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THE CATHOLIC
HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOL. 101

SUMMER, 2015

NO. 3

On a Mission:
Priests, Jesuits, “Jesuitresses,” and
Catholic Missionary Efforts in
Tudor-Stuart England
LISA MCCLAIN*
Beginning in 1609, English Catholic women in Mary Ward’s Institute of English Ladies returned to England to advance the mission of
reclaiming England for Rome. The English Ladies typically avoided
detection by Protestant authorities as they struggled to meet the religious needs of neglected populations. As women, they often could go
where men could not, and their labors allowed those already involved
in the mission to reach more Catholics and potential converts. This
essay seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of the English
Mission’s delivery of pastoral care as well as the role of Ward and the
English Ladies.
Keywords: English Mission; Institute of English Ladies; pastoral
care; Ward, Mary

T

he story of the English Mission is fairly well known, or so we used to
think. Beginning in 1574, first secular and then Jesuit priests began
arriving in Protestant England illegally to strengthen the Catholic faith
and save souls.1 Working out of the homes of the Catholic gentry, priests
such as Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell reconciled English subjects to Rome and provided sacraments as best they could to a dwindling
*Dr. McClain is professor of history at Boise State University, email: lmcclain@boise
state.edu.
1. For discussion of the penal laws and their impacts on Catholics’ ability to worship in
England, see Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience
among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York, 2004), pp. 21–28, 203–08.

437

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ON A MISSION

population of Catholics. It was dangerous work, and many such missionaries were imprisoned, tortured, and even executed for treason. The country never did return its allegiance to Rome, and many scholars have laid
partial blame for this failure on the Mission’s overemphasis on wealthy
Catholics who lived near London.2 In the past decade, scholars have revisited the Mission, examining its priests, networks, priorities, coordination,
and geographic scope and attempting to craft a clearer picture of how the
Mission functioned.3 What has rarely been incorporated into this picture
is how, between 1609 and 1631, English women trained on the continent
returned to England on the Mission so that they, too, might work toward
the salvation of their neighbors’ souls. These women were the English
Ladies—members of Mary Ward’s Institute, an organization modeled
after the Society of Jesus. They participated in the vibrant current of experimentation in women’s spirituality and modifications to compulsory
women’s enclosure in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
Although Pope Urban VIII suppressed the Institute in 1631, English
Catholic women revived a form of it after Ward’s death, and this organization spread across continents by the nineteenth century.4 Ward’s Institute exists worldwide today as the Congregation of Jesus and the Institute
of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM). It is commonly known as the Sisters
of Loreto, which counted among its members Mother Teresa of Calcutta.5
When historians write of Ward and the Institute, they predominantly
focus on an analysis of early-modern women’s piety and debates over

2. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the
Tudors (Oxford, 1993), Chapter 15; “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,” Past and Present, 93 (1981), 37‒69, here 57–59; and “Revisionism, the Reformation and
the History of English Catholicism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), 394–408; John
Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 206, 216, 224, 251,
282, and “The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism,” Past and Present, 21 (1962), 39–59.
3. Robert E. Scully, Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission into Elizabethan England and
Wales, 1580–1603 (St. Louis, 2011); Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 2005);
McClain, Lest We Be Damned, pp. 38–49. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism,
Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, UK, 1993), p. 92.
4. By 1900, approximately 6000 followers were educating 70,000 girls in 200 schools
worldwide without credit to Ward. See David Wallace, Strong Women: Life, Text and Territory 1347–1645, [The Clarendon Lectures in English 2007], (Oxford, 2011), p. 134. Leo
XII’s Constitution Conditae of 1900 and subsequent Regulations of Canon Law in 1901
finally made it possible for women to live as religious under simple vows, paving the way for
more diverse forms of religious life for women.
5. Mother Teresa was a Sister of Loreto and served in the Loreto Schools in India from
1928–50 before beginning her Missionaries of Charity.

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women’s enclosure, neglecting the English Ladies’ contribution to
Catholic efforts to reclaim England for Rome. The experiences of Ward
and the English Ladies can shed new light on the Mission itself—how it
worked and whom it served.6 Benefitting from gendered attitudes and
stereotypes, Ward’s English Ladies were less likely than priests to be suspected, identified, and arrested for their work on the English Mission.7
This allowed them to work relatively undetected and to reach populations
typically described as underserved by male missionaries, such as the poor.

6. The majority of scholarship on Ward and the Institute centers on the issue of female
enclosure. Previous scholars have explained Ward either as a proto-feminist pioneer for
rejecting enclosure or as a conservative Catholic woman whose attempts to avoid enclosure
unintentionally challenged gender biases. Ward has also been characterized as caught up in
the animosities between the Jesuits and secular clergy in the aftermath of the Appellant controversy or as a contemplative whose attempts at self-abnegation motivated her endeavors.
These are important topics surrounding Ward but quite separate from issues surrounding the
English Mission raised here. See M. Immolata Wetter, Mary Ward: Under the Shadow of the
Inquisition, trans. M. Bernadette Ganne and M. Patricia Harriss (Oxford, 2006); Ulrike
Strasser, “Early Modern Nuns and the Feminist Politics of Religion,” The Journal of Religion,
84 (2004), 529–54; Patricia Ranft, “A Key to Counter Reformation Women’s Activism: The
Confessor-Spiritual Director,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 10, no. 2 (1994), 7–26;
Pamela Ellis, “‘They are but Women’: Mary Ward (1585–1645),” in Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, ed.
Sylvia Brown (Leiden, 2007), pp. 243–63; Laurence Lux-Sterritt, “Mary Ward’s English
Institute and Prescribed Female Roles in the Early Modern Church,” in Gender, Catholicism,
and Spirituality, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen M. Mangion (London, 2011), pp.
83–98; Ibid., “Mary Ward’s English Institute: The Apostolate as Self-Affirmation?” Recusant
History, 28 (2006), 192–208; Ibid., “An analysis of the controversy caused by Mary Ward’s
Institute in the 1620s,” Recusant History, 25 (2001), 636–47; Patricia Harriss, “Mary Ward in
Her Own Writings,” Recusant History, 30 (2010), 229–39; Lowell Gallagher, “Mary Ward’s
‘Jesuitresses’ and the Construction of a Typological Community” in Maids and Mistresses,
Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen
Robertson (New York, 1999), pp. 199–219; Ellen A. Macek, “‘Ghostly Fathers’ and Their
‘Virtuous Daughters’: The Role of Spiritual Direction in the Lives of Three Early Modern
English Women,” The Catholic Historical Review, 90 (2004), 213–35; Christina KenworthyBrowne, ed., Mary Ward 1585–1648: A Briefe Relation with Autobiographical Fragments and
a Selection of Letters (Rochester, NY, 2008), pp. xviii–xix; Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes:
Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Kingston, Canada, 1990), pp. 3–9, 28–34.
7. Clare Walker’s and Caroline Bowden’s recent work on continentally-based English
nuns demonstrates a similar ability of religiously-oriented Englishwomen to network for the
Catholic cause relatively undetected by Protestant authorities. See Walker, “Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration,” The Historical Journal, 43
(2000), 1–23, and “Loyal and Dutiful Subjects: English Nuns and Stuart Politics,” in Women
and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Burlington, VT, 2004),
pp. 228–42; Bowden, “The English Convents in Exile and Questions of National Identity c.
1600–1688,” in British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688, ed. David Worthington (Leiden, 2010), pp. 297–314.

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ON A MISSION

FIGURE 1. Engraving of Mary Ward, from Mary Catharine Elizabeth Chambers,
The Life of Mary Ward, vol. 2 (London, 1885), frontispiece.

Moreover, they increased the effectiveness of priests and laypeople already
working on the Mission. This analysis challenges our understanding of the
Mission’s interest in and ability to provide pastoral care for Catholics—
indeed, our very understanding of how the Mission could and did work, at
least for these twenty years. Ironically, this very success contributed to the
eventual suppression of Ward’s Institute by stirring up so much fear,
rumor, and controversy that it overshadowed the benefits of the English
Ladies’ work on the English Mission.
Mary Ward and Her Institute
Ward (1585–1645, see figure 1) spent her childhood in several recusant households in Protestant England.8 In 1559, the first Elizabethan
8. For a critical depiction and interpretation of Ward’s childhood in England devoid of
the hagiographical undertones evident in earlier biographies, see Lux-Sterritt, “Apostolate,”
pp. 196–201, and Henriette Peters, Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation, trans. Helen Butterworth (Leominster, UK, 1994), pp. 28–54. The quality of early histories of Ward varies
between enthusiastic hagiographical accounts and rigorous scholarship, likely due to scholars’
need to interpret critically the primary sources written by Ward’s supporters that were clearly
biased in her favor. The full text of primary documents by and relating to Ward contained

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441

Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity, establishing Protestantism as
England’s only legal religion. Catholic worship continued clandestinely,
however, especially after 1574 when continentally trained English priests
began returning as part of the Mission to reclaim England for Rome. Such
missionaries visited homes such as Ward’s to provide spiritual comfort and
the sacraments, and Protestant authorities knew of these underground
activities. Beginning in the 1570s, Parliament passed penal laws of increasing severity. Eventually, it was illegal and punishable by death just to be a
priest ordained after 1559 in England. Harborers and helpers of priests
were to “suffer death, loss, and forfeit as in cases of one attainted of
felony.”9 These laws significantly hampered missionaries’ efforts to find
safe houses, convert and minister to Catholics, and avoid detection.
A growing body of scholars is asking increasingly complex questions
about the evolutions in belief, ritual, identity, and community among these
Catholics. Earlier comprehensive studies and county analyses described and
quantified various socio-demographic aspects of Catholic life in a Protestant state.10 Later scholars refined these general depictions of Catholicism
to focus on issues such as changing religious practices and understandings
of community, gender, and negotiations of religious and temporal alle-

within Mary Catharine Elizabeth Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, 2 vols. (London, 1882),
are authoritative and invaluable. Only in the last decade has a full body of documentation relative to Ward and her Institute become easily accessible to scholars, most notably in Ursula
Dirmeier, ed., Mary Ward und ihre Gründung: Die Quellentexte bis 1645, 4 vols., [Corpus
Catholicorum 45–48], (Münster, 2007), some of which duplicates texts provided by Chambers. Both resources are used as documentation in this essay. Other important materials
include the English Vita, or the Briefe Relation, a biography written shortly after Ward’s death,
most likely by two of Ward’s closest companions, Mary Poyntz and Winefrid Wigmore; an
Italian Vita, possibly also written by Poyntz or Elizabeth Cotton at a later date from Rome;
and Ward’s incomplete autobiography. Kenworthy-Browne’s edited versions from Mary
Ward are used in this essay. A biography/autobiography of fifty painted images known as The
Painted Life is extant and displayed at www.congregatiojesu.org/en/maryward_painted_life.asp
and the Convent of the Congregation of Jesus in Augsburg, Germany. Letters and other documents have been preserved in the archives of the Congregation of Jesus at the Bar Convent,
York; Munich Nymphenburg; and Bamburg. Vatican archival material reflecting the Roman
Church’s attitudes toward Ward and the Institute became available with the opening of
Inquisition archives in 1998.
9. 13 Eliz I, c. 1 & 2, building upon 35 Henry VIII, c. 2; 27 Eliz I, c. 2; 29 Eliz I, c.
6; 3 and 4 James I, c. 4, 5; 7 James I, c. 6. See The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London,
1810–28). Protestant authorities increased financial pressure upon English Catholics as well.
10. Bossy, English Catholic Community; Haigh, English Reformations; J. C. H. Aveling,
Northern Catholics: Recusancy in the North Riding, 1558–1791 (London, 1966); S. J. Watts,
From Border to Middleshire: Northumberland 1586–1625 (Bristol, 1975); A. L. Rowse, Tudor
Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (New York, 1969).

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ON A MISSION

giances and identities.11 Many current scholars seek to weave the history of
English Catholics back into broader debates about religion, politics, and
society in England.12 Ward lived and worked in the midst of these complexities and conflicts, at the intersections of religion, gender, and politics.
Ward grew up in households that upheld and actively promoted
Catholicism. In 1606, at age twenty-one, Ward left England for the Low
Countries, intending to pursue a religious vocation at one of the many convents accepting English Catholic women. After joining a Flemish convent
of Poor Clares and later starting an English house of the same order, Ward
received a series of divine revelations in which she said she was called to
pursue a different type of religious vocation based on the example of the
Society of Jesus.13 This challenged mandatory claustration of all religious
women, which Pope Boniface VIII imposed with his decretal, Periculoso, in
1298 and which Trent had recently confirmed.14 Moreover, St. Ignatius
Loyola and the Jesuit Constitutions forbade the establishment of a female
branch of the Society of Jesus.15 Ward understood this and intended her
Institute to be modeled after the Jesuits but as an independent institution,
in no way under the authority or jurisdiction of the Society. Requesting
papal approval, Ward asked that her Institute bypass Periculoso and traditional episcopal hierarchies to exist, as the Jesuits did, under the direct
jurisdiction of the pope and free from any cloister as a form of “mixed life.”
Its primary purposes would be to succor English Catholics and promote
11. See Questier, Catholicism and Community; McClain, Lest We Be Damned; and Walsham, Church Papists, as well as Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre Dame, IN,
2010); Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (Routledge, 1993); Sara
Heller Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720
(Oxford, 1998).
12. Examples include Julie Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer, eds., Women during the
English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity (New York, 2014); Ethan
Shagan, ed., Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious politics and identity in early modern
England (Manchester, UK, 2005); Alice Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution, ed. David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson, [ReFormations: Medieval and
Early Modern], (Notre Dame, 2012).
13. Although previous divine communications had told Ward that her future was not
with the Poor Clares or the Carmelites, in 1611 she received a revelation in which she was
told specifically to “Take the Name of the Society.” Letter of Mary Ward to Nuncio Antonio
Msr Albergati, May/June 1621, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, pp. 143–48.
14. Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–1545 (Washington, DC, 1999), pp. 1–8.
15. Loyola believed such responsibility over women would hinder the Society’s mission.
See Gemma Simmonds, “Women Jesuits?,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed.
Thomas Worcester (Cambridge, UK, 2008), pp. 120–35.

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the salvation of others through educating young girls or “by any other
means that are congruous to the times,” “in any place,” for the “propagation” of the Catholic Church.16 The Institute consisted of forty members
by 1612. By 1616, Institute houses were opening across Continental
Europe and by 1628 were established in cities as diverse as Liège, Naples,
and Prague, with a membership of approximately 200.17
But even before this, as early as 1609, Ward traveled back to England
to help with the Mission and gathered other Englishwomen to her cause.
Some members lived together in London in a house kept by the Institute.
Others stayed with Catholic families—wealthy and poor—in villages in the
countryside. Their presence was known to both Catholics and Protestants,
and their missionary efforts appear to have been succeeding. Ward certainly
thought they were, and Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot reportedly claimed that Ward alone “did more harm than six Jesuits.”18 Catholic
leaders in England agreed. The secular clergy of England—led by the opinions of Archpriest William Harrison—asserted that the Institute had “made
such progress in a very few years that its disciples have come together into
England in great numbers.”19 Letters written by lay Catholics in England
shared such perceptions. In June 1619, for example, a parent wrote to an
English Jesuit living in the Low Countries, complaining that a daughter
wished to join the Institute. The parent described how the Institute’s members were “scattered through almost all the island” with a great deal of
harmful influence on young women, Jesuits, and Catholic unity.20 Even if
such critics likely exaggerated the real threat posed by Ward and the English Ladies, these Catholic and Protestant fears demonstrate how well
known the English Ladies became within England. Such public acknowledgment of their presence and work, even if overstated, simultaneously
served to increase membership in the Institute and rally an opposition.
16. Mary Ward, Ratio Instituti or Scheme of the Institute, 1616, full text translated in
Chambers, Life of Mary Ward, 1:376–78, 384. The Institute was allowed to operate until the
papacy made a determination about the organization.
17. Rapley, The Dévotes, p. 28; Wetter, Under the Shadow, p. 162n2.
18. [Mary Poyntz and/or Winefrid Wigmore?], The English Vita or Briefe Relation
(1650), 21r, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 21.
19. “Memorial of the English Clergy to the Holy See by the Very Reverend William
Harrison, Archpriest of England, lately deceased, and subscribed by his Assistants after his
death,” Archives of the Diocese of Westminster, vol. 16, pp. 201, 213–20; full text in Chambers, Life, 2:183.
20. See Letter of A. B. to an unnamed Father of the Society of Jesus, June 1, 1619, St.
Omer Papers, Archives de l’État, Brussels, Carton 29, Supplement; full text in Chambers,
Life, 1:444–46.

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Jesuits and “Jesuitresses”
In comparison to the copious Jesuit records of the Mission, the English Ladies left few written accounts of their work in England.21 But they
left enough: biographical and autobiographical accounts of Ward’s life, letters between the English Ladies discussing missionary activities, and even
a narrative of daily activities on the English Mission.22 By comparing their
opportunities, practices, and priorities with those of Jesuit missionaries, it
quickly becomes evident that the English Ladies’ missionary efforts and
impact reached further than scholars have previously recognized, enabled
by social attitudes toward women and the relative anonymity such preconceptions offered the Ladies.
The English Ladies and Jesuits shared many similarities. Most were
well integrated into influential Catholic social and political networks due
to family ties. Just as Henry Garnet, for example, was implicated in the
Gunpowder Plot, Ward’s relatives and the relatives of other English Ladies
were as well.23 The women traveled to the continent steeped in the knowledge of the challenges and dangers faced by English Catholics determined
to adhere to and promote their faith back home. The training provided by
schools run by the Society of Jesus and Ward’s Institute emphasized Latin
for theological scholarship and humanist study and prepared students to
propagate the Catholic faith in whatever roles to which they might be
called.24 Both the English Ladies and the Jesuits participated in a defined
hierarchy that organized their missionary efforts in England.25 Regarding
21. For example, the Archives of the Society of Jesus contain the written records of the
Jesuit efforts on the English Mission (Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus).
22. See Lux-Sterritt, “Apostolate,” pp. 196–201; Peters, Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation, pp. 28–54; Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward; Dirmeier, Mary Ward und ihre
Gründung: Die Quellentexte bis 1645; [Poyntz and/or Wigmore?], Briefe Relation; [Poyntz or
Elizabeth Cotton?], Italian Vita.
23. Mary’s uncles (John Wright, Christopher Wright, and Thomas Percy) were among
the main plotters, as were her Winter/Wintour relations (Thomas Wintour and Robert Wintour). Ambrose Rookwood was a relative of English Lady Susannah Rookwood.
24. Letter of Mary Ward to Winefrid Wigmore, February 8, 1625; Letter of Ward to
Winifred Bedingfeld, July 16, 1627; and Letter of Ward to Wigmore, October 10, 1627, in
M. Emmanuel Orchard, Till God Will: Mary Ward through Her Writings, foreword Mother
Teresa of Calcutta, introd. James Walsh (London, 1985), pp. 76, 95–96.
25. The Society of Jesus’ hierarchy is well known, headed by a Jesuit Superior General.
The Institute also established a superior who supervised the Ladies’ work in England. Ward
served when she was in England, but other English Ladies such as Rookwood, Anne Gage,
and Frances Brooksby were appointed to serve in her absence. Orchard, Till God Will, pp.
81nn3, 91.

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their day-to-day missionary activities, both Jesuits and English Ladies
engaged in covert evangelization. They educated young people, catechized
families, encouraged religious vocations, and persuaded and prepared
people to turn or return to the Catholic faith.26
Accepting the risks inherent in the English Mission, both male and
female missionaries employed disguises and engaged in subterfuge. Jesuits
and English Ladies were familiar with hiding holes and writing letters with
the “invisible ink” of citrus juice.27 When imprisoned, Ward and her
Ladies recognized that persecution offered opportunities to publicize the
Catholic cause, strengthen their co-religionists’ resolve, and inspire both
jailers and prisoners. They could put on as good a performance to promote
the Catholic cause when arrested as the Jesuits famously did. For example,
when Ward was taken while trying to leave England after a period of missionary work in 1618–19, she used the opportunity to publicize devotion
to the Virgin Mary. When standing before Protestant authorities at the
Guildhall, Ward deliberately displayed either a rosary (which was prohibited by law) or a picture of Mary to the public and to her accusers. When
a justice challenged her, she used it as an opportunity to defend Mary publicly. Not surprisingly, the authorities decided to send her to prison, but
she used the trip through London to further Marian devotion again by
publicly reciting Marian litanies “with a courageous and heavenly voice.”
She continued this performance upon her arrival, kissing the threshold of
the jail as if it were a sanctified place and “this publickly before them all.”
She said that there were three causes for which she would gladly give her
life: “her faith, the honour of our Blessed Lady, and her chastity.”28 While
imprisoned, she appears to have succored English Catholics, just as imprisoned secular priests and Jesuits commonly did.29
Protestants harshly criticized members of both organizations, certainly, but so did some Catholics. Southwell described how Jesuits were
“made the common theme of every railing disclaimer, abused without
means or hope of remedy … our slanders are common work for idle

26. John Gerard, The Hunted Priest: Autobiography of John Gerard, trans. Philip Caraman, introd. Graham Greene (London, 1959), pp. 51, 85, 102–03, 147, 163, 196.
27. Orchard, Till God Will, p. 105.
28. English Vita, 23v–24r, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 23, and Chambers,
Life, 1:436–43. Eventually Ward’s friends secured her release with bribes, and she returned to
the continent.
29. McClain, Lest We Be Damned, pp. 62–70, 144–47. Ward, of course, could not provide the sacraments.

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presses.”30 The same might be said about the English Ladies, although the
criticisms were often more outlandish, steeped in fearful and negative rhetoric about women popularized in the early-modern debate over the worth
of women and the “fight for the breeches.” Depictions of the English
Ladies bore little relation to what the women actually did. For example,
rumors circulating about Ward had her traveling around England and
Flanders in a high-end carriage and four, calling herself either a duchess or
the “Abbess of St. Clare at Gravelines.” She was said to preach out in
public streets in front of an altar. Her Ladies were alleged to be prideful,
licentious, overly loquacious, and indecorous. Detractors alleged that the
English Ladies would go to inns “to gaine soules” and were “esteemed curtisans and suspected for hoores.” Male missionaries working in England
maintained that these “Jesuitresses” passed themselves off as priests and
claimed apostolic authority. Critics disparaged them as “galloping nuns”
and “apostolic Viragoes” of dubious virtue.31
These mischaracterizations had much to do with fear: fear of what
unsupervised women might do in society and fear over the discord between
secular and Jesuit missionaries during the Archpriest/Appellant controversy, much of which has been analyzed previously.32 It is argued here,
however, that an unintended consequence of this false picture of the Institute’s activities was that it made the English Ladies working on the Mis-

30. Robert Southwell, An Humble Supplication to Her Maiestie (n.p., 1591), pp. 40–41.
See also Gerard, Hunted Priest, pp. 48, 80, 82–83, 107, 195–96; William Weston, William
Weston: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman, foreword Evelyn Waugh
(London, 1955), pp. 83, 139–43.
31. Godfather’s Information, or Certaine observations delivered me by Mistress Marie Allcock, the first minister of Mistress Wardes Companie at Leeds (Liege) yea the first of all who was
publicklye so called (n.p., 1623); Chambers, Life, 1:170; “Memorial of the English Clergy” in
Chambers, Life, 2:183–86; Sister Dorothea to Frances Brooksby, also known as “Sister
Dorothea’s Narrative,” full text in Chambers, Life, 2:38–39; Dirmeier, Mary Ward, 1:763–64.
32. See Wetter, Mary Ward; Strasser, “Early Modern Nuns”; Ranft, “A Key to Counter
Reformation Women’s Activism”; Ellis, “‘They are but Women’”; Lux-Sterritt, “Mary
Ward’s English Institute and Prescribed Female Roles”; Lux-Sterritt, “Mary Ward’s English
Institute: The Apostolate”; Lux-Sterritt, “An analysis”; Harriss, “Mary Ward in Her Own
Writings”; Gallagher, “Mary Ward’s ‘Jesuitresses’”; Macek, “‘Ghostly Fathers’”; KenworthyBrowne, ed., Briefe Relation, pp. xviii–xix; Rapley, The Dévotes, pp. 3–9. Rome used the established Jesuit hierarchy to help organize and lead secular priests and missionaries from other
male religious orders as well, leading to resentment among many missionaries who were not
Jesuits. Conflicts over who exercised authority over whom within the English Mission
resulted in the Archpriest/Appellant Controversy in the early-seventeenth century. See
Thomas Graves Law, The Archpriest Controversy: Documents Relating to the Dissensions of the
Roman Catholic Clergy, 1597–1602 (London, 1896–98).

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sion difficult to identify. Protestant authorities knew what to look for to
find Jesuits. Pursuivants knew how male missionaries surreptitiously
entered and worked in England, so they watched the ports and coastlines,
kept alert for clues, searched homes, and laid traps.33 With the English
Ladies, however, Protestant authorities searched for the wrong “tells.”
There was no duchess, no lavish lifestyle, no altar in the street. There were
no immodest women loudly and scandalously preaching and usurping
priestly functions.
On the other hand, the Ladies were not nuns either, which was the
Protestant authorities’ other point of reference. At one point officials
raided the home of the Spaniard Luisa de Carvajal who ran her household
of English Catholic women living under a convent-like “rule” in Spitalfields under the protection of the Spanish embassy. The authorities
thought Carvajal was Ward and that they were raiding the Institute. They
had difficulty envisioning Catholic women working on the English Mission who would not live like and look like either galloping girls or nuns.34
Even if the authorities found an English Lady, they usually did not
know what they had. They knew the woman was a Catholic but did not
suspect her of being a member of the Institute. Additionally, as women,
the English Ladies were not suspected of political intrigue and treasonous
activities in the same way as Jesuits were.35 As a result, a member of the
Institute was often not punished as harshly as either a secular or Jesuit
priest or a male Catholic would have been, even to the point of being
released without charges. As Frances Brooksby, the Institute’s Superior in
England in 1622–23, allegedly said, the Protestant authorities were “like
unto dogs, who with their barking do endeavor only to hinder people from
attaining to their journey’s end, but bite they dare not.”36 The Ladies knew
this and used their anonymity and this lenience to their advantage. For

33. Southwell, Humble Supplication, p. 18; Weston, William Weston, pp. 80–81, 100.
34. See Glyn Redworth, The She-Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de
Carvajal (Oxford, 2008), pp. 46, 89. A valuable contrast might be made between Carvajal,
who enjoyed much English Jesuit support for her work among Catholics in England, and
Ward, who often did not.
35. Walker describes English Protestants as fearing English Catholic religious women
less than religious men, dismissing them as foolish and not significantly threatening to
Protestant interests. “Loyal and Dutiful Subjects,” pp. 229, 238.
36. Frances Brooksby, Superior of the Institute in England, quoted or paraphrased by
Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:29. See descriptions of
other English Catholic women receiving less severe punishment than Catholic men in Redworth, She-Apostle, pp. 144–46, 200, 204.

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example, a lay sister of the Institute, known only as Sister Dorothea, was
arrested in the 1620s. The Protestant magistrate knew she was Catholic
but not that she was an English Lady. He released her, lauding her charitable activities, which were evidently well known in the community, but
warned her not to try to convert anyone.37 So after her release, Dorothea
wrote how she “little respecting the Justice his command or request, went
presently to a poor sick woman in the town and persuaded her to become
a Catholic and save her soul.”38
Because the English Ladies were harder to identify, they could work
among populations not easily reached by the Jesuits, most notably the poor.
As previously discussed, even to be a Jesuit in England was illegal and punishable by death. As the Jesuit John Gerard observed about his own experience on the mission between 1588 and 1606, “to lead a simple life among
the common people was to invite arrest.” A man in a poor or working-class
home was expected to earn his living, and everyone knew what their neighbors’ livelihoods were. If a man lived in such a home and did not work, he
raised a red flag with his neighbors and the authorities, especially if he lived
conservatively, was unmarried, and received many visitors.39 Additionally,
if a male missionary attempted to pass himself off as a layman living among
the poor, he would often be exposed when Catholics of similar or higher
ranks showed unexpected deference to him, as happened to Ward’s cousin,
Francis Ingleby (d. 1586). A missionary disguised as a poor man, Ingleby
was leaving York, accompanied by a Catholic gentleman to the city gates.
As the man bade Ingleby goodbye, he repeatedly showed him greater
marks of respect—such as doffing his hat—than a gentleman should show
to one dressed like Ingleby. Unfortunately, two alert Protestant chaplains
recognized the clues that this might be a priest in disguise and notified the
authorities. Ingleby was arrested and later executed.40 In the end, as Gerard
observed, it was safer for priests to live in the great houses, which provided
a cover story for their presence as men without obvious occupation and
with the frequency of visitors and the marks of deference shown them.

37. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2: 29, 33–34.
See also Scully, Into the Lion’s Den, pp. 241–89.
38. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:34.
39. Gerard, Hunted Priest, pp. 16, 70. See also the experiences of Henry Hubert and
William Weston in Weston, William Weston, pp. 3–6.
40. From William Warford’s “Relation of Martyrs” in Stonyhurst MSS, Grene’s Collectanae, quoted in Christine Kelly, Blessed Thomas Belson: His Life and Times 1563–1589
(Gerrards Cross, UK, 1987), p. 74. Gerard describes a similar experience in Hunted Priest,
p. 66.

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In such homes, they did valuable work, providing the sacraments,
counsel, and instruction for family members and neighborhood Catholics,
in what is traditionally called manor-house Catholicism by historians. By
participating in customary masculine activities of the gentry—such as
hawking, hunting, and card-playing—they exploited their opportunities to
convert people from that rank.41 They would leave these gentry homes to
perform pastoral duties if they received a summons.42 Although priests
such as Robert Persons and Edmund Campion described leaving their
home bases to ride circuits through neighboring shires, their modus
operandi still centered on the manor. They would arrive at a gentry home,
gather the neighbors, and perform the sacraments at this home before
moving on again.43
As women, the English Ladies had fewer worries of discovery, and
their living conditions and activities on the Mission reflect this. In London
and later near York, the Institute kept a house in which the women lived
together like a reputable, secular family. As women, they were not expected
to leave home to work. As unmarried women, it was not unusual for them
to share a home. The Ladies dressed modestly as secular women.44 “When
need was,” they dressed in “poor, mean clothing” but would also dress in
more fashionable attire “like ladies accustomed to good society” when the
situation required.45 Because they were women and neither priests nor
nuns, they did not need to worry about Catholics showing them unwarranted displays of deference. This is not to say the English Ladies lived
without fear of discovery. They had to change houses when searchers came
too close for comfort.46 What they did enjoy was a greater opportunity to
live as a community and to go abroad in disguise to minister to diverse
groups of Catholics but especially the poor.
This is best revealed in the short narrative of a woman’s daily life on
the English Mission written c. 1623 by Sister Dorothea.47 Just as Jesuit
superiors commanded missionaries such as William Weston and Gerard to
41. Gerard, Hunted Priest, pp. 157, 169, 188–89; Weston, William Weston, pp. 37–38.
42. Weston, William Weston, pp. 12, 142–44.
43. McClain, Lest We Be Damned, pp. 41–42; Weston, William Weston, pp. 34–36.
44. Chambers, Life, 1:431, 443–44; 2:25–26.
45. Chambers, Life, 1:423; English Vita, 14v–15r, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward,
pp. 14–15.
46. English Vita, 22v–23r, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 22.
47. Ward’s secretary in Rome, Margaret Horde, copied Dorothea’s letter. Dirmeier,
Mary Ward, 1:772. Both Dirmeier and Chambers reproduce the original text, and all references herein are from Chambers.

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write autobiographical accounts of their experiences on the Mission,
Dorothea’s superior asked her to describe her life and work on the Mission
in Suffolk between 1621–23. Dorothea lived with a poor woman but had
contact with Catholics of higher rank.48 Her greatest emphasis, however,
was clearly on working with the poor, as indicated by her refusal to leave
“her poor friends” to live with and serve a gentlewoman.49
In contrast to Jesuits such as Roger Lee who used men’s activities such
as hunting and hawking to make contacts, Dorothea used traditional
women’s activities to disguise and further her missionary activities. For
example, she used her healing skills to build trust with people whom she
served. She related:
I tend and serve poor people in their sickness. I make salves to cure their
sores, and endeavor to make peace between those at variance. In these
works of charity I spend my time, not in one place, but in many.

She also educated children and catechized the “simple and vulgar sort.”50
That Dorothea was not alone in her degree of contact with the poor is
reflected in Archpriest Harrison’s worries about the dangers of the English
Ladies sowing “false doctrines” among the poor people with whom they
worked.51
Only when Dorothea succeeded in establishing relationships with
potential converts would she begin to speak of God and faith in an attempt
to save souls. This could be a long-term endeavor. Many people feared to
become Catholics because of persecution, so she described the stages
where, little by little, she would lead them toward what she saw as the
soul’s only chance of salvation within the Roman Church.52 For example,
in one household, she described how when she first arrived, she
48. Dorothea resided near the Timperley family of Hintlesham Hall near Ipswich.
Peters, Mary Ward, pp. 357–61.
49. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:33.
50. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:28–31. For a
further example of an English Lady healing while on the Mission, see English Vita, 20r, in
Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 20.
51. “Memorial of the English Clergy,” in Chambers, Life, 2:185.
52. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:27–28. Other
English Ladies wrote of the long-term and different approaches of Ward and her Ladies in
converting the poor. They would go, sometimes in disguise and at other times in their own
clothing, using “some times familiar conversation, other times authority amongst the
common and poore sort, woud first put them in doubt of their owne errour, and then lay the
Light before them.” English Vita, 19v–20r, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 20.

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perceived it would not have been well taken if I had spoken of God, etc.,
wherefore sorting myself to their dispositions I soon gained their affections, by serving and tending them both, and making medicines and
salves and teaching them to do the same. In fine I so gained them that
whatsoever I did or said was gratefully taken. . .53

Another of her tactics was to begin by educating the children and eventually gain the parents’ confidence. This approach could take many weeks or
months, however—time too dangerous for a Jesuit to spend in poor homes
raising many red flags among neighbors and the authorities. A Jesuit often
had only days to gain a convert.
Moreover, Dorothea described a very different interpersonal dynamic
in which conversions might be made. Male missionaries, upon entering a
home, expected to lead in that home. As priests, they took over as spiritual
heads of household but often reorganized household routines and expenditures in addition to leading worship. They made recommendations with
the expectation that these would be followed.54 Female missionaries
adopted a lower status position in a household, often as a poor relation or
servant, and attempted to build trust through their good works and humility. Ward herself did this, putting on a maid’s dress and serving in a household until she won the confidence of her target. Many people with whom
the English Ladies worked did not even know the women were members
of Ward’s Institute. Because prejudicial rumors circulated about scandalous
galloping nuns, the Ladies often found it best simply to do their work
without advertising their Institute affiliation. They expected not the
extreme reverence shown a Jesuit but the disparagement of their critics if
their institutional ties were known.55
When potential converts “desire[d] nothing more than to save their
souls, by means of the sacraments,” the English Lady would find a priest
to reconcile them. This often proved difficult to do, because of the dangers
of priests visiting the poor as previously discussed. The English Ladies preferred Jesuits but were perfectly willing to work with secular priests and
other religious.56 For example, Dorothea wrote that for approximately six

53. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:29.
54. Southwell, A Shorte Rule of Good Lyfe, York Minster Library, Add MS 151, f. 8;
Gerard, Hunted Priest, pp. 43, 48, 51, 166.
55. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:31–32.
56. One of the criticisms levied against Ward and her Institute was their alleged preference for Jesuit priests. See “Memorial of the English Clergy,” in Chambers, Life, 2:183–86.

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months, she had been trying to find a priest to reconcile three poor people
with whom she had been working. On March 20, 1622, she came in contact with a Benedictine called Mr. Palmer who agreed to reconcile them.
The first—a poor woman—he reconciled in an out-of-the-way field
because of the danger of being seen. In the end, Dorothea had to walk
twelve miles to bring back a secular priest to reconcile the other two individuals, plus one additional convert. Shortly thereafter, she reported that
she had several more poor folk who desired reconciliation. A nearby gentry
family, the Timperleys, arranged for a Benedictine, whom Dorothea
described as a “very good and zealous man,” to come and reconcile them all
at once. Dorothea gathered the poor people together, advertising to others
that they were gathering herbs to make salves. Again, she used a traditional
women’s activity to mask the true purpose of her missionary activities.57
What Sister Dorothea described appears to be standard practice for
these female missionaries. English Ladies on the Mission would do much
of the preparatory work of reconciliation. They made contacts, building
trust through their acts of charity, service, and education, after which they
would attempt to persuade and prepare people to return to the Catholic
faith and receive the sacraments. When the person was ready, the Lady
would locate a priest who had only to come and “seal the deal.”58 For example, Ward described her visits to a “Mistress Knatchbull’s house” next to the
Globe Theater in London where, she mentioned, posters for Macbeth were
on display. Over time, Ward brought the woman food, spoke with her
about God, and eventually “the dying woman declared her readiness to see
a priest” who Ward then procured.59 This process would have worked well
for everyone involved. The Ladies contributed to their goal—the salvation
of souls—and the priests performed their duties with less risk of discovery.
Moreover, the Ladies brought priests and the sacraments to a segment of
the population that the priests were not reaching in large numbers: the poor.
Indeed, the English Ladies helped the priests in other ways as well.
The Institute kept and supported two priests in its London residence at all

57. Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:28–29.
58. Ward described that, once a poor or common person was ready to be reconciled,
“they [her Ladies] instructed them how to make good Confessions, and so prepared them as
the Priests had but to heare theire Confessions, and so avoid the danger which a long stay
woud have brought them.” English Vita, 20r, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 20.
59. Mother Mary Margaret, The Wedge of Gold: The Life of Mary Ward (1585–1665
[Ward died in 1645]) Foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (London, 1955), pp.
28–29. See also Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:25–38.

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times. One priest was always on hand to assist the women, whereas the
other priest was free to go abroad, especially among, as Mary Poyntz, one
of Ward’s closest companions, explained, “the poore to whome priests
could not get but with great danger, and by Night, not having justifyable
pretexts.”60 The Ladies opened their house to many Catholics during holy
days for Mass and for priests to provide the sacraments. English Ladies
also procured from other Catholics residences and stipends for priests.
They encouraged wealthy English Catholic families to construct chapels
and chambers for priests on the Mission. They could also strengthen the
resolve of priests in danger of apostatizing, as Ward did while working on
the Mission and living in prison between 1618 and 1619.61
In addition to enhancing the effectiveness of priests, the English
Ladies also increased the impact of recusant laywomen who aided the Mission. Catholic male heads of households often conformed outwardly as
church papists to protect a family’s finances and status.62 Catholic women
were able to engage in private resistance at home. Scholars typically characterize these women as heroically refusing to attend Church of England services and fostering a household-based Catholicism patterned after fairly traditional models of women’s sanctity.63 In so doing, such women frequently
engaged in charitable works among the poor. Dorothea, however, demonstrated how the English Ladies could work alongside such women, mediating between people of different social ranks, to increase the opportunities to
save souls. The Benedictine priest Palmer who reconciled one of Dorothea’s
poor converts in a by-field was so impressed with Dorothea’s success among
the poor that he wanted recusant women of gentry status to follow her
example, go among the poor, and prepare them to be reconciled and receive
the sacraments. It did not prove so simple, however, probably because of the
obvious difference in status between the gentry recusant women and the
60. English Vita, 19v, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 20.
61. Ward, Ratio Instituti, in Chambers, Life, 1:384; English Vita, 18r–20r, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p. 20; Sister Dorothea, “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers,
Life, 2:35; Mary Margaret, Wedge of Gold, p. 42. Image no. 29 of The Painted Life depicts such
activity.
62. Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 73–81.
63. Marie B. Rowlands, “Recusant Women 1560–1640,” in Women in English Society
1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London, 1985), pp. 112–35; Roland Connelly, The Women of the
Catholic Resistance: In England. 1540–1680 (Edinburgh, 1997); Frances Dolan, “Reading,
Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies,” English Literary Renaissance, 33 (2003), 328–57;
Crawford, Women and Religion; Dorothy Latz, Glow-Worm Light: Writings of SeventeenthCentury English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts, [Salzburg Studies in English Literature], (Salzburg, 1989).

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poorer potential converts. There was no trust, no relationship established
between these gentry women and those they sought to aid. Dorothea had
lived in a poor household for months, serving her neighbors. Only then did
she begin discussing matters of faith. It was unrealistic for Palmer to expect
that a recusant woman of gentry status, no matter how good her intentions,
could enter the homes of the poor once or twice, offer the services of a
priest, and see her invitation accepted in the same manner. Regardless,
these women tried. Dorothea accompanied several recusant women, “Mrs.
Arrendell and others to the houses of poor people.” The recusant women
wanted Dorothea to be the spokesperson, so she was—effectively, evidently,
because Dorothea wrote that they “resolved to become Catholics.”
Dorothea then had to be elsewhere for several weeks and thus could not be
present for the priest’s arrival, so she left her new converts with Mrs. Arrendell as their resource for further instruction. When Dorothea returned six
weeks later, she discovered that not only had a priest never reconciled the
converts but also that Mrs. Arrendell had not even spoken to the poor
people in the interim. Wanting to know the reason, she returned to the
poor and found them still willing to be reconciled but also frustrated that
the gentlewoman had not visited them since Dorothea left. Why, they
asked, should they have to go to her and not the other way around?64
Trusted and sensitive to both sides’ needs and concerns, the Institute’s missionary was the critical cog that made the machine work.
Supporters and Critics
Particularly in the early years, activities such as these garnered some
praise in England, on the continent, and even from Rome.65 When
Thomas Sackville took Ward’s plan for the foundation of the Institute to
Rome in 1616, Pope Paul V’s initial reception was encouraging.66 Despite
64. “Sister Dorothea,” “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Chambers, Life, 2:36.
65. For example, Bishop Jacques Blaes, who had jurisdiction over St. Omer, and the
Jesuits Leonhard Lessius, Roger Lee, John Gerard, and Andrew White all wrote in praise of
the activities of Ward and the English Ladies. English Vita, 18r–19r, in Kenworthy-Browne,
Mary Ward, pp. 17–19; Bishop Jacques Blaes, In Defense of the English Virgins, an open letter
dated March 19, 1615, quoted in Chambers, Life, 1:319–25; Chambers, Life, 1:340 and 2:13,
53–54; Ward, The Italian Autobiography, AB6, repr. in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, pp.
134–35; Cardinal Orazio Lancelotti to Bishop Jacques Blaes, April 10, 1616, quoted in
Chambers, Life, 1:385; Sister Dorothea to Frances Brookesby, in Chambers, Life, 2:37–38;
Peters, Mary Ward, pp. 144–47. Even some letters of criticism mention the support received
by the English Ladies within England. See Letter of A. B. in Chambers, Life, 1:444–46;
Ward, Ratio Instituti, in Chambers, Life, 1:384.
66. Wetter, Under the Shadow, p. 23.

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the Ladies’ seeming effectiveness and the initial positive reception in
Rome, the English Ladies’ critics increased in number, volume, and impact
by the 1620s, pushing for the suppression of the Institute. These were
Catholic critics, not Protestant ones.
The innovations instituted by the men of the Society of Jesus had been
revolutionary enough for many Catholics, laity and clergy alike. Women
working in society without religious habits, the enclosure of the cloister,
and the supervision of any ecclesiastical hierarchy was too much for many
Catholics to accept. Scholars such as Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Pamela Ellis,
and Lowell Gallagher have produced valuable analyses of the intersections
of gender, religious vocation, and enclosure, particularly within Ward’s
own writings on these issues and within the negative attitudes to Ward and
her colleagues displayed by both Catholics and Protestants.67 There is
much in the gendered language about useless women, “chattering hussies,”
and “galloping nuns” that provides scope for scholarly discussion.
Undoubtedly, enclosure issues played a large role in the suppression.
Yet, considering the English Ladies’ successes on the English Mission, it is intriguing that the Holy See would suppress Ward’s Institute,
since Rome deeply desired to reclaim England for the Catholic Church. In
many ways, it appears as if the Holy See lost a great deal by preferring to
enforce enclosure of women rather than using the women’s efforts in the
fight to reclaim England for Catholicism. On the other hand, one might
ask how the papacy could have allowed the Ladies to continue working as
long as they did, considering that they lived without a distinctive habit,
enclosure, or episcopal oversight for decades. Such women were accused of
violating scripture and canon law. They were “meddling,” overstepping
their roles as women, endangering the Mission by sowing dissension
among Catholics, and possibly spreading false doctrine.68 The Institute’s
suppression merits future in-depth inquiry—beyond enclosure—into doctrinal and secular issues that are beyond the scope of this essay.69
In general, lay and clerical support for the Institute was strongest
during the early years of the Ladies’ work on the English Mission because
67. Ellis, “They are but Women”; Lux-Sterritt, “Mary Ward’s English Institute” and
“An analysis”; Harriss, “Mary Ward”; Gallagher, “Mary Ward’s ‘Jesuitresses.’”
68. Wetter, Shadow, p. 25.
69. See Lisa McClain, “Catholicism, Gender, and the English Mission: New Models
of Piety and Gender among Jesuits and Mary Ward’s English Ladies,” North American Conference on British Studies, Montréal, Québec, Canada, November 10, 2012.

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their efforts started on a small scale that did not appear threatening at first.
Additionally, word about the women’s activities needed time to spread, and
fears about the women’s unrestricted activities needed time to mount. As
years passed, however, the scale of Ward’s endeavors grew, and rumors and
fears began to spread. The Institute’s efforts became entangled in pre-existing controversies such as the debate over the worth of women, enclosure,
and the Archpriest controversy, as many scholars have previously explored.70
Ward and the English Ladies received the most support from clerics
with whom they had personally worked. Mary initiated what would
become her Institute in 1609, gathering companions, engaging in missionary activities, and eventually educating Catholic girls in St. Omer. Significant controversy does not seem to have arisen until several years later. In
1615, Jacques Blaes, the bishop with jurisdiction over St. Omer, wrote a
public letter in defense of Ward and the English Ladies.71 Blaes’s letter
refuted the charges of an anonymous yet “illustrious” English gentleman
who had written openly and critically of the women. This critic claimed
that “scarcely any approves of the new plan of these Virgins, except a few
Fathers of the Society of Jesus by whose work and aid this thing was
begun.” Unnamed “men of weight and authority,” were offended, the
author asserted. Any plan of such women was useless. Anyone could see
the danger these women posed by “gadding about” in England, overstepping the bounds of womanhood, and siphoning off English Catholic girls
and women from established convents on the continent.72
Many of the criticisms that would balloon in later years are present in
this early critique, but here a prominent churchman publicly defended the
women and their activities. In the open letter, Blaes professed that he had
full knowledge of the “English Virgins” and their activities and that the
rumors spread by the earlier writer were false. “Anyone critiquing them
does so in ignorance of what is really going on,” Blaes maintained. He provided the results of his investigation, documenting the numbers of women
70. See Wetter, Mary Ward; Strasser, “Early Modern Nuns”; Ranft, “A Key to Counter
Reformation Women’s Activism”; Ellis, “‘They are but Women’”; Lux-Sterritt, “Mary
Ward’s English Institute and Prescribed Female Roles”; Lux-Sterritt, “Mary Ward’s English
Institute: The Apostolate”; Lux-Sterritt, “An analysis”; Harriss, “Mary Ward in Her Own
Writings”; Gallagher, “Mary Ward’s ‘Jesuitresses’”; Macek, “‘Ghostly Fathers’”; KenworthyBrowne, ed., Briefe Relation, pp. xviii–xix; Rapley, The Dévotes, pp. 3–9; Law, The Archpriest
Controversy.
71. Blaes, In Defense, in Chambers, Life, 1:319–25.
72. Anonymous letter, c. 1613–14, endorsed “Puellae Anglae [sic] Audomari,” St.
Omer Papers, Archives de l’État, Brussels, quoted in Chambers, Life, 1:320–21.

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involved, where they went, how they presented themselves, and what they
did. He presented evidence refuting each charge of the rumor, including
testimonials from Jesuits and well-born Englishmen in support of the
Ladies.73 When back in England, these women profited English Catholics,
Blaes maintained. Such vocal clerical support for what at this time would
have been perceived as a small-scale group of women working on behalf of
the Church was not unusual in northern Europe at this time.74 What differentiates the Institute from other smaller, more localized organizations of
unenclosed, pious women engaging in good works out in their communities is its later growth and subsequent public reaction to it.
Blaes’s support appears to have calmed public fears for several years,
and the Ladies’ efforts in England and the continent grew. Like Blaes, clerics who met the English Ladies were likely to praise the women and
encourage their work. Edward Catcher, a Jesuit also known as Father
Burton, served as their confessor and commended the women’s efforts in his
writing and preaching from the pulpit in Liège. He maintained that, from
its earliest years, the Church had employed women as “helpers in working
for souls.” He compared the English Ladies’ endeavors to those of the
Virgin Mary, female saints, deaconesses, and other women in the early
Church.75 Andrew White, also a Jesuit, respected Ward and her work, as a
help of neighbours, conversion of soul, correctories [sic], sodalities and
such like: teaching chiefly Christian doctrine, modesty and piety, with all
other ornaments belonging to women of needle, music, and higher learning, moral and divine, according to the capacity of that sex . . . [They
have born] infinite crosses, contradictions, pressures, prisons, and persecutions, working still by strong, sweet and prudent patience, heroical acts
in the service of God . . . hopes of infinite spiritual fruit in the Holy
Church, to the comfort and admiration of all who know them.76

Jesuits Lee and Gerard, who had worked on the English Mission,
were among the strongest supporters of Ward and the Institute. Such men
understood the challenges faced by Catholics within England and the mis73. Blaes, In Defense, pp. 322, 324–25. Ward describes her interactions with Blaes in
her autobiography. Ward, Italian Autobiography, AB6, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, p.
135.
74. Wetter, Under the Shadow, p. 141.
75. Letter of A. B. in Chambers, Life, 1:445.
76. Letter of Andrew White, February 4, 1621, from London, reprinted in Chambers,
Life, 2:53–57. White states that he knows the Institute has not yet been approved but that he
himself approves of it.

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sionaries who tried to sustain and support them. Lee served as Ward’s confessor and spiritual director from 1606 to 1615. Although he initially resisted her efforts to model her Institute on the Society of Jesus, he reconsidered after her 1611 vision convinced him this was God’s will. Lee worked
with Ward to draw up the first plan for the Institute, the Schola Beatae
Mariae, which clearly reflects his conservative influence.77
Gerard knew Ward from the Institute’s work in Liège and personally
directed her in the Spiritual Exercises in 1618. In the 1620s, during Ward
and her Ladies’ quest for papal approval of the Institute, Gerard sacrificed
much to support her endeavors. He lost the rectorship of the English College at Liège, his correspondence was monitored, and the Society of Jesus
distanced itself from him. He helped procure financial support for the Institute houses in Cologne and Trier. He visited Ward in Rome, advising her
and her supporters about how best to approach the Holy See to gain
approval. He wrote letters to other supportive Jesuits such as Henry Lee and
to leaders of the Institute’s houses in the Holy Roman Empire, under a
pseudonym, “John Tomson,” knowing his letters could be intercepted.78
Ward’s Institute differs from other, smaller, more locally based groups
of women working on behalf of Christians in their communities in its
growth, visibility, and institutional structure.79 Eventually the Ladies became
impossible to ignore, especially after Ward formally sought papal approbation. In 1621, she and several of her closest companions traveled to Rome to
present and defend their final plan for the Institute before Pope Gregory XV.
Opponents of the Institute—Jesuits, regulars, priests, and laypersons—sent
an increasing number of letters and other documents critical of the English
Ladies’ “manner of living and acting” to the Superior General of the Society
of Jesus and to Propaganda Fide in Rome. In turn, they communicated with
Pope Gregory XV and, after 1623, with Pope Urban VIII, as the papacy
deliberated the future of the Institute.80 The papacy’s earlier, more positive
77. Peters, Mary Ward, pp. 122–24.
78. Mary Ward to John Gerard, April 1619, in Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, pp.
141–42; Letter of John Gerard to Henry Lee in Munich, March 8, 1627, in Chambers, Life,
2:227–30; Chambers, Life, 1:417 and 2:13–14, 89–90.
79. Contrasts might be drawn between the Institute and small groups of pious women
living communally yet unenclosed, such as beguines, beatas, Ursulines, women of Torre di
Specchi, and Carvajal’s home for English Catholic Women in London.
80. Letter of Mutio Vitelleschi, endorsed “What the General Says about the Virgins,”
February 1619, in response to a nonextant letter to the General from Richard Blount, S.J., St.
Omer Papers, Archives de l’État, Brussels, repr. in Chambers, Life, 2:14–15; Peters, Mary
Ward, pp. 246–71.

