following of Jesus was the specification and culmination of ideas implicit in Hellenism. As a Jew, Paul also expressed an idea
shared and expounded in much greater detail and length by Philo, who
found Greek philosophy and philosophical conduct anticipated in
Judaism—as did Josephus, several decades later. Yet later Christian authors
also condemned the religion of polytheism—and these views, too, were
shaped by books of the Old Testament usually referred to as Deuteronomistic—those works insisting on a sharp line of demarcation between
those faithful to the covenant of Abraham and those who followed the religion of “outsiders” such as the Philistines or the Egyptians.
Christians themselves harbored a similar ambivalence toward paganism, based on the library of Jewish works they took with them as churches
and synagogues separated (and on their local experiences), and it deepened
regarding all religious expressions that were not Christian and not Jewish.
But what should contemporary scholars call these groups? Jones spends the
first chapter of his book discussing the terms available for those “outsiders”
from the Christian perspective. He considers pagan, Hellene, gentile, and
polytheist—but finally settles on a modified use of the term pagan. “It is
best therefore,” he writes, “not to think of the distinction between pagans
and Christians as a single spectrum running, like modern party-lines, from
full or ‘committed’ Christians at one end and ‘committed’ pagans at the
other, with ‘center-pagans’ and ‘center-Christians’ toward the middle.”

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What counts as “pagan depends very much on the outlook of the contemporary observer. . . . Paganism is always a blurred and shifting category that
defies neat taxonomies.” Jones wants to show that paganism is consistently
a “blurred and shifting category that defies neat taxonomies” and to examine their interaction and combination on the edges (the above three quotes
are from p. 7).
The second chapter discusses Constantine, the first Christian emperor
whose “sudden and mysterious conversion . . . was to be a turning point in
the relations of Christianity in the pagan world” (p. 9). Jones does not dispute that up to Diocletian, the imperial government could impose prosecution and gruesome capital punishments for refusing to sacrifice to gods
or to emperors—yet, although Christians were under threat for two and a
half centuries from Nero to Constantine, they continued to develop their
church by “the slow and patient work of teaching and example” (p. 9).
Constantine’s conversion was downplayed by pagan historians and emphasized by Christian historians (like Eusebius), yet the emperor’s true depth
of belief is difficult to ascertain. Jones speculates that Constantine may
have been similar to earlier emperors known to be more sympathetic to
Christianity such as Caracalla and Severus Alexander. He may himself
been a pagan monotheist and therefore tolerant of Christianity. To
demonstrate how his contemporaries could have interpreted Constantine
as either Christian or pagan, Jones compares a series of five Latin, pagan
panegyrics for Constantine (307–21) with one for his father Constantius
(297). None of these discusses Constantine’s Christianity; indeed, they
portray him in terms completely unlike the Praise of Constantine that Eusebius wrote after the emperor’s death. Jones writes that even in 321, a pagan
orator “could fit a Christian emperor into a frame of pagan thought” (p.
14). Like the 313 panegyric, the Arch of Constantine (provided by the
Roman Senate to honor the new emperor in 315) also “glides over the
space between paganism and Christianity” by speaking of the emperor’s
“divine mind” (p. 15) but—unlike Eusebius—without comparing him to
the Logos, the second person of the Christian Trinity.
Constantine favored, but did not enforce, Christianity, Jones maintains—even though he ordered the destruction of a temple of Aphrodite in
Jerusalem to make way for the pilgrimage church of the Anastasis. Constantine acted like a pagan emperor while encouraging Christianity; for
him, the two positions were not incompatible. Nonetheless, his practice of
Christianity encouraged the conversion of subjects, as did, in the next century, the conversion of the royal houses of Armenia, Georgia, and
Ethiopia. Finally, Jones suggests that in the case of the first two countries,

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a significant feature of Constantine’s conversion was the example of the
great rival to Rome—the Sassanian emperors of Persia. Uniting and
strengthening their lands with the religion of Ahura-Mazda—Zoroastrianism—their “unifying cult,” complete with a network of temples and a
powerful priesthood, they provided an unsettling example worthy of imitation and particularly useful in encouraging the restoration of social order
after the Roman Empire’s chaotic third century. “Part of the impulse for
the emperor’s conversion to Christianity,” Jones concludes drily, “may have
come from the supreme God of the Persians” (p. 22).
Chapter 3 evaluates Constantine’s immediate successors. Did they
campaign against paganism? Rather, Jones writes, they followed the precedent of Constantine, who was not overly anxious about the “persistence of
paganism” (p. 23). Indeed, with the exception of the Platonic-pagan
emperor and self-styled restaurator templorum, Julian (“more fanatical than
most of the Christian emperors” [p. 23] in his attempt to restore traditional
religious practice), all subsequent emperors were Christian and followed,
albeit unevenly, Constantine’s policy of “Christianization from above” (p.
24). The imperial legislation of Theodosius II and Justinian’s Code both
legislate against paganism, but such legislation does not dominate those
emperors’ legal legacy. Even when they did make laws restricting pagan
practices like temple sacrifices and subsequent feasting, they did so with
limited success, for those activities were popular, resistant to change,
adaptable—and passed with minor adjustments into Christianity over the
several centuries after Constantine. Unlike Julian, most of his successors
did not enjoy the religious fervor of the Constantinian dynasty. Even
Theodosius I’s antipagan legislation, a watershed in the imperial treatment
of the ancient religion, did not lead to the complete exclusion of pagans
from imperial service or from public life. It is true that Theodosius’s reign
marks “a visible hardening of imperial attitudes toward paganism” (p. 26).
Theodosius and his co-rulers forbade in 381 the practice of divinatory sacrifice in public and private; and in 391 Theodosius outlawed sacrifices, visiting shrines, and “rever[ing] images made by human hand, lest he become
liable to divine and human sanctions” (p. 26). These laws he targeted at all
ranks of the imperial service—cutting off, in effect, the connection
between imperial rule and the customary guardianship of the Roman pantheon, and providing another incentive, at least among civil servants, for
the abandonment of the prior customs of sacrifice. Yet even Theodosius
did not ban prominent pagans from participation in high imperial office or
in public discourse, and the policies of Theodosius’s immediate successors,
Jones writes, “show a consistent but selective movement toward restriction
[of pagan worship]” (p. 27). Even after 435, when animal sacrifice was for-

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bidden, and the destruction of temples and shrines was ordered, numerous
places—from villages to cities—continued their practice quietly. The pattern in the early-fifth century seemed to be dual—as Jones wryly notes, “In
423, the emperors in one and the same ordinance suppose that there are no
longer any pagans, and decree that pagans and Jews are to remain unmolested so long as they live quietly and break no law” (p. 27). Up through
the reign of Anastasius (491–518), antipagan measures were taken by the
emperors, but without any thorough attempts to eradicate paganism.
Yet the empire was brought to a stricter policy when the emperor
Justin (518–27) and his nephew, Justinian (527–65), tried to reorganize
and stabilize an empire under attack from its enemies; the issuance of the
Code of Justinian marked a rise in imperial strictures against both pagans
and heterodox Christians, the latter of whom had usually been punished
more strictly than pagans in previous reigns. Justinian reinforced the
empire’s sponsorship of Christianity by rejecting leniency toward Christians who relapsed into paganism. Pagans as yet unbaptized had to take
their households and families to local churches for catechizing and baptism; no pagans could teach or be paid by the empire to operate schools,
so that they could not influence young students. Sacrifice was considered
a plot against the state, and officeholders who had converted for the sake
of holding office but had let their families remain pagan were to be punished. Still, however, Jones reminds his readers that even though the
charge of paganism could be a political weapon used against a rival, Justinian did not force all pagans to convert to Christianity, choosing instead,
like his predecessors, merely to forbid pagan practice. Although the laws
were used to “restrict freedom of [pagans’] action and offered inducements to convert,” yet those laws did not amount to “instruments of
oppression such as have been used by modern states against dissenters or
those of alien religions” (p. 29).
Instead, local actions on the part of Christians, often bishops and
monks, against pagans were far more numerous and severe than any imperial action. Thus in Egypt, the Christian mob killing (415) of Hypatia, the
Alexandrian pagan philosopher, or the attacks on “idols” at Menouthis in
the late-fifth century, took place at the instigation of bishops encouraging
monastic violence. Likewise, the purges approved by Justinian and
launched by John, the miaphysite bishop of Ephesus in Constantinople,
demonstrate that pagans were still plentiful enough to make lynchings
effective. Similarly, under Tiberius in about 579 there was a purge against
pagans in Syria, in which investigations by Christian bishops resulted in
the torture and confession of pagans under an imperial visitor.

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Finally, Jones concludes that the emperors from Constantine through
Justinian acted unevenly against paganism—sometimes restricting it,
sometimes leaving it alone. Since Constantine, emperors wanted the assistance and divine protection granted only by an effective religion, and then
as secular rulers, the emperors were always more concerned with preserving Christian unity than with crushing paganism; their disfavor fell less
on pagans, whose fault was a curable blindness, than on the Jews, who in
the Christian view had deliberately closed their eyes to the divine revelation offered to them and instead had killed God’s own Son and Messenger. (p. 32)

Yet even in the Christian empire, Judaism survived despite increasing
restrictions on the rights of Jewish communities. Not all Christian voices
were brutal ones. Jones quotes the fifth-century historian Socrates, who
wrote disapprovingly of Hypatia’s murder and noted that “murders, fights
and similar things are completely alien to those whose minds are Christian” (p. 33). Persuasion and instruction still constituted the real entry into
Christianity. As Jones writes, “there was another strain in Christianity that
held that persuasion was a better way to ensure true conversion, and this
strain, which historically precedes the use of force, was to survive well into
Late Antiquity” (p. 33).
After his historical survey of the relationship between the imperial
promotion of Christianity and customary paganism, Jones turns to matters
of belief and practice, devoting the next five chapters to the relationship
between Christianity and paganism. Chapter 4, “God and Other Divinities,” discusses how Christianity developed as an ambiguously monotheistic religion. Its mother, second-Temple Judaism, was itself not strictly
monotheist in any contemporary sense; the labeling of pagans as “polytheists” and “idolaters” by Christian authors belied Christianity’s own populous heaven. Jones writes:
Christians took from Judaism a complex picture of the higher powers
that not only allowed for a conception of multiple gods, even if one god
alone was supreme, but also acknowledged an opposing power, Satan or
“the Devil” who could even count as a god. (p. 34)

He might have added that canonical Jewish scriptures preserved traces of
goddess-worship opposed by the prophets later recorded in the Old Testament, and the panoply of angels and demons observable in the postexilic
Tobit, I Enoch, or 4 Ezra resemble the invisible Mesopotamian powers
also absorbed into Persian Zoroastrianism. Jones discusses this legacy and

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the complex Christian understanding of divinity that built on it, adding a
triadic Godhead, and retaining its demons and angels. This set of heavenly
powers, although not as complex as pagan conceptions, still bridged paganism and Platonic teaching, which allowed Christianity to absorb pagan
conceptions and pagan philosophical teachings about those powers. Christians like Clement of Alexandria or Eusebius of Caesarea could think thus
that much pagan philosophy was an anticipation of Christianity and its
teaching—especially when pagan teaching emphasized one divine principle behind all these powers. According to Jones, “in many ways pagan and
Christian beliefs resembled one another. The effect of this resemblance
was like a magnet, creating both positive and negative force, both attraction and repulsion” (p. 42). Certain Christian groups—the Carpocratians,
or the Hypsistarians to whom the father of Gregory Nazianzus belonged,
were evidently groups that freely combined pagan and Christian beliefs.
Because Christianity—“like most religions” (Jones notes) “was inherently
fissile from the start, liable to divisions temporary or permanent,” it both
resembled and rebuked pagan polytheism; yet “the distinction between one
god and plural gods was more than a boundary between Christianity and
paganism: it was a mine buried beside Christianity’s onward path” (p. 46).
The subsequent history of Christian belief, up to and including its
Mormon child, may demonstrate Jones’s acuity here: the careful Constantinopolitan creed, hedging in Trinity with monotheism, was one thing;
Christian belief, discussion, and fragmentation was another.
Chapter 5, “Idolatry,” addresses the conflict within Christianity—a
conflict externalized against pagan practice—inherited, like demons and
angels, from Judaism. Not only do doctrine and belief often diverge but
also there may be irreducible conflicts in opinion. On the one hand, depiction of the divine is forbidden as early as the Book of Exodus; on the other
hand, ancient synagogues portrayed divine interactions with humans and
decorated their floors and walls with potent symbols of God. Behind the
prohibition against idols—recorded in early Christian discussions (in the
“Jerusalem council” and Paul’s writings)—was “a tendency common to
Christians and pagans alike, to regard images, especially those in the
round, as having some of the qualities of the person or the being that they
represented” (p. 49). Later Christian apologists attacked idolatry, but
pagans responded that Christians were “staurolaters” (worshipers of the
cross). Yet as paganism weakened, Christian veneration of the cross
increased, as did their love of the portraits of holy peoples. Formally,
Christians continued to resist images—either statuary or flat depictions in
mosaics or paintings, with Eusebius of Caesarea and Epiphanius of
Salamis as two of the last representatives of this older prohibition. Yet

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thanks to imperial sponsorship and largesse, Christian portraits and statues
abounded. Sometimes, during late antiquity, Christians “saved” pagan art
by interpreting it as Christian, or at least not anti-Christian, whenever possible. Yet they still occasionally sought to destroy idols, and people remaining pagan sometimes hid their respected statues in houses—in other
words, measures against pagan idolatry drove the veneration of statues
underground. The measures taken by the emperor Leo III in 726, inaugurating the period of iconoclasm in the east, marked the widening of a conflict within Christianity itself over what was idolatry and what was not—a
conflict that, in a way, moved from the area between religions to an area
within one religion, Christianity, and continues to characterize it.
In “Sacrifice, Blood, and Prayer,” Jones in his sixth chapter comes to
the heart of ancient religion. Sacrifice—whether it took the form of the
actual slaughter of an animal near a temple, followed by a communal feast;
or metaphorical sacrifice, often interpreted in a philosophical way—was at
the heart of all ancient religious practice. Jones writes:
Greeks and Romans valued sacrifice not only because it was thought a
traditional and powerful form of communication with the gods, but also
. . . because it was closely connected with feasting, so much so that the
Greek word for “sacrifice,” thysia, had the secondary meaning of “banquet.” (p. 62)

Sacrifices in the pagan world were organized public rites, not unopposed in
late antiquity by philosophical teaching, but so central that Julian tried to
restore them in his brief reign, as a way restore and strengthen pagan practice. Christianity had a complex attitude toward sacrifice—again, because
it was an outgrowth of Judaism. As in the case of images, the Old Testament and other scriptural books cherished by Christianity also contained
contrary attitudes toward animal sacrifice and the Jerusalem Temple where
it occurred: on the one hand, elaborate commandments for sacrifice are
contained in it, and the erection of the Temple in Jerusalem detailed—the
central purpose of which was sacrifice pleasing to God and beneficial for
his people. But prophetic discourses also contained in the same book “proclaimed God’s disapproval of sacrifice when unaccompanied by true piety,
and such prophetic utterances later provide textual justification for Christians to reject all material sacrifice” (p. 65).
Nonetheless, Christianity itself could not avoid attraction to sacrifice
at least at the theological level—following from “commemorating the sacrifice of Christ, the central rite of Christianity, the Eucharist itself came to
be thought of as a sacrifice” (p. 66). Their admirers (like Origen) called the

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Christian martyrs participants in Christ’s redeeming action through their
own sacrificial deaths, and the collection of their garments or parts of their
bodies laid the groundwork for later Christian veneration (and, ironically,
feast-days in their honor, sometimes with the slaughter of animals for
communal feasting). Sacrifice, too, became part of the dialogue between
Christianity and enduring paganism in late antiquity. Although Jones does
not say so explicitly, the development of Christian ideas of sacrifice ultimately allowed the displacement of pagan sacrifice—not just by forbidding
it as a menace to public order and (sometimes) the health of the emperor
but also by providing an alternative. Sacrifice remained such a powerful
form of communal and personal religious life that prayer itself became seen
as a sacrifice, so that although blood sacrifice persisted, Christianity offered
an alternative, both building upon earlier pagan ideas and combining
Jewish ritual with its own. Ultimately Christian liturgy offered both verbal
and metaphorical sacrifice in its prayers, hymns, and Eucharistic offering.
Here, too, pagan practice persisted, but it did so by infusing new garments
and rituals.
Chapter 7, “Debate,” returns to the scene of Paul’s speech on the Areopagus of Athens and traces the evolving literary argument between Christian and pagan authors. Disputes or debates in this written form could be
adapted to Christian arguments against Judaism, ultimately becoming the
adversus Judaeos tradition. In the Christian Roman Empire, Jews could not
respond in kind—although they struck back with appropriate insults from
the safety of Persian Mesopotamia. But pagans could and did respond to
Christian criticism, learning more about Christianity as it grew in the
second and third centuries. They viewed Christians as irrational and as
impious; their blame of Christianity for the invasion of Italy led Augustine
of Hippo to write On the City of God. Christian ascendancy did not obviate
the need for a Christian response to paganism, and the fifth century produced significant, lengthy defenses of Christianity:
Paganism continued to be a threat, not only because some pagans refused
to be converted, but because Christians could be led astray by their reading of secular works, or by events that suggested that their opponents
were in the right. (p. 79)

Thus appeared the Apocriticos of Macarios of Magnesia, who perhaps drew
on Porphyry’s lost work against the Christians, as well as the Against Julian
of St. Cyril of Alexandria, who responded decades later to Julian’s Against
the Galilaeans. There are Cure of Hellenic Maladies by Theodoret, bishop of
Cyrrhus; Theophrastus by Aeneas of Gaza; and On Creation by Zacharias of
Mytilene. The two latter works contrast in detail neo-Platonist teachings

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with Christian—declaring Christianity the victor. Jones thinks that even in
the sixth century, pagan philosophy continued to draw adherents:
Even if [Zacharias’s] work does not report actual encounters in [a]
schoolroom, it shows how pagan thinkers continued to resist the doctrines of Christianity, and how Christian writers still felt the need to
counteract the influence of such unbelievers on their Christian listeners.
(p. 89)

Two final examples from the sixth century show the ongoing power of platonic philosophy: [pseudo-] Dionysius the Areopagite, whose purported
transmission of Pauline teaching makes the pagan neo-Platonist philosopher Proclus a main source for the metaphysics of Christian office, liturgy,
and mystical experience; and Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was
“famously free from any overt trace of Christianity” (p. 89). Jones concludes that Christian victory in the debate with paganism “was a victory by
absorption rather than by conquest” (p. 89).
In chapter 8, “Conversion,” Jones introduces the one clear difference
between Christianity and paganism in late antiquity—the Christian view
of salvation offered to the repentant and the conversion required to participate in that salvation. Jones writes:
The idea that God himself wished to “save” humanity from sin, and that
an institution set up on earth by God’s own son could forgive sin, was a
radical departure from the [pagan] idea that a human could escape divine
wrath only by sacrifice and other means of appeasement. (p. 104)

He does not discuss the origins of this difference, but it clearly originates
in first-century Judaism, in which (according to some) the favor extended
by God to his elect people could now potentially encompass “all nations”
by conversion and entry into the elect people understood as the worldwide
ekklesia (a word that, after all, differs little in meaning from synagogos).
Here, as throughout the book, Jones strives for balance: some who
responded to Christianity did not stay with the Church, and some (like
Constantine) delayed baptism until their deathbeds out of a concern for
the seriousness of their actions. Families like Augustine’s could be divided
among Christian and pagan; and although Augustine’s conversion (like
that of Marius Victorinus) was deep and inward, not all conversions resembled his. Family members were influential (again, like Augustine’s
mother), but gentle deathbed conversions occurred that followed a long life
of paganism. According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, numerous conversions in
Neocaesarea came about through medical cures given by saints, often in

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competition with the offerings of other religions. The demolition of pagan
shrines also caused conversions, as the substitution of churches for shrines
resulted in the attendance of Christians new and old—either in new
churches built near old shrines or in shrines repurposed for Christian use.
Pagan rituals, too, were converted—perhaps most famously the “rowdy
celebrations of martyrs” (p. 99) on the anniversaries of their deaths, alike
in almost every particular to the memorials of the dead on their anniversaries. But West and East were to be different in this regard: while Christian Europe began to be established in the West, the Roman East yielded
much of its territory to Islam and a new form of conversion. But before the
triumph of the Ummayads and finally the Ottomans, the population of the
Greek-speaking East was learning the language of sin and salvation—or of
final damnation—a theology with little resemblance to pagan ideas about
the afterlife.
Chapters 9 and 10 take up, respectively, the history of paganism and
its waning in the East and the West. The city of Rome, unlike Constantinople, had firm attachments to the old religion, and members of its aristocracy remained proudly pagan into the fifth century. The spread of
Christianity was widely blamed for its fall, and the old culture remained
after Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. Jones explores the poem of Rutilius
Namatianus, discouraged and disgusted with the “root of stupidity” (p.
117) of the Jews that had blossomed as Christianity, and the wretchedness
of the monks who lived near Rome. Similar was the Saturnalia of Macrobius, probably a pagan neo-Platonist like the younger Anthemius, a
learned patrician and politician whom some pagans hoped would revive
Hellenism. Some pagan rituals survived well into the late-fifth century. “It
is not surprising that this blend of paganism and Christianity,” Jones
writes, “persisted in Rome” (p. 120). Just because the empire was now
Christian did not mean that Christianity had won the villages of the countryside: bishops Maximus of Turin, Caesarius of Arles, and Martin of
Braga in Galicia all wrote about the paganism of the peasants they tried to
shepherd; the latter’s sermon On the Correction of Peasants gives details of
the inherited religion of the unlettered; and as Jones points out, the continuous recopying and translation of the sermon well into the Middle Ages
indicates its usefulness to pastors and bishops working, decade after
decade, at the same thankless job as Martin. Although pagan practices
remained, the conversion of kings like Clovis the Frank and his successors
spurred the Christianization of peasants in the fifth and sixth centuries.
In the East, the situation differed, although some pagan cities like
Harran and Baalbek in Syria persisted as wholly pagan, as did others in

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Egypt; the high prestige of Hellenistic culture allowed for wealthy and literate people to inhabit both Christianity and non-Christian, philosophical
paganism. Reasons are lost for which exceptions were made: Jones might
have mentioned the bishop Synesius of Cyrene (373–414), appointed by
the very same Alexandrian bishop Theophilus who destroyed the Serapeum with the instrument of a monastic gang; the same Synesius, the
friend of Hypatia who agreed to serve but reserved a blended Christian and
pagan philosophy and rhetoric for himself, consented to teach Christian
rudiments to the unwashed, and insisted on the use of marriage after his
consecration so that his family line would continue. Jones’s history of the
Platonic school in Athens is also illustrative; it persisted discreetly and
without much antagonism, unlike the relationship between Christians and
pagans in Alexandria. But neo-Platonism nonetheless declined in Athens
with the removal of cult statues from temples and their conversion to
churches. In Attica, as elsewhere, writes Jones, “erudite pagans from the
city were sustained by the cults of the surrounding territory, which their
interest helped to perpetuate” (p. 130). Eleusis did not become Christian
until the sixth century, but in the later fourth century Corinth’s temples fell
in earthquakes, and the city gained large churches and “pagans now worshiped less obtrusively at natural springs, where they jostled with Christians” (p. 131). In Asia Minor, too, Christianity spread unevenly; Jones
points to the survival of paganism in Aphrodisias until the later fifth century. In the eastern Mediterranean, outside of cities, “old cults continued
to flourish, and Christian communities could scarcely be distinguished
from pagan” (p. 135). Jones explores the continuing pagan practice of Gaza
(again until the late-fifth century) and Harran—cities where pagan practice proved durable, as well as in the country. Egypt, too, gives an example
of stubborn paganism, shown in the obstreperous campaigns against
paganism of the abbot Shenoute in 430–60. Even in Alexandria, pagan
philosophy and worship survived the assaults of Theophilus in the fourth
century and the anti-Julian treatise of Cyril in the mid-fifth. In the earlysixth century the warfare of gangs of Christian and pagan students resulted
in the discovery of pagan worship in suburban Menouthis—leading to an
imperially ordered investigation. Yet along the Nile to the south, in territory that remained Roman, a Christian bishop had to struggle in the midfifth century against “barbarians” (nomadic tribes including the Blemmyes), and the situation had not improved a century later.
Christianity did not have as secure a hold in the East as in the West;
although the emperor was “a defender of the faith,” the church was divided
after the Chalcedonian controversy. No central ecclesiastical authority held
sway in the East, as the bishop of Rome would achieve eventually in the

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West (thanks, perhaps, to the loss of rival North African bishoprics to
Islamic conversion), and the conversion of the formerly Arian Germanic
kingdoms further spread its authority. Interestingly, the mission of Augustine to England, writes Jones, “occurred only a few years before Muhammad received his summons from the angel Gabriel” (p. 143) and overturned the imperial religions of both Rome and Persia.
Jones uses his concluding chapter 11 to make a general statement of
the shifting of religious practice and doctrine in the Roman Empire.
Christianity expanded because it became a governmentally sponsored religion. With Christianity attaining a subsidized footing, bishops gaining
local political jurisdiction, emperors influencing bishops’ meeting in councils, and Christians achieving a favored status for social advancement,
paganism began to fade. Yet Christianity continued to split, and even
when whole kingdoms on the border of the empire became Christian—
Ethiopia, for instance, and Armenia—they did not necessarily adhere to
the emperor’s theology, but tended to follow that of their own rulers.
Competition with Persia remained, weakening the empire and its religion;
with the coming of the Arabs and Islam, Christianity did not die, “but
decline was inevitable” (p. 146). Because Christianity ceased to be the religion of the rulers, the “history of Christianity in the Arab world partly
replicated the history of paganism after the conversion of Constantine” (p.
146). In the Latin West, paganism haunts a Christianity that managed to
become the majority religion for a much longer time. It persisted as the
label for corruption in another’s Christian practice—for the Inquisition, for
the Protestant reformers, and for the Enlightenment as well. Edward
Gibbon himself, for eighteen months of his youth a convert, recovered and
came to believe, with his Protestant countrymen that his now-spurned
Roman Catholicism contained paganism as well.
So in the Latin West, paganism—despite the reorientation of shrines
and the Christianizing of certain pagan practices, following the explicit
instructions of Gregory the Great to Augustine of England—never really
died. Gibbon, Jones points out, could write about “The Final Destruction
of Paganism” over a fifty-year period between Constantine and Theodosius I. “Yet in another sense,” Jones writes, “paganism was indestructible,
in that it had never really existed except as an entity in the eyes of its
beholders” (p. 145).

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COMMENTS OF DAVID FRANKFURTER
(BOSTON UNIVERSITY)
Coming on the immediate heels of Alan Cameron’s enormous Last
Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2011), which largely rejects the notion of any
continuing “paganism”; of Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianity and Paganism
in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, 1997), which demonstrated
the utter complexity of “pagan” versus “Christian” boundaries in late antiquity; and of Frank Trombley’s Hellenic Religion and Christianisation
(Leiden, 1993), which managed in two volumes to deconstruct any triumph of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean, Jones’s succinct and
engaging book conjures a world of shared discourses, religious and intellectual resistance, and outright conflict between these two (putatively distinct) religious ideologies well into the sixth century.
A book seeking to encompass so subtle a topic over so great a swathe
of geography and time (c. 200–600 AD), and in so few pages, is bound to
incur specialists’ criticisms. A good number of reviewers will certainly
object to Jones’s overly credulous use of hagiographical sources as historical
witnesses to the realities of Christianity and local religions and of the New
Testament as theological witness to an essential Christianity. I would like,
however, to raise a larger point about the dichotomy that Jones uses to
frame the book (and that he astutely worried in an earlier essay1). “Paganism,” he admits, “is always a blurred and shifting category that defies neat
taxonomies” (p. 7)—indeed, “that it had never really existed except as an
entity in the eyes of its opponents” (p. 145). Throughout, he finds, “Pagan
and Christian motifs can seem so close that it is difficult to decide between
direct influence and independent creativity” (p. 51); or the two are
“blended,” as in festival practices in the West (pp. 120–23); or “in many
ways Pagan and Christian beliefs resembled one another” (p. 42) and even
merged in some Eastern cults. It is this fundamental messiness in the historical record, loudly denied by early Christian authors asserting thick
boundaries, that has led a new generation of historians to take more seriously the self-defeating nature of the term pagan for scholarly work.
The problem is this: even if one begins with caveats about “paganism”
as a Christian construct that denigrates its subjects and mischaracterizes
the diverse worlds of traditional religion into which Christianity assimilated (as Jones laid out in “Fuzziness” and suggests in chapter 1 here), one
1. Christopher P. Jones, “The Fuzziness of ‘Paganism,’” Common Knowledge, 18 (2012),
249–54.

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inevitably comes to embrace monolithic generalizations about “paganism’s”
inevitable idolatry, blood-sacrifices, and rustic conservatism, which
required a psychological “conversion” to appreciate Christianity’s higher
theology of sin and redemption (see pp. 102–05). Essentially, in the course
of characterizing “paganism,” one inevitably comes to depict a kind of
Catholicism in Protestant caricature.
Jones’s otherwise compelling chapter on discourses of sacrifice is a case
in point. We have been led by public altar friezes, certain Roman authors,
and, even more, early Christian authors redefining Jewish concepts of
Avodah zera to imagine that “the usual form of both Greek and Roman
sacrifice involved the slaughter of animals . . . and consumption of the
blood and meat” (61). With this image we can simultaneously gasp at the
public butchery that sustained ancient cities, cringe at its (putative) extension into martyrdoms of Christians, and shift beatifically to Christ’s own
metaphorical sacrifice that supplanted it all. But thusia, as Jones himself
points out, really had the sense of feasting, while the usual form of ritual
offering across the Mediterranean world involved wine, cakes, and oils. It
is possible to acknowledge Christian authors’ near-obsession with bloody
animal slaughter while contextualizing this ideological topos against a religious world where such slaughter was not the norm in interacting with
gods and where—when it did take place—it had the character of a holiday
pig-roast, not some crude perversion of the Eucharist. Avoiding the
stereotype of “paganism and its blood-sacrifices” allows us more easily to
understand the integration of animal slaughter and feasting into Christian
festival life, as Paulinus of Nola celebrates for the cult of St. Felix and
Sozomen for the cult of Mamre. The language of “paganism” turns the one
into “animal sacrifice” and the other into “animals humbly brought for
God,” whereas a more circumspect terminology sees simply the vicissitudes
of festival animal slaughter.
I cannot propose a simple replacement for “paganism,” since any
attempt to capture the overwhelming diversity of local, civic, and imperial
religious practices in the Roman world, as well as the new intellectual
trends that Jones addresses, will intrinsically conjure a theological phantom
of little historical value for discussing either continuities or the innovative
local forms of Christianity that fill the pages of saints’ lives and bishops’
sermons. Jones (“Fuzziness,” p. 253) and I have independently returned to
“heathen” as a sufficiently extreme term of ancient alterity that readers can
grasp the prejudice in its use; but this term can only be used to gloss the
perspective of Christian authors. What of the historian’s? Perhaps the
answer is simply more precision in specifying the religious worlds of intel-

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FORUM ESSAY

lectuals or of late-antique Panopolis, of Rome or Hierapolis or the Iberian
countryside, and to describe those worlds in such a way that Christianity is
not so much an encroaching absolutist ideology to which one converts as a
selection of symbols and stories that people could appropriate as they were
inclined, leaving religion, properly conceived, in perpetual contestation and
syncretism.

COMMENTS OF ROBERT J. PENELLA
(FORDHAM UNIVERSITY)
Jones has written his own account of the rise of Christianity and the
decline of paganism. It is grounded in broad learning, and marked by crystal clarity and economy. The examples and case studies of each chapter are
felicitously chosen. Jones inevitably revisits much-discussed topics,
although always with an eye on recent scholarship. Among points less
commonly made, I appreciated his observations that the fourth-century
conversions to Christianity of the royal houses of Armenia, Iberia, and
Ethiopia may be helpful analogues to Constantine’s conversion and that
that conversion may owe something to the third-century unification of
Persia under Zoroastrianism (pp. 18–22).
In line with recent trends, Jones issues calls to unsimplify and to
appreciate the gray. He warns against misunderstanding paganism as a
simple entity: it is the construct of an in-group describing a heterogeneous
out-group.2 He looks for the “gray” common ground between paganism
and Christianity, for similarities between them, whether coming from a
shared culture or from the influence of the one on the other. The search is
remarkably fruitful, although some walls of separation were immediately or
fast in place (e.g., in views of sacrifice and sin). Jones is interested mainly
in paganism’s showing itself in Christianity; the influence of the latter on
the former would also be an interesting theme to pursue (e.g., Asclepius or
Apollonius of Tyana as consciously intended counters to Christ, or the
scripturalization of texts like the Chaldaean Oracles or even of the classical
canon itself), although doubtless a less fecund one.
The notion of a spectrum can be helpful with two aspects of paganChristian interplay. I find Alan Cameron’s spectrum “committed Christians, center-Christians, center pagans, committed pagans,” with a middle
2. Cf. the terms Arianism and Monophysitism (Miaphysitism), which can erroneously be
taken to describe entities when, in fact, they refer to ranges of opinion. The term Christianity
itself is better replaced by Christianities when speaking of its early centuries.

FORUM ESSAY

787

category of those who “resisted straightforward classification,” to be useful,
despite Jones’s criticism that “[w]ho or what counts as ‘pagan’ depends very
much on the outlook of the contemporary observer” (p. 7). Cameron’s
spectrum can co-exist with Jones’s observation, because the former tries to
describe objective reality, whereas the latter concerns human perception.3
Another useful spectrum, hinted at by Jones (pp. 113, 136), is one that
begins with the Bible and the Christian encyclopedia and ends with the
Greco-Roman classics and encyclopedia, with various degrees of mixing
in-between. This spectrum represents a range found in the writings of educated Christians; the far end of it would conceal the writer’s Christianity
(see Jones’s appendix for the pertinent and problematic case of Macrobius).
This welcome book—on a subject fundamental not only for the Roman
Empire but also for Western civilization—will be read by specialists, but it
is also accessible to students and to serious general readers.

COMMENTS OF JILL HARRIES
(UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS)
In what terms should we discuss the process that, from the early fourth
to the seventh centuries, resulted in the (partial) replacement of “paganism” by Christianity? In the West, the transformation was largely,
although not universally, successful; in the East, Christianity would be
challenged by the rise of Islam and take a separate path resulting in the
evolution of Byzantine Christian Orthodoxy.
“Paganism,” writes Jones, was “indestructible, in that it had never
really existed, except as an entity in the eyes of its opponents” (p. 145).
True indeed, but it is risky to concede that paganism was a label, rather
than an entity; labels, being the product of rhetoric and polemic, are, as
tools of analysis, fluid and elusive. “Paganism,” as a Christian construct,
encompasses a huge diversity of religious experience, belief, and cultic
practice, as the book in general well explains. But in describing the
“progress” of Christianity, Jones buys into the Christian agenda, assuming
a religiously bipolar world in which those “between” were “progressing”
from one religious camp to the other, assisted from 312 onward by Constantine’s placing his favored religion on an “official basis” (pp. 53, 144).

3. See Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (New York, 2011), pp. 176–77. Jones
fails to mention Cameron’s middle category. He objects (p. 168n12) to Cameron’s placing of
both time-servers and sincere Christians not interested in or well informed about theology in
the center-Christian category. But such problems of classification do not in themselves nullify
the utility of Cameron’s scheme.

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FORUM ESSAY

Such an achievement would have bemused the ruler of an empire that
never had an official religion; significantly, he would retain the title of
Pontifex Maximus, traditionally the head expositor of (pagan) Roman
ritual law, until his death.
Under Constantine, the Roman senators (p. 15) and the citizens of
the empire as a whole (p. 16) would not have categorized themselves as
“overwhelmingly” or “largely” pagan, in contrast to the Christians; religious
culture, whether polytheist or monotheist, was more nuanced. Constantine
was a man of his time and therefore less radical than Jones assumes. For
example, the rescript to Hispellum in Italy (p. 18) is not problematic in the
context of its time (330s AD); in answer to a petition that is largely echoed
in the inscription, Constantine (or, rather, his son Constans) insists on the
ban on sacrifices known to have been Constantine’s policy (see pp. 61–74)
and outlaws “superstition” (which the petitioners are expected to define for
themselves). In this bipolar world of “pagan” versus Christian, there is little
room for those who really were “between” the two and stayed there, such
as Olympios, the Christian friend of the pagan Libanius, or the Christian
bishop Pegasios, who was encountered by Julian at Ilion and carefully
tended the shrines and statues of Hector and Achilles while he carried out
his ecclesiastical duties.
Jones rightly argues that Christianity progressed through local initiatives rather than a centrally driven phenomenon. Laws against paganism
were comparatively rare (p. 24), and their efficacy depended on local
enforcement. But emperors themselves were implicated in driving some
local enforcement, as in the cleansing of the shrine of Abraham at Mamre
at the initiative of Constantine’s ferociously interventionist mother-in-law,
Eutropia. Yet Jones does not note that the local council left unpunished the
angry pagans who incinerated an overzealous bishop (pp. 96–97) for
destroying their sacred shrine. For many such religious neutrals, civic disorder or the disruption of the local elite consensus were more pressing concerns than the consequences of “wrong” belief. These were the real inbetweeners, whose history has yet to be written.

COMMENTS OF AVERIL CAMERON
(UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD)
Jones’s new book represents decades of thinking and teaching about the
ambiguities of religion in the Roman Empire and especially about the elusive categories “Christian” and “pagan.” How can we be sure on the basis of
a possibly laconic inscription, or from what people said or wrote them-

FORUM ESSAY

789

selves—usually tendentiously—or from the lifestyles they chose and the
possessions they owned, what their religion really was? How many of us are
so sure now, whether about ourselves or about others? Jones is interested in
the difficult areas of overlap, where it is hard to be clear on the basis of the
evidence we have, as well as in the methods by which Christians and pagans
sought to express or assert their identities. The old narrative involved a “triumph” of Christianity and its march toward becoming not only the religion
of the Roman Empire but also a world religion. Now that this has been
clearly revealed as based on Christianizing assumptions, the task of interpretation is made much harder. How to deal with the mass of ambiguous or
misleading evidence, and especially the assertions of contemporary Christians with their self-serving agendas, is the question that Jones asks.
Getting to the real meaning behind the available evidence is a major
problem. Christianization was a slow process. Starting from the earliest
stages and continuing over a period of several centuries, Christians used
every tool they had to claim the high ground; but Jones’s account makes it
clear just how hard they had to work. This continued to be the case, despite
the boost given by state support, the growing wealth of the Church and the
influence of highly visible and articulate bishops. A central issue was that of
sacrifice, solved by Christians by appropriating and reinventing it through
the ideas of Christ’s sacrifice and the sacrifice of the Eucharist. Jones agrees
here with the prominence given to the issue in Guy Stroumsa’s book, The
End of Sacrifice (Chicago, 2009), and adds interesting observations on how
Christian attitudes to prayer constituted another such process.
Christians in the Roman Empire had to engage in a lengthy process
of differentiation, which would establish them as definitively different
from pagans. To that end they produced an enormous literature, at once
philosophical, ethical, spiritual and imaginative. Yet, as Jones rightly
emphasizes, they were still struggling to convince their rivals until as late
as the sixth century and, I would say myself, also beyond.
Jones lays more stress on the coercive efforts of Justinian than on the
Constantinian “revolution,” and he is right to tell the story in gradual
rather than dramatic terms. This is both refreshing and profound. As he
puts it, “emperors labored in vain” (p. 144), and indeed they continued to
try, and to fail, for centuries after the book ends. Jones does not deal
directly with the coming of Islam, but he makes clear his view that it
brought about gradual decline rather than any clash of religions, with a
telling comparison between Christians under Islam and pagans in the
Roman Empire after the conversion of Constantine.

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FORUM ESSAY

This is a much-needed and salutary book, to be taken as an excellent
remedy against many others.

COMMENTS OF CHRISTOPHER P. JONES
(HARVARD UNIVERSITY)
I am very grateful to Robin Darling Young for organizing this forum
and for her critique, as well as to the respondents for their thoughtful and
helpful comments.
Almost all the respondents picked up on the word between. I intended
it in several ways, as a term both of process and of position. Of process,
because one of my themes was the way in which Christianity developed out
of Judaism and evolved into something recognizably different, while it
absorbed elements from its pagan environment or defined itself more
sharply by contrast with that environment. As for position, Jews and
pagans could move or “be converted” from their previous way of thinking
about the divine to a new one that involved acceptance of Jesus, son of
Joseph, as the Messiah: for Jews, the notion of the Messiah, although postExilic, was familiar, whereas pagans had to accept both the concept of a
Messiah and the idea that someone condemned to death as an ordinary
criminal could be the Son of God and his “Anointed.”
Between also means that some in late antiquity, perhaps many or most,
had beliefs that combined elements of paganism, Judaism, and Christianity
to differing degrees. As Averil Cameron observes, “How can we be sure …
what their religion really was?” (pp. 788‒89). This uncertainty, moreover,
could not be remedied by words alone. Even the Creed of Nicea was subject from the start to different interpretations and later to important modifications: one need only think of the Filioque controversy. So I remain
skeptical of placing Christians or pagans in a linear continuum that spans
“marginal,” “moderate,” and “committed,” and prefer to think of a religious
interzone, in which many Christians, Jews, and others moved and met
while others stayed aloof. Was such a stance, a position of unaggressive
paganism, still available to a Macrobius or a Volusianus in the 420s? We
are not yet in the New Rome of Justinian, and we do not have to suppose
that the debacle of the Frigidus changed everything overnight.
David Frankfurter finds me to have been “overly credulous” (p. 784)
in using hagiographical sources, and Jill Harries similarly holds that “in
describing the ‘progress’ of Christianity, [I buy] into the Christian agenda”
(p. 787). I agree that St. Paul’s speech before the Areopagus may well be

FORUM ESSAY

791

as much of a historical fact as the Flight into Egypt. I would plead, however, that my main concern was with the period from 300 to 600 and that
in talking about the prior centuries, I did not think it necessary to use the
subjunctive or to flag the uncertainties that would belong in a detailed
study of them. I would also distinguish between tendentious or fictional
narrative (including speeches) and documents such as the Pauline and
pseudo-Pauline letters or the extracts contained in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine.
Robert Penella makes a related but different point: “The term Christianity itself is better replaced by Christianities when speaking of its early
centuries” (p. 786n2). I would go further and say that there has never been
a single Christianity; indeed, like most religions, it was fissile from the
beginning. Nor do the documentary sources of the early Christians conceal
the fact: I Corinthians 1.12 (“Each of you says, ‘I am Paul’s,’ ‘I am Apollo’s,’
‘I am Cephas’s,’ ‘I am Christ’s’”) is enough to show that the first Christian
decades were anything but unitary. But, as when exploiting early Christian
sources, I would plead that my lens was focused on late antiquity and that,
as in a photograph, the background must be blurred if the subject is to
stand out clearly.

Review Essay
New Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War:
The Gomá Archive
WILLIAM J. CALLAHAN*
Archivo Gomá: Documentos de la Guerra Civil. Edited by José Andrés Gallego and Antón M. Pazos. Vols. 5–13. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas. 2003–10. Vol. 5: Pp. 628; €47,43; ISBN
978-84-00-08149-2. Vol. 6: Pp. 704; €49,41; ISBN 978-84-0008222-2. Vol. 7: Pp. 672; €48,08; ISBN 978-84-00-08302-1. Vol. 8:
Pp. 752; €57,69; ISBN 978-84-00-08335-9. Vol. 9: Pp. 672; €47,12;
ISBN 978-84-00-08429-5. Vol. 10: Pp. 520; €45,19; ISBN 978-8400-08640-8. Vol. 11: Pp. 584; €47,12; ISBN 978-84-00-08589-6.
Vol. 12: Pp. 784; €66,35; ISBN 978-84-00-08800-2. Vol. 13: Pp.
488; €39,42; ISBN 978-84-00-09261-0.)
The publication of the final volumes of the archive of Cardinal Isidro
Gomá y Tomás (1869–1940), archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain
during the Spanish Civil War, concludes one of the most ambitious editorial projects in Spanish ecclesiastical history. Together with the published
archive of Cardinal Francisco Vidal y Barraquer, archbishop of Tarragona
and effective head of the hierarchy between 1931 and 1935 (Arxiu Vidal i
Barraquer: Esglesia i Estat durant la Segonda Repúlica Espanyola, 1931–1936,
ed. Miquel Batilori and Victor Manuel Arbeloa, 4 vols., Barcelona, 1971–
91), the Gomá archive provides a wealth of material for the study of the
Spanish Church during the most turbulent period of its modern history.1
Some of the documents have been published previously, particularly those
related to the complex and difficult relations between the Holy See and the
Francisco Franco regime over the extension of full diplomatic recognition.
But the archive covers a broad range of subjects affecting every aspect of
ecclesiastical and religious life during the Civil War. There are, to be sure,
materials on minor topics such as the cardinal’s intervention with the
*Dr. Callahan is professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of
Toronto.
1. Vols. 1–4 were reviewed by William J. Callahan, in ante, 90 (2004), 341–44; vols. 7–
8 were reviewed by Callahan in ante, 93 (2007), 686–88.

792

WILLIAM J. CALLAHAN

793

Nationalist authorities to expedite the export of olive oil to the Vatican or
to secure reduced railway fares for the clergy. Some of the correspondence
is formulaic such as the numerous letters of congratulation received by
Gomá from Spanish and foreign prelates on the occasion of the publication
of the Collective Letter (1937) written by the cardinal on behalf of the Spanish hierarchy to the world’s bishops to justify the Nationalist cause as a
defense of Christian civilization. But there is abundant documentation on
the central issues affecting the Church, including relations with the papacy,
the immense task of reconstruction in the former Republican zone where
nearly 7000 clergy and religious had perished, the very nature of the
Nationalist regime and its ideology, the problem of the Church’s reaction to
the determination of the military to root out the autonomist sympathies of
many Basque clergy in one of the country’s most Catholic areas, and the
educational role of the Church under Franco.
Little in Gomá’s background prepared him for the formidable difficulties
he would face during the Civil War. Ordained in 1885 for his native Tarragona archdiocese, he served briefly as a parish priest, then received doctorates
in theology and canon law. He spent more than two decades as a seminary
professor before he assumed diocesan administrative posts and was promoted
to the obscure bishopric of Tarazona in 1927. Pope Pius XI, using the power
to appoint bishops freely as a result of the separation of church and state by
the Republic, surprised ecclesiastical pundits of the day by appointing Gomá
archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain in 1933. It is not entirely clear
why the pope did not follow the customary practice of naming the prelate of
a larger diocese to the most important position in the hierarchy.
But Gomá possessed important strengths. Although he was sixty-six
when the war began and suffered from bouts of poor health, he worked
tirelessly at the monumental task before him. His correspondence with
bishops, clergy, government officials, generals, diverse figures in the Vatican, and even individuals of modest social standing reached impressive
proportions. His wide-ranging contacts provided a constant flow of material that made him well informed about the country’s political and religious
situation. His numerous reports to papal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli
and later to the nuncio Gaetano Cicognani accurately assessed the diverse
political currents and tensions that lay beneath the surface of the Franco
regime in spite of the image of unity it projected to the public.
It is interesting that the cardinal continued to correspond with figures
viewed, he knew, with open hostility by the regime such as Canon Alberto
Onaindia, a Basque priest forced into exile before the repressive policy of the

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

military authorities toward clergy sympathetic to Basque autonomy and a
severe critic of the regime. He also maintained an extensive correspondence
with Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, whom the authorities were determined to
remove as archbishop of Tarragona and prevent his return from exile on the
grounds that he was a Catalan separatist and had followed an excessively
compliant policy before the Republic’s anticlerical policies. The documentation shows that Gomá was aware of the climate of official hostility directed
against the man who had consecrated him as a bishop in 1927. There were
differences between the two cardinals over Vidal’s refusal to sign the Collective Letter of 1937 and on the issue of restoring the public cult in Catalonia,
a project briefly considered by the Republic in the later stages of the war. But
Gomá continued to treat Vidal as a functioning member of the hierarchy,
perhaps hoping that the regime would permit Vidal to return to his diocese
following the Nationalist conquest of Catalonia. Gomá did not choose to
confront the regime on the fate of Vidal, although he continued to insist
that, as far as the Church was concerned, Vidal should be treated with full
respect. Gomá’s caution in this case and in another—the efforts of the
Nationalist military authorities to expel Bishop Mateo Múgica of Vitoria
from the country on similar grounds—were characteristic of the cardinal’s
leadership style. He sought to avoid open confrontation with the regime,
working behind the scenes to achieve his primary goal of restoring the
Church within a new political order in the process of formation. One has the
impression from these volumes that Gomá saw the task of securing his
objectives in Franco’s “New Spain” as a kind of minefield to be navigated
with caution, an awareness of hard political realities, the necessity for compromise, and scenarios that would require grudging acceptance. There may
have been some who believed that the Nationalist victory would simply mean
the restoration of the Church’s position as the established church of the state
based on the Concordat of 1851. Gomá realized early on that Franco’s triumph meant that a new game had begun.
The cardinal supported the military rising as a means of saving country
and religion. He emerged from his first meeting with Franco convinced
that he was a sincere Catholic committed to respecting what ecclesiastics
of the day called the “liberty of the Church,” meaning its right to conduct
its religious and social work free of government control and interference.
But Gomá’s reports to the Vatican and the papal nuncio, as well as his own
recollections of his many meetings with the general, reveal a far more complex situation.
Gomá did not express a preference for any particular form of government, although like many of his episcopal colleagues, he shared their his-

WILLIAM J. CALLAHAN

795

toric suspicion of liberalism and democratic political movements. But he
knew what he did not want—a totalitarian regime inspired by the ideology
of Nazi Germany. The documentation shows how apprehensively he
viewed the possibility of such a development. From the war’s early stage,
his network of correspondents made him aware of Nazi propaganda activities in Spain, particularly at Franco’s headquarters in Salamanca. The cardinal’s suspicions also focused on the Falange, the country’s quasi-fascist
party that had rallied enthusiastically to the military rebellion. He saw one
of the party’s leaders, Manuel Hedilla, as guilty of pro-Hitler sympathies
and welcomed his dismissal by Franco, who also forced the Falange’s
merger with the Carlist Traditionalist Communion in 1937 to form the
country’s only authorized party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista
(FET). Although it lacked real political teeth, as Franco intended, the new
organization was not entirely free of totalitarian pretensions. True to form,
Gomá never challenged the new party directly. It was, after all, Franco’s
creation. But the cardinal’s skirmishes with the organization were frequent.
For example, he strongly opposed priests holding official positions in the
FET and rejected outright its proposal to organize anniversary funeral
Masses throughout the country for José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the
founder of the Falange executed in the Republican zone during the early
months of the war. The Church, he maintained, should not support a
political device designed to elevate the slain Falange leader to a nearly
divine status.
The cardinal also feared the introduction of Nazi racist ideology into
Spain. Although he delayed publishing Pius XI’s celebrated encyclical, Mit
Brennender Sorge (1937), on the subject, fearing the reaction of a regime
deeply indebted to Germany for financial and military support, he eventually did so, while affirming in a letter to the minister of the interior that his
views on Nazism corresponded entirely with the pope’s. Although Franco
repeatedly assured Gomá in their periodic meetings that he would not
permit the introduction of an ideology opposed to Spain’s Catholic traditions, the cardinal remained wary. The final two documents in this collection are drafts of letters to Franco and the minister of the interior expressing deep concerns over the impact of a recently concluded treaty between
the regime and Germany. The treaty provided for cultural exchanges that
involved sending young Spaniards to Germany, a move that Gomá feared
would expose them to an ideology opposed to Christian values. The cardinal’s persistent fear of the Nazi danger was understandable, but it is doubtful that Franco intended to implant a fully blown version of the German
totalitarian model. He cultivated Germany, his most powerful ally in the
Civil War, and allowed the FET to display fascist trappings. But in the

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

end, he was a military man more concerned with maintaining his position
by manipulating the factious ranks of the Spanish Right on which his
power ultimately depended.
Gomá had precise ideas about what the Church expected from the
regime. He expected it to abrogate the Republic’s anticlerical legislation,
restore the Church’s role in education that had been severely curtailed in
1933, provide for the financial well-being of the clergy, and respect the
“liberty of the Church” in carrying out a wide range of activities to fulfill
its religious function. By 1939, these objectives had been achieved more or
less except for the last. The regime had a very different idea from the cardinal of what the “liberty of the Church” entailed. Since 1900, the Spanish
Church had developed an elaborate network of institutions passing well
beyond purely religious activities. There was a substantial Catholic press, a
large Catholic agrarian syndicate, a smaller group of trade unions, associations of university students and teachers, as well as the Catholic Action
organization made up of laity committed to advance the Church’s mission
within the broader society. These were put at risk before the regime’s
determination to impose a new form of social organization controlled by
the state through a corporatist system patterned, in part, on the Italian fascist model.
Gomá did not challenge the new system. Initially, he imagined that it
would be possible to secure a degree of autonomy for Catholic associations
within the official syndicates. But before a constant stream of complaints
from members of Catholic federations of teachers, university students, and
agriculturalists about the regime’s bullying tactics, he soon realized that his
many representations to Franco and his ministers on the subject were futile,
as the government insisted on the incorporation of many Catholic organizations into the official syndicates. The regime also imposed rigorous censorship and a barrage of bureaucratic regulations on the press, including
publications of the Church. For an institution that had operated, for the
most part, with freedom of the press since the days of the Restoration
(1875–1923) and even during the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de
Rivera (1923–30), the new press legislation was a heavy blow. A steady flow
of representations came to the cardinal from ecclesiastical authors and
Catholic journalists protesting the draconian censorship now imposed on
them. Although occasionally Gomá was able to persuade the authorities to
relent, the regime remained adamant in most cases. He was more successful
in preserving Catholic Action, although the organization and its former
president during the Republic, Angel Herrera, were viewed with deep suspicion by elements of the regime on the grounds that they had been less