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view of the Institute, such critics argued, had been based on incomplete
information, a situation now rectified by the critics.
No matter the strength of earlier shows of support for Ward and the
value of the Institute’s endeavors, such praise eventually faded into
insignificance in comparison with fears over the long-term implications of
this form of women’s work and its perceived connections with the Jesuits.
Rumors that Jesuits were promoting a religiously active women’s organization gave ammunition to the Jesuits’ critics. Conversely, being linked with
the controversial Jesuit order increased English fears about the Institute.
For example, perhaps more influential than White’s effusive support of the
Institute and its possibility of bearing “infinite spiritual fruit” was other
phrasing that characterized the Institute and Ward’s role in it as definitively Jesuit. Despite Ward’s continued insistence that her Institute was
not under Jesuit supervision but existed as a separate organization, White
referred to Ward as the “chief Superiour of the sacred beginning Society of
Jesus for Women” and the Institute and its Ladies as the “Institute of the
Society of Jesus,” the “sacred Mothers of this holy Society of Jesus.”81
Jesuit Superior General Claudio Aquaviva (1581–1615) expressed
concern as early as 1612 that secular priests rather than Jesuits ought to
work with the English Ladies. He presumably recognized the possibility of
confusion of roles and organizations and the danger of drawing additional
criticism to the order.82 In the early years, this was a mildly voiced uneasiness. Over a decade later, it would become official policy. Jesuits were
never united in support of the English Ladies, but those who had never
worked with Ward or the Ladies were more likely to oppose the Institute,
particularly by the 1620s. Following the rapid spread of the Institute into
new regions on the Continent, some Jesuits spoke in favor of suppressing
the Institute and others worked actively to achieve this goal.83 Some Jesuits
like Henry Silisdon, for example, undertook anonymous letter-writing
campaigns disparaging the Institute.84

81. Letter of Andrew White, in Chambers, Life, 2:53, 56–57.
82. Letter of Claudio Aquaviva to Jean Herron, August 25, 1612, Roman Archives of
the Society of Jesus, Gall-Belg, 1, I, p. 12.
83. Letter of Barbara Babthorpe, head of the Pressburg house of the Institute, to Elizabeth Keyes, Institute member in Rome, 1631, handed over to the Inquisition by Keyes;
Letter of Mary Wivell to Mary Poyntz, April 4, 1631, both discussed in Wetter, Under the
Shadow, pp. 91–92, 108–10.
84. It took six letters written by Vitelleschi over the course of a year to calm the controversy
caused by Silisden’s anonymous letter to the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria disparaging the Institute. Margaret Mary Littlehales, Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic (London, 1998), pp. 166–67.

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ON A MISSION

Over time, Jesuit leaders moved from a position of limited support for
the Institute to one that actively distanced the Society of Jesus from the
English Ladies. Superior General Mutio Vitelleschi (1615–45) was forced
to intervene again and again in disputes throughout Europe involving confusion between the Institute and the Society of Jesus. He ordered that
Jesuits show all kindness and courtesy to the virtuous English Ladies but
that they avoid any involvement in the Institute’s work. They were to have
no more to do with the English Ladies than with any other penitent or
woman in the Church. Any Jesuit found doing otherwise was to be
reported immediately to the Superior General of the order. Eventually
Propaganda Fide forbade the Society from assisting the Institute’s growth
in any way.85
English secular priests circulated memorials, letters, and testimonials
critical of the Institute as well. Many secular priests distrusted Jesuits, fearing their influence, and assumed the English Ladies would only strengthen
Jesuit sway over English Catholics. For example, Matthew Kellison, president of the English seminary at Douai from 1614 to 1642, believed the
English Ladies on the English Mission criticized the secular clergy to the
laypeople and encouraged Catholics to prefer Jesuits.86 In the “Memorial
of the Secular Clergy” to Rome, secular clerics led by the views of Archpriest Harrison maintained that Jesuits “assert themselves to be moderators, patrons and defenders of these women, whilst all other regulars,
priests and the laity themselves protest.”87 The procurator of the English
Clergy formally complained to Propaganda Fide in 1624 that the English
Ladies’ activities within England worked to the detriment of the English
Mission because of their “manner of living.”88
Once rumors began, they snowballed, and English clerics were not the
Institute’s only detractors. As Immolata Wetter has argued, Francesco
Ingoli, secretary to Propaganda Fide, harbored an intense distrust of the
Institute and spent years collecting accusations and evidence of English
Ladies’ wrongdoing, many of them unsubstantiated or misrepresented. In
his 1630 report, Parere, he concluded based upon this questionable evidence that there was sufficient proof of the English Ladies’ guilt and the
threat posed by the Institute to warrant judgment by the Roman Inquisi85. Letter of Mutio Vitelleschi in Chambers, Life, 2:14–15.
86. From Matthew Kellison’s accusations, Westminster Archives, in Orchard, Till God
Will, p. 49. See also “Memorial of the English Clergy” in Chambers, Life, 2:183–85.
87. “Memorial of the English Clergy” in Chambers,” Life, 2:186. See also 2:89–90.
88. Chambers, Life, 2:xix.

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461

tion. He advocated punitive measures against Ward and her companions.89
Many scholars contend that Ward and her English Ladies, unfamiliar with
the politics of the Roman Church and inadequately counseled, could not
or did not effectively argue their cause before the Holy See or before papal
representatives.90
In 1631, Pope Urban VIII suppressed the Institute in particularly vitriolic language, giving it “sharper censure” than was usual because of the
serious dangers posed to Christians by the women’s activities.91 Ward’s
Institute was to be “extinguished,” perpetually abolished, and “removed
entirely from the Church of God,” according to the bull of suppression.92
Most of its houses were closed and its members dispersed. The very success
of Ward and the Institute contributed to their eventual downfall. What
had begun apparently as a small-scale pious endeavor with the encouragement of bishops, clerics, Jesuits, and perhaps even the pope at the time of
the initial submission of the foundation for the Institute in 1616 had
grown by the 1620s into a large-scale, European-wide, and unapproved
organization that believed itself free from traditional ecclesiastical hierarchies. What had been laudable became feared.
Conclusion
As decisive as the bull of suppression was, it did not signal the end of
Ward’s Institute. One of Ward’s companions, Frances Bedingfeld, created
a new form of the Institute in England in the later seventeenth century. Its
leader, Mary Anne Babthorpe, submitted the Institute’s Rules to the
papacy in 1699, carefully concealing its connections to Ward’s former
organization. Pope Clement XI approved the new Institute in 1703. Religious climates continued to change, and the organization continues today
under the name of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (I.B.V.M.) and
now proudly claims Ward as its founder after centuries of enforced institutional forgetfulness.93 In 2003, the Roman branch of the I.B.V.M.
adopted the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, just as Ward had originally desired, and took the new name Congregatio Jesu, or Congregation
89. Wetter, Under the Shadow, pp. 59–61.
90. Wetter, Under the Shadow, pp. 33–58, 62, 73, 121–22, 191–93; Chambers, Life,
1:xi–xii; 2: xi–xvii.
91. Urban VIII, Pastoralis Romani Pontificis; full text in Wetter, Shadow, pp. 129–40,
213–18.
92. Ibid.
93. See Lux-Sterritt, “Mary Ward’s English Institute,” p. 94.

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ON A MISSION

of Jesus, in conformity with the directive she received in her 1611 vision to
“Take the Name of the Society.” The Irish branch adopted the Constitutions but not the new name in 2009, after Pope Benedict XVI declared
Ward “Venerable” in the first of the three steps toward canonization by the
Roman Catholic Church.
But the decades-long contribution of Ward and her companions to
the English Mission remains to be written into scholarship on the Mission.
The English Ladies participated in the Mission in different ways than the
male missionaries did, using different tactics, reaching a different demographic, and increasing the effectiveness of other groups—such as priests
and recusant laywomen—whose work on the Mission is already well recognized. By weaving their contributions into existing knowledge of the
Mission, we change the gendered and class profile of the Mission from the
traditional narrative. For more than twenty years, the English Ladies
worked alongside the well-known Jesuits, such as Roger Lee and John
Gerard, and in so doing changed the experience, character, and effectiveness of the English Mission. Ironically, their combined success on the
Mission and their growth throughout Continental Europe contributed to
their temporary downfall.

Ubiquitously Useful:
The Jesuit College of St. Francis Xavier,
New York City, 1847–1912
THOMAS J. SHELLEY*
For sixty-five years the College of St. Francis Xavier was one of the
largest and most important Jesuit colleges in the United States. It made
a much greater contribution to Catholic higher education in New York
City than St. John’s College (the future Fordham University), producing hundreds of clergy, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. The Jesuits
who ran the college also staffed a busy parish church; served as chaplains in many of the city’s hospitals, prisons, and asylums; and founded
the Catholic Club of the City of New York, the most important lay
Catholic social organization in New York City.
Keywords: Catholic higher education; Dealy, Patrick Francis, S.J.;
Larkin, John, S.J.; Society of Jesus

S

ir Richard Southern once characterized the ministry of the Augustinian
canons in medieval England as “ubiquitously useful” because of the
numerous ways in which they served people through their dense network of
small religious houses scattered throughout the country.1 One might make
a comparable claim on a much smaller geographical scale for the influence
of the Society of Jesus in late-nineteenth-century New York City. However,
in the case of the Jesuits, for a period of more than sixty years, the many
contributions that they made to the pastoral, educational, charitable, and
cultural needs of New York Catholics stemmed largely from one center:
their College of St. Francis Xavier in the heart of Manhattan.
The college dates from 1847. In the previous year a community of
exiled French Jesuits, who were struggling to administer a college in the
wilderness of Kentucky, accepted the invitation of Bishop John Hughes to
take charge of his faltering diocesan college of St. John, which was located

*Msgr. Shelley is professor emeritus in the Department of Theology at Fordham University, email: tjshelley@fordham.edu
1. R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (New York, 1970),
p. 248.

463

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UBIQUITOUSLY USEFUL

seven miles north of the city in the hamlet of Fordham. For a brief interlude thereafter, the objectives of both Hughes and the Society of Jesus
coincided. They both wanted a Jesuit college and church in New York
City, which at that time was coterminous with the island of Manhattan.
Hughes offered the Jesuits the Church of St. Andrew in the povertystricken Sixth Ward (the “Bloody Auld Sixth”) not far from the notorious
Five Points. Clément Boulanger, the Superior of the New York-Canada
Mission who had negotiated the acquisition of St. John’s College from
Hughes, prudently declined the bishop’s offer of St. Andrew’s Church.
However, Boulanger was eager to establish a Jesuit presence in New York
City, if he could do so on more favorable terms for the Society of Jesus.
Hughes was amenable to working out a compromise, and for this delicate
task Boulanger selected one of the most talented and resourceful members
of the local Jesuit community at Fordham: John Larkin (see figure 1).2
Fifty Cents and a New College and Church
A tall, commanding figure who weighed more than 300 pounds, the
English-born Larkin had a varied career before joining the Society of Jesus
in Kentucky in 1840. According to Larkin’s often-told tale, he left Fordham in July 1847 immediately after the close of the school year with 50
cents in his wallet. He claimed that he spent 25 cents for his railroad ticket
from Fordham to New York City, paid another 20 cents for a carriage to
transport his trunk to the residence of a friend, and was left with 5 cents in
his wallet to establish a Jesuit college and church in the largest city in the
United States.3
The 5 cents seem to have multiplied miraculously, since Larkin
quickly purchased a former Protestant church in downtown Manhattan for
$5000, renamed it the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, and opened a
“college” for 120 students in the basement of the church. Six months later,
on January 22, 1848, the church burned to the ground, forcing the Jesuits
to relocate their college to another church basement where the sympathetic
pastor was a former Jesuit. After five months of subterranean living the
Jesuits emerged from the basement in May 1848 and moved their college
again, this time to two rented houses where the parlors served as a rudimentary parish church.
2. Gilbert J. Garraghan, “Fordham’s Jesuit Beginnings,” Thought, 16 (1941), 17–39,
here 26. “An Historical Sketch of the Mission of New York and Canada,” Woodstock Letters
(hereafter WL), 4 (1875), here 135.
3. Thomas C. Hennessy, ed., Fordham: The Early Years (New York, 1998), pp. 83–86.

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

465

FIGURE 1. John Larkin, S.J. Image from “Necrology of Father John Larkin, S.J.,”
Historical Records and Studies, 1, pt. 1 (1899), 379–86, facing 384.

By this time Larkin had resigned as the president of the College of the
Holy Name of Jesus (with the permission of his superiors) so he could
travel to Rome, seeking to persuade Pope Pius IX to rescind his appointment as the bishop of Toronto. Despite his brief tenure, however, Larkin
was the key figure in giving the Society of Jesus its first permanent presence
in New York City. His principal obstacle was neither fire nor flood, nor
importunate creditors nor Nativist bigots, but rather the bishop of New
York who had asked the Jesuits to establish a college in the metropolis: the
formidable but erratic John Joseph Hughes (see figure 2).
When Larkin’s first church burned to the ground in January 1848,
Protestant bystanders were as sympathetic as the Catholics and vied with
them in trying to rescue the church furnishings.4 The same could not be
said of Bishop Hughes. Larkin was furious at his reaction to the fire. “Not
one solitary word of episcopal sympathy” came from him, Larkin noted.
When Larkin asked Hughes for permission to take up a collection to
replace the church and school, Hughes initially refused on the grounds that
4. Michael Nash, “Reminiscences of Father Michael Nash,” WL, 26 (1897), 267–82.

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UBIQUITOUSLY USEFUL

FIGURE 2. Bishop John Hughes of New York, c. November 1847. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction no. LC-DIG-pga-05258.

he did not allow collections in the diocese for “private purposes and petty
local interests.” However, Hughes met his match in Larkin who was not
intimidated by him. He asked Hughes point blank that, if the establishment
of a Catholic college in the heart of Manhattan was not a matter of public
interest, “pray, tell me what [do] you call a matter of public interest?”
Hughes made no reply. He relented and grudgingly allowed the Jesuits to
take up a collection. Larkin prudently insisted on getting Hughes’s permission in writing. When Hughes heard that Larkin was also seeking contributions from private donors, he ordered him to stop and “to explain a proceeding so much at variance with my judgment of ecclesiastical order.”5
Larkin’s jousting with Hughes was the first serious disagreement that
the Jesuits had with the bishop in New York and a harbinger of the more
serious difficulties that were to arise later. It confirmed Larkin in his sus5. New York, Archives of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus (hereafter
ANYPSJ), Larkin to Gockeln, May 8, 1848; Hughes to Larkin, n.d.

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

467

picions of the bishop’s character that he had first expressed to his superior,
Boulanger, eighteen months earlier in Kentucky. At the time Boulanger
had paid little attention to Larkin’s warnings. “He sees it now,” Larkin told
his good friend and fellow Jesuit, Frederick William Gockeln, “and suffers
greatly from it.”6
Hughes was a born autocrat. Jay Dolan said famously that Hughes
presided over his diocese like an Irish chieftain. Larkin came to the same
conclusion a century earlier, although he used a different metaphor to
express it. “‘La France, c’est moi,’ said Louis XIV. Here the c’est moi is everything,” Larkin told Gockeln. He believed that Hughes was jealous of the
popularity of the Society of Jesus in New York. “Until we came,” he told
Gockeln, “every eye turned to him; he was alone. The coadjutor [John
McCloskey] attracted considerable attention; he was made Bishop of
Albany. The Society attracts many; this too is inconsistent with centralization. I have to manage matters with some dexterity,” he explained, “for he
is a violent man and a stubborn one, and neither reason nor law have [sic]
any weight against his will.”7
Larkin was one of the few priests in New York with the gumption to
stand up to Hughes. When two Irish-born diocesan priests protested that
Hughes had violated their rights in canon law, he replied that he would
teach them County Monaghan canon law and send them back to the bogs
whence they came.8 Larkin reported that at the annual retreat for the
diocesan priests in 1849 Hughes told them that, if they wanted canon law,
they were welcome to go to Italy, Spain, or any other country where it
existed because in New York, he was the “lord and master.” It is little
wonder that Hughes was eager to be rid of Larkin. When Hughes heard
that Larkin had been selected as the new bishop of Toronto, he told Larkin
that he was bound in conscience to accept the appointment, a conclusion
that Larkin found self-serving and unconvincing.9

6. ANYPSJ, Larkin to Gockeln, January 2, 1849.
7. ANYPSJ, Larkin to Gockeln, May 8, 1848. Hughes’s first biographer (and former
secretary) said: “It needed a brave man to face him when he was displeased. His rebukes were
terrible. He had the power of expressing scorn to a greater degree than any other man I ever
saw.” John Hassard, Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes, D.D., First Archbishop of New York
(New York, 1866), pp. 324–25.
8. New York, Archives of the Archdiocese of New York (hereafter AANY), Burtsell
Diary, July 26, 1865, n.pag.
9. ANYPSJ, Larkin to Gockeln, March 6, 1849. Larkin also thought that Hughes was
trying to improve his strained relations with his priests by stirring up their jealousy of the
Jesuits.

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UBIQUITOUSLY USEFUL

FIGURE 3. Engraving of the College of St. Francis Xavier. Image from Manual of
the Corporation of the City of New York (New York, 1869), p. 271.

Larkin’s successor as the president of the College of the Holy Name
was John Ryan, S.J., whose first priority was to find a permanent home for
the church and school. In summer 1850 he purchased property on West
15th and 16th Streets between Fifth and Sixth Avenues (see figure 3)
where the Jesuits would eventually erect a huge baroque church and several
four-story college buildings. Ground was broken for the new college in the
beginning of July 1850, and on November 25 of that year the Jesuits and
their students moved into the still unfinished building.10
In the meantime, when the Jesuits asked Hughes for permission to
take up a collection throughout the diocese for their new college and
church, they received a curt refusal. At first, he denied permission on the
grounds that the college was not a diocesan institution and did not serve
the needs of the poor. He told them to operate the college on a self-sustaining basis as did the Religious of the Sacred Heart and the Sisters of
Charity at their girls’ academies. However, he left open the possibility that
he might allow a collection if the property and buildings were surrendered
to the diocese. Even if the Jesuits agreed to this condition, Hughes told
10. Nash, “Reminiscences,” pp. 281–82.

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

469

them ungraciously that he would prefer a collection for the Christian
Brothers because they “teach gratuitously the poor children of our communion.” Caught between a rock and a hard place, Ryan capitulated to
Hughes’s demand and handed over to him the deed to the college in the
agreement that he concluded with him on October 31, 1850, three months
after Hughes had been appointed the first archbishop of New York.11
Hughes was not finished with the Jesuits. He also told Ryan that he
wanted a new name for the church and college. According to Michael
Nash, a Jesuit scholastic who accompanied him on his visit to the archbishop, he said to Ryan,
Your old church was the Holy Name, that is, the Gesù. Now let me tell
you that I shall have no Gesù here. You have your Gesù in Rome outshining St. Peter’s. It must not be so here. You have many great and glorious saints of your society. Call the new church after one of these, St.
Francis Xavier, for instance. No Holy Name.12

When Larkin visited what was now the College of St. Francis Xavier
in its new quarters on West 15th Street after his return from Europe in
September 1851, he was disappointed at what he found. He noted without
comment that Ryan had deeded the buildings and property to Hughes,
something that he had steadfastly refused to do. “What a pitiful concern
this New York establishment is,” he told Gockeln, “but it is best to say
nothing about it.” The original plans called for a three-story brick building
on West 15th Street with two wings surrounding a central courtyard. Only
the central structure and the west wing were built. On a happier note
Larkin estimated that the enrollment had risen to about 170 students with
the result that the college authorities were already running out of space for
both the students and the faculty. In 1851, Ryan also secured the services
of the Christian Brothers and the Religious of the Sacred Heart for the
boys and girls in the parish school. That same year Charles de Luynes and
Charles Maldonado, priests from the Xavier community, went to Mexico
where they conducted a successful fund-raising drive for the college.13
11. ANYPSJ, Hughes to Boulanger, April 11, 1850; Christa R. Klein, “Evidence of the
Understanding between the most R. Archbishop of N. York and the Superior of the Jesuits,”
October 31, 1850, in “The Jesuits and Catholic Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century New York
City: A Study of St. John’s College and the College of St. Francis Xavier, 1846–1912” (PhD
diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1976), p. 72.
12. Nash, “Reminiscences,” p. 281.
13. ANYPSJ, Larkin to Gockeln, September 24, 1851; The College of St. Francis Xavier:
A Memorial and a Retrospect (New York, 1897), pp. 32–33; Edward I. Devitt, “History of the
Maryland-New York Province,” WL, 65 (1936), 7–32, 189–223, here 194.

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UBIQUITOUSLY USEFUL

New York’s Premier Jesuit College
“By 1865,” said Christa Klein, the preeminent historian of Jesuit education in nineteenth-century New York, “it was apparent that Xavier was
more truly the school of the metropolitan Catholic community than Fordham.” There are a number of reasons that explain why Xavier was able to
overshadow Fordham less than twenty years after its establishment.
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century Xavier was the larger
of the two schools. Accurate measurement of the number of college students before 1881 is difficult because, prior to that date, the Jesuits did not
regularly publish separate statistics for the college departments of their
schools. However, in 1875–76, Xavier had more than twice as many students (elementary school, high school, and college) as Fordham: 464 compared to 178. In 1900 Xavier had the largest total enrollment (639) of the
thirty Jesuit colleges in the United States and Canada, and the third-largest
number of college students (147). Only the College of the Holy Cross and
Boston College had more college students than Xavier. In 1896, Archbishop Francesco Satolli, the first apostolic delegate to the United States,
indicated that he would like to visit St. John’s College at Fordham but canceled his plans at the last minute. “Thank God,” said St. John’s president
Thomas J. Campbell. “I would have been ashamed of the small number of
students.” Not until 1905–06 did the number of college students at Fordham (109) temporarily exceed the number at Xavier (104).14
Perhaps the most important factor in the success of Xavier was the
modest cost. Unlike Fordham, Xavier was a day school with a tuition of
only $50 a year that was soon raised to $60, but even that figure compared
favorably with the cost of tuition, room, and board at Fordham, which was
originally $200 and rose to $330 by the end of the nineteenth century.
Fordham was primarily a boarding school that drew its student body from
a much wider area than Xavier. In 1862–63, 45.9 percent of the students
at Fordham came from the vicinity of New York City; in 1880–81, 43.6
percent; and in 1903–04, 72.3 percent. At Xavier, 80 percent of the students came from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey in 1862–63; a
whopping 96.4 percent in 1880–81; and 93.3 percent in 1903.15
14. Klein, “Jesuits and Catholic Boyhood,” pp. 81, 353, 354; WL, 29 (1900), 550; New
York, Fordham University Archives (hereafter FUA), Diary of Presidents, 1885–1906, October 17, 1896, n.pag. In the privately circulated Woodstock Letters references to the Jesuit college in New York City always mean Xavier, not St. John’s.
15. Archives of the College of St. Francis Xavier (hereafter ACSFX), Historia Domus,
1880–1881, n.pag.; Klein, “Jesuits and Catholic Boyhood,” pp. 79, 356, 361. In 1900, there

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

471

Like Xavier, Fordham also charged only $60 a year for day students
but failed to attract as many commuters as Xavier because of geography
and transportation. Although one old alumnus described the area around
West 15th Street as almost rustic in 1851, Xavier was located in the socalled “New City” between 14th Street and 42nd Street that grew rapidly
in the two decades before the Civil War. The school was a short distance
from the New York and Harlem Railroad on Fourth Avenue and within
walking distance of six north-south streetcar lines as well as numerous
crosstown streetcar lines. The construction of four elevated railway lines in
the late 1870s further expedited travel within Manhattan, and, after 1883,
cable cars on the Brooklyn Bridge provided direct access to downtown
Brooklyn and the numerous elevated railway lines in Brooklyn. There was
frequent ferry service across the Hudson from downtown Manhattan to
both Jersey City and Hoboken. By contrast, the only access to Fordham by
public transportation was the New York and Harlem Railroad until the
Third Avenue “El” reached Fordham in 1901.16
Klein suggested still another reason for the popularity of Xavier with
New York’s Catholic families that is more difficult to substantiate. She
believed that Xavier Americanized more rapidly than its sister school at
Fordham that was also the residence of the first two superiors of the New
York-Canada Mission, Clément Boulanger (1846–56) and Jean-Baptiste
Hus (1856–59), who were both French. However, her explanation is open
to question, since only three of the twenty-seven Jesuits at Fordham could
be identified as French in 1880.17
Another reason for the popularity of Xavier may be that, since it was
a day school, there was less emphasis at Xavier than at Fordham on the
French Jesuit penchant for surveillance and consequently less resentment
among the students. There were six to nine prefects at Fordham but only
one prefect at Xavier. The Jesuits themselves attributed the good behavior
of the students at Xavier to the fact that it was a day school and also to the
fact that most of the parents were Irish with a great reverence for priests,
an attitude that they inculcated in their children.18
were 170 boarders and seventy-six day students at Fordham. FUA, Diary of Presidents,
1885–1906, October 2, 1900, n.pag.
16. Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd ed. (New Haven
and New York, 2010), pp. 405–06, 1249–50.
17. Klein, “Jesuits and Catholic Boyhood,” p. 91; Catalogue of St. John’s College, 1880–81.
18. ACSFX, Litterae Annuae, Letter of 1862–1863, n.pag. Unlike Xavier, Fordham
hosted a substantial number of students from Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. In 1880–

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Although there was frequent rotation of the professors and administrators between Xavier and Fordham, each college developed its own distinctive ethos, and each faculty maintained a fiercely protective attitude
toward its own institution. In 1857, the Jesuits at Fordham complained
that Xavier had admitted a number of students who had left St. John’s College, and they feared that this would lead to further loss of students at
Fordham. The Jesuits at Xavier considered the complaints of their confreres seven miles to the north and rejected them. “The College of St. Francis Xavier is altogether independent of St. John’s,” they declared, and they
decided that they not only had the right to accept these students but also a
moral obligation to do so, since otherwise they might be forced to attend
public or private colleges. In 1866, Xavier displayed the same independent
streak when Fordham asked Xavier for a loan that Fordham promised to
repay on three months’ notice. The members of the board of consultors at
Xavier (all Jesuits) turned down the request because they doubted that St.
John’s could repay the loan on such short notice, and they wanted to save
their money to buy additional property for their own college.19
The Jesuits at Xavier were exaggerating when they boasted in 1857
that their school was completely independent of St. John’s College. There
was one major difference between the two institutions that kept Xavier
dependent on its older rival. St. John’s College possessed a charter from
New York State (obtained by Hughes before he sold the college to the
Jesuits) that enabled it to confer degrees. By 1854, Xavier had gradually
added the full four years of college courses to the curriculum, but it still
lacked a state charter so that the graduating seniors had to receive their
degrees from St. John’s College. Philosophy was taught in the senior year
of college at Xavier as well as at Fordham and in other Jesuit colleges, but
it was taught unofficially at Xavier because the Jesuit Superior General had
not given the faculty formal permission to teach philosophy. Without a
full-fledged philosophy component in the curriculum, the Jesuits at Xavier
saw little hope of obtaining a state charter for their school.20
Disaster struck Xavier in 1859 when Superior General Peter Jan Beckx
decided that philosophy in New York should be taught only at Fordham,
not at Xavier. When William Stack Murphy, the newly appointed Superior of the New York-Canada Mission, informed the Jesuits at Xavier of
81, they accounted for 19.9 percent of the enrollment. Klein, “Jesuits and Catholic Boyhood,”
pp. 356–59.
19. ACSFX, Acta Consultorum, February 7, 1857; May 30, 1866, n.pag.
20. Klein, “Jesuits and Catholic Boyhood,” pp. 134–36.

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

473

the Superior General’s decision, the consultors described it as “the death
blow of this college” and complained that Beckx had made his decision
without consulting any of the Jesuits in New York. The decision was a particularly cruel disappointment because it came at a time when the Jesuits at
Xavier were in the process of acquiring additional property in the hope that
in New York one day they could have “something like a university.”21
Murphy tried to soften the blow by telling the Jesuits at Xavier to
continue teaching philosophy surreptitiously while he appealed the Superior General’s decision. Fortunately for Xavier, Félix Sopranis, the Visitor
to the New York-Canada Mission, sided with Murphy and the Xavier
Jesuits. He obviously did not have the authority to countermand Beckx’s
decision, but he promised to do his best to convince Beckx to reverse it.
In the meantime, he told the Jesuits at Xavier to proceed slowly with their
plans to expand the school. “Do not build, do not buy, wait [for] the question about philosophy [to] be decided,” he advised them and gave permission for them to “draw [up] a plan of a large and magnificent college or
university.”22
Sopranis was as good as his word. He prevailed in Rome and persuaded Beckx to allow Xavier to continue teaching philosophy, which
assured its continuation as a college, not as a mere literary academy. A state
charter followed shortly thereafter on January 10, 1861, and for the first
time in June of that year Xavier issued its own degrees after relying on St.
John’s College for the previous five years. Xavier could finally boast that it
really was completely independent of St. John’s College.23
As for constructing a new home for Xavier that would be worthy of a
college or university, the Jesuits hired Patrick Keely, the well-known
church architect, to come up with suitable plans. He designed a structure
consisting of twin four-story buildings 120 feet long by 60 feet wide that
were connected by a one-story building 80 feet in length. If it had been
built as planned, the total frontage on 15th Street would have come to 200
feet. Ground was broken on August 13, 1861, only four months after the
outbreak of the Civil War. However, shortage of funds forced the Jesuits
to scale down their plans as they had been forced to do once before in 1850.
Only the eastern wing of the college was built at a cost of $45,000.24
21. ACSFX, Acta Consultorum, September 19, 1859, n.pag.
22. ACSFX, Acta Consultorum, April 15, 1860, n.pag.
23. College of St. Francis Xavier, pp. 208–10.
24. Ibid., p. 68.

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474

The erection of the massive, new baroque parish church on 16th Street
in 1878 (also designed by Keely, who was better known for his Gothic
churches) led to a flurry of reorganization and rebuilding of the college
facilities. By 1894, a large four-story grammar school and a new entrance
to the college were built on 15th Street west of the building erected in
1861. A Jesuit residence, library, and theater were constructed in another
new, large, four-story building east of the new church on 16th Street.
Progress came at a price. Even the semblance of a campus disappeared as
the Jesuits’ garden on 16th Street was expropriated to make space for the
new buildings.25
Xavier and the New York Catholic Community
One of the major innovators at Xavier was Father Samuel H. Frisbee,
a convert to the Catholic Church and a graduate of Yale, who became the
seventh president in 1880. Frisbee offered a scholarship to the classical
course to the brightest student in every parochial school in New York City,
not only to implement the Jesuit tradition of free education but also to raise
the academic standards at Xavier, which were already higher than those at
Fordham. At Xavier, the full course (elementary school, high school, and
college) was twelve years in length compared to ten years at Fordham. The
difference was that both the elementary and high school programs at
Xavier were four years in length instead of three. An admirer of Frisbee
said that his aim was to change nothing but to improve everything, which
was not quite accurate.26
In 1882, he eliminated the commercial course, which enrolled only 17
percent of the students in 1880. (At Fordham, 40 percent of the students
were enrolled in the commercial course.) The Xavier College catalog
defended the elimination of the commercial course on the same grounds
that Oxford dons once invoked to insist that they were preparing their students to run the British Empire by giving them a classical education. “The
details of business life can be learned only by practice,” the Xavier catalog
declared, “and these once mastered, superior training makes itself felt from
the outset.” At the same time Frisbee adapted the Jesuit ratio studiorum to
the needs of nineteenth-century American college education by modernizing the classical course with additional classes in science and math.
Although not all of Frisbee’s innovations were retained after he stepped

25. Ibid., pp. 128–29.
26. Ibid., p. 144.

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

475

down as president in 1885, the 1880s and 1890s were widely regarded as
the golden age of Xavier.27
The Jesuits at the College of St. Francis Xavier successfully accommodated their educational apostolate to the needs of the local Catholic community by placing a classical college education within reach of lower
middle-class Catholics who did not have the financial resources to send
their sons to Fordham. In 1896, Charles H. Colton, an alumnus who later
became the bishop of Buffalo, described most of the student body as the
sons of “the progressive middle class and the industrious and honest working people of the noblest and loftiest principles, who wished to give their
sons a liberal education to make their lot and station better than their
own.” During its first fifty years Xavier graduated 649 students, many of
whom became priests, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen and constituted
the Catholic elite of New York City. The overwhelming majority were
Irish Americans with a sprinkling of German, English, Scottish, French,
and Dutch names. Judging by the surnames, it would appear that there was
only one student who was Italian and one who was Hispanic.28
By far, the most popular vocational choice of the graduates was the
clergy, who numbered 204, or 31.43 percent of the graduates in 1897. If
one adds the forty-three seminarians, the percentage rises to 38.06 percent
of the graduates. Of that number, nineteen of the priests and twenty of the
seminarians were Jesuits; there was one Benedictine monk and four Paulist
priests. The rest were diocesan priests and seminarians, with the great
majority belonging to the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of
Brooklyn. The law was the second most popular choice of the graduates:
14.33 percent, with ninety-three lawyers and law students. Medicine was a
distant third: 6.32 percent, with forty-one physicians and medical students.
There were also eighteen professors, school principals, or teachers; fourteen merchants, six journalists, five contractors, two bankers, and two brokers. The profession of many of the alumni is unknown, although one
proudly described himself as U.S. weighman at the New York Custom
House. St. Francis Xavier was definitely a local college. Not only were
most of the graduates natives of New York City, but only twelve of the 220

27. College of St. Francis Xavier, pp. 143–44, 148, 154; Klein, “Jesuits and Catholic
Boyhood,” pp. 140, 153, 175.
28. Charles H. Colton, “Reminiscences: A Quarter of a Century Ago,” The Xavier,
April 1896, in David E. Nolan, “The Catholic Club of New York City: A Study of Lay
Involvement in New York City, 1888–1960” (MA thesis, St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie,
1995), p. 2. College of St. Francis Xavier, pp. 240–58.

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UBIQUITOUSLY USEFUL

lay alumni whose addresses are known resided outside the New York metropolitan area in 1897.29
Among the Jesuit alumni William O’Brien Pardow had a celebrated
career as a preacher and president of Xavier; and Campbell served as acting
president of Xavier, president of Fordham on two separate occasions, and
Provincial of the Maryland-New York province from 1888 to 1893. John
Wynne was a key member of the editorial board of the Catholic Encyclopedia,
the founding editor of America, and a creative gadfly who was a thorn in the
side of numerous Jesuit Superiors. One of the Paulists, John J. Burke, edited
the Catholic World, cofounded the Catholic Press Association, organized the
Chaplains’ Aid Association during World War I, gave the U.S. hierarchy
its first national organization when he founded the National Catholic War
Council in 1917, and served as the first general secretary of the National
Catholic Welfare Conference from 1919 to his death in 1936.
In addition to Colton, five other graduates of Xavier became bishops:
Winand Wigger, bishop of Newark (1881–1901); Charles E. McDonnell,
bishop of Brooklyn (1892–1921); John A. McFaul, bishop of Trenton
(1894–1917); Michael J. Hoban, coadjutor of Scranton (1896–99) and
bishop of Scranton (1899–1926); and Thomas F. Cusack, auxiliary of New
York (1904–15) and bishop of Albany (1915–18).
John E. Burke was the first pastor of St. Benedict the Moor Church
on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, the first black Catholic parish
north of the Mason-Dixon line, and in 1907 he was named the executive
director of the Catholic Board for Mission Work among the Colored
People. His successor at St. Benedict the Moor, Thomas O’Keefe, was also
an alumnus of Xavier. Francis P. Duffy, who earned a M.A. degree at
Xavier, was a founder of the New York Review in 1905 while serving as a
professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, and became a national
hero as a chaplain in World War I.
One of the most distinguished lay alumni of Xavier was Charles
George Herbermann, who taught the classics at Xavier from 1860 to 1869
and at the City College of New York from 1869 to 1915. Together with
John Gilmary Shea, he was instrumental in founding the United States
Catholic Historical Society in 1884 and served as president from 1898
until his death in 1916. Herbermann was also the editor-in-chief of the
29. College of St. Francis Xavier, pp. 240–58.

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477

FIGURE 4. Morgan J. O’Brien, New York State Supreme Court justice, Xavier
alumnus, and prominent Catholic layman. Image from The Brown Book: A Biographical Record of Public Officials of The City of New York for 1898–9 (New York,
1899), p. 259.

Catholic Encyclopedia, was made a papal knight by Pope Pius X, and was
awarded the Laetare medal by the University of Notre Dame in 1913. A
close associate of Herbermann was another Xavier alumnus, Thomas J.
Meehan, who was the managing editor of the Irish-American from 1874 to
1904, assistant managing editor and prolific contributor to the Catholic
Encyclopedia, and editor of the publications of the United States Catholic
Historical Society from 1916 until his death in 1942.
The most respected Catholic jurist in New York City in the late-nineteenth century was Morgan J. O’Brien, who received his BA degree from
St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1872 and his MA from Xavier a year later
(see figure 4). Elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 1887, he
was appointed to the appellate division in 1896 and named presiding judge
in 1905. Throughout his life O’Brien was an exemplary Catholic layman,
chair of innumerable committees, and a speaker at virtually every major
Catholic event in New York for fifty years.

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UBIQUITOUSLY USEFUL

In addition to the graduates who earned BA and MA degrees at
Xavier, several hundred other students were enrolled in the commercial
or business course, which did not require Greek or Latin and did not lead
to a degree. Although the commercial course was discontinued in 1882,
it produced two of the wealthiest Catholics in New York City: John
Crimmins and Hugh Grant. Crimmins was a contractor and one of a
handful of Catholics identified as a millionaire by the New York Tribune
in 1892. Grant was a successful real-estate speculator and Tammany Hall
stalwart. In 1888, he was the second Catholic to be elected mayor of New
York City.30
Both men were devout and dedicated Catholics. Crimmins, the father
of fourteen, was a close friend of Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan
and was a generous supporter of Catholic charities. More than anyone
except the archbishop himself, Crimmins was responsible for the construction and financing of the new diocesan seminary at Dunwoodie in 1896 at
a cost of $1 million. Grant and his wife were generous donors to Jesuit
causes, and after his death, she endowed Regis High School in Manhattan,
the only tuition-free Jesuit high school in the United States.31
Pastoral Ministry
The Church of St. Francis Xavier was the center of a large urban
parish with a crowded schedule of Masses, devotional services, and sacramental ministrations (especially confessions, which drew penitents from all
over the city). Between August 1862 and 1863 the priests at St. Francis
Xavier baptized 142 adults and 573 infants, prepared 243 youngsters for
First Communion, distributed Holy Communion to 67,760 people, witnessed 146 marriages, gave the last rites to 300 individuals, conducted
fourteen parish missions in their own church and elsewhere, preached 701
sermons, and made 2400 sick calls and 160 visits to prisons. They heard
108,728 confessions in the parish church where it was not uncommon to
have fifteen or twenty priests hearing confessions on special occasions such
as parish missions. In addition, there were 3400 members in the parish
temperance society, and 1600 new members joined the scapular society
30. “American Millionaires,” Tribune Monthly, June 1892, in New Light on the History of
Great American Fortunes: American Millionaires of 1892 and 1902, ed. Sidney Ratner (New
York, 1953), pp. 57–85. On the Grant family, see Anthony D. Andreassi, Teach Me to Be Generous: The First Century of Regis High School in New York City (New York, 2014), pp. 15–37.
31. On the role of Crimmins in the construction of Dunwoodie, see Thomas J. Shelley,
Dunwoodie: The History of St. Joseph’s Seminary (Westminster, MD, 1993), pp. 53–59, 79–81.

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479

that year. As for the distribution of alms, they simply listed it as multa quotidie (“many daily”).32
As early as 1852, the Jesuits at Xavier expanded their pastoral ministry
to include the Tombs, the lugubrious main prison in New York City,
which was within walking distance of the church. Once or twice a month
they also traveled by train to Sing Sing, the large state prison located some
twenty miles north of the city. In addition, they served as chaplains at St.
Vincent’s Hospital and New York Hospital, two of the largest hospitals in
New York City. A major expansion of this pastoral ministry occurred when
Hughes asked the Jesuits to replace the Redemptorist Fathers as chaplains
in the public institutions on three islands in the East River: Blackwell’s
Island, Ward’s Island, and Randall’s Island. Later the Jesuits also assumed
responsibility for the institutions on Hart’s Island in Long Island Sound.
There were a total of fourteen institutions on the four islands, which
included an orphanage, reformatory, two mental institutions, several prisons and workhouses, and several hospitals (including a smallpox hospital at
the southern tip of Blackwell’s Island). The 9100 inmates and patients
included some of the most wretched and destitute residents of the city.33
The first Jesuit who volunteered for the work as a chaplain on the
islands, John Jaffré, died shortly thereafter, but two other priests replaced
him in May 1861. The following year the Jesuit chaplains baptized 253
adults and 279 infants, prepared 108 people for confirmation, gave the last
rites to 1245 people, and administered Communion to 9000 people. Most
of the Catholics were Irish. The Jesuits found it relatively easy to persuade
even those who were not regular churchgoers to return to the practice of
their faith because of the same phenomenon that they had noticed among
the Irish parents of the students at Xavier: their respect and reverence for
the priesthood. During the first six years of the Jesuit ministry on the
islands, in addition to Jaffré, three other priests also died in the line of duty:
Philip Chopin, George Laufhuber, and Joseph Pavarelli.34
Despite the loss of these victimae caritatis, as they characterized them, or
perhaps because of their deaths, the Jesuit mission on the islands flourished.
Initially a major obstacle had been the hostility of the Protestant officials in
charge of the institutions, but the dedication and fortitude of the Jesuit chap32. ACSFX, Litterae Annuae, Letter of 1862–1863, n.pag.
33. Weiss, “Jesuit Missions,” p. 135.
34. ACSFX, Litterae Annuae, Letter of 1862–1863, n.pag.; ACSFX, Liber continens
nomina defunctorum, n.pag.

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lains toned down at least the open manifestations of this hostility and led to
a grudging respect for their efforts. Nonetheless, one Jesuit chaplain observed
that even the best-intentioned Protestant doctors and nurses had only the
vaguest understanding of the sacramental ministry of Catholic priests.35
By the 1880s, there were five Jesuit chaplains assigned full time to this
difficult and dangerous ministry. In addition to those who “have died from
infectious diseases or excessive labor,” Thomas J. Campbell, the provincial,
told Msgr. Thomas Preston, vicar general of the Archdiocese of New
York, that others “have been ruined in health by innutritious food or the
insanitary conditions in which they have been forced to live.” One Jesuit
chaplain on Blackwell’s Island said that the first requisite for this ministry
was good health. “The life is a very laborious and exhausting one,” he
explained. “Once on duty means always on duty,” he said. He began his day
with private prayer at 5 a.m. and made the last round of the hospital wards
at 7 p.m. In 1910–11, the young priest John LaFarge spent eight months
as a chaplain living in the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island where he
administered the last rites to some 3000 people. “[The seminaries at] Innsbruck and Woodstock were schools of knowledge,” he later wrote, “but
Blackwell’s Island was a school of life and death.”36
In 1866, Archbishop John McCloskey gave the Jesuits the Church of
St. Lawrence O’Toole on East 84th Street to assist their ministry on the
islands. “No doubt,” the Jesuits at Xavier recorded presciently, “it will soon
be one of the leading city parishes, but it pleases us most of all because it
is midway between our two colleges and close to the three islands that are
the most fruitful fields of our apostolic works.”37 For the Jesuits,
McCloskey was a welcome change from Hughes, his predecessor. Immediately after he became the archbishop of New York in 1864, McCloskey
returned to the Jesuits the deeds to the Church and College of St. Francis
Xavier that Hughes had forced them to surrender to the archdiocese.38 In
35. ACSFX, Historia Domus, 1863–1864, n.pag.; ACSFX, Charles Charaux to Father
Rector [Henry Hudon], February 26, 1876. The author is grateful to the late Henry Bertels,
S.J., for bringing this letter to his attention.
36. AANY, Campbell to Preston, n.d. J. P. M. Schleuter, “Requisites for Missionary
Work on Blackwell’s Island,” WL, 26 (1897), 382–86. John LaFarge, The Manner Is Ordinary
(New York, 1954), pp. 151–52.
37. ACSFX, Historia Domus, March 1866, n.pag. Today the Church of St. Lawrence
O’Toole is the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, located on Park Avenue, in one of the most
fashionable residential areas of New York City.
38. Archivum Romanun Societatis Jesu (hereafter ARSJ), Joseph Loyzance to Beckx,
December 9, 1864. ACSFX, Historia Domus, December 12, 1864, n.pag.

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1876, when the Jesuits at St. Francis Xavier were thinking of building a
new church, Charles Charaux, the last Superior of the New York-Canada
Mission, urged them to do so immediately while McCloskey was still the
archbishop. “We can hardly expect that his successor, whoever he be,” he
explained, “will be as kind and favorable to our Soc[iety] as he has always
shown himself to be.”39 Despite the gift of the church of St. Lawrence
O’Toole, the Jesuit community at Xavier continued to be responsible for
the ministry to the islands, perhaps because after 1879, Xavier was also the
headquarters of the newly established Maryland-New York province.
Xavier Union and the Catholic Club
In 1863 Xavier president Joseph Loyzance formed an alumni sodality,
a standard practice in Jesuit schools. In 1870 the moderator of the sodality,
Patrick Francis Dealy, persuaded his superiors at Xavier to give the sodality
a permanent home in one of the buildings on West 15th Street. He then
proposed to expand the scope of the sodality to include both social and cultural activities.40 He encountered considerable resistance from members of
the sodality who feared that this expansion would alter the spiritual character of the sodality. However, an enthusiastic minority supported Dealy’s
proposal. With his encouragement in March 1871, they organized the
Xavier Union and obtained a charter of incorporation from the state legislature on May 12, 1873.
“The Xavier Union has been formed [from the Sodality,]” the founders
of the new society declared in the charter, to promote objectives “not strictly
within the scope of a religious body.” Specifically they announced their
intention of establishing a reference and circulating library with the best
reviews and journals; sponsoring literary, religious, historical and scientific
lectures; and providing musical entertainments and social activities.41
Dealy was the guiding force behind the Xavier Union even after he left
to become president of St. John’s College, Fordham, but he deliberately
remained in the background, allowing the lay officers to assume responsi39. ACSFX, Charaux to Hudon, February 26, 1876.
40. The Irish-born Dealy was the first Fordham student to become a Jesuit. Thomas
C. Hennessy, How The Jesuits Settled in New York: A Documentary Account (New York, 2003),
pp. 178–79.
41. New York, Archives of the American Irish Historical Society (hereafter AAIHS),
Register of the Xavier Union, Charter of the Xavier Union, May 12, 1873, pp. 1–4; Register
of the Xavier Union, Preamble to the Constitution and By-Laws, May 12, 1873, pp. 7–8.

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bility for the direction of the society. Active membership in the Xavier
Union was originally limited to full members of the Xavier Alumni Sodality. Anyone who ceased to be a full member of the sodality was immediately excluded from membership in the Xavier Union. However, there was
a provision for other “Catholic gentlemen” to be admitted to associate
membership without the right to hold office or vote for officers.
The Xavier Union began with sixty-five members in 1871—only a
small proportion of the 300 members of the Xavier Alumni Sodality, which
continued to exist as a separate organization. In 1882, the bylaws were
changed to allow associate members to become active members simply by
expressing their desire to do so. It was also decided to admit to full membership not only alumni of Xavier but also all Catholic laymen who are of
“undoubted fidelity to the church and devotion to the Holy Father.”42
Six years later, in 1888, as the ties with Xavier grew more tenuous, the
name of the society was changed from the Xavier Union to the Catholic
Club of the City of New York. Another tie with Xavier was broken that
year when Dealy reluctantly resigned as the moderator of the Xavier Union
upon his reassignment to Boston. For some reason, the Jesuits declined the
request from the club to replace him as moderator with another Jesuit. The
officers of the club appealed to Archbishop Corrigan, who replaced Dealy
with Vicar General Arthur Donnelly and later with Charles McDonnell—
Corrigan’s secretary, Xavier alumnus, and the future bishop of Brooklyn.
At his first appearance before the Catholic Club, Donnelly told the members, “Next to the priesthood, I consider such an organization as this the
backbone of the Catholic Church.”43
In the 1890s, membership in the Catholic Club became both more
inclusive and more exclusive. The numbers swelled to almost 1000, but the
new members were increasingly drawn from the ranks of upper middleclass Catholics. In the early days, grocers, shopkeepers, and even one ship
chandler rubbed shoulders with lawyers and physicians. In 1892, the
42. AAIHS, Register of the Xavier Union, Amendment to the Constitution, June 2,
1882, pp.45–46; Amendment to Constitution, April 4, 1884, p. 49; Bulletin of the Catholic
Club of the City of New York, January 1888, n.pag. For the opposition to the formation of the
Xavier Union, see Nolan, “Catholic Club,” pp. 3–5.
43. AAIHS, Bulletin of the Catholic Club of the City of New York, January, February,
March 1888, n.pag. The most recent study of the Catholic Club is Patrick J. Hayes, “Catholic
Action in the Archdiocese of New York: The Case of the Catholic Club of New York City,”
in Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action Before and After Vatican II, ed. Jeremy Bonner,
Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly (New York, 2014), pp. 21–45.

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

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bylaws were amended to limit admission to those who were “members of
liberal professions or graduates of colleges or who have passed at least two
years at a collegiate institution.” There were no more ship chandlers in the
Catholic Club. That same year the club moved to a new five-story clubhouse at 120 Central Park South overlooking Central Park. It became the
favorite site for hosting elegant receptions for visiting Catholic dignitaries
like Satolli. Expenses did not seem to be a problem. In 1893, the budget
was $85,000, and expenditures for cigars ($4058.28) exceeded the combined gas and electric bill ($3289.97).44
The Catholic Club proved its value to the Catholic community during
the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1894 when an attempt
was made to eliminate government aid to “sectarian” child-caring institutions. Working closely with Corrigan, the Committee on Catholic Interests of the Catholic Club, chaired by Judge O’Brien, led a successful effort
to defeat this proposal and preserve government assistance to 20,000
youngsters in fifty-eight Catholic institutions.
In 1916 Patrick J. Hayes, auxiliary bishop of New York, called the
Catholic Club “the greatest achievement of the Catholic laity in this city.”
The club reached the peak of its influence in the 1920s when membership
grew to 1600, and there was a long list of applications. Once again the club’s
Committee on Catholic Interests demonstrated its value by playing an
active role in combating the anti-Catholic xenophobia of that decade. In
1925, William D. Guthrie, a former professor of constitutional law at
Columbia University and a member of the club, successfully challenged the
Oregon School Law of 1922 (which would have effectively outlawed all private and parochial schools in the state). In a unanimous decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court sided with Guthrie and declared the law unconstitutional.45
The Catholic Club never recovered from the depression despite a generous donation and loan from the usually parsimonious Cardinal Hayes and
gradually faded into oblivion during the 1960s. However, for fifty years,
first as the Xavier Union and later as the Catholic Club, it was the most
prominent lay Catholic organization in New York and gave the lay Catholic

44. AAIHS, Register of the Xavier Union, Amendment to the Constitution, November 3, 1892, p. 61; Annual Reports of the Officers and Standing Committees, June 16, 1893,
pp. 9, 12. There were 977 members of the Catholic Club in 1893. AAIHS, Annual Reports
of the Officers and Standing Committees, Report of the Committee on Admissions, June 16,
1893, p. 12.
45. Nolan, “Catholic Club,” pp. 19, 40.

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elite a focal point where they could strengthen their bonds with one another
and coordinate their services to the Catholic Church in New York City. It
remained a legacy to the Catholics of New York from the College of St.
Francis Xavier even after the college itself had disappeared from the scene.
Finis
In 1900, the College of St. Francis Xavier was the third largest Jesuit
college in the United States and Canada. Twelve years later, it graduated
its last class, and the college department was transferred to Fordham.
Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, the college enrollment at Xavier remained approximately the same as at St. John’s College,
Fordham. Only in 1910 and 1911 was there a dramatic shift in numbers,
with twice as many students at Fordham as at Xavier (174 to seventy-four
in 1910, 165 to seventy-six in 1911). However, the consolidation of the
two colleges had been under consideration for some time.
The Xavier house history explains that “the reason for the change was
greater efficiency and progress since there was an urgent necessity in
broadening the scope and methodology on the college level and introducing more and diverse courses into the curriculum.”46 Academically it made
sense for the Jesuits to concentrate their limited financial and personnel
resources in one college. (After the opening of Brooklyn College in 1908,
there were four Jesuit colleges within twenty miles of one another in the
New York metropolitan area: St. John’s, Xavier, Brooklyn College, and St.
Peter’s College in Jersey City.) There was little room for expansion at
Xavier but plenty of space on the Fordham campus.
The shifting demographics of the Catholic population also hurt Xavier
as Catholics left lower Manhattan for the outer boroughs. Access to mass
transit—with its sacrosanct 5-cent fare, which had once worked in favor of
Xavier—now benefited St. John’s, as the Third Avenue “El” to Fordham
was completed in 1901 and the subway lines were extended to the Bronx
in the following decade. Another factor in the decision to close the College
of St. Francis Xavier may have been competition with another day school,
Cathedral College, a six-year minor seminary (high school and junior college) that was opened by the Archdiocese of New York in 1903 and
enrolled 327 students in 1912.47
46. ACSFX, Historia Domus, 1912, n.pag.
47. Archbishop John Farley heard rumors that the Jesuits at Xavier had criticized him
for opening Cathedral College. FUA, Diary of Presidents, 1885–1906, John J. Collins, S.J.,
June 26, 1905, n.pag.

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485

Another factor in the decision to discontinue the college at Xavier was
the changing nature of the neighborhood, which was becoming more and
more commercial and industrial. “In several years Xavier will be surrounded by business houses and not suitable for a good college site,”
Provincial, Joseph Hanselmann told Superior General Franz Xavier Wernz
in 1906. New York University had already moved its undergraduate
department from Washington Square to University Heights in the Bronx
in 1894, and Columbia University moved from midtown Manhattan to
Morningside Heights in 1897. “If we move north,” said the president of
Xavier in 1907, “we will be at the gates of Fordham and amalgamation
would be the only sensible solution.”48
At a meeting at Fordham on January 18, 1912, with the approval and
encouragement of Hanselmann, the New York Jesuits decided to retain
only one college in the New York area: St. John’s, Fordham, which
Hanselmann envisioned as “the great university center.” Only the high
school departments were to be retained at Xavier, Brooklyn College, and
St. Peter’s College.49
The marriage between Xavier and Fordham, which took effect in September 1912, was not a happy one on the part of either partner. Campbell,
who had served as president of both institutions, said candidly in print that
the scheme was “impossible” to begin with and the result was “chaos.” By
March 1913, the boards of trustees at Fordham and Xavier had voted to
rescind the agreement signed by representatives of their two colleges on
September 10, 1912. Unfortunately, as the Jesuit historian Francis X.
Curran noted fifty years ago, the text of that agreement has been ripped out
of the minutes of the board of trustees meetings of Xavier. As a result, one
can only surmise the reasons for the bitter recriminations that followed the
merger. In any event, the merger remained a fait accompli.50
The academic year at St. John’s began in September 1912 with 290
students, a record enrollment that reflected the transfer to Fordham of
many of the students from Xavier. As graduation day approached in 1913,
48. ARSJ, Hanselmann to Wernz, October 4, 1906; David Hearn to Wernz, May 15,
1907.
49. ARSJ, Hanselmann to Wernz, September 8, 1911.
50. FUA, Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Trustees, March 27, 1913. Campbell, “Fordham University,” WL, 45 (1916), 369–70. One of the Jesuits at Xavier blamed the
confusion on the failure of the Jesuits at Fordham “to meet the issue honestly and straightforwardly.” ACSFX, Acta Consultorum, January 17, 1913, n.pag.

486

UBIQUITOUSLY USEFUL

rumors circulated that the graduates would receive their diplomas from the
College of St. Francis Xavier, which led to protests from college seniors at
Fordham and alumni. The trustees of Xavier insisted that the graduates
should have the option of receiving their degrees in the name of either
institution. Other disputes revolved around money, specifically whether
the burses and legacies that had been donated to Xavier should be transferred to St. John’s College and whether Xavier should continue to pay the
tuition of its former scholarship students who were now at Fordham.51
A further complication arose over the future of Brooklyn College,
which had been allowed to remain open but failed to qualify for a permanent charter from the state and consequently was unable to confer degrees.
The new Jesuit Superior General, Wlodimir Ledochowski, ordered it
merged with the now defunct College of St. Francis Xavier. As a result,
New York’s once premier Jesuit college experienced a brief afterlife for nine
years as Brooklyn College–College of St. Francis Xavier and conferred
degrees on the graduates in the name of the College of St. Francis Xavier.52
Sequel
The College of St Francis Xavier was not the oldest, the wealthiest, nor
the most prestigious Jesuit college in the United States. It can stake a
modest claim to have been briefly one of the largest Jesuit colleges in latenineteenth-century America, but perhaps its real significance is best captured by the phrase that Southern used to describe the role of the Augustinian canons in medieval England. Like the Augustinian canons, the Jesuit
Fathers at Xavier were “ubiquitously useful” to a broad spectrum of the
Catholic community of New York City. They conducted a classical college
for middle-class Catholics of limited financial means that produced an
impressive number of prominent alumni for the church and society at large.
At the same time, they maintained a busy parish church that drew worshipers and penitents from all across the city; served as chaplains to the most
disadvantaged members of the Catholic population in the city’s hospitals,
prisons, and asylums; and inspired the creation of the most important and
51. FUA, Acta Consultorum, October 1, 14, 1912; November 18, 25, 1912; December
18, 1912; February 17, 1913; March 10, 1913; April 17, 1913, n. pag.; ACSFX, Minutes of
the Board of Trustees, September 13, 1912; March 31, 1913.
52. FUA, Acta Consultorum, April 7, 1913, n.pag.; Joseph H. Rockwell, S.J., to
Alumni of St. Francis Xavier College, June 1913, WL, 42 (1913), 401–02. ARSJ, John H.
O’Rourke, S.J., to Ledochowski, August 26, 1918. St. Peter’s College was closed in 1918 and
was reopened in 1930. Brooklyn College was closed permanently in 1921.

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

487

exclusive lay Catholic organization in late-nineteenth-century New York
City. By any standard, that may be considered ubiquitous usefulness.
“And one poor man has to be in charge of it all,” complained David
Hearn, the president of the College of St. Francis Xavier, in 1907. “Really
it is rather too much,” he told Superior General Wernz, “it is almost
beyond human power.” One may sympathize with Hearn, but Larkin’s
mythical 50 cents paid handsome dividends for New York Catholics
during the course of the following sixty-five years.53
Although the College of St. Francis Xavier closed its doors in 1912,
the high school department has continued to flourish at the same location
for more than a century under the legal title of “The College of St. Francis
Xavier and Xavier High School.” In 1929, it was one of the largest high
schools in New York state with 1120 students, and it occupied a distinctive
niche in Catholic secondary education in New York City from 1895 to
1971 as a military academy. The dark blue uniforms of the Xavier cadets
(as the students were called) were a familiar sight on the New York City
subways and streetcars, and the precision marching of the Xavier cadets
was one of the highlights of the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The tradition is preserved today through the Junior ROTC unit at Xavier and its
participation in several major New York City parades.54

53. ARSJ, Hearn to Wernz, May 15, 1907.
54. Anthony D. Andreassi, “On West Sixteenth,” Company , Winter 1998–99, 21–24.

Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb and the
Rescue of Jews, 1941–45
ESTHER GITMAN*
During World War II, Blessed Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac, archbishop
and later cardinal of Zagreb (1898–1960), took action to rescue several hundred individuals associated with Croatia’s Jewish community,
more than 1000 Jews in mixed marriages, and a number of others in
danger from the Nazis. Using archival evidence, survivor testimonies,
and other documentation, the author discusses how Stepinac reacted to
the policies of the Nazi- and fascist-sponsored Ustaše regime and used
his position in the Church to promote the rescue of Jews, supported by
his moral convictions and Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone, Benedictine
abbot and Pope Pius XII’s apostolic visitor to Croatia.
Keywords: Croatian Church; the Holocaust; Jewish-Catholic relations; Stepinac, Alojzije, Cardinal

F

acing a grim situation in which three-fourths of Croatia’s Jews were
being killed by Nazi occupiers and their associates, members of the
Ustaše regime led by Ante Pavelić, Archbishop Alojzije (Aloysius)
Stepinac of Zagreb intervened both directly and indirectly to rescue several
hundred individuals; these included Jews who had converted to Catholicism and others who identified themselves with the Jewish community (see
figure 1). In addition, he rescued approximately 1000 converted Jews1—

*Dr. Gitman is an independent scholar living in New York; email: estherg2039@
gmail.com. Unless otherwise noted, English translations in this article have been provided by
the author. She wishes to thank Patrick Henry, Nelson H. Minnich, and Elizabeth Foxwell
for their editorial assistance.
1. Raul Hilberg pointed out that the explanations of who was a Jew and the associated
laws were fully articulated by Hitler; see Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New
York, 1985). The final version of the racial categories was published on November 14, 1935.
It contained three categories of Jews: full Jews (three Jewish grandparents), half-Jew (Jewish
Mischling first degree), and quarter-Jew (Jewish Mischling second degree), each with its own
regulations. According to Hitler, when someone was more than 50 percent Jewish, that individual was beyond the point of saving and was evil (uebel). The Nazis resorted to religious
criteria to define these racial categories, which were ultimately determined by birth,
baptismal, marriage, and death certificates. Marriages between a Jew and an Aryan that
occurred before 1935 were called “privileged mixed marriages” and were afforded some
protection for the Jewish spouse.

488

ESTHER GITMAN

489

those involved in mixed marriages—and their offspring who, according to
the Nazi Nuremberg Laws and racial policies, were Jews because they had
three Jewish grandparents. This was the case even though several highranking officials in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država
Hrvatska, or NDH) such as Pavelić and Slavko Kvaternik (head of the
Croatian armed forces) had Jewish wives.2 Clearly, ideology among the
NDH’s leaders was tempered by greed, pragmatism, and outright
hypocrisy.
Stepinac also saved a sizable number of orphans, although an exact
figure is unknown.3 The losses of Jews in the NDH were considerably
lower than in most other parts of the country. According to Jozo Tomasevich, there were several reasons for this situation: the variety of policies of
the Ustaše regime toward Jews (discussed later); the division of the state
into German- and Italian-controlled areas with Jews protected in the
latter; the involvement of the Catholic Church, the International Red
Cross, and various international Jewish organizations on behalf of Jews in
Croatian territory; and the fact that Jews in the NDH had more time and
opportunity to flee to the Italian-controlled areas or join the Partisans than
did Jews in other parts of Yugoslavia.4
Coming to power with the support of Nazi Germany and fascist Italian sponsors on April 10, 1941, the Ustaše (literally “insurgents”) proclaimed the “Independent State of Croatia,” which composed the territories of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina of the former Kingdom of
Yugoslavia. When the NDH was proclaimed, Stepinac became a determined supporter of the new entity. As the highest Catholic cleric in the
country, protocol required that he immediately pay courtesy visits to
Kvaternik and Pavelić. Stepinac, in his circulated letter of April 18, 1941,
urged the clergy of his archdiocese to fulfill their duty toward the Croatian
state and to pray that the head of state “may have the spirit of wisdom to
fulfill this noble and responsible office for the glory of God and for the sal2. Zagreb, Croatia, Croatian State Archives (hereafter HDA), Hans Helm. File, box
33-str 5–7. book XIII. In Box 33. book VII.
3. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe,
1939-1945 (New York, 1953), p. 358: “In no country of Axis-occupied Europe is the fate of
Jewry more difficult to assess.” It is difficult to ascertain the actual number of Yugoslav Jews
who were killed during World War II or survived the war. This applies even more to the
Independent State of Croatia than to Yugoslavia as a whole because birth and death records
as well as records of arriving refugees were poorly kept.
4. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945, Occupation and
Collaboration (Stanford, 2001), p. 592.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

FIGURE 1. Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb, center, with Dominican friars
Sibe Budrović (left) and Hijacint Bošković, Stari Grad (Island of Hvar), August 18,
1940. Photo courtesy of Dominikanci Hrvatska (Croatian Dominicans), Zagreb.

vation of the people in justice and truth.”5 Overjoyed that his people gained
their own state, he wrote:
There is no one among you who has not been a recent witness to the
momentous events in the life of the Croat nation. . . . No reasonable
person can condemn and no honest one can cast blame, because the love
toward one’s own people is inscribed in the human heart by God and is
His commandment.6

Stepinac’s happiness was short lived; he soon realized that Nazi Germany
and, to a lesser extent, fascist Italy were in control and that Pavelić headed a
puppet government. Stepinac then distanced himself from the NDH authorities.7 He detested the “Racial Laws” introduced in Croatia by Nazi Germany
5. Richard Pattee, The Case of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac (Milwaukee, 1953), pp. 258–60.
6. Katolički list, a Catholic weekly taken over by the government when Pavelić came to
power, published a letter by Stepinac on April 29, 1941, which has been translated and
appears in Richard Pattee, The Case of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, pp. 258–60.
7. Glas koncila, September 16, 1967, interview with Bishop Franjo Salis-Seewis.

ESTHER GITMAN

491

and carried out in his country by the Ustaše. The aim of these laws was to
resolve the “Jewish Question” in the NDH. As Stepinac explained:
. . . within the past ten years, certain theories and atheistic ideologies
have succeeded in infecting so much of the world that hate has become,
so to speak, the main incentive for all human actions. The danger exists
that even those who glory in the name of Catholicism, not even to speak
of those who glory in a spiritual vocation, may become victims of passion,
of hatred, and of forgetfulness of the law that is the most beautiful characteristic trait of Christianity, the law of love.8

The question of what constitutes a rescue in NDH has no simple answer;
it remains an emotionally charged subject. From the author’s conversations
with survivors as well as from the material available on the subject in various archives, most specifically Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, it became apparent that a definition of “rescue” has to fulfill certain criteria. These sources
can be crystallized into a one-sentence definition: Rescue is a deliberate and
purposeful act that involves a risk taken by non-Jews in an effort to save Jews.9
“Deliberate and purposeful” implies thought and intention. “Risk”
implies a possibility of loss—be it of money, status, or, potentially, life.
Assisting Jews in Nazi-controlled NDH was considered treason, punishable by death. Often, even in cases where rescue was requested by a government official and approved by the NDH minister of the interior, it
entailed a potential risk if or when such an official fell out of favor. Thus,
even a high-ranking Ustaše could incur risk by aiding Jews, as was the case
with Ivo Petrić, minister of health, who had to flee the NDH for allegedly
assisting Jews.10 Thus, it follows that rescue as defined here requires more
than random or unintentional activities that result in the saving of a life.
The complex situation of borders in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia meant that an individual Jew often had several rescuers, at times as
many as twenty, during the war years. For example, Joseph Indig-Ithai
8. Juraj Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac svjedok Evanđelja ljubavi, Životopis, dokumenti i svjedočanstva−prije, za vrtjeme i nakon Drugoga svjetskoga rata, Knjiga 2 Dokumeni I,
1–399, (1933–1943), p. 629, item 126, Propovijed nadbiskupa Stepinca u zagrebačkoj katedrali,October 26, 1941.
9. Esther Gitman, “Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia
(NDH), 1941–1945” (PhD diss., Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
2005), p. 10.
10. Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the
Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945 (St. Paul, 2011), p. xviii. In 1942, Petrić had to flee
Croatia because he assisted in the rescue of Jewish physicians with the approval of Pavelić.
He was not considered to be a loyal Ustaša.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

from Zagreb, who had five years of experience in trying to keep approximately forty-five Jewish children out of Nazi hands, makes clear that their
rescue would have been impossible without ongoing help from Croatians,
Slovenians, and Italians from outside the Jewish faith:
We had the good fortune, however, to come across many Righteous
Gentiles as we were buffeted by our destiny. There were many more that
sympathized with us and gave us help on our long journey. It was important for our children to see that not only Nazis existed in this world, but
also good people who had not lost the faith and courage to be humane.11

Similarly, Albert Maestro from Sarajevo was called to testify in 1945
before the National Commission for the Ascertainment of Crimes Committed against the Jews in NDH. He described atrocities but thanked the
Croatian peasants of the Jasenovac region, who at every opportunity helped
Jews with food and encouraging words. He stated that these individuals
prolonged their lives until the opportunity for escape presented itself.12
At first glance, it seems that Maestro might have exaggerated the help
he received from the peasants; it was puzzling to think that a few morsels
of bread and kind words could have saved his life and the lives of other
Jews. But reviews of many such cases reveal that there were nearly always
many rescuers along the way. The Croatian peasants, with many others,
formed a link in a long chain of rescuers that Maestro and many like him
encountered over four difficult years.
The means of rescue differed: some individuals offered shelter, obtained
forged exit visas, or provided food, whereas others accepted belongings for
safekeeping or conducted Jews across enemy lines, with rescuer and rescuee
often disguised in Muslim garb or Ustaše uniforms. Still others sheltered in
their homes or in Catholic orphanages those children whose parents had
joined the Partisans or had been taken to concentration camps.
The relationship between Pavelić and Stepinac became tense for several reasons. The archbishop did not participate, as was customary, in the
welcoming party for Pavelić at the Zagreb railroad station on April 13,

11. Josef Ithai-Indig, “Children of Villa Emma,” in The Italian Refuge: Rescue of Jews
during the Holocaust, ed. Ivo Herzer, Klaus Voigt, and James Burgwyn (Washington, DC,
1989), pp. 178–202, here p. 180.
12. Albert Maestro, Testimony. See Zagreb, Croatian National Archive (HDA),
Zemaljska komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača protiv Židova
(ZKRZ, or National Commission for the Ascertainment of Crimes Committed by the Occupiers and Their Local Collaborators Against the Jews), GUZ 2235-45, box 10, Jasenovac.

ESTHER GITMAN

493

1941; nor was a “Te Deum” sung at the cathedral on the occasion of
Pavelić’s birthday. Pavelić attended services at the Zagreb Cathedral only
once in four years and, even on that occasion, Stepinac refused to greet him
at the entrance, although such a greeting was the usual practice in the past.
Another issue of contention was Stepinac’s active discouragement of clergy
from joining the Ustaše movement. He reasoned that to join was a political
act and contrary to the tradition that maintained neutrality.13 But the most
painful issue for Pavelić was the Vatican’s refusal to bend the rule on behalf
of NDH. Vatican authorities constantly stressed that the Vatican could not
and did not recognize the Croatian state de jure because, according to
established custom, it did not recognize states created during war until
peace treaties were concluded and the new states were accepted into the
community of nations. Although the NDH had Pope Pius XII’s apostolic
visitor, Benedictine abbot Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone (see figure 2), with
the Croatian episcopate, and the Croatian state had an unofficial representative at the Vatican, the dissatisfied Pavelić blamed Stepinac for this serious setback for the new so-called “Catholic state.”14
It is impossible to speak about rescuing Jews in the NDH without
mentioning Stepinac. Without much apparent support from the Holy See
and other prelates in the region, Stepinac dared to speak out and act openly
against Nazi and Ustaše brutalities. His task was often hazardous, difficult,
and discouraging because his efforts seldom yielded immediate results. Yet
Stepinac persisted in his effort to save Jews.15 He acted to the best of his
abilities as a loyal servant of the Roman Catholic Church and never
wavered from his belief in moral law as his guiding principle.
This discussion will focus on Stepinac and to some degree on the
assistance he received from Marcone, examining how the divisions
between the Church and the Ustaše regime—and their philosophical differences regarding the duty of Christians—helped in the rescue of Jews.
Although the actions of Stepinac and Marcone were notable in the rescue
of Jews, such an operation was not an act of any one individual or entity.
Rescue can be jointly attributed to local residents, the Italian 2nd Army,
the Holy See, ZAVNOH16 Partisans, and humanitarian organizations.
13. Pattee, The Case of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, p. 79.
14. Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija (Zagreb, 1983), p. 140. The
Vatican had diplomatic relations with the Serbian monarchy. It was not customary to recognize a new state during wartime.
15. Jews were not the only ethnic and religious group that needed his assistance.
16. ZAVNOH, Zemaljsko antifasističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Hrvatske (AntiFascist Board of Directors of the Peoples’ Liberation of Croatia).

494

ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

FIGURE 2. From left: Croatian Minister of the Interior Andrija Artuković;
Benedictine abbot Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone, apostolic visitor to Croatia; and
Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb at an unidentified ceremonial gathering c.
1941–45. Washington, DC, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy
of Memorijalni muzej Jasenovac.

The rescue of Jews and those of other faiths demonstrates that popular
attitudes influenced events in NDH and that common stereotypes of
Croatia during the war should be reconsidered.
Who Is Alojzije Stepinac?
Stepinac was born on May 8, 1898, in the village of Brezarić in Croatia; he was one of eleven children. Like many other families in Croatia, his
parents, Josip and Barbara, subsisted on farming; toil and prayer marked
their lives. Shortly after graduation from high school in June 1916,
Stepinac was drafted to fight in World War I. He was taken prisoner by
the Italians while fighting in the Austro-Hungarian Army and, like many
Croats, had volunteered to fight for the Allies on the Salonika front.17
17. Francis H. Esterovich, “Spiritual Portrait of Cardinal Stepinac,” Crown and Cross,
September 1962, 274–75.

ESTHER GITMAN

495

After Stepinac returned home, he attended the University of Zagreb
but found it unfulfilling and left to work on his family’s farm. Influenced
by his mother and a local priest, he began studies for the priesthood and
was sent to Rome. After seven years he was ordained and in 1930 returned
to Zagreb, where within months he was appointed master of ceremonies to
Archbishop Anton Bauer. In 1934, because of Bauer’s advanced age, the
Holy See began searching for a successor. Because of his war record, his
devotion to the Church, and his lack of local political ties, Stepinac became
the only viable candidate who would be deemed acceptable to King
Alexander.18 To Stepinac’s dismay, he was appointed coadjutor bishop
with the right of succession to the largest archdiocese in Europe. In this
same year, he initiated and edited Caritas magazine, which had as its primary theme the Christian duty of “giving.” In 1937 Bauer died, and
Stepinac became the archbishop of Zagreb and president of the Catholic
Bishops’ Conference in Yugoslavia. Stepinac’s older and prosperous fellow
clergymen in Zagreb reportedly were unenthusiastic about his ascetic life
and his efforts to reduce the revenues of the high-ranking clergy so that
more monies could be directed to charity and to the construction of small
churches on the outskirts of the city. Even at the seat of the archbishopric,
he was referred to as “the Bolshevik.”19
From 1939 onward, there were trying times for the young and inexperienced archbishop who realized that a Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia
would mean great responsibilities for him.20 His postwar defense lawyer,
Ivo Politeo, posed to the court a rhetorical question that this article will
attempt to answer:
Would such a man, who distinguished himself as a fighter for liberation from the Austro-Hungarian yoke, for Yugoslav unity, for the
Croatian people and its sovereignty, for Democracy, for anti-fascism
and anti-Nazism, betray his past and cooperate with the occupiers and
the occupation? 21

18. Ivan Meštrović, “Stepinac, the Spiritual Hero,” Hrvatska revija, 6, no. 3 (1956),
201–06, here 203.
19. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 552.
20. Anthony O’Brien, Archbishop Stepinac: The Man and His Case (Westminster, MD,
1947) p. 12.
21. College Park, MD, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), State
Department, Central Files, Microfilm, 860.00/10.1446, T. J. Hohwnthal, American Consul,
Zagreb, to the Secretary of State [James Francis Byrnes], October 31, 1946. Trial of
Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb and Others, p. 3.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

Historical Context
The Third Reich’s plans for Europe were modeled on its success in
synthesizing the entire German nation: industry, bureaucracy, the party,
and the military toward one purpose—conquest. This “impressive” integration of the four pillars of the social structure also included countrymen
living abroad; in Yugoslavia the Nazis relied on 500,000 Volksdeutsche
(Yugoslav citizens of German origin). In this new system, the citizens of
the Third Reich and those collaborating with them were indoctrinated
with the idea that change of the political, economic, social, and religious
structures was of the essence and was the price to be paid by society for
social progress.22 Their ideology was illuminated by the slogan “Today
Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the entire world.”23 The means for
achieving this goal were summed up by Heinrich Himmler: “The only way
to solve the social problem is for one lot to kill the others and take their
land.”24 Nazi ideology intended to trample the Judeo-Christian ethic.25
Coming to power on April 17, 1941, with the support of Nazi Germany and fascist Italian sponsors, Pavelić was installed as leader by the
Axis partners. His Bosnian birth and his ten years in exile, most of it in
Italy, were political liabilities in nationalist Croatia. From the beginning,
most of the Croatian intelligentsia was hostile to the Ustaša regime and its
policies. Pavelić often took note of this and was quoted as saying that “in
Croatia, the Zagreb intelligentsia above all was against the government.”
Thus, Pavelić was obliging and malleable for Germany.26 In return for
Croatian territorial gains and “independence” from Serbia, Nazi Germany
demanded that Pavelić’s regime implement the Nazi-like ideology
22. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–
1944 (Oxford, 1942), pp. 62–82. (Neumann explained that Hobbes had borrowed the titles
of both Leviathan and Behemoth from Jewish mythology; both names refer to rulers, the
latter of the sea. Both leaders were monsters of Chaos).
23. John Colville states that by September 1939, Hitler had already proclaimed that
“[t]oday Germany is ours; tomorrow the whole world”; see Colville, The Fringes of Power: The
Incredible Inside Story of Winston Churchill during WW II (Guilford, CT, 2002), p. 19.
However, no example of Hitler actually saying it has been found. In Mein Kampf (1925),
Hitler stated, “If the German people, in their historic development had possessed tribal unity
like other nations, the German Reich today would be the master of the entire world.”
24. Götz Aly and Susan Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of
Destruction (Princeton, 2002), pp. 25–26.
25. Jacob L. Talmon, “European History as the Seedbed of the Holocaust,” Holocaust
and Rebirth. A Symposium (Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 11–75.
26. On Italy’s hopes that Pavelić would reward the country with territorial gains in the
Adriatic, see Galeazzo Ciano, The Ciano Diaries, 1939–1943 (New York, 2001), p. 341.

ESTHER GITMAN

497

enshrined in legislation for the “Protection of the Croatian (Aryan)
People.”
With Germany’s indulgence, Pavelić and his associates developed a
somewhat idiosyncratic notion of racial purity that encompassed not just
the Volksdeutsche and the 6.3 million nominally Slavic Croats but also the
750,000 Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), who were
deemed by the new state as “the flower of the Croatian People” and thus
“Honorary Aryans.”27
Once the Nazis had secured their rule in Zagreb by planting SS and
Gestapo personnel, the Wehrmacht and SS troops marched south on
April 15 and reached Sarajevo, the capital of BiH. The Yugoslav Army
collapsed on April 17, causing the dissolution of the twenty-three-year
union of the South Slavs and the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities of Yugoslavia. The partition of Yugoslavia and the distribution of
its territories among Axis partners triggered a civil war that exacerbated
the viciousness of anti-Jewish policies. Under Axis occupation, Yugoslavia
reverted to a collection of disparate states, all of them plagued by chaos
and civil war.28
During the first month Stepinac tried to work with the Ustaše government.29 This might have been in part because Pavelić portrayed himself as
a “good Catholic” who would enforce “Christian values” neglected in the
previously heterogeneous society.30 The cooperation between Stepinac and
Pavelić was short lived; after a month Stepinac distanced himself from the
regime and began criticizing the Ustaše’s barbarous racial activities. Tomasevich states that the ire of Croats toward Pavelić is not surprising. First,
the Ustaše as a political group was corrupt on a large scale. Second, for
27. Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, Germany’s plenipotentiary general in Croatia,
November 26, 1941, to Colonel Friedrich von Mellenthin, Wehrmacht High Command
(OKW). U.S. Department of State, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945
(hereafter DGFP), Series D (Washington, DC, 1960–64), 12:515–17.
28. Hrvoje Matković, Povijest Nezavisne Države Hrvatske (Zagreb, 1994), p. 242.
29. Darko Zubrinić, “Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac and Saving the Jews in Croatia during
WW2,” 1997, http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/jews.html. See also Michael Savor, “Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, ‘a Servant of God and the Croatian People,’” http://www.
croatianhistory.net/etf/stepinac.html.
30. See Jure Krišto, “The Catholic Church in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the
Face of Totalitarian Ideologies and Regimes,” in Religion under Siege: The Roman Catholic
Church in Occupied Europe 1939–1950, ed. Lieve Gevers and Jan Bank, [Annua Nuntia
Lovaniensia, no. 56], (Leuven, 2007), pp. 39–92, here p. 59. See also Tomasevich, War and
Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 349.

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many people, the arbitrary nature of justice in the NDH resulted in arrest,
jail, concentration camps, death, or disappearance. People in authority
with good contacts such as Stepinac and others intervened with powerful
individuals and state authorities on behalf of those victimized by the
regime. In the NDH, such intervention became part of the system.31
During these few first months of occupation, several major events
occurred as the struggle for Yugoslavia began. It involved the Ustaše; Croat
and Bosnian Muslims; the Četniks, a remnant of the Serbian army; the
Volksdeutsche; and the Partisans that represented diverse ethnic, religious,
and political affiliations. Three of these four warring parties found common
cause in hunting down and murdering Jews; only the Partisans invited Jews
to join their ranks and, after the capitulation of Italy in September 1943,
they shielded thousands of them.32 Nazi Germany, treating the former
Kingdom of Yugoslavia as plunder, took over the control and distribution
of land; it kept its most lucrative regions but also rewarded its allies: Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy. Italy annexed “Zone I,” a small stretch of land
along the Adriatic. Although the Italian military and the NDH civil administration officially operated another region, “Zone II,” under joint control,
there was no question as to which Axis partner was in control.
Jews under Attack
On April 17, 1941, Pavelić’s government implemented the first antisemitic legislative package, the “Act for the Protection of the Croatian
People and State,” which established the basis for the subsequent annihilation of the Jews. This act stated that
anyone who compromises, or has compromised, in any way the honor of
the Croatian people and their vital interests, or who endangers in any way
the existence of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and its ruling
authorities, even if such an act is merely attempted, is guilty of the crime
of high treason.33

But the identification of Jews as the national enemy did not enjoy automatic or universal acceptance. The next day in the daily newspaper Novi
list, the Ustaše proceeded to elaborate on the measures and threatened
31. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 350.
32. Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, pp. 23–24.
33. Narcisa Krizman Lengel, “A Contribution to the Study of Terror in the So-Called
Independent State of Croatia: Concentration Camps for Women in 1941–1942,” Yad Vashem
Studies, 20 (1990), 1–52, here 2–4.

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499

those who might help Jews evade them. The intervention on behalf of Jews
triggered a chain of events where the Office for Law and Order sent
instructions to the State Regulatory Board forbidding lawyers and solicitors from being involved in political matters, particularly on behalf of the
Jews. Those not upholding this law will be held accountable and penalized
for treason (veleizdaja).
On April 30, twenty days after its creation, the NDH imposed harsh
collective measures on Croatian Jews, effectively providing legal justification for their murder and for the punishment of any Croat who assisted
them.34 Jews were charged collectively with disseminating lies about the
conduct of the government and thus disturbing the public peace and order.
For this, the NDH authorities determined that they deserved to die.35
Postwar Yugoslavian investigation officials described the decrees as
one of the first tasks of the Nazi-occupiers assigned to the NDH regime:
to resolve the “Jewish Question” swiftly and radically. The solution
included the following main components:
(1) Dismissing Jews from all government and civil service posts, shutting
down their private enterprises, and confiscating their assets, thus ensuring
their inability to earn a living;
(2) Demolishing synagogues and Jewish cultural institutions, thereby affecting their fighting spirit; and
(3) Killing them via labor and concentration camps.36

The Nazis aimed to ensure that anti-Jewish measures were implemented
throughout the territories to assure their swift annihilation.37
From April 1941 to July 1942, the Ustaše—assisted by the SS, the
Gestapo, and the Volksdeutsche—humiliated, robbed, interned, and murdered the Jews on NDH’s soil. Raul Hilberg noted the state’s efficiency in
implementing antisemitic policies: by the end of August 1941, or within
four months, the Ustaše government had Aryanized most Jewish enter34. NARA, Record Group (RG) 59, 860-H·4016/64, PS/RJH, “Persecution of Jews of
Croatia, June 13, 1941.” See also Zbornik Zakona i Naredba Nezavisne Države Hrvatske
(listing of NDH rules, decrees and regulations) (Zagreb, 1941).
35. HDA, ZKRZ-GUZ 2235-2/45, box 10, 18, Report by Dr. Samuel Pinto (who had
been asked by the National Commission to summarize the NDH measures against the Jews).
36. HDA, ZKRZ-GUZ, 2235/2-45, box 10, p. 123.
37. Jaša Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945: Žrtve genocida i učesnici narodnooslobodilačkog rata (Victims of Genocide and Participants in the War for Freedom) (Belgrade,
1980), pp. 31–32.

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prises, barred Croatian women from intermarrying with Jews, and specified
other prohibited actions. Hilberg concludes: “It had taken Nazi bureaucrats
more than eight years to think up and implement the model policies,
whereas the Ustaše managed to implement them within a few months.”38
Although the Ustaše embraced the Nazis’ “Final Solution of the
Jewish Question” and threatened Croatian citizens who helped Jewish
friends, neighbors, or coworkers escape it, they themselves shielded
selected groups of Jews. Among these were “Honorary Aryans”—persons
who had contributed to various Croatian causes, which amounted to about
500 individuals, including immediate family members. Also protected
were Jews who applied for and received “Aryan rights,” albeit without
actual recognition as “Aryans” per se—a few thousand professionals
needed for the functioning of the economy included engineers, business
people, physicians, and their family members.
At this point, however, it is imperative to recognize that a change
occurred between the Nazi racial ideology and that of the Ustaše. Nazi ideology is characterized by the fact that it placed the Jews outside the limit
of humanity: “It did not view the Jews as the Croats did, a low variant of
the human race, but rather as mere organic matter.”39 Thus, the Holocaust
in NDH, although it should be viewed as an abomination, has a frame of
reference that is different from the one that characterized the National
Socialist antisemitism. Thus we can speak of rescue of Jews because in the
Ustaše ideology, they belong to the human race.
Jews in the Italian Zones of Occupation
Even before the war began in Yugoslavia, thousands of European
Jewish refugees were passing through the country. For some, it was a
bridge to reach other safe havens; many others stayed. As soon as the war
started, many of these refugees left for the Italian zones of occupation.
With their departure, rumors circulated that the Italian army, unlike the
Nazi occupiers, refrained from killing unarmed men, women, and children
who were Jewish. Within a few months, thousands—accompanied by nonJewish friends and neighbors, and sometimes in the company of professional guides or taxi drivers—crossed the borders of the NDH to reach the
Adriatic coast. In mid-May 1942, however, a problem emerged when
38. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 711.
39. Nathan Rotenstreich, “Summary Lecture,” in Holocaust and Rebirth. A Symposium,
pp. 191–208, here p. 197.

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501

Giuseppe Bastianini, governor of Dalmatia, reported that the numbers of
Jews entering the annexed territories had escalated to alarming levels. Consequently, he gave orders to repel the refugees, despite the traumatic scenes
of Jews frantic to escape. Nevertheless, Bastianini requested military intervention to end the exodus to Dalmatia.40
When news reached Stepinac of Bastianini’s planned extradition of
Jews by force from the Italian zones to the NDH, he, in concert with Marcone, decided to act. They asked Cardinal Luigi Maglione, the Vatican’s
secretary of state, to request that the Italian authorities reconsider Bastianini’s request and allow the Jews to remain in the Italian-annexed territories
on the Adriatic.41 Permission was granted.42 The basis for this permission
was the argument that, by 1942, about 30 percent of the Jews of Zagreb
had converted. Because some were baptized, Maglione obtained permission from the Italian government to allow all Yugoslav Jewish refugees to
remain in the Italian zones.43
By September 1943, when Italy capitulated to the Allies, more than
5000 Jews had survived there. Croatian-born Menahem Shelah—alias
Raul Shpitzer, the Israeli historian—notes that “Stepinac and Abbot Marcone’s energetic effort was crowned with great success; the Jews were
granted permission to remain in the Italian zones of occupation.”44 Due to
Stepinac’s initiative and the assistance of Marcone and Maglione in keeping the Jews in the Italian zones, they averted Bastianini’s plan and prevented a calamity.
The Jews in the Italian zones were, nevertheless, penniless refugees in
need of protection, shelter, and food. Because they were spread over a large
territory, it was impossible to provide them with basic services. The Italian

40. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce, Lo stato totalitario, 1936–1940 (Turin, 1981), 835.
41. The Holy See (Latin Sancta Sedes) is the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Catholic
Church in Rome. The Holy See is viewed as analogous to a sovereign state and has a
centralized government, called the Roman Curia, with the cardinal secretary of state as its
chief administrator. The Holy See is not the same entity as the Vatican City State; the latter
came into existence in 1929. Ambassadors are officially accredited not to the Vatican City
State but to the Holy See, and papal representatives to states and international organizations
are recognized as representing the Holy See, not the Vatican City State.
42. Menahem Shelah, “The Murder of Croatian Jews by the Germans and Their
Helpers during the Second World War” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 1980), pp. 40, 257.
43. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington,
IN, 2000), p. 84.
44. Shelah, “Murder of Croatian Jews,” p. 281.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

2nd Army decided to place them in two defensible areas: approximately 1000
were situated on the island of Korčula, and 3600 were relocated to the island
of Rab. Their care and protection was a joint effort of the Italian authorities,
and their daily sustenance—including medical care—was provided by Delegazione Assistenza Emigranti e Profughi Ebrei (DELASEM). After the
Italian capitulation, the Partisans guided Jewish women, children, and aged
individuals to the Croatian-freed territories of Croatia and inducted the
young into their military units.45 But even in the free territories, the Jews
continued to receive help from DELASEM, the International Red Cross,
and their fellow Jews who had found shelter in Italy.46
Thirty years later, Shelah wrote that Italy’s behavior toward the
Yugoslav Jews represented something unique in the annals of the Holocaust, for it consisted of protection and rescue rather than persecution and
slaughter.47 He neglected to acknowledge the efforts of Stepinac and Marcone that clearly contributed to this state of affairs.
To paint a more complete picture of the rescue of Jews by Stepinac
and others who assisted him, the author interviewed and recorded seventyseven rescuers and survivors, as well as listened to more than 200 recorded
testimonies conducted by the University of Southern California-based
Shoah Foundation and by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as those collected in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
DC. Survivors’ stories have been of particular value, as they provided a way
to weave individual stories into an analysis that seeks to explain how one
quarter of Croatia’s Jews survived the Holocaust.48
Consulted were contemporary newspapers, legal publications, archival
documents, intelligence records, survivor testimonies gathered by
Yugoslavia’s postwar national commission, memoirs, and relevant secondary literature of the years immediately after the war. Fortunately, the
declassification of U.S. intelligence and State Department records have
provided evidence to support more nuanced accounts of actions by Pius

45. Belgrade, Jewish Historical Museum, 4560, K.24-4B-5/2; on Vela Luka, see also
Israel, Library of Kibbutz Ein-Shemer, David (Dado) Maestro, Vela Luka Diary, 1941–1943.
46. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945, pp. 279–98.
47. Shelah, “The Italian Rescue of Yugoslav Jews 1941–1943,” p. 205.
48. The author received a 2002–03 Fulbright Fellowship to Zagreb, which facilitated a
review of more than 30,000 documents in the Croatian National Archives. A postdoctoral
fellowship to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provided a wider
understanding of the subject of rescue and the contributions made by Stepinac.

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XII, Catholic prelates, and the Vatican.49 But the stories of Stepinac’s
actions on behalf of Jews were frequently mentioned.50 His rescue of Jews
and others is well documented in most of the archives frequented by the
author. The letter below, written in 1942 by a small Jewish community in
Crikvenica, indicates that Jews of the period seemed to be aware of
Stepinac’s rescue efforts:
During the burial of the Jewess Sabina Steiner in the Catholic cemetery
in Crikvenica, as was a Jewish custom, the Jews attending the ceremony
collected from each attendee a small contribution to be given to charity.
The attendees decided to contribute the 306 kunas to the orphans of
Crikvenica in the name of Archbishop Stepinac who at every opportunity
made an effort to ameliorate the tragic conditions of those in the concentration camps.51

Individuals Testify on Stepinac’s Behalf
The information most relevant to the rescue of Jews by Stepinac
includes the documented testimonies by individuals whom he rescued, by
those who witnessed such occurrences, and by those who learned from primary sources about them.52
Anthony O’Brien, count of Thomond and a British citizen, stayed in
Zagreb for more than two years and met Stepinac for lunch once a week.
During this period, they developed a close relationship and discussed various subjects, but mostly the war in Europe. In 1941, O’Brien escaped from
Zagreb and ended up in Korčula. He related that for safety reasons,
approximately 1000 NDH Jews were placed on that island, which was
scornfully known among the German and Croat press as the “Island of the
Jews.” He also suggests that thousands upon thousands of Austrian,
German, Czech, and Polish Catholics of Jewish origin owe perpetual gratitude to Stepinac: “They asked for his help and received it.” Within his
branch of the Caritas organization in Zagreb, he organized a special Relief
Committee for Refugees:

49. David Bankier, Dan Michman, and Iael Nidam-Orvieto, eds., Pius II and the Holocaust, Current State of Research (Jerusalem, 2012).
50. See Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed.
51. HDA, Odvjetnička Pisarnica I. Politeo, Predmet: A. Stepinac. English translation
by the author. See appendix A for a copy of the original document.
52. Jure Krišto, Katolička crkva i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 1941–1945, Dokumenti
(Zagreb, 1998). See also Fontes, izvori za Hrvatsku Povijest, issued by the National Croatian
Archives (Hrvatski državni arhiv, or HDA), Zagreb, February 1996.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS
From what I have seen with my own eyes I can testify that he did all in
his power to find shelter for these people in Croatia and to enable them
to live an honest and decent life; he helped those who wished to leave
Yugoslavia [for] England, the United States or South America: that in
most of these cases he paid out of his own pocket the major part of the
travelling expenses, which were far beyond the means at the disposal of
the Relief Committee.53

From the Jews in Korčula, O’Brien learned about Stepinac’s contempt
for the German and Italian occupiers and officials of the puppet regime of
Croatia, as well as about the assistance he gave the Jewish people. “What
they reported made me feel proud of belonging to the Catholic Church,”
he writes, “prouder than I have ever felt in my whole life.”54
Ljudevit Stein, born in Zagreb in 1935, described how in 1943,
Stepinac saved him from the detention center on Savska Street. He stated
that on June 14–15, there were mass deportations of Jews. Margita
Stilinović, his father’s sister, was married to a Catholic and was desperate
to save Stein, her only surviving relative. After seeking help in many places,
she reached Stepinac, whom she begged to do something on behalf of her
eight-year-old nephew. In his letter Ljudevit states that he, his wife, and
his children are eternally grateful to Stepinac who rescued him.55
On June 17, 1945, the Catholic convert and writer Evelyn Waugh,
then a captain affiliated with the British Mission in Yugoslavia, sent the
following testimony about the protests of Stepinac in 1941 against Pavelić
and against the deportations of Jews:56
Thus in Zagreb in June 1941 the Archbishop Stepinac led a deputation
to Pavelić to protest against the persecution of the Jews; many of the
clergy of Zagreb wore the yellow star in the streets to ridicule Pavelić’s
attempt to mark Jews in the Nazi manner. . . . Recently Archbishop
Stepinac, still in German hands, issued a condemnation of the acts of
cruelty committed by both sides. . . . The Archbishop also expelled Professor [Stevo] Zunić from the university for his criticism of the antiUstaše activities of the clergy.

53. O’Brien, Archbishop Stepinac, pp. 10–11.
54. Ibid., p. 14.
55. Ljudevit Stein, testimony of rescue by Stepinac. Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Glasnik
Postulature, 6 (1999), str. 1–2.
56. Waugh, testimony about the rescue of Jews, “Church and State in Liberated
Croatia,” South Slav Journal, 2, no. 4 (1979), 17–26. Repr. in Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac,
Knjiga 3. See appendix B for a copy of the original document.

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505

On June 3, 1995, Croatian-born Dan Baram wrote to Juraj Batelja57
regarding the rescue of Jews and described how Stepinac rescued him and
the following individuals: Slavko Radelj and his wife, the physician Elizabeth Podkaminer; Baram’s parents, Erna and Miroslav Radičević, alias
Fuks; and Baram’s aunt, Elsa Gross, and her husband, Richard. Baram also
stated that Stepinac shielded a few young Jewish men, but he had forgotten
their names. Initially the family stayed with the curia in the archdiocesan
headquarters in Zagreb, where they received falsified identification cards
and other documents. They were transferred to a parish. The priest there,
Dragutin Jesih, knew that they were Jews, but he took responsibility for
their well-being. In 1944 the Ustaše killed Jesih. Again with the help of
Stepinac, Baram and his family were moved to the Olex refinery, where
they remained in hiding until the end of the war. Apparently, Stepinac,
with other Croats, formed teams of rescuers.58
Olga Rajšek-Neumann, a Catholic woman, described how she had
become a rescuer in 1942. She received a letter from Zlatko Neumann, her
Jewish fiancé and a prisoner of war in Germany, asking her to travel to the
small village of Pakrac in Slavonia and take his young nephew, Danko
Shtockhammer, to live with her in Zagreb. Neumann’s aunt had perished
in the Djakovo concentration camp, and his uncle was a prisoner of war.
The eight-year-old Shtockhammer had already experienced two concentration camps. She did as requested, but on April 12, 1943, the child was
sent to the Savska Street detention center in Zagreb. Rajšek-Neumann ran
to her parish priest for help, and he reassured her that Stepinac would
come to her aid. Stepinac placed Shtockhammer in a Catholic orphanage,
where the boy remained until the war ended.59 On January 14, 2003, the
Commission for the Righteous declared Rajšek-Neumann Righteous
Among the Nations (file number 9848a).
Another testimony on Stepinac’s behalf was given by Teodor Gruner.
Gruner stated that Bernard Gruner, his father and the chief cantor of the
Jewish community in Zagreb, was captured and sent to the city’s central
57. Surviving Jews sent their testimonies to Juraj Batelja of Zagreb, the postulator of
the cause for Stepinac’s beatification.
58. Dan Baram, testimony sent to Juraj Batelja, June 3, 1995, in Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 3, p. 566. See appendix C for a copy of the original document.
59. Olga Rajšek-Neumann interview, December 26, 2002, Zagreb, Croatia. See also
Danko Shtockhammer’s statement to Yad Vashem in Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga
3, p. 566. An excerpt from his testimony appears in appendix D. He tells the entire story of
his suffering and, in the last paragraph, names Stepinac as his rescuer. His letter indicates that
Stepinac’s name appears on Shtockhammer’s discharge certificate from the detention center.

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detention center, the assembly point for deportations to the concentration
camps. In an interview, he recalled that his father was freed shortly after
Stepinac was informed about his imprisonment. Stepinac’s office pressured
the authorities to release the cantor on the grounds that his son was a
physician in the service of the government on a medical mission in
Bosnia.60 It was known that immediate family members of Jews working
for the government were exempted from deportation.
In his testimony Amiel Shomrony (alias Emil Schwartz)—an assistant
to Miroslav Šalom Freiberger, chief rabbi of Croatia—recalled that in 1943,
after Himmler’s visit, he was on an errand to the archdiocese. At that time
he was informed that the Ustaše, along with the SS, planned imminent
roundups of the remaining Jews. Stepinac’s personal secretary told Shomrony that Stepinac had invited the rabbi, his wife, Irena; his parents; and his
sister, Ljubica, to stay in his palace in the archdiocese. When Shomrony
delivered the invitation to Freiberger, along with the news of the deportations of Zagreb’s Jews, the chief rabbi declined the invitation, choosing
instead to be deported with his congregation. The rabbi did, however, ask
that the archdiocese take his library for safekeeping. Stepinac agreed, and
after the war the library was returned intact to Croatia’s Jewish community.61
Major General Stjepan Steiner described with respect and admiration
the efforts exerted on behalf of Jews by Stepinac and Ante Vuletić, whom
he defined as “two extraordinary Croats” who rescued a large number of
Jews during the war. He estimated that Stepinac had saved at least 400
Jews, apart from those in mixed marriages, whereas Vuletić had rescued
142 Jewish physicians and their immediate family members by sending
them to Bosnia.62 To illustrate what Stepinac did for Jews, he told the
author the following story.
60. Teodor Gruner interview, January 14, 2003, Zagreb.
61. Amiel Shomrony (Emil Schwartz), whose father was an Honorary Aryan, was free
to move about without having to wear the “Ž,” the Jewish identification symbol. In an interview with a Croatian journalist on April 21, 1996, Shomrony was asked: “If Archbishop
Stepinac helped so many Jews, why, then, has such a small number of Jews spoken on his
behalf?” Shomrony replied: “The Jews are neither united nor do they hold one opinion about
their own religion, let alone about other matters. I, for example, never favored the Communist regime, this is one of the reasons that I never chose to return to Zagreb; yet many Jews
favored Communism.” Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 3, p. 568. “Prenosimo ‘Glas
koncila’ 21 travnja 1996. Razgovor s dr. Amielom Shomroniyem, promicateljem istine o Kardinalu Stepincu, Kardianal Stepinac je svetac i mučnik.” Bilten, Židovska općina (Jewish
Community Library), Zagreb, June 1996, 44–45.
62. Jure Krišto, Katolička crkva i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, Documents 287, 298. Corroborated by the testimony of Stjepan Steiner, interview, December 16, 2002. Zagreb. Croatia.

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507

In mid-1942, he and his wife, Zora, defected to the Partisans from
their NDH post in Bosnia, where they were assigned as physicians to treat
the Muslim population for endemic syphilis. Steiner recalled that, after
the war, he had asked the physician Miroslav Dujić (Deutsch) why he left
Zagreb in 1943 to join the Bosnian mission. Dujić replied that in 1943,
he, among many other young Jews who were recent converts to Catholicism and who were under Stepinac’s protection, were informed that the
archbishop’s life was in danger, and he could no longer take the responsibility of protecting them.63 Dujić ended up with his family on the mission
to Bosnia.
During a visit to Rome in May 1943, Stepinac openly criticized the
Nazis and the Ustaše. The Germans and Italians demanded that Pope
Pius XII remove Stepinac from office. The pope refused to do so, but he
warned Stepinac that his life was at risk.64 A good friend of Stepinac, the
sculptor Ivan Meštrović, met the archbishop in Rome in 1943 and
begged him to forego a return to the NDH because he was in danger.
Stepinac replied that he had already accepted his fate: if the Ustaše did
not kill him, the communists would. Thus Stepinac indicated his awareness of the possible ramifications for his continued determination to
fight for others.65 As previously mentioned, Stepinac alerted those under
his protection to leave Zagreb without delay. Dujić’s move to Bosnia and
the story related by Steiner were corroborated by other oral histories and
extant documents.
Vladko Maček, the former head of the popular Croatian Peasant
Party, contributed one of the most striking postwar assessments of
Stepinac’s actions and values. The Ustaše sentenced Maček to the Jasenovac concentration camp and then to house arrest after he rejected Nazi
overtures to lead the NDH. He respected Stepinac’s ethical, moral, and
humanitarian values:
Archbishop Stepinac was not a man of idle words, but rather, he actively
helped every person when he was able, and to the extent he was able. He
made no distinctions as to whether a man in need was a Croat or a Serb,
whether he was a Catholic or an Orthodox, whether he was Christian or
63. Stjepan Steiner, interview with the author, Zagreb, January 10, 2003.
64. Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth: A Life of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, [East European Monographs], (Boulder, 1987), p. 95.There is some solid evidence to support a widespread belief that some Ustaše members plotted to kill Stepinac in order to silence him. See
also Jure Krišto, “The Catholic Church in Croatia,” pp. 73–74.
65. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York, 1993), p. 28.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS
non-Christian. All the attacks on him, whether the products of misinformation or of a clouded mind, cannot change this fact.66

Maček’s point of view was reinforced by Stepinac’s public actions in 1943,
which had repercussions for him. On July 7, 1943, BBC Radio broadcast
a program in the Croatian language in defiance of German threats of
retaliation:
Yesterday the Vatican published two excerpts from speeches delivered by
Dr. Stepinac to his parishioners.67 The Archbishop of Zagreb has
strongly and sharply condemned the deportations of Jews and other
ethnic groups that were based on Nazi theories and Nuremberg Laws.
The Vatican radio announces that Archbishop Stepinac, in his weekly
address, stated that every people and every race on earth has a right to
exist and to humane treatment. If God gave this right to mankind there
is no government on earth that can take it away.68

On November 23, 1943, related information was sent in a telegram
from the U.S. consul in Bern, Switzerland, to the U.S. secretary of state in
Washington, DC. Titled “Controversy between the Roman Catholic Primate and the State Authorities,” the document summarized an editorial in
the daily Hrvatski narod (Croatian People), in which Julije Makanec,
NDH minister of education, attacked Stepinac for stating the following in
one of his sermons:
The Catholic Church knows races and peoples only as God’s creatures
and values the one with the noblest heart more than the one with the
strongest fist; all men are alike in God’s eyes, whether European or colored men from Central Africa.69

Stepinac was ridiculed, subjected to public mockery, and placed under
short-term house arrest. Upon his release, he was informed unequivocally
66. Vladko Maček, “Kardinal Stepinac i nasilno prekrštavanje pravoslavnih” (Forced
Conversions of Serbs), Hrvatski glas (Croatian Voice), Winnipeg, Canada, March 16, 1953.
67. Radio New York, 6.1.15: The Talk that Angered the Ustaše. See also HDA, MUP
RH, I-25, pp. 426–28.
68. BBC Radio broadcasts from London, July 7 and 8, 1943; on July 7 Radio New York
aired the program Slobodna Jugoslavia (Free Yugoslavia) in the Serbo-Croatian language. See
also “Croat Attacks Germans: Archbishop of Zagreb Denounces Their Theories of Race,”
New York Times, July 8, 1943, 10, and the letter to the editor from Steven Lackovic (Stepinac’s
former secretary), “Archbishop Stepinatz (sic): His Defiance of the Nazis is Cited as Proof of
His Innocence,” New York Times, Oct. 9, 1946, 26.
69. NARA, Microfilm 860H.40416/79, telegram no. 7382, twenty-third, 2–3. See
NARA, RG 59, Lot file no. 61 D33, Legal Adviser Relating to War Crimes, box 33, location:
250/49/25/7, 14. See also Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, p. 38.