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than vigorous in their opposition to what they saw as a government hostile
to the country’s national and religious values. Gomá devoted considerable
time to warding off these attacks. In the end, the regime allowed Catholic
Action to survive, although the government insisted that the organization
must confine its activities to purely religious ends.
Relations between the Franco regime and the papacy form an important part of the documentation. Franco expected Pius XI to extend full
diplomatic recognition in 1936 and pressed Gomá, who served briefly as
the pope’s personal representative to the general in 1936–37, to use his
influence to secure this objective. The cardinal did his best, but the Vatican
for various reasons moved slowly until it finally acceded in 1938. But it was
not disposed to fulfill another of the regime’s goals: the signing of a concordat that would guarantee the regime’s patronage rights over episcopal
appointments, a provision contained in the Concordat of 1851 that had
governed civil-ecclesiastical relations until 1931. Having so recently
acquired the right of free appointment of bishops under the Republic, the
Vatican had no desire to return to a system that it had long disliked. Gomá
fully supported the papal position. But, characteristically, he sought a compromise by suggesting that the Holy See should accede to pre-notification
(that is, the pope advising the government of a potential appointment to
ascertain if there were strong official objections to it). This suggestion was
not accepted, as an impasse developed between the Vatican and the
regime. Although Pius XI was able to name a few bishops freely, the government soon refused to accept further appointments until the patronage
issue was resolved. Thus numerous episcopal vacancies occurred until an
agreement was finally reached in 1941, a year after Gomá’s death.
The cardinal’s role during the Civil War has been controversial. Critics of the time, particularly progressive French Catholics, took him to task
for throwing the cover of religion over the Nationalist rising in the Collective Letter of 1937. Some historians, too, have taken a similar position,
notably the distinguished scholar of the Church’s role in the Civil War,
Hilari Raguer. Advocates of the Basque autonomous government
approved by the Republic shortly before July 18 and historians of modern
Basque nationalism have reproached the cardinal for defending a regime
openly hostile to the region’s aspirations for autonomy. During its brief
existence, the new Basque government and its Catholic president, José
Antonio Aguirre, won substantial support from the local clergy, some of
whom backed the decision to remain loyal to the Republic as the Civil War
began. This situation placed Gomá between the proverbial rock and hard
place. Abundant material in these volumes deals with the cardinal’s efforts

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

to navigate through dangerous waters. As a Catalan, he was aware of the
strong appeal that autonomous sentiments exercised over much of the
Basque and Catalan populations, including the clergy. Indeed, some within
the Nationalist government viewed the cardinal suspiciously as a separatist
simply because he was a native of Catalonia. He also knew from the information received from his correspondents that the military authorities,
especially in the Basque Provinces, were engaged in a ruthless purge of
autonomist sympathizers, including priests.
Gomá’s extensive correspondence with the minister, generals, and
military officers immediately responsible for governing the Basque
Provinces after their conquest reveals a contorted attempt to manage an
impossible situation. He recognized that his influence over the region’s
military, committed to eliminating “separatism” root and branch, was limited. Always sensitive, perhaps excessively so, to the reaction of the authorities, he accepted that priests accused of alleged subversive activities could
be tried and sentenced if found guilty, although with the proviso that any
conviction should be based on credible evidence and not on rumor and
innuendo. But he also defended ecclesiastical administrators in the region
against the charge often levied by the military that they were not acting
aggressively enough against “separatist” priests. The cardinal also informed
Franco directly that he and the pope were resolutely opposed to the imposition of the death sentence on clerical prisoners. The cardinal and other
bishops also resisted pressure to transfer less dangerous but still suspect
priests (in the regime’s view) to other dioceses. The cardinal protested that
the proposal violated canon law—not an argument likely to divert the
authorities from their single-minded obsession with “separatism.” In the
end, the hierarchy reluctantly accepted the transfer scheme. The cardinal’s
policy with respect to the Basque clergy was based on the recognition of
hard political reality and efforts to mitigate a situation that he could not
control. Ironically, in this, as in other aspects of his relations with the
Franco regime, Gomá followed an “avoid the worst” strategy similar to that
pursued in the case of Vidal under the Republic.
Some historians have criticized the cardinal for his lack of force in condemning the wave of repression directed by the regime against its enemies,
which may have reflected his unwillingness to confront the authorities
directly. But he received many letters from friends and relatives of individuals imprisoned or sentenced to death that asked him to seek clemency for
the victims. He usually did so, even when he knew that the person accused
was viewed with implacable hostility by the regime. Such was the case for
Manuel Carrasco Formiguera, a Catholic activist and advocate of Catalan

WILLIAM J. CALLAHAN

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autonomy, who received a death sentence. Gomá was also aware of the
destructive implications for the future if the bitter divisions dividing
Spaniards were not healed. In his first pastoral letter after the end of the
war, he called for a sweeping pardon. The letter also revealed his continuing
apprehension with the possible triumph of totalitarian tendencies within
the regime, an opinion that caused the authorities to ban the letter’s publication and led to a personal dressing-down by Franco himself. The cardinal
remained loyal to Franco, but until the end, he feared that the regime would
move in a totalitarian direction hostile to the Church and religion.
By 1939, Gomá viewed the future of the Spanish Church with pessimism. He had doubts about its ability to carry out the immense task of
religious reconstruction in the former Republican zone. He realized, of
course, that the Church has secured substantial concessions from the
Franco regime. But he was also aware of the price that had been paid,
whether in the form of the absorption of Catholic trade unions, agrarian
movements, and other church-related associations into the state corporatist system or the muzzling of a once free Catholic press in spite of his
best efforts.
The constant battles and skirmishes with the regime between 1936
and 1939 exacted a toll. As the years passed, his health worsened. He often
suffered from physical exhaustion and occasional bouts of depression, as
his letters to personal friends reveal. His role as the leader of the Spanish
Church will remain controversial, but these volumes taken as a whole show
that this is not a simple black-or-white story but, rather, an extraordinarily
complex narrative of a man facing a daunting task. There is no question
that this collection, so professionally done by the editors, will be invaluable
to scholars concerned with the history of the Spanish Church and Spain
itself during the most conflictive time of the country’s modern history.

Book Reviews
ANCIENT
Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity.
Edited by Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed. [Jewish Culture
and Contexts.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2013. Pp. x,
388. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4533-2.)
This set of thirteen papers on Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire
assesses how Jews and Christians functioned as “Romans.” All but one or two of
the contributors are specialists in Judaism in late antiquity, and Jewish topics and
materials are the major focus of the collection. The papers treat a wide variety of
literary genres, and archaeological and artistic evidence, over a broad expanse of
space (from Gaul and Spain to Mesopotamia) and time (from the third century to
the early Middle Ages). The unifying theme is Judaism’s and Christianity’s experience of and response to Romanization, both before and after Constantine’s conversion, when Christianization further complicated Romanization. Rather than seeing
Jews and Christians as stuck between the stark alternatives of assimilation or resistance, however, the papers approach them as subgroups carrying on their lives in
what to them was “normalcy,” both subject to and at the same time exploiting the
particular legal, social, and cultural conditions attached to “being Roman.” The
perspective thus owes something to postcolonial theorizing, but most of the contributions are mercifully sparing in their use of fashionable terminology.
Space limitations only permit comments on a few especially noteworthy
papers. William Adler’s “The Kingdom of Edessa and the Creation of a Christian
Aristocracy” studies the third-century Eastern Christians Bardaisan of Edessa and
Julius Africanus, who illustrate the book’s theme of creative and self-serving
provincial accommodation to Western invasion, first via Greek paideia, then via
Roman imperium. Readers unfamiliar with the swashbuckling figure of Africanus
should read this well-informed portrait of a cultural entrepreneur, whose Christianity sat easily with his cultural pluralism and service to pagan royalty, first in
Edessa and then in Rome.
Natalie B. Dohrmann’s “Law and Imperial Idioms: Rabbinic Legalism in a
Roman World” asks why rabbinic legality triumphed so totally as to eliminate any
surviving mention of the many other types of authority and literary genre that prevailed in pre-1970s Judaism. She identifies three Roman aspects that the rabbis
might have been inspired to imitate in their devotion to scholastic jurisprudence:
Roman imperial administration, which offered a model of efficient governance and
social order that invited and needed local cooperation; the second-century emergence both of scholastic jurists and Greek rhetors, whose prestige grew rapidly (pro800

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801

viding a model of “meritocratic cultural dualism,” p. 74); and Roman law’s success
as political propaganda, which convinced the locals to seek out Roman justice and
thus provided the rabbis “a galling competitor” (p. 75) with which they had to work.
Joshua Levinson’s “There Is No Place Like Home: Rabbinic Responses to the
Christianization of Palestine” denies that rabbinic texts ignored the rapid Christianization of Palestine after Constantine and identifies strategies such as imitating
Christian pilgrimage to sacred graves; “de-territorializing the sacred” (God is
everywhere, p. 110); and “relocating” God’s Presence such as from the Temple to
the Mount of Olives and then to heaven. Note the “comic burlesque” (p. 118) in
Sifre on Deuteronomy, in which imperial commissioners are miraculously led on a
wild-goose chase for the grave of Moses that undermines Christian triumphalist
narratives about marvelous sites in Palestine.
Oded Irshai’s “Christian Historiographers’ Reflections on Jewish-Christian
Violence in Fifth-Century Alexandria” analyzes the account by church historian
Socrates of a violent action by Alexandrian Jews against local Christians. Irshai proposes that recent changes in imperial law and policy, along with newly elected
patriarch Cyril of Alexandria’s aggressive posture, pushed Jews to fear that a tipping
point had been reached in interreligious relations and that they needed to defend
themselves while they could still expect support from the local administration,
Christian though it was. He suggests that Socrates used Cyril’s high-handedness
(with which he contrasts the leadership of Atticus, patriarch of Constantinople) to
demonstrate how Christians themselves bore partial blame for Jewish failure to
acknowledge Christianity’s claims.
Ophir Münz-Manor’s article “Narrating Salvation: Verbal Sacrifices in Late
Antique Liturgical Poetry” compares Jewish and Christian liturgical texts that can
be regarded as verbal sacrifices and that reflect “differing degrees of contrast and
continuity between sacrifice and prayer, blood and word, ritual and story” (p. 166).
These are, first, a Jewish liturgical poem for the Day of the Atonement, the Seder
`avodah, compared with a Christian Eucharistic prayer, the Anaphora in the latefourth-century Apostolic Constitutions; and second, several liturgical poems on the
Aqedah, the binding of Isaac, that singles out the sacrificial function and discusses
parallels with near-contemporary Christian Syriac verse homilies and the sixthcentury Christian poet Romanos the Melodist.
University of Saint Thomas
St. Paul, MN

MICHAEL HOLLERICH

The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity. By
George E. Demacopoulos. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.]
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2013. Pp. vi, 262. $69.95.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4517-2.)
This account of the early history of the bishop of Rome has a provocative title.
For George E. Demacopoulos, “invention” is not simply a metaphor; he under-

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stands the term quite literally to designate a kind of discourse, what he calls the
“Petrine topos” (p. 2), created by the early popes to shape and control events and
to establish the unique authority of the successor to St. Peter. The term discourse
does not, however, refer simply to words. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Demacopoulos uses it to designate, actions, institutions, and rituals as well as words.
A persistent theme is that claims of papal primacy were most forcibly asserted at
times of papal weakness and insecurity. Rome’s hegemony “was intermittent and often
contested” (p. 8). In contrast to earlier histories such as the works of Erich Caspar and
Walter Ullman, Demacopoulos argues that the rise of the papacy is not an ascent from
“strength to strength” (p. 8). This is most evident in the language chosen by Demacopoulos to depict how the bishops of Rome dealt with ecclesiastical, jurisdictional,
and political challenges: “rhetorical performance,” “display,” “self-aggrandizement,”
“anxiety,” “frustration,” “bluster,” and the like (pp. 2, 41, 42, 74, 75).
The Invention of Peter is not, however, a polemical work. Demacopoulos is a serious scholar with deep knowledge of the sources of papal history and an impressive
command of the modern literature. In particular he makes good use of recent specialized studies of the social world of ancient Rome. Pope Gelasius, for example, had
great difficulty, as bishop of Rome, asserting his authority over the religious practices
in the homes of the senatorial elite in the city and the clergy who served them.
The central argument of the book rests on the analysis of three popes: St. Leo
the Great in mid-fifth century, St. Gelasius at the end of that century, and St. Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century, with brief sections on papal dealings
with the Gothic king Theodoric and the emperor Justinian. As is well known, Leo
was the first bishop of Rome to identify himself with Peter. Demacopoulos calls
this the “single most important rhetorical development in the history of papal selfaggrandizement” (p. 42). Significantly, Leo was less likely to invoke the “Petrine
topos” when speaking to the laity or lesser clergy. In this pope’s dealings with the
East and Christological debates, the “Petrine topos” appears most often when Leo’s
authority was in question. The Petrine topos was a “marker of papal insecurity
rather than ecclesiastical strength” (p. 71).
The tomb of St. Peter was a key factor in the celebration of papal authority
and a “prime site for papal performance.” When Emperor Valentinian III visited
Rome in 450, Leo made certain he took part in a vigil at St. Peter. A century later,
when the Gothic king Theodoric visited Rome, Pope Symmachus saw to it that the
king visited the basilica. One hundred years later, Pope Gregory required those
who served as his agents to swear an oath at the tomb of St. Peter before taking up
their assignments.
Leo used the term apostolic see to refer to the See of Alexandria and the See of
Antioch. Gelasius, however, reserved the term for the See of Rome.
Gregory does not fit the pattern developed by earlier popes. In his writings the
emphasis on Peter’s authority is muted. In Gregory’s theological works Peter serves

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as a model of the Christian life. In fact, Gregory uses Peter’s shortcomings to highlight his humility. In dealing with affairs in Sicily, he rarely appealed to the “Petrine
topos.” Gregory did, however, believe that Peter was “mysteriously active” (p. 150)
in his day through miracles and relics at his tomb. On the other hand, Gregory was
vigorous in his effort to suppress the title “Ecumenical Patriarch” for the patriarch
of Constantinople. Only Rome deserves that title, said Gregory, but as a gesture to
the whole Church the Roman bishops have not used it.
There is much here that is illuminating, at least to someone who is not a specialist in papal history. There is no question that the office of the bishop of Rome
as it came to be practiced in later centuries was the creation of the popes of the early
centuries. In dealing with the many challenges faced by the Church as it was seeking language to express its central teachings and giving enduring form to its institutional structures, the early popes had a sophisticated grasp of the language they
used, the rituals they celebrated, and the actions they took. They knew full well, as
any astute leader of people and institutions knows, that words and actions have a
horizon of meaning that is not exhausted by their presumed intention.
Yet there is more to the story than Demacopolous presents. For example, he
mentions Irenaeus’s statement about the pre-eminence of Rome and its role in
ensuring faithfulness to the apostolic faith in the face of gnostic challenges. Here,
the attribution of authority of the bishop of Rome comes from outside of Rome:
from a bishop in Gaul. It is not Rome that is pressing the case. Rome also had the
good fortune to judge matters rightly and to be vindicated by later events in, for
example, the controversy in the second century over the date of Easter and in the
third over rebaptism.
Demacopoulos has little to say about the bishop of Rome as teacher. In fact,
he has little interest in the substance of the theological controversies that divided
the Church, which means that questions of theological truth are bracketed. There
is no discussion of how the bishop of Rome came to be recognized as teacher. Early
papal authorities dealt in the main with moral and disciplinary matters, but by the
fifth century they began to address doctrinal issues. The role of appeals judge
imperceptibly became that of teacher who, as it turned out, usually came down on
the right side of things.
Perhaps it is inevitable in dealing with ecclesiastical/political matters that one
is drawn to a psychological vocabulary to interpret words and depict actions of the
players. But is it really possible from this historical distance to use terms such as
“insecurity,” “frustration,” “anxiety,” “self-aggrandizement,” “bluster,” and “rhetorical performance” with confidence? Nevertheless, or perhaps for this reason, The
Invention of Peter is a stimulating book that offers a unique perspective on early
papal history.
University of Virginia (Emeritus)

ROBERT LOUIS WILKEN

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Costantino e il suo secolo: L’“editto di Milano” e le religioni. By Massimo Giudetti. [Di
fronte e attraverso, 1090.] (Milan: Editoriale Jaca Book. 2013. Pp. x, 223.
€18,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-16-41190-6.)
The term Edict of Milan, which occurs in no ancient source, was invented by
Cardinal Baronius in the 1590s. Hence, it is most unfortunate that this purely
hypothetical document, which never in fact existed, has dominated so much
modern scholarly writing about Constantine. It is incomprehensible why this
“edict” continued to dominate debate even after Otto Seeck completely exploded it
in 1891, when he acidly observed that the so-called “Edict of Milan” was neither
issued in Milan nor by Constantine, but issued by Constantine’s imperial colleague
Licinius specifically and exclusively for the eastern parts of the Roman Empire.
Massimo Giudetti, who is a careful and judicious writer, is fully aware of this, and
he avoids most of the notorious pitfalls of his subject, since for the most part he
deals directly and honestly with the ancient evidence. In particular, unlike some
very famous twentieth-century historians of the period, he records Lactantius’s
report that immediately after his proclamation as Augustus in York in 306, Constantine “aveva deciso la restituzione dei cristiani al loro culto e al loro Dio” [had
decided on the restoration of the Christians to their worship and their God], correctly noting the sharply different modern evaluations and interpretations of what
Lactantius says (p. 35).
Giudetti shows a good working knowledge of the vast modern bibliography
on Constantine and “the Constantinian question.” Yet there are some surprising
blind spots in his knowledge, which result in unfortunate episodes where he goes
seriously astray. As is required of everyone who writes about the emperor, Giudetti
discusses the vision of Constantine and its relevance to his conversion to Christianity, which was announced to the world in 312 (pp. 18–23). But Giudetti makes
no reference to the important and original article by Peter Weiss, published in
German in 1993 and translated into English by Anthony Birley with addenda and
corrections by the author.1 In this reviewer’s opinion Weiss has solved the long
controversy over the conversion of Constantine by showing that both the panegyric
of 310 and Eusebius describe the same well-known celestial phenomenon: Constantine and his army saw a solar halo in the sky in northern Gaul in spring 310,
which the emperor initially credited to the Sun-god Apollo, but subsequently in
312 (or possibly already in 311) reinterpreted in a Christian sense, and it was this
“sign of God in the sky” (caeleste signum Dei) that, according to Lactantius, Constantine saw in a dream before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Another central
and familiar crux interpretationis is the Speech to the Assembly of the Saints, which
Constantine delivered at Eastertide in 325 in the city of Nicomedia, a city that he
had “liberated” from Licinius some months earlier. Giudetti denies both the unity

1. Peter Weiss, “Die Vision Constantins,” Colloquium aus Anlass des 8 0 . Geburtstages von
Alfred Heuss, ed. J. Bleicken. Frankfurter Althistorische Studien 13 (Kallmünz, 1993), 143–69;
“The Vision of Constantine,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, 16 (2003), 237–59.

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and Constantine’s authorship of the Speech, which he describes as a composite that
the imperial chancellery cobbled together from statements made on various occasions to justify imperial policies (p. 25). But Giudetti fails to analyze the detailed
content of the Speech, which fits perfectly into its historical context between Constantine’s conquest of the East and the forthcoming Council of Nicea.
Giudetti writes with a clarity, elegance, and lack of bombast that makes his
book a better introduction to Constantine than almost anything else available in
Italian.
University of Edinburgh

T. D. BARNES

The Funerary Speech for John Chrysostom. Translated with an introduction and commentary by Timothy D. Barnes and George Bevan. [Translated Texts for
Historians, Vol. 60.] (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Distrib. University of Chicago Press. 2013. Pp. xiii, 193. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-184631-888-7.)
As the first translation into English of a work in Greek available to scholars
in edited form only in 2007 (and then in an obscure Italian series)—a work until
the 1970s dismissed as late and derivative, now acknowledged as the earliest source
for the life of the influential early-fifth-century bishop John Chrysostom—this is
an essential resource for students and scholars alike. Add in the status of the translators and annotators—the eminent emeritus classicist, Timothy Barnes, and his
former student, George Bevan, now exciting interest in his own right for his application of new technologies to numismatics and archaeology—and one gains some
idea of the importance and impact of this seemingly unassuming volume.
Although the core of the volume brings to life the funeral oration composed
by a supporter on receipt of news of the death of John in exile in late 407, the translators have enriched the text further not just with the detailed introduction and
notes typical of this series but also with the translation of thirty letters composed
by John from exile and a further three related texts of historical significance (appendices A–C). The latter are the acts of the Council of the Oak (403) preserved by
the ninth-century bishop of Constantinople, Photius (A); the summary of five lost
orations by Theodoret of Cyrrhus on John, likewise preserved by Photius (B); and
the neglected segments on John in the tenth-century Constantinopolitan synaxary
(C). Of these texts, only a single letter has been published previously in an English
translation. The letters, selected from those addressed to persons of status at Constantinople and to prominent Western bishops, are prefaced by their own detailed
introduction. Because of the confusing history of a number of these key sources,
resulting in a variety of citations by scholars, Barnes and Bevan supply additional
tools (appendices D–F). The first (D) is a concordance between the chief manuscript of the funeral oration (Parisinus Graecus 1519, available in a preliminary edition in a doctoral thesis in 1974), the 2007 edition by Martin Wallraff, and the
small portion of the text published by Migne in PG 47. The second (E) is a con-

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cordance between the two editions of the other chief witness to John’s life, Palladius’s Dialogue, and the sole English translation (in the series Ancient Christian
Writers) by Robert Meyer. The latter appeared prior to the more recent edition.
The third (F) is a concordance between the Malingrey edition of the first seventeen
letters written by John in exile (to Olympias) and the order in which these same letters were published (in PG 52) by Migne, supplemented by Roland Delmaire’s
conclusions regarding their probable date and place of composition. An equally
useful chronology of John’s life and rehabilitation prefaces the volume, supplemented at the volume’s close by a map of Asia Minor showing John’s route in exile.
Although one could quibble about the certainty of some of the facts and dates
asserted in the introductions and notes across the volume, in the case of the funeral
oration the translators make good sense of a not always elegant or clear text. This
unique and unashamedly partisan witness to John’s life provides snippets of information unattested elsewhere. By providing such a richly contextualized translation
in a readily available, affordable, and respected series, Barnes and Bevan have taken
the next step toward ensuring that this largely neglected historical source receives
the attention it deserves.
Australian Catholic University

WENDY MAYER

Prophecy and Kingship in Adomnán’s “Life of Saint Columba.” By Michael J. Enright.
(Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distrib. ISBS, Portland, OR. 2013. Pp. iv, 202.
$70.00. ISBN 978-1-84682-382-4.)
Adomnán’s Life of Saint Columba has been a text of deep interest for Michael
J. Enright for many years, and a full exposition of his views on the Life is thoroughly welcome. As the title suggests, the book is mainly concerned with the interaction between two themes: Adomnán’s conception of St. Columba as an Old Testament prophet, and his views on the Irish (and to some extent also Anglo-Saxon
and Pictish) kingship that encompass the previous 150 years and his own time. The
Life, written c. AD 700, was divided into three books: book I was devoted to
prophecies, book II to miracles that often had a basis in prophecy, and book III to
visions of angels. Enright’s book is similarly divided into three long chapters:
“Adomnán’s ‘call’ for an Old Testament-style regime”; “Claims, agendas and a
prophetic culture in the Lives of Patrick and Columba”; and “A Columban
covenant in Northumbria: interpreting VC I 1 and II 46.”
The argument in the first chapter is that Adomnán shaped his picture of
Columba so as to present him as a prophet similar to Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha;
that an implication of this picture was Columba’s divine authority in his dealings
with kings; and that Columba’s authority as a prophet served a “reform plan” put
forward by Adomnán himself. Up to a point, this is not especially controversial; as
Enright notes, Adomnán himself compares Columba to Old Testament prophets
as well as to New Testament apostles. One must also note the qualification made
by Enright at the beginning of his conclusion—namely, that his book does not

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claim to present a full analysis of the Vita Columbae, but simply offers “evidence for
a new reading of those parts of the text that focus on kingship and prophetic status
and awareness” (p. 185). It soon becomes evident, however, that Enright is as much
concerned to defend arguments presented in an earlier book—Iona, Tara and Soissons: The Origins of the Royal Anointing Ritual (Berlin, 1985)—as he is to propound
something new.
The defensive aspect of the book may have interfered with the positive. For
example, Enright argued in the earlier book (reiterated in the present one) that
Adomnán saw Columba “ordaining” kings in a ceremony of unction that made the
person anointed a king by divine authority, just as Samuel anointed Saul and David.
A counterargument has been advanced: that “ordaining” at the time could be by
unction but that there were other ways of ordaining kings. “Ordaining,” therefore,
would not bear quite the weight that Enright places on it. One of the kings said to
be ordained in the Vita Columbae is Diarmait mac Cerbaill, ancestor of the Southern
Uí Néill, “ordained by God’s will as king of all Ireland.” Since Enright believes (and
thinks Adomnán believed) that Diarmait was a pagan, he has to explain what this
divinely authorized ordination of a pagan king involved. Enright’s explanation
includes the claim that Adomnán saw Diarmait as a latter-day Cyrus, pagan and yet
the agent of God in conquering Babylon and freeing God’s people to return to their
homeland. In this way Enright comes to the conclusion that, for Adomnán, Diarmait underwent “God’s mystical anointing” (p. 30). This is all very ingenious, but
one has to ask: what is the evidence that Diarmait was a pagan? For Enright, the
evidence is in annals for 558 and 560, which are commonly understood as deriving
from a “Chronicle of Ireland” extending to 911. The earliest contemporary entries
of this chronicle derive from an Iona chronicle beginning soon after the foundation
of Iona, perhaps c. 565 and thus within a decade of the events in question. The
Chronicle of Ireland is established by comparing the extant Annals of Ulster with a
family of chronicles deriving from Clonmacnois, a midland monastery that had a
particular interest in Diarmait. The paganism of Diarmait is deduced from an entry
on Diarmait’s holding the “Feast of Tara,” which appears twice in the Annals of
Ulster (in 558 and 560). The Clonmacnois chronicles have a version of the 560 entry
in which it is said to be “the last Feast of Tara.” This is then interpreted as a pagan
ritual by which the king married his kingdom, a ritual that was abandoned by subsequent (and Christian) kings of Tara. But one has to be careful before concluding
that Diarmait must have been a pagan because he participated in a ritual of pagan
origins (compare the survival of the Lupercalia at Rome until the end of the fifth
century); and one most certainly has to be careful before putting any weight on the
qualifying adjective “last,” which is not in the Annals of Ulster and thus cannot be
attributed on textual grounds to the Chronicle of Ireland.
Another piece of supporting evidence is cited as from the Annals of Ulster—
namely, that Diarmait fought a battle in 561 with the aid of a “druidic fence.” But
this is wrong: the “druidic fence” is not in the original Annals of Ulster, but in the
Clonmacnois chronicles, from where it was probably taken and added in the
margin of the primary manuscript of the Annals of Ulster. The early Irish chroni-