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to expect penalties should he dabble in politics.70 Such a response
demonstrated that Stepinac’s predicament was grave, considering his
open criticism of the “Racial Laws” and the brutality of the Nazi/Ustaše
regimes.71
Stepinac’s Assistance to the Chief Rabbi of Croatia
and His Communities
In December 1941, Stepinac wrote a report for Pope Pius XII on the
Croatian Bishops’ Conference, including Catholic efforts undertaken to
assist Jews and other persecuted people. On December 15, 1942,
Freiberger applied to Marcone, asking the Holy See for help in transferring
fifty to sixty orphan children from Zagreb to Florence, Livorno, or Padua,
with the Jewish community covering the expense.72 In another letter,
Freiberger asked the archbishop to speak on behalf of 200 orphaned Jewish
boys aged seven to seventeen, who were in danger of capture by the Ustaše
and thus needed to be evacuated to Italy. On January 9, 1943, Stepinac
sent a letter to Maglione asking for his assistance in transferring 200 boys
to an Italian Jewish community outside the NDH that would care for them
and enable them to attend school.73
On May 8, 1941, Stepinac arranged work permits for the Jewish community in Zagreb. In this regard, he wrote:
Mr. Minister: I feel free to present to you a request from the Jewish
Community in Zagreb, in which they are asking you to free some of their
workers from detention so as to resume work for the welfare of those still
left in freedom . . .74
70. NARA, Microfilm 860H.40416/79, telegram no. 7382, twenty-third, 2–3. (The
quotations are copied verbatim; it is clear that a few articles are missing.) See HDA, Hans
Helm File, box 33-str5, book (knjiga) XIII. On October 11, 1943, Hans Helm notified his
superiors in Berlin of a new and open rift between the Ustaše regime and Stepinac. See also
Alexander, The Triple Myth, pp. 91–93.
71. Esther Gitman, Kad Istina Prevlada, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHTBb
G0JNs4, Part 3.
72. Krišto, Katolička crkva i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 1941–1945, Documents 231,
242. An answer was received that Artuković did not approve the relocation of the thirty-eight
children from Zagreb to Italy.
73. HDA, Ivo Politeo documents, p. 1187. The Jewish community in Zagreb asked
Stepinac to contact the Holy See regarding entry visas for 200 Jewish children from Croatia
from the Italian interior ministry.
74. Marina Stambuk-Skalić, Josip Kolanović, and Stjepan Razum, eds., Proces Alojziju
Stepincu, Dokumenti (Zagreb, 1997), p. 64, Document 63.23.3.

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Although the author did not locate documents that attest to the
employees’ release, it is certain that some were rescued given that the only
Jewish community to remain open during the war was in Zagreb. On April
13 Stepinac personally delivered to NDH Minister of the Interior Andrija
Artuković a request from the Jewish community to reissue permit #2550I-A-1942, which originally covered the transit of fifty orphans. By the time
the permit was issued, only eleven were still alive, and they were sent to
Turkey. Since the permit was only partially used, Stepinac, on behalf of the
Jewish community, requested its reissue so he could include a new group
of thirty-eight children.75
The relationship between Stepinac and the Jewish community in
Zagreb extended beyond the relocation of orphans. On December 6, 1943,
the German authorities in Zagreb entered the “Lavoslav Schwarz,” the
Jewish home for the elderly, and ordered the residents to vacate the premises within ten days. The Nazis warned that anyone who remained in the
building would be deported to Auschwitz. Josipa Shulhof, an employee of
the Jewish community, testified on June 9, 1945,76 that the employees of
the community turned to Stepinac for assistance. Stepinac immediately
organized the transfer of sixty elderly residents to the archbishopric’s building in Brežovica near Zagreb.77 They lived on church property from 1943
to 1947, and Stepinac visited them frequently.78 The elderly Jews also
received regular financial assistance from a Swiss humanitarian organization. Only five of the residents died during this period, all from natural
causes—with the majority surviving because of the Church’s assistance.79

75. HDA, Ivo Politeo, subject A. Stepinac, document 1188. See appendix E for a copy
of the original document.
76. HDA, ZKRZ-GUZ 2235/45-2, box 10, Zapisnik, document 1771, testimony
given by Josipa Shulhof, June 9, 1945, pp. 2–21, here p. 11.
77. HDA, Ivo Politeo, A. Stepinac file, 1588/P/43-Dr.F./DA. This letter from Chief
Rabbi Freiberger to Stepinac requested the archbishop’s assistance in relocating approximately sixty elderly Jews to a safe location.
78. Slavko Goldstein, in a July 23, 1991, interview with Globus magazine, implied that
Stepinac’s favor was partial since the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration paid for their sustenance. Some of the author’s interviewees, who wished not to be identified by name, considered such remarks unnecessary and ungrateful given that such a benevolent gesture and kindness were rare in those days and always involved risk.
79. HDA, ZKRZ-GUZ 2235/45-2, box 10, Zapisnik, document 1771, testimony
given by Josipa Shulhof on June 9, 1945, pp. 2–21.Shulhof testified (p. 11) that when a
demand to vacate the home arrived, the Jewish community turned to Stepinac, who immediately agreed to provide a building and granted permission for renovation so it could accommodate fifty-eight people

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Another incident involving Stepinac took place on October 16, 1944.
Approximately 120 Jews on the island of Rab were rescued by the Partisans and sent to the Croatian free territories. They were, however, captured by the Ustaše. Only two managed to escape: Sarajevo natives Jakica
Gaon and Moric Katan. After reaching Zagreb, they found employment
in the Jewish community. They disregarded warnings to remain in the
compound and were caught by the Ustaše police. They were brought back
for identification. At the same time, the Ustaše captured eight Jewish
employees. Six of the captives were killed, but Robert Glucksthal, the
official representative of the Jewish community and Asher Kisičkog, his
assistant, were released after Stepinac and International Red Cross representatives intervened.80
Stepinac and Couples in Mixed Marriages
In mid-1941 approximately 12,000 individuals composed the Jewish
community in Zagreb. However, it must be taken into account that 3860
members had declared a new religious affiliation: Catholicism.81 Such
conversions are not surprising, since it was a question of survival, and
Stepinac took this into consideration when he began instructing his clergy
to issue certificates of baptism to endangered Jews and Serbs. Stepinac
realized that to adhere strictly to the “Resolution on Conversions,” as
decided in 1941, could be a death sentence for Jews and Serbs. Thus, he
issued an informal order, transmitted by word of mouth or written on
paper, instructing clergy to disregard the usual requirements of conversion
and baptize all individuals—regardless of the sincerity of their newly professed faith—who sought conversion:
When you are visited by people of the Jewish or Eastern Orthodox faith,
whose lives are in danger and who express the wish to convert to Catholicism, accept them in order to save human lives. Do not require any special religious knowledge from them, because the Eastern Orthodox are
Christians like us, and the Jewish faith is the faith from which Christianity draws its roots. The role and duty of Christians is in the first place
to save people. When this time of madness and savagery has passed,
those who would convert out of conviction will remain in our church,
while others, after the danger passes, will return to their church.82

80. HDA, ZKRZ-GUZ 2235/2-45, Box 10, Zapisnik, June 9, 1945, 14.
81. Židovska Opčina Zagreb (ŽOZ), Community Books of Registered Conversions.
Ninety percent converted in 1938. Only in 1941 was the Jewish community notified.
82. Editorial, The New Leader, the self-described “Liberal Labor Weekly,” October 11,
1946. See also Ivan Meštrović, “Stepinac, The Spiritual Hero,” Hrvatska Revia, 6, no. 3

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

Because of Stepinac’s instructions many Serbs survived the war, and
most returned to their own religion, as can be seen from the interview of
Archpriest Dušan Kašić, an Orthodox Serb. In 1975 he attested that ascertaining the number of wartime converts was difficult, since all such conversions had been deemed acts of political violence and annulled by the postwar
civilian authorities. Of the converts from that period, only a few remained
Catholics—mostly Orthodox Serbs who had married Catholic women and
chose to remain in the faith.83 When the Croatian government instructed all
Jews to register with their local authorities, including those in mixed marriages, Jews involved in such relationships turned to Stepinac for help.84
In 1942 Stepinac was besieged with letters from Catholic women
whose husbands had been interned in detention and concentration camps.
Letters arrived from all parts of the NDH, but the most conscientious effort
was made by forty-eight women from Osijek, whose husbands had been
taken to concentration camps. They, together with their priests and bishops, appealed to Stepinac.85 Although Stepinac was fully aware that the
measures imposed against them could not be abrogated easily, he and Marcone were determined to rescue the Jewish partners in mixed marriages and
their offspring. Stepinac sent letters to the Ustaše authorities, requesting the
men’s immediate release from the concentration camps. At the same time
he also requested Vatican assistance. He openly declared that should action
be taken against those incarcerated people, he would close the churches in
Croatia temporarily and let the bells ring continuously.86
(1956): 201–06. Meštrović stated in his footnote that the message was passed from one parish
to another. Although Stepinac’s position was that Serbs were already baptized and thus did not
require a formal process of conversion, he recognized that more Serbs survived if they went
through this process. See also Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 542. He
doubts the validity of Meštrović’s explanations because the message contains the word divljalu,
a regional Bosnian form for the word savagery instead of the literary Croatian form
divliastvo—therefore casting doubt on its authorship. In addition, these sources give no indication of whether the note was in the archbishop’s handwriting, handwritten by somebody else,
or typed. Tomasevich’s argument introduces unnecessary doubts, as it is clear that Stepinac did
not write hundreds of copies. In the process of copying and disseminating this instruction, mistakes could have been introduced. The idea of accepting as converts those who thought that
such a step might save their lives makes sense, especially to a person like Stepinac.
83. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 577. On October 25, 1975,
Tomasevich received an official letter to this effect from Kašić.
84. HDA, MPB, NDH, box 15, No. 4778/41.
85. HDA, Ivo Politeo, file A. Stepinac, documents 1183, 1197. Many Catholic women
individually and in groups fought against the Racial Laws and separation of those in mixed
marriages. They wrote directly or via their priests asking for Stepinac’s assistance.
86. John F. Morley, Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews during the Holocaust, 1939–1943
(New York, 1980), p. 161. Stepinac told the top Ustaše hierarchy who had Jewish wives—

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513

Initially, Pavelić took Stepinac’s threats into consideration, as seen
in Hans Helm’s correspondence with Berlin. Helm, the Nazi police
attaché in Zagreb, sent daily briefings, underscoring that Stepinac was a
great friend of the Jews and would involve himself on their behalf.87 In
September 1942, German SS officer Franz Abromeit was appointed to
organize the final deportation of Jews from Croatia. Included in this
operation were the Jewish partners in mixed marriages and others who
had been exempted previously by the NDH government. When Marcone and Stepinac heard this news, Stepinac sent a letter to Pavelić
demanding that the authorities abrogate all such measures against the
protected Jews.88 In a sermon delivered on March 3, 1943, Stepinac
insisted that no one outside the Church had the right to dissolve any
marriage performed by Catholic clergy and considered by the Church to
be a sacrament.
Pavelić was aware that the mounting pressure from Stepinac and Marcone could mean trouble if it reached the Holy See; consequently, he
advised Helm and Siegfried Kasche, the German ambassador and an SS
officer, to stop the deportation of protected Jews, converts, and partners in
mixed marriages. Despite Pavelić’s explicit instructions, Kasche reported to
Germany that the final Judenaktion in Croatia would end in March 1943.89
Two thousand Jews were deported, but Jews in mixed marriages survived.
The archbishop directed his sermon at the Ustaše officials who had
ordered the imposition of the Nuremberg Laws on all Jews in NDH. The
Radio Vatican broadcast portrayed the archbishop as a “resolute soldier”
advocating moral justice and freedom.
The Files of Hans Helm, German Police Attaché in Zagreb
The files of Helm, the German police attaché in Zagreb, demonstrate
that the Nazis and the Ustaše leadership often identified Stepinac as a
such as Pavelić, Kvaternik, and many others—that they could find themselves in the same
predicament.
87. Review of Croatian History, 2, no.1 (2006), 47–72. A similar letter was sent to
Reichsführer SS [i.e., Himmler], the chief of police in Germany, NARA, Reich Central
Security Office (RSHA) 266–267-Amt VI, Amt IV, Berlin: Subject: Mixed Marriages in
Croatia, March 25, 1943.
88. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, pp. 598–99. Abromeit dealt with
these matters in cooperation with Helm, the German police attaché at the German Embassy
in Zagreb.
89. Yugoslav Information Center, “Adolf Eichmann’s Crimes in Yugoslavia,” Facts &
Views, 125 (1961), 1–14, here 8–9.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

“traitor.”90 For example, on December 29, 1941, Helm wrote to the office
of SS Stubaf Hanke, Einsatzgruppe Sipo and SD:
We were informed all along about political meddling of the Cleric
[Stepinac] in the internal affair of the country. He has connections in
every department, most specifically in education and he controls the
media. . . . The most significant news is that the Church in Croatia has
contacts with London and the Government in Exile. This approach
undertaken by the Church could be viewed as contrary to the interests of
the Third Reich and of the NDH. Our objective is to eliminate the influence of the Cleric [Stepinac]. . .91

Every year, the bishops of Croatia gathered in Zagreb for a meeting
that aimed at finding solutions to the pressing issues at hand. In 1941 the
bishops passed two resolutions concerning the situation of converted Jews:
first, the bishops would request that the NDH government give all
converts, including their immediate family members, Croatian citizenship;
and second, clergy would request protection of the converts’ assets.92 As a
follow-up to the anti-Jewish legal decrees on July 30, 1941, the authorities
sent the following circular:
The government of the NDH is aware that many Jews are registering
with the Catholic Churches requesting conversion to Catholicism. But
conversion to Catholicism would not have any impact on the status of
these individuals in relation to the State. The laws enacted on April 30,
1941, preclude Jews from Aryan rights.93

90. A letter dated March 24, 1943 (HDA, Hans Helm File, box 33, book XIV), states
that Nazi agents Mravunac and Gošnjak reported that Stepinac was the protector of Jews and
that he intended to close all the churches should the deportation of Jews of mixed marriages
continue. The file also contained two documents informing the authorities in Berlin that the
life of the archbishop was in danger; a similar letter was sent on March 25, 1943.
91. Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 2 Dokumeni I, 1–399 (1933–1943), p.
484: “Njemački obavještajac u Zagrebu javlja svojoj središnjici u Njemačkoj o postupicima
nadbiskupa Stepinca u zaštiti i obrani Židova u mješovitim brakovima sklopljenima u
Katoličkoj crkvi.” See also box 33, book VII, which has a good number of other letters that
demonstrate that many Partisans had close contacts with Stepinac. Most of this mail
circulated via the Vatican.
92. HDA, Ivo Politeo, Rezolucija Hrvatske biskupe konferencije o Židovima, Vrhovni
Sud NRH stup 6/1946, 863.
93. Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 2 Dokumeni I, 1–399, (1933–1943), p.
484: “Izvješće H. Helma, policijskog atašea pri Njemačkom poslanstvu u Zagrebu, o
mješovitim brakovima u NDH, protiv nadbiskupa Stepinca kao velikog prijatelja Židova, 25.”
See also HDA, MUP NDH, Pr. 21378/41, box 25.

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515

On August 28, 1942, Helm informed Berlin of Stepinac’s hostile
conduct toward National Socialism and the Ustaše. He specifically cited
where his sermons stressed “Mir” (peace), a subject that Helm thought
demoralized the spirit of fighting men.94 Helm also frequently addressed
the subject of mixed marriages in Croatia. He stressed that since it was
acceptable to the top echelon of the Ustaše hierarchy who had Jewish
wives—including Pavelić and Kvaternik—they had little motivation to
control the archbishop and the masses.95
On March 24, 1943, Helm related an incident reported by two agents
named Mravunac and Gošnjak. They stated that Stepinac was the protector of Jews. The file contained two documents informing the authorities in
Berlin that the life of the archbishop was in danger.
On March 25, 1943, Helm wrote to Himmler (Reichsführer SS, the
chief of police in Germany) on the subject of mixed marriages in Croatia:
The Archbishop promised full protection, sending a memorandum to
this effect to the Pope. . . . Although not as yet confirmed, the pope
intends to take up this matter with the Fuehrer. But since it is known
that Archbishop Stepinac is a great friend of the Jews, it can be assumed
that he would involve himself on their behalf.96

Due to the personal intervention of Stepinac and Marcone, many
converted Jews, like the previously mentioned Dujić, and those in mixed
marriages survived.
Stepinac’s Sermons
From a historical and moral perspective, Stepinac opposed Hitler’s and
Pavelić’s aspirations to divide the world into races and then annihilate those
they considered superfluous and unworthy. In 1940 in the Hrvatica, he summarized his thoughts regarding the outcome of totalitarian philosophies:

94. HDA, Hans Helm File, box 33-str 5-7, book XIII, pp. 17–34.
95. Hannah Arendt, A Report on the Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem (New
York, 1977), p. 184.
96. Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 2 Dokumeni I, 1–399 (1933–1943), p.
485: “Izvješće H. He1ma policijskog atašea pri Njemačkom poslanstvu u Zagrebu, o
mješovitim brakovima u NDH, protiv nadbiskupa Stepinca kao velikog prijatelja Židova, 25.
ožujka 1943.” See also HDA, Hans Helm File, subject Mixed Marriages Sent to Berlin,
25.3.1943. Report 266.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS
We are retreating to old desecrations. And with desecration there is a
return to brutality and slavery. Concentration camps, like in the old
establishment forced labor in which millions would be taken, all these are
new names for a very old principle, totalitarianism.97

Stepinac acknowledged that the Ustaše would be a liability to the
humanitarian fabric of the Croatian society for years to come, and he
detested the Nazis and the communists in equal measure. In his sermons,
he clarified his position regarding both fascism and communism as well as
attempted to shed light on topics that trouble the world. He emphasized
the following:
(1) the freedom and worth of the individual as an independent entity;
(2) the freedom and respect for religion;
(3) the freedom and respect for every race and nationality;
(4) the freedom and respect for private property as the basis of the personal freedom of the individual and independence of the family; and
(5) the freedom and respect for the right of every nation to its full development and to independence in its national life.98

These principles of justice and freedom of the individual and nations were
held by the archbishop throughout his life, and they were evident throughout the war years. For example, Shomrony testified that, shortly after the
Jewish synagogue in Zagreb was demolished, he was sent on an errand to
the archdiocese. As was his practice, he entered the cathedral and heard
Stepinac deliver a sermon that included the following words: “A House of
God, of whatever religion, is a holy place. Whoever touches such a place
will pay with his life. An attack on a House of God of any religion constitutes an attack on all religious communities.”99
At the end of May 1942, Stepinac addressed his congregation and
pointed out that it would be absurd to speak of a new world order, as
both communist and the Nazi philosophies did, if that order did not

97. Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga II, pp. 48–50: “Članak Osuda rasizma. i
ostalih suvremenih zabluda, kojim su katolički novinari upozorili javnost na pogubne
posljedice rasne ideologue, 18. svibrija 1938.” The article was republished in Hrvatica, 3,
March 1940.
98. HDA, Ivo Politeo, Predmet Stepinac.
99. HDA, Ivo Politeo, file of Dr. Stepinac. Amiel Shomrony’s testimonies are on file
in the Croatian National Archives. Shomrony had left Yugoslavia by the time of Stepinac’s
trial; however, he volunteered to return to Zagreb from Israel as a witness for the defense. In
the end, he did not testify in person because of urgent warnings by Politeo that he would be
arrested, and his testimony would remain unheard.

ESTHER GITMAN

517

value the human person: “each soul has its inalienable rights, which no
human power can or ought to limit.”100 He also declared that it would be
absurd to suggest that the Catholic Church was afraid of any human
force when defending the elemental rights of human beings and freedom
of conscience.
On October 25, 1942, Stepinac asked: “How then must we judge individuals who arrogantly behave as if God no longer exists on earth?” He
then declared:
Only one race really exists and that is the Divine race. Its birth certificate
is found in the Book of Genesis. . . . All of them without one exception,
whether they belong to the race of Gypsies or to another, whether they
are Negroes or civilized Europeans, whether they are detested Jews or
proud Aryans, have the same right to say “Our Father who Art in
Heaven!”101

Stepinac’s sermons reached an increasingly wider audience, which
angered the Nazis and the Ustaše; in time, he was marked as a traitor.
Rumors and correspondence circulated saying that he was dead. His followers knew that he was alive, but feared for his life; many in fact, predicted that Stepinac’s days in freedom were numbered.102
Politeo, in his legal defense summary of Stepinac in 1946, described
the power of Stepinac’s sermons in denouncing the atrocities and
defending human rights:
. . . they [sermons] were attended in masses not only by the Catholics but
even by those who otherwise did not go to Church. Those sermons were
spread, recounted, copied and propagated in thousands and thousands of
copies among the people and even penetrated to the liberated territory.
. . . They became an underground press, a means of successful propaganda against the Ustaši, a substitute for an opposition press.103

Although we have no direct knowledge of how Stepinac’s sermons
motivated individuals to act against their enemies, the level of attendance
100. Štambuk-Škalić et al., Proces Alojziju Stepincu, pp. 264–66.
101. HDA, Ivo Politeo, file A. Stepinac, fond, documents prepared for Yad Vashem.
See also O’Brien, Archbishop Stepinac, p. 19, and Phayer, The Catholic Church and the
Holocaust, p. 85.
102. HDA, MUP 3RH, I-49 and MUP RH, I-22.
103. NARA, RG 59, Lot file No. 62 D33, Legal Adviser Relating to War Crimes,
box 33 (location 250/49/25/7), pp. 12–13.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

and dissemination of Stepinac’s sermons and the number of Croats who
joined the Partisans—150,000, including Stepinac’s brother, Miško—can
in some measure be attributed to his condemnations of fascist ideology.
Stepinac’s Correspondence
As early as 1936, Stepinac supported Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi
Germany and Austria. As a young archbishop, in 1938, Stepinac founded
“Action to Aid Refugees.” To raise funds he sent a request to 298 eminent
Croats asking for help on behalf of the predominantly Jewish refugees:
Dear Sir, Due to violent and inhuman persecution, a large number of
people have had to leave their homeland. Left without means for a
normal life, they wander throughout the world. . . Every day, a large
number of emigrants contact us asking for intervention, for help in
money and goods. It is our Christian duty to help them. . . I am free to
address You, as a member of our Church, to ask for support for our fund
in favor of emigrants. I ask You to write Your free monthly allotment on
the enclosed leaflet.”104 Alojzije Stepinac, the Zagreb Archbishop.105

In the same year, Stepinac addressed a group of university students and
condemned the racist ideologies that prevailed throughout many parts of
Europe: “Love toward one’s own nation cannot turn a man into a wild
animal, which destroys everything and calls for reprisal, but it must ennoble
him, so that his own nation secures respect and love of other nations.”106
On January 11, 1939, he sent another fund-raising letter to the members of his archdiocese, in which he informed them that, every day, masses
of new refugees from Europe were flocking to the church with requests for
help. In his letter, the archbishop once again emphasized the Christian
duty to assist those in need.
Stepinac’s care for the refugees earned him the derogatory title
“judenfreundlich” (Jew lover) from the Nazis.
104. HDA, Congregatio de Causis Sanctorum, Copia Publica Trans. Proc. S. Virt. et
Mart. In the Kaptol Archive it is designated as CP, Arhiv Postulature (AP), Kaptol 31,
Zagreb, sv. CVIII, str. 3140 (preslik).
105. Ibid., AP, sv. C, str. 711 (preslik); spis je pronađen međ dokumentima izbjegle
vlade NDH u Leibnitzen, 1945. godine. Translation: A general letter from Archbishop
Stepinac at the beginning of WWII. This letter attests to the fact that Archbishop Stepinac
was not a Germanophile, fond of the Germans, but on the contrary, he did everything to
shield Jews and all others whom the Germans for whatever reason wanted to prosecute.
106. Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga II, p. 47.

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519

Archbishop Stepinac [of Croatia] and his entourage are “judenfreundlich” [friendly to the Jews], and therefore enemies of National Socialism.
The same Archbishop had been the protector of Jewish émigrés under
the Yugoslav regime, although he paid no attention to the misery of his
own people.107

A small representation of letters written by Stepinac to Pavelić and his
ministers demonstrates his fearless objections to their conduct. On May
22, 1941, he wrote to Artuković regarding the interpretation of the
antisemitic legislation:
But to take away all possibility of existence from members of another
nation or race and to mark them with the stamp of shame is already a
question of humanity and of morals. And moral laws have application not
only to the lives of individuals but also to those who rule the states. In
these days, general morality does not brand as ill-reputed those criminals
who have been released from prisons and who have been sentenced as
murderers. . . . Why treat in this way those who are members of another
race through no fault of their own?. . . Do we have the right to commit
this outrage on the human person . . . I ask you, Mr. Minister, to give
appropriate orders so that the Jewish laws and others similar to them (the
measures against the Serbs) are executed in such a way that the human
dignity and personality of every man is respected.108

In another letter, written in July and in September 1941, he protested to
Pavelić:
As an Archbishop and representative of the Catholic Church, I am free
to call your attention to some events that touch me painfully. I am sure
hardly anyone has the courage to point to them, so it is my duty to do so.
I hear from many various sides about the inhuman and cruel treatment of
non-Aryans. . .109

107. Freiburg im Breisgau, Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg (BAMA), Edmund
Glaise von Horstenau, RH 31III/5 bev, dt Gen. in Agram (Zagreb) Fliegermajor Josef
Donegani to Glaise, October 7. 1942.
108. HDA, RUR 252, Ivo Politeo Stepinac file, personal letter from Stepinac to
Artuković, May 22, 1941. Original letter in Archives of the Archbishopric, Zagreb, no.
30168. OMOT 12, pp. 21–22: “Pismo nadbiskupa Stepinca ministru unutarnih poslova
NDH A. Artukovicu, u kojem prosvjeduje protive progana Židova i odredbe vlasti da oni
moraju nositi židovski znak, 22 svibnja 1941.”
109. Gitman, “Rescue and Survival of Jews,” II:478, appendix 6.1.4: letter to the
Poglavnik Ante Pavelić. See also HDA, Antisemitske mjere: “Nokon izvršenja popisa Židova
u Hrvatskoj, donesane je odluka da svi Židovi prebivalistem u Zagrebu, bez obzira na vjeru
ispovijdaju moraju od 28. ovog mjesaca nositi na ljevoj strani prsa i leđa distinktina obilježaja

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

On March 6, 1943, the archbishop wrote another letter to Pavelić,
addressing the inhuman conduct of the Ustaše toward the Jews, in this
context Stepinac wishes to know whether their conduct was chosen by the
regime or imposed on them by a foreign power. He states firmly:
But if there is here [the anti- Jewish policy] the interference of a foreign
power in our internal and political life, I am not afraid if my voice and
my protest carry even to the leaders of that power; because the Catholic
Church knows no fear of any earthly power, whatever it may be, when it
is a question of defending the most basic rights of men.110

In his summary for Stepinac’s 1946 trial on charges of collaboration
with the enemy, Politeo emphasized how unpleasant Stepinac was to the
Ustaše regime and how adversely it was affected by his letters, his sermons,
and his 1943 BBC broadcast.
NDH in the Historiography of the Holocaust
Holocaust historiography in the countries of the former Yugoslavia has
focused heavily on the atrocities perpetrated by the Axis powers and their
local collaborators. After the war, the new Yugoslavian government established official Commissions for the Ascertainment of Crimes Committed
by the Occupiers and their Local Collaborators against the Jews. For this
purpose, they obtained testimonies from surviving Jews and others who had
information about the criminals. For Marshal Tito, the communist leader
of the postwar second Yugoslavia, the objective was the rehabilitation of
Yugoslavia by consolidating all the religious and ethnic groups under the
slogan “bratsvo jedinstvo” (brotherhood and unity). It was necessary to
punish those who provoked conflict among the various factions in the oncemore heterogeneous Yugoslavia. He aimed to consolidate these troublesome parties under the banner of communism. The first to be executed was
Draža Mihajlović, the Serb royalist leader. On the other hand, it was necessary to pardon those who had been “blind tools in the hands of their masters.”111 Tito realized that prolonged trials of criminals would be divisive;

. . . sa zvjezdom Siona Ž (Židov).” See also Georges Gueyraud, consul general charge du consulat de France à Zagreb to François Darlan, ministre secrétaire d’état aux affaires étrangeres,
MESURES ANTI-SÉMITES, in Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga II, p. 143.
110. Skalić-Štambuk, Kolanović, and Razum, eds., Proces Alojziju Stepincu, Dokumenti,
p. 164.
111. Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks, His Self-Portrait and Struggle with Stalin (London,
1953), p. 252.

ESTHER GITMAN

521

war criminals such as Pavelić and his ministers were allowed to pass through
Western countries without hindrance, so as to avoid retribution.
But after such a long and bloody war, a scapegoat had to be found from
among those who voiced objection to land redistribution, public schools, civil
marriages, and similar measures. Stepinac had objected to these initiatives
and adamantly refused to disassociate the Croatian Catholic Church from
the Holy See. Tito turned to the media to create propaganda that would
demonstrate that Stepinac embodied the evils of the Ustaše regime.112
In the 1990s, communist Yugoslavia disintegrated, and its archives were
opened to the general public. Some of the misconceptions about Stepinac
were clarified. But it took an additional eight years for the declassification of
U.S. intelligence and State Department records, under the Nazi War Crimes
Disclosure Act of 1998, to gain access to the diplomatic mail and other relevant sources of World War II. Historians began turning to subjects such as
the rescue of Jews by non-Jews, the rescue of Jews by other Jews, and Jewish
resistance as integral parts of the Holocaust. In recent years, Holocaust historiography has turned increasingly to its victims, in particular letting the
survivors tell their own stories. This redirection and broadening of research
assists in highlighting the proactive role played by individual Croats, the
Church, Italian authorities, and the Partisans in this period.
Portrayals of Stepinac in the Media
From 1945 to the 1990s, the only information that reached the western world from Yugoslavia was the news printed in the Yugoslav daily
newspapers, whose objective was to portray Stepinac as a collaborator of
the Ustaše and one whose aim was to rid the country of Serbs. Once
archival documents in the United States and other countries were declassified, historians began to correct and clarify the deceptions and misconceptions disseminated at first by the Serbian royal family, which escaped
from Yugoslavia to England, and later by historians and media controlled
by Tito’s communists.
Stepinac was concerned that the negative propaganda reaching the
Western world would be inflammatory toward the Church; thus he
attempted to spread the news about the atrocities in Croatia and the
efforts by himself and other clergy to alleviate the plight of the oppressed.
In September 1942 Monsignor Augustine Juretić left the NDH for
112. Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 257–58.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

Switzerland. Juretić had in his possession Stepinac’s strong criticism of
the activities at the Jasenovac concentration camp and a letter written by
the archbishop to Pavelić on February 24, 1943, that included the following sentence: “This is a shameful blot and crime which cries to heaven for
revenge, as the whole Jasenovac camp is a shameful fault for the Independent State of Croatia. . . .”113 In June 1943 Juretic provided copies of
a fifteen-page exposé in French, “The Catholic Episcopate in Croatia.”
He also supplied it to the coordinator of information at the U.S. Office
of Strategic Services (OSS), as well as to other allies. Juretić’s report
stressed that the Katolički list (formerly the official newspaper of the
archbishop) had become an organ of the Ustaše government and was no
longer a voice of the Church. The new editors frequently distorted
Stepinac’s words and even criticized papal encyclicals and pronouncements when it was to their advantage.114 That December, Juretić forwarded other material to the OSS, with the objective of reaching Allen
Dulles, then head of operations.115
Juretić apparently believed that Dulles would be aware of the situation
in the NDH and in a position to protect Stepinac’s reputation for high
moral standing, despite the malicious and erroneous accusations leveled
against the archbishop. It is not clear whether Juretić’s information was of
any interest to the OSS. The unfortunate fact is that Juretić’s mission was
at least in part a public relations project in which Stepinac’s activities had
to be brought to light. A confidential airmail dispatch, “On the Policy of
the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia,” sent by the American Embassy in
Cairo to the State Department on August 5, 1944, makes clear the type of
information reaching the public about Stepinac’s character:
The Church is accused of collaborating with the enemy, forcing conversions of Serbs to Catholicism in the manner of the Inquisition, of being
passive about helping the victims of the terror, and not sounding its clarion cry in the protest against the outrages.116

Although Stepinac could not be privy to U.S. diplomatic traffic, the lack
of publicity about Juretić’s exposé must have made the archbishop painfully
113. “Juretić Report,” NARA, RG 226, OSS·File No. 21782, pp. 3, 8.
114. Alexander, The Triple Myth, p. 82. On the criticism of papal pronouncements, see
“The Catholic Episcopate,” pp. 8–10. See also Goda, “The Ustaše,” p. 207.
115. NARA, RG 226, entry 210, box 94, 974345.
116. NARA, Microfilm 860H.40416/59, enclosure No. 181, from the American
Embassy, Cairo, August 5, 1944, concerning the policy of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia,
cover page.

ESTHER GITMAN

523

aware that Juretić’s account had never been released and that all the material entering the United States was classified. The power of Juretić’s message was also undercut by the reality that, despite their best efforts to alleviate suffering, Stepinac and other clergy could claim only limited success.
The Stepinac experience illustrates the observation made by Hilberg: “The
churches, once a powerful presence in Europe, reached the nadir of their
influence during World War II, unable as they were to maintain independence against the political order.”117
One of the most serious accusations leveled against Stepinac by
historians and his detractors was that in the early days of the war he failed
to issue a strong, formal, and loud condemnation of the Nazi and Ustaše
slaughter and genocide of the Jews. One reason can be attributed to the
Vatican’s instructions sent to Stepinac to be mindful of his words and
conduct in the interest of saving lives. This was especially true after the
vigorous efforts to defend Jews by the Catholic hierarchy in the
Netherlands were followed in 1942 by a roundup of all Jews, even longtime converts that included priests and nuns. The Dutch bishops
demonstrated great courage, but 79 percent of the country’s Jews—
110,000 individuals—were murdered. The Nazis were determined to
prevent similar clerical attempts elsewhere.118 On June 2, 1943, Pius XII
sent a circular to the Sacred College of Cardinals, advising that
Every word that We address to the responsible authorities and every one
of Our public declarations have to be seriously weighed and considered
in the interest of the persecuted themselves in order not to make their
situation unwittingly even more difficult and unbearable.119

The pope emphasized that one best assisted the oppressed by quietly
and persistently performing acts of rescue. Stepinac recognized the validity
of these instructions. He had to act with prudence and without ostentatious
protests, especially to prevent his replacement by a fervent Ustaše supporter
such as Ivan Šarić, archbishop of Sarajevo.120 Sizable documentation
supports Pius XII’s concern regarding a potential negative German reaction
to a formal and vocal objection on the part of the Catholic hierarchy.121
117. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945
(New York, 1993), p. 260.
118. Joseph L. Lichten, Question of Judgment: Pius XII & the Jews (Washington, DC,
1963. See also Peter White, “An Attack on Pope Pius XII,” Jubilee, June 1963, 14–17.
119. Alec Randall, The Pope, the Jews, and the Nazis (London, 1963), p. 18.
120. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 551.
121. Ronald J. Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Columbus, MO, 2000).

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German ambassador to the Vatican from
1943 to 1945, wrote in his memoirs:
Not even institutions of worldwide importance, such as the International
Red Cross or the Roman Catholic Church, saw fit to appeal to Hitler in
a general way on behalf of the Jews or to call openly on the sympathies
of the world. It was precisely because they wanted to help the Jews that
these organizations refrained from making any general and public
appeals; for they were afraid that they would thereby injure, rather than
help, the Jews.122

Why, then, should Stepinac have been expected to act differently?
Historians should also take into account the Vatican’s long relationship
with Croatia, extending back to December 1509, when Pope Julius II
declared that “the Head of the Catholic Church will not allow Croatia to
fall, for they are the Antemurale Christianitatis (shield and bulwark) of
Christianity.”123 He bestowed this accolade upon the Croats for their
tenacity and valor in the Balkans and throughout central Europe. More
recently, the position of the Roman Catholic Church in Yugoslavia was
placed under pressure during the interwar period. Demographically
Croatia was a heterogeneous society, although it had a Catholic majority.
But it also had a sizable Serbian Orthodox minority, which held political
control in Yugoslavia and thus posed a threat to Croatia’s independence.
Whether the Vatican was right or wrong, given the Ustaše regime’s
atrocities, to uphold the ancient promise not to let Croatia fall is beyond
the scope of this article.
In the 1950s, only a small number who followed Tito’s ideology were
permitted to write history, which was based on directives of the
Communist Party. One of them was Yugoslav historian Vladimir Dedijer,
who strongly attacked the conduct of the Vatican and indirectly Stepinac:
The Vatican’s conduct not only demonstrated a lack of care for human
lives, but in fact, the Pope not only did not lift a finger to improve
matters, but to the contrary showed in all his actions that he was only
concerned with the pacification of the Ustaša and with the furthering of
Catholicism in the Croatian part of the Balkans.124

122. White, “An Attack on Pope Pius XII,” qtd. in Randall, The Pope, the Jews, and the
Nazis, p. 18.
123. Pattee, The Case of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, pp. 6–7.
124. Vladimir Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican (Buffalo, NY, 1992), pp.
313–20.

ESTHER GITMAN

525

On another occasion, Dedijer wrote: “The Catholic Archbishop of
Croatia, Aloysius Stepinac, openly sided with the Germans and their
quisling Croatia. At a Church conference held later, he urged a resolution
in favor of collaboration.”125
Shelah, in his doctoral thesis, claims that, unlike many Yugoslav
historians of his generation, he does not think that Stepinac was a supporter of the Nazi regime. On the contrary, the documents demonstrate
that the Nazis thought of Stepinac not only as an adversary but also as an
outright enemy.126 When he began writing for Yad Vashem, Shelah’s tone
changed, and he became more critical:
There is no doubt that [Stepinac] worked behind the scenes, and towards
the middle of 1943 tried in public to save Jews and condemned the atrocities perpetrated by the regime. If not for his intervention and that of the
Vatican representative in Zagreb, it is possible that the Jews in mixed
marriages would have been sent to the death camp. But at the same time,
Stepinac cannot be absolved because, by his procrastination and public
expressions, he convinced the public that the Ustaše were a lesser evil
than the communists . . . Stepinac also failed to take action against
dozens of priests who willingly took part in the murders.127

American historian Stella Alexander acknowledges that “Stepinac was a
conscientious and brave man, of deep piety and considerable intelligence but
with a blinkered world view. In the end, one is left feeling that he was not
quite great enough for his role.”128 Tomasevich stated that several of
Stepinac’s actions “helped the Ustaše consolidate its power, especially his
immediate visits, on April 12, 1941, to Slavko Kvaternik, the head of the
Croatian Armed Forces, and on April 16, to Ante Pavelić, the Poglavnik.” He
also considers Stepinac’s circular letter of April 28, 1941, injurious, because he
urged the priests of his archdiocese to do their duty toward the new state.129
Croatian historians Ivo and Slavko Goldstein argue that until May
1942, Stepinac chastised Pavelić only in correspondence, instead of issuing
a strong public condemnation of the regime, and that Stepinac failed to
distance himself from the Ustaše. They wrote that “Stepinac was not

125. Ibid., p. 321.
126. Shelah, “Murder of Croatian Jews,” pp. 256–306.
127. Ibid., pp. 283–84.
128. Alexander, The Triple Myth, p. 3.
129. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 555. See also Katolički list, 16
(April 21, 1941).

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

afraid, he was a brave man; but because the Ustaši declared that they were
staunch Catholics, Stepinac searched to find their positive attributes.
Finally he discovered that they [Ustaši] forbade pornography in NDH.”130
It is clear that Shelah did not live long enough to have access to all the
documents available at present. However, that some historians write now
as if they, too, had no access to archives is surprising and highly
disappointing.
Conclusion
Some historians have argued that Stepinac’s sermons and correspondence with the Ustaše regime did not contribute to the rescue of Jews and
that a person in his position could have done much more. These statements are speculative because their claims cannot be evaluated or substantiated by facts. Can any historian rightfully claim that if Stepinac had acted
differently, the outcome would have been substantially different and more
Jews, Serbs, and others would have survived? The answer clearly is no. Several historians in recent years, among them the Australian William Rubinstein, contended that value judgments pronounced decades later are “ipso
facto highly suspect if not historiographically illegitimate.”131
The objective in presenting Stepinac here in his role as the head of the
Archdiocese of Zagreb is to demonstrate his unenviable position of being
between a rock and a hard place. He acted to the best of his abilities as a
loyal servant of the Roman Catholic Church and never abandoned his belief
in moral law as a guiding principle. His role and position encouraged him
to denounce at every opportunity the inhumanity of the Ustaše regime’s
laws and actions. Throughout the war years, Stepinac followed but one
maxim: only one race exists, and that is the human race created by God.

130. Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb, 2001), pp.
559–78, here p. 559: “Moglo bi se reći da je ‘Alojztje Stepinac bio čovjek visokih moralnih
standarda, snažnih strasti i uskog poltičkog horizonta. Bto je fanatično pobožan, beskrajno
odan katolićkoj crkvi i strasveno je mrzio komunizam. Bio je hrabar čovjek.’ Držanje
Katolićke crkve i Stepinca neraskidivo Je povezano s odnosom cijele katolićke crkve i Vatikana
prema nacizmu, odnosno fašizmu, a svi vatikanski arhivi o tim događajima još nisu otvoreni.
Nadbtskup Steptnac mogao je o nekim problemima odlučivati sukladno vlastitim stavovima i
inicijativama, ali je prije svega bio vjeran predstavnik i sljedbenik Vatikana.”
131. William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have
Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London, 1999), p. 206.

ESTHER GITMAN

527

APPENDIX A. Copy of 1942 document written by Crikvenica Jews regarding the
collection of monies in the name of Archbishop Stepinac. HDA, Odvjetnička Pisarnica I. Politeo, Predmet: A. Stepinac.

APPENDIX B. A copy of the testimony of Evelyn Waugh regarding Stepinac’s leadership of his clergy in protesting the persecution of Jews in 1941. Waugh, “Church
and State in Liberated Croatia,” South Slav Journal, 2, no. 4 (1979), 17–26. Repr.
in Juraj Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 3.

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ARCHBISHOP ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS

APPENDIX C. Excerpt from testimony of Dan Baram describing his rescue by
Stepinac. Repr. in Juraj Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 3, p. 566.

APPENDIX D. Excerpt from testimony of Danko Shtockhammer (rendered as “Dan
Stockhamer” in document) that notes Archbishop Stepinac’s role in his release
from a detention center. Repr. in Juraj Batelja, Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac, Knjiga 3,
p. 566.

ESTHER GITMAN

529

APPENDIX E. Copy of a document regarding Stepinac’s request to reissue a permit
that would enable the rescue of thirty-eight Jewish children. HDA, Ivo Politeo,
subject A. Stepinac, document 1188.

A Call to Action: John Courtney Murray, S.J.,
and the Renewal of American Democracy
FRANCESCA CADEDDU*
As a Jesuit and an American intellectual, John Courtney Murray
believed that U.S. society in the post–World War II era lacked a public
philosophy and that intellectuals could reformulate the societal consensus so crucial to the early Republic. Invoking St. Thomas Aquinas,
Murray formulated the concept of a city composed of democratic ideals
and believed that Catholics could challenge the academy to preserve this
city and the consensus that built it. Murray committed his life to work
within Catholic and other intellectual circles and to the interpretation
of U.S. democracy that could reveal the truths held by Americans.
Keywords: Catholic intellectuals; consensus; creative minority;
Fund for the Republic; Murray, John Courtney, S.J.

S

ince John Courtney Murray’s death in 1967, much has been debated
about the who, when, and what of his life: Murray’s Catholic identity,
his doctrinal reasoning, his theological perspectives, his enemies and
friends inside the Catholic hierarchy, and his legacy.1 In 2013, J. Bryan

*Dr. Cadeddu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari and a research
fellow at the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose “Giovanni XXIII” in Bologna, email:
cadeddu@fscire.it.
1. A decade later, Donald E. Pelotte published the biography John Courtney Murray.
Theologian in Conflict (New York, 1976). With the exception of Leon Hooper’s pioneering
The Ethics of Discourse: The Social Philosophy of John Courtney Murray (Washington, DC,
1987), readers had to wait about fifteen years before seeing Murray’s work collected by
Hooper in John Courtney Murray, Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism
(Louisville, KY, 1993) and Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray, S.J. (Washington, DC, 1994). On the contextualization of Murray and the
interpretation of his work, see Robert W. McElroy, The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray (New York, 1989); Robert P. Hunt and Kenneth L. Grasso, eds., John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation (Grand
Rapids, MI, 1992); Thomas P. Ferguson, Catholic and American: The Political Theology of
John Courtney Murray (Kansas City, MO, 1993); Thomas Hughson, The Believer as Citizen:
John Courtney Murray in a New Context (New York, 1993); Dominique Gonnet, La liberté
religieuse à Vatican II. La contribution de John Courtney Murray (Paris, 1994); Leon Hooper
and David T. Whitmore, eds., John Courtney Murray and the Growth of Tradition (Kansas

530

FRANCESCA CADEDDU

531

Hehir suggested that many of Murray’s works often are read not to understand the specific historical moment in which they were written, but rather
to identify definitions that can be used in the debates about the great issues
of American Catholicism today.2 If Murray is still discussed, it is because
the importance of his work transcends any interpretation of it.3
In 1969, Emmet John Hughes wrote a first, short biography of
Murray for The Priest. After describing Murray’s biographical details,
Hughes felt urged by an imaginary Murray to ask a precise question:
“Where did John Courtney Murray, S.J., live?”4 In his view, Murray “lived
in the America of many faiths and of free consciences—excited by its pluralism and exasperated by its confusion, convinced of its power and dubious of its purpose.” According to Hughes, within all the “confusion,”
Murray committed his work to the search of the “purpose.”5 The outcome
of Murray’s search is partially but substantially illustrated in his writings
collected under the title We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the
American Proposition. The volume conveys reflections on the role played by
the Catholic intellectual tradition in the articulation of a public philosophy
“capable of renewing American democracy.”6 But from where did Murray
conceive his specific contribution to this renewal? From where did he, as
an American citizen and a Catholic intellectual, bring his contribution to
the public discussion?

City, MO, 1996); and Thomas W. O’Brien, John Courtney Murray in a Cold War Context
(Lanham, MD, 2004).
2. J. Bryan Hehir, “Postconciliar Catholicism: What John Courtney Murray Did Say,
Did Not Say, and Might Have Said,” John Courtney Murray Lecture, Fordham University,
January 14, 2013. Retrieved on July 30, 2014, from http://www.fordham.edu/Campus_
Resources/enewsroom/topstories_2668.asp
3. A recent debate was opened by Michael Baxter with the publication of the article
“Murray’s Mistake: The Political Divisions a Theologian Failed to Foresee,” America, September 23, 2013, 13–18. Massimo Faggioli’s reply included the wider issue of the role of
American Catholics within the public arena; see Faggioli, “A View From Abroad: The
Shrinking Common Ground in the American Church,” America, February 24, 2014, 20–23.
Faggioli also criticized William T. Cavanaugh’s article, “The Root of Evil. Does Religion
Promote Violence?,” America, July 29–August 5, 2013, 11–14. Baxter and Cavanaugh published their response as “Reply to ‘A View From Abroad’ by Massimo Faggioli,” America,
March 31, 2014. Retrieved on April 2, 2014, from http://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/reply-view-abroad-massimo-faggioli.
4. Emmet John Hughes, “A Man for Our Season,” The Priest, 25 (1969), 389–402, here
393. Emphasis in original.
5. Hughes, “A Man,” p. 393.
6. Kenneth L. Grasso, “Introduction to Symposium: John Courtney Murray’s We Hold
These Truths at 50,” Catholic Social Science Review, 16 (2011), 67–71, here 68.

532

A CALL TO ACTION

FIGURE 1. John Courtney Murray, S.J., n.d. Image courtesy of the CUA University
Photographic Collection, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Washington, DC.

In 1993 Leslie Woodcock Tentler published her essay “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” strongly encouraging historians to make American Catholic history part of the national narrative:
“We are certainly concerned to know how the American environment
affected Catholics. But we seldom ask how Catholics affected American
society and culture.”7 The “balkanized state” of Catholic history is a symptom of the difficulties still hard to overcome in narrating a history where
more than one identity can be represented without one excluding the
other. Murray was a symbol of how the American environment affected
Catholics in the twentieth century and of how American Catholics contributed to the national character.
Born to a Scottish father and Irish mother, Murray was a son of the
newly created suburbs—living in Jamaica Village, Brooklyn, the so-called
“Diocese of Immigrants” (see figure 1). Even if he “became a hero and a
model during the 1960s,”8 his intellectual and public life started with the
7. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly, 45 (1993), 104–27, here 115. It was reprinted in the U.S. Catholic
Historian, 21, no. 2 (2003), 77–95.
8. Leon Hooper, “Citizen Murray,” Boston College Magazine, Winter 1995, 29–37.

FRANCESCA CADEDDU

533

publication of his doctoral dissertation in 1937,9 and his stature kept growing during the forties and the fifties.10 As an intellectual, Murray emerged
precisely when American Catholicism was on the verge of applying the
social, economic, and cultural power acquired during the New Deal into an
expression of an intellectual elite. New educational programs, better synergies between universities and professionals, a wider range of donors, new
Catholic journals—and the war—gave rise to this ambition.11 The cultural
movement that emerged from this unprecedented context soon became
part of the mainstream religious and secular intellectual environment.
Murray was part of it: not only did he serve as editor for the periodicals
Theological Studies and America, but he also participated in non-Catholic
debates about natural law, interfaith dialogue, the First Amendment,
authority, democracy, and even principles of national defense. When he
formulated his thesis on public consensus, natural law, and religious freedom, his articles were widely discussed and challenged.12

9. John Courtney Murray, Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s Doctrine on Supernatural, Divine
Faith: A Critical Exposition (PhD diss., Gregorian University of Rome, 1937), repr. in
Matthias Scheeben on Faith: The Doctoral Dissertation of John Courtney Murray, ed. D. Thomas
Hughson [Toronto Series in Theology, 29], (Lewiston, NY, 1987).
10. His fame did not grow without trouble—and suffering. In 1941 he became editor of
Theological Studies. After four years, he was appointed as religion editor of America and started
working on religious liberty and the church-state issue. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, pro-secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, did not regard his work with favor; in summer
1954 the Holy Office required Murray to correct what it considered to be erroneous views
expressed in his “On the Structure of the Church-State Problem,” in The Catholic Church in
World Affairs, ed. Waldemar Gurian and Matthew A. Fitzsimons (Notre Dame, 1954).
Murray was also ordered by his superiors to submit his works to Jesuit authorities prior to publication. He sent to the assistant to the Superior General Vincent McCormick two articles on
the church-state issue in 1955 and 1958; both were rejected. Murray had to wait five years—
and spend his summers trying to recover from acute angina—before his official rehabilitation,
when he was appointed a conciliar peritus at the Second Vatican Council in April 1963 through
the assistance of Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York. See Joseph A. Komonchak, “The
Silencing of John Courtney Murray,” in Cristianesimo nella Storia. Saggi in onore di Giuseppe
Alberigo, ed. Alberto Melloni, Daniele Menozzi et al. (Bologna, 1996), pp. 657–702.
11. Educational reform was assisted by the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (otherwise
known as the G. I. Bill). Among its dispositions, it offered to veterans the funds to cover college and university expenses. See Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher
Education in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1995), pp. 209–34; Elizabeth A. Edmonson,
“Without Comment or Controversy: The G.I. Bill and Catholic Colleges,” Church History,
71 (2002), 820–47.
12. The topics of interreligious dialogue and church-state relations stimulated intense
and strong debates. Encouraged by Archbishop Amleto Cicognani, apostolic delegate to the
United States, Francis Connell began opposing in 1943 the interreligious cooperation advocated by Murray and other Jesuits as a way to address the social difficulties caused by World
War II. In 1950 Connell was joined by Joseph Fenton, his colleague at The Catholic Univer-

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Murray was a Catholic and an American intellectual. As Hughes
observed in the passage quoted above, he felt exasperated by the “confusion” in the United States; he was convinced of the nation’s power but
remained dubious of its purpose. However, each of the two intertwined
aspects of his identity affected the American religious and secular milieu.
According to George Marsden, “the mid-twentieth century was a time of
tremendous optimism” as well as “an era of great cultural anxiety and
uncertainty.”13 The “Greatest Generation” linked the virtues and uniformity of the communities and of traditional morality and religion with the
cold war, the bomb, and mass culture. Murray’s thought reflected the spirit
of this time in America. He remained positive about the potential of the
American historical experience but thought that it could only be possible
through the definition of the only antidote to uncertainty: the truths held
by the Americans since the Founding era. This article aims to show from
where and how Murray articulated the role of those he regarded as the preservers of these truths. The concept of public consensus highlights how
Murray understood the engagement of intellectuals in society and how this
was reflected in his personal participation in intellectual debates.
Exploring the Meaning of Public Consensus
When Theological Studies was founded in 1939, the list of Catholic
periodicals was rich. Even if the Americanist crisis had restricted the cultural and intellectual Catholic panorama,14 new journals were printed in the
thirties, and some of the long-standing ones began to focus more closely on
methodology, research trends, and pedagogy.15 Considering the state of the
sity of America, and by George Shea in the debate against Murray’s view on church-state relations, which proposed a shift from the dichotomy thesis/hypothesis. In 1953, as a reaction to
the Jesuit’s position, Ottaviani gave the speech “Doveri dello Stato cattolico verso la religione”
(translated as “Church and State: Some Present Problems in the Light of the Teaching of
Pope Pius XII”), stating the legitimacy of the Catholic state. Murray responded by commenting on the speech “Ci riesce,” given by Pius XII on December 1953: he described Pius XII’s
speech as a public correction of the views expressed by Ottaviani. From that time on, Ottaviani worked to undermine Murray’s work.
13. George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (New York,
2014), pp. x, xii.
14. For an analysis of the impact of the Great Crisis and the issues involved, see Gleason, Contending with Modernity, pp. 283–304; Thomas McAvoy, The Great Crisis in American
Catholic History, 1895–1900 (Chicago, 1957).
15. See, for example, the debate that emerged within the pages of The Catholic Historical Review during the thirties over the teaching, methodology, and philosophy of history, as illustrated by Alberto Melloni in “From a Catholic Identity to an American View:
Historical Studies, Reviews, and Fundamentals in Articles on Late Modern and Contem-

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research in U.S. Catholic media, it is difficult to ascertain the precise role of
these journals in the intellectual growth of American Catholics and their
participation in the public arena. But according to a preliminary study published in 1971 by Mary Lonan Reilly on the activities of the Catholic Press
Association,16 the efforts of the Catholic media corresponded to a new attitude, namely a will to gain a clearer position and a louder voice within a pluralist society.17 Moreover, Catholic journals managed to face the competition with the secular journals that covered religious issues with the added
capacity of tuning into the needs and the curiosities of the readers on specific issues related to the double American/Catholic identity. The variety of
publications showcased a variety of voices, which “served the purpose of
taking a lot of [Catholic] people away from their inferiority complex,” and
openly declared the will to participate in the shaping of public opinion.18
Murray treasured his role as editor for the Jesuit periodicals America
and Theological Studies to promote a plurality of voices on multiple issues.19
He started a series of reflections on interreligious and interconfessional
dialogue, and subsequently fostered the debate on religious liberty and
church-state relations. Surrounded by several Catholic scholars who studied in depth the theological, political, and social aspects of these issues, he
perceived the demand for a deeper and more self-conscious scholarship.
Murray’s prolific work as a theologian and his cutting-edge perspectives on
American Catholicism transformed him into one of the mid-century’s
most public Catholic figures. The well-known cover story published on
December 12, 1960, by Time magazine was not only an expression of the
regard of his old friend Henry Luce, the publisher, but it was also a public
recognition of Murray’s efforts in reconciling Catholic and American histories under the same national narrative—and it was not an accident that
the article was published during the preparatory period of the Second Vatican Council. His most famous attempt toward reconciliation (and rehabilitation) was the volume We Hold These Truths. It was published in 1960
porary Europe,” The Catholic Historical Review, 101, Centennial issue 2 (2015), 123–55,
here 140−46.
16. Mary Lonan Reilly, A History of the Catholic Press Association, 1911–1968
(Metuchen, NJ, 1971).
17. During the thirties, the expansion of the Catholic media involved journals, newspapers, newsletters, and radio programs such as The Catholic Hour. On the impact of The
Catholic Hour on the Catholic and non-Catholic imaginary, see Mark Massa, Catholics and
American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York,
1999), pp. 82–101.
18. Reilly, A History, p. 113.
19. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray, pp. 5–13.

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A CALL TO ACTION

before Election Day, but most of its popularity came only after John F.
Kennedy’s election. It still represents one of the most striking pieces of evidence for American Catholic awareness of the U.S. philosophical and
political questions of that time. The book is a symbol of what Murray
shared with the intellectual group that Robert Cuervo later labeled as the
“believing skeptics.” They held a common perception of their time as a
moment of crisis, a moral vacuum created by the events of the decade they
had just left behind. 20 They thought that it was not only possible but also
necessary to re-establish a source for consensus to overcome the crisis, in
order to renew the equilibrium of E pluribus unum. Murray and his contemporaries conceived the search for a public philosophy as a tool that
could be employed against any despotic deviance from democracy—such as
the German Enabling Act of 1933—and that could act as a barrier against
the social and biological control that made racism a devastating reality.
Although anti-Catholic resentment still endured,21 and interconfessional and interreligious initiatives were encountering never-ending obstacles from communities,22 Murray looked at the Founding era of the United
States for the ultimate basis of knowledge and principles on which to
rebuild public life after the cataclysm of World War II. Following Clinton
Rossiter’s work, he did not find in the early Republic the golden age of a
pluralist yet harmonious society that drew on the Bible as a common
source, but he considered it a precious reference that could be used to confront the course of the American Republic of his time.23 He realized that
the consensus of the Founding Fathers was actually grounded in the compatibility of the dominant concept of (religious) freedom with the “Protestant” theology of the secular sovereignty—and pluralism was tolerated as
20. Robert F. Cuervo, “John Courtney Murray and the Public Philosophy,” in John
Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation, pp. 67–88.
21. See, among the others, the eight articles published by Harold E. Fey in the Christian Century between October 1944 and January 1945, and the famous volumes written by
Paul Blanshard: American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston, 1949), and Communism,
Democracy and Catholic Power (Boston, 1951).
22. John Courtney Murray, “Current Theology: Christian Co-operation,” Theological
Studies, 3 (1942), 413–31; “Current Theology: Co-operation. Some Further Views,” Theological Studies, 4 (1943), 100–11; “Current Theology: Intercredal Co-operation—Its Theory and
Its Organization,” Theological Studies, 4 (1943), 257–86; “To the Editor [Reply to Paul Hanly
Furfey],” Theological Studies, 4 (1943), 472–74; “On the Problem of Co-operation: Some Clarifications. Reply to Father P. H. Furfey,” American Ecclesiastical Review, 112 (1945), 194–214.
23. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths. Catholic Reflections on the American
Proposition, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD, 2005), p. 46. Rossiter was among the eight “eminent
Americans” chosen in the election year of 1960 for Life magazine’s sponsored discussion on
“The National Purpose.” See Life, May 23, 1960.

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an inner structure of a single culture. Nonetheless, in Murray’s eyes the
success of the American experience was represented by a form of government conceived as an instrument of contribution to common life and of
consent on the way it ruled. Government was therefore strongly held in the
hands of the people: E pluribus unum.
The consensus described by Murray had nothing in common with the
policy consensus of interest politics, where powerful groups influence both
the economy and the decision-making process for their own profit. Nor
was it the consensus found in The Federalist Paper no. 5524 : Murray
thought that the generalization of America’s genius, spirit, and moral character made by Publius could no longer be embraced. In Murray’s words,
Protestant Christianity, “especially in its left wing,” failed to secure the
continuous prosperity of the public consensus by denying the natural law
that had inspired it since the Declaration of Independence. The eighteenth-century “law of nature” proved not to be the right ground for the
development of a pluralistic society based on rights and freedoms because
it led to the illusion of liberal individualism. This alienation had endured
until the contemporary age, but Catholicism could actively contribute to
the renewal of the original ideals, thanks to the preservation of the principles and the traditions of natural law.25 Moreover, natural law was a key
point in the dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. With regard to
the moral issues faced by both groups, it offered an exit strategy from the
theological consensus that was rejected by the Catholic Church and considered unfeasible by Murray himself.
Murray believed that Americans held some undeniable truths, which
preceded any form of public consensus yet composed its substance. Those
truths were the essence of what a Catholic theologian could ambiguously
call “natural law”26—the Western heritage of law or “the philosophia peren24. “I must own that I could not give a negative answer to this question, without first
obliterating every impression which I have received with regard to the present genius of the
people of America, the spirit which actuates the State legislatures, and the principles which
are incorporated with the political character of every class of citizens. I am unable to conceive
that the people of America, in their present temper, or under any circumstances which can
speedily happen, will choose, . . . men who would be disposed to form and pursue a scheme
of tyranny or treachery”: James Madison, quoted in Kenneth L. Grasso, “We Held These
Truths: The Transformation of American Pluralism and the Future of American Democracy,” in John Courtney Murray, ed. Hunt and Grasso, pp. 89–115, here p. 93.
25. Murray, We Hold These Truths, p. 55.
26. On the plurality of meanings, see John Finnis, “Natural Law: The Classical Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, ed. Jules L. Coleman,
Kenneth Einar Himma, and Scott J. Shapiro (Oxford, 2002), pp. 1–60.

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A CALL TO ACTION

nis, whose origins go back to Heraclitus and to the greatest of Greek
philosophers and Roman jurists, and whose developed expression is found
in St. Thomas Aquinas and the later Scholastics.”27 Consensus was subject
to history; it was a matter of experience. Natural law was a historically
embodied moral tradition that shaped public consensus. Therefore, Murray
appealed to the doctrine of natural law as “a point of contact between two
communities which stand in a relation of mutual suspicion to each other,
and yet share enough of a common heritage to offer a basis for overcoming
that suspicion.”28 He adapted the national narrative to the exigencies of his
religious and national community; both communities were in fact struggling
to find a path to a historical narrative less grounded in conflict.
Murray undertook the task of exploring, analyzing, and writing about
the meaning of the public consensus within U.S. history as a way to fill the
moral vacuum created by, in his view, the loss of the dominant guidance by
Protestants and the Catholic community not yet attaining leadership on
such issues. It was Murray’s opinion that, through the renewal of the principles of the natural law preserved by Catholics, Americans could renovate
the ancient bond that brought them to the Declaration of Independence
and to the Constitution. But to make the Catholic commitment effective,
there was also the need to understand who could discuss and communicate
these truths. It was necessary to identify those who could understand the
state of crisis, find a solution, and enforce it.
Renewing the Tradition: American Catholics as a Creative Minority
The debate on the need for a specific intellectual elite within Catholicism reached its symbolic peak in 1960, when Frank L. Christ and Gerard
E. Sherry edited their volume American Catholicism and the Intellectual
Ideal.29 More than a decade earlier, between 1946 and 1950, John Tracy
Ellis and his school at Catholic University had opened the field to new,
comprehensive publications on the Catholic intellectual community, starting with the most influential scholarship on the Americanist and modernist periods.30 Christ and Sherry gained momentum and collected a
27. Murray, We Hold These Truths, p. 272.
28. Jean Porter, “In the Wake of a Doctrine: A Reassessment of the Doctrine of the
Natural Law as Developed in We Hold These Truths,” in John Courtney Murray, ed. Hooper
and Whitmore, pp. 24–40, here pp. 38–39.
29. Frank L. Christ and Gerard E. Sherry, eds., American Catholicism and the Intellectual
Ideal (New York, 1961).
30. Gleason, Contending with Modernity, p. 284. See, in particular, the seminal article by
John Tracy Ellis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” Thought, 30 (1955), 351–88.

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selection of writings published between the First Provincial Council of
Baltimore of 1829 and 1960. They realized how the path had been
enriched by works on the topic, particularly in “the aftermath of World
War II [which] brought no discernible break in the pattern of Catholic
scholarship.” During those years, “some bishops, priests and laymen questioned whether much progress had yet indeed been made,” and the debate
began with names such as “Bishop Wright, Tracy Ellis, John Cavanaugh,
John Kane, John Courtney Murray, and Gustave Weigel.”31 Between 1946
and 1958 Murray’s name is among the few listed frequently. His contribution to the debate is best demonstrated in the following excerpts from two
of his articles. The first, “Reversing the Secularist Drift,” was published in
1949 in the journal Thought,32 and the second, “Special Catholic Challenges,” was published by Life magazine in 1955.33
In “Reversing the Secularist Drift” Murray’s ideal of the Catholic
intellectual arises from his analysis of the perils faced by postwar Western
societies. He issues a monitum to his fellow Catholic thinkers: given “the
drift, as described by P. de Lubac . . . toward an atheism that consciously
sets out to be ‘positive, organic, constructive,’” as “a positive new ideal—a
humanism without God,” what kind of counteraction could Catholic
thinkers launch? In his view, “American culture [was] being forced more
explicitly to formulate its own premises and goals,” and to understand “how
much [democracy was] under the intellectual guidance of traditional
Christian principle.” In the attempt “of reversing the drift, of altering the
secularist climate,” Murray offers a few suggestions, strongly based on the
resistance against “the temptation of Thabor,” through the action of
Catholic colleges and universities. He singles out three basic sources: the
first is the cultivation of a higher number of motivated scholars—not just
“good Catholics” but also good intellectuals; the second is the cooperation
between priests and laity in the religious and apostolic formation; and the
third is the strengthening of the Catholic Commission on Intellectual and
Cultural Affairs (CCICA). The CCICA was “a coalition of intellectuals”
who aimed to “change the attitude toward the Church and scholarship.”
The group “sought to draw in the best and brightest Catholics in the coun-

31. Christ and Sherry, introduction to “The Fourth Period 1946–1958,” American
Catholicism, p. 133.
32. John Courtney Murray, “Reversing the Secularist Drift,” Thought, 24, no. 1 (1949),
36–46.
33. John Courtney Murray, “Special Catholic Challenges,” Life, December 26, 1955,
144–46; also published as “Challenges Confronting the American Catholic,” Catholic Mind,
57 (1959), 196–200.

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A CALL TO ACTION

try, in and out of academia, to aid in rebuilding the Church and the world
after the catastrophic losses of the world war.”34 Murray’s long engagement
in the activities of the commission has recently been extensively documented by Patrick J. Hayes, who highlights the way Murray “lived what he
believed”35: he committed himself to the rethinking of the role of intellectuals and acted to make it a reality. He worked strenuously for the CCICA
to become a synthesis of the “American Christian Summa of minds,” in
order to guarantee the accordance of the disciplines and to pursue the
intellectual apostolate needed for the preservation of what Murray termed
the City—“an order of democratic institutions and culture.”36
In “Special Catholic Challenges,” Murray advocates thoroughly for
the need of cooperation between priests and the laity. He looked at it as
the only antidote to both clericalism and anticlericalism, for both lead to
the exclusion of the laity from sharing responsibilities and from playing an
active role in the Church. But Murray goes further, adding a charge to the
Catholic intelligence: “the task of helping to clear the atmosphere of its
smothering anti-intellectualism.”37 Murray was thus intervening in the
ongoing debate about American and Catholic anti-intellectualism, as
interpreted by Ellis’s seminal essay “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life.” Whereas Ellis’s work was a strong historical denouncement of
what had not worked within American Catholicism for the development
of an intellectual elite, Murray took a more proactive line: the Catholic
scholar must face the challenge of avoiding “the divorce of religion from
the reason of man” and enforce the presence of “Catholic doctrine, and the
philosophies it has inspired, [that were] still conspicuously absent from the
university.”38 It was a call for a sounder intellectual apostolate.
During the same year, Murray published two other works dedicated to
the issue of intellectualism that revealed his “great design” for American
Catholics. The first, The Christian Idea of Education, focuses on the need to
convey the harmony between the “liberal life” and the Christian life into the
school system, enforcing the synthesis of the “civilized intelligence” and the
“unity of truth” into a “Christian humanism.”39 This was an idea that
34. Patrick J. Hayes, A Catholic Brain Trust: The History of the Catholic Commission on
Intellectual and Cultural Affairs, 1945–1965 (Notre Dame, 2011), p. 3.
35. Ibid., p. 19.
36. Murray, “Reversing the Secularist Drift,” p. 37.
37. Murray, “Challenges Confronting the American Catholic,” p. 200.
38. Ibid., p. 199.
39. The book was based on the speech “The One River of Truth,” which was given at
St. Louis University in November 1955; Washington, DC, Georgetown University, Lauinger

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541

Murray shared with his Georgetown University colleague Rudolf Allers and
involved the reformation of the teaching of philosophy. Looking at the
work that Origen did with the School of Alexandria, they felt the need to
reconcile reason and sense experience with that of faith and spirit. They
realized that the unity of truth could not be separated from culture—civilization—and that philosophical inquiry was the only way to reach it.40
The second article is the most enlightening of the two. In “Catholics
in America—A Creative Minority?”41 Murray adapts Arnold Toynbee’s
concept of creative minority for the history of the Catholic minority in the
United States: Murray explicitly assimilated Toynbee’s language to elucidate what Catholics would contribute to the American experience. At the
outset, Catholics are defined as a creative minority:
America is made up of minorities. This is a fact of politics, even religiously. Protestantism in this country is a statistical majority; but sociologically there are three minority religious groups. If cult and culture,
religion and civilization are closely related, the question of their cultural
creativity is to put to all three minority groups.42

Toynbee’s work at that time was popular. His idea of creative minority
was far more complex than Murray’s. However, if it is taken out of the systematic analysis offered in the volumes of A Study of History and applied to
the specific context of the American socio-religious dynamics of the 1950s,
it reveals a great deal about Murray’s project for U.S. Catholics.
Inspired by the work of H. G. Wells,43 Toynbee argued that each society contains a minority of creative personalities, of pioneers that contribute
to the growing civilization. He believed that the uncreative, vast majority of
the members of society were “the fundamental cause of the crisis with which
our Western Civilization is confronted in our day”44; thus he assumes that
the creative minority will be able to provide leadership to resolve the crisis.
Library, Special Collections, John Courtney Murray Papers (hereafter JCMP), folder 587,
box 8; see the edited text in John Courtney Murray, “The Christian Idea of Education,” in
The Christian Idea of Education: Papers and Discussions, ed. Edmund Fuller (New Haven,
1957), pp. 152–63.
40. For a wider view of the debate on the Scholastic method, see Hayes, A Catholic
Brain Trust, pp. 226–28.
41. John Courtney Murray, “Catholics in America—a Creative Minority?,” Catholic
Mind, 53 (1955), 590–97.
42. Ibid., p. 590.
43. H. G. Wells, Democracy under Revision (London, 1927).
44. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London, 1955), 3:242.

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A CALL TO ACTION

Therefore, within society, he identifies some “superior personalities” whose
actions turn a primitive society into a civilization and cause a civilization to
grow.45 That growth, in his opinion, could only be engendered by practice
or by imitation, so that the uncreative majority could be induced to follow
automatically the flux of change, because “a creative minority’s mission is to
perform its work of creation, not just for itself, but for the benefit of the
whole of the society to which it belongs.”46
In line with the historian’s view, Murray believed that Catholics were
the next American creative minority. He found all the conditions of the
Catholic’s “creative feat, unique in history”: “bishops, priests and people
met all the five challenges which Toynbee list[ed] as stimuli to creativity—
a hard country, new ground, pressures, penalization, etc.”47 Moreover,
Catholics had built a well-established Church whose condition of independence fully corresponded to what Pius XII had noted as the purpose of
concordats. If this independent relation with the state was allowed, the way
was cleared of any possible source of instability: anti-Catholicism—the
most public challenge to American Catholicism—was no longer a problem.48 Therefore, the American identity of Catholics could be taken for
granted, and the real questions could be posed.
What identified the creativity of the Catholic minority? Murray’s idea
is based on the Catholic system of education—“the greatest religious
achievement in America”—and on the Christian family—“a shining light
in a world that is infidel.” Both institutions could contribute to the maintenance of a strong traditional, religious, and moral commitment, while
ensuring not just the stability within the Catholic community but also new
suggestions for the enrichment of American society as a whole. This vision
reveals Murray’s familiarity with the (Christian) conservative environment
of the 1950s, which based a significant part of the definition of the American way of life on the combination of education and family.49

45. Ibid., p. 243.
46. Toynbee, A Study, 9:346.
47. Toynbee lists “blows” as the fifth type of stimulus.
48. Murray mainly expressed his position on the issue in “Religious Liberty: The Concern of All,” America, February 7, 1948, 513–16; “The Catholic Position: A Reply,” American
Mercury, September 1949, 274–83, 637–39; “Review of American Freedom and Catholic Power,
by Paul Blanshard,” Catholic World, June 1949, 233–34; “Paul Blanshard and the New
Nativism,” Month, new ser. 5 (1951), 214–25.
49. The combination of education, family, and Americanness are very typical aspects of
the U.S. conservative political thought of the fifties, broadly represented by the historiographical school of consensus. As Joseph Chinnici recently wrote, “Cold war ideology and a focus

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The article also reveals Murray’s sharp answer to the problem that
divided the Catholic academia of the 1950s: the relation between Americanism and intellectualism. As Hofstadter has clearly demonstrated in
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the anticommunist crusade of the late
1940s had, among its side effects, the diffusion of resentment against intellectuals and intellectualism, especially among right-wing critics and politicians. In his book, Hofstadter analyzes the issue of anti-intellectualism
from the origins of the nation to the emergence of the phenomenon in the
electoral campaign of 1952, rubbing salt into the wound of the relation
between access to, and success in, education and progress.50
Murray experienced this epoch from the side of academia, as a
Catholic and as an intellectual. In 1955, the public querelle with Paul Blanshard was still in the air, and he clearly felt the exigency to deconstruct the
widespread idea that being Americanist meant being anticommunist and
consequently anti-intellectual.51 To fulfill the task, it was necessary for him
to revitalize public philosophy and reconcile the learned with the masses,
the elite with the people. However, this reconciliation could only be
achieved through changes in the nature of intellectuals, who held the
public philosophy but ironically were isolated from society. Following
Francis G. Wilson, who believed that “the transitions of society can be
marked by the changing character of the intellectuals,” Murray called for
men “who will live the tension between the actualities of secularized intellectual life and the ideals of Christianized intelligence.”52
The re-creation of a public philosophy required more time. According
to Murray’s interpretation of national history, the U.S. public philosophy
within the “Christian climate” of the eighteenth century was derived from
the tradition of natural law—the source of the ideas of justice, freedom,

on the family unit with the father at the head went hand in hand.” Joseph P. Chinnici, “The
Cold War, the Council, and American Catholicism in a Global World,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 30, no. 2 (2012), 1–24.
50. In 1952 the witch hunt had begun to affect universities in particular, and the victory
of Dwight Eisenhower was greeted by Time magazine as the symbol of the “unhealthy gap
between the American intellectuals and the people”; see Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963), p. 4.
51. On the plurality of reactions of American Catholics to McCarthyism, see Massa,
Catholics and American Culture, pp. 57–82.
52. Murray, “Catholics in America,” pp. 596–97, here p. 597. Murray expressed his
views on freedom within the university and its relationship to communism, truth, and consensus in his correspondence with Robert M. MacIver, director of Columbia University’s
American Academic Freedom Project. See folder 147, box 2, JCMP.

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A CALL TO ACTION

human law, and divine law—and of the limitation of the state. But looking
at the postwar United States, he found that “the public philosophy ha[d]
been eroded, eclipsed, discarded. The very idea of a public philosophy
[was] alien. It [was] regarded with incomprehension, even with fear.”
Therefore, he thought that “the great experiment of the American constitutional commonwealth” was not intelligible and could not be made to
work except by those men who possessed “the public philosophy within
whose context it was conceived.” Catholics were those men, because he
knew that this was “our philosophy, our tradition.”53
To understand what Catholics could do to re-create that tradition,
Murray relied on two of the most outstanding intellectuals of his time,
Walter Lippmann and Adolf Berle. With Lippmann, Murray shared two
propositions. The first one is the distinction between the history of
Anglo-Saxon liberalism and that of Continental liberalism. The research
on order that guided Lippmann from 1938 to the publication in 1955 of
his Essays in the Public Philosophy originated from the need to understand
totalitarian “deviance.” He interpreted totalitarian “counterrevolution”
against liberal democracy as a product of the inefficient reaction of AngloSaxon liberalism to French liberalism: whereas the former resulted in the
conception of liberal constitutional democracy, the latter ended in “a
morbid course of development into totalitarian conditions.”54 Murray
articulated the same distinction in 1952, but preferred the more meaningful term Jacobinism to French liberalism. Second, the two intellectuals
believed that the deficiency of the modern liberal democratic state in
fighting against the counterrevolution/Jacobinism was due to a crisis in
the effectiveness of the public philosophy. They realized that public philosophy was no longer capable of giving a common foundation to the
public discourse. Therefore, there was a need for renewing what was

53. Murray, “Catholics in America,” p. 594.
54. Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston, 1955), p. 63. Lippmann’s
interpretation of the two forms of liberalism was developed by Murray in “How Liberal Is
Liberalism?,” America, April 6, 1946, 6–7; “Separation of Church and State,” America,
December 7, 1946, pp. 261–63; “Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on
Church and State in the Light of History,” Theological Studies, 10 (1949), 177–234; “The
Church and Totalitarian Democracy,” Theological Studies, 14 (1952), 525–63; “Leo XIII on
Church and State: The General Structure of the Controversy,” Theological Studies, 14 (1953),
1–30; “Leo XIII: Separation of Church and State,” Theological Studies, 14 (1953), 145–214;
“Leo XIII. Two Concepts of Government,” Theological Studies, 14 (1953), 551–67; “Leo XIII.
Two Concepts of Government: Government and the Order of Culture, Theological Studies,
15 (1954), 1–33; “Leo XIII and Pius XII. Government and the Order of Religion,” in
Hooper, Religious Liberty, pp. 49–125.

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already known but forgotten, the essence of the historical experience of
the United States: the tradition of natural law:
This philosophy is the premise of the institutions of the Western society,
and they are, I believe, unworkable in communities that do not adhere to
it. Except on the premises of this philosophy, it is impossible to reach
intelligible and workable conceptions of popular election, majority rule,
representative assemblies, free speech, loyalty, property, corporations and
voluntary associations.55

Berle offered to Murray the vital step of shifting from concept to
agent. It emerges in one of the three chapters newly edited for the volume
that brought Murray to the attention of a wider public, We Hold These
Truths. In his collection of lectures given in 1958 at Princeton and later
published in the volume Power without Property,56 Berle translated into a
secular economic language what Murray and Lippmann had stated some
years before. Even if he did not use natural law as a key concept, he
adopted Lippmann’s idea of consensus as a “body of doctrine which has
attained wide, if not general acceptance,” and which is not spontaneous
but “is the product of a body of thought and experience.”57 However, from
Murray’s point of view, the innovative aspect of Berle’s analysis was the
identification of the depositaries of the consensus. Berle first stresses the
difference between public opinion and public consensus: “public opinion
is the specific application of tenets embodied in the public consensus to
some situation which has come to general consciousness.”58 Consequently, in his view, the guardians and agents of consensus can only be the
people able to influence the public opinion and its debates, such as university professors, specialists, responsible journalists, and respected politicians who “are thus the real tribunal to which the American system is
finally accountable.”59 The real challenge for Murray was to see how the
high and broad generalities of this public philosophy could fit within the
practical affairs of a modern state. Berle gave him a key to better apply the
Thomistic idea of “the wise”—that is, those dedicated to the truth. Thus
the problem of Catholic intellectuals as well as other American intellectuals was presented.

55. Hooper, Religious Liberty, p. 101.
56. Adolf A. Berle, Power without Property: A New Development in American Political
Economy (New York, 1959).
57. Murray, We Hold These Truths, p. 105.
58. Ibid., p. 106.
59. Ibid.

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A CALL TO ACTION

A Court of Reason to Strengthen the Fabric of the Nation
Berle and Murray shared more than just a common view on the wise
already mentioned. They both participated in the activities of the Center
for the Study of the Democratic Institutions (CSDI) located in Santa Barbara, a think tank established by Robert Maynard Hutchins for the Fund
for the Republic.
When the Ford Foundation established the Fund for the Republic in
1952, its objective was “to assist the promotion of a national security based
on freedom and justice.”60 The Fund examined the tendency of communism to disrupt free nations, the effects of international politics on domestic hate and suspicion, the controversial effects of the fight against domestic communism, and the meaning of freedom and justice in the United
States so that the vision of a “free, just and unafraid America” could be
restated.61 Its activities had to be “research-oriented, educational, dedicated to the study—by itself and others—of the strengths and weaknesses
of American democracy.”62 Ultimately, the foundation provided the first
$15 million to the Fund with a clear objective: to strengthen American
democracy through the work of a large group of intellectuals ready to challenge McCarthyism and its prejudices.63
After a trial stage of three years, Hutchins realized that a new plan of
action was needed. He felt that the moment had come for the shifting of
the Fund’s objectives from the symptoms to the core of the U.S. “illness.” It
was time “for a transfer of the planning functions of the Fund from the
board to a group of thinkers who would attempt to ‘work out the concepts
basic to freedom’ in a modern technological society.”64 He thought that the

60. Thomas C. Reeves, Freedom and the Foundation: The Fund for the Republic in the Era
of McCarthyism (New York, 1969), p. 30.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., p. 45.
63. The support of and the fight against McCarthyism were both understood by
Catholics as ways to the recognition of a full, American citizenship. Mark Massa reports how
in 1951, McCarthy’s attack on Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall galvanized Catholics
fearful of the senator’s effect both on the Catholic and non-Catholic perception of the same
Catholic community. The magazines America and Commonweal channeled the resentment
and gave voice to a new current of Catholics—mostly composed by intellectuals—who would
“soon come to define a ‘Catholic mainstream.’” Massa, Catholics and American Culture, pp.
78–81.
64. Frank K. Kelly, Court of Reason. Robert Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic (New
York, 1981), p. 118.

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directors lacked an absolute dedication to a “prolonged discussion of principles”65 that was not yet achievable, given the practical difficulty of placing
long seminars on every member’s schedule. He had in mind an institute or
a council that would combine the activities and mission of a think tank with
the devotion of the Platonic academy. An advisory committee was formed
to examine the proposal for the Fund’s reorganization, and Murray and
Berle were two of the scholars chosen for the task.66 In the months between
June and September 1956 Murray worked with the group on the draft of
the report, conferring with more than 100 political scientists, philosophers,
diplomats, editors, lawyers, theologians, and scientists.67
Murray’s papers testify to his involvement in the formulation of the
philosophy underlying the future institute. One of his letters focuses
closely on the Hutchins proposal and attempts to define “the argument
leading to the need for an ‘intellectual center’” and thereby “the purpose of
the center.” According to his analysis, the only viable approach was to
determine the needs of the Fund and consider them as separate from the
needs of the Republic. The activities of the Fund were received at that time
in a “confused, ignorant, antagonistic, or apathetic” way, so he realized that
the Fund needed “a wider and more profound intellectual framework” that
would “furnish a more comprehensive understanding of the whole theory
and practice of civil liberties.” Intellectuals needed to communicate the
essence of U.S. democracy with a more coherent, intelligible, and effective
strategy, where the real point at stake was that “the Republic need[ed] a
freshly formulated self-understanding,” which needed to be split into two
topics. The first one was “an understanding of the American Republic as a
constitutional commonwealth” distinguished by its construction of equality; the second was “an understanding of the American Republic as a pluralist society,” according to its conception of pluralism and unity “and of
the demands and limitations of each.” The spirit that should have been
guiding this reformulation was historical consciousness, as it arose out of
the historical experience, “in this era of transition, in this ‘age of danger,’
in this time of spiritual crisis, in this day of new responsibilities.”

65. Ibid., p. 117.
66. For the list of the central group of consultants, see Reeves, Freedom and the Foundation, p. 262. Murray was later designated as a consultant to the Basic Issues Program on
Religion in a Free Society, along with Reinhold Niebuhr, Francis J. Lally, Henry Van Dusen,
and Eleanor Stevenson. John Cogley directed the program. The first pamphlet by the group
was Religion and the Free Society, which was published in 1958 by the Fund for the Republic.
67. For a complete list of experts—which included Jacques Maritain, at that time resident at Princeton University—see Kelly, Court of Reason, p. 122.

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A CALL TO ACTION

There was a close link between the U.S. perception of itself and its
presentation of the country to the world. For this reason, it was Murray’s
opinion that the Fund could contribute to the “American action-in-history” in a responsible, coherent, and effective manner, avoiding the troubles that could “have been caused by the isolation of the problem of civil
liberties from the wider problem of consensus.”68
The long letter continues with many reflections on what the institute’s
activities should address: the American proposition, civil liberties, and the
vacuum of self-understanding that was considered “the greatest danger” to
freedom and justice. Immediately before the closing remarks, Murray
returns to the principal aim of the center. In his view, defining it as an
“intellectual” center could only mean one thing: the impossibility of reaching an agreement. This apparently paradoxical observation was based on
his analysis of the “religious and philosophical pluralism” of the United
States and was strongly related to his position on interreligious dialogue as
well. However, even though theoretical agreement was not possible, “theoretical argument ought to be possible.”69 As he would write in a later
essay, “we hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them.”70
Murray’s proposal on the meaning of the CSDI constitution was
widely accepted by the group of the Fund’s advisers and became part of the
Report of the Committee to Advise the Fund for the Republic on the Basic Issues
in Civil Liberties. As reported by Frank Kelly, “Goldman, McKeon,
Murray, Redfield, and Rossiter” presented their historical analysis with
even more belligerence than Hutchins. They thought that “something
[had] been lacking in all the heated public discussion about civil liberties
during recent years,” and they believed that “the ingredients needed more
than any others [were] coherence and perspective. Abuses of civil liberties have
generally been regarded as isolated phenomena; they have been treated in a
vacuum.” So they concluded: “[W]e believe that the Fund, as the only educational foundation specifically dedicated to strengthening the basic fabric
of the nation, can make an outstanding contribution to America and the
world by correcting this.”71 The harmony between Murray’s idea of the
center and the center’s general mission is also described by Hutchins in the
internal debate that preceded the publication of the memorandum: “Even

68. Letter to Robert M. Hutchins, President, July 14, 1956, folder 83, box 1, JCMP,
p. 2.
69. Ibid., p. 3.
70. Murray, We Hold These Truths, p. 27.
71. Kelly, Court of Reason, p. 123. Emphasis added.

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if the problem of indicating the conditions under which such a [free] society might flourish may exceed the powers of a group with a limited life and
limited funds.” But he was sure that “it should be possible to straighten out
the issues, to show what the questions are, and to offer some preliminary
answers that might be debated in the country.”72
Murray’s definition of the goals of the center was not speculative; he
felt the urgency to reconcile the mere theoretical argument with a call to
action in the formation of consensus, about which he long debated with his
colleagues during the seminars given in Santa Barbara. On this issue, he
gave two speeches that became chapters of We Hold These Truths. The first
is “The American Consensus,” a lecture given on December 22, 1959, and
the second is “The Public Consensus as Public Moral Experience,” presented on March 14, 1960. They became respectively the third and fourth
chapter of the volume.73 Especially in the former, Murray brings to the
reader the positions of Lippmann and Berle and then shifts to Aquinas on
the specific topic of the wise. He stated that “[i]t is for the wise, who
develop consensus, to give ‘instruction’ to the generality, in the meaning of
its principles as ‘matters of necessary observance,’ and so in the manner of
their application.”74 Moreover, Murray’s development of the concepts of
constitutional commonwealth and action-in-history, drafted in the previously mentioned letter to Hutchins, first appeared in the essay “America’s
Four Conspiracies,” which is the edited version of a speech given at the
Seminar on Religion in a Free Society and sponsored by the Fund in 195875
and became the focal point of the introduction to We Hold These Truths.
After the publication of the advisers’ report, the center worked to
actualize what Murray formulated more precisely in 1963. He had been
called to be the respondent for a speech on the topic “The Elite and the

72. Reeves, Freedom and the Foundation, p. 263.
73. Santa Barbara, CA, Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara, “The American Consensus, 1959,” folder 4, box 392, and
“The Public Consensus as Public Moral Experience, 1960,” folder 6, box 392, Center for the
Study of Democratic Institutions Collection, Mss 18. A third speech, “Confusion of U.S.
Foreign Policy,” was published by the Fund for the Republic in Foreign Policy and the Free
Society, ed. John Courtney Murray and Walter Millis (New York, 1958), pp. 21–42. It was
later published as chapter 10 in We Hold These Truths.
74. Murray, We Hold These Truths, p. 118.
75. John Cogley, ed., Religion in America: Original Essays on Religion in a Free Society
(New York, 1958). The Seminar on Religion in a Free Society was held at the World Affairs
Center in New York on May 5–9, 1958, and gathered about 100 people as exponents of
Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, and atheism.

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A CALL TO ACTION

Electorate” by Senator J. William Fulbright (D–AR). On that occasion,
Murray denounced the impotence of the classic democratic theory in light
of the recent historical developments to “direct either the people or the
government in the construction of a viable, free and just society.” He realized that the people no longer lived in that theoretical tradition anymore,
but rather in the “received opinion”: a state where people thought that classic democratic theory was directing political institutions, but a lack of
political philosophy made this no longer possible. At that point, the nineteenth-century idea of the development of political rationality did not correspond to the raising of the standards of public education, since it did not
produce the “liberal mind of the tradition, but the free mind of the received
opinion.” To overcome this impasse it was necessary to look back to the
tradition, to the times before that nineteenth-century “distortion.” In
Murray’s opinion, colonial-era “America did not hold[,] whether in politics or anywhere else, the Socratic paradox that knowledge is somehow
virtue.” The freedom of men was given by personal, social, and political
virtue. For this reason, while endorsing Fulbright’s call for the reconstruction of the philosophy of self-government, he added his own plea “to cultivate among the people the faculty of political judgment, which mean[t],
above all, laying down standards for right political judgment.” It was a
problem of ideas: iudicare, dirigere, and corigere had to be rearticulated from
the tradition and channeled through the institutions chosen by the people.
Murray’s call was a call for a renaissance, a creative return to the past “to
seize the principles of the past and re-think them in the light of the contemporary fact.”76
In this short presentation, Murray formulated his view on the United
States based on the lost tradition of the Founding Fathers and ultimately
on that of natural law. He conceived it as an innate characteristic of the
people, which could not be instilled by education but only through the cultivation of virtues. Nevertheless, cultivating the faculty of political judgment and defining the right standards for it were implicitly attributed to
those who already held the tradition: the virtuous. The center kept working
for the renaissance of the United States, while leaving to the people the
final, decisive act of change.

76. “The Elite and the Electorate, program 47, part b,” Item no. 4904, Center for the
Study of Democratic Institutions, Digital Collections. Retrieved on July 29, 2014, from
http://digital.library.ucsb.edu/items/show/4904

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Murray’s Challenge to the City and the Academy
Even if the concept of consensus can easily be taken too far from the
context, it leads to some conclusions about the depth of Murray’s engagement with the issues of democracy and American Catholics between
World War II and the “revolution” of the sixties. First of all, his idea of
consensus was shaped as a way to reconcile, under the same narrative, some
of the aspects of the Catholic tradition with the American political tradition. As Michael Kraus and Davis D. Joyce suggested, since 1948—when
Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It was
published—“the idea of consensus and conflict became a central organizing
concept for American historical writing.”77 The conservative frame of reference, the criticism of progressivism and the deviance of ideologies, and
the stress on the continuity of history and the gifts of the past given to the
present have a clear role within Murray’s narrative of the American history.
These were the same themes that guided the vast body of works that
mainly characterized post–World War II historiography and the “School
of Consensus.” Even if Murray made a nonmythic use of the history of the
early Republic, he translated the same issues and the same need to “return
to the origins” into his own Catholic language and contributed to the writing of a unique narrative that could be shared by both Catholics and nonCatholics. His tackling of large-scale questions testifies to his wholehearted embrace of American culture as a symbol of a Catholicism that
already stood out of the “ghetto mentality.” Descended from two immigrant families, he nonetheless came to the public scene as a well-educated,
middle-class Republican who felt at ease being an intellectual and making
a case for the intellectual life both as an American and as a Catholic.
Second, the role he depicted for the wise represents the main connection that he found between the call to action of the Thomistic tradition of
thought on natural law and the call to action he proposed for the Catholic
and other intellectuals of his time. Murray “flung out a bristling challenge”78 to what he called the City and the Academy—secular as well as
Catholic institutions. His challenge addressed both philosophy and action.
He incarnated and translated into action the path to intellectual empowerment that the Catholic community lived, and he forged this path in secular
and religious contexts, thus demonstrating that American Catholics had an
77. Michael Kraus and Davis D. Joyce, eds., The Writing of American History, rev. ed.,
(Norman, OK, 1985), p. 312.
78. John Cogley, “Catholic Tradition and American Present,” New York Times, October 30, 1960, BR42.

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important role to play in the construction of the national narrative. Moreover, he identified that route as a way for American society to enhance the
role of faith, overcome the crisis of the postwar decades, and combat
sources of ignorance and fear.
Third, in Murray’s view, the role of learned mediators that he assigned
to intellectuals was a way to democracy. His strong belief in the Jeffersonian democratic heritage of the people’s inalienable rights took shape in the
intellectual crusade of the CCICA and more broadly in the CSDI: the wise
would guide the people to rational and moral discernment and to the full
enjoyment of their right of consent. Murray’s correction of Fulbright’s proposal for the renewal of the principle of self-government was indeed based
on a more radical perspective of the same renewal. Through the cultivation
of virtues, men would discover the principles of natural law, which he considered the proposition of political judgment, the tool to reach the consensus and ultimately to reinforce democracy. As John Cogley recalled,
Murray felt frustrated by the “extra weight” entailed by the Church’s long
history of response to his statements and subsequent suspicion by nonCatholics, but “taking his place in the democratic forum, he thought of
himself primarily as a citizen dedicated to the propositions developed in his
We Hold These Truths.”79 This is the reason why he engaged in discussions
that were not exclusively related to religion. Murray was among the first
American Catholic intellectuals to understand that there was a secular
public open to Catholic-related issues and that American Catholicism was
ready to discuss the relationship between these issues and the national
intellectual history in an arena that encompassed religious as well as secular
circles. He saw that such discussions were confined only by the level of his
and his colleagues’ commitment to “doing by arguing” at the CSDI—
within the “Tradition of Reason.” They were all engaged in a common
effort in finding a way for intelligence to guide social, political, cultural,
and ultimately moral agency. As they experienced the social and political
damages of the McCarthy era, they felt compelled to stand for rights and
freedoms in an effort to strengthen U.S. domestic and foreign activities.
The fact that all these aspects emerged during the years when Murray
was censored by Rome and pressured by his order reveals how he felt compelled nonetheless to act publicly and to live what he believed, reaching
new shores outside the Church. Hutchins, Rossiter, Berle, and Lippmann

79. John Cogley, “John Courtney Murray,” America, September 2, 1967, 220–21, here
221.

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were Murray’s contemporary, non-Catholic sources. He acquired new
perspectives from them on U.S. history and a new language to describe
the country’s present from different disciplinary perspectives. He brought
to their shared arena his contribution as a theologian with a clear political
thought, aiming to find a synthesis—not a compromise. His belief was
grounded in a strong confidence in the role that intellectuals could have
in the reconciliation of men with history—and in a deep trust in their call
to action.

FORUM ESSAY
SIMON DITCHFIELD; WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.;
LUKE CLOSSEY; ENRIQUE GARCÍA HERNÁN;
M. ANTONI J. UCERLER, S.J.;
AND LIAM MATTHEW BROCKEY
The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia. By Liam Matthew
Brockey. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press. 2014. Pp. x, 515. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-674-41668-0.)
Introduction by Simon Ditchfield (University of York, UK)

T

his carefully argued and richly contextualized study of the Portuguese
Jesuit André Palmeiro (Lisbon, 1569–Macau, 1635), inspector of the
Society’s missions in India and the Far East, consciously makes use of the
unfashionable genre of life-and-times biography to make two polemical
points. The first is that it is necessary to remember that the Society of
Jesus, which in recent decades has come to be seen as standing for everything that was ‘“modern” about the early-modern age, was not an undifferentiated Zeitgeist but made up of individuals who often were to be found
on both sides of the many controversies of the age (not excluding the strategy of cultural accommodation with which the Society’s missions are perhaps most closely associated). In Brockey’s words, one should not forget
they were “a community representative of the rich variety of early modern
Catholic piety and preoccupations” (p. 19). Second, Brockey excoriates the
tendency of much recent scholarship to misuse the term global and to see
the members of the Society as “harbingers of globalization” (p. 428).
Instead, by restoring “depth and texture to the men of the early modern
Society of Jesus” (p. 19), the author seeks to show how pragmatism was
king, heroism in short supply, and failure more common than success.
“Alas, no,” Brockey writes in his conclusion, “It was not the world that
became more connected because of the Jesuits; rather, it was the Society
that, owing to the limitations of communications in early modernity,
became more thinly stretched as it spread out across the world” (p. 429).
Emblematic of this was the definitive loss of the Japanese mission by the
mid-seventeenth century, which, as Brockey memorably puts it, “lies at the
eastern terminus [of] … this panorama of Jesuit dead ends” (p. 432). The
latter included the failed missions of Ethiopia, Agra, Tibet, Sri Lanka, the
554

SIMON DITCHFIELD ET AL.

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Coromandel, Fishery and Malabar coasts, and even Malacca (surrendered
by the Portuguese to the Dutch in 1641).
The brief prelude, set in Nagasaki in 1635, sets the deliberately downbeat “antiheroic” tone of the book, since it fast-forwards us to the symbolic
denouement of the Society’s mission in Japan: when the professed Jesuit
Cristóvão Ferreira abjured his faith as a result of brutal torture by the Tokugawa regime. This event was immortalized by Shusaku Endo in his historical novel, The Silence (Tokyo, 1966), the reading of which, Brockey admits
in his acknowledgments, was the seed out of which this book project germinated years later. The main text of the book is divided into two roughly
equal parts (each consisting of five chapters). The first, “Inside the Empire,”
is dedicated to the time spent by Palmeiro in his native Portugal. There he
enjoyed a modestly successful career in the Society, first working as a
teacher of theology at Coimbra and then serving a brief term as rector of the
college at Braga. He left for India at the mature age of forty-eight in 1617.
The second part, “At Empire’s Edge,” covers the time he was based in
Macau not only as visitor of the Province of Japan (although he never visited
the island nation) and the Vice-Province of China (which he did visit) but
also as promoter of Jesuit missions to Tonkin and Cochinchina.
From the outset, Brockey is determined to bring us down to earth and
to emphasize that after the first two generations of larger-than-life figures
such as Ss. Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier and their more grounded
but scarcely less heroically enterprising missionary successors of Alessandro
Valignano and Matteo Ricci, Palmeiro belonged to a generation that was
as spiritually conscientious as it was pragmatically prosaic. At every stage
Brockey refuses to argue beyond the evidence, which, before Palmeiro left
for the Indies, is exiguous at best. For example, we do not even have any
record that he ever penned one of the several thousand letters addressed to
the Jesuit Superior General in which their authors petitioned to be sent on
the overseas missions (the so-called litterae indipetae). But this gives
Brockey the opportunity to fill in much useful contextual detail about the
daily routine and tensions that characterized life in the Jesuit colleges—
which included, in this case, a particularly brutal murder committed by a
disgruntled servant brother against the brother in charge of the college’s
hired help—and is often overlooked by historians who usually pay more
attention to Jesuit intellectual bravura and missionary derring-do. In particular, Brockey discusses at some length the crucial distinction between
those Jesuits—upward of 50 percent—who never took the final vow of personal obedience to the pope as well as those who were unordained and so
made possible the very functioning of their numerous colleges—who were

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FORUM ESSAY

referred to as temporal or spiritual coadjutors—and the fully professed and
ordained elite. Both murderer and victim in the episode uncovered by
Brockey, for example, were coadjutors.
Once he arrived in India, Palmeiro’s first challenge came not from the
demands of converting and attending to the spiritual needs of the indigenous Christians but from the squabbling bishops, archbishops, inquisitors,
and rival mendicant orders jealous of Jesuit privileges. In addition, there
was also to be found division within the Society of Jesus itself. Traditionally, this has always been interpreted in terms of nationalistic rivalry: particularly that between the Portuguese Jesuits and their Italian brethren.
However, Brockey is quick to argue that this is as anachronistic as it is
inaccurate. Palmeiro’s skeptical pragmatism in the face of Roberto Nobili’s
aristocratic posturing as a Christian brahmin, is well described by Brockey
(who is able to draw on Palmeiro’s account of his personal inspection of the
Italian’s mission) and was the result not of proto-nationalist chauvinism
but of direct experience. In his final assessment, Palmeiro tempered his
admiration for the Italian missionary’s successful attempt to overcome
Hindu prejudice against the “dirty and lowly” Jesuits with the realization
that Nobili clearly considered himself not only above the vast majority of
his potential Indian converts but also, much less acceptably, made it abundantly clear that he felt personal aversion to eating and spending time with
his Jesuit colleagues. As Palmeiro wryly noted to his superiors back in
Rome in a devastating put-down: “In its present form this mission is something fantastic, without substance or abundance” (p. 112). As happened on
more than one occasion, Rome found against its local expert, and Nobili’s
use of the so-called “Malabar Rites” remained tolerated until the eighteenth century. During Palmeiro’s time in India he undertook, in 1620, an
inspection of the Jesuit Province of Malabar, covering 1900 miles in some
eight months. The Visitor’s account of this expedition (in chapter IV)
finally provides Brockey with enough material to discern Palmeiro’s personal voice, and he reports how, for the Jesuit, the highlight of his trip was
assuredly his stay in the place where the apostle and martyr St. Thomas
had lived and worked—São Tomé. The Visitor was given privileged access
by the bishop to the martyr’s relics and celebrated Mass in a cave inland
where the apostle was wont to pray, which Palmeiro compared favorably
with the Jesuit-administered shrine of Nossa Senhora de Lapa in Portugal.
Like Xavier, Palmeiro was similarly enthusiastic about the apparently sincere faith of the poor inhabitants of the Fishery Coast. Once back in Goa,
Brockey recounts (in chapter V) how Palmeiro, finding himself in what
was effectively a “court-city” environment comparable to that of Lisbon,
Madrid, and even Rome, was forced to “think big” and construct some

SIMON DITCHFIELD ET AL.