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cles are a wonderful source, but only when compared with one another and treated
with all due textual care. The elaborate comparison with Cyrus, king of the Persians, is quite redundant.
It is a pity that Enright does not treat the evidence, whether of the chronicles
or of the Vita Columbae, with more care. The book could then have been much
more convincing.
T. M. CHARLES-EDWARDS

Corpus Christi College, Oxford

MEDIEVAL
The Companion to Medieval Society. By Franco Cardini. Translated by Corrado
Federici. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2012. Pp. 288. $49.95.
ISBN 978-0-7735-4103-0.)
Recently some major publishers have produced an array of “companions” and
“handbooks” on a variety of topics associated with the humanities. Among the most
recent additions to this growing body of literature is The Companion to Medieval
Society by Franco Cardini. Cardini is one of the foremost (and also one of the most
prolific) Italian historians of the Middle Ages. A professor at the University of Florence, he has published on an impressive range of subjects, including knighthood,
magic and witchcraft in the Middle Ages, St. Francis of Assisi, the significance of
1492 for Europe, St. Joan of Arc, and the history of Florence and Tuscany, among
many others. The Companion to Medieval Society is the English translation of the
Italian text that appeared the same year, La società medioevale (Milan, 2012), and it
is a book that contains impressive flashes of insight and sumptuous illustrations. It
is also a text marred by numerous errors.
Unlike most other recent “companions” or handbooks associated with the
Middle Ages, such as those published by Oxford and Cambridge, The Companion
to the Middle Ages is not intended for an audience of scholars, graduate students,
and undergraduates. Rather, lavishly illustrated, it seems primarily aimed at the
general, educated reader. It is meant more for the living-room table than the
research or undergraduate library. Written without footnotes or endnotes, it has a
short select bibliography of only thirty-four titles. Organized both chronologically
and topically, the book tackles a wide variety of subjects, framed by the first and last
chapters: “What Are the Middle Ages?” and “Toward the Renaissance.” Among its
other twenty-four chapters are “The Christianization of Europe,” “Women in the
Church and in Society,” “The New Figurative Art,” and “Internal and External
Enemies.” Cardini is very careful to stress that generalizations about the Middle
Ages, which he defines roughly as the fourth through fifteenth centuries, are difficult to make, given the “profound changes” (p. 17) of the period. Along with its
sumptuous pictures and maps, the book includes some valuable insights. The
author notes for example that recent scholarship recognizes that early economic
expansion in Europe probably commenced in the eighth and not the eleventh century. In chapter 12 there are some illuminating observations drawn between north-

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ern European and Italian cities. The chapters on “Kings” (chapter 8), “The Aristocracy” (chapter 9), “Science and Magic” (chapter 22), and “Languages and Literature” (chapter 23) are especially insightful, perhaps because they draw on his particular expertise in the history of magic and knighthood.
The overall quality of the text, however, is disappointing. Some shortcomings
are conceptual. The application of the term medieval “solely to the Western world”
(p. 17) oddly relegates the Islamic world and Byzantium to minor, peripheral roles
in the narrative. The stated aim of the book is to explore themes that “provide a
possible meaning for the term, ‘medieval’” (p. 16), but the book seems to present
no argument that summarizes what those themes may be. Words like “feudalism”
and the “feudal system” (as on page 42) appear frequently, but some readers will not
know that these are now very vexed and disputed terms, often now avoided altogether by historians. Did Abelard and Heloise really invent “love as it would come
to be understood in modern times”? (p. 179). There are also numerous errors of
fact. For example, King Cnut died in 1035, but we learn that he attacked England
in 1055 (p. 84). Bernard of Clairvaux was born in 1090, but he was canonized in
1104 (p. 98). In what must have been an error in translation, we learn on page 124
that Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) was writing in the thirteenth century. These
examples and others like them were avoidable mistakes that could have been corrected by careful proofreading.
Saint Michael’s College
Colchester, VT

GEORGE DAMERON

The Life of Patriarch Ignatius. By Nicetas David. Text and translation by Andrew
Smithies, with notes by John M. Duffy. [Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, Vol. LI.] (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection. Distrib. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 2013. Pp.
xxxviii, 194. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-88402-381-4.)
About twenty-five years ago, Andrew Smithies submitted as a doctoral dissertation a critical text and translation of the Life of Ignatius, ascribed to Nicetas David
the Paphlagonian. Since then he has pursued a career in librarianship, and his thesis
has been consulted frequently, but with inevitable difficulty. This text and translation has now been published, with notes added by John M. Duffy. The Vita Ignatii
is a (very partisan) account of Ignatius, who was the son of Michael II Rangabe, was
originally named Nicetas, and was briefly emperor in the confused years between the
death of Emperor Nicephorus (whose skull ended up, inlaid with silver, as a drinking bowl for the Bulgarian Khan Krum) and the accession of Emperor Leo V, who
reintroduced iconoclasm. Later in the ninth century, Nicetas (now Ignatius, and
emasculated and tonsured by Leo) succeeded Methodius, the patriarch who had
overseen the end of iconoclasm. It was most likely a political appointment, and as
the political climate changed, Ignatius was deposed as patriarch and replaced by
Photius who, with another shift in the political landscape, found himself deposed
and Ignatius reinstated. From the point of view of the supporters of Ignatius,

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Photius was a figure of hate, and this Vita expresses their point of view eloquently.
Nicetas David, the biographer, acknowledges Photius’s vast intellectual culture and
wealth, with which “every book found its way into his possession” (Vita 21, p. 35);
he acknowledges, too, that, once a churchman by per saltum ordination, he devoted
himself to ecclesiastical learning. Nevertheless, he is presented as a man of overbearing pride, whose learning and culture became the basis for corruption and compromise with the secular authorities. The Vita Ignatii is one of the main sources for the
vilification of Photius. The supporters of Ignatius called on Pope Nicholas to investigate Photius’s accession to the patriarchal throne: a strategic opportunity to exercise papal claims within the Byzantine Empire. This set in motion a sequence of
events, which included Khan Boris’s attempts to play Rome off against Constantinople as he came to embrace Christianity, that led to the Photian schism in the
860s. Duffy’s clear and concise notes to the translation set the evidence provided by
the Vita in the context of the other accounts we have of these events and scholarly
discussion of them. The ninth century was an important and complex century for
Byzantium, as the empire emerged from the troubled years of iconoclasm into a
world in which the rift between East and West had become more firmly established,
and both papacy and patriarchate found themselves able to develop a more defined
identity. History-writing in the ninth century in Byzantium is, more than ever, an
attempt to tell a story from the perspectives of various groups claiming to define the
world in which they were living. Within Byzantium, these encompassed the newly
confident patriarchal court and various monastic groups, most obviously the Studites. The papal court, too, was busily gathering material to support a papal view of
the history of the Empire, notably in the material translated by Anastasius the
Librarian. The Vita Ignatii is an important element in this bid to interpret the past
with a view to the future. It is very good to have it available in an excellent critical
edition and accurate translation, supported by invaluable notes.
University of Durham, UK

ANDREW LOUTH

The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe, 1090–1500. By Emilia Jamroziak. [The
Medieval World.] (New York: Routledge. 2013. Pp. viii, 315. $39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4058-5864-9.)
Emilia Jamroziak has written an ambitious book about the Cistercian order in
medieval Europe that will on many issues replace Louis J. Lekai’s The Cistercians,
Ideal and Reality (Kent, OH, 1977). Her study is unusually strong in its inclusion
of Cistercians on the periphery of medieval Europe as well as those in the center,
and the linguistic abilities that allow that to be done are impressive. This work has
also begun to incorporate the history of the order’s nuns, citing an unusually complete series of recent studies in a separate chapter, but one that is admirable as more
than an “add-on.” Although the author begins the task of integrating the history of
Cistercian nuns into chapters on economies, architecture, and relations with
donors, much more could be said on buildings built for Cistercian nuns, on their
women donors and patrons, on their record-keeping and management of resources,
and on their creation of devotional images and needlework.

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It was pleasant to find that this reviewer’s notion of the gradual development
of the Cistercians from “ordo” to order had been incorporated into the opening
chapter on Cistercian origins.1 Jamroziak goes beyond the argument that Cistercian abbeys were rarely founded in the wilderness, rejecting both the “ideal and
reality” notions that we associate with Lekai and the notion of “golden age” followed by decline that has been the traditional way of telling the history of monastic
reform for centuries. Yet this leads to a certain blandness, for Jamroziak refrains
from describing the complex individuals involved in what history inevitably has to
be—the account of change over time—when she lumps together the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries throughout Europe in a narrative of a “multinational” religious
group; attributes the late-medieval order’s difficulties to outsiders like the papacy;
or presents Stephen of Lexington, Arnaud Amaury, and Jean of Cirey as flawless.
Sadly, some errors mar this fine book such as “utility” for “futility” and “Cherlieu”
for “Châalis,” which no doubt could have been addressed through more diligent
copyediting. Readers also may wish that the book could have included additional
images of Cistercian buildings, manuscripts, and landscapes.
Less convincing for Jamroziak are this reviewer’s arguments that solid dates
for foundation accounts must be based on the careful dating of a manuscript in
Trent once dated to c. 1135, but which was remade for Cistercian use considerably
later.2 Indeed, Jamroziak defers a little too much to M. Chrysogonus Waddell’s
“sound methodological principles” (p. 25). In “The Myth of Cistercian Origins,”3
Father Waddell disagreed with this reviewer regarding methodology, but many
Cistercian scholars now recognize that this reviewer had examined the original
twelfth-century manuscripts under discussion and thus had a legitimate basis for
her argument. Given the importance of Jamroziak’s book and the ways in which
she incorporates new views of the order, that record should be set straight.
University of Iowa

CONSTANCE H. BERMAN

Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s
Sentences and the Development of Theology. By Clare Monagle. [Europa Sacra,
Vol. 8.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2013. Pp. xx, 194. $102.00. ISBN 978-2-50352795-6.)
The present book is interested in the rise of the clerici, the schoolmen, during the
twelfth century. These men were well trained in the techniques needed by popes,

1. Constance H. Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in
Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 2000).
2. See Constance H. Berman, “The Cistercian Manuscript, Trent 1711, Version One
and Its Exemplar,” in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound. Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval
Manuscripts, ed. Jonathan Wilcox (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 159–76, and color plate 7, p. 231;
the latter considerably clarifies that argument.
3. Chrysogonus Waddell, “The Myth of Cistercian Origins: C. H. Berman and the
Manuscript Sources,” Citeaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 51 (2000), 299–386.

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princes, and town councils—that is, “systematization and codification” (p. xii). Among
them, Peter Lombard stands out as the author of the most influential collection of
patristic sentences in medieval times. When the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215
emphatically endorsed his trinitarian theology, “the figure of Peter Lombard was constructed as the voice of orthodoxy and as the builder of a reverent and authoritative
system of theological speculation” (p. xiii). This was, however, far from self-explanatory, since there had been severe criticism of the Lombard’s Christological reasoning
around 1179 and of his Trinitarian theology, uttered by Richard of St. Victor and
Joachim of Fiore. The author investigates the history of theological controversies from
mid-eleventh to mid-twelfth century (chapter 1), introduces the Lombard and his
Sentences (chapter 2), analyzes Christological thought and debate in his later work and
its critics (chapter 3) and in schools of the period after 1160 (chapter 4), and finally
explains the endorsement of the Lombard by the Fourth Lateran Council (chapter 5).
The trials of Berengar of Tours, Roscelin, Peter Abelard, and Gilbert of Poitiers
set the scene for the “discursive tradition of both attacking and endorsing the schools”
(p. 41) and thus for the Lombard’s life and work. Methodological innovations are
hinted at in the Magna Glosatura on the Psalms (pp. 52–53) and come to the fore
with the Four Books of Sentences, whose organization of the matter is “held together
through his authorial explanations” (p. 54). The Lombard managed to articulate “the
crucial relationship between God, language, and virtue” on which the twelfth-century
scholars concentrated (for example, John of Salisbury; p. 68). This did not save the
Lombard from criticism of his Christology, in which he stressed “the absolute reality
of Christ’s participation in humanity” (p. 75). Such accusations of heresy can be
traced back to the Lombard’s lifetime (Robert of Cricklade, p. 87); they continued
with Gerhoh of Reichersberg, John of Cornwall, and Walter of St. Victor and
reached a peak with the Lateran Council of 1179, whereas the Lombard’s legacy was
defended by Peter Comestor and Peter of Poitiers (p. 126). They produced different
interpretations of the Christology of the Sentences and thus each “another Peter Lombard” (p. 129), culminating in the perfectly orthodox Peter of Lateran IV, who “was
constructed as a thinker who enabled the possibility of orthodoxy expressed notionally” (p. 149), against Joachim and the Amalricians (pp. 152–53).
In sum, this is a readable book with a clear-cut argument that will greatly contribute to our understanding of twelfth-century debates. The argument is mainly
convincing, although the wide horizon of “orthodoxy and controversy” is not always
in the foreground, as the title might suggest. Following the seminal work of Marcia
Colish and others, Monagle has succeeded in placing the Sentences within the
debates and developments of its time and has explained convincingly how “theology became a tool for reform” with Pope Innocent III (p. 169) and why the Lombard’s work finally succeeded as hallmark of orthodoxy, although there had been
substantial suspicions of heresy. The book thus reminds us that even this most
influential book initially had to overcome severe obstacles and needed strong
patronage before dominating the theological discourse and education for centuries.
University of Göttingen, Germany

PETER GEMEINHARDT

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813

The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late
Middle Ages. Edited by Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, and Kathryn A. Smith.
[Medieval Texts and Cultures in Northern Europe, Vol. 21.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2013. Pp. xxiv, 552. €120,00. ISBN 978-2-503-53212-7.)
In The Social Life of Illumination, art and literary historians examine French
and English illuminated manuscripts produced between the thirteenth and earlysixteenth centuries. The volume’s essays demonstrate that manuscript imagery
expresses, instigates, and solidifies social interactions and relationships.
The volume’s first section, “Spiritual Community,” analyzes illuminations that
integrate the reader-viewer into communities of people with similar devotional practices, religious beliefs, or theological agendas. Marlene Villalobos Hennessey argues
that illuminations depicting Christ’s blood indicated that the book itself signified
Christ’s suffering body, a medieval metaphor that spread to varied audiences
through communal viewing of these images or sermons preached to the laity. Alixe
Bovey asserts that illuminations depicting the Eucharistic ritual reinforce the
viewer’s participation in the ceremony of the Mass. Lucy Freeman Sandler articulates that the creation and use of an Old Testament picture cycle necessitated communication between the patron’s household and the Augustinian friars who worked
in their service as artists and spiritual guides. Kathryn Smith claims that the prevalence of heraldic imagery in Books of Hours allowed the patron to pray while contemplating marital and feudal alliances. David Joseph Wrisley argues that images of
an imagined debate between a Christian and a Muslim express the mid-fifteenthcentury Burgundian court’s shared anxiety regarding the expansion of the Islamic
Ottoman empire. Robert Clark and Pamela Sheingorn suggest that the illuminations depicting scenes from a passion play enable viewers to envision themselves as
audience members witnessing a performance. Laura Weigert asserts that images
depicting the destruction of Jerusalem c. 70 AD motivated readers to share the ideology of late-fifteenth-century French crusaders in their desire to invade Jerusalem.
The book’s second section, “Social and Political Community,” examines
images that inspire a collective awareness of worldly values and shape secular relationships. Logan Whalen examines mnemonic devices in illuminations illustrating
Marie de France’s Fables that allow a reader to remember Marie’s moral commentary. Nancy Freeman Regalado discusses images that locate an allegorical triumph
of Virtues over Vices in early-fourteenth-century Paris, a victory that readers likely
linked to their hopes for good government under Philip V. Anne Hedeman investigates illuminations that chronicle the legal activity of French kings such as King
Philip VI of France presiding over dukes, counts, and bishops at a trial; such images
present semi-fictionalized versions of historical events to legitimize royal authority
and political alliances. Mark Cruse posits that an illuminated copy of the Roman
d’Alexandre functions as a social agent by encouraging communal reading, proper
courtly conversation, communication via vernacular language, and empathetic
responses to the story’s events. Joyce Coleman considers illuminations depicting
the text’s author presenting the book to its patron. Such “presentation miniatures”

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not only express the social relationship between creator and recipient but also reveal
the social prestige ascribed to political texts. By examining another presentation
miniature, Dhira Mahoney explores the idealized visual construction of relationships between the manuscript’s recipient (King Edward IV), his family members,
the text’s translator, and the text’s initial compiler. Elizabeth Morrison argues that
King James IV of Scotland presented his English bride, Margaret Tudor, with a
Book of Hours as a wedding gift; images of the Holy Family emphasize Joseph’s
role as Mary’s husband and, by analogy, the potential for a harmonious marriage
between James and Margaret. Mary Erler examines royal inscriptions in a Book of
Hours owned by an English female courtier. The inscriptions expose the emotional
and obligatory bonds between a courtier and the court that she served.
Taken together, these essays thoroughly support the editors’ contention that
“illuminated manuscripts . . . were constitutive of social bonds that would not have
existed, or not in the same way, without them” (p. 2).
Suffolk University

SARAH BROMBERG

Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait. By Denys Turner. (New Haven: Yale University Press.
2013. Pp. xi, 300. $28.00. ISBN 978-0-300-18855-4.)
Introductions to St. Thomas Aquinas, which have been legion in recent
decades, fall into three categories—the historian’s, the philosopher’s, and the theologian’s—although there is inevitably a degree of overlap among them. This study
by Denys Turner (Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale),
despite a chapter of contextualization of Aquinas the Dominican and subsequent
references to such controversies as the Parisian quarrels over mendicant university
chairs and the crisis over Latin Averroism, does not fall into the category of the historian’s book. Although the only slip noted was the (seeming) identification of
Hugh of St.-Victor as a monk rather than canon regular, the weakness of the “portrait,” historically considered, lies in its relative inattention to Aquinas the biblical
commentator (although the interesting suggestion is made that a Thomasian synthesis might be constructed from Aquinas’s lectures on St. John’s Gospel) and its
almost complete silence on Aquinas the eager collector of patristic texts. This of
itself may alert the reader to the fact that Turner’s Thomas Aquinas is not a theologian’s study either. It is, in fact, a philosopher’s book—although one of an unusual
philosopher passionately wedded to Christian orthodoxy and greatly stimulated by
theological themes.
Turner’s own intellectual odyssey is unusual. It involved a training in AngloSaxon analytical philosophy combined with an early commitment to Marxism and
more recently a delight in exploring the experiential claims, or assumptions, of the
medieval mystics. These tools—and concerns—surface in Turner’s treatment of
Aquinas that emphasizes the logical defensibility of some of his characteristic positions such as the “materialism,” or high doctrine of matter, found in his writing and
the apophaticism of his account of God. More specifically, the book is much

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indebted to the late-twentieth-century English Dominican Herbert McCabe,
whose inspiration is suitably noted. The notion of human beings as linguistic animals, the dislike of assertoric theologies of divine being, the minimalization of the
Platonist elements in Aquinas’s thought, the presentation of grace as divine friendship, the robust rejection of logical critiques of the two-natures doctrine of Chalcedon, the account of the Eucharistic conversion as trans-signification or transformation of meaning, even the downplaying of the monastic (or “canonical”)
elements in the Dominican life—these are hallmarks of Herbertianism even if
Turner gives some of them original twists such as that on the rationale of the Incarnation (an especially fine section).
A less attractive feature shared with the same source is the rhetorical trope
whereby the reader is knocked off balance by some maximally radical statements in
the hope that he or she will not recover in time to establish its implausibility. A
good example runs: “It is, for sure, no overstatement to say that for Thomas theology is but an extended meditation on the meaning of bread and wine, a reflection
on what they really are” (p. 268, emphasis in original). Overstatement is, of course,
exactly what this assertion is.
With some help from the publisher (according to the author), the style
adopted aims at accessibility to a general audience beyond the academy. In this aim
Thomas Aquinas. A Portrait succeeds very well indeed. The book buzzes with excitement, but its relentless exclusion of so many of the biblical and creedal topics of
sacra doctrina in Aquinas’s work makes it more of a personal testimony to a twofold
debt (Thomas and McCabe) than a rounded account of a thirteenth-century
divine.
Blackfriars
Cambridge, UK

AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the
Medieval Universe. By Sophie Page. [The Magic in History Series.] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 232. $79.95.
ISBN 978-0-271-06033-0.)
There is something thrilling for the researcher about working in a library for
the first time, familiarizing oneself with its contents, both their riches and their
lacunae, figuring out its organizational principles, stumbling upon evidence of past
users and important benefactors, and then by ever more extended use, discerning
the patterns and trajectory of the library’s development over time. The experience
encompasses both archaeological and forensic dimensions, and can be of far greater
and longer-term value than getting to the individual volumes that brought the
researcher to the library in the first place. As Sophie Page demonstrates in Magic
in the Cloister, the thrill is not limited to a summer spent in a scrupulously maintained Fachbibliothek at a twenty-first-century university institute, but can also be
won through a more constructed visit to a library in the distant past.

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The library in question in Magic in the Cloister is the late-medieval library of
the Abbey of St. Augustine in Canterbury, especially its collection of learned
magic. The collection amounts to some thirty volumes and warrants Page’s efforts
on account of the pre-eminence of the abbey in English ecclesiastical and intellectual life. Her self-stated aim is to ascertain the internal rationality of the magic collection and to evaluate the rationale for its possession and use in a religiously orthodox monastic context.
Magic in the Cloister is the substantially revised dissertation submitted by Page
for her doctorate at the Warburg Institute in 2000. Those origins would suggest
that Page has been working in this medieval library, whose contents were dispersed
during Britain’s early-sixteenth-century monastic dissolution, for about two
decades. The familiarity that comes from such a long association enriches the
analysis. Three highlights follow: First, the monograph contributes to a current
research priority in the study of magic that magical texts should be analyzed in their
codicological and librarious contexts. The series Magic in History has done much
to shape this research agenda and includes this volume, Richard Kieckhefer’s Forbidden Rites (1998) and Benedek Lang’s Unlocked Books (2008). Page’s chapter on
the monks who acquired the magic books for the abbey is exemplary in this regard.
Second, the monograph attends with sophistication to the medieval diffusion in
Western Europe of magical works of Mediterranean origin. Her analysis of the
liber vaccae in the second chapter and her consideration of theurgy in the sixth shed
important light on the appropriation of Arab and Jewish magical thought into the
Western Christian world. Third, Page includes two translated texts as appendices,
the Glossulae super librum imaginum lunae and the Liber de essentiali spirituum.
These are shorter texts that would not likely otherwise find their way to press, that
are important to particular chapters in the monograph, and that are now happily
available for broader classroom use. Their inclusion is to be applauded.
Weaknesses are apparent only in contrast to the volume’s overriding strengths:
the epilogue on John Dee, although at points intriguing, is unclearly linked to the
substantive chapters that precede it. Furthermore, the concern to establish the
“orthodoxy” of the texts’ possessors is overwrought at points: Cecco d’Ascoli’s execution in Florence would be more the exception than the rule and too far away to
have been of real concern to readers at St. Augustine’s. Nonetheless, Magic in the
Cloister is a stimulating work: its research is meticulous, its insights compelling, and
its prose limpid. For this reviewer, the first visit to the library of St. Augustine’s was
thrilling indeed.
Georgetown University

DAVID J. COLLINS, S.J.

The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority. By Tanya
Stabler Miller. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. iv, 293. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4607-0.)
In her fine contribution to the study of medieval beguines Tanya Stabler Miller
focuses on thirteenth-century Paris, whose enormous beguinage has not before been

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the subject of a detailed analysis. This focus allows her to examine the role of the
saintly King Louis IX in the foundation, and his and his descendants’ continued
patronage and protection of the biggest “court” beguinage in France (chapters 1, 7);
to use Parisian tax rolls to explore the beguines’ financial status and professional
activities (chapters 2, 3); to show how university scholars like Robert of Sorbon used
beguine ideals in their teaching and preaching (chapter 4); to take another look at
the educational activities of beguines (chapter 5) and at the debates concerning the
origin of the term beguine (chapter 6). The heart of the book, containing the most
interesting and innovative findings, is to be found in chapters 2–4.
Chapters 1 and 7 provide an excellent framework for understanding the importance of royal support for the Paris beguinage, especially after the Council of Vienne
(1311–12), which made the beguines’ life and work very difficult by raising suspicions about their lifestyle and attempting to suppress them (unsuccessfully). Chapter
5 addresses such diverse topics as the beguines’ religious education and book ownership, as well as the importance of the vernacular, followed by an analysis of two
texts (studied many times before, notably by Barbara Newman and Sylvia Huot,
who are both acknowledged) that link beguines to love by using a courtly vocabulary.
Chapter 6, in addition to revisiting the term beguine, deals with the case of Marguerite Porete (executed in 1310) but adds little to Sean Field’s recent findings.
So what is in the heart of this book? Real lives of real beguines. By digging
into tax records, wills, and other relevant documents, Miller has been able to recreate the world of the Paris beguinage. We see women preaching, interacting with
university clerics, trying to dispose of their property, and drawing up careful wills
that leave their property to other beguines (not their families). We especially see
women working in the manufacture and trade of textiles, specifically those of silk.
In the process some new angles appear, encouraging us to rethink the dynamics
between women with religious aspirations and clerics by privileging, as do some
other recent studies (notably by Fiona Griffiths), “interaction and collaboration
over marginalization and persecution” (p. 13). That beguines retained control over
their property distinguished them from traditional religious and enabled them to
ensure, for example, that their houses stayed within the enclosure of the beguinage
even after their deaths and would continue to be owned by beguines. Their role in
the skilled silk manufacture and trade, only possible for non-enclosed women of
course, assured their livelihood and made possible their active charity. The links
between “economic success and lay religiosity” (p. 59) refocus debates about religious poverty, especially for the thirteenth century. That Robert of Sorbon adduced
the beguines as exemplars of charity and humility to teach his book-obsessed clerics
a lesson will surprise some readers. The author’s nuanced analysis of varying
degrees of literacy also is a useful contribution to recent debates. An appendix provides the names and occupations (when known) of beguines listed in the Parisian
tax rolls. Several maps and later images of some of the beguines’ tombs help us
imagine this community in its Parisian location. In sum, The Beguines of Medieval
Paris is an informative and lively book that will make readers see these women not
as the hypocritical figures of the satirical tradition nor as the targets of hostile papal

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pronouncements but as active and charitable women who carved out an important
place for themselves in a city replete with religious orders and institutions.
University of Pittsburgh

RENATE BLUMENFELD-KOSINSKI

Speculum Curatorm: A Mirror for Curates. By Ranulph Higden. Introduction, edition and translation by Eugene Crook and Margaret Jennings. [Dallas
Medieval Texts and Translations, Vol. 13.] (Leuven: Peeters. 2012. Pp. xvi,
444. €58,00 paperback. ISBN 978-90-429-2487-1.)
The appearance of Eugene Crook and Margaret Jennings’ elegant edition and
translation of the first of three books of Ranulph Higden’s Speculum Curatorum
could not be more timely. Among medievalists Higden is better known for his universal history, Polychronicon, and preaching manual, Ars componendi sermones. His
Speculum, however, is beginning to enjoy a renaissance, particularly in regard to fraternal correction and postmedieval integration of theology and law. A product of a
Benedictine monk based in Chester, the Speculum is a compendium that draws on
materials ranging from Christian doctrine and legal discourse to folklore. It exists
in two versions: one produced in 1340 and extant in four manuscripts; the other
revised around 1350 and extant in a single manuscript.
The 1350 recension of the Speculum has a distinctive tripartite structure, with
the first part dealing with the commandments, the second with the deadly sins, and
the third with the sacraments. As the edition and translation by Crook and Jennings of the first part or book of the Speculum are based on the 1350 recension, it
should be noted that the two recensions differ significantly with regard to intended
audience, form, substance, and length. Oriented not only to priests but also to the
Christian laity, the revised version of the Speculum is much longer (with 130 more
chapters, of which fifty alone are devoted to the commandments). In revising the
earlier version, Higden shifts the focus of the Speculum away from Archbishop John
Pecham’s educational model for priests to Bishop Robert Grosseteste’s catechetical
agenda as found in his Templum Domini.
To read Crook and Jennings’ edition is to encounter a voice at once familiar
and fresh: familiar, because, as the editors helpfully suggest, Higden’s work belongs
to the rich harvest of fourteenth-century pastoralia (such as Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis, John de Burgo’s Pupilla oculi, and Mirk’s Manuale sacerdotis); and fresh, because
Higden draws on both canon and civil law in a manner that would be comprehensible to a nonacademic audience, whether lay or clerical.
Crook and Jennings have done admirable justice to Higden’s text. To begin
with, unlike many other parallel translations of medieval texts, their translation is
exceptionally careful in matching the Latin text with regard to paragraph breaks
and thus ensures easy comparisons between the Latin and English. Their edition is
particularly well suited to the modern scholar, who can access not only Higden’s
own text but also its legal sources. Crook and Jennings have taken painstaking care

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to highlight Higden’s acknowledgment of his precise debts to canon and civil law:
embedded in their translation are citations pointing to the relevant texts of the
Corpus iuris canonici or the Corpus iuris civilis. Equally important and laudable, their
succinct notes on each of the fifty chapters of book 1 and the index to its sources
encourage and enable the reader to check cross-references without any difficulty.
The translation is refreshingly literal without being leaden.
A few liberties have been taken in translating from the Latin, but they do not
undermine the integrity of this well-executed edition and its translation. On pages
50–51, “canum sectatores, diurni potatores, nocturni peccatores” is translated as
“cheats, drunkards, perverts,” whereas a slightly more accurate translation would be
“followers of dogs [hunters], drunkards by day, sinners by night.” On pages 56–57,
the biblical precept “neminem ad perfectum adduxit lex” is translated as “the law
brought nothing to perfection,” which is no doubt the correct translation of the text
in the Bible, but Higden changes the Bible reading from “nihil” to “neminem” (“no
one”). On pages 190–91, the translation of “qui autem suscipit habitum professionis ignoranter adhuc non solempnizat” misses the adverb “ignoranter.” On page
282–83, “si dominus rem illam habet pro derelicto” is translated as “if the owner
has abandoned the property” rather than, as the Latin and Higden’s Justinian
source indicate, “if the owner considers that he has abandoned the property.” On
page 284, there appears to be a typo: “improbus” (qualifying the neuter noun
“furtum”) should be “improbum” in “Set improbus cum quis spoliatur set improbissimum quod fit per rapinam. Omnis namque raptor est fur, set non econtrario.”
Also, in the quotation just cited, they mistake rapina (“plunder”) for raptus (“sexual
rape”) and hence translate the words “rapina” as “rape” and “raptor” as “rapist.”
This edition, translation, and comprehensive contextualization of the Speculum are a tour de force and enrich the scholarship on the subject of pastoral care.
Like W. A. Pantin, Leonard E. Boyle, Joseph Goering, Michael Haren, and H. A.
Kelly, Crook and Jennings have done for the twenty-first-century medievalist
something analogous to what Higden did for his intended audience: bring to light
a text useful to dispel the ignorantia scolarum hodie about the cura animarum in fourteenth-century England.
University of California at Los Angeles

ARVIND THOMAS

The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe. By Laura Ackerman Smoller. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014. Pp. xx, 343. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8014-5217-8.)
The Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer was an ardent critic of the Great
Schism who nonetheless remained close to the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, until
nearly all others had abandoned him. A confidant of the count-kings of the Crown
of Aragon, he (after Martin I died without an heir) helped shape the Compromise
of Caspe that moved Catalonia into the Castilian orbit. Born in 1350, he died in
1419 in Vannes, where he was preaching at the invitation of the duke of Brittany.

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In old age his fiery preaching and apocalyptic message attracted crowds of selfmutilating followers and caused riots that led to forced conversions and deaths.
Despite all of this, Laura Ackerman Smoller turns our basic assumption of Ferrer’s
profound importance on its head; perhaps his lasting influence is due not to his
own achievements but to the powerful persons who promoted his saintliness to
advance their own agendas.
This book is not a biography but rather an assessment of the uses of recollection. Much of the book treats the politics and processes that led to Ferrer’s canonization in 1455, concentrating foremost on the canonization inquest at Vannes.
The single “cult” of the book’s subtitle should be read in the plural, since it is one
of Smoller’s central assertions—one for which she presents ample evidence—that
there were a number of ways to read Ferrer’s sanctity after his death as well as various ways of promoting and acting upon the many readings.
Smoller argues that Ferrer’s cause succeeded because powerful persons who
had the money and political capacity to pursue their agendas saw that Ferrer’s canonization would serve them well. The canonization in 1450 of the Franciscan
Bernardino of Siena lit a fire under the Dominicans that moved them to make
claims for a new saint of their own; once they put their institutional muscle behind
it, the canonization process moved along quickly. The dukes of Brittany similarly
attached themselves to Ferrer in competition against French kings who quite usefully rode the coattails of St. Louis. The papacy and the Catalan count-kings had
their own reasons for advancing Ferrer’s sainthood and their own stories to tell
about why his saintliness mattered. Even ordinary people found ways of benefiting
from the canonization fervor. Given the complexity of voices and interests, it seems
no surprise to find evidence of “whitewashing” of Ferrer’s record, of leading witnesses along a preapproved script, and of a vita written to redress and obscure.
The ample nuance and complexity here may leave some readers feeling that
the book is disjointed or that they have occasionally lost the main line of argument.
Others might want more or less substance in this or that citation or wish that some
really good material was not relegated to sparse notes, as for example, in the story
of the man who lost his intestines after murmuring against Ferrer. Smoller brings
odd humor to her work when she describes the cooking of the chopped-up baby as
Valencian paella and when she implies that Ferrer, after death, found several occasions to tell his supporters that he would do them some good once they succeeded
in having him canonized. Quibbles and curiosities aside, the author has done well
to let facts, legends, and evidentiary threads open one onto another into nets of
questions and resources for future Ferrer studies. There is much to learn from this
exemplary study of Ferrer’s afterlife.
State University of New York at New Paltz

MICHAEL VARGAS

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EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN
Papato e politica internazionale nella prima età moderna. Edited by Maria Antonietta
Visceglia. (Rome: Libreria Editrice Viella. 2013. Pp. 649. €42,00 paperback.
ISBN 978-88-6728-019-3.)
This is a wide-ranging collection of more than twenty studies representing the
work of several different centers of research and coordinated by Maria Visceglia of
the Sapienza in Rome. Most are in Italian (except for three in English, four in
French, and one in Spanish), but after the index, there are English summaries of
them all. Visceglia herself contributes (in English) a synthesizing introduction
packed with interesting ideas and learning. The main purpose of the book is to
explore strategies employed to restore and reinterpret papal authority, both spiritual
and temporal, from the end of the Great Schism to the early-eighteenth century;
there is some stress on developments during and after the 1580s with new initiatives
of Pope Gregory XIII and his successors. Political and diplomatic operations in
Europe and the Mediterranean region are discussed and, in global perspective, wider
perceptions about the papacy and missions conducted by new religious orders.
A first grouping, focused on ideology and political expedients, begins with the
policy of compromise. Marco Pellegrini (the only contributor much concerned with
the fifteenth century) provides a masterly analysis of the concordats between the
papacy and secular powers from 1418 to 1516 (when he shows that King Francis I
retreated slightly from Gallican claims to support Pope Leo X’s neo-crusading
agenda). Concordantia is also the subject of Maria Rosa’s contribution, but in an
eighteenth-century context, after other authors expound on some policies that are
more robust. First, revisiting Prodi’s theme of a monarchy with two souls, a revival
of papal universalism is perceived by Heinz Schilling, with reference to the claims
of sacrality and visual splendor intended to make Rome seem a truly world capital.
Alain Taillon then discusses papal attempts to act—not very successfully—as a
neutral force or as arbiter in international disputes even though punitive violence
was also sometimes pursued (and not only in defense of Italian temporalities).
There follow Silvano Giordano’s useful analysis of curial officialdom, including the
role of the cardinal-nephew, and Giovanni Pizzorusso on the foundation in 1622
and functions of Propaganda Fide.
The second grouping is largely devoted to the theme of “the frontier,” meaning the frontier regions of Catholic Christendom. It starts, perhaps surprisingly,
with two essays concerned with Protestant Swiss, the first of them interestingly
focused on Milan’s role as a religious and military border city. Two studies consider
Inquisitorial policy in the Empire and on the crucial importance of Bohemia; Stefano Villani deals with England, underlining the near possibility of a reconciliation
with Rome under King Charles I through the network of agents around Queen
Henrietta Maria. He draws attention to the Scotsman George Conn, a rather
unlikely candidate for a pro-English cardinal’s hat, and some little-known correspondence of a gossipy Frenchman, from which, disappointingly, he does not quote

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directly. The frontier then moves east, to border regions of Islam: different studies
discuss Spanish attempts to make the Magreb an urgent field for crusading initiatives, provide curious details about the mixed Christian minorities in Albania and
their connections with nearby Apulia, and explore the situation in nearby Ragusa
and Venetian Cattaro. There is an investigation, perhaps out of place here, tending
to authenticate Pope Alexander VI’s dubious dealings with the Ottoman sultan
and, finally, two studies of attempted Catholic penetration of the Slav lands and
Syria that seem to suggest that reconciliation with the Eastern Churches was not a
papal priority, and in the case of Russia, a hopeless cause. The final section moves
into the transoceanic world, with one essay about the South American missionary
field, as well as a rather miscellaneous trio about relations with the Safavid court of
Persia, about oriental languages taught and used for publishing purposes in Rome,
and about the papal legation in Peking in the eighteenth century—this reveals the
unacceptability or incomprehensibility of papal claims of universal authority to the
Chinese mind.
This is an impressive collection even if the thematic structure is not always as
well organized as it could be; all the authors (to whom justice cannot be done individually) provide innumerable multilingual bibliographical references (unfortunately, there is no overall bibliography) and testify to the vast quantity of new
research and revision recently undertaken and still in progress.
The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study
University of London

DAVID CHAMBERS

Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and Its Empire: Francisco de Torrejoncillo and the Centinela contra Judios (1674). By François Soyer. [The
Medieval and Early Modern World, Vol. 54.] (Leiden: Brill. 2014. Pp. xxv,
319. $135.00. ISBN 978-90-04-25047-5.)
François Soyer offers here the first academic study and English translation of
the most widely read vernacular Iberian manifesto of antisemitism. Fray Francisco
de Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judios, a relatively brief but comprehensive catalog of both religious and social hysteria about Jews, went through nine editions in
Spanish between 1674 and 1736, plus a blatant plagiarism (p. 67), and four editions
in Portuguese between 1684 and 1748. Soyer demonstrates its impressive dissemination among literate “Old-Christians,” although it encountered some mixed
responses after 1750 (pp. 61–63); and reading the Centinela even persuaded one
Old-Christian priest in Galicia to become a Judaizer (p. 64). This enthusiastic
defense of the Spanish Inquisition (by a Franciscan unaffiliated with it) also spread
throughout Spain’s American empire and was partially reprinted in Mexico in 1775
(pp. 65–66).
Soyer’s densely annotated translation fills more than half of the book and
incorporates two lengthy décima poems (pp. 146–50, 162–71; texts on 285–99).
Torrejoncillo probably composed these himself, but attributed the first to an

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unnamed Judaizer sentenced ten years previously at a local auto da fe and the other
to the founder of limpieza statutes. The author, who lived near the Portuguese
border, also included firsthand knowledge of a few local Jewish atrocities (pp.
226n27, 232n43, 255). This literary cesspool flaunted an impressive display of erudition by citing more than 100 authorities, some of them truly obscure (e.g., p.
242n23). However, Soyer shows that the Centinela relied heavily on four authors,
often cited either without acknowledgment or inaccurately (pp. 79–80). It most
often pillaged a little-known Portuguese antisemite, Vicente da Costa Mattos, plagiarizing him almost verbatim throughout chapter 13 (p. 264n3). Two others were
fellow Franciscans from Portugal; Torrejoncillo’s only major Spanish source, used
in eight of his fourteen chapters, was a pseudonymous sixteenth-century defense of
Spain’s limpieza de sangre statutes.
More might have been done with the biography of the author of this farrago.
Soyer demonstrates that Torrejoncillo became a missionary to the Philippines
before his manuscript was printed (thus some of its many errors were not his fault),
but cannot decide when he was born, suggesting 1604 or 1607 (p. 49). However,
note 7 on page 49 suggests he was forty-six when he completed the Centinela in
1672; this accords better with serving three decades in the Philippines before dying
at Manila in 1704. His later years in Asia, when he probably never saw an Iberian
“New Christian” or even a copy of his own book, were remembered for minor feats
involving force-fed Hosts and the cord of his robe. They never mention his book,
but do record his botched attempt at self-castration (p. 53)—an odd contrast with
the Centinela’s castigation of eunuchs as despised even by Jews (p. 141).
Northwestern University (Emeritus)

WILLIAM MONTER

Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History. Edited by Jeffrey
D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press. 2014. Pp. x, 482. $46.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-02240-2.)
Many students of church history, especially non-Catholics, assume that the
Roman Catholic Church takes little or no account of general social, political, and
intellectual developments, even among Catholics. After all, the doctrines of the
Church rest on an unchanging Bible and on supposedly infallible pronouncements
by church authorities over many centuries. The concept of a “Catholic Enlightenment” or “Enlightened Catholicism” can easily seem an absurdity, especially given
the ridicule to which the literal Bible story and the pronouncements of the popes
were subjected by leaders of the Enlightenment in Catholic countries such as
Voltaire. But “the Catholic Enlightenment” and “Enlightened Catholicism” are
now themes widely studied and discussed by Catholics and non-Catholics, reflecting the fact that the Church, while claiming to be “always the same,” has produced
numerous critics and innovators whose “Enlightened” views have eventually
become orthodox, or at least accepted by church authorities as worthy of consideration. This is a phenomenon perhaps especially difficult for British students to
grasp, since their countries were largely cut off from internal Roman Catholic

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debates from the time of the Reformation onward, and little of the relevant literature is in English. Furthermore, in the history of the United Kingdom Catholic
Irish inflexibility has been much more conspicuous than Continental subtleties. It
is scarcely surprising that Ireland hardly figures in this volume.
The volume is introduced by a valuable essay from Jeffrey Burson titled
“Catholicism and Enlightenment, Past, Present, and Future,” which gives some
account of the history of the concept, together with a short bibliography. But the
book’s great contribution is that it supplies English-language accounts of some of
the most significant Catholic writings of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries from many European countries, not only France, Italy, and Germany but
also Spain, Austria, Poland, and Scotland. In each case a bibliography is also supplied. No other book conveys so well the pan-European nature of Catholic discussion, or its range and depth. Of course, many of these pieces were originally published in Latin or French, but some appeared first in German, Italian, Spanish,
Polish, or Portuguese. Burson has adopted a very wide definition of Catholic
Enlightenment, which more or less amounts to “any sign of sympathy with
Enlightenment or of dissent from the more reactionary papal pronouncements
and policies.” This approach has the great merit of introducing Anglophone readers to many texts from the long eighteenth century that are very little known in
Britain and, in some cases, anywhere. The editors deserve congratulation for
having ranged so widely and for having insisted on publishing short accounts of
works by many authors, so that their variety and geographical range can be appreciated. It is refreshing to find snatches of Johann Pezzl’s Vienna journalism
included in a volume otherwise almost entirely the work of serious-minded clergy.
A unique note is struck in Mark Goldie’s reprinted essay on Alexander Geddes,
an “extremist” (p. 426) who held an extraordinary range of views that he claimed
were based on Catholicism, applauding the French Revolution and rejecting the
temporal power of the pope.
A collective volume such as this naturally raises many questions. To marshal
so many authors from many countries and keep them to the plan of the book has
been a major editorial achievement. But the fact that the index has been ruthlessly
confined to listing names is unfortunate, making it impossible, for example, to find
easily the references in the book to Jansenism and its suppression, and similarly to
the Jesuits. No doubt the fate of the Jesuits has been well studied, but their suppression surely deserves some discussion here.
The risks of punishment and even death run by dissident Catholic authors
have been decidedly underplayed. It seems strange that Lord Acton and his work
are nowhere mentioned. The translations from the books discussed are usually
good, but it is disconcerting to find Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier’s Combien les moeurs
donnent d’éclat au talent rendered as “How Many Morals Make Talent Resplendent” (p. 64).
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

DEREK BEALES

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825

LATE MODERN EUROPEAN
Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies,
1760–1870. By Bob Tennant. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp.
xii, 342. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-956785-0.)
Bob Tennant’s work on the eighteenth-century British sermon dates back to
at least 2004, when he published a book chapter on an antislavery sermon by Beilby
Porteus, bishop of Chester from 1776 to 1787. Since then, he has also published
essays on John Tillotson, the Scottish Episcopalian Robert Morehead, and sermons
about charity schools in England and mission work abroad. This is his second
book-length study, after Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (Rochester, NY, 2011).
For most of the book, the meaning of the main title is not entirely clear. This
is certainly a study of corporate Christianity, specifically the Incorporated Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), and the Church Missionary Society (CMS).
“Holiness,” however, receives just a passing mention in the second chapter (p. 80).
Only in the conclusion do we finally learn that the title comes from “William Warburton, who conceived of corporate holiness as an expression of national spirituality
and practice, grounded on . . . the mutually reinforcing platforms of Church and
State” (p. 287). This reasoning is sound, but it would have been preferable to find
it in the introduction, where it could help set the stage for the chapters to come.
The appropriateness of the subtitle, in contrast, is evident from the start. The
first three chapters examine sermons preached at the annual meetings of each of the
three missionary societies. Tennant then traces the overall phenomenon of the
“anniversary sermon” through three stages: the “heroic phase” (1810–32), “Christian Empire” (1820–60), and “From Christian Empire to Global Communion,
1850–70” (the title of the final chapter). By the end of the book, a complete trajectory has been traced: the sermon began as a vehicle for introducing corporate
policy, then ceased to have an administrative function, and eventually became a
“mainly ceremonial” event (p. 255).
Throughout these chapters, we see some of the interests pursued by Tennant
in other projects: “directionality,” or the use of pronouns in preaching (p. 14); the
frequency with which preachers invoke various scripture texts (appendix 2, pp.
293–95); and especially Butlerian philosophy. He also introduces the new idea of
preaching as a “conversation.” This can take place within a single service, a “communal” event where the preacher invites the congregation to think with him, if not
actually talk with him, about his topic for the day (p. 14). It can also involve the
idea of preachers being in dialog with one another, using their sermons to endorse
or refute ideas presented in earlier addresses. This is an important element of the
anniversary sermons, which gave preachers annual platforms for engaging with
their colleagues’ work. It also has applications beyond Tennant’s immediate subject, and it strikes me as adding an important new dimension to homiletic theory.

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Tennant concludes by describing his book as “an essay in criticism” (p. 287).
This may be a nod to Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem, in which he offers this advice
to aspiring critics: “In ev’ry Work regard the Writer’s End, / Since none can compass more than they Intend; / And if the Means be just, the Conduct true,
Applause, in spite of trivial Faults, is due.” This is sound advice for the book
reviewer as well. Corporate Holiness is not what Pope would call “a faultless Piece,”
because there is no such thing as a perfect work of scholarship. In this case, for
example, some of the earlier chapters may end a bit abruptly, and the references to
Butler’s thought seem overdone at times. On the whole, however, Tennant has
largely accomplished the task he set for himself, and this book is a welcome addition to the growing field of sermon studies.
Marshall University

ROBERT H. ELLISON

Religious Institutes and Catholic Culture in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe. Edited by
Urs Altermatt, Jan De Maeyer, and Franziska Metzger. [KADOC Studies on
Religion, Culture and Society, 13.] (Leuven: Leuven University Press. 2014.
Pp. 216. €49,50 paperback. ISBN 978-94-6270-000-0.)
The title of this volume of eleven contributions by eleven authors is exact and
informative, once the meaning of “Religious Institutes” becomes clear. The term
refers to congregations and orders of religious sisters, brothers, and priests. Most of
the essays, all in English, treat the intellectual or broader cultural influence of these
religious institutions in their different settings. They treat cases in Belgium and
Switzerland, the home countries of the editors, as well as France, Germany, the
Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. In their framing pieces,
Altermatt and Metzger suggest that historians and sociologists of Catholicism have
not yet uncovered the broader significance and implications of these foundations
for the shape and nature of modern European Catholicism. Left unspoken is the
relevance to comparative church history of North America.
The individual essays will be of interest not only to specialists in the national
history of the countries treated and to connoisseurs of specific congregations but
also to scholars of such fields as journals of opinion, education (especially convent
schools), and retreats for forming a working-class elite. The volume is part of a
larger undertaking housed principally in the KADOC series. Volume 2 of the series
set the stage: Religious Institutes in Western Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries:
Historiography, Research and Legal Position, edited by Jan de Maeyer, Sofie Leplae,
and Jochim Schmiedl (2004). Students of religious history and cultural studies will
find a wealth of careful scholarship and bibliography offered in these publications
(cf. http://www.kadoc.kuleuven.be/relins/eu). Volume 11 in the series, The Economics of Providence, edited by Maarten Van Dijck, Jan de Maeyer, Jeffrey Tyssens,
and Jimmy Koppen (2013), takes up a quite different angle: how these “institutes”
financed themselves, as political economies changed.
Another focus of analysis is something quite new to this reviewer. Two articles
in the collection deal with children’s literature “as lieu of the construction and

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promulgation of Catholic identities, focusing on narratives and narrative modes as
well as on the social historical questions of how and where, during the 19th and
20th centuries, this literature was produced” (p. 9). This work follows up on volume
3 of the same KADOC series: Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe 1750–2000, edited by Jan De Maeyer (2005).
Based on the results achieved thus far, the participants in the “Relins”
endeavor see their project also as promising in view of a more adequate understanding of religious developments in the second half of the twentieth century.
One generalization that the individual studies as well as the framing essays by the
editors sustain is that the religious congregations underwent the intense paradigm
shift (some would say breakdown) that European Catholicism experienced in the
same period. Again, another volume of the KADOC series (no. 6, 2010) offers
corroboration: The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe
1945–2000, edited by Leo Kenis, Jaak Billiet, and Patrick Pasture. Academic
libraries should acquire this series of important explorations for the use of students
and researchers.
PAUL MISNER

Marquette University (Emeritus)

AMERICAN
Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples: Historical and Evolutionary Dimensions of
Intracemetery Bioarchaeology in Spanish Florida. By Christopher M. Stojanowski. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2013. Pp. xx, 304. ISBN
978-0-8130-4463-7.)
For many decades now, archaeologists working in Spanish Florida have been
concerned with mission churches. Not only did these structures represent the heart
of the Indian communities in which they were built, but they have been key to
investigating facets of the colonial experience unavailable from other sources. Some
specific areas of interest have been religious architecture, construction techniques,
building orientation, and the spatial relationship of churches to other buildings in
the native communities in which missions were established.
Another primary focus of these studies has been the cemeteries found beneath
the nave floors. The location and manner of burial is often suggestive of social
standing, material wealth, and cultural influences—particularly when compared to
pre-mission burial practices. Archaeologists have found a positive correlation
among burials near the altar, coffin burials, and grave goods. Although each individual seems to have been carefully placed in pits large enough to accommodate
their fully extended bodies, there was generally far less disturbance and superimposition of burials close to the altar. By contrast, it was common practice to dig burial
pits into earlier ones farther back in the nave, creating tremendous admixture of
skeletal remains and associated materials. Most coffin burials, which were relatively
rare and labor intensive, were located close to the altar. The greatest concentrations