557

kind of imperial vision commensurate with his status as the most senior
Jesuit between Mozambique and Agra. However, the Visitor’s resources
were anything but abundant, since in 1621 there were in the entire
province of Goa just 273 Jesuits (of whom at least 50 percent were not
priests but coadjutors) who had to spread themselves between eight colleges and three missions. For Palmeiro, “the heart of the matter was the
supply of [missionaries] in Europe” (p. 160). Brockey emphasizes how
those sent to the East were rarely the Society’s “best men,” as provincial
superiors jealously kept these to perform valuable service in Europe (as was
the case of the prodigiously gifted Jesuit preacher and historian Daniello
Bartoli whose several litterae indipetae fell on deaf ears). On the contrary,
those sent east were usually dispatched as untried young men, and so
Brockey is forced to conclude that “those sent to the missions were dispensable men” (p. 160).
When Palmeiro arrived in Macau in 1626 as Visitor of the Jesuit missions in East Asia (essentially China along with some isolated pockets in
Vietnam, since the mission to Japan was on its last legs), he found the situation unreassuringly familiar: a lack of resources combined with the hostility and rivalry of the other religious orders and suspicion of the secular
authorities. Moreover, in the case of Macau, described by Brockey as “in
reality a minute territorial concession made by the Ming emperors” (p.
197), not only did Palmeiro find the resident community of sixty-eight
priests and brothers facing the problem of housing an influx of Japanese
refugees without sufficient buildings at the Society’s disposal but also that
its main source of income, which had come from the lucrative silk trade
with Japan, had been much diminished by the progressive closing of the
market there to Portuguese merchants. Things were scarcely more promising in the Vice-Province of China, where in 1615 there were still only
eighteen missionaries who had no college or permanent novitiate of their
own. Palmeiro therefore undertook his visitation of the Vice-Province—a
3000-mile round trip that included a visit to the Ming capital of Beijing—
with his eyes wide open. As he put it to Jesuit Superior General Muzio
Vitelleschi in a December 20, 1629, letter from Macau after he returned
from the trip: Why were there so few Christians there (Palmeiro calculated
there were just 6000), despite the presence of the Jesuits within the Ming
empire for forty years “with so much labour and expense?” (p. 216).
Brockey prefers to see the answer straightforwardly in terms of a lack of
manpower: “the Vice-Province [of China] was largely a collection of isolated priests, living alone or in pairs” (p. 299). The Visitor’s own answer
was threefold—there was widespread xenophobia on the part of the Chinese, there was the lack of clear imperial permission for them to reside

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openly in China, and there was the timidity of the missionaries. Palmeiro
linked this last weakness to the policy of accommodation championed by
Matteo Ricci, and the Visitor’s reservations were borne out by the boldness
of his colleague, the old Japan-hand João Rodrigues, who never tried to
pass himself off as a silk-clad member of the literati and “never asserted
that the teachings of the Chinese literati were roughly equivalent to those
of Christianity” (p. 325) yet did not incur the wrath of the Chinese authorities. This represented a turning point in the fortunes of the Jesuit mission,
which was able to take advantage of the chaos of the period of transition
between the Ming and Qing dynasties to embark on its longest period of
growth in terms of Christian converts. Chapter IX (“Sunrise in the West”)
is given over to what was perhaps the biggest legacy of Palmeiro’s time as
visitor of the Jesuit missions in East Asia: the sponsoring of the Jesuit missions to Tonkin and Cochinchina. Here, as elsewhere, Brockey is excellent
on the challenges faced by Palmeiro in putting in place the infrastructure
for these missionary initiatives. To begin with, the closure of the Portuguese trade with Japan meant that the Visitor was forced to purchase and
equip his own ships for the silk trade. He also used them for the new mission fields. The recurrent manpower challenge was met by the use of
indigenous assistants, who consisted essentially of three kinds: dojuku/dojicos (general helpers relating to worship and ministry, including catechesis),
catechists, and plain servants. By the end of 1634, eighteen catechists had
assisted just three priests to produce a tally of some 9864 baptisms at the
Tonkin mission (p. 367). Brockey accounts for the lack of indigenous
Jesuit priests in East Asia in terms of “a confusion of expectations” (p. 370)
on the part of the indigenous Christians who were faced with an atypical
profile of the Society before their eyes—one with a top-heavy proportion
of fully professed Jesuits and thus a corresponding lack of temporal and
spiritual coadjutors. It was therefore more difficult for prospective indigenous Jesuits to appreciate the potential career path they might have taken.
However, the main reason for the lack of indigenous Jesuit priests can perhaps be explained more simply in terms of the absence of a seminary in
Macau or a full range of courses at the college there.
The final chapter, “Sunset in the East,” takes the reader back to
Nagasaki and the nadir of Jesuit fortunes in the Japan mission. After a discussion of the difficulty of assembling enough evidence to support the canonization of the Jesuit missionaries who were martyred by the Tokugawa
regime, at precisely a time when Rome was tightening up the canonical procedure, Brockey draws attention to the important point that any attempts at
securing the official recognition of the cult of the Jesuit martyrs posed a
grave threat to the religious peace of Macau owing to the bitter mutual

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recriminations between the Society and the mendicants over assigning
responsibility for the brutal persecution of the Tokugawa regime due to
proselytizing. The chapter closes with Brockey’s argument, adumbrated at
the start of this synopsis, against a crude understanding that simply equates
the missionary activities of the Society of Jesus with the making of Roman
Catholicism as a world religion. The conclusion consists, in the main, of a
sensitive account of the “good death” of Palmeiro, who was worn out by his
long exertions on behalf of the Society and by Lenten penances intensified
by his concern for the disastrous state of affairs at the mission in Japan.
Hero he may not have been, but as Brockey writes:
. . . it is the continual movement that he kept up ad maiorem Dei gloriam
over the course of his twilight years, and the constant critical regard that
he applied to his men and their endeavours that make the Visitor worthy
of study. (p. 23)

Comments of William A. Christian Jr.
(Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain)
It is frustrating to read a lengthy book about a man and yet have so
little sense of him as an individual, and in this respect it is difficult to get
fully caught up with his story. For it is André Palmeiro’s itinerary and
judgment that structure The Visitor, which on one level is the biography of
an austere company man—a manager of managers interested in hierarchies, prestige, and checks and balances.
Given the author’s extended time with his subject, it is difficult for
him to avoid a certain abduction by the seventeenth-century Jesuits in general and Palmeiro in particular. Liam Brockey has absorbed their lingo and
at times their point of view, speaking of “harvests of converts” (p. 431,
without quotation marks in the original) and evaluating results by numbers, so that the account takes on an institutional, apologetic flavor.
Hence this reader welcomed the moments when the narrative stepped
back (examining the context of Lisbon, Braga, and Coimbra; the things
that Palmeiro was not shown in Beijing, or events in Japan and Macau
after Palmeiro died). But one learns to accept that this is an account in
which the protagonist is right, judicious, flexible, and sensible. When, on
the contrary, he spars with the Augustinians of Goa or when he has a slave
as a servant, he is “a man of his time.”
Yet, as we move from Lisbon to Coimbra, to Goa and Madurai, and
on to China and Japan, a second and more engaging story emerges, one of

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creative innovation versus continuity, local adaptation versus imposed conformity, with connections in the immediate past to the Council of Trent
and in the distant past to the spread of Christianity across Europe.
For Brockey shows that the Jesuit missions in Asia were laboratories
for strategies of local accommodation and the introduction of new rules
(“positive law,” p. 345). Each mission station seemed to be an experiment,
and we look on as Palmeiro evaluates and weighs each result.
Two notions of how to effect conversions were in conflict. One had to
do with convergence and identification, building on respected local social
models such as the adoption of Brahmin dress and identity in Madurai, or
mandarin costume in Beijing. This is similar to the British anthropologist
Godfrey Lienhardt’s concept of linguistic parallax, guided by similarities
between local and imported concepts.1 Like some of the Jesuits in China and
India, Lienhardt warned of the pitfalls in applying Western terms for local
deities or religious concepts, or vice versa, and it is noteworthy that at times
this issue was so serious for the Jesuits that it had to be resolved in Rome.
In regard to this approach, it was striking to see how the limits to innovation in Christian liturgy, dress, hairstyle, and doctrine were set and policed
not (as, say, in France and Central Europe) by the Protestants but by the
other, competing Catholic orders, quick to denounce the Jesuits to Rome.
The contrasting notion involved flat-out conversion, with a radical
transformation. This reader was reminded of a stark contrast between mission approaches on the Peruvian Altiplano in 1971. On the one hand, there
were Maryknoll missionaries who engaged with Aymara culture by sharing
local rituals, music, and dress; on the other, there were Mormons offering a
total transformation of habitat, dress, ritual, and lifestyle, which seemed to
be accepted willingly, enthusiastically, and effectively. It is not surprising that
at any one time, many people around the world are ready for a total reset.
Despite the diversity among the Jesuits and their cultural accommodations, it is important to keep in mind that Brockey is working at the
extreme end (scrupulous, highly policed, closely observed, with a special
esprit du corps) of the Catholic spectrum, with the Jesuits and, within the
Jesuits, with Palmeiro. In Vietnam, for instance, the Jesuits were careful to
separate their highly successful catechists from the Company, refusing to

1. Godfrey Lienhardt, “The Dinka and Catholicism,” in Religious Organization and
Religious Experience, ed. John Davis (New York, 1982), pp. 81–95.

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make them temporal coadjutors and making sure they resided separately.
At the other end of the spectrum, when the diocese came to supervise these
same catechists, it promptly made them priests.
In Palmeiro’s and Brockey’s accounts we only get fleeting glimpses of
other Catholicisms that are more object-centered or landscape-anchored.
Palmeiro’s austere disconnect from practical religion, for instance, is evident in his confiscation of the devotional prints that the Macau Jesuits
owned and appreciated. A second glimpse is of the celebration of an
encamisada in 1634 in Macau for the Jesuit Sebastião Vieira’s martyrdom
in Japan, involving displays of horsemanship, strutting about, bullfights,
and ostentatious luxury. Palmeiro forbade the Jesuits any public ceremony.
But Spaniards still celebrate encamisadas dating from the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries, including one in San Esteban del Valle (Ávila) for a
Franciscan martyr of Nagasaki, San Pedro Bautista.
Comments of Luke Clossey (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
With a unique vantage on a fascinating point in global history, André
Palmeiro has been frequently appearing as a minor character in recent
scholarship on Christianity from Malawi to Japan. We are lucky here to
have his full biography, which Brockey describes as a “compelling story of
adventures in distant lands, told . . . by a man who was obliged to project
his voice around the globe. . .” (p. 23).
Brockey concludes his biography with an editorializing critique of the
global in history and of historians seeking early forms of globalization. Such
an approach, he warns, leads to “caricatures,” “flat silhouettes,” “superficiality,” and “misleading similarities between the past and the present” (pp. 428,
429). Such historians deceitfully use globalization as a “subterfuge” and a
“smoke screen” in an attempt to “claim more than their share” (p. 428).
Brockey explains the potential dangers: The global “masks the limited
capacity for action enjoyed by early moderns” and incorrectly implies a
world “more interconnected because of Jesuits” and “a decisive turn towards
a modern understanding of the world” (p. 429). He specifically criticizes
four books, on subjects more complex than biography: Cátia Antunes’s
Globalisation in the Early Modern Period: The Economic Relationship between
Amsterdam and Lisbon, 1640–1705 (Amsterdam, 2004); Luke Clossey’s Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York, 2008);
Geoffrey C. Gunn’s First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500 to
1800 (Lanham, MD, 2003); and Miles Ogborn’s Global Lives: Britain and
the World, 1550–1800 (New York, 2008).

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Brockey’s critique of global history at the end of a solid book of global
history certainly surprises. More surprisingly still, the four books he
selected for censure, when they deal with the Jesuits at all, give the dangers
he mentions an even wider berth and have collectively advanced the same
caution that Brockey now hails. In these books we find limited capacities
for action, broken connections, and Jesuits acting in decidedly nonmodern
ways. Gunn has Jesuits battling Franciscans; Ogborn has them putting
“captives under pressure to convert” (Ogborn, p. 72). Even the Jesuits’
most modern moments in Gunn are not particularly modern: They bring
Copernicus to China, but a Copernicus censored and therefore garbled.
They study vernacular languages, but this reader knows of no Jesuit then
writing on any vernacular language with a sophistication greater than the
ninth-century Kavirajamarga’s analysis of Kannada. Clossey’s monograph,
the only one that focuses on Jesuits, made the same critique as Brockey, yet
more emphatically. In it, limited capacity for action is not masked, but
rather highlighted as the cause of decentralizing globalization: It is, in fact,
the limitations that motivate the globalization. Clossey’s final chapter surveys the literature to find specific ways that the Jesuits have been described
as modern—and then argues for nonmodern Jesuits. Brockey’s conclusion
is not only preaching at the choir but also accusing its singers of denying
the very song on their lips.
The unexpected critique turns The Visitor into a confused ouroboros
that uses its tail to bite its own head, which began with “This global
study. . .” The author appears to be sincerely condemning books with
global or globalization in their titles after presuming their contents feature
an anachronistically efficient and modern globalizing network. This
would require judging a book by its front cover, as the back of the Clossey
volume asserts that “logistical problems of transportation and communication incompatible with traditional views of the Society as a tightly centralized military machine” led to “connections unmediated by Rome.” A
sensitive reader might be annoyed by Clossey’s whimsy in, say, comparing the Society of Jesus to MTV, but such comparisons generate similarities, differences, and new questions. The usefulness of these outweighs
the improbability that readers will confuse the Like a Virgin Madonna
with the Blessed Virgin Mary. If we take the permeability of polities’
frontiers as an index of globalization, we could even make a case that the
early-modern world was more globalized than our own.
Although this targeting of allies who share his principles, if not his
purity, is ill-advised, Brockey’s passionate crusade against ahistorical readings of globalization does remind us of important values (essentially avoid-

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563

ing anachronism) that responsible writers of history, from undergraduates
to the authors of the four books he cites, all share. Perhaps globalization
comes with such modernist baggage that any book invoking it—even in an
attempt to liberate it from said baggage—is automatically tainted, in which
case these books’ content is indeed irrelevant. Recently the Institut für die
späte Altzeit discussed whether historians should utilize words not native
to their subjects’ time; the consensus held that the rhetorical force of such
scrupulous avoidance was trumped by historians’ responsibility to use every
available tool to mediate between the past and the present. This emphasis
on a human fidelity to the sources has in fact itself been intelligently yoked
to the global by Ogborn, in his reflections on writing one of the books
Brockey criticizes here, who notes that individuals’ “actions and the conditions within which they occur are more closely interwoven than accounts
of globalisation usually make out.”2
Comments of Enrique García Hernán
(Institute of History, CSIC, Madrid)
This book is a magnificent study not only of Palmeiro but also of the
entire action undertaken by the Jesuits in Asia over a twenty-year period.
This is an excellent piece of research that takes the reader into the missionary world of the Jesuits in the East Indies. The level of detail displayed here
is truly impressive, and the results are, in many respects, magnificent. The
challenge faced by the author is a general shortage of documentation with
which to reconstruct the first fifty-six years of the life of Palmeiro, to which
some 163 pages are dedicated. By contrast, the last nine years of the subject’s life receive 247 pages. Certainly Brockey has shown how worthwhile
it has been to recover his life, but the same could be said of his predecessors
and successors in this office (Alessandro Valignano, Francesco Pasio,
Francisco Vieira, Jerónimo Rodrígues, Gabriel de Matos, Manuel Dias,
and Antonio Rubino), some of whom have been the subject of biographies.
Between 1574 and 1635 there was always a visitador in these provinces,
closely linked to Father Nuno Mascarenhas, assistant of Portugal in Rome.
Of these officials, Palmeiro served the longest. The author provides a magisterial analysis of this process, which will surely serve as a model for similar
biographical studies. The book also reflects the diversity of tensions that
the visitador had to face and overcome such as disputes among Castilians,

2. See “Miles Ogburn on His Book Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800,”
May 8, 2009, http://rorotoko.com/interview/20090508_ogborn_miles_global_lives_britain_
world_1550-1800).

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Italians, and Portuguese within the Society as well as divisions and rivalries
between the various missionary orders. Palmeiro was divided between his
desire to be faithful to the normal Jesuit “way of proceeding” and his calling
as a martyr-missionary. Illustrations and maps considerably enrich the
book, although the addition of a basic chronology would have been very
useful.
However, notwithstanding such qualities, there are two principal deficiencies. One of these is related to the sources, both published and archival,
and the other refers to the themes analyzed. In the first place, the adoption
of a broader view of the Spanish-Portuguese Empire would have been very
beneficial to this study. The Union of the Two Crowns (1580–1640) is
decisive, yet here, too much emphasis is placed on Portuguese sources and
archives, with an inevitable Lusophone bias in perspective. The study fails
to take into account important sources from other countries, efforts to
advance the Society into other Asian territories, and the involvement of the
Spanish monarchy in this missionary history. Part of the celebrated archive
of the Jesuits in Japan, once in Macau and now in Spain, has not been consulted in depth. This archive is now in Madrid and housed at the Real
Academia de la Historia (RAH) (to which Brockey makes only two references), the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and the Biblioteca Nacional. It is
also worth asking about the degree of involvement of Palmeiro in the
translation into Chinese of the lives of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier;
the collected writings of Alfonse Vagnone, Giacomo Rho, Manuel Dias,
Matteo Ricci, and others; or indeed the works of St Teresa of Jesus, the
Lives of the Saints, the Missal, the catechism, and so forth. Moreover, the
source bequeathed to the RAH by Rafael Pereyra that pertains to missionaries has not been used; it provides interesting insights into economic
organization, drawing from the procurador of the Indies in Madrid and
Lisbon. Some of the latter’s archive is now in the Archive of the Society in
Alcalá de Henares. Finally, other important sources are noticeable for their
absence: the Audiencia de Filipinas of the Archivo General de Indias
(Seville) and the Consejo de Portugal of the Archivo General de Simancas;
the series Congregationes in the Society’s Roman archive (ARSI); as well as
the archives of the Roman Congregations, which might also be expected
to have many useful documents—especially the series Concilium (crucial for
the dioceses governed by Jesuits such as Ethiopia, Cranganore, and Funai),
as well as materials from Propaganda Fide and the Congregation of Rites.
Perhaps, indeed, the book’s very qualities as well as its weaknesses can
be best appreciated when we realize that it draws principally from documentation now in ARSI. Although useful, these insights need to be cross-

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referenced with alternative sources of information. A final observation
relates to Brockey’s use of secondary sources, which. although he covers
much of the relevant literature, still omits some significant studies. These
include work by Fernando Iwasaki, Osami Takizawa, Andreu Martínez,
Giuseppe Marino, Taciana Fisac, Tronu Montane, Antonio Cabezas, Juan
Gil, Carmelo Lisón, Marta Manchado, Rafael Valladares, Cervera Jiménez, and Martínez Shaw.
Brockey also leaves to one side the all-consuming tensions within the
Society in the Portuguese provinces and does not look at questions about
spirituality, despite the Jesuit commitment to these areas and the concerted
opposition by Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians. Women do not
appear at all, and this is surely an important deficiency when we take into
account the female congregations founded by Pedro Morejón in Miyako
and their possible links with Palmeiro. There is no attempt to link these
missionary campaigns to the world of the visionaries and Satanism (about
which Haruko Nawata Ward and López Gay have published important
studies). The critical source for this (on St. Teresa of Ávila) is to be found
in the RAH: Shengji baiyan (Beijing, 1632), translated by Giacomo Rho
(with a modern critical study by José Antonio Cervera Jiménez).
Notwithstanding these reservations, Brockey’s achievement deserves
recognition, since it sets out this world and its missionary strategies in
superb detail, and his book is to be warmly welcomed for providing such a
mass of fresh information on religious, economic, and cultural activities as
well as some insights into commercial and military ventures.
Comments of M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. (Ricci Institute,
University of San Francisco, and Campion Hall, University of Oxford)
The volume is without a doubt a splendid book. Not only is it well
written and meticulously researched, it also brings to life the important and
largely forgotten—or at least neglected—figure of André Palmeiro. As
Simon Ditchfield has pointed out in his synopsis, this genre of the “lifeand-times” biography can be unfashionable in academia; and yet it can also
diachronically provide the crucial “bigger picture” that cannot always be
included in more thematic monographs. The book reads almost like a
novel on account of its elegant literary style; and that should be taken as a
compliment to the author’s skills in creating a coherent narrative that is
both highly engaging and informative. That alone, however, would not
suffice to make it a good historical tome. It is the author’s impressive mastery of the relevant primary archival sources, including reports, treatises,

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and Palmeiro’s personal correspondence, that lend this study the scholarly
authority and credibility it deserves.
Palmeiro, who acted as Visitor of the Jesuit missions of the East Indies
in the first decades of the seventeenth century, represents a uniquely curious
figure of the early-modern world. As Brockey reminds us, in light of the
Jesuits’ vow of religious obedience, Palmeiro yielded significant influence
and authority over the work of a large group of men dispersed throughout
the Portuguese maritime empire from Africa to Asia. Not only did he travel
across the world, his “words” and his policy decisions did as well.
A great deal of ink has been spilled with regard to the earlier period or
the “heyday” of Jesuit missions in India, Japan, and China—when the missions were first founded or were quickly expanding—namely, the mid- to
late-sixteenth century. Brockey’s study introduces us to a man of a different
generation, a Jesuit, who found himself facing complex problems that
resulted from a shift of ecclesiastical as well as geopolitical circumstances
that marked the early- to mid-seventeenth century. Having introduced us
to his early career as an accomplished theologian in Coimbra, the author
reveals how Palmeiro was particularly well placed to grapple with the controversial theological and political problems that arose from how the Jesuits
were conducting their activities in the Asian mission fields.
To give some coherence to these remarks, the focus here shall be on
Brockey’s discussion of Japan and China. By the time Palmeiro arrived in
East Asia, the Jesuit missions had been functioning for several generations
and had experimented with a number of missionary strategies, the most
important of which was “accommodation” to the cultures of East Asia.
Brockey’s narrative successfully highlights and contrasts the difference
between these two periods, which we may call the “early-pioneer” stage
and the “next-generation” stage. We can take the year 1610—the death in
Beijing of Matteo Ricci, which came only four years after the death in
Macau of the Jesuit missionary enterprise’s first Visitor to the East,
Alessandro Valignano—as a meaningful date that concludes this “earlypioneer” stage. Brockey illustrates and contrasts how the mission in 1601,
when Ricci arrived in the capital of the Ming Empire, was very different
from that of 1629, when Palmeiro visited Beijing.
The author offers the reader important insights into Palmeiro’s fundamental dilemma—which reflected the quandary of the entire Society of
Jesus during this period vis-à-vis its missions—namely, whether to trust
what the “veteran” missionaries had been doing for several decades or

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whether to restrain some of their cultural experiments and call them back
to a more universal and Roman perspective. This tension between the
“universal” and the “particular” affected the entire Catholic Church as it
expanded to the ends of the known world in the so-called “Age of Discoveries.” The theological debates that ensued, especially regarding cultural
accommodation—and that tragically culminated in the Chinese Rites controversy—were developments that can be attributed to the Jesuits’ actions
in large part. But as the author also reminds us, the bitterness and ill will
toward the Jesuits that were the consequence of those very same controversies would eventually overtake and overwhelm the Society of Jesus, especially in the eighteenth century.
Perhaps one of the most significant achievements of this book is to
bring to light yet again the wide range of opinions on both sides of the
accommodation debate among the Jesuits themselves, regardless of nationality. The author is particularly keen to debunk a number of stereotypes
and caricatures so as to provide us with a more “three-dimensional” understanding (p. 6) of the people involved; and for the most part he is successful
in doing so. What perhaps the author has not done sufficiently is to
emphasize another psychological and spiritual aspect of the lengthy and
painful process of accommodation—that is, how men such as Ricci, Nobili
in India, and others were personally transformed by their encounters and
therefore tended to be uncompromising in upholding their positions.
Although they never forgot that conversion was their ultimate aim, for
many of them the line between their “European” identity and their new
“hybrid” identity within the “target culture” became blurred.
Another important contribution of this book is the detailed account of
the “Terms Controversy” over the translation of theological language into
Chinese and Japanese. What the author might have considered further in
explaining the genesis of this controversy was the role of the initial disagreement between Ricci and Michele Ruggieri over accommodation to Buddhism—which resulted in Valignano’s decision to have the woodblocks and
extant copies of the first catechism translated into Chinese in 1586, The
True Record of the Lord of Heaven, destroyed and replaced years later by
Ricci’s new translation. This was a turning point in China; as was Xavier’s
misuse in Japan of Buddhist terminology. It would also have been useful to
bring into this conversation the more recent scholarship published in Japan
and China over the question of translation in relation to Christianity vis-àvis Buddhist philosophy and neo-Confucian debates—although these areas
are admittedly for the more specialized sphere of scholars and beyond the
scope of the author’s original biographical undertaking.

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The author’s concluding reflections on the fragility of the Jesuit
endeavor in terms of a number of “dead ends” and “dinosaurs” (p. 429) may
be rhetorically effective in bringing the narrative of Palmeiro’s life and
times to a close, but it tends at times to fall into the type of generalizations
about “global” trends that the author has otherwise tried so hard to avoid.
The systematic destruction of the Christian community in Japan in the
seventeenth century might today be accurately described as nothing short
of a “religious genocide”; and yet, the survival of this underground community of “hidden Christians” without priests for more than 200 years bears
witness to an astonishing “success” of the Japanese mission—arguably
unparalleled in the history of Christianity. Success and failure often
become apparent only after centuries and may be ambiguous categories
that obscure rather than clarify. Japanese Christians did not consider martyrdom a failure but a revelation and perfect enactment of the faith they
had embraced.
In either case, as the author illustrates so skillfully, Palmeiro was a
remarkable figure in this story of European missions among the peoples of
South, Southeast, and East Asia; and his struggles to resolve the many
challenges that the Jesuits of the generation faced after Francis Xavier,
Alessandro Valignano, and Matteo Ricci makes for a compelling read. As
with every good book, it will engender debate and stimulate scholars to
explore this period and these themes further.
Response of Liam Matthew Brockey
(Department of History, Michigan State University)
I am grateful to the editor of The Catholic Historical Review for organizing this forum on my study of André Palmeiro and to the colleagues who
offered reviews. Simon Ditchfield’s excellent synopsis of The Visitor gives a
thorough overview of the book’s organization and primary arguments. He
rightly notes that I intended this biography of a relatively unknown figure
to “deflate” the image of the Jesuit missionaries in the early-modern world.
I pursue this goal by insisting on the limitations to their apostolic ambitions. Instead of focusing on the loci of conversion in the mission field, my
study concentrates on the Jesuits’ “back office,” where administrators faced
manifold concerns: the perennial lack of funds, a want for manpower,
geopolitical challenges, logistical complications, fractious subordinates,
dubious decisions, and ambivalence toward or rejection of their religious
message. By shifting the focus of debate from considerations of what the
Jesuits would do to analysis of what the Jesuits could do, I seek to bring
discussion of the missions back “down to earth.”

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The checks on missionary élan mentioned above have elsewhere been
explained as obstacles for the visionaries who propelled the most audacious
Jesuit endeavors. If Matteo Ricci or Roberto Nobili were not successful in
their projects, it was because they were impeded by others who did not
understand their methods. If Alessandro Valignano’s plans came to
naught, it was because his subordinates and successors were ill-equipped to
give form to his ideas. I chose to write about Palmeiro because his biography gives an alternative view on the story of the Jesuit missions in India,
China, and Japan. It offers a different perspective on the Asian enterprises
of the Society of Jesus that stresses other explanations for their outcomes.
My selection of Palmeiro was motivated by a desire to find a counterpoint
to the abovementioned trio who have been lionized by generations of
scholars: He, too, went to the mission fields of southern India and Ming
China where he was obliged to contemplate the best means for winning
conversions; and he, too, enjoyed a full range of powers to direct all of the
Asian missions. But Palmeiro came after Valignano, Ricci, and Nobili and
so had to deal with their legacies—a task that involved reconsidering, and
at times rejecting, many of the innovative approaches that have so captured
the minds of contemporaries and modern scholars. By concentrating on
Palmeiro’s decisions in Asia, my aim was to demonstrate that the scope of
his strategic vision was just as broad as that of his predecessors and that he
enjoyed no less confidence from the Society’s Superior Generals in Rome.
To me, he is a “visitor” not only in his role as external inspector of the missions but also as an outsider to the historiography of the Jesuits in Asia. I
nevertheless did not seek to promote Palmeiro’s beatification and did not
applaud his every decision. Rather, I presented the full range of Palmeiro’s
actions to contrast them with the heroic tone of his celebrated predecessors’ biographies. The picture of Palmeiro that I painted is that of, in
Ditchfield’s accurate phrase, an antihero—a man whose preoccupations,
decisions, and actions were in keeping with the messy realities of his age.
Ditchfield’s rigorous summary of The Visitor also correctly identifies
my desire to discuss the complex nature of early-modern Catholicism.
Since the primary challenge of missionaries was to export their religion—
here conceived in the broadest sense, involving institutions, doctrines,
devotions, and more—it was necessary to discuss the European background of the Jesuits and the different manifestations that Catholicism had
in Asian (and East African) contexts. Religious transmission was not
simply a matter of ensuring that the missionaries kept on message, but
rather of coordinating men from a variety of backgrounds; enforcing the
norms of the Society of Jesus; confronting other representatives of ecclesiastical authority as well as rivals from other religious orders; and respond-

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FORUM ESSAY

ing to the desires of prospective converts, neophytes, and mature Christians. Ditchfield underscores my point about the difficulty of handling all
of these internal tensions within the Church and cites several of my statistics about the size of both the Jesuit communities and the Asian churches.
The consideration of missionary strategy is another of the central
themes of my study and one that also caught the attention of the other participants in this forum. Ditchfield places this question in the contexts of
both South Asia and East Asia, since those were the sites where Palmeiro
found the most audacious attempts to present Catholicism in forms
believed to be most acceptable to potential converts. Such strategies, I
argue, were efforts at translation and compose different versions of the
famed “accommodation” policies. Whether in Madurai with Nobili or in
Ming China with Ricci, the willingness to adapt external forms to local
cultures has rightly been placed at the center of scholarly reflections on the
early-modern Jesuits. My goal, as recognized by Antoni Uçerler and
William Christian Jr., was to consider the policing of those strategies of
cultural accommodation in light of their outcomes. A visitor to the missions after innovations were made by Jesuit pioneers, Palmeiro was thus an
ideal figure for gauging the effectiveness of those strategies. Although he
was not a translator himself, he was also fully capable of evaluating the
work of his subordinates and of mediating their disputes over the accuracy
or necessity of certain translations. I appreciate that this question still has
relevance, as confirmed by Christian’s Peruvian anecdote, and that the
notion of translation as I have explained it in the early-seventeenth-century
context can be seen as a topic with relevance to a wide range of scholars in
the humanities.
As both Ditchfield and Uçerler note, I chose an unfashionable form
for my book, but one selected to call into question many different historiographical assumptions—about nationalities among the Jesuits, about the
relationships between religious orders and imperial structures, about cultural accommodation, about the unity of purpose and vision of the men of
the Society of Jesus, and about the facile yet fashionable identification of
“global” trends in the early-modern period. Ditchfield’s summary asserts
that this last item is perhaps the most polemical aspect of my nearly 500page book. My position with regard to the proper use of the term global in
studies of institutions and individuals in the early-modern world is most
explicitly revealed in a three-paragraph section in the epilogue (pp. 428–
29) and was sufficient to elicit a spirited response from Luke Clossey. I
agree with him that there are indeed different ways to view the earlymodern period and that different concepts can guide the historian, but I

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571

respond that my argument is not a call for “purity.” It is rather a call for
accuracy. Clossey points to my brief passage and a footnote, but he would
do better to cite my entire book. The Visitor, after all, is a very long argument for my position: If there is any place for the term global in considerations of early modernity, it is not in coincidences of a Jesuit (or British, or
Dutch mercantile, or Franciscan) presence simultaneously found in different parts of the world in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather, it lies
with the extremely limited set of individuals like Palmeiro whose lives and
travels actually achieved something of the “global”—although their understanding of that quality bears little resemblance to ours and should therefore not be judged by our criteria. Historians, as Clossey rightly claims,
should use all appropriate tools for their task. But the fact of having a range
of tools, however, does not oblige one to use them all. The difference
between historians, we therefore must agree, lies in the skill with which
they gauge the usefulness of the tools at their disposal.
The respondents in this forum raised other points that I should also
address. Enrique García Hernán suggested that my bibliography was lacking in some aspects. Indeed, it is: The book has no bibliography, and its
notes are drastically condensed. This state of affairs reflects the nature of
academic publishing today. My publisher offered a greater commitment to
distribution, as well as increased funding for book production, if I would
forgo footnotes, reduce my endnotes to the bare minimum, and omit a full
list of reference works. In accepting this offer, I had to suppress mention
of the authors cited by García Hernán—since most of them were included
in the notes of my original manuscript—but also of many others whose
work contributed to shaping my ideas about Palmeiro. In the end, only
those sources that were directly quoted in the text, supplied a precise fact
or figure, or offered essential background reading (with bibliographic support) were included. The press argued that these excisions were necessary
for the book to reach a greater number of readers who would recoil in fear
from the traditional scholarly apparatus. As a historian who endeavors to
communicate to broad public, I saw the reduction as a small sacrifice to
make for the greater good of reaching more readers.
García Hernán’s other point, about the nature of my sources, also
requires comment lest the readers of this forum believe that I did not chase
Palmeiro’s document trail to its logical end. Indeed, a visit to the Spanish
capital would have been fun, but it was not necessary to achieve my goal—
the documents that he mentions in Madrid are only part of the old Jesuit
archive of Macau, whose papers were shipped to Manila and then to Spain.
In that transfer, many of the sources were lost, meaning that Madrid has

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FORUM ESSAY

only a fraction of the original documents. Thankfully, one of the initial
projects of the Academia Real da História Portuguesa (founded 1720) was
to procure copies of documents in the colonial archives of religious orders,
including that of the Jesuits in Macau. The sixty-one volumes of the Jesuítas na Ásia collection at the Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon are the result of
that effort and are thus more complete than the remnants that survive in
Madrid’s repositories.3 A consultation of my notes for references to this
collection will reveal that the Ajuda sources are one of the foundations of
The Visitor, as they are in my previous book, Journey to the East: The Jesuit
Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA, 2007). I also consulted the
catalogs of other libraries and archives in Spain, France, and Portugal, as
well as provincial collections in Braga, Évora, and Coimbra, confident that
I had identified the principal materials necessary for this study. Keeping in
mind that I intended to have Palmeiro at the center of the story, I sought
his writings in the principal repositories in Lisbon and Rome. Since my
book was not intended to be a general history of Christianity in earlymodern Asia, nor a history of the Portuguese empire, nor a history of the
Society of Jesus—and keeping in mind the restrictions on notes previously
mentioned—I chose not to give a full catalog of dispersed references to the
padre visitador by royal and ecclesiastical officials that I sought and found
in a number of other archives.
It is always a pleasure to see that one’s work solicits a range of different
responses. I am pleased that The Visitor raised a variety of questions for
these reviewers and that it left them wanting more rather than less. García
Hernán would have preferred more consideration of the Spanish elements
of my Portuguese story; Uçerler would have appreciated more background
on the Jesuits in East Asia and more consideration of missionary spirituality; Christian would have liked drier, more analytical prose and a consideration of “other Catholicisms.” All of these suggestions make it clear that the
story I have told is a compelling one that forces readers to reconsider the
overseas missions in the early-modern period. If this prompts the reviewers,
the readers of this journal, or the general public to pursue further research
of André Palmeiro, the Jesuits, early-modern Catholicism, or the Asian
missions, then I will be content that I have done my job as a historian.

3. The story of this archive is told in the introduction to Josef Franz Schütte, El
“Archivo del Japon”: Vicisitudes del Archivo Jesuitico del Extremo Oriente y Descripción del Fondo
existente en la Real Academia de la Historia de Madrid (Madrid, 1964).

REVIEW ESSAY
A New Edition of the Medieval Councils
WALTER BRANDMÜLLER*
Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta: Editio critica.The General
Councils of Latin Christendom: From Constantinople IV (869/870) to
Lateran V (1512–1517). [Corpus Christianorum Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta. Edited by Istituto per le scienze religiose
Bologna; Giuseppe Alberigo and Alberto Melloni, general editors. 3
vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006–13)]. Vol. II. 2013. Pp. 1450.
€740,00. ISBN 978-2-503-52527-3.
Vol. II, tome 1: The General Councils of Latin Christendom from Constantinople IV to Pavia-Siena (869–1424). Edited by Antonio
Garcia y Garcia, Peter Gemeinhardt, Georg Gresser, Thomas
Izbicki, Atria Larson, Alberto Melloni, Jürgen Miethke, Kenneth
Pennington, Burkhard Roberg, Riccardo Saccenti, and Philip
Stump. 2013.
Vol. II, tome 2: From Basel to Lateran V (1431–1517). Edited by Frederick Lauritzen, Nelson H. Minnich, Joachim Stieber, Harald
Suermann, and Jürgen Uhlich. 2013.

T

he first volume of the COGD, published in 2006, ended with the
Second Council of Nicaea (787). This breaking point has a programmatic character, for the editors are of the opinion that Nicaea II had been
the last ecumenical council. From that moment, as indicated in the title of
volume II/1, there are only “The General Councils of Latin Christendom.”
This formulation covers the basic problem of the entire enterprise.
First of all, the editors do not provide a clear definition of what constitutes an “ecumenical” council. The unexpressed and undiscussed idea
that underlies the volume is that an ecumenical council (assuming a constitution of the Church based on the concept of Pentarchy) requires the

*Cardinal Brandmüller is cardinal-deacon of San Giuliano dei Fiamminghi and president emeritus of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, email walter.
brandmueller@gmail.com.

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participation of all five patriarchates, where “old Rome,” even while the
first, is to be considered only one of the five. This implies that the Church
was seen to be congruent with the understanding and boundaries of the
Roman Empire, or vice versa. It thus seems to have totally escaped the editors that with this concept, they were “excommunicating” all of Oriental
Christianity. Thus those who did not follow the Council of Chalcedon
remain excluded, for they separated themselves not on the basis of Christological differences with the imperial Church but from a desire to be independent from the Empire. And thus from this conception of Pentarchy
derives the first pseudo-wording (oecumenicorum generaliumque) in the title
of the edition. If one does not wish to start from this point, then one
should say so clearly and distinctly. Thus, one should not use the Catholic
terms oecumenical and general council, but speak of them all more generally
as church meetings.
But with this arrives already the second, equally thorny problem—i.e.,
the selection of the councils. Which of the numerous synods should be
included in the volume? Was the choice based on comprehensible criteria?
The editors owe an answer to this question. Nevertheless, the term general
council should be clearly distinguished from the term ecumenical used in the
first volume. The reviewer has treated this problem at length.1 Specifically,
before this background, there is the problem of how to assess the two
Photian synods of 869/70 and 879/80. In particular, these two synods
should not be considered Latin (!) general councils, for in both cases they
were affairs of the church of Constantinople. Another striking feature is
that each of the two is called “Concilium Constantinopolitanum IV.”
Equally surprising is the inclusion in this collection of the Pisan Council
of 1409. Surely it has been claimed at times that it acted as a general council. Indeed, it should not be overlooked that not only the whole obedience
of Benedict XIII—including Spain, Portugal, a considerable portion of
France, and Scotland—had not attended but also the followers of Gregory
XII in Italy and Germany. So, how can one call “general” such a fragmentary assembly just when it was about to reunite the two broken parts of the
Church? Consequently, neither the Photian synods nor the Pisan Council
of 1409 found a place in the previous editions of the COD.
On the other hand, a progress can be found in the decision of the editors to include in the collection the Council of Pavia-Siena (1423/24). The

1. Walter Brandmüller, “Zum Problem der Ökumenizität von Konzilien,” Annuarium
Historiae Conciliorum, 41 (2009), 275–312.

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first edition of COD referred to the “Concilium Papiense-Senense” on
page 429 and in the second edition on page 452. J. Wohlmuth claimed that
the Council of Padua (!)-Siena (1423–24) did not take place due to the
absence of fathers (quod ob absentes patres locum non habuit) and was not
acknowledged due to the lack of participation, but nonetheless had chosen
Basel as the location of the next council. How, one wonders, if the council
was not acknowledged, could it make such an important decision as the
location of the next council (after Frequens)? The existence of the twovolume history of this council (1968–74) was apparently not noticed by the
previous editors. That the council was convened by the pope and that its
decrees were confirmed by him proves without a doubt (together with the
above-mentioned other criteria) that it enjoyed the character of an ecumenical council.2
Similar questions with respect to the councils in the second volume
(1431–1517) arise only in the case of the Council of Basel. Based on one’s
conception of the Catholic Church or of a council, the Council is not to be
considered legitimate after the thirty-first session on January 24, 1438,
because of its opposition to the pope. Nonetheless, the historical significance of what happened in Basel after that date merits the inclusion of the
acta of the by now schismatic assembly in the COGD collection. Finally,
it must be asked: which are the criteria according to which texts were
included that in no way deserve to be included in a Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta? Certainly there are texts that have arisen in
connection with the councils and contribute to understanding them. But
that could be said of many texts. So why only and precisely these? So much
for the overall design of the edition.
So what is the reality and intention of the entire enterprise? Why have
the editors gone beyond the first edition of the COD? That edition was
created in preparation for the Second Vatican Council so that the legislative and magisterial yield of previous councils would be made available,
quasi as a basis for the forthcoming council. It dealt with the authentic
texts of the magisterium and the pastoral office of the Church. But what
purpose should the present edition serve? What is the purpose of the texts
of synods or attempted synods that were neither “ecumenical” (when one
wishes inaccurately to distinguish them) nor “general” councils? A sourcebook for the history of councils certainly could not have been intended.

2. Cf. Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Pavia-Siena, 2nd ed. (Paderborn, 2002), pp.
343–48.

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A NEW EDITION OF THE MEDIEVAL COUNCILS

That would have required the inclusion of much more material. But what
then? The design of the edition enterprise is indeed highly questionable
and anything but plausible.
As it is, the edition represents nonetheless a rather significant
progress, as it presents for the first time critical editions of the texts of several councils that are based on extensive manuscript consultation. This is
true for Lyon II (B. Roberg), Vienne (R. Saccenti), Pisa (J. Miethke),
Konstanz (Ph. Stump), and Basel (J. Stieber). For Lateran IV, see the reliable edition of A. Garcia y Garcia; for Lyon I, that of C. Leonardi in the
COD; for Pavia-Siena, the edition of the reviewer. For Ferrara-Florence,
too, the editors had to adapt the Acta Latina and Graeca from the Concilium
Florentinum, as well as the Armenian and Arabic texts, and we are thankful
that their specific problems are deigned worthy of consideration in the
respective introductions. It is astonishing that, according to the editors, the
manuscript basis for the first three Lateran councils could not have been
extended since the 1962 edition. After all, the cataloguing of manuscripts
has made great progress in recent decades. With regard to the Photian
councils one cannot lament enough that the extensive preparatory efforts
of Vittorio Peri for an edition were discontinued after his death in 2006.
Not even one of his relevant works is cited in the introduction. The editor
limited himself to reproducing the texts of P. Joannou. This is even more
incomprehensible with regard to the council of 869/70, since in 2012 a
critical edition of its texts was published.3 For the text of Lateran V, the
question of the manuscript tradition remains no longer, as the decrees were
quickly distributed in print after each session. So one could here refer back
to the texts in the COD. In addition, the editor referred to the “versions
found in the few surviving bulls and those recorded in the papal registers
and the official pamphlet editions.” Volume II/2 concludes with the
Indices—Locorum Sacrae Scripturae et Fontium (pp. 1459–1507).
When one looks at the introductions to the respective conciliar texts,
one notices that they are not of a uniform shape. One author is satisfied
with providing a synopsis of the decrees or canons; another provides a
sketch of the history of the council. Others deal with the history of the
research on the texts or their edition. Most striking is the (by the way, very
important) introduction to Lyon II published in German, whereas the
3. Gesta sanctae ac universalis octavae synodi quae Constantinopoli congregata est Anastasio
bibliothecario interprete. Recensuit, emendavit, adnotatione critica instruxit Claudius Leonardi;
post cuius obitum recognovit, prolegomenis notulis indicibus exornavit Antonius Placanica. [Edizione Nazionale dei Testi Mediolatini d’Italia, 27], (Florence, 2012).

W ALTER BRANDMÜLLER

577

others are in English. It is noteworthy that for the Council of Basel a Registrum Bio-Bibliographicum is provided. Why, one wonders, only for
Basel and why at all for Basel? This lack of uniformity could have been
avoided if the editors had given appropriate instructions. Careful editing
could have prevented a number of annoying defects. Thus, for example,
one misses from the bibliography of Pisa (1409) articles by Herbert
Immenkötter and Walter Brandmüller.4 For the rest, it is impossible to
deal here with the inaccurate or controversial statements in the introductions—for example, the introduction to Lateran I. However, we cannot
ignore, in an edition that claims to be scholarly, the intolerable number of
typographical errors; see, for example, pages 3, 7, 22, 37, 39, 46, 151, 152,
153, 158, 366–68, 478, 483, and 485. Nonetheless, historians and theologians are offered a new critical edition of texts, which from now on will be
authoritative for the councils in question.

4. Herbert Immenkötter, “Ein avignonesischer Bericht zur Unionspolitik Benedikts
XIII,” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 8 (1976), 200–49; Walter Brandmüller, “Die
Gesandtschaft Benedikts XIII. an das Konzil von Pisa,” in Papst und Konzil im Großen
Schisma (Paderborn, 1990), pp. 42–70; and Walter Brandmüller, “Sieneser Korrespondenzen
zum Konzil von Pisa,” Ibid., 171–224.

REVIEW ESSAY
Essence, Concept, or History:
What Is at Stake in a Dispute over the COGD
ALBERTO MELLONI*

S

ince the beginning of the institute founded in Bologna by Giuseppe
Dossetti1 in 1953 and directed by Giuseppe Alberigo for fifty years
before the latter passed away in 2007, the history of councils was and is at
the core of the institute’s research.2 This is not by chance. From the theological point of view of Dossetti, councils are the places for providing the
long-awaited, profound renewal of Catholicism (according to the famous
adage “in the Pope there is more authority, in the Council more grace”3).
From the historical point of view of Alberigo, councils are the places where
the reciprocated immanence between Christianity and history is more relevant: because they are instances of ecclesiastical life, not an abstract
essence—and even less an essence derived from “a genuinely Catholic concept of the Church.” Places where the real development of ideas and passions, fears and tricks, bureaucracy and hopes become effective.
Editio critica
An edition of the councils was among the first projects of the Bologna
institute. It was published in October 1962 with no less than Hubert Jedin4

*Dr. Melloni is professor of the History of Christianity at the University of
Modena/Reggio Emilia and secretary of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in
Bologna, email: melloni@fscire.it.
1. See La fede e la storia. Studi nel decennale della morte di Giuseppe Dossetti, ed. Alberto
Melloni (Bologna, 2007).
2. See Alberto Melloni, “Obituary: Giuseppe Alberigo (1926–2007),” The Catholic Historical Review, 93 (2007), 1030–32.
3. For the history of the quotation, see Giuseppe Alberigo, “La conciliarità della chiesa:
una passione,” in La fede e la storia, ed. Alberto Melloni, pp. 47–66. See also Giuseppe
Alberigo, “Introduzione,” in Giuseppe Dossetti, Per una chiesa eucaristica. Rilettura della portata dottrinale della Costituzione liturgica del Vaticano II. Lezioni del 1965, ed. Giuseppe
Alberigo and Giuseppe Ruggieri (Bologna, 2002), pp. 139–247.
4. See Giuseppe Alberigo, “Hubert Jedin storiografo (1900–1980),” Cristianesimo nella
storia, 22 (2001), 315–38.

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as consultant and a group of young scholars as editors, with the title Conciliorum œcumenicorum decreta. It was a piece of historical research that
could have raised in scholars like Walter Brandmüller the same question
that has troubled the cardinal since 2007, when the first volume of the
revised and reshaped edition of that work was issued with the title Conciliorum œcumenicorum generaliumque decreta (COGD): what were the “criteria” adopted by the young and unknown scholars of councils, at that time
working under Jedin’s auspices?5 How could they alter a “list” (which was
a very fluid one, indeed) that originated with St. Robert Bellarmine and
was transformed into a semi-doctrinal issue by those who, ignoring the
depth and the meaning of a 2000-year debate, considered it as having deviated (if the language of Brandmüller may be used once again) from a “genuinely Catholic concept of the Church”?
What can be considered a reproach to the COD volume, which was
received as a gift by John XXIII,6 can be imputed to the COGD program
too: namely the new critical edition, edited with the concurrences of spe5. A status quæstionis in the sixties is in Vittorio Peri, “Il numero dei concili ecumenici
nella tradizione cattolica moderna,” Aevum, 37 (1963), 432–501; see also I concili e le chiese.
Ricerca storica sulla tradizione d’universalità dei sinodi ecumenici (Rome, 1965), in which Peri
explains why he did not take part in the COD edition (p. 80). He later returned to the subject
in “Concilium plenum et generale. La prima attestazione dei criteri tradizionali dell’ecumenicità,” Annuarium Historiæ Conciliorum, 15 (1983), 41–78, and “I concili ecumenici come struttura portante della gerarchia ecclesiasitica,” in The 17th International Byzantine Congress—
[Dumbarton Oaks] Major Papers (New Rochelle, NY, 1986), pp. 59–81; “Vent’anni dopo.
Ancora sul numero dei concili ecumenici,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 23 (1987),
289–300; and “L’ecumenicità di un concilio come processo storico nella vita della Chiesa,”
Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 20 (1988), 216–44, which was republished in Lo scambio
fraterno fra le chiese. Componenti storiche della comunione (Vatican City, 1993), 149–79. On the
same debate in a different confessional area, see John Meyendorff, “What Is an Ecumenical
Council?”, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 17 (1973), 259–73, and Francis Dvornik,
“Which Councils Are Ecumenical?”, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 3 (1966), 314–28. A confessional perspective is in Hans-Joachim Schulz, “Die sieben ökumenischen und die späteren
abendländischen Konzilien. Der unterschiedliche Grad ihrer Verankerung in der altenkirchen
Überlieferung,” Orthodoxes Forum, 5 (1991), 265–80, and Peter L’Huillier, “The Development of the Concept of an Ecumenical Council (4th–8th Centuries),” Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 36 (1991), 243–62.
6. Pope John XXIII received the COD during a private audience in the Private Library;
he noted the meeting in his diary on October 1, 1962. See Pater amabilis. I diari di papa Giovanni, ed. Mauro Velati (Diari di A.G. Roncalli-Giovanni XXIII) (Bologna, 2007), p. 438; a
picture appears in L’“officina bolognese” 1953–2003, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo (Bologna, 2003),
n6. COGD1 was offered by Alberigo to Pope Benedict XVI in a private audience near the
Sala Nervi on February 7, 2013, and presented to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos at
the Phanar on October 1, 2010, by Enzo Bianchi and Alberto Melloni, who later presented
COGD1-3 to Pope Francis in a private audience in his Private Library on June 23, 2013.

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cialists from all over the world by the foundation that is the last institutional form of Dossetti’s institute, published by Brepols in the Corpus
Christianorum. The new COGD, which offers only the decisions or
decrees of the councils in seven tomes,7 is in fact a work of the historian
dealing with historical events that have a different status from time to time
within each tradition and a different type of acknowledgment within different confessional borders; in the fluctuating variety of conceptions and
receptions, however, they offer the evidence of the common conciliar
engagement of the churches.8
Something before History
Walter Brandmüller’s position is different and respectable: he belongs
to a school that considers the historian theologically blind and crippled—
at least when dealing with councils; so only a confessional approach can tell
him or her what is the object that the historian is entitled to “dissect” with
critical tools. For Brandmüller’s essentialism, the COGD’s decision to
follow the different traditions of the churches and the consensus doctorum is
“anything but plausible”; and the historical criteria—to study and edit the
conciliar history of the Churches “wie es eigentlich gewesen”—appears to
him as a lack of criteria.
Other people, much more versed in theology, think exactly the opposite: the recent works of Christoph Théobald on the Second Vatican
Council are good examples of how a fresh theological approach can benefit
from historical study.9 Other historians, like John O’Malley, proved that a
genuine historical approach is not a threat to the Church, when it helps the
Church to revise the concepts that are offered by a “fixed” hermeneutic of
what is presumed to be the unchangeable.10
On one point we all do agree: the COGD program, started by
Alberigo as an improvement over the critical status of the COD text and
7. COGD1, The Ecumenical Councils, from Nicea I to Nicea II; COGD2.1–COGD2.2,
The General Councils of Latin Christendom, from the So-Called Constantinople IV of 869 to Lateran V; COGD3, The Ecumenical Councils of the Roman Catholic Church, with the Councils of
Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II. They will be followed by COGD4 and COGD5 with the
great councils of the Byzantine and post–Byzantine Orthodox Churches and the Oriental
Orthodox Churches, and COGD6.1 and COGD6.2 with the great councils of the Churches
of and after the Reformation, including some conciliar events of the twentieth century.
8. This point is developed in Alberto Melloni, “Concili, ecumenicità e storia. Note di
discussione,” Cristianesimo nella storia, 28 (2007), 509–42.
9. Christoph Theobald, La réception du concile Vatican II, I. Accéder à la source (Paris 2009).
10. John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA, 2008).