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of grave goods (both native and European in origin) were also generally associated
with individuals interred near the sanctuary.
The other fascinating component of mission cemetery investigations has been
the study of the human remains themselves. The pioneer in this field was Clark
Spencer Larsen (Ohio State University), who initiated the widely respected and
productive La Florida Bioarchaeology Project and has written the foreword for this
book. Larsen and his colleagues examined a range of variables, including ethnicity,
age at death, certain diseases, injuries, activity levels, physical and/or nutritional
stress, and sometimes even the direct cause of death (for example, gunshot). They
were able to identify a complex of factors that resulted in the near extinction of the
missionized native populations. Although epidemics were certainly a major factor,
their impact was exacerbated by an overall nutritional decline, increased workloads,
and poor living conditions.
The current study by Christopher Stojanowski adds a new dimension to the
research discussed above. Using skeletal data from San Pedro y San Pablo de
Patale, San Martín de Timucua, and three distinct burial populations on Amelia
Island (Santa Catalina de Guale—Santa María, Ossuary at Santa Catalina, and
Santa María de Yamassee), the author takes an evolutionary approach to re-evaluating mission cemeteries known as biodistance analysis. Through the spatial analysis of dental phenotypic and pathological variation within each assemblage, Stojanowski is able to identify familial similarities (kin-groupings) through their
heritable traits revealing distinct mortuary patterns at the various missions. He has
also used this approach to clarify chronological sequencing and to suggest possible
in-migration of nonlocal natives at Amelia Island.
Stojanowski’s study is fascinating and thought provoking. Although this book
is not light reading, it is clearly written and contextualizes its findings within the
broader realm of Spanish Florida research. It will undoubtedly help lay readers
appreciate the frontiers of science and how bioarchaeology is making unique contributions to our understanding of the Spanish colonial-mission experience.
Mission San Luis
Tallahassee, FL

BONNIE G. MCEWAN

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America. By Paula M. Kane. (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 313. $39.95. ISBN
978-1-4696-0760-3.)
Sister Mary Crown of Thorns (neé Margaret Reilly, 1884–1937), a sister of
the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd at Peekskill, New
York, reportedly endured the stigmata from September to November 1921. The
manifestations of a cross on her breast and on the walls of her cell were witnessed
by some of her sisters and were brought to the attention of Archbishop Patrick
Hayes of New York. However, their publicity beyond the convent walls was the
result of communications from overzealous clergy. The appeal of the story could

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not be quashed, despite the best efforts of Hayes, and newspapers promptly
splashed headlines of the Peekskill stigmatic for public consumption.
Kane’s monograph is a work of American studies, not church history, and still
less a biography. It examines an unusual spiritual narrative arising in New York’s
Gilded Age. It occurs to an Irish American woman with serious health problems.
Kane calls herself a bricoleur—one who casually observes the detritus of life, mining
it for shards of meaning. As a method, it is wanting. Through some valuable
archival work, however, Kane alights on a very intriguing subject whose crosshatches traverse the piety of Irish Catholic New York, convent culture, and authority structures that do as much to promote as to try to contain a story of stigmata.
The book relies on primary source data found in archives in the United States
and London and an extensive, if tangential, secondary literature. After an initial
survey of material related to Sister Thorn’s case in the archives of the Good Shepherds, a sudden change in policy there closed the files for the author’s research.
Similarly, she had difficulty in obtaining information from the archdiocesan
archives in New York. Kane did not consult a large file in the Secret Vatican
Archives (Archivio della Delegazione degli Stati Uniti d’America, Subseries XIX:
Istituti religiosi, Posiz. 1229) pertaining to Thorn’s case and the havoc raised over
her among the Good Shepherd sisters. Doubtless the book would have been
enhanced with further engagement of the sources.
In seven chapters, Kane examines Thorn’s family, vocation to the religious
life, the motivations of her champions, Catholics and the scientific study of supernatural phenomena, devotional culture in the United States, and the “Americanization of modern sanctity” (p. 217). A final chapter covers the possibility of the
supernatural in a modern Catholic context. The author often attempts to psychologize Thorn, using Freudian studies and even Jacques Lacan to gain insight into
her mind. Among Thorn’s contemporary examiners was James Walsh (author of
The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries, New York, 1907), who had studied at the
Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and was fascinated by supernatural phenomena.
In Kane’s view, Walsh and other misogynistic physicians who sought to treat her
dismissed Thorn’s visions as hysterical ravings, just as other purported stigmatics—
Theresa Neumann or Marie Rose Ferron among them—had their experiences disregarded and even subjected to ridicule. Faulting these men with the lash of feminist critique has the effect of impugning their diagnoses as somehow sinister and
uncaring, uncoupling their decisions from their context and uncritically accepting
Thorn’s stigmata as genuine.
Ultimately Kane’s portrayal of Thorn, her religious order, ecclesiastical culture, and Catholicism generally is cast under the pall of a perceived medievalism.
Her claims are titillating but tendentious and often mistaken. For instance, Thorn’s
alleged cherishing of suffering and pain, she insists, melds perfectly with the rise of
devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus—never considering that this cult was based
upon the Savior’s love for humanity, not some divine desire for sacrificial misery or
baroque asceticism. Kane cites this reviewer’s work on the interplay between cult

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and commerce in the case of an alleged miracle site in Massachusetts, although she
supplies the name of the protagonist incorrectly (it is Father Patrick Power, not
“Powers”) and misreads this article.1 Worse, though, are purely fanciful motives
ascribed to Hayes, who Kane believed sought his cardinal’s hat at the expense of
this nun. There is simply no evidence for such an assertion. Insofar as Kane’s reconstruction of the period and personages involved displays a crabbed view of the reality that permeated and enveloped the life of Sister Mary Crown of Thorns, she
remains the stuff of so much legend.
Redemptorist Archives
Brooklyn, NY

PATRICK J. HAYES

Living on Fire: The Life of Brent Bozell, Jr. By Daniel Kelly. (Wilmington, DE: ISI
Books. 2014. Pp. x, 253. $27.95. ISBN 978-1-610-17086-4.)
The late Daniel Kelly, the author of a well-regarded biography of conservative
National Review editor James Burnham, has written an excellent, lucid, and brief
overview of the life of L. Brent Bozell Jr., a major influence on National Review
conservatism and the founder and editor of the “radical conservative” Catholic
magazine Triumph, which was published from 1966 to 1975. Bozell is one of the
few central figures in the conservative intellectual movement to be without a biographer, and in Kelly’s skillful narrative, the oversight has been rectified at last.
The apt title of the book demonstrates not only Bozell’s passion and belief in
the conservative cause in America but also his eventual disenchantment with movement conservatism by the 1960s and 1970s. A Yale-educated, Catholic convert,
Bozell was long overshadowed by his prominent debate colleague, coauthor, and
brother-in-law, William F. Buckley Jr., who gained more notoriety as a result of his
status as National Review editor and conservative celebrity. Kelly depicts how
Bozell resented Buckley’s greater fame and influence, especially as Bozell’s began to
wane by the mid-1960s. Eventually, the two men broke with one another over
Bozell’s embrace of traditional Catholicism and his dissatisfaction with NR’s
response to the Second Vatican Council reforms as well as Buckley’s sharp critique
of Bozell’s decision to embrace a traditional Catholic conception of American life.
What is most surprising in this biography is that Bozell turned so strongly
away from not only American conservatism but also American constitutionalism
and society in general (his book, The Warren Revolution, remains a well-regarded
conservative critique of modern Supreme Court jurisprudence). But by the late1960s, Bozell regarded America (which he took to spelling with a k, similar to the
New Left) to be morally bankrupt and the Constitution a document that encour-

1. Patrick J. Hayes, “Massachusetts Miracles: Controlling Cures in Catholic Boston,
1929–1930,” in Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World, ed. Margaret Cormack (Columbia, SC, 2006), pp. 111–27.

BOOK REVIEWS

831

aged such moral drift. Finding solace in Catholic Spain and in the Carlist movement, Bozell founded Triumph magazine in 1966 and dedicated the remainder of
his public career to create a traditional Catholic position in the United States.
He failed to do so. As Triumph floundered in the mid-1970s, Bozell turned
more to Spain as a place to build a Catholic movement that would educate young
Catholics in traditionalism. The result of this was the founding of a Catholic college in Escorial, later renamed Christendom College when it moved to Front
Royal, Virginia.
Increasingly, Bozell was plagued by the demons of alcoholism and a diagnosis
of bipolar disorder, which led him to suffer from manic episodes that contributed
to myriad health problems. Kelly describes several of these episodes, which caused
his ten children and wife, Trish, much grief and worry. With treatment, Bozell
remained out of the public spotlight until Mustard Seeds, a collection of writing
from Triumph, was published in 1986. The remainder of his life was spent living
the Gospel of Christ, ministering to the poor, the downtrodden, and AIDS victims
in Washington, DC, the fire of his early years as a combatant for conservatism and
traditional Catholicism fading like his fiery red hair. Later a Third Order Discalced
Carmelite, Bozell found an inner peace lacking in his passionate and restless life,
dying reconciled to his brother-in-law and to his family, and with God’s grace, as
Kelly attests, in 1997.
Bozell has been a neglected figure in the story of the development of American conservatism. A staunch anticommunist who worked for Joseph McCarthy, a
tremendous speaker who was quite popular on campuses in the 1960s, Bozell’s
work and life are well captured and documented by Kelly in this biography. Living
on Fire is an important addition to the literature on conservatism and to a brief
episode in Catholic history in America as well.
GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER

Emporia State University
Emporia, KS

LATIN AMERICAN
Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race & Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias. By
Nicole von Germeten. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2013.
Pp. xii, 304. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8263-5395-5.)
This monograph explores provocative case studies that analyze how Cartagena’s
residents negotiated issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and politics in the Spanish
Indies from 1600 to 1800. Eleven chapters provide compelling vignettes: protagonists
debate a dubious virginity; women practice love magic; witches fly to night beach
orgies; elite males duel and kill defending their honor; married women engage in
prostitution; almost everyone flees from the Inquisition. Such narratives provide
enticing introductions for undergraduates as well as historical grist for specialists.

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Yet, the ensuing analysis does raise the ever-persistent question concerning
the methodology of selection. As the author notes, since “local archives do not survive in Cartagena” (p. 188), the cases derive from Inquisition documents from the
Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, from appeals to the Council of the Indies
located in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, and from the Criminal section
of the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Bogotá. So why these particular choices and
not others? Lacking guidance as to authorial options—was the choice topical, the
most dramatic, the most colorful—what was available, what was left out—the
absence of any stated rationale as to choice problematizes generalizations. For
example, if, as suggested, the concept of matrimonial love seems rare in these stories, how much might authorial selection have influenced any conclusion?
Where the author’s thick analysis of these case stories yields historical gold is
less in broad generalizations than in explication of processes. Embedded throughout these very different stories are consistencies: underlying patterns providing
oblique but telling insight into how things worked. For example, whether dealing
with duels, witches, or inquisitors, the author explores how the testimony of those
involved revealed mutually-held conceptualizations about the difference between
the public and private spheres, gendered definitions concerning the salience of
honor, dynamics surrounding constructions of public reputation, and tactics to
secure reputable witnesses for favorable outcomes. Other themes—the particular
use of the word enemy to denote known detractors or the ubiquity of the dismissive
phrase “Go with God” as an attempt to bring a contretemps to a close—might also
have received closer analysis.
Most revisionist is the author’s deft explications revealing how female and
male sexuality impacted politics from the local to the viceregal level, particularly
how “factions used female sex and the language of honor as weapons or a means of
settling scores” (p. 5). For example, the court ordered one “thoroughly disgraced”
lover, appropriately named Don Juan, to provide a dowry for a women with dubious virginity; the scandal, promoted by his “enemies,” led to the “ruin” of his “political standing in Cartagena” (p. 29). He was not alone, as other cases show how
members of Cartagena’s elite “combated their political rivals by exposing female
sexuality in judicial cases” (p. 35). Stories from succeeding chapters reveal that
“women’s sex lives were eminently political,” because “female sex and sexual reputation were popular tools to publicly manipulate status” (p. 91). Men also proved
vulnerable, as their opponents might use a “sex scandal” as a way “to bring down a
political rival” (p. 98). The result was that both men and women found that “private
sexual acts” might become part of “public disputes” as “seemingly petty local fights”
could become entwined with “imperial political issues” (p. 45). In sum, Violent
Delights provides nuanced and rich interpretations exposing the complexities of the
intimate worlds of the inhabitants of colonial Cartagena de Indias, and, by extension, of patterns characteristic throughout Spanish America.
University of Texas at Austin

ANN TWINAM

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833

BRIEF NOTICE
Karraker, Meg Wilkes. Diversity and the Common Good: Civil Society, Religion, and
Catholic Sisters in a Small City. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2013. Pp. x,
165. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-7391-8152-2.)
In the introduction to this book (p. 17), the author states that its purpose is to
explore how a small city can create civil society, and the role that religion (specifically, the role that Catholic sisters) might play in this. However, she does not really
get around to addressing this question until page 120—a mere nine pages before
the end. It is there that she mentions the key role of “small communities of critical
thinkers in developing new ideas and inspiring their dissemination”; it is there that
she lists requirements for effective community building and notes the role that
social networks play in expanding social capital. What is missing in the previous
119 pages, however, are specific descriptions of how the various communities of sisters
have enacted these roles. For example, the activities of SET (Sisters Engaging
Together) could have been better described (beyond a mention that it erected a
billboard urging the community to welcome immigrants). When and how did this
group interface with the rest of the community? How did the sisters display
instances of embeddedness, assets, and centrality, which were listed as essential on
page 109? Exactly how did the networks of sisters mentioned on page 106 function:
were they densely or loosely linked, and what links did they have to the larger community? On page 102, the author states that the sisters were “not well-known in
the larger community outside of the civic leaders,” so is it enough only to have links
to the leaders? This book could potentially have been an exciting dialogue among
several literatures in sociology, history, and the study of nonprofit organizations,
but it falls far short of its promise. There are also minor factual inaccuracies (St.
Francis de Sales was not a Jesuit; St. Cloud is a diocese, not an archdiocese; making
simple vows predates the Second Vatican Council), instances of sloppy editing
(“Peter” instead of “Robert” Wuthnow on p. 2, Roger Finke’s name is missing a
final “e,” the NAACP and the ACLU are switched around on p. 46), and grammatically confusing sentences. It is a shame that such an important and neglected
topic was not better covered. PATRICIA WITTBERG, S.C. (Indiana University
Purdue University Indianapolis)

Notes and Comments
CELEBRATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS
To commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Council of Constance (1414–
18), the Badisches Landesmuseum is sponsoring the exhibition “1414–1418 Weltereignis des Mittelalters” in the city of Constance in the Konzilgebäude ending
on September 21. Among the items on display are the lavishly illustrated Richental Chronicle of 1465, contemporary paintings and statues, reliquaries, and processional crosses. A 400-page catalog with 500 color illustrations and seventy-two
essays can be purchased for €29,90. Other events are planned for the coming years,
with the celebrations ending in 2018. For more information, visit http://www.
konstanzer-konzil.de.
To mark the 200th anniversary of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus,
Loyola University of Chicago’s Museum of Art at 820 N. Michigan Avenue is
sponsoring the exhibition “Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women
Religious, American Experience, 1814–2014.” Curated by Stephen Schloesser, S.J.
(Loyola University), with the assistance of David Miros (Jesuit Archives of the
Central United States in Saint Louis), the exhibition highlights the connections
between Europe and the United States. It will last until October 19. For more
information, visit http://LUC.edu/crossings.
On September 14, 2014, the parish of Notre-Dame-de-Québec celebrated the
350th anniversary of its foundation. The church is considered the “mother-church”
of all the parishes in Canada. Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, cardinal-archbishop
of San Cristóbal de La Habana in Cuba, was the personal representative of Pope
Francis at this celebration.

CAUSES OF SAINTS
On July 8, 2014, Pope Francis authorized the promulgation of decrees
acknowledging the heroic virtues of the following Servants of God: Antonio Ferreira Viçoso, C.M. (1787–1875), Portuguese bishop of Mariana in Brazil; Saturnino Lopez Novoa (1830–1905), Spanish priest and cofounder of the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly; Joseph-Auguste Arribat
(1879–1963), French professed priest of the Salesians of Don Bosco; Mary Veronica of the Passion (neé Sophie Leeves, 1823–1906), British professed nun of the
Order of the Discalced Carmelites and foundress of the Sisters of the Apostolic
Carmel; Elena da Persico (1869–1948), Italian lay foundress of the Secular Institute of the Daughters of the Queen of the Apostles; Gaetana of the Blessed Sacra834

NOTES AND COMMENTS

835

ment (neé Carlotta Fontana, 1870–1935), Italian superior general of the Poor
Daughters of St. Cajetan; and Marcello Candia (1916–83), Italian layman.

CONFERENCES
On May 14–17, 2015, the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies
at Western Michigan in Kalamazoo, Michigan, will hold its annual conference. At
this conference the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law will sponsor
a panel on “Medieval Canon Law and Social Issues.” Proposals for papers should
be sent by September 15, 2014, to Mary Sommar (Millersville University of Pennsylvania) at msommar@gmail.com. The International Society of Medieval Canon
Law/Iuris Canonici Medii Aevi Consociatio (ICMAC), in conjunction with the
Hagiography Society, will sponsor the panel “Saints, Heretics, and Canon Law:
Re-thinking the Significance of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),” which will be
organized by ICMAC President Kathleen G. Cushing (Keele University). She
invites the submission of abstracts of papers (no more than 200 words), together
with participant information, to k.g.cushing@keele.ac.uk by September 15, 2014.
The complete call for papers for the Congress can be found at http://wmich.edu/
medieval/files/call-for-papers-2015.pdf. For proposal information, visit http://
wmich.edu/medieval/files/pif-2015.pdf.
On July 6–9, 2015, the Leeds International Medieval Congress and ICMAC
will cosponsor a number of sessions in conjunction with the Church, Law, and
Society in the Middle Ages Network (CLASMA) under the theme “Reform and
Renewal.” Scholars are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers to be presented at the conference, preferably in English. An abstract of a maximum of 200
words should be submitted before September 1, 2014, to Danica Summerlin
(d.j.summerlin@gmail.com).
On July 14–18, 2015, the Australian and New Zealand Association of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies will hold its tenth biennial conference at the
University of Queensland. The conference organizers welcome proposals for papers
on themes from the period 600 to 1800 in such disciplines as history, theology and
religious studies, art history, music, culture, philosophy, literature, politics, gender
studies, and other areas. Papers are assigned twenty minutes with ten minutes for
discussion. The deadline for submission of proposals is October 31, 2014. They
should be sent to anzamems2015@uq.edu.au.
On November 24–29, 2015, a conference will be held to commemorate the
800th anniversary of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Peter Clarke, professor of
ecclesiastical history at the University of Southampton in England, is organizing a
conference and invites scholars to submit to fourthlateranat800@gmail.com by
November 1, 2014, abstracts of a maximum of 200 words for 30-minute papers in
English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish. For more information, visit
http://www.lateraniv.com.

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

PUBLICATIONS
Cities of Mary in Italy are studied in the third number for 2013 (vol. XLIX)
of the Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa under the heading “Città di Maria:
Tradizioni civiche e devozioni tra medioevo ed età moderna.” After an introduction
by Maria Pia Paoli, “Città italiane e pietà mariana: una storia millenaria” (pp. 479–
99), there are five articles: “Tra devozione e politica: aspetti del culto mariano nella
Firenze del Duecento” by Anna Benvenuti (pp. 501–29); “Madonne all’angolo:
Tabernacoli fiorentini tra patrimonio, segnaletica e devozione” by Valeria E. Genovese (pp. 531–75); “Pisa città di Maria in età medievale: storia di una tradizione
in(in)terrotta” by Vittoria Camelliti (pp. 577–602); “La devozione mariana a
Genova in Antico Regime tra politica e dissidenza religiosa” by Paolo Fontana (pp.
603–39); and “«Siena, questa figlia prediletta di Maria». Episodi e forme del culto
mariano a Siena in età moderna” by Aurora Savelli (pp. 641–85).
In anticipation of the quincentenary of the Reformation, E vangelische Theologie has devoted its second number of 2014 (vol. 74) to that theme. Ute Gause has
contributed both the introduction (pp. 83–86) and the article “Dekonstruktion der
Reformation?” (pp. 87–95). The four other contributors and their articles are
“Spurensuche? Die Reformation im Blick der Lutherdekade” by Lucian Hölscher
(pp. 96–111); “Auf den Spuren der Reformation. Anmerkungen zu Lucian
Hölschers »Spurensuche?«” by Johannes Schilling (pp. 112–17); “Reformation und
politisch-gesellschaftliche Emanzipation” by Bernd Oberdorfer (pp. 118–26); and
“The Freedom of a Christian: Martin Luther’s Reformation of Law & Liberty” by
John Witte Jr. (pp. 127–35).
An interdisciplinary symposium was held at the University of Fribourg in
Switzerland on September 13–16, 2012, on the theme “Mission und Evangelisierung als Thema von Synoden und Konzilien.” The second part of the papers
presented there have now been published in Heft 2 of Jahrgang 44 (for 2012 but
actually printed this year) of the Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, as follows: “La
evangelización en los concilios celebrados en América Latina entre 1899 y 1957” by
Carmen José Alejos (pp. 214–62); “The Catholic Missions in the XXth Century” by
Willi Henkel, O.M.I. (pp. 263–90); “Una tappa importante del passaggio dalla missione alla Chiesa locale in Estremo Oriente. La recezione della Maximum illud nei
testi del Primo Concilio Cinese del 1924” by Carlo Pioppi (pp. 291–342); “Diözesansynoden in den 1920er Jahren in Ungarn” by Tibor Klestenitz (pp. 343–58);
“Das Program der Evangelisierung der Diözesansynoden von Vác (Waitzen) in der
Zwischenkriegzeit” by Andor Lénár (pp. 359–78); and “Il tema dell’evangelizzazione nel Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II” by Agostino Marchetto (pp. 379–94).
The Journal of E arly Modern E urope has devoted its fifth issue for 2014 (vol.
18) to the theme of war and conscience. The introduction, “War, Conscience, and
Counsel in Early Modern Catholic Europe,” is written by Nicole Reinhardt (pp.
435–46). The other four articles are “Conscience and Catholic Discipline of War:
Sins and Crimes” by Vincenzo Lavenia (pp. 447–71); “Conscience and Empire:

NOTES AND COMMENTS

837

Politics and Moral Theology in the Early Modern Portuguese World” by Giuseppe
Marcocci (pp. 473–94); “Just War, Royal Conscience and the Crisis of Theological
Counsel in the Early Seventeenth Century,” also by Nicole Reinhardt (pp. 495–
521); and “Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern
Europe” by Robert von Friedeburg (pp. 523–28).
The bicentenary of the birth of Frédéric Ozanam (1813–53) has been commemorated in the issue for January–June 2014 (vol. 100) of the Revue d’histoire de
l’É glise de France. There are a dozen articles under the subtitle “Facettes d’un
itinéraire”: “Ozanam 2013. De l’usage scientifique d’un bicentenaire” by Matthieu
Brejon de Lavergnée (pp. 7–12); “Ozanam, un étudiant dans le Paris des années
1830” by Bernard Barbiche (pp. 13–22); “Une autre «famille». Frédéric Ozanam
et le milieu universitaire: carrière, relations, influence” by Rémy Hême de Lacotte
(pp. 23–35); “Frédéric Ozanam et l’Allemagne: extériorité et attirance” by Catherine Maurer (pp. 37–47); “Universitaire et catholique: Ozanam, un modèle fondateur?” by Charles Mercier (pp. 49–64); “La croisade de l’aumône: Frédéric
Ozanam et les évêques” by Séverine Blenner-Michel (pp. 65–80); “Frédéric
Ozanam et l’art” by Christine Franconnet (pp. 81–94); “La correspondance
Amélie-Frédéric, un exemple de l’écriture de l’intime dans la France du XIXe
siècle” by Léonard de Corbiac (pp. 95–105); “Ozanam sous le regard du psychanalyste: la passion d’une destinée” by Jacques Arènes (pp. 107–19); “Frédéric
Ozanam et la mort” by Guillaume Cuchet (pp. 121–41); “De Dupront à Ozanam:
la conversion biographique” by Gérard Cholvy (pp. 143–50); and “Ozanam, une
voix” by Pierre Brunel (pp. 151–55).
“Les médias confessionnels et la prise de pouvoir d’Adolf Hitler en 1933” is
the theme of the articles published in the second number of volume 71 (2014) of
Mélanges de Science Religieuse. Following a préambule by Jean Heuclin, “La presse et
la montée du pouvoir d’Hitler” (pp. 3–6) are “La montée au pouvoir d’Adolf Hitler
dans la presse catholique américaine [between 1933 and 1937 as reflected in two
weekly magazines, America and Commonweal, and one monthly, The Catholic
World]” by Raymond Ledru (pp. 7–21); “La presse catholique espagnole face à l’arrivée au pouvoir du nazisme, mars 1932–juillet 1933” by Álvaro Fleites Marcos (pp.
23–33); “Comment comprehendre les événements outre-Rhin de ’33: les protestants français et l’accession au pouvoir d’Adolf Hitler” by Martin Bray (pp. 35–44);
“The Church Times [of London] face à l’arrivée au pouvoir d’Adolf Hitler en 1933”
by Thibault Sigiez (pp. 45–57); and “L’arrivée d’Hitler au pouvoir vue par deux
quotidiens catholiques des ex-départements occupés [La Croix du Nord and Le Journal de Roubaix]” by Jean-Paul Visse (pp. 59–76).
Ökumenische Rundschau, in its issue for October–December 2013, observes the
fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council with perspectives from outside
and inside. The “Perspektiven von Aussen” are “Das Zweite Vatikanum und die
Anglikanische Kirche” by Claire Amos (pp. 470–80); “Alt-Katholische Kirche und
Zweites Vatikanisches Konzil” by Günther Esser (pp. 481–502); “Das Ökumenische am Zweiten Vatikanum. Eine orthodoxe Sicht” by Evgeny Pilipenko (pp. 503–

838

NOTES AND COMMENTS

12); and “Hat ‘die Lehre der Kirche, dass niemand zum Glauben gezwungen
werden darf . . . die Zeiten überdauert’? Die geschichtliche Entwicklung der Lehre
von der Religionsfreiheit und das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil” by Neal Blough.
There follow the “Perspektiven von Innen”: “Die Hermeneutik des Zweiten
Vatikanischen Konzils und die Zukunft des ökumenischen Dialogs” by Massimo
Faggioli (pp. 526–36); “Konzil und Rechtsstrukturen. Eine erforderliche gegenseitige Herausforderung” by Myriam Wijlens (pp. 537–45); and “Andere Zeichen
der Zeit. Skizzen zur Rezeption des Zweiten Vatikanischen in Polen” by Elzbieta
Adamiak (pp. 546–55).
The issue for winter 2014 (vol. 32, no. 1) of U.S. Catholic Historian contains
articles dealing with Catholics of Eastern rites, as follows: “Bishop Soter Stephen
Ortynsky: The First Eastern Catholic Bishop in the Western Hemisphere” by Ivan
Kaszczak (pp. 1–22); “Becoming What We Always Were: ‘Conversion’ of U.S.
Greek Catholics to Russian Orthodoxy, 1890–1914” by Joel Brady (pp. 23–48);
“The Liturgy and the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the United States: Change
through the Decades” by Mark M. Morozowich (pp. 49–69); “The Maronite
Church in the United States, 1854–2010” by Georges T. Labaki (pp. 71–85); and
“The San Fernando Bell: Repatriation Efforts Spanning Christian East and West”
by Raymond A. Bucko, S.J. (pp. 87–104).
The next issue (spring 2014) is focused on the process of conversion to Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following a thematic essay, “The
Contours of Conversion to Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century” by Lincoln A.
Mullen (pp. 1–27), are five biographical studies: “‘Jane will be useful, and because
useful, happy’: An Elite New England Family Confronts Conversion in the 1850s”
by Erin Bartram (pp. 29–49); “‘Whatever they considered would be most conducive
to His glory’: The Religious Conversion of Thomas Fortune Ryan” by Stephanie A.
T. Jacobe (pp. 51–66); “Anti-Semitism and Catholic Aesthetics: Jacques Maritain’s
Role in the Religious Conversion of Emmanuel H. Chapman” by Charles R. Gallagher, S.J. (pp. 67–90); “Intellectum Quaerens Fides: Mortimer J. Adler’s Journey of
Mind and Heart” by Tim Lacy (pp. 91–116); and “Catholics Like Me: The Conversions of John Howard Griffin” by Justin D. Poché” (pp. 117–42).

PERSONALS
Rosa Bruno-Jofré (Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada) has been awarded a
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant for a study
titled “Catholicism and Education: Fifty Years after Vatican II (1962–1965): A
Transnational Interdisciplinary Encounter.” She is the principal investigator and
will work with Paulí Dávila (University of the Basque Country, Gipuzkoa campus,
Spain).

Periodical Literature
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
4 Popes, 4 Saints, One New Guy. Ingrid D. Rowland. American Scholar, 83
(Summer, 2014), 30–37.
Benedikt XVI. als kirchlicher Gesetzgeber. Ein Überblick über die legislative
Tätigkeit des Papstes. Yves Kingata. Archiv für Katholisches Kirchenrecht, 181
(II, 2012), 487–511.
“Dying Well” from the Fifteenth Century to Hospice. Donald F. Duclow.
Lutheran Quarterly, XXVIII (2, 2014), 125–48.
Katholiken des byzantinischen Ritus in Ungarn. I. Teil: Von den Anfängen bis
1920. Tamás Véghseő. Ostkirchliche Studien, 62 (2, 2013), 281–309.
Geschichte der Christlichen Archäologie in Russland vom 18. bis ins. 20. Jahrhundert. (4. Folge). Liudmila G. Khrushkova. Römische Quartalschrift für
Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte, 108 (3–4, 2013), 254–87.
‘Preaching Disaffection’ in the Presbyterian Atlantic: Jotham Blanchard and the
Reform Crisis in Scotland and Nova Scotia, c. 1827–37. Valerie Wallace.
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42 (3, 2014), 377–99.
Raisons théologiques, historiques et culturelles des mouvements anti-œcuméniques
dans l’Orthodoxie. Pantélis Kalaïtzidis. Istina, LIX (Jan.–March, 2014), 43–
70.
Demonic possession and the historical construction of melancholy and hysteria.
Herman Westerink. History of Psychiatry, 25 (Sept., 2014), 335–49.

ANCIENT
Entertaining the Trinity Unawares: Genesis XVIII in Western Christian Interpretation. Marie E. Doerfler. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (July, 2014), 485–
503.
Justin’s Debate with Crescens the Stoic. Runar M. Thorsteinsson. Zeitschrift für
Antikes Christentum, 17 (3, 2013), 451–78.
“Defining Sacred Boundaries”. Processes of Delimitation from the Pagan Society
in Syrian Christianity according to the Didascalia Apostolorum. Daniel Benga.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 17 (3, 2013), 526–59.
Baptism and Chrismation in Third- and Fourth-Century Egypt: The State of the
Question. Maxwell E. Johnson. Worship, 88 (July, 2014), 311–32.
839

840

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Die Anfänge des Melitianischen Schismas. Sebastian Moll. Zeitschrift für Antikes
Christentum, 17 (3, 2013), 479–503.
Bishop over “Those Outside”: Imperial Diplomacy and the Boundaries of Constantine’s Christianity. Alexander Angelov. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine
Studies, 54 (2014), 274–92.
On the Early History of Quadragesima: A New Look at an Old Problem and Some
Proposed Solutions. Harald Buchinger. Studia Liturgica, 43 (2, 2013), 321–41.
La figura di Costantino in Occidente fra tardo antico e alto Medioevo (s. IV ex.–
VIII in.). Michele Di Marco. Gregorianum, 95 (II, 2014), 365–91.
Ad sanctitatem mortuorum: tomb raiders, body snatchers and relic hunters in late
antiquity. Sean Lafferty. Early Medieval Europe, 22 (Aug., 2014), 249–79.
Zur Biographie des Bischofs Fortunatian von Aquileia. Lukas J. Dorfbauer.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 17 (3, 2013), 395–423.
A History of Heresy Past: The Sermons of Chromatius of Aquileia, 388–407.
Robert McEachnie. Church History, 83 (June, 2014), 273–96.
The Soul’s Cure in Letters: The Death of Gregory of Nazianus and the Consolation of Evagrius of Pontus. Joel Kalvesmaki. The American Benedictine Review,
64 (June, 2014), 135–44.
Quelques considérations sur le problème du logement des clercs à travers le prisme
des relations avec les laïcs dans l’Antiquité tardive. Ariane Bodin. Revue d’Études Augustiniennes et Patristiques, 59 (2, 2013), 337–78.
Asceticism and syeisaktism in Asterius’ Liber ad Renatum monachum. Hajnalka
Tamás and Liesbeth Van der Sypt. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 17 (3,
2013), 504–25.
Antecedentes del clericalismo y anticlericalismo en España (De Nerón a Carlos
III). Una introducción (II). La Hispania visigoda. Victor Manuel Arbeloa.
Lumen, LXIII (Jan.–March, 2014), 5–56.
La ‘Passio’ de san Vicente de Zaragoza según las prédicas de Agustín en el día de
la fiesta. Hubertus R. Drobner. Augustinus, LIX (Jan.–June, 2014), 17–45.
San Agustín y los pobres de su tiempo. Enrique A. Eguiarte. Augustinus, LIX
(Jan.–June, 2014), 47–76.
San Agustín y la vida fraterna: un itinerario existencial y trinitario. Enrique A.
Eguiarte. Augustinus, LIX (Jan.–June, 2014), 77–117
From a Martyrological ‘Tabernacula Pastorum’ towards a Geographical ‘In Meridie’. Augustine’s Representation and Refutation of the Donatist Exegesis of
Sg. 1, 6–7. Anthony Dupont and Matteo Dalvit. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 109 (1–2, 2014), 5–33.
Come leggere il de Civitate Dei. Domenico Marafioti. Augustinianum, LIII (Dec.,
2013), 441–67.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

841

Orosius und seine “Sieben Geschichtsbücher gegen die Heiden”: Geschichtstheologie oder Rhetorik? Hans-Werner Goetz. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 96
(1, 2014), 187–98.
Politics and Bishops’ Lists at the First Council of Ephesus. Richard Price. Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 44 (2, 2012), 395–420.
African Controversy: The Inheritance of the Donatist Schism in Vandal Africa.
Robin Whelan. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (July, 2014), 504–21.
Un épisode méconnu de la “préhistoire” du purgatoire chrétien: Fauste de Riez,
Césaire d’Arles et les “miséricordieux” gaulois. Raúl Villegas Marín. Revue
d’Études Augustiniennes et Patristiques, 59 (2, 2013), 299–335.
Recruitment and conflict in sixth-century Antioch: A micro-study of Select Letters
6, 1, 5 of Severus of Antioch. Peter Van Nuffelen and Andy Hilkens.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 17 (3, 2013), 560–75.
The Roman Liber Pontificalis, Papal Primacy, and the Acacian Schism. Deborah
Deliyannis. Viator, 45 (2, 2014), 1–16.
Elezioni e consacrazioni episcopali nella Gallia merovingia del sec. VI. Silvia Cantelli Berarducci. Archivio Storico Italiano, CLXXII (Jan.–Mar., 2014), 3–76.
Zu Überlieferung und Textgestaltung der Regulae Magistri und Donati im
Umkreis der Regula Benedicti. Klaus and Michaela Zelzer. Revue Bénédictine,
124 (June, 2014), 5–47.
Confinement and exclusion in the monasteries of sixth-century Gaul. E. T. Dailey.
Early Medieval Europe, 22 (Aug., 2014), 304–14.
Fabricando pergamino durante la antigüedad tardía. Notas arqueológicas para los
monasterios de España. Jordina Sales Carbonell. Augustinianum, LIII (Dec.,
2013), 469–99.
The Second Book of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. Michaela Puzicha,
O.S.B. The American Benedictine Review, 65 (June, 2014), 126–34.

MEDIEVAL
Hira and her Saints. Philip Wood. Analecta Bollandiana, 132 (June, 2014), 5–20.
Migration of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe. Alexandra Walsham. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies, 44 (Spring, 2014), 241–80.
In search of God’s only emperor: basileus in Byzantine and modern historiography.
Alexander Angelov. Journal of Medieval History, 40, (2, 2014), 123–41.
The earliest Anglo-Latin poet: Lutting of Lindisfarne. Michael Lapidge. AngloSaxon England, 42 (Dec., 2013), 1–26.
La localisation des premiers sièges épiscopaux en Europe centrale et nordique. Tradition et adaptation (VIIIe–XIe s.) Sébastien Rossignol. Revue d’Histoire
Ecclésiastique, 109 (1–2, 2014), 64–89.

842

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

The ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’: papal politicking and power in the Middle Ages.
Kriston R. Rennie. Journal of Medieval History, 40 (1, 2014), 108–22.
La Vie métrique de Théodore Stoudite par Stéphane Mélès (BHG 1755m). Olivier
Delouis. Analecta Bollandiana, 132 (June, 2014), 21–54.
Deux manuscrits personnels de Prudence de Troyes. Warren Pezé. Revue Bénédictine, 124 (June, 2014), 114–50.
‘What agreement has the temple of God with idols?’ Christian homilies, ancient
myths, and the ‘Macedonian Renaissance.’ Theodora Antonopoulos. Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 106 (Dec., 2013), 595–622.
Two Newly Discovered Tenth-Century Organa. Giovanni Varelli. Early Music
History, 32 (Jan., 2013), 277–315.
Sind die ersten Mönche nach Böhmen aus dem Kloster St. Bonifatius und Alexius
auf dem Aventin gekommen? Petr Kubín. Römische Quartalschrift für
Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte, 108 (3–4, 2013), 192–206.
The Conquest of Burgundy, the Peace of God, and the Diplomas of Robert the
Pious. Geoffrey Koziol. French Historical Studies, 37 (Spring, 2014), 173–214.
The Patriarch Alexios Stoudites and the Reinterpretation of Justinianic Legislation
against Heretics. Zachary Chitwood. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 54
(2014), 293–312.
Pierre Damien et les raisons de la foi au XIe siècle. Alfredo Gatto. Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 57 (Jan.–Mar., 2014), 21–32.
Une étude du programme de fresques bibliques de la basilique du Mont-Cassin à
la lumière des vers qu’Alphanus de Salerne rédigea pour l’église. Teemu
Immonen. Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 57 (Apr.–June, 2014), 169–97.
Le Banquet d’Hérode de l’abbaye Saint-Martin de Ligugé. Contribution à l’étude
des peintures murales romanes en Poitou. Lucien-Jean Bord and Bertrand
Pilot. Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 57 (Jan.–Mar., 2014), 3–20.
La Vita S. Petri ep. Oxomensis (BHL 6760–61). Edición y estudio del oficio completo en honor del obispo Pedro de Osma. José Carlos Martín-Iglesias.
Analecta Bollandiana, 132 (June, 2014), 55–88.
Les dépendances de l’abbaye Saint-Sulpice aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Vincent
Launay. Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, 121 (March, 2014), 27–49.
Pisa, Catalonia, and Muslim Pirates: Intercultural Exchanges in the Balearic Crusade of 1113–1115. Matthew E. Parker. Viator, 45 (2, 2014), 77–100.
The “Sunset Years”: John of Salisbury as Bishop of Chartres and the Emergent
Cult of St. Thomas Becket in France. Karen Bollermann and Cary J. Nederman. Viator, 45 (2, 2014), 55–76.
Augustine’s Heritage in Late Medieval Biblical Scholarship (1200–1500). Wim
François. Studi Medievali, LV (June, 2014), 25–73.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

843

Institutionalizing Penitential Life in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe:
Third Orders, Rules, and Canonical Legitimacy. Alison More. Church History, 83 (June, 2014), 297–323.
Jocelin of Brakelond and the power of Abbot Samson. Daniel Gerrard. Journal of
Medieval History, 40 (1, 2014), 1–23.
The Papacy and Christian Mercenaries of Thirteenth-Century North Africa.
Michael Lower. Speculum, 89 (July, 2014), 601–31.
Demonic Possession and Mental Illness: Discussion of selected cases in Late
Medieval Hagiographical Literature. Carlos Espi Forcén and Fernando Espi
Forcén. Early Science and Medicine, 19 (3, 2014), 258–79.
The Wonder of the Heart: Albert the Great on the Origin of Philosophy. Marjorie
O’Rourke Boyle. Viator, 45 (2, 2014), 149–72.
Los Frailes Menores en la Hispania medieval y su asentamiento. José García Oro.
Archivo Ibero-Americano, LXXIII (May–Dec., 2013), 195–228.
Obispos Franciscanos Españoles, siglos XIII, XIV y XV. Atanasio López (†) and
Hipólito Barriguín. Archivo Ibero-Americano, LXXIII (May–Dec., 2013),
229–574.
Voci e storie di monache del medio evo italiano: Umiltà da Faenza (1226–1310).
2. I sermones e il dottorato mistico di Umiltà da Faenza. Lea Montuschi, OSB
Vall. Studia Monastica, 55 (2, 2013), 377–407.
Quelques observations sur la fabrication des bibles au XIIIe siècle et le système de
la Pecia. Chiara Ruzzier. Revue Bénédictine, 124 (June, 2014), 151–89.
Robert Grosseteste and the simple benefice: a novel solution to the complexities of
lay presentation. Philippa Hoskin. Journal of Medieval History, 40 (1, 2014),
22–43.
Conversion and Autobiography: The Case of Salimbene of Parma. Ionuţ
Epurescu-Pascovici. Medieval History Journal, 17 (Apr., 2014), 27–55.
Titles for Orders in England, 1268–1348. David Robinson. Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 65 (July, 2014), 522–50.
Ein Johannes “Erzbischof von Ninive” siegelt 1293 tirolische Ablassurkunden mit
dem Typar des armenischen Katholikos Yakob I. († 1286). Werner Seibt and
Martin Bitschnau. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 122 (I, 2014), 112–23.
Papal pronouncements on legitimate lordship and the formulation of nationhood
in early fourteenth-century Scottish writings. Sarah Tebbit. Journal of
Medieval History, 40 (1, 2014), 44–62.
Das Beginenwesen eine allseits anerkannte religiöse Lebensform? Quellenkritische
Anmerkungen zu einer Neuerscheinung und zum spezifischen Wert von
Vorarbeiten. Brigitte Hotz. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische
Geschichtsforschung, 122 (I, 2014), 124–39.

844

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

La plenitudo potestatis dans le Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico (1339–1341) de
Guillaume d’Ockham. Benoît Debiève. Studi Medievali, LV (June, 2014),
101–63.
An Occitan Prayer against the Plague and its Tradition in Italy, France, and Catalonia. William D. Paden. Speculum, 89 (July, 2014), 670–92.
Miraculous, Natural, or Jewish Conspiracy? Pierre Ceffons’ Question on the Black
Death, with Astrological Predictions by Gersonides and Jean de Murs/
Firmin de Beauval. Chris Schabel and Fritz S. Pedersen. Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales, LXXXI (1, 2014), 137–79.
Esigenza di pace, prospettive di missione e idea di crociata nelle lettere di Santa
Caterina da Siena. Massimo Viglione. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 109 (1–
2, 2014), 91–120.
Estate management and institutional constraints in pre-industrial England: the
ecclesiastical estates of Durham, c. 1400–1640. A. T. Brown. Economic History
Review, 67 (Aug., 2014), 699–719.
Margery Kempe and the Legal Status of Defamation. Bryan Van Ginhoven. Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 40 (1, 2014), 20–43.
Thinking of Their Sisters: Authority and Authorship in Late Medieval Women’s
Religious Communities. Rabia Gregory. Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 40 (1, 2014), 75–100.
The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation.
Laura Saetveit Miles. Speculum, 89 (July, 2014), 632–69.
Reintroducing the English Books of Hours, or “English Primers.” Kathleen E.
Kennedy. Speculum, 89 (July, 2014), 693–723.
‘That Uncouth Dialect’: English-Speaking Clergy in Late Medieval Gaelic Scotland. Iain G. MacDonald. Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 43
(2014), 1–29.
Preaching the Name: The influence of a sermon on the Holy Name of Christ. Jennifer Depold. Journal of Medieval History, 40 (2, 2014), 195–208.
Geographies of Charity: Women and the Vita mista in Renaissance Italy. Jane
Tylus. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44 (Spring, 2014), 345–
71.
My sister for abbess: fifteenth-century disputes over the Abbey of Sainte-Croix,
Poitiers. Jennifer C. Edwards. Journal of Medieval History, 40 (1, 2014), 85–107.

SIXTEENTH CENTURY
La movilización religiosa femenina vinculada a la corte de Isabel la Católica: doña
María Dávila y sus fundaciones. María del Mar Graña Cid. Estudios Eclesiásticos, 89 (Jan.–Mar., 2014), 35–65.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

845

Religion et politique dans les éloges funèbres des souverains des XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Irene Dingel. Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, 94 (Apr.–June,
2014), 137–61.
Simonie und Papstwahl. Zur Bulle Cum tam divino Julius’ II. Ulrich Horst.
Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 44 (2, 2012), 421–44.
Vergilianism in Early Cinquecento Rome: Egidio Gallo and the Vision of Roman
Destiny. Jeffrey Glodzik. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLV (Spring, 2014), 73–
98.
Order and Resistance in the Polemical and Catechetical Literature of Early
Modern Spain (1515–1599): Christians, Muslims, and Moriscos. Jason Busic.
Hispanic Review, 82 (Summer, 2014), 331–58.
Personal, Societal, and Literary Reform in John Colet’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.
Daniel J. Nodes. Church History, 83 (Sept., 2014), 547–70.
Ludovico di Canossa, l’evangelismo francese e la riforma gibertina. Guillaume
Alonge. Rivista Storica Italiana, CXXVI (I, 2014), 5–54.
Reformation, Renaissance und Hermetismus: Kontexte und Schnittstellen der
frühen reformatorischen Bewegung. Friedemann Stengel. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104 (2013), 35–80.
“And your daughters shall prophesy!” Luther, Reforming Women and the Construction of Authority. Charlotte Methuen. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte,
104 (2013), 82–109.
“To Sweeten the Bitter Dance”: The Virgin Martyrs in the Lutheran Reformation.
Margaret Arnold. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104 (2013), 110–32.
Un atto del Cardinale Giovanni Battista Pallavicino, presente Gaetano Thiene.
Andrea Vanni. Regnum Dei, LXVIII (Jan.–Dec., 2012), 5–11.
San Gaetano Thiene e il Divino Infante. Il culto nella devozione dei Santini. Vincenza Musardo Talò. Regnum Dei, LXVIII (Jan.–Dec., 2012), 125–92.
Erinnerungsstrategien in Zeiten des Wandels: Zur Bedeutung der Reformation als
Generationserfahrung im Spiegel sächsicher Leichenpredigten für adlige
Beamte. Ulrike Ludwig. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104 (2013), 158–
84.
Erasmus against Augustine and Wittenberg: The Ecclesiastes and the De doctrina
christiana. Christopher Boyd Brown. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104
(2013), 9–34.
San Juan de Ávila y las Instituciones Educativas para el Clero. Arturo Llin Cháfer.
La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXVII (May–Aug., 2014), 377–98.
Estate Solidarity and Empire: Charles V’s Failed Attempt to Revive the Swabian
League. Christopher W. Close. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104 (2013),
134–57.

846

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

I libertini di Giovanni Calvino: Ricezione e utilizzo polemico di un termine neotestamentario. Federico Zuliani. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104 (2013),
211–43.
Parental Authority and Freedom of Choice: The Debate on Clandestinity and
Parental Consent at the Council of Trent (1545–63). Charlotte ChristensenNugues. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLV (Spring, 2014), 51–72.
The Protestant Reformation in Counter-Reformation Italy, c. 1550–1660: An
Overview of New Evidence. Simone Maghenzani. Church History, 83 (Sept.,
2014), 571–89.
Between Marginalization and Orthodoxy: The Unitas Fratrum in Poland in the
Sixteenth Century. Maciej Ptaszyński. Journal of Moravian History, 14 (1,
2014), 1–29.
Metropolitan Makarii and Muscovite Court Politics during the Reign of Ivan IV.
Charles J. Halperin. Russian Review, 73 (July, 2014), 447–64.
Elizabeth I and Pope Paul IV. Ted W. Booth. Church History and Religious Culture,
94 (3, 2014), 316–36.
From the Strange Death to the Odd Afterlife of Lutheran England. David Scott
Gehring. Historical Journal, 57 (Sept, 2014), 825–44.
La necesidad de la ley humana como intérprete del derecho divino. Fray Juan de la
Peña y Martín Lutero sobre los votos monásticos. Sebastián Contreras. Studia
Monastica, 55 (2, 2013), 291–308.
Le “sfumato confessionnel” du cardinal de Châtillon en 1560–1561: une relecture
du parcours politique, intellectuel et spirituel d’Odet de Coligny. Nicolas
Breton. Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 160 (Apr.–
June, 2014), 565–87.
The Colloquy of Poissy, François Baudouin and English Protestant Identity,
1561–1563. Alexander Russell. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (July, 2014),
551–79.
En los 450 años de la Primera Piedra del Monasterio de El Escorial. Teófilo Viñas
Román, O.S.A. Ciudad de Dios, CCXXVII (May–Aug., 2014), 399–434.
The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature in England to 1700.
John R. Yamamoto-Wilson. Recusant History, 32 (May, 2014), 67–89.
“Zum Andenken und zur Ehre Gottes”: Kunst und Frömmigkeit im frühneuzeitlichen Luthertum. Bridget Heal. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104
(2013), 185–210.
Voices of Jewish Converts to Christianity in late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. Jens Åklundh. The Seventeenth Century, 29 (1, 2014), 45–71.
The Missing ‘Allen-Persons’ Cases of Conscience. Peter Holmes. Recusant History,
32 (May, 2014), 1–19.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

847

Libro de gradas del monasterio de Sahagún (S. XVI–XIX). Ernesto Pascual
Zaragoza. Studia Monastica, 55 (2, 2013), 309–73.
Converted Relationships: Re-negotiating Family Status after Religious Conversion
in the Nassau Dynasty. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent. Journal of
Social History, 47 (Spring, 2014), 647–72.
Referencias histórico-culturales en los escritos de los Jesuitas en el Japón del siglo
XVI. Antonio Míguez Santa Cruz. Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 75–107.
Two Macanese Jesuits in the China Mission: The Fernandes/Zhong Brothers.
Isabel Murta Pina. Journal of Asian History, 48 (1, 2014), 1–13.
Organized Violence in the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic. Malcolm Smuts.
History, 99 (July, 2014), 418–43.
Early Editions of ‘Upon the Image of Death’. Dara Kaye. Recusant History, 32
(May, 2014), 21–36.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
Le confesseur du prince: profil et fonction des confesseurs des gouverneursgénéraux espagnols à Bruxelles de 1598 à 1665. Pierre-François Pirlet. Revue
d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 109 (1–2, 2014), 123–52.
Die Eparchien Przemyśl und Mukačevo. Wechselbeziehungen im 17. und 18.
Jahrhundert. Stanislaw Nabywaniec. Ostkirchliche Studien 62, (2, 2013), 310–
17.
Die Königen and ihr Beichtvater. Die Briefe Richard Hallers SJ aus Spanien in den
Jarhen 1600 und 1601. Katrin Keller. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 122 (I, 2014), 140–51.
Veneration, Translation and Reform: The Lives of Saints and the English Catholic
Community, c. 1600–1642. Elizabeth Ferguson. Recusant History, 32 (May,
2014), 37–65.
“A known holy body, with an inscription and a name”: Bishop Sancho Dávila y
Toledo and the Creation of St. Vitalis. A. Katie Harris. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104 (2013), 245–70.
Clandestine marriage in early modern London: when, where and why? Gill
Newton. Continuity and Change, 29 (Aug., 2014), 151–80.
Metaphor, Cure and Conversion in Early Modern England. Helen Smith. Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (Summer, 2014), 473–502.
Guido Reni, gli angeli e il sangue necessario. Francesco Saracino. Gregorianum, 95
(II, 2014), 255–71.
Abericus, the Principal Scribe of the Hilandar Menologium, the Largest Extant
South Slav Menologium. Francis J. Thomson. Analecta Bollandiana, 132
(June, 2014), 89–143.