ALBERTO MELLONI

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increased in size by the author of this essay, has quite a different perspective. There is no nostalgia for the pentarchic regime of the Church,11 nor
any hidden desire to excommunicate the beloved non-Chalcedonian
churches, but the humble effort to accept that a council is an historical fact,
with its own factual ontology.
The churches may attribute different powers by method to their councils; they can consider the decision taken as binding or not and discern different degrees of authority in each decision. However, they are in one way
or another facts. And the historian has the moral obligation to take facts
into consideration (this is true mostly for the historian belonging to the
Catholic Church, who knows since the time of Leo XIII that “God is not
in need of our lies”).
The Council as a Fact
The councils are facts provided with a self-understanding and also with
adjectives that were given to them by three of the many “owners” of a council: (a) the councils themselves as acting events placed in a history and looking for their place in that history; (b) the reception offered to them in different ways according with the statute of each church; and (c) the historical
knowledge (where “historical” indicates a discipline with a quite different
consciousness of its targets and limits from the time of Luke or Eusebius up
to Jedin and Alberigo). The way in which a council names itself is not a
unique parameter (e.g., Nicaea I never called itself “ecumenical”12); but
where a long-standing tradition names some of them as general or universal,
only theology or an ecclesiastical authority can offer good reasons to call
them differently in a realm that is not the realm of history and historical
truthfulness. And neither theology nor authority has felt the need to close
off such a discussion, which was enlivened by endless debates and positions.
In fact, when a council names itself in Latin as “general,” it implies
ideas that should be considered as a fact to be respected and explained in the
historical context with intellectual honesty. Brandmüller thinks in an oppo11. In “Notices bibliographiques,” Revue de théologique de Louvain, 4 (1973), 375–77,
André De Halleux reproved the “lourde handicap œcuménique” coming from the adoption of
part of Baronius’s list: because if the Union bulls of 1439 were edited, it would have been necessary to add the Syriac bulls of 1444–45 on the Syrians, Chaldeans, and Maronites that
Eugene IV approved in the Lateran council that he pretended to be the continuation of Ferrara-Florence.
12. L’Huillier, The Development of the Concept of an Ecumenical Council, p. 243; only
Eusebius applied the word ecumenical.

582

ESSENCE, CONCEPT, OR HISTORY

site way that suspects a subterfuge adopted by the editor of this series, and
this way of thinking very openly dislikes it. As far as this reviewer knows,
he was not so upset when Paul Tombeur named his precious concordance
of the COD as Thesaurus Conciliorum Oecumenicorum et Generalium Ecclesiae
Catholicae. The cardinal is not available to explain why, when confronted by
so great a danger, even John XXIII wrote “general” in the convocation of
the Second Vatican Council; and if the report of Msgr. Josef Höfer to
Konrad Adenauer is correct, he also said “general” to the cardinals listening
to his announcement on January 25, 1959.13 The cardinal does not take
issue with Paul VI who used the expression “general”14 with the intention
to witness to the other churches that the specific use of “ecumenical” implemented by some authors since the seventeenth century was not at all an
affirmation of a Roman auto-sufficiency, as it was in the past.
It is a pity. Such a clear papal attitude is not an argument for polemics;
it shows that even the Catholic authority does not want to interrupt a discussion that has always been very open. The Kleine Konzilsgeschichte of Jedin,
published on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, called the medieval
councils “papal” more than “general.” Vittorio Peri, one of the scholars who
invested much time on the topic, recalled that Bellarmine (in his first controversy De conciliis et ecclesia, I,17) says that he will discuss «ex iis conciliis que
omnium consensu generalia fuerunt». Going back to Juan Torquemada, one
can read in the Summa de ecclesia, III.50, that «concilium generale catholicæ
ecclesiæ est congregatio maiorum prælatorum auctoritate Romani Pontificis speciali
convocata». Anastasius Bibliothecarius mentioning the council of 869/70
wanted to call it «synodus universalis octava». Even Camillo Mazzella, in his
De religione et Ecclesia prælectiones dogmaticæ that was published in Rome
while he was still in the United States as a professor, had as a goal to prove
that the councils called “general” can be taken at the same level as the ecumenical ones, even if there is some dispute on that: «Concilium generale

13. Alberto Melloni, Papa Giovanni: un cristiano e il “suo” concilio (Turin, 2008) where
the original manuscript is studied and edited in critical edition. For Höfer’s notes on the pope
reading from a seven-page manuscript, see Alberto Melloni, L’altra Roma. Politica e S. Sede
durante il concilio Vaticano II (1959–1965) (Bologna, 2000), p. 39. Roncalli, who had a great
familiarity with Caesar Baronius and ecclesiastical history, is a good example also of a differentiating language: opening the Second Vatican Council, he follows Baronius numbering
“twenty ecumenical councils”; see also Melloni, Papa Giovanni, p. 305 (as he had done before
in front of the first Roman Synod).
14. Paul VI, allocution Lugduni in urbe, October 19, 1974, in L’Osservatore Romano, ad
diem: Paul VI called the Council of 1274 as «Lugdunense Concilium, quod sextum recensetur
inter Generales Synodos in Occidentali orbe celebratas»; the “Latin Christendom” of the subtitle
of COGD2 parallels Montini’s this “western world.”

ALBERTO MELLONI

583

vocatur etiam plenarium, universale, œcumenicum etsi quoad hanc postremam
appellationem aliqua existat nominis discrepantia inter auctores». As successor of
Johann Baptist Franzelin, the later cardinal Mazzella incorporated the conditiones of Bellarmine, explaining that «habita ergo ratione rei potius quam
nominis, appellationem œcumenici sumimus tamquam synonimam generalis et
œcumenicum dicimus “concilium repræsentans universam Ecclesiam [“of course
for him”], actis assentiente Romano Pontifice».15
An Open Debate
Such a constantly open debate is the reason for the title of COGD and
its subtitles: and in this open debate COGD offers a scholarly motivated
position, which does not pretend to invade the field of the churches as it
kindly asks the ecclesiastical authority to respect the little truth of history.
Therefore, COGD3 described “the Ecumenical Councils of the Roman
Catholic Church,” using a terminology that implies a semantic shift for
“ecumenical,” no less relevant than the semantic shift that one can find in
the naming of the movement raising the desire for Christian unity with a
different content of ecumenicity. Even the history of Nicaea II16 indicates
that nobody can pretend that a unimodal list of councils (that defined
themselves as ecumenical, universal, or general) has ever existed inside or
among the churches: nor does it exist a priori for the Councils series.17
COGD is simply registering the existing views on the subject with the
instrument of the historian and a sense of historical change: new antinomic
principles were expressed,18 generating a semantic move19 that the historian cannot but record in all its nuances.

15. De religione et Ecclesia prælectiones dogmaticæ (Rome, 1865), pp. 796–97.
16. When Nicaea II denies the qualification of ecumenical to the previous iconoclastic
council of Hiereia, it expresses an a posteriori conscience: in Vittorio Peri’s words, such a position becomes an “opinion” that was “traditional and venerated” but nonetheless was challenged by Carolingian Christendom; see Peri, I concili e le chiese cit., p. 32, also for the life of
Stephanus of del Metafraste in Vat. gr. 805, f. 226v ab, revised by another author in PG100,
1144 bc and also of Peri, “L’ecumenicità di un concilio come processo storico nella vita della
Chiesa,” 227; for the Carolingian resilience see Alberto Melloni, “L’«Opus Caroli Regi contra
Synodum» o «Libri Carolini,” Studi Medievali, 29 (1988), 873–86.
17. The Council of Ferrara-Florence was printed for a century as Oecumenicum VIII,
and such a definition was noticed by Caesar Baronius; see Christian Unity. The Council of Ferrara-Florence, 1438/39–1989, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo (Leuven, 1991); on the wording, see
Peri, “Il numero dei concili,” pp. 492–93.
18. The typical example is that of Mark of Ephesus (the Eugenikos), which in Florence
disputed about the Photian and anti-Photian councils, opposing the οἰκουμενική synod to the
simply μερική synod; see Gill in Peri, I concili e le chiese, p. 41.
19. Peri, I concili e le chiese, p. 77.

584

ESSENCE, CONCEPT, OR HISTORY

The view of Walter Brandmüller is different and, if I may say so,
inconsistent. When he expresses again his disapproval for such an approach
(more or less in the same words he used in a newspaper article in 2007, later
developed in a longer piece published in the Annuarium Historiæ Conciliorum), he is apparently offering his endorsement to a list, which in practice
does not exist. It may recall the list of Bellarmine; but the list, appearing in
the section De conciliis et Ecclesia of the Controversiæ, explained the theological «conditiones ad generale concilum», because for Bellarmine (it is not true
for Brandmüller) to say general or ecumenical was not exactly the same; the
problem for the seventeenth-century scholar-cardinal was to defend Trent
against Protestant critiques and postconciliarist ideas;20 and with some mistakes21 he made a list that was used by Baronius and by the publishers of the
editio romana, printed under Paul V, between 1608 and 1612.
But even that list was changed22 and disputed—so disputed that Yves
Congar in 1950 and Jedin in the COD preface of 1962 said very clearly
that a single “Catholic list” of the councils does not exist; and in 1967 Karl
Fink wrote his critique of Karl Hefele’s history of the councils because he
welcomed the list of Bellarmine, without taking into consideration its
exclusions (Pisa, according to Fink, is as “general” as the other ones of the
fifteenth century).23
Recent research has discovered that Bellarmine had his own theological intentions, as well as an approach designed to provoke controversy; the
list he offered as an argument,24 however, was not created ex nihilo, but

20. See Klaus Ganzer, “Zur Frage der Ökumenizität des Konzils von Trient. Eine
Auseindersetzung zwischen Stanislaus Orzechowski und Stanislaus Hosius,” in Konzil und
Papst. Festgabe für Hermann Tüchle, ed. G. Schwaiger (Paderborn, 1975), pp. 357–72.
21. The list that can be found in Roberti Bellarmini, Disputationum de controversiis
christianæ fidei adversus huius temporis hæreticos, t. I, (Lyon, 1590), pp. 845–51, has a wrong
date for Nicaea I (327–30 instead of 325), Ephesus (434 instead of 431, which was considered
wrong), Constantinople III (between 681 and 685 instead of 680–81), Lateran III (1180
instead of 1179), and for a mere misprint Florence. Other errors are made on Constantinople
I, II, and IV (anti-Photian); Chalcedon; and Vienne. The list was to be revised by François
Salmon, Traité de l’étude des Conciles et des leurs Collections (Paris, 1724), pp. 389–419, which
includes Constance and Basel.
22. See the Dictionarium morale et canonicum, directed by Pietro Palazzini in 1962, that
did not include Basel (I:834). In the 1963 edition (pp. XVIII–XX), Palazzini makes a correction, which does not prevent the rebuke of Karl August Fink, “Konzilien-Geschichtsschreibung im Wandel?” in Theologie im Wandel. Festschrift zum 150. jährigen Bestehen der katholischtheologischen Fakultät Tübingen 1817–1967 (Munich-Freiburg i.Br., 1967), pp. 179–89.
23. Fink, “Konzilien-Geschichtschreibung im Wandel?” p. 180.
24. See Franco Motta, Bellarmino. Una teologia politica della Controriforma (Brescia, 2005).

ALBERTO MELLONI

585

relied on the Chronographia written by Arnauld de Pontac (Arnaldus Pontacus)25: further evidence that the great cardinal was not looking for a systematic readjustment of the past, but simply demonstrating in a method
designed to incite passions that the Council of Trent was not lacking anything substantial to be obeyed (and for such a purpose, he was dismissing
the councils of Constance and Basel26 as well as Pavia).
Agnosco stylum
So it is an impolite abuse and an unfair inference for Brandmüller to
say that when the historian derives from the sources the self-definition of
“ecumenical” or “general” (as well as “local,” “national,” or again “ecumenical” in 1948), as has been done in the COGD series, there is an unexpressed and undiscussed idea of ecumenicity. As Alberigo did with the
COD, reintegrating the councils of Constance and Basel before the
Second Vatican Council (as Brandmüller wanted for Pavia, for his personal
satisfaction), the new series of COGD is working with historical instruments to add to the immense fresco of Christian conciliarity. This is the
intention of the research of the Bologna team that launched and is carrying
out the project.
It has nothing to do with essences or concepts of the Church, except
for the fact that such an approach refuses to subscribe to the extrinsecismus
redivivus that is part of Brandmüller’s arguments since 2007. On June 3,
2007, Alberigo was on his deathbed in Bologna, and— agnosco stylum—the
Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published a short note with three
25. José Goñi Gaztambide, “El número de los concilios ecuménicos,” in Ecclesia Militans. Studien zur Konzilien- und Reformationsgeschichte R. Bäumer zum 70. Geburstag gewidmet
(Paderborn, 1988), pp. 1–21, discovered Pontac as the source of Bellarmine. On Pontac, see,
in addition to Hurter, Nomenclator, Jules Delpit, “Notes sur diverses éditions d’un livre curieux
d’Arnaud de Pontac, évêque de Bazas,” Revue des Bibliophiles, 1 (1879), 45–48. Before
Pontac’s appointment as bishop in 1572, he published a universal Chronographia taken from
Gilbert Genebrard, a professor of Hebrew studied by Frederick Purnell, “Hermes and the
Sybil: A Note on Ficino’s Pimander,” Renaissance Quarterly, 30 (1997), 305–06. The Chronographia in libros duos distincta was reprinted as Gilbertus Genebrardus and Arnaldus Pontacus,
Chronographiæ libri quatuor (Paris, 1585).
26. Hermann Josef Sieben, Traktate und Theorien zum Konzil. Vom Beginn des Großen
Schismas bis zum Vorabend der Reformation (1378–1521) (Frankfurt, 1983). See also Brian
Tierney, Foundations of Conciliar Theory (Cambridge, UK, 1955) and Giuseppe Alberigo,
Chiesa conciliare. Identità e significato del conciliarismo (Brescia, 1981). For an example of the
history of the research, see Johannes Helmrath, Das Basler Konzil, 1431–1449: Forschungsstand und Probleme (Cologne-Vienna, 1987); Josef Wohlmuth, Verständigung in der Kirche:
Untersucht an der Sprache des Konzils von Basel (Mainz, 1983).

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ESSENCE, CONCEPT, OR HISTORY

asterisks (“sans signature et sans autorité,” as Henri De Lubac would have
said),27 claiming that the position of the COGD concerning the ecumenicity of the Councils was not “Catholic.” The boutade curiously reported the
very same arguments used by Brandmüller in an article of July 13, 2007,28
and again arguments very similar to these can be found in his 2009 article29
and 2015 review of the COGD230: namely, that in COGD there is an
“intention” other than increasing the knowledge of the scholar, and a “definition” was adopted that cannot match the “essence” of the councils,
which those who want to ignore the dispute consider stable.
So, although an expression of gratitude is required for the corrections
of the misprints that he noted,31 I must confess that I remain persuaded

27. The asterisks as CDF signature can be found in the comment to Risposte a quesiti
riguardanti alcuni aspetti circa la dottrina sulla Chiesa (Vatican City, July 10, 2007).
28. Published by Avvenire and L’Osservatore Romano. See Nelson H. Minnich, “Cos’è
un Concilio Ecumenico? Il dibattito storiografico contemporaneo sulla ratio universalitatis
dei Concili alla luce della riflessione cinquecentesca del teologo Roberto Bellarmino e del
canonista Domenico Giacobazzi,” in Storia dei Concili Ecumenici: Attori, canoni, eredità, ed.
Onorato Bucci and Pierantonio Piatti (Rome, 2014), pp. 13–35.
29. Walter Brandmüller, “Zum Problem der Ökumenizität von Konzilien,” Annuarium
Historiae Conciliorum, 41 (2009), 275–312.
30. Including the questions about the two “fourth” councils of Constantinople: on the
ecumenicity of the Photian or anti-Photian Council a memorable dispute opposed Claudio
Leonardi, “Anastasio Bibliotecario e l’ottavo concilio ecumenico,” Studi medievali, 8 (1967),
59–192, and Vittorio Peri, “C’è un concilio ecumenico ottavo?” Archivum Historiæ Conciliorum, 8 (1976), 53–79. A response to Claudio Leonardi, “Das achte ökumenische Konzil,”
Archivum Historiæ Conciliorum 10 (1978), 53–60, was written by Vittorio Peri, “Postilla sul
concilio ecumenico ottavo,” Archivum Historiæ Conciliorum. 10 (1978), 61–66. On the general
issue, see Dvornik, Which Councils Are Ecumenical?
31. Here are some of the little errata/corrige for the intolerable errors listed by Brandmüller, for which I apologize (as well as apologize for the where/were and a/and that
remained after a simple translation was made at Turnhout and insufficiently verified): p. 3:
des 9. Jahrhunderte/des 9. Jahrhunderts; p. 7: pope Henry/pope Hadrian; p. 39: adiuventionibus/ adinventionibus; p. 46: consuerunt/consenserunt; p. 151: è la pagina segnalata dalla
Harvey; p. 152: Vicentius/Vincentius; p. 153: vita regolare/vita religiosa; p. 158:
fréquance/fréquence; pp. 366–67: Freidberg/Friedberg; p. 368: des Konzil/des Konzils; p.
483: acque/actaque; p. 478: functioined/functioned. Some critical notes, on the contrary, are
based on wrong assumptions: the error on “Padua” (sic!) is in a German translation of the old
edition, not at all in COGD; Gresser did consider the new ms tradition on Lateran I not so
relevant for the actual text of the decrees. Editors of the first three Lateran are perfectly aware
of recent literature, like the article of Martin Brett, “Lateran II and Usury,” now in the proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law that was held in
Toronto on August 5–11, 2012. As for Lateran III, pages 121–23 explain the role of Walter
Herold and the use of BAV ms. Reg. lat. 596 (Va) and 984 (Vb), which confirms and/or corrects Herold’s readings. The old article that Brandmüller cites is supposed to be absorbed in

ALBERTO MELLONI

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that the work done with an immense amount of erudition by the editors of
the COGD2, was a proper act of critical scholarship of which the only purpose is to say to the churches that conciliarity is a common part of their
history. Although this practice and an institution have no explicit reference
in Jesus’s words, they have played an essential role in church reforms, like
the reforms now ongoing that are bitterly disliked by the cardinal, even
more than my dear “generaliumque.”

his later work. As for Herbert Immenkötter, “Ein avignonesischer Bericht zur Unionspolitik
Benedikts XIII,” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 8 (1976), 200–49: probably the editors
followed the choice of Brandmüller who, if I am not mistaken, does not quote it in his Papst
und Konzil im Großen Schisma.

Book Reviews
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
The Devil: A New Biography. By Philip C. Almond. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014. Pp. xviii, 270. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5337-3.)
This thoughtful, well-written book by a secularist evinces a good understanding of the Judeo-Christian development of the devil from the Old Testament to the
eighteenth century. The organization combines chronological with topical exposition in a relatively seamless way. Philip C. Almond is a specialist in seventeenthcentury thought, and it is in his section on that and the following century that he
brings the most original and thorough contributions to the subject.
Dealing with theological, literary, artistic, and legal evidence, the author
makes numerous thoughtful observations, of which only one is way off the mark.
One of his two most salient arguments is absolutely right: the devil is an extremely
important aspect of traditional Christianity that we ignore at the cost of misunderstanding the narrative of “Western intellectual history” (p. 222). But he is wrong
to call the devil “a being of absolute evil . . . in the story of a world in which God
had lost ultimate control” (p. 48) and to say that the “Christian story cannot be told
without the Devil” (p. xv). The story certainly has been told without the devil and
still is, although whether it is coherent to do so in the light of the New Testament
and tradition is a valid question.
There are several ways to consider the existence of the devil: as a real personage in a cosmic battle between God and Satan; as a historically real concept of the
human mind; as a metaphor for radical evil. Almond presents the historical
approach very cogently, even though he does not believe in the truth of Christian
tradition. And he is certainly right (p. 48) that evil is present since the beginning
of the world and that Christians require an explanation for this fact.
Almond’s other most salient argument is off the mark: he sees Christianity as
a dualistic religion with a cosmic contest between Christ and Satan. There are two
main sorts of dualism: one between body and spirit, and the other between good
and evil, and Christianity shows marks of both. But better than arguing whether
Christianity is dualist or not is to construct a spectrum of dualism from most dualistic to least dualistic: from Mazdaism and Platonism through Gnosticism through
Manichaeism through Christianity through Judaism and Islam. The author places
Christianity much too close to Manichaeism. The sanctity of the body and its resurrection are at the center of Christian belief in contrast to the first sort of dualism.
As to the second, almost all Christian thinkers believed that the devil is not an
independent principle but a fallen angel who used his free will to reject God.
588

BOOK REVIEWS

589

Almond also emphasizes the Ransom Theory of salvation, a minority view historically but the one that assumes the importance of the devil (pp. 49–55).
Belief in the devil’s reality as leader of all evil beings has frequently encouraged
the Christian demonization of opponents such as heretics, Jews, Muslims, alleged
witches, and above all in the sixteenth-century wars between Catholics and Protestants. However, demonization of opponents is almost universal, even in ideologies
that do not believe in demons.
With its understanding that the devil is best understood through his history,
with its many stimulating and illuminating obiter dicta (for example, p. 203 on the
relation between magic and science), with its up-to-date bibliography, and with its
understanding of the moral importance of the devil as at least a metaphor of real
evil as opposed to treating the subject as merely a literary topos, Almond’s book is
a welcome addition to the subject.
University of California, Santa Barbara (Emeritus)

JEFFREY BURTON RUSSELL

Redeeming Our Sacred Story: The Death of Jesus and Relations between Jews and Christians. By Mary C. Boys. (New York: Paulist Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 387. $29.95
paperback. ISBN 978-0-8091-4817-2.)
The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,
Dei Verbum (November 18, 1965), teaches that “the Old and New Testaments are
like a mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God” (n. 7). Since
Christians’ inadequate approaches to this sacred mirror have generated erroneous
theological ideas, Dei Verbum proceeds (nn. 8–20) to explain and endorse the critical interpretation of the Bible within the Church’s life and worship.
Redeeming Our Sacred Story builds on Dei Verbum, as it aims at releasing the
New Testament’s references to the Jewish people from longstanding, tragic misinterpretations. This enlightening book is the fruit of participation in Jewish-Christian dialogue by Mary C. Boys, Union Theological Seminary’s Skinner and
McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology and dean of academic affairs.
The book’s part I, “A Trembling Telling,” highlights the issue. On the one
hand, Christians have at times wrongly appealed to Jesus’s suffering and death in
support of their denigration of themselves and/or of others (for example, women,
African Americans, and Jews). On the other hand, they have at other times rightly
approached the cross as a “mirror” of their misery and their hope. This mirroring
is often evident, for example, in the religious hymns of enslaved Black Christians
(pp. 26–31).
Part II, “A Troubling Telling—and Its Tragic Consequences,” examines how
the passion narratives, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline letters have served
as the “raw materials for hostility to Jews” (p. 47). For example, they were distorted
in Nazi propaganda against Jews and Judaism, and, for centuries, they were misread

590

BOOK REVIEWS

in the Oberammergau Passion Play’s misrepresentation of the Jewish people as
“Christ killers” (pp. 104–36). A decisive, ecclesiastical effort to overcome antiSemitic renderings of the New Testament occurred not only with the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum but also with its Declaration on the Relation of the
Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate (October 28, 1965). As Boys
explains, this effort is continuing today, although not without occasional ambiguity,
in the Vatican’s deliberate engagement in Jewish-Christian relations (pp. 130–36).
Part III, “A Transformed Telling,” demonstrates how Christians, building on
Dei Verbum, can adopt a judicious hermeneutics to assure an accurate reading of the
Bible. In particular, it proposes “eight guidelines for interpreting New Testament
texts about the passion and death of Jesus” (pp. 221–26). These helpful, concrete
criteria are meant to free the true “power of the story” of Jesus Christ. In pursuit of
this goal, Boys illumines how the gospels’ authentic power may be experienced in
the Church’s devotional practices such as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and
meditations on Jesus’s “Seven Last Words.”
The epilogue observes that this book is a “synthesis,” uniting “biblical,
hermeneutical, and historical studies” for the sake of “a ‘practical’ theology” (p.
258). In this vein, it recommends that Christians will discover more of the New
Testament’s wisdom as they learn from Jewish interpretations of the Bible as well
as from Jewish art and literature on Jesus’s Crucifixion such as that rendered by
Marc Chagall and Chaim Potok (pp. 265–68).
Appearing fifty years after the Second Vatican Council, Redeeming Our Sacred
Story is a significant, timely contribution to the Council’s renewal of the Church’s
life, mission, and theology. Written in clear, energetic language, it is readily accessible to general readers, and it is an invaluable resource for pastors, homilists, catechists, and teachers.
University of Notre Dame

ROBERT A. KRIEG

Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity. Edited by Kristine Kolrud and Marina
Prusac. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2014. Pp. xvi, 230. $109.95.
ISBN 978-1-4094-7033-5.)
This volume presents the proceedings of a series of papers delivered in 2009
at the University of Oslo. The volume offers eleven articles broadly focused on a
number of “iconoclastic” episodes ranging from late antiquity until the twenty-first
century. The focus is predominantly on episodes of iconoclasm in European history, although the contributions of Eberhard W. Sauer (chapter 1) and Jens Braavig
(chapter 10) extend the geographical scope of the volume to include Sauer’s discussion on the Sassanians and Braavig’s on Angkor Watt, Tibet, and Afghanistan.
The collection is introduced by Kristine Kolrud and Marina Prusac, whose
introductory chapter succinctly summarizes the main themes addressed in each
article and many of the overarching questions addressed by the 2009 conference.

BOOK REVIEWS

591

Chief among them is the definition of iconoclasm itself and the application of such
a term to multiple cases of image destruction since late antiquity. Both Kolrud and
Prusac rightly draw attention to the diversity of opinions on this matter, but readers
may have benefitted from a slightly bolder approach to the question or perhaps a
more open recognition of the difficulties faced by each of the contributors in reaching a consensus.
The collection is roughly organized chronologically starting with three studies
of iconoclasm in late antiquity. Sauer (chapter 2) examines the complex responses
of Christian iconoclasts to images of pre-Christian deities in the Roman Empire.
This is complemented by two further studies by Marina Prusac (chapter 3) and
Bente Kiilerich (chapter 4), which examine attacks on imperial images, cases of
Damnatio Memoriae, or the replacement of images of rulers within the Roman and
Byzantine Empires. Collectively, the three articles draw attention to a number of
important case studies, although one may question the extent to which such broad
geographical and chronological treatment risks de-contextualizing episodes of
image destruction from their unique social contexts.
Cases of early-medieval iconoclasm from the Byzantine and Carolingian
worlds are addressed in two separate articles by Anne Karahan (chapter 5) and
Thomas F. X. Noble (chapter 6). Noble’s sensitive treatment of Carolingian attitudes, in particular, will undoubtedly provoke new readings of the material by both
Carolingian specialists and Byzantinists.
Three further chapters by Tarald Rasmussen (chapter 7), Andrew Spicer
(chapter 8), and Kristine Kolrud (chapter 9) examine cases of iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beginning with Rasmussen’s treatment of early
Lutheran responses to sacred images, followed by Spicer and Kolrud’s separate discussions of iconoclast outbreaks in Le Cateau and among the Waldensians in the
Savoyard Alps. These predominantly text-based studies offer a useful complement
to the broader and more materially focused approaches of earlier chapters.
The final study by Braavig (chapter 10) examines three instances of iconoclasm in Angkor Watt, Tibet, and Afghanistan. Although its incorporation of nonEuropean material is welcome, the application of European concepts of “secular”
and “religious” to premodern, non-Western, iconoclastic sentiments is open to
debate. Further, can we interpret such episodes of image destruction without more
systematic engagement with the views of its perpetrators, to balance interpretations
derived from the perception of European traditions of “heritage” and “art”?
In sum, this volume undoubtedly raises more questions than it can fully answer.
Those seeking to find a coherent understanding of the question of iconoclasm from
late antiquity until the present day are unlikely to find it here. However, the wealth
of material and discussion it does offer makes it a useful repository, which should
ignite further debate among scholars. The book is to be commended for bringing
together such a diverse range of themes and periods, and offers a useful opportunity
for readers to engage with the methodologies and debates beyond their individual

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disciplines. As such, it is an important contribution to establishing the study of iconoclasm as an avenue of historical inquiry for scholars of all regions and periods.
University of Birmingham

DANIEL REYNOLDS

The Many Faces of Christ: Portraying the Holy in the East and West, 300–1300. By
Michele Bacci. (London: Reaktion Books. Distrib. University of Chicago
Press. 2014. Pp. 294. $55.00. ISBN 978-1-78023-280-5.)
Despite its title, this wide-ranging study of how different religious traditions
represent and visualize the holy does not focus exclusively—or even predominantly—on representations of Christ. Thus the book’s title actually refers mainly to
the material in its second half. That said, this work has many merits, among them
that the author actually does draw parallels and comparisons with depictions of
other religions’ sacred images and delivers a rather wide-ranging study of the construction of holy portraits throughout history and across cultures. And, one must
say, the book’s introduction raises an important question about when portraits of
Jesus emerged and how they were transmitted. Moreover, it offers some theories
about why his facial features came to be standardized in Christian art of both East
and West from the Middle Ages to the present.
In the first part of the volume, Bacci considers more than images of Christ and
more even than “faces” by discussing sacred topography, holy footprints, and relics,
as well as portraits of saints and holy men and women from Buddhism, Hinduism,
Judaism, and Islam. For example, the first chapter of the book opens with accounts
of various (and sometimes misunderstood) images of the Buddha; it moves to a discussion of Manichaean artifacts (including an illuminated scroll and depictions of
Mani himself). What follows are broad, introductory studies of related themes pertaining to visualizing the holy: miraculously-made images of the Virgin Mary and
Christ, pilgrimages to Jewish and Christian shrines, the Hindu doctrine of darśan,
and ascetic practices of averting the gaze (so as develop a more finely tuned inner
eye). This discussion concludes with a condensed analysis of ancient theories of
how someone’s external appearance (physiognomy) was believed to display his or
her internal character. Those readers who primarily seek a close study of how actual
depictions of Christ were achieved and disseminated (as well as justified) will want
to skip to the second half of the book.
Turning to the problem of how Christ was imagined to appear, the author
raises the obvious yet important debate over whether and how an artistic depiction
might render both divine and human natures in a single image. He then moves to
a series of interesting and controversial topics, including the significance assigned
by biblical and patristic literature to the Messiah’s purported beauty or ugliness
(and the age-old question of how one defines beauty) and the belief that physical
appearance reflects character, virtues, or status. Bacci also considers the varied
depictions of Jesus in early Christian art, including the debates over his complexion,
hair texture, eye color, stature, beard, and the incorporation of certain features that

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would mark him as identified with one ethnic group or another. This last launches
the author into an interesting but perhaps tangential and general discussion about
the ancient perceptions of skin tone, baldness, and various meaning assigned to
growing, shaving, or cutting/trimming/curling hair. Bacci reasonably concludes
that Jesus’s physical appearance in art is not only symbolic and culturally constructed but also a “powerful symbol of alterity” (p. 204) in the present day.
In sum, this book is both more and less than it would seem to be from its title.
It is filled with what some may find extraneous but interesting asides, a few odd
mistakes of historical fact (for example, that the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore
in Rome was originally dedicated to commemorate the martyrdom of Pope Callixtus I), yet displays a kind of idiosyncratic genius that readers will find both enlightening and refreshing.
Vanderbilt University

ROBIN M. JENSEN

Cross and Kremlin: A Brief History of the Orthodox Church in Russia. By Thomas
Bremer. Translated by Eric W. Gritsch. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing. 2013. Pp. xii, 178. $26.00 paperback. ISBN 978-80286962-3.)
Thomas Bremer, professor of Eastern Church studies and peace studies at the
University of Münster in Germany, has written an insightful, brief tome on the
Russian Orthodox Church among the Russian East Slavs. The book was originally
published in German in 2007, and now Bremer has brought it up to date with new
statistics and an excellent translation.
After a short introduction of Russian Orthodoxy’s early history, the author
adopts a thematic style and covers such topics as ecclesiastical structures, churchstate relations, theology and religious thought, monasticism, spirituality and religiosity, monasticism, relations with the West, and dissidence. In clear, pithy summaries he explains the history of Russian Orthodoxy, examining its dramatic
evolution among the East Slavic tribes of Kievan Rus, the emerging state of Muscovy under the Mongols, the Westernizing tsars of the Russian Empire, the communist dictatorship, and now the Russian Federation. He shows that history always
unfolds in a place, and thus the cities of Kiev, Vladimir-Suzhdal, Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and Moscow once again serve in recent times as convenient and
descriptive markers across the span of Russian Orthodoxy’s history.
Bremer stresses that the Russian Orthodox Church saw the Russian state as
the God-ordained method to protect and expand the Orthodox faith. It was an
ingrained perspective that evolved from the Byzantine Empire and the experience
of surviving under the Mongol occupation and the constant threats of living on the
open Eurasian Plain. So strong was the Church’s attachment to the state that it
stood by even the Soviet government, which was dedicated to its destruction.
Today the Church’s identity with the state is reflected in its support of Vladimir
Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. The Church views its canonical territory as

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encompassing all lands that were formerly part of the former Soviet Union, except
for Georgia and Armenia, which the Church holds to be separate Orthodox jurisdictions. In all other former Soviet lands, including Ukraine, the Church claims
canonical jurisdiction, no matter what Ukrainians might think. Putin likes this outlook and now regularly uses religious justification as a basis for bringing the
Ukrainian and Russian peoples together again, so the Caesaropapist relationship of
the tsars, which the communists had interrupted, has returned.
Bremer gives special attention to Russian Orthodoxy’s complex relationship
with the West. On the one hand, the Church saw Russia as partly of the West
because of dynastic ties between European ruling houses and the tsars. On the
other hand, the West was the land of Catholics and Protestants, whom the Russian
Orthodox regarded with suspicion and considered heretics as well as enemies of the
Russian people and state. Specifically in the case of Catholics, the Russian Orthodox saw them as rivals in the struggle to establish religio-political values for emerging global interdependency and interconnectedness. Although Bremer largely dismisses the importance of the theory of Moscow as the Third Rome, he does call
attention to Orthodoxy’s sense of messianism and uniqueness as the bearer of
God’s truth, a position that inevitably leads to strain with peoples who do not share
its view of the Russian state.
Texas State University

DENNIS J. DUNN

Crutched Friars and Croisiers: The Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross in
England and France. By J. Michael Hayden. (Rome: Crosier Generalate [Via
del Velabro, 19, 00186; infoosc@oscgeneral.org]. 2013. Pp. 326. $45.00.
ISBN 978-1-304-53618-1.)
Michael Hayden, professor emeritus of history at the University of
Saskatchewan, is a distinguished expert on the medieval and early-modern history
of the religious order known as the Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy
Cross, also known as Croisiers (in France), Crutched Friars (in England), and
Crosiers. Since the 1960s, Hayden has published extensively on the history of the
Croisiers and the Crutched Friars; he is also able to approach his research from the
point of view of a former insider, as he was a Crosier novice in the United States
in the 1950s.
At the request of a member of the order, Hayden brought together in book
form his previously published work with some new research and a chapter containing personal reflections on the state of the order today. Indeed, this book was edited
and published by the Crosier Generalate in Rome, using the self-publishing Web
site Lulu.com.
Given the state of scholarly publishing and the challenges of finding a home
at an academic press for a book with a potentially limited audience, it is not surprising that Hayden and the Crosiers chose the self-publishing route. This book
clearly shows, however, the value of professional editors, copyeditors, and book

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designers who work at scholarly presses. Unfortunately, there are typographical
errors throughout the book, and even the title on the cover (Crutched Friars
Croisiers in England and France) does not match the title on the spine or title page.
Historians consulting this book would probably prefer a greater number of footnotes to assist them in locating the author’s sources (there is a tendency here to
group all the references for several paragraphs into one footnote, which this
reviewer feels is not ideal).
The first chapter investigates the legends and theories regarding the medieval
origins of religious orders focused on devotion to the Holy Cross. The repetition of
content and confusing organization of the material in this section impedes the
development of a clear analysis. Chapters 2 and 3—the portions of the book most
closely based on Hayden’s previously published work on the Crutched Friars in
England and the Croisiers in France—are easier to follow. It is surprising, however,
that despite the author’s argument that central to the identity of the Crutched Friars
and Croisiers is the fact that they were regular canons, there is no evidence that the
author consulted recent scholarship regarding the roles of medieval regular canons
(see, for example, The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, ed. Janet Burton
and Karen Stöber, Turnhout, 2011). The final portion of the book consists of reflections on the recent past and future of the order with reference to the author’s own
experiences with the Crosiers. Greater discussion here of contemporary issues such
as the growth of the order in countries such as Indonesia and the Democratic
Republic of Congo, as well as more extensive treatment of how the Crosiers in the
United States have dealt with sexual abuse scandals, would have been welcome.
Hayden is clearly highly knowledgeable about the history of the Crosiers,
especially in the medieval and early-modern periods. Academic historians interested in this subject might find it more satisfying to consult the author’s articles in
scholarly journals on this topic, however. This book will likely be most appreciated
by the Crosiers themselves, who will find it convenient to be able to find in one
volume both discussion of the historical origins of the order and reflections on the
current state of the order and possible directions for its future.
Campion College
University of Regina, Canada

ALLISON D. FIZZARD

The Great Age of Mission: Some Historical Studies in Mission History. By Lawrence
Nemer, S.V.D. [Studia Instituti Missiologici Societatis Verbi Divini, No.
100.] (Sankt Augustin, Germany: Steyler Verlag. 2013. Pp. 194. €19,90
paperback. ISBN 978-3-8050-0615-6.)
It is appropriate that the first chapter in The Great Age of Mission. Some Historical Studies in Mission History by Lawrence Nemer, S.V.D., is “My Pilgrimage in
Mission,” his narrative of influential intellectual, spiritual, and personal factors that
shaped his life through almost fifty years of teaching seminarians in the United
States, England, Australia, and Asian countries. One significant factor in Nemer’s
approach to church history was his interaction with Protestant scholars, especially

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Leslie Newbigin, Max Warren, and R. Pierce Biever. Past president of the Missionary Institute London, and most recently faculty member at Yarra Theological
School in Melbourne, Nemer explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic
missions in this collection of selected articles, most written after 2005. His teaching
philosophy embodies his historical study of “big issues” through a study of “smaller
issues” (p. 11), a plan observed in the book’s overall organization (Western Scene,
Asian/Oceanic Scene, African Scene). With a focus mainly on men’s mission congregations, some chapters paint a wide geographic sweep, as in his study, “Catholic
Missions in Oceania and the Pacific (1910–1920).” Other chapters analyze a
detailed context and shorter time period such as “Australian Divine Word Missionaries Go to ‘The Missions’: The First Recruits.”
Nemer’s goal in historical research and teaching is to have students develop a
dialogue with church history, as, for example, noting mission concern for peoples
and individuals, openness to circumstances, and emphasis on mission spirituality
(p. 25). Without denying the often nationalist approach to mission and willingness
to collaborate with colonial powers (although there were differences on the point
among European countries), Nemer also indicates the expressions of mission stemming from the Second Vatican Council, such as the importance of Christian witness, the “seed of the Logos” within the world, dialogue, and affirmation of local
culture (pp. 67–86).
His focus on piquing students’ interest in church history is noted in several
ways, beginning with his first assignment at the Divine Word Seminary in the
United States in 1962. His students were not concerned with what was “new” at
the Second Vatican Council, even though Nemer’s mentors were among those
instrumental in the formation of the Council documents. They “were more interested in knowing what would be the implications and consequences of [the Vatican
documents] for missionary work” (p. 17). The impact of theology touched him
poignantly when a student, who had studied liberation theology with him, was
killed as he was negotiating between squatters and cattlemen in Brazil. “Our [mission] theology has consequences,” he states (p. 17).
His extensive research in the Archives of Propaganda Fide in Rome for eight
months over several years provides a surprising insight: “The centralization of mission
work in the Propaganda [between 1860 and 1914] was a gradual process and the mission congregations were somewhat to ‘blame’ for this process” (p. 169). This was due
in part to mission congregations’ unwillingness to reach agreement among themselves
on division of vicariates, for example, even though Propaganda sought their advice.
By 1900, individual congregations appealed to Propaganda to make decisions, and
fewer congregations sent reports on vicariate situations. By then, Propaganda was
making decisions without consultation of the missionary groups (p. 170).
A companion Festschrift further illuminates Nemer’s work, suggests new historical sources, and draws out implied topics: Ross Fishburn, Michael Kelly,
Christopher Monaghan, and Peter Price, eds., Creating a Welcoming Space. Reflec-

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tions on Church and Mission. Essays to Honour Larry Nemer, S.V.D. (Northcote, Australia, 2014).
Saint Louis University

ANGELYN DRIES, O.S.F.

Sport & Christianity. A Sign of the Times in the Light of Faith. Edited by Kevin
Lixey, L.C.; Christoph Hübenthal; Dietmar Mieth; and Norbert Müller.
(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2012. Pp. xx,
257. $24.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8132-1993-6.) Orig. publ. as Sport und
Christentum: Eine anthropologische, theologische und pastorale Herausforderung
(Ostfildern, 2008)
This volume contains the English translation of the papers from the European
seminar “Sport and Christianity: Anthropological, Theological, and Pastoral Challenges” that was held on March 1–4, 2007, in Mainz, Germany. It starts with an
introduction by Bishop Joseph Clemens on the operations of the Church and Sport
Section of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, whose task is to coordinate the
Church’s worldwide initiatives in this area according to the aims established by the
Holy See.
The book is divided into three main sections. The first part (“Anthropological
Aspects,” pp. 13–78) offers an anthropological investigation of some fundamental
considerations of the human person and his or her final destiny relating to sporting
activity in a general way. The second part (“Theological Aspects,” pp. 79–185) is a
theological approach that considers sporting activity from the perspective of the
Church’s magisterium and from current theological reflection. Alois Koch focuses
on the meaning of the biblical and patristic metaphors in ecclesial literature that are
drawn from the realm of sport. Kevin Lixey investigates the concern of Pope Pius
XII in the aftermath of World War II about the role of sport in the lives of Italian
Catholic youth. The pope encouraged the sporting activities that were carried out
under the leadership of the Church through its Catholic youth and sports associations. The author suggests that Pius XII had a broad vision of pastoral care that
considered youth sport as an opportunity for developing certain natural and Christian virtues. Thus, Pius XII highlighted sport’s educational dimension. In his ethical evaluation of sport, he primarily stressed natural law, the Decalogue, and the
salvific dimension of human existence. Carlo Mazza focuses on sport in the writings and speeches of Pope John Paul II, as one who spoke about sport from the perspective of an insider (who practiced it). This personal experience explains the
enthusiasm for the phenomenology of sport that overflowed into his speeches. John
Paul II always placed his analysis of sport within the framework of the modern
development of culture. He therefore used two levels of criteria: the criteria of truth
of creation, and the criteria of the salvation and redemption of man. By reuniting
these concepts, he created a socio-ethical concept of the human person that is
understood in a complex and holistic way. Josef Clemens reflects on the theme of
sport by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. He begins with an interview that Ratzinger gave on Bavarian radio before the Football World Cup in

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1978. This interview is followed by a study of Benedict XVI’s papal addresses on
sport throughout the first five years of his pontificate. Dietmar Mieth concludes
this part by stressing the necessity of communication of the language of the Church
and the levels of ecumenical extension, in an effort to lead an authentically religious
and moral life in sport.
Part III (“Pastoral Aspects,” pp. 187–233) seeks to describe some of the pastoral aspects of sport from the twofold perspective of its challenges and opportunities. After this, it moves toward a consideration of this phenomenon from a more
practical perspective.
DRIES VANYSACKER

Catholic University of Leuven

ANCIENT
Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus. By Andrew Hofer, O.P.
[Oxford Early Christian Studies.] (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013.
Pp. xii, 270. £65.00; $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-19-968194-5.)
Andrew Hofer’s new monograph argues that Gregory of Nazianzus’s life, ministry, and Christology are mutually informative and that to understand any one fully
requires understanding its interplay with the other two. To show the connections,
Hofer presents the concepts of autobiographical Christology (a framing of “the Incarnation as the mystery of the Word coming to mingle with human life, the life that
Gregory knows to be his own” [p. 91]) and christomorphic autobiography (the blending of “Christ into the troubles, fears, and joys of [Gregory’s] own life” [p. 56]).
Hofer’s argument for Gregory’s autobiographical Christology is developed in
chapters 1, 3, and 4. Chapter 1 ties Gregory’s rhetorical efforts to his logos-theology (the Greek logos is used for both God’s Word and Gregory’s rhetorical discourse): for Gregory, the true art of rhetoric is “persuading others to be similarly
purified in their lives by the Word” (p. 34). Chapter 3 shows how Gregory builds
on Aristotelian thought to claim that Christ “recreates not simply the human race,
but Gregory in particular” (p. 91) by using a mixture with divinity to transform the
human constitution, a re-creation that occurs primarily in the human mind. This
sets up chapter 4, which boldly reinterprets Letter 101 to Cledonius as a treatise
that attacks the “mindless Christ” (p. 124) of Apollinarius and not the Christological duality of Diodore (the scholarly consensus’s assumed target). To make his
case, Hofer resorts to connecting Letter 101’s ten anathemas with the anti-Apollinarian polemic of writers like Athanasius and Epiphanius. Autobiographical Christology, however, makes the Apollinarian challenge personal: to call Christ mindless
is to call Gregory mindless.
Hofer develops his argument for Gregory’s christomorphic autobiography in
chapters 2, 5, and 6. In chapter 2 he argues that Gregory’s self-writing is best
understood as a pastoral project of compositional soul-searching that “makes the

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reader experience the form of Christ in Gregory’s own life” (p. 57). It is a personal
expression of the relevance of doctrine and devotion. Chapter 5 illustrates the point
through expositions of Gregory’s festal orations (Oration 38–40, 41, and 44): festivals, Gregory proposes, are prime opportunities for the ecclesial body of Christ to
mimetically experience the very things that the physical body of Christ did. Chapter 6 shows that Gregory’s priestly and episcopal activities are an embodied model
of Christ’s ministerial work, whereas the leadership of bad bishops reveals them to
be anti-Christs (p. 225). In sum, Hofer argues that Gregory’s personal demonstration of his connection to Christ will show other Christians how to live the truly
philosophical life.
Hofer’s rejection of the traditional compartmentalization of Dogmengeschichte
is laudable, as are the lucidity of his textual expositions and his willingness to
engage many of Gregory’s lesser-known works. The book, however, suffers from
multiple weaknesses. Most notably, Hofer never develops into a full treatment his
oft-repeated assertion that Gregory’s life and experience affects his understanding
of Christ (autobiographical Christology). The reader is left to wonder what, if any,
effect Gregory’s life had on his Christology, and how Hofer’s autobiographical
Christology departs from previous understandings of Gregory’s Christology.
Moreover, Hofer never presents the logic for pairing autobiographical Christology
with christomorphic autobiography. A nice wordplay, no doubt, but the pairing
joins concepts that are fundamentally different: one pertains to his doctrine, the
other to the genre of self-writing. With regard to christomorphic autobiography,
Hofer’s argument is obvious to any reader of Gregory’s oeuvre and does not guide
the reader to appreciate how Gregory’s characteristic torment and soul-searching
contribute to his self-presentational strategies. Simply put, if the reader is to take
the interplay between autobiographical Christology and christomorphic autobiography as the best framework for understanding Gregory’s life and thought, the significance of Hofer’s thesis requires further elucidation.
Louisiana State University

BRADLEY K. STORIN

The Sacred Architecture of Byzantium: Art, Liturgy and Symbolism in Early Christian
Churches. By Nicholas N. Patricios. [Library of Classical Studies, Vol. 4.] (New
York: I.B. Tauris. 2014. Pp. xvii, 446. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-78076-291-3.)
In this book, Nicholas Patricios extends his research beyond the limits of
Byzantium or of early Christian churches to build an understanding of Eastern
Orthodox church architecture and art as interrelated to liturgy. A rather poetic prologue, in which the author takes the reader into the magic atmosphere of contemporary Saturday liturgy in the Ionian island of Ithaka, reveals the suggestion that
brought him to write this book. After a brief introduction, chapter I presents an
outline of Christianity and Byzantine history. Chapter II introduces the realm of
“Sacred Architecture,” which for the author is the architecture of congregational
churches that can be grouped into seven major types according to their features.
Following this grouping, chapter III outlines Patricios’s analyses of church archi-

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tecture in several major cities. Chapter IV and chapter V focus on figurative themes
and particular iconographies, which appeared in church decoration. In chapter VI,
the author discusses the liturgy of the Eucharist through time and relates it to both
the development of church architecture and the location of specific religious images
within the church building. Finally, chapter VII seeks to exemplify the symbolism
of both the church building, with its space and liturgical furnishing, and the liturgy
of the Eucharist within ecclesiastical architecture, through translations from various ancient texts. In the epilogue, a poem by Konstantine Kavafy closes this journey
through Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture and art.
The book is richly illustrated with an enormous number of images that provide a real compendium to the text. In fact, these are rarely discussed but are meant
to support Patricios’s words with evidence of architecture and art. Unfortunately,
the captions often do not include dates that would help the reader with a sense of
the chronological distance among buildings and artworks represented side by side.
As this book is addressed to a wide audience, the author has chosen to add very few
endnotes; a limited list of further readings; and a short bibliography that includes
a wide range of secondary literature, from guidebooks to educational and scholarly
readings, but unfortunately lacks most recent research.
The value of this book resides in the author’s sensitivity for the ecclesiastical
architecture of Byzantium that he is able to make accessible to the reader by means
of simple explanations and clear schematizations. This approach, however, does not
reflect theological, political, and economic issues that affected building practice and
art in the long course of Byzantine history and within the changing geographical
areas of influence of the Byzantine Empire. Patricios’s grouping of Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture into seven church types is worth noticing for the architectural
historian of Byzantium, as it is based on close inspection of buildings as well as
reflection upon previous scholarly theories. Nevertheless, his overview of church
buildings and art is inaccurate, as it presents the evidence as part of a “Byzantine”
original project without considering historical events or restorations and changes
that evidently altered buildings and artworks. The approach to symbolism and
liturgy is also problematic as it is characterized by generalizations that do not do
justice to the multiple meanings of iconographies and rites. Similarly, the author
uses ancient texts that are sometimes culturally and chronologically very distant
with the sole purpose to support his arguments, without considering the often-contrasting environments in which these arose.
Although Patricios’s book is deceiving for a scholar expecting a new interpretation of Byzantine architecture, art, and liturgy, it represents a useful reading for
nonexperts who are first approaching Orthodox Christianity and the great fascination of its architecture. It provides a valuable tool for making the complex world of
Byzantine church architecture and art accessible to nonspecialists and will—hopefully—inspire the readers with curiosity to improve their knowledge and understanding of such complexity.
University of Bologna

MARIA CRISTINA CARILE

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The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium. By Bissera V.
Pentcheva. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2014. Pp.
xvi, 327. $89.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-271-03584-0; $44.95 paperback,
ISBN 978-0-271-03583-3.)
In recent years, art historians have found that many more icons have survived
from the Byzantine period than was previously thought. Correspondingly, attention has shifted away from the study of manuscripts, once the dominant area of
interest, and away from mosaics and wallpaintings, for a period seen as the major
achievement of the culture. Instead, the “icon” has become the center of scholarly
attention. This conceptual shift began in the United States with the experience of
Kurt Weitzmann of Princeton University, who participated in a series of visits to
the monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai in Egypt in 1958, 1960, 1963, and 1965.
He intended to study the manuscripts in the library (and their importance is such
that a program of digitization is now in progress) but was shell-shocked (intellectually, that is) to come across some 2000 icons in the monastery, the majority never
discussed in print. He realized that this remote monastery had somehow acquired
many high-quality painted icons dating from the sixth century onward. His priority
was to catalog and describe these icons. Before his death in 1993, he had published
what he saw as a number of the major pieces. His method of work was traditional,
aiming to date the works, determine their place of production and the character of
the artist, and interpret their iconography. This kind of work is of primary interest
to the art historian rather than the theologian or church historian, although all
manner of researchers have looked at the newly found icons, like the now wellknown sixth-century encaustic painting of Christ.
Bissera Pentcheva in The Sensual Icon is one of a number of recent scholars
who are going beyond the cataloguing stage of publishing new icons and attempting to ask broader questions. Beautifully produced, the book brings together a
wealth of material, although it is essentially a restatement of her recent articles.
Obviously in the present state of work, with many more unstudied icons emerging
into the field and a number of exhibitions of Byzantine and Russian art being presented, both cataloguing and interpretation are necessary and complementary activities. The main question in looking at this book is to ask who can benefit from its
methodology, and herein are difficulties. The fundamental problem is that the
whole book depends on a false premise, summed up on page 15: “all the existing
translations have started from the point of view that eikon means ‘painting.’”
Pentcheva then argues that on her translations there was a change in aesthetic
values in Byzantium; that from the ninth to the eleventh century, relief icons rather
than painted icons became the dominant medium in the church; and that they were
viewed as a sort of performance art. The trouble with this argument is that neither
Lampe in his Patristic Greek Lexicon nor in the secondary art-historical literature are
icons seen only as a painted medium as she suggests. Moreover, it is clear from
archaeological evidence that painted and relief icons did actually co-exist throughout the Byzantine period. Contrary to her argument, made on what she calls philological grounds, it can be maintained that, depending on various circumstances, not