848

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Comenius, the Unity of Brethren, and Correspondence Networks. Vladimir
Urbánek. Journal of Moravian History, 14 (1, 2014), 30–50.
“Redditus orbis erat”: The Political Rhetoric and Bernini’s Fountains in Piazza
Barberini. Matthew Knox Averett. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLV (Spring,
2014), 3–24.
“Diligence in his ministrie”: Languages of Clerical Sufficiency in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Chris R. Langley. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte,
104 (2013), 272–96.
Rethinking church and state during the English Interregnum. Charles W. A.
Prios. Historical Research, 87 (Aug., 2014), 444–65.
Manoscritti di chiese teatine romane nei Fondi Reginense latino e Reginense
Greco detto di Pio II della Biblioteca Vaticana, S. Andrea della Valle. Paolo
Vian. Regnum Dei, LXVIII (Jan.–Dec., 2012), 13–75.
San Cayetano en Madrid o el trasplante de una devoción popular. Gabriel Llompart. Regnum Dei, LXVIII (Jan–Dec., 2012), 193–224.
“El asesinato del Chantre Don Ventura Ferrer. Clérigos y bandos en la Seo
valentina seiscentista.” Emilio Callado Estela. Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 109–
31.
Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy: Niccolò
Guidalotto’s Panorama of Constantinople (1662). Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby.
Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (Summer, 2014), 503–43.
Latitudinarianism, secular theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s influence in George
Mackenzie’s Religio Stoici (1663). Clare Jackson. The Seventeenth Century 29
(1, 2014), 73–94.
Conceptualizing the Priest: Lay and Episcopal Expectations of Clerical Reform in
Late Seventeenth-Century Padua. Celeste McNamara. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 104 (2013), 297–319.
In Search of “Fellow Pilgrims”: Radical Protestants and Transconfessional
Exchanges in Europe and the British Atlantic, c. 1670–1730. Elizabeth
Bouldin. Church History, 83 (Sept., 2014), 590–617.
John Bunyan and Socinianism. Nicholas Seager. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65
(July, 2014), 580–600.
St. Kajetan’s of Munich “Main Altar of 1675” in the Year 1675. Thomas Reiser.
Regnum Dei, LXVIII (Jan.–Dec., 2012), 77–107.
Balancing and Limiting Episcopal Power: Bishop Thomas Barlow’s Use of
Common Law in Disputes with Arminian Anglican Clerics. Daniel M.
Paltzer. The Seventeenth Century, 29 (2, 2014), 131–52.
Kingship and Catholicism in Posthumous Representations of Charles II, 1685–
1714. Patricia Gael. The Seventeenth Century, 29 (2, 2014), 173–96.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

849

Histoire, théologie, politique à la fin du XVIIe siècle: Rome, la France et la triple
condamnation du P. Alexandre. Jean-Louis Quantin. Rivista Storica Italiana,
CXXVI (I, 2014), 55–93.
The “Boast of Antiquity”: Pulpit Politics Across the Atlantic Archipelago during
the Revolution of 1688. Newton Key. Church History, 83 (Sept., 2014), 618–
49.
Il ritorno a Messina dall’esilio di Mons. Placido Scoppa, C.R. Giovan Giuseppe
Mellusi. Regnum Dei, LXVIII (Jan.–Dec., 2012), 109–23.
Conversion, Autobiography, and Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696).
Tim Cooper. The Seventeenth Century, 29 (2, 2014), 113–29.
Collecting Money, Connecting Beliefs: Fundraising and Networking in the Unity
of Brethren of the Early Eighteenth Century. Alexander Schunka. Journal of
Moravian History, 14 (1, 2014), 73–92.
Briefe von Nonnen als Quelle für die Analyse familiärer Netzwerke: Die
Augustiner Chorfrau Isabella von Thürheim (1663–1723). Christine Schneider. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 122 (I,
2014), 62–81.
German Pietists between the Ancient Unity of the Brethren and the Moravian
Church: The Case of Württemberg Pastor Georg Konrad Rieger (1687–
1743) and His History of the Bohemian Brethren. Siglind Ehinger. Journal of
Moravian History, 14 (1, 2014), 51–72.
Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of
Jonathan Edwards. Jan Stievermann. Church History, 83 (June, 2014), 324–66.
El origen de la intolerancia civil y religiosa: Rousseau contra Hume. Bernardo
Pérez Andreo. Verdad y Vida, 262 (Jan.–June, 2013), 95–103.
The Inner Life of Doctrine: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the CalvinistArminian Debate Among Methodists. Bruce Hindmarsh. Church History, 83
(June, 2014), 367–97.
Burke’s Catholic Conservatism. Garrett Ward Sheldon. Modern Age, 56 (Summer,
2014), 16–24.
The patron function in eighteenth-century book dedications: the case of Croatian
religious writing. Zoran Velagic. European Review of History, 21 (3, 2014),
363–78.
Giovanni Battista Serafino Rotingo, CR. Gian Luigi Bruzzone. Regnum Dei,
LXVIII (Jan.–Dec., 2012), 225–46.
Unholy Laughter. Misty G. Anderson. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 26 (Summer,
2014), 731–55.
Anglicanisme et abolition de l’esclavage dans l’Empire britannique. Jack McDonald.
Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, 94 (Apr.–June, 2014), 163–76.

850

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Hildebrand Verhoeckx (1766–1815). Notes on an Augustinian Family History.
Martijn Schrama. Augustiniana, 63 (1–4, 2013), 83–154.
From the Catholic Enlightenment to the Risorgimento: the Exchange between
Nicola Spedalieri and Pietro Tamburini, 1791–1797. Dale K. Van Kley. Past
& Present, No. 224 (Aug., 2014), 109–62.
Principal William Robertson, the Popular Part and the General Assembly. John R.
McIntosh. Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 43 (2014), 31–49.

NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Gesucht: Der katholische Mann. Die katholische Kirche in Deutschland und die
Männerwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Bernhard Schneider. Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift, 123 (2, 2014), 85–109.
The Religious Question in the United Kingdom Census, 1801–2011. A. J.
Christopher. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (July, 2014), 601–19.
Secularization: the birth of a modern combat concept. Ian Hunter. Modern Intellectual History, FirstView article, Aug., 2014, pp. 1–32.
El obispo Nicolás Videla y el General Belgrano, 1812–1819. Emiliano Sánchez
Pérez. Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 133–77.
La visita de Fernando VII al Escorial en 1814 según la relación de La Atalaya de la
Mancha en Madrid. Gustavo Sánchez. Ciudad de Dios, CCXXVII (May–Aug.,
2014), 435–57.
Unitarians and the Book of Common Prayer in Nineteenth-century Britain. Michael
Ledger-Thomas. Studia Liturgica, 43 (2, 2013), 211–28.
Tablas Capitulares de la Provincia Franciscana de la Purísima Concepción, años
1815–1816. Hipólito Barriguín Fernández. Archivo Ibero-Americano, LXXIII
(May–Dec., 2013), 605–54.
Kindness and Reciprocity: Liberated Prisoners and Christian Charity in Early
Nineteenth-Century England. Helen Rogers. Journal of Social History, 47
(Spring, 2014), 721–45.
Liturgie et Tradition chez Dom Guéranger. Claudine Blanchard. La Maison-Dieu,
276 (Dec., 2013), 91–115.
John Cairns: A Liberal Conservative. Eric McKimmon. Records of the Scottish
Church History Society, 43 (2014), 51–72.
Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France: The Popular
Reception of Renan’s Life of Jesus. Robert D. Priest. Journal of Modern History,
86 (June, 2014), 258–94.
Revisiting Robert Rainy. Todd Statham. Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 43 (2014), 73–105.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

851

Discourses of Desire: Religion, Same-Sex Love and Secularisation in Britain,
1870–1930. Naomi Lloyd. Gender & History, 26 (Aug., 2014), 313–31.
‘We visit the colo towns … when it is safe to go’: Indigenous Adoption of
Methodist Christianity in the Wainibuka and Wainimala Valleys, Fiji in the
1870s. Christine Weir. Journal of Pacific History, 49 (2, 2014), 129–50.
The Division of the Diocese of Beverley 1878, ‘a distasteful and painful affair’.
Margaret Turnham. Recusant History, 32 (May, 2014), 91–105.
La polémica restauración de la fachada de la catedral de Barcelona en el siglo XIX.
Judith Urbano Lorente. Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 209–33.
Trust, religion, and cooperation in western agriculture, 1880–1930. Eva Fernández. Economic History Review, 67 (Aug., 2014), 678–98.
The Mystical Theologian: The Influence of Abbé Huvelin on Baron Friedrich von
Hügel. Robyn Wrigley-Carr. Downside Review, 131 (Oct., 2013), 184–95.
Paul Maria Baumgarten im Umfeld der christlichen Kunst und ihrer Förderer. IsaMaria Betz. Römische Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und
Kirchengeschichte, 108 (3–4, 2013), 220–53.
Franz Ehrle et Hippolyte Delehaye. Bernard Joassart. Analecta Bollandiana, 132
(June, 2014), 145–65.
L’influence de l’“École de Paris” sur le pasteur baptiste Philémon Vincent (1860–
1929). Jean-Marcel Vincent. Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme
Français, 160 (Apr.–June, 2014), 633–63.
Containing Voices in the Wilderness: Censorship and Religious Dissent in the Japanese Countryside. Emily Anderson. Church History, 83 (June, 2014), 398–421.
Science, Theology, and the Simplicity of Chant: Victorian Musicology at War.
Bennett Zon. Journal of the History of Ideas, 75 (July, 2014), 439–69.
A Broken World: Benedict XV’s efforts for peace during the First World War.
Dennis A. Castillo. America, 211 (July 21–28, 2014), 20–23.
“It is Poor Buonaiuti’s Turn to Burn.” The Condemnation of the Rivista di Scienza
delle Religioni According to the Correspondence of E. Buonaiuti, F. Cumont
and A. Loisy. Annelies Lannoy. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 109 (1–2,
2014), 154–85.
Unity in Christ or Pan-Europeanism? Nathan Söderblom and the ecumenical
peace movement in the interwar period. Jörg Mathias. Religion, State and Society, 42 (1, 2014), 5–22.
Pie XI et les exercices spirituels. Yves Chiron. Revue d’Historie Ecclésiastique, 10 (1–
2, 2014), 187–94.
The “Interference” between Nouvelle Théologie and Catholic Practice in Church
and Society. Michael Quisinsky. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, 90
(March, 2014), 71–98.

852

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

“We Were a Chosen People”: The East African Revival and Its Return to PostGenocide Rwanda. Phillip A. Cantrell, II. Church History, 83 (June, 2014),
422–45.
El Socialista versus El debate (Enero-Septiembre 1933). Víctor Manuel Arbeloa.
Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 287–335.
‘A belated return for Christ?’ The reception of Anrold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History in a British context, 1934–1961. Alexander Hutton. European Review of
History, 21 (3, 2014), 405–29.
Dios, patria y hogar. La trilogía en la educacíon de las mujeres. Teresa González
Pérez. Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 337–63.
Les jésuites: acteurs et héros de la BD “franco-belge” des années 1950–1960.
Philippe Delisle. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastiqe, 109 (1–2, 2014), 234–56.
The impact of the sons and daughters of slaves from the south on the Romanian
churches during the Communist era, 1950–2000. George Hancock-Stefan.
Baptist History and Heritage, 48 (Fall, 2013), 92–100.
Le Saint-Siège et la fin du Congo belge (1958–1960). Guy Vanthemsche. Revue
d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 109 (1–2, 2014), 196–232.
The Dialogue between Catholics and Communists in Italy during the 1960s.
Daniela Saresella. Journal of the History of Ideas, 75 (July, 2014), 493–512.
Problems, survival and transformation: religious education in Scotland—a historical review, 1962–1992. Yonah Hisbon Matemba. History of Education, 43
(July, 2014), 542–60.
Il Card. Montini e il Concilio. Cronologia del primo periodo (III). Giselda Adornato. Istituto Paolo VI Notizario, 67 (June, 2014), 41–68.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania, 1963–2013. Godson S. Maanga.
Lutheran Quarterly, XXVIII (2, 2014), 179–91.
Eugene Stockton: A Life’s Work. A Gift to the Nation. Ann-Maree O’Beirne.
Australasian Catholic Record, 91 (Apr., 2014), 160–77.
The ‘Great Offender’: feminists and the campaign for women’s ordination. Jessica
Thurlow. Women’s History Review, 23 (June, 2014), 480–99.

AMERICAN AND CANADIAN
The Missionary Réductions in New France: An Epistemological Problem with a
Popular History Theory. Takao Abé. French Colonial History, 15 (2014), 111–
33.
Beyond Expectation: How Charles Town’s “Pious and Well-Disposed Christians”
Changed Their Minds about Slave Education during the Great Awakening.
Fred Witzig. South Carolina Historical Magazine, 114 (Oct., 2013), 286–315.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

853

Los misioneros franciscanos ante la conversión religiosa en la Alta California
Española. David Rex Galindo. Archivo Ibero-Americano, LXXIII (May–Dec.,
2013,) 575–604.
“Indescribable Being”: Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society
of the Public Universal Friend, 1776–1819. Scott Larson. Early American
Studies, 12 (Fall, 2014), 576–600.
The Protracted Meeting Myth: Awakenings, Revivals, and New York State Baptists, 1789–1850. Curtis D. Johnson. Journal of the Early Republic, 34 (Fall,
2014), 349–83.
Consecrated Merchants and Midnight Criers: Commercial Evangelicalism and a
Jazz Theory of Gender Distinctions in Nineteenth-Century America. T. R.
Noddings. Early American Studies, 12 (Fall, 2014), 601–25.
Catholics, Constitutions, and Conventions: Bishop John England and the Democratization of American Catholicism. William S. Cossen. South Carolina Historical Magazine, 114 (Oct., 2013), 316–40.
Transatlantic Textbooks: Karl Hagenbach, Shared Interests, and German Academic Theology in Nineteenth-Century America. Zachary Purvis. Church
History, 83 (Sept., 2014), 650–83.
Loyalty and Liturgy: Union Occupation and Religious Liberty in Wilmington,
North Carolina, 1865. Paul E. Teed. American Nineteenth Century History, 15
(Mar., 2014), 43–65.
Proslavery Christianity after Emancipation. Elizabeth L. Jemison. Tennessee Historical Quarterly, LXXII (Winter, 2013), 255–68.
Religion, “Moral Insanity,” and Psychology in Nineteenth-Century America. Jodie
Boyer. Religion and American Culture, 24 (Winter, 2014), 70–99.
God Directs—We Follow Divine Guidance: The First Polish Evangelical
Lutheran Congregation of Christ the Lord, Dundalk, Maryland. Thomas L.
Hollowak. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 87 (Summer, 2014), 21–61.
“Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits”: Evolution, Eschatology, and the Anticommunist Politics of George McCready Price. Carl R. Weinberg. Church
History, 83 (Sept., 2014), 684–722.
Relics in 21st Century America: The Collection of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Colleen Maura McGrane, O.S.B. The American Benedictine
Review, 65 (June, 2014), 145–52.
Missions in Missouri: The Story of Frederick Brand (Part II). Christopher Vossler.
Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 87 (Summer, 2014), 9–20.
Silence and Outrage: Reassessing the Complex Christian Response to Kristallnacht
in English-Speaking Canada. Jonathan Durance. History of Intellectual Culture, 10 (2012/13), 1–17.

854

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

The Baptism of Four Little Roxbury Girls: Jewish Angst in America’s Religious
Marketplace During the Interwar Period. Zev Eleff. American Jewish Archives
Journal, LXV (1 & 2, 2013), 73–94.
Northside “hypocrites” versus Southside “racists”: three Atlanta Southern Baptist
churches respond to changes in the racial status quo. Scarlet Jernigan. Baptist
History and Heritage, 48 (Fall, 2013), 57–70.
From the Sidelines to the Front Lines: Mathew Ahmann Leads American
Catholics into the Civil Rights Movement. Paul T. Murray. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 107 (Spring, 2014), 77–115.
A tale of two Baptists: Jimmy Carter and Jerry Falwell. J. Brooks Flippen. Baptist
History and Heritage, 48 (Fall, 2013), 33–56.
Being the Advocate. Renee McKenzie. Anglican and Episcopal History, 83 (June,
2014), 165–76.
The Old German Baptist Brethren church division of 2009: the debate over the
Internet and the authority of the Annual Meeting. Gerald J. Biesecker-Mast.
Mennonite Quarterly Review, 88 (Jan., 2014), 45–64.

LATIN AMERICAN
The Use of Mayan Script in the Americas’ First Christian Theology. Garry Sparks.
Numen, 61 (4, 2014), 396–429.
The Scientific, Anthropological, Geological, and Geographic Exploration of
Northern Mexico by Eighteenth-Century German Jesuit Missionaries. A
Religious and Scientific Network of Multilingual Writers. With a Focus on
Johann Nentuig and Marcus Antonius Kappus. Albrecht Classen. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 122 (I, 2014), 40–61.
Caciques as Placeholders in the Guaraní Missions of Eighteenth-Century
Paraguay. Julia Sarreal. Colonial Latin American Review, 23 (Aug., 2014),
224–51.
Intimate Indulgences: Salvation and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala. Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara. Colonial Latin American
Review, 23 (Aug., 2014), 252–79.
“Las señales de los últimos tiempos”. Laicidad y escatología en el pensamiento
católico hispanoamericano del siglo XIX. Gabriel Cid. Hispania Sacra, 66
(2014), 179–207.
La “Mujer Católica” y la sociedad de masas en la Argentina de entreguerras. Catolicismo social, consumo e industria cultural en la ciudad de Rosario (1915–
1940). Diego Mauro. Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 235–62.
Anticlericalismo y primera violencia en la Diócesis de Nueva Pamplona, Colombia
(1930–1934): Clero, políticos, jueces y policías. María del Rosario Vázquez
Piñeros. Hispania Sacra, 66 (2014), 263–85.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

855

Sonoran Adventure: A 1981 Journey. Bernard L. Fontana. Journal of the Southwest,
56 (Spring, 2014), 183–204.
Ideas and Leaders in Contentious Politics: One Parish Priest in El Salvador’s Popular Movement. Peter M. Sanchez. Journal of Latin American Studies,
FirstView article (Aug., 2014), pp. 1–26: available on CJO2014 doi: 10.1017/
S0022216X14000704.
O laicato na Conferência Episcopal Latino-Americana de Aparecida (2007). Sávio
Carlos Desan Scopinho. Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 74 (Jan., 2014), 78–
102.

Other Books Received
Allen, John L., Jr. The Catholic Church: What Everyone Needs to Know. Updated edition. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp. xx, 313. $16.95 paperback.)
Anderson, Gary A., and Joel S. Kaminsky (Eds.). The Call of Abraham: Essays on the
Election of Israel in Honor of Jon D. Levenson. (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. xvi, 390. $64.00 clothbound.)
Anidjar, Gil. Blood: A Critique of Christianity. (New York: Columbia University
Press. 2014. Pp. xx, 441. $40.00 clothbound.)
Bartunek, John, L.C. Answers: Catholic Advice for Your Spiritual Questions. (Cincinnati: Servant Books, an imprint of Franciscan Media. 2014. Pp. x, 145. $15.99
paperback.)
Bullivant, Stephen. Faith and Unbelief. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2014. Pp. xx,
156. $16.95 paperback.)
Cameron, Peter John, O.P. Made for Love, Loved by God. (Cincinnati: Franciscan
Media. 2014. Pp. viii, 152. $15.99 paperback.)
Carvalho, Corrine L. (Ed.). Reading the Old Testament: Pastoral Essays in Honor of
Lawrence Boadt, CSP. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 162. $18.95
paperback.)
Cohen, Paul A. History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of
Crisis. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2014. Pp. xx, 279. $35.00
clothbound.)
Combs, Jack Beckham. The Cubans. (Santa Fe: Documentary Photography Press,
distrib. University of Virginia Press. 2010. Pp. 191. $49.95 clothbound.)
Essay “Cuba in Limbo—Cuba en transición” by Julia E. Sweig (pp. 25–28).
A book of extraordinary photographs.
Cooper, Adam G. Naturally Human, Supernaturally God. Deification in Pre-Conciliar
Catholicism. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2014. Pp. x, 259. $39.00 paperback.)
Curran, Charles E. The Development of Moral Theology: Five Strands. (Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press. 2013. Pp. x, 306. $29.95 paperback.)
Doak, Kevin M. (Ed.). Xavier’s Legacies: Catholicism in Modern Japanese Culture.
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2011. Pp. xiv, 217. $34.95
paperback.) Among the articles published here are “Catholic Women Religious and Catholicism in Japan: 1872–1940” by Ann M. Harrington (pp. 31–
46), “Toward a History of Christian Scientists [i.e., scientists who were
Catholic or Protestant] in Japan” by James R. Bartholomew (pp. 47–63),
856

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

857

“Tanaka Kōtarō and Natural Law” by Kevin M. Doak (pp. 64–79), “Catholicism and Contemporary Man” by Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko (pp. 80–90),
“Kanayama Masahide: Catholicism in Mid-Twentieth-Century Japanese
Diplomacy” by Mariko Ikehara (pp. 91–114), “Crossing the Deep River:
Endō Shūsaku and the Problem of Religious Pluralism” by Mark Williams
(pp. 115–33), “An Essay on Sono Ayako” by Toshiko Sunami (pp. 134–44),
“Theory and Practice of Inculturation by Father Inone Yōji: From Pantheism
to Namu Abba” by Yoshihisa Yamamoto (pp. 145–68), and “Between Inculturation and Globalization: The Situation of Catholicism in Contemporary
Japanese Society” by Mark R. Mullins (pp. 169–92).
Durand, William. Rationale Book Four: On the Mass and Each Action Pertaining to
It. Introd., trans., and annot. Timothy M. Thibodeau. [Corpus Christianorum in Translation, Vol. 14; Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaeualis
CXL.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2013. Pp. 525. €70,00 paperback.)
Endo, Shusaku. White Man, Yellow Man. Two Novellas. Trans. Teruyo Shimizu.
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2014. Pp. 134. $14.95 paperback.)
Foley, Marc, O.C.D. The Ascent of Mount Carmel: Saint John of the Cross. Reflections.
(Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies. 2013. Pp. xiv, 238. $16.95
paperback.)
González, Ondina E., and Justo L. González (Eds.). Nuestra Fe: A Latin American
Church History Sourcebook. (Nashville: Abingdon Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 239.
$44.99 paperback.)
Groody, Daniel G., and Gustavo Gutiérrez (Eds.). The Preferential Option for the
Poor beyond Theology. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2014.
Pp. viii, 252. $30.00 paperback.)
Großbölting, Thomas, Massimiliano Livi, and Carlo Spagnolo (Eds.). L’avvio
della società liquida? Il passaggio degli anni Settanta come tema per la storiografia
tedesca e italiana. [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento,
Quaderni, Vol. 91.] (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2013. Pp. 374.
€30,00 paperback.)
Hoover, Brett C. The Shared Parish: Latinos, Anglos, and the Future of U.S. Catholicism. (New York: New York University Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 298. $49.00 clothbound.)
Levin Rojo, Danna A. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of
Nuevo México. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 307.
$34.95 clothbound.)
MacDonald, Elizabeth. Skirting Heresy: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe.
(Cincinnati: Franciscan Media. 2014. Pp. xiv, 210. $16.99 paperback.)
Meale, Carol M., and Derek Pearsall (Eds.). Makers and Users of Medieval Books:
Essays in Honour of A. S. G. Edwards. (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, an
imprint of Boydell & Brewer. 2014. Pp. xvi, 258. $99.00 clothbound.)

858

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

Mondini, Marco, and Massimo Rospocher. Narrating War: Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives. [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento,
Contributi, 28.] (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2013. Pp. 277. €26,00
paperback.)
Mundy, Linus. Simply Merton: Wisdom from his Journals. (Cincinnati: Franciscan
Media. 2014. Pp. xxii, 138. $14.99 paperback.)
Newman, Sharan. Defending the City of God: A Medieval Queen, the First Crusades,
and the Quest for Peace in Jerusalem. (New York: Palgrave, an imprint of
Macmillan. 2014. Pp. xiv, 256. $28.00 clothbound.)
Niell, Paul B., and Stacie G. Widdifeld (Eds.). Buen Gusto and Classicism in the
Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910. (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press. 2013. Pp. xxxvi, 292. $65.00 clothbound.) Chapter XI is “From
Baroque Triumphalism to Neoclassical Renunciation: Altarpieces of the
Cathedral of Cuzco in the Era of Independence” by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi
(pp. 232–54).
O’Callaghan, Joseph F. The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 376. $29.95
paperback.) Originally published in 2011 and reviewed by Nicolás Agrait,
ante, XCVIII (April, 2012), 364–66.
O’Keefe, Mark, O.S.B. Love Awakened by Love: The Liberating Ascent of Saint John
of the Cross. (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies. 2014. Pp. x,
179. $14.95 paperback.)
O’Neel, Brian. 150 North American Martyrs You Should Know. (Cincinnati: Servant
Books, an imprint of Franciscan Media. 2014. Pp. xiv, 190. $15.99 paperback.)
Régent-Susini, Anne. Bossuet et la rhétorique de l’autorité. [Lumière classique, Vol.
89.] (Paris: Honoré Champion. 2011. Pp. 838. €147.00 clothbound.)
Roynon, Tessa. Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition. Transforming American
Culture. [Classical Presences.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp.
xii, 220. $99.00 clothbound.)
Rylko-Bauer, Barbara. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps. My Mother’s Memories of
Imprisonment, Immigration, and a Life Remade. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 400. $26.95 clothbound.)
Satlow, Michael L. How the Bible Became Holy. (New Haven: Yale University Press.
2014. Pp. xiv, 350. $35.00 clothbound.)
Shea, Eugene B. The Immortal “I”: Restoring the Sovereignty of the Soul. (Lisle, IL:
The Shelton Group. 2014. Pp. xviii, 144. $19.95 paperback.)
Taylor, Patrick. Now and in the Hour of Our Death. [A Novel of the Irish Troubles.]
(New York: Forge Books. 2014. Pp. 382. $24.99 clothbound.)

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

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Tremayne, Peter [Peter Berresford Ellis]. Atonement of Blood: A Mystery of Ancient
Ireland. (New York: Minotaur Books. 2014. Pp. x, 338. $25.99 clothbound.)
———. The Seventh Trumpet: A Mystery of Ancient Ireland. (New York: Minotaur
Books. 2014. Pp. xvi, 336. $16.99 paperback.)
Van Engen, John. Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life. The Devotio Moderna and
the World of the Later Middle Ages. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 433. $29.95 paperback.) Originally published in 2008 and reviewed by Wybren Scheepsma, ante, XCVI
(July, 2010), 532–33.
Vansina, Jan. Through the Day, Through the Night: A Flemish Belgian Boyhood and
World War II. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 247.
$26.95 paperback.)
Vasilev, Georgi. Heresy and the English Reformation. Bogomil-Cathar Influence on
Wycliffe, Langland, Tyndale and Milton. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2008. Pp.
viii, 204. $49.95 paperback.)
Watson, Evelyn Theresa. Historical Phases of Prophetic Teaching. Vol. I: The Bible’s
Statutory Code of Ethics. A Guide to the Signs of the Times. (Bloomington, IN:
WestBow Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 114. $11.95 paperback.) Originally published
in 2006.
Wilken, Robert Louis. The Christian Roots of Religious Freedom. The Père Marquette
Lecture in Theology 2 0 1 4 . (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 2014. Pp.
55. $15.00 clothbound.)
Williams, D. H., and Phillip J. Donnelly (Eds.). Transformations in Biblical Literary
Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative, and Ethics. Essays in Honor of David Lyle
Jeffrey. [Notre Dame Studies in Ethics and Culture.] (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press. 2014. Pp. viii, 348. $70.00 clothbound.)
Yamane, David. Becoming Catholic: Finding Rome in the American Religious Landscape. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 242. $29.95 clothbound.)