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least the wealth of the patron, icons were made concurrently in a variety of different
media. These included precious materials such as silver-gilt metalwork and ivory,
less expensive materials such as steatite, or the most common form—painting on
wood. The trouble with her thesis is that it may be true that a gold or ivory Byzantine icon is more expensive and luxurious, but that does not mean it is any the more
or less effective in its visual impact on the faithful viewer. This question leads to
the second main problem in reading this book, and that is the interpretation of how
relief icons were viewed and how far the medium was different. How can we evaluate the power that a particular image had on its historical audience and differentiate it from our own reception with all sorts of conceptual baggage? The issue of
how a spectator in a historical period viewed religious art is well articulated by John
Shearman in his Mellon lectures, published as Only Connect (Princeton, 1992) that
sets out a “transitive” methodology of what he calls the engaged spectator, who
becomes in this approach effectively part of the pictorial narrative. The imagery of
the work of art extends into the mind of the viewer, who becomes integrated into
the sacred space. This way of handling the history of art does help the modern
observer to participate in the Renaissance experience. In some sense Pentcheva
seems to be following the same lines, but its clarity is undermined by an emotional
approach called hierotopy, a term invented by the Russian art historian Alexei
Lidov. The trouble here is a lack of distinction between the historical viewer and
modern mentalities. As for her experimentation with moving candles in front of
metal icons—where does it lead intellectually? Although this book illustrates the
variety of the Byzantine icon, it mystifies rather than clarifies its history.
Courtauld Institute of Art, London

ROBIN CORMACK

Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self
in Byzantium. By Derek Krueger. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 311.
$75.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4644-5.)
Beginning with Ephraim the Syrian in the fourth century, a rich tradition of
liturgical hymnody flourished in Eastern Christianity. In the sixth century
Romanos the Melodist composed kontakia—poetic homilies chanted during services. In the seventh Andrew of Crete wrote his Great Canon, a penitential composition used in Lent. Other Lenten hymns were brought together in the ninth century in the Triodion. Some of this material was composed for use in monasteries;
but by the eleventh century, the monastic liturgical tradition had largely replaced
the “cathedral” tradition in the Byzantine Orthodox Church.
Derek Krueger, the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Religious Studies at
the University of North Carolina, has studied this material—and the addresses
given by Symeon the New Theologian to his monks in the late-tenth and earlyeleventh century—to write this fascinating book. He aims to show how the selfunderstanding of Orthodox Christians in the Byzantine Empire from the sixth to
the eleventh century was formed by the psalms, scripture readings, and hymnody

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read or chanted in the course of the daily services. Based on a detailed examination
of the texts he has chosen, mostly penitential in character, he assesses the impact
they must have had on the formation of the Byzantine self. He studies, too, the
impact on worshipers of the liturgical year and the Eucharist, which he presents as
promoting a sense of sinfulness in Byzantine worshipers. Both rehearse the history
of salvation, so reminding the congregation of their need to be saved, although
from the early-sixth century the eucharistic prayer was said inaudibly, Justinian’s
law of 565 AD notwithstanding.
Krueger concludes that “Byzantine liturgists preferred performances of a disordered self, wracked with remorse, bewailing its past, overwrought with inwardly
directed grief” (p. 221). It is of course true that sorrow for sin and repentance is at
the heart of Christianity. But the Christian East never adopted St. Augustine of
Hippo’s doctrine of original sin and had a less pessimistic view of human nature. It
took seriously the good news that God in Christ had overcome sin and freed
humankind from its dominance. Byzantine sinners were not only saveable, as
Krueger of course affirms: in an important sense, they had been saved. After the
Lenten Triodion comes the Pentecostarion; and its Eastertide texts, among them
the Easter Canon of St John of Damascus, speak of Christians sharing now in the
risen life of Christ—a truth presented visually by the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection, of which every Sunday is a weekly celebration in the Orthodox East.
Byzantine Christians, says Krueger, gained access to themselves through penitential rhetoric and gained self-understanding by means of repentant speech. Was
their self-understanding then not at all influenced by texts affirming the present
reality of salvation? Had such texts no effect on the formation of the Byzantine self?
Possibly not, or at least not as much as might be thought. Krueger raises the
question of how far the majority of Byzantines could understand the liturgical texts,
and even if they could, how far they listened to them. He believes the texts were
comprehensible, but is aware that congregations could be far from attentive in
church. He acknowledges, too, that we have no direct evidence of the inner life of
Byzantine Christians. Perhaps, then, not all Byzantine selves were fashioned by
liturgical worship to the extent the clergy wished, either in sorrow for sin or rejoicing in present salvation.
University of Oxford

HUGH WYBREW

Augustine on War and Military Service. By Phillip Wynn. (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press. 2013. Pp. x, 363. $49.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4514-6473-3.)
This book’s title fails to indicate its full range, since Phillip Wynn has written
an account of Christian attitudes to service of the state, and especially to military
service, from the earliest Christian days down to St. Augustine, also adding some
indication of how something more like a modern just-war theory came later to be
attributed to Augustine himself. He distinguishes between the views of Christian
rigorists, who objected to all state service, and accommodationists, who even before

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Constantine were willing to undertake both civil and military service, despite the
warnings of such as Tertullian and Origen against Christians polluting themselves
by the shedding of blood. In general, he makes a good case about just war—there
is certainly no Augustinian “theory”—but he is inclined to overreach himself: a
generously unambiguous distinction between Augustine’s implicit and localized
attitude, and the explicit and more generalized theories of later theologians and
canonists, would have helped out. But Wynn is certainly right not only to point out
that in late Latin the word militia applies to both civil and military service but also
that the moral distinction between civil and military service might be less marked
than is immediately apparent, since execution and torture were part of the civil code
of justice as administered in Augustine’s time by public officials, including bishops.
Wynn’s strength lies in his placing Augustine within his historical and pastoral context, which reveals his concerns as very different from those of medieval
just-war theorists. He hates war, as Wynn emphasizes, but finds it sometimes necessary; although virtually all wars will to a degree, in our fallen world, be unjust,
some are less unjust than others. But perhaps Augustine’s chief problem, not least
in the Contra Faustum, lies in explaining, especially to the Manichaeans, that the
God-promoted, if genocidal, wars of Moses, Joshua, and other Old Testament
worthies, are indeed just—which means, as Wynn sees, that only wars promoted by
God or by those in tune with God’s wishes can be recognized as such. (The problem, of course, became perennial, and continuing Christian inability to solve it was
one of the reasons in the eighteenth century for rejecting the Christian God as
immoral).
A final point—at times indicated by Wynn—reveals Augustine’s attitude both
to warfare and to the frequent executions that, as noted above, formed a regular
part of civilian life: the soldier (and the executioner) are just obeying orders, as they
should, and—despite Augustine’s view of executioners as the scum of the earth—
he thought that such obedience was the only way to preserve the good order of society in the darkness of social life. For officers and senior civilians, of course, things
are very different: they will indeed be held accountable by God, even for doing
things qua officials that will cause them deep regret.
There might appear to be exceptions to this attitude toward obedience. In On
Free Choice Augustine argues that unjust laws should not be obeyed, but in the light
of the Christian tradition going back to St. Paul that rulers are maintained and tolerated by God and thus should be obeyed, that text should probably only be read as
insisting that laws restricting the Christian religion are unjust and should not be
obeyed: a limitation that has also enjoyed an unfortunate afterlife.
Cambridge, UK

JOHN RIST

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MEDIEVAL
The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! Edited by Mary Dzon and
Theresa Kenney. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2012. Pp. xxii, 349.
$80.00. ISBN 978-0-8020-9894-8.)
In the introduction to The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, the
editors express a desire to provide an interdisciplinary sourcebook on the figure of
the infant and adolescent Jesus in late antiquity through the Middle Ages. In this,
they have succeeded with a collection of essays that cover a sweeping variety of
forms, genres, and social settings. The central motif is that of Christ as a child
whose Incarnation simultaneously prefigures and manifests his Passion, and whose
paradoxical divine and human nature fascinated and perplexed medieval Christians,
from the highest theologian to the simplest believer.
Part 1 of the volume, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice,” begins with the reprint
of a 1973 essay by Leah S. Marcus on the theological fusion of the Incarnation and
Passion in the English cycle plays. Marcus’s study was seminal in identifying the
basic elements of the Christ Child motif and pointing to the interdisciplinary scope
of the theme in medieval culture; although it understandably does not engage with
more recent scholarship on such issues as medieval ideas of childhood, the piece has
a clarity and focus that sets the tone for the subsequent chapters of the volume. In
Theresa Kenney’s contribution, the conflation of manger and altar as the locus of
sacrifice in Middle English lyrics is a starting point for discussion of one of the
most important aspects of the motif: that of the “collapse” of sacramental time that
allows Christ’s birth, death, and all the events in between to be represented as
simultaneous. Often identified as a Franciscan innovation, the theological and
devotional preoccupation with Christ’s nativity is convincingly traced by Keeney
back to fourth-century hymnody. The theme of the Proleptic Passion is taken up
by Elina Gertsman in her essay on the iconography of the Child of Sorrows, in
which the infant Jesus carries the instruments of his Passion, and by Nicole Fallon
in her discussion of both textual and visual presentation of the Child Jesus mounted
in a tree that figures at once as the tree of life and the wood of the Cross.
The affective power of the child figure is further explored in the second part
of the volume, “The Christ Child and Feminine Spirituality.” Mary Dzon shows
how the mystical visions of Birgitta of Sweden exploit the motif of cloth and
sewing that are so central to the spiritual identity of medieval women. Here the
image of the “fabric” of Jesus’s human body sewn in the womb of the Virgin is continued by the swaddling clothes, seamless tunic, and burial garments, items that are
produced by Mary. The role of Jesus’s mother in all the moments of his earthly life
is again the focus of Holly Flora’s discussion of the illustrations of one manuscript
of the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ (BnF ital. 115), which
relates that Mary herself performed Jesus’s circumcision; the first to shed Christ’s
blood in an act that prefigures the Eucharist, the weeping Mary, anticipating her
son’s pain in the Crucifixion, demonstrates an intense emotional engagement and

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serves as a model for the female Franciscan reader for whom this devotional work
was intended. Reinforcement of the spiritual experience of the female religious is
also the objective of the late-medieval German sister books discussed by Richard
Kieckhefer. These fourteenth-century volumes tell of visions of the Christ Child
that appeared to thirteenth-century nuns, often in moments of illness and at the
point of death, and seek to promote an intense spirituality that is both deeply individual and powerfully communal when shared with the nuns’ fellow sisters.
The development of the child Jesus captures our attention in the final three
essays of the volume. William MacLehose, through discussion of both polemical
treatises and a well-known poem attributed to Gautier de Coinci, examines the cult
of the infancy relics and specifically that of Jesus’s milk tooth at Saint Médard in
Soissons. Iconographic representations of Christ learning to write are the focus of
Mary McDevitt’s essay, which again foregrounds the role of Mary in life of the
Christ Child. In the concluding piece of the volume, Pamela Sheingorn demonstrates how, in textual and visual figurations, the adolescent Jesus was understood
by medieval audiences to have miracle-working power that was both astonishing
and at times problematic for his mother.
Meticulously documented and edited, The Christ Child in the Medieval Culture provides an impressively rich display of the intersections of medieval theology
with the visual arts, literary expression, and popular devotion. The breadth and
variety of the collection are such that in the end we will certainly keep this “sourcebook” to explore further the ever-endearing and engaging figure of God as baby
and little boy.
Barnard College
Columbia University

LAURIE POSTLEWATE

Medieval and Monastic Derry: Sixth Century to 1600. By Brian Lacey. (Dublin: Four
Courts Press. Distrib. ISBS, Portland, OR. 2013. Pp. x, 166. $45.00. ISBN
978-1-84682-383-1.)
Urban history has become a significant focus for historians over the past several decades, boasting at this point several journals and professional associations all
around the globe. Much of what has been written under this rubric has been driven
by economic and sociological agendas, sometimes expressed through the biographies of individual cities and sometimes through studies of the nature and consequences of urbanization as a process. Brian Lacey’s new book on Medieval and
Monastic Derry: Sixth Century to 1600, commissioned in conjunction with the
United Kingdom’s 2013 City of Culture festivities and launched as part of the
400th-year celebration of Derry’s historic city walls, does not overtly engage with
this by now substantial body of scholarly literature. However, it does provide a
superb overview of what can be known of “one of the oldest more or less continuously documented places in Ireland” (p. vii) in the period leading up to 1600, when
Derry began its history as an English-ruled town.

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Lacey is one of the most proficient historians writing currently on the north
of Ireland in the early Middle Ages. As this is a field that demands a high level of
technical expertise, it is impressive that he has been able to produce a book that will
be of interest both to specialists and nonspecialists alike. It is short, heavily illustrated with maps and period drawings, and (in all but a few places, where the sheer
volume of names gets a bit overwhelming) easy to read. The book is chronologically
organized, and for the most part consists of Lacey’s meticulous reconstructions of
the growth and development of the site. Among the biggest surprises for readers
not yet familiar with his more specialized work will be his contention that Colum
Cille, or St. Columba, was not, in fact, the primary founder of the monastery as is
commonly held in popular tradition. Rather, as he shows convincingly, the association with Colum Cille is the product of literally centuries of carefully constructed
propaganda by a variety of peoples and families with interests in the site.
Lacey is particularly strong on the politics of the place: the manner in which
secular and ecclesiastical interests meshed or came into conflict during the long centuries of its existence as a native town. Thus we hear of the site’s transformation
from a small fort belonging to the Cenél nÉnnai, to its foundation as a monastery
under the Cenél Conaill king Áed mac Ainmerech, to its heyday under the
MacLochlainns of Cenél nEógain. Of particular interest is the vivid account of the
reform under the colorful Flaithbertach Ó Brolcháin in the twelfth century, when
Derry became the head of the Columban churches in Ireland. Cenél Conaill and
Cenél nEógain continued to dispute—and share—power within what had by that
time become a large and important town until the fourteenth century, when the
island of Derry itself was partitioned. The book ends with Derry’s decline and eventual re-establishment as an English town. Three of the most interesting chapters are
thematic rather than strictly narrative in nature. Chapter 6, on the layout and structures of the town itself, gives a vivid sense of what buildings were there and how they
were related to one another, whereas chapter 8 recapitulates a remarkable visitation
there in 1397 by Archbishop John Colton of Armagh, friend of King Richard II of
England and his justiciar in Ireland. Chapter 10 addresses the manner in which
Derry’s past and, somewhat surprisingly, Colum Cille himself, were remembered in
the centuries after the English settlement by Catholics and Protestants alike.
In short, this is an important and accessible study for anyone interested in the
history of one of the island’s most vibrant cities.
University of Washington

ROBIN CHAPMAN STACEY

A Paradise of Priests: Singing the Civic and Episcopal Hagiography of Medieval Liège.
By Catherine Saucier. [Eastman Studies in Music.] (Rochester, NY: University
of Rochester Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 300. $75.00. ISBN: 978-1-580-46480-2.)
Medieval Liège was a special place for secular clergy. Known from the sixteenth century onward as a “Paradise of Priests,” it boasted an imposing cathedral
and seven collegiate churches, in addition to myriad smaller ecclesiastical institu-

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tions. With 270 canons singing in these churches as early as the mid-eleventh century, the extraordinary size and wealth of Liège’s clerical population attracted international attention. The liturgy sung by these canons has been studied in conjunction with the widely celebrated feasts of Corpus Christi and the Holy Trinity, both
of which were founded in Liège. Yet the plainchant and polyphony that celebrates
the city’s own clerics and saints has received comparatively little attention.
In this book, Catherine Saucier examines the liturgies for three of the most
prominent bishops associated with Liège—St. Theodard (d. c. 668), St. Lambert
(d. c. 700), and St. Hubert (d. 727)—and shows how the city itself is celebrated
through the plainchant and polyphony written and sung by the liégeois clerical community. Through a meticulous investigation of the rich hagiographic tradition that
provided inspiration and textual sources for these liturgies, Saucier traces how the
saintly identities of these bishops developed and how the stories of their lives were
shaped—and sometimes even rewritten—to promote civic ideals and objectives. In
the first two chapters, she shows how the Offices of Ss. Theodard and Lambert,
both of whom were murdered for political rather than religious reasons, draw upon
an idea begun in the corresponding hagiographic literature that the city was sanctified by the blood of these martyrs. Saucier argues that the chants of the liturgy
were designed to validate and idealize these bishops’ martyrdoms, to make their
sacrifices holy rather than political. She shows that the translations of their relics to
Liège as celebrated in the liturgies were important occasions of conflating civic and
saintly attributes, such as in the antiphon Laetare et lauda that she discusses
throughout the book.
In the central chapter, Saucier demonstrates that the Office for St. Hubert was
at odds with its hagiographic sources by maintaining the appearance of the physical
presence of Hubert’s relics in the city, despite the fact that his remains had been
translated to Andage. As Lambert’s successor, Hubert promoted Liège as a sacred
site by overseeing the translation of Lambert’s relics to the city, but the liturgy for
St. Hubert ensured his continued veneration in Liège. The fourth chapter turns to
polyphony and an analysis of the motet Fortis cum quevis actio by Johannes Brassart
(c. 1400-55). Saucier elaborates on the clerical context of the motet (including the
unusual detail of a liturgical strike) and how Brassart drew inspiration from another
important episcopal founder, Bishop Notger (d. 1008). The final chapter addresses
the larger importance of ritual in the sanctification of Liège by tracing the development of the feast of St Lambert’s Translation from the later Middle Ages to the
early-sixteenth century. Saucier discusses five occasions on which Lambert’s relics
were venerated, including three processional displays of his nude skull, that reflect
varied civic motivations for calling upon the protection of the saint.
The book includes convenient tables that outline the plainchant along with its
textual sources for the saints’ offices as celebrated in the city’s cathedral and an
appendix of sources preserving the music. The analytical musical portions are written in such a way as to be comprehensible to the wide audience likely to be interested in Saucier’s colorful narrative. Because of its broad scope, clear organization,

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and accessible style, this rich book will be of service not only to musicologists but
also to scholars of liturgy, hagiography, church history, and urban history.
Alamire Foundation
Catholic University of Leuven

EMILY THELEN

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation. By Sverre Bagge. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2014. Pp.
x, 326. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-691-16150-1.)
Sverre Bagge, most of whose previous publications have been about early Norwegian history, explains that he was persuaded to write this book by his recent
experience as director of two Nordic research centers with participants from the
universities of Bergen, Helsinki, Gothenburg, and Odense. The result, especially
the discussion of early-medieval developments, is disappointing. It is surprising
that his contacts in these centers did not keep him up-to-date. The main weakness
is that Sweden is virtually ignored before 1250 because, Bagge claims, the sources
are too meager. It is true that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Swedes wrote
far less about their early history than the Danes, Icelanders, and Norwegians, but
Bagge makes no attempt to glean information from the surviving texts and ignores
the evidence of more than 2000 legible runic inscriptions, many thousands of coins,
and the few relevant skaldic verses.
The two brief references to Olof Skötkonung (pp. 33, 55) are totally misleading: Bagge states that he was “probably a historical person,” whose main area
“seems to have been in the west.” The well-attested fact that he minted coins in
Sigtuna for more than twenty years is not mentioned. Bagge attempts to justify his
neglect of Sweden by claiming that it was not a united kingdom until “around
1250,” when it began to develop “a relatively stable monarchy” (pp. 33, 165–66).
The unity of the Kingdom was, however, not doubted by Pope Alexander III when,
in 1164, he created the Archbishopric of Uppsala with a province composed of five
(soon six) bishoprics that formed the kingdom ruled by Karl Sverkerson, rex Sveorum et Gothorum. For several generations the kingship was contested by two dynasties that traced their descent from the twelfth-century kings Sverker and Erik.
Bagge’s claim (p. 56) that the Sverker dynasty was extinct after 1222 is misleading:
it continued in the female line. Attempts to unite them by marriage succeeded in
1250 with the succession of Valdemar, son of Birger Jarl (descendant of Sverker)
and Ingeborg (descendant of Erik).
The neglect of Sweden means that there is no discussion of the marriage
alliances and other links between all three kingdoms and across the Baltic that were
crucially important factors in the twelfth century and that no attention is paid to
Birger Jarl’s predecessors as Swedish duces. The discussion of conversion is also disappointing. The identification of the missionary Poppo as Folkmar, later archbishop of Cologne, is ignored, as are the serious doubts that have been cast on the
earlier interpretation of the royal complex at Jelling that he accepts. The comparison with Anglo-Saxon England is unhelpful; to say that its conversion was accom-

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plished “without any military or political pressure” (p. 69) ignores the decisive role
of the Franks.
Very little attention is paid to towns, trade, and the source and distribution of
the wealth on which power depended. Bagge makes good use of thirteenth-century
Norwegian texts, but does not even mention the Swedish Um styrelse konunga ok
höfdinga or the Danish Compendium Saxonis, both written c. 1300. The Compendium was created to turn Saxo’s tendency upside down since it praises King
Valdemar at the cost of Absalon, archbishop of Lund.
At least two serious errors should have been corrected: Olof Skötkonung never
paid tribute to Cnut, but probably to Svein Forkbeard (p. 55), and Dalarna is not
in “northern” Sweden (p. 251). It is generally praiseworthy when scholars make
their own work widely known, but in this case, one can only deplore that an English-speaking audience is expected to read so much about medieval Scandinavia
that is outdated, misleading, or simply wrong.
Uppsala, Sweden

PETER SAWYER

The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald
of Aurillac. By Mathew Kuefler. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. x, 306. $79.95. ISBN 978-08122-4552-3).
This ambitious study dramatically revises the development of an especially
important and well-known saint’s legend while probing intriguing questions that
bear on medieval saints generally. Mathew Kuefler traces the fate of Gerald of
Aurillac’s sanctity from the tenth century to the modern era in order to explain how
this saint’s image was shaped and reshaped over time, how devotion to him ebbed
and flowed, and what this fluid history may reveal about the cult of saints.
Kuefler begins by arguing that Gerald’s two vitae, the Vita brevior and the Vita
prolixior, have been erroneously dated and misattributed. The predominant view
holds that Odo of Cluny wrote the Vita prolixior c. 930 and that soon thereafter an
anonymous monk of Aurillac abbreviated it to create the “uninteresting” shorter
version (p. 9). By contrast, Kuefler argues that Odo wrote the Vita brevior, which
was then vastly expanded by none other than Ademar of Chabannes in the 1020s,
whom Kuefler likewise identifies as the author of several other texts celebrating
Gerald. To support this argument, Kuefler marshals a wealth of detailed evidence
from the texts themselves and from well beyond. He makes a very impressive case
even if, as he acknowledges, some readers may remain skeptical (p. 34). Even those
who hesitate to accept the attribution will likely find Kuefler’s prosecution of the
question a model of lucid and thorough argumentation.
Kuefler then analyzes each vita’s portrait of Gerald. As one might expect, he
explores how these monastic writers made the case for a saint who was not merely
a layman, but one tangled up with wealth, power, and—most problematic—vio-

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lence. More unexpectedly, Kuefler does this in part by reading each vita as reflecting its author’s own life, in the most intimate sense: not merely his earthly ties and
concerns but also his possible “regrets” about having renounced the world (pp. 60–
61) or doubts that his personal “sacrifice . . . was truly worthwhile” (p. 82). Much
of this discussion necessarily takes place in the subjunctive (“How could [Odo] not
have paused to reflect on what his own life might have been?” [pp. 60–61]). Here,
too, skeptical readers may want further evidence. Yet Kuefler’s challenge to historians to rethink how we read hagiographical texts, which, after all, were the work
of specific (if mostly unknown) individuals, is certainly apt.
The last three chapters trace the cult’s rise, fall, and transformation over some
ten centuries. In particular, Kuefler seeks to identify factors that help to keep a saint’s
memory vibrant and, conversely, those that lead to his or her being forgotten or
“unmade.” As he proceeds through this vast sweep of time, Kuefler shifts from the
highly specific (the fate of Gerald’s abbey in Aurillac and its dependencies) to the very
broad (the rise of heretics and mendicants, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the French Revolution and its aftermath). The illuminating conclusion is that
it takes quite a lot to make a saint stick: not just a good vita and abundant miracles
but also assets such as a flourishing institution dedicated to his or her memory, or
(better yet) a network of such institutions; a geographical situation favoring pilgrimage; alignment with spiritual fashion; peace and prosperity. The complex set of circumstances needed to keep any cult afloat leads Kuefler to suggest that “saints have
life cycles,” and most do not survive the onslaught of history (p. 148).
This stimulating book will be of great interest to all who work on saints and
hagiography. Kuefler challenges historians to grapple with important questions
about Gerald of Aurillac, his promoters, and saints’ cults in general—shown here
to be complex and fragile constructions.
Syracuse University

SAMANTHA KAHN HERRICK

The Secular Clergy in England, 1066–1216. By Hugh M. Thomas. (New York:
Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 422. $125.00. ISBN 978-0-19870256-6.)
This is a highly detailed study of a large section of English society in the postconquest period, those clergy who held or aspired to positions in the parishes, cathedrals, and dioceses of England. Hugh M. Thomas aims to be comprehensive in a
book that, as he rightly said, is the only one so far to attempt the entire field of study
(although he does not deny it builds on the work of the many scholars presently in
the field). He brings a huge range of published and unpublished sources to bear and
uses them meticulously, the deploying of unpublished sermon material being a welcome addition to the debate. Very little of the life of these men escapes his attention:
their ideals, income, career strategy, ambitions, sexuality, learning, and violence.
Although linked by a common ordination, the group comprehended the whole
range of incomes and social groups in society, apart, that is, from females. Thomas
makes his point that as a group the secular clergy carried a considerable economic

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and cultural weight within their society, although their contrasting political impotence and their sexual nullification by zealous reformers may explain the lack of
attention to them by general historians—a situation that he bemoans. The book’s
summative nature is its great strength, and the richness of the detail drawn out by
Thomas from his sources will make this a valuable future resource for scholars of
medieval society in general, not just the clergy. In this, the author may well be said
to have fulfilled his admirable overall ambition for his work. Its weakness lies in his
ambition for his subject matter. The concluding chapter attempts to preach the centrality of the secular clergy in the study of medieval society, without which our
understanding of it will be “deeply flawed.” Here he relies on secondhand theories,
which he treats as established fact. The work of Michael Clanchy by no means
establishes the rarity of lay literacy and literate modes in lay life before 1150; others
have argued that it was lay literacy that made the phenomenon of rising bureaucracy
imaginable, not the existence of the mechanical skills of clerics. His handling of
counter-arguments are brusque and tendentious, not least when he points out that
laymen produced no literary works of note, as a counter to Martin Aurell (a point
Aurell himself admitted and addressed). Lay authors of some genius are in fact
abundant in his period; they just only rarely wrote in Latin. Because clerical writers
complained a lot about the trials of the court does not make them the architects of
courtly culture, even if they were practitioners of it. Here he relies on the seminal
work on the “origins of courtliness” by C. Stephen Jaeger, who saw conscious modes
of courtly behavior arising in a tenth-century clerical milieu and filtering out into lay
life by the end of the twelfth century. Jaeger has subsequently qualified his theory,
admitting he wrote in 1985 without much idea of what early lay culture was and that
self-conscious lay courtliness can be found before his theory admitted its existence1;
indeed, the first self-conscious essay on cortezia was written by an Auvergnat baron
possibly as early as 1130 (Garin lo Brun, E∙l tremini d’estiu). Although a clerical contribution to lay modes of behavior may well be arguable, it did not occupy the centrality asserted by Thomas. Thomas’s book is, therefore, a great and lasting contribution to its field, but a pinch of salt would have helped very much in the recipe for
its confection.
University of Hull

DAVID CROUCH

Vie et miracles de Bérard, évêque de Marses (1080–1130). Introduction, critical edition of the Latin text, and French translation by Jacques Dalarun. [Subsidia
hagiographica 93] (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes. 2013. €65,00. ISBN
978-2-87365-028-5.)
Bishop Bérard was of the ruling family of Marche, a region in central Italy
north of Abruzzo and east of Rome. Nominally within the Papal States, Marche was
controlled by strong local rulers who accrued landed wealth and power by alliances

1. See Jaeger, “The Origins of Courtliness after 25 Years,” Haskins Society Journal, 21
(2009), 187–216.

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created by kinship, clientage, and patronage. Bérard’s career was part of the reform
movement initiated by Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85). Gregory VII endeavored to
expand the authority and autonomy of the Church by imposing clerical celibacy,
abolishing lay investiture and simony, and prohibiting “incestuous” marriage. Over
a century of struggle was required to achieve its objectives, and the papacy frequently
compromised with annulments, dispensations, and settlements. The Church’s
weapon of excommunication dissolved oaths of fealty and precipitated leadership
struggles. King Henry IV of Germany (r. 1070–1108) retaliated for his humiliation
at Canossa by exiling Gregory VII in 1085. Later reformers like Bernard, abbot of
Tiron (c. 1050–1116), and Peter II, bishop of Poitiers (r. 1087–1115), fell victim to
violence and imprisonment. The hagiography of Bérard sheds further light on the
difficult process of imposing the reform on religious and secular leaders.
Writing in the 1130s, John, bishop of Segni, shares his reminisces at Bérard’s
tomb with his colleague John Furatus, prior of the chapter of the cathedral of Santa
Sabina in modern San Benedetto dei Marsi. Bérard was a member of the comital
family of Marche, educated at the cathedral of Saint-Sabina and at MonteCassino, and was made subdeacon and count of the province of Campania or
southern Latium by Paschal II (r. 1109–18). Bérard was captured, thrown into a
cistern, and rescued. He became deacon of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria and cardinal
priest of San Crisogono in Rome before becoming bishop of Marche. His posthumous healing miracles reflect devotion to the poor and afflicted. Perhaps because
of Bérard’s closeness to the papacy, he fought simony with exceptional rigor and
suffered severe reprisals. He survived attempted poisoning and was repeatedly
expelled from and recalled to his see.
Dalarun’s work is based on manuscripts of Vita beati Berardi episcopi Marsorium et miracles by John, bishop of Segni (Jean de Segni), and his continuators,
which can be found in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Biblioteca
nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III in Naples, and the Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana
in Vatican City. They are the basis for the F. Ughelli editions in Italia sacra, published in Rome in 1644 and in Venice in 1717, and the J. De Backer edition published in Acta Sanctorum Novembris, II/1, in Brussels in 1894. In the comprehensive
introduction Dalarun establishes a meticulous stemma of manuscripts, skillfully
resolves their variants, and presents the life and miracles of Bérard of Marche,
introduced by a letter of dedication and concluded by a hymn. Dalarun has prepared a well-annotated and faithful French translation of John of Segni’s rough and
unbridled Latin text, with its exceptionally lengthy sentences with numerous subordinate clauses disrupted by parenthetical discourse. This life of Bérard of Marche
is an important contribution to a corpus of contemporary saints’ lives that deepens
our understanding of the turbulent process of the twelfth-century reform.
Georgetown University

RUTH HARWOOD CLINE

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Corrado de Hirsau e il «Dialogus de cruce». Per la recostruzione del profilo di un autore
monastico del XII secolo. By Marco Rainini, O.P. [Millennio medievale, 101;
Strumenti e studi, n. s. 38.] (Florence: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo. 2014.
Pp. xxvi, 458. €70,00. ISBN 978-88-8450-540-8.)
The German monk Conrad of Hirsau (c. 1080–c. 1140) is known primarily for
his bibliographical work Dialogus super auctores, a guide to the authors—both
Christian and pagan—commonly taught in the school curriculum. He has also
been suggested as the author of other works, including the widely disseminated
treatise on female monastic life Speculum virginum. To this attribution Marco
Rainini seeks to add the Dialogus de cruce, extant today in only one manuscript
dating from the last third of the twelfth century: Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14159.
Rainini begins with a description of the work as it appears in the Munich manuscript. This he ascribes not to St. Emmeram in Regensburg, which its call number
might suggest, but to the nearby monastery of Prüfening, where it was held in the
nineteenth century. After discussing the title and structure of Dialogus de cruce, Rainini
then moves on to a detailed historical study of Conrad of Hirsau and his works. This
discussion necessarily involves considering the claims of the early-modern Benedictine
abbot and historian Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), whose two-volume Annales
Hirsaugienses of 1511–14, constitute an important narrative sources for Hirsau in this
period. The common topos of Trithemius’s unreliability has, perhaps, been overdone,
and it is to Rainini’s credit that he takes a sensible attitude in seeking to corroborate
Trithemius’s testimony with other extant references to Conrad. He concentrates in
particular on the cognomen peregrinus, for Peregrinus is also the master in the dialogue
Speculum virginum. Rainini ends this first part of the book with a section on the dating
of the works ascribed to Conrad, including Dialogus de cruce.
Rainini’s study is not merely an attempt to attribute a new work to Conrad, for
its second and largest part examines the fundamental theological themes of Dialogus,
with subsections on scriptural exegesis, the points of the cross, the depiction of the
Lamb, the physical and spiritual sides of man, and the Church. The author has been
careful to pay special attention to the materiality of Dialogue de cruce, for the book is
accompanied by ten high-quality color reproductions from the manuscript, and
these are meaningfully integrated in his analysis of the work’s theology.
The book’s third part examines the authors and sources that influenced Dialogus de cruce: classical and late-antique authors, the Glossa ordinaria, Hugh of St.
Victor, Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, the Eriugenian tradition,
other authors, and—possibly—Peter Abelard. The final influences on Dialogus discussed by Rainini include contemporary debates over the respective places of secular and divine learning, the curriculum of the seven liberal arts and its place in
expounding the sacred page.
In conclusion, Rainini’s thorough study, almost Germanic in its approach, is
nevertheless carried off with enough sprezzatura to make the material engaging and

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useful to the wider audience of medieval scholars. His arguments regarding Conrad
of Hirsau and the Dialogus make for important contributions on this medieval
author and on the wider state of spiritual learning in the early-twelfth-century
Empire. But his consideration of the work’s materiality, in line with recent trends
focusing on the intersection of medieval reader and manuscript page, marks this out
as a particularly useful book.
New College of Florida

T. J. H. MCCARTHY

Monasteries on the Borders of Medieval Europe: Conflict and Cultural Interaction.
Edited by Emilia Jamroziak and Karen Stöber. [Italia Sacra: Medieval Church
Studies, Vol. 28.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2014. Pp. x, 274. €80,00. ISBN 9782-503-5435-6.)
This dynamic and interdisciplinary collection has its origins in the Leeds
Medieval Congress of 2008 and offers a fresh approach to frontier scholarship. It
explores the experiences of religious communities in border areas across Europe in
the high and later Middle Ages and considers how their experiences were different
from those of their counterparts in the hinterlands. The essays represent a wide geographical spread and include studies on Scandinavia, Poland, Britain, and Frankish
Greece. Although monastic, canonical, and mendicant houses are considered, analysis is restricted to male communities, for the additional conditions that affected religious women require that they have their “own systematic approach” (p. 3).
Monasteries on the Borders seeks to examine all aspects of the frontier experience to understand better the roles that these houses played in their localities; the
challenges they faced; and their negotiation of political, cultural, and linguistic
landscapes. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to focus on the potential
problems experienced in frontier zones, these essays consider the possible benefits
that might result for both the communities and their neighbors. The collection
opens with an editorial introduction, which includes a lucid historiographical discussion of frontiers, and introduces the aims and key themes of this publication.
The ten essays are divided into two groups to represent two important types of
frontier monastic experience—conflict and acculturation. A bibliography follows
each contribution and there is a common index at the end.
The first section—“Conflict and its Resolution”—considers the various conflicts that these frontier houses faced in their differing environments. This commences with a fascinating account by Brian Golding of two incidents involving the
transfer of relics across the border from Wales to the Benedictine abbey of Shrewsbury: a relic of St. Winifred in 1138 and bones of St. Beuno in 1338. Golding
argues that both acts need to be understood within the conditions of contemporary
frontier politics. Thus, the first was a carefully negotiated act in volatile times when
the Anglo-Welsh border was fluid—a “currency” in uncertain times and likely
orchestrated by Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd (p. 32). In contrast, the second was
a violent seizure instigated by the abbot of Shrewsbury and tantamount to theft.
This act took place when borders were fixed, and life was ostensibly more peaceful

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and thus threatened the equilibrium. Other contributions in this section include
Paul Milliman’s discussion of a fourteenth-century boundary dispute involving the
Teutonic Knights and the land of Chełmno; and Ana Novak’s study of the fortifications of Castrum Thopozka, a Cistercian monastery on the edge of the Bishopric
of Zagreb that played an important role in securing the bishopric and later, following the Ottoman invasion, in the defense of the kingdom of Croatia.
The second group—“Acculturation and Cultural Interactions on the Frontiers”—explores how these border communities interacted with their neighbors and
assesses their relative success. The frontier experience was especially complex in
medieval Iberia that was a melting pot of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious
groups and subject to shifts in the balance of power. The Augustinian abbey of
Santa Maria de Vilabertran in Northern Catalonia straddled two counties—
Empúries and Besalú. Stöber explains that the community here was affected by
both external and internal borders—the former were political and geographical; the
latter social, cultural, religious, and linguistic. Whilst the abbey was unavoidably
affected by political conditions—and indeed, these were often more volatile in
border areas—Stöber argues that more subtle factors such as their multicultural
interactions could actually be more profound. For instance, the canons of Vilabertran drew benefactors and welcomed guests from both counties. They provided
spiritual services to folk on both sides of the border; indeed, the intercessory role of
these frontier communities should not be underplayed, for often this was heightened in border areas.
Monasteries on the Borders highlights the multifaceted nature of the frontier. It
represents an impressive range of disciplines, subjects, and geographic coverage,
and underlines the importance of understanding the total experience of these
border communities to determine how they were shaped by their conditions—and
how they affected the locality. The book poses new and stimulating questions that
should inspire further research.
University of Edinburgh

JULIE KERR

The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century. By
Conrad Rudolph. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xix,
609. $120. hardback. ISBN 978-1-107-03705-2).
The author is a professor of art history at the University of California, Riverside, who has written extensively on twelfth-century art. His subject here is a large
painting that Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) or one of his students described in the
small book Libellus in the critical edition of Patrice Sicard, which Rudolph calls by
its traditional title, The Mystic Ark. In Rudolph’s estimation, this work,
fundamentally political, the medieval equivalent of a best-seller, conceived by
one of the leading scholars of the day, unique in its format and in its means
of presentation, is not only the most complex individual work of figural art of
the entire Middle Ages, but also certainly one of the most ambitious and
astonishing. (p. 377)

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Rudolph has produced a study worthy of such a subject.
Rudolph emphasizes Hugh’s polemical or political aim for his painting, which
was to stake out a middle ground in what Rudolph calls the culture wars of the
twelfth century between the conservative representatives of traditional theology,
one of whom was St. Bernard, who criticized the use of figural art in monastic settings, and representatives of the “New Theology” such as Peter Abelard, Thierry of
Chartres, and William of Conches.
Rudolph argues forcefully several convictions. Hugh painted this large (12 by
15 feet) and complex artistic image on the wall of the cloister at St. Victor. It was
a visual summa of theology that served as the basis for a lecture series that Hugh
gave at Saint Victor for advanced theology students. Using the written description
of the painting in The Mystic Ark and Hugh’s further elaborations of the painting
in The Moral Ark, On Vanity, and What Truly Should be Loved, other teachers
throughout Europe composed their own paintings and gave lectures on them.
Rudolph’s study has two parts. The first is a meticulous art-historical analysis
of Hugh’s description and presentation of the drawing in its literal, allegorical, anagogic, and tropological dimensions (the Ark of Noah, the Ark of the Church, the
Ark of Wisdom, and the Ark of Mother Grace). Here Rudolph draws on Hugh’s
other writings and on antecedents in the Bible, St. Augustine, and other Christian
writings and provides computer-generated reconstructions of the painting, many of
them in color.
The second part is a translation of The Mystic Ark. Whereas the 1500 notes in
the first part of the book were mostly quite short references to primary and secondary literature, the 437 notes to the translation are detailed justifications and explanations of Rudolph’s translation, which anyone who has struggled with the Latin
text will greatly appreciate. There are an excellent bibliography and a subject index.
Rudolph is critical of the work of most previous scholars on this important
text and painting. His book should, then, generate a good deal of discussion among
art historians and students of Hugh of St. Victor and his milieu. Apart from questions of detail, there are some questions for which Rudolph presents answers that
perhaps are not yet settled. What was the nature of the discussion (collatio) from
which the painting arose? Was there actually a painting at St. Victor? Is the existence of more than sixty manuscripts of The Mystic Ark evidence enough to conclude that the painting was reproduced or used in teaching elsewhere? How polemical and political were Hugh’s relations with the representatives of the theological
currents of his time? If The Mystic Ark is a reportatio, why would Hugh not have
corrected it more carefully?
Monastery of the Ascension
Jerome, ID

HUGH FEISS, O.S.B.

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From Knowledge to Beatitude: St. Victor, Twelfth-Century Schools, and Beyond: Essays
in Honor of Grover A. Zinn, Jr. Edited by E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith.
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. xxiii, 488. $75.00.
ISBN 978-0-268-03528-0.)
As a versatile scholar, elegant translator, and masterful teacher, Grover A.
Zinn Jr. spent five decades elucidating the school of St. Victor for fellow scholars;
general readers; and students at his institution, Oberlin College, and elsewhere.
The present volume honors his contributions to medieval studies with a set of
essays devoted primarily to high-medieval thought and spirituality, although a few
range far beyond the Victorines.
The first four contributors explore the art and architecture of St. Victor and its
Parisian environs. Catherine Delano-Smith analyzes Richard of St. Victor’s drawings of the Temple of Jerusalem that accompanied his In Visionem Ezechiel and
demonstrates the complex interactions between word and image in Victorine exegesis. Her emphasis on images is shared by Walter Cahn, who finds in an illustrated
Parisian manuscript of Hugh of St. Victor’s writings an opportunity to consider the
interpretive possibilities opened by the visualization of Victorine ideas. William W.
Clark offers a useful survey of the evidence for the appearance of the twelfth-century
church of St. Victor, whereas Thomas Waldman reflects on what a privilege of Pope
Innocent II can tell us about Suger of St. Denis’s vision for church construction.
The next three essays delve into the Victorines’ approach to the written word
and together provide a clear summary of the order’s intellectual project. Franklin
Harkins demonstrates that for students at St. Victor reading led necessarily to a virtuous life and that reading and Christian action reinforced each other. Hugh Feiss
turns to the classic Victorine model of teaching by word and example, with attention to vernacular as well as Latin preaching. Turning again to the problem of reading (and, by extension, glossing), Lesley Smith surveys a collection of biblical
glosses by the Parisian master Robert Amiclas and presents it as an example of how
books operated in the early Scholastic context.
Chapters 8 through 11 cover the high speculative thought of the Victorine
world. Boyd Taylor Coolman neatly links theology to behavior and argues that
Hugh of St. Victor’s conception of beauty had a moral dimension: “spiritual beauty
consists in proper measure in desire, thought, and act” (p. 196). Dale M. Coulter
and Marcia Colish turn to the reception of the classical inheritance in medieval
thought, with Coulter considering the Victorines’ transmutation of Boethius’s idea
of speculation and Colish presenting a most erudite account of the medieval peregrinations of Stoic views on conscience. Dominique Poirel rounds out the quartet with
another piece on beauty that effectively captures Hugh’s thought at its most conceptually enthralling. A canon’s vocation, she notes, asks him to contemplate beauty
and then “radiate it all around [himself] unto the limits of the universe” (p. 196).
The final five essays take the collection in very different directions. Barbara
Newman looks at the affective spirituality surrounding the metaphor of “exchang-

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619

ing hearts” from the mid-twelfth to late-thirteenth centuries and argues that
women authors, especially the nuns at Helfta, treated the metaphor in their own
fashion. In a piece that should become compulsory reading for Anglophone students of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Rachel Fulton imaginatively and persuasively
argues that Hildegard’s mysticism is far more methodical and sophisticated than
those who see it as primarily a subversion of male clerical authority have allowed.
Raymond Clemens concludes the discussion of gender with a careful reception
study of medieval female mystics, examining Jacques Lefèvre’s 1513 compilation
Liber trium virorum et trium spiritualium virginum. Two contributions by Jeremy
Adams and Frans van Liere look at other manifestations of high-medieval spiritual
energy: attitudes toward returning crusaders and the reception of Jewish apocalypticism in the twelfth century.
In an original and touching final piece, E. Ann Matter evokes a wintry night
in Oberlin, Ohio, listening to a Bach cantata she had brought to share with Zinn
and his Medieval Christianity class. Here she compares the spirituality of that cantata to Richard of St. Victor’s Mystical Ark, which Zinn was then translating. That
a decades-old experience should inspire such quality scholarship is testament to
Zinn’s intellectual generosity and immense didactic skill. This entire volume likewise does great credit to his wonderful career.
Whitman College

JOHN D. COTTS

The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil. Edited by Steven Biddlecombe.
(Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. 2014. Pp cviii, 153. $99.00. ISBN 978-184383-901-9.)
It is always good to see the publication of a long-neglected primary source. To
those of the early-twelfth century, the chronicle of Baldric of Bourgueil (also
known to modern scholars as Baldric or Baudrey of Dol) was one of the betterknown accounts of the First Crusade, although not as widely read as that by Robert
the Monk. Yet Baldric’s Historia has not been republished since 1879, and that edition was based on only seven of the twenty-four known manuscripts. This new edition is a product of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project
on the historical narratives of the First Crusade led by Marcus Bull and is based on
twenty manuscripts. At last Baldric’s work is available to scholars and students in a
modern edition with full editorial apparatus and index.
Steven Biddlecombe has not only edited Baldric’s Historia to meet modern
standards of scholarship but has also provided a detailed analytical introduction to
the text and its author. He introduces readers to Baldric as a man as well as an
author, setting out his career trajectory as prior, abbot of Bourgueil, and bishop of
Dol (from 1108). He also considers Baldric’s poetry before going on to discuss the
Historia in detail: the books that informed Baldric’s writing, his use of the anonymous Gesta Francorum, his interpretation of the First Crusade, and his presentation
of it to his readership. The introduction also explores the reception of Baldric’s work
by his contemporaries, its uses by later writers, and the earlier printed editions.

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Biddlecombe shows that Baldric was not only an historian of recent events but
also an author in his own right who built on the Gesta Francorum to create a sophisticated and lively narrative, creating personalities around the Gesta’s brief descriptions. In particular, Baldric developed Bohemond of Antioch as a flawed hero,
depicting Bohemond’s trickery and ambition to make him a more credible, interesting personality.
Discussing the date of Baldric’s work, Biddlecombe concludes that it was
probably composed before Bohemond of Antioch came to France in 1106 to drum
up support for a new crusade. He argues for two stages of composition: one version
of the text produced in 1105, when Baldric was at Bourgueil, and then another after
he became bishop of Dol, when he added some details and made some corrections.
There are, then, two manuscript traditions for the text; the edition published in
1879 in volume 4 of the Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens occidentaux was
based on the 1107 version, whereas Biddlecombe’s new edition is based on the
1105 version. The 1879 edition “corrected” Baldric’s Latin to mirror classical Latin,
introduced divisions, and imposed a sentence structure and punctuation. In contrast, Biddlecombe has set out to produce an edition that is representative of the
manuscript tradition, as modern scholars expect. His edition is prefaced by a
description of each of the surviving manuscripts and supported by full editorial
apparatus. It is thus a valuable source for medieval Latin in early-twelfth-century
France as well as a record of how contemporaries interpreted the First Crusade.
This new edition will be invaluable both to scholars of the First Crusade, of
its reception, and of the development of the idea of crusade, as well as to students
of medieval Latin literature. Students will demand a translation—but that is work
for the future.
Cardiff University

HELEN J. NICHOLSON

Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity. By Sara Ritchey. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 225.
$55.00. ISBN 978-0-8014-5253-6.)
The expansive title and somewhat grandiose jacket description of this
volume’s contents set a demanding and challenging agenda, promising a major
reconsideration of the fundamentals of late-medieval religious and devotional practice. To cram all that promised within a short space—text and footnotes amount to
only 204 pages, some of them taken up with illustrations—would be a major
achievement. In reality, it is not achieved; although on the way the book is often
thought-provoking.
The volume certainly ticks several key boxes for current work on high- and
late-medieval Catholic spirituality. Its title overtly invokes “the material turn,” with
the focus on “the material world” interpreted (as becomes clear) with a quasi-environmentalist agenda. Three of its five chapters focus on religious women, thereby
contributing to “gender studies” and work on “the body.” The introduction outlines

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a series of claims and promises along these lines. The argument builds from an interpretation of the new approach to nature in the twelfth-century Renaissance, here
read as an understanding that the world had been materially re-created through
Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection. Accordingly, subsequent centuries saw
the emergence of a new way of thinking about the material world—its flowers
and spices and mountains and agriculture and animals, and even its people and
their God. Everything was to be understood as holy matter—matter made
sacred by the world’s re-creation. And, as we shall see, this new understanding
was significant in inspiring a great variety of religious behaviours. (p. 11)

There is no doubting Sara Ritchey’s commitment to the project; but the ambition goes beyond the material and evidence offered, so that the argument’s foundations are insufficiently established. The basic trap seems to be that readings of texts
are offered that proclaim authorial intentions without considering reception and
responses, the readings being used as the foundation for a rather vague construct
that never quite takes shape. The discussion moves from the twelfth to the fifteenth
century, leaping rather than flowing. For the twelfth century, Hildegard naturally
has pride of place (but is not the only source); Ss. Clare and Francis are dominant
in the thirteenth. Chapter 5 then jumps to “the Estranged Wilderness” of the
Carthusians, drawing on Ludolph of Saxony and the well-known miscellany of
British Library MS Add. 37049 to provide the basis for discussion of the development of the Carthusians’ concept of wilderness. Although connected, the chapters
come across as somewhat episodic analyses, with the texts and individuals not necessarily sharing the same goals. How far those goals were in fact as Ritchey asserts
is unclear: for the texts she uses Harvard-style referencing, but the major statements
of the appeal to nature or material re-creation often have to be taken on trust, lacking clear ascription or quotation. Possibly the words are treated too concretely: the
book imparts a nagging and growing anxiety that its foundations are much shakier
than Ritchey is willing to consider; that whatever should be made of the texts, the
“naturalistic” vocabulary and images are merely metaphor. After all, books still have
folia, but that does not make them inherently environmentally friendly.
The selectivity in the choice of texts also raises questions about the extrapolation. Several survive in small quantities; readership and impact are problematic
issues that are never addressed head-on. Rather, there is an assumption of impact;
that these ideas are an obscured, neglected, yet nevertheless significant current.
That may be true, given the way medievalists work and sometimes fail to notice
things; but, ultimately, that it is true is not convincingly demonstrated.
University of Birmingham

R. N. SWANSON

Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William
Chester Jordan. Edited by Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner, and Anne E. Lester.
(Boston: Brill. 2013. Pp. xxvi, 304. $156.00. ISBN 978-90-04-24359-0.)
This impressive Festschrift to the eminent Princeton historian William
Chester Jordan traces the contours of theory and methods of political history since

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1973, the year Jordan received his doctorate at Princeton and took up a position
there in the Department of History. It is a fitting tribute to a scholar whose work
has influenced a generation of graduate students whose careers encompass the
political centers of western Europe as well as the very poorest people at the margins
of society. Their essays take a wide range of topics, but despite their differences,
they all betray the hallmarks of Jordan’s tutelage: deep engagement with an array of
sources, “squeezing” those sources to get the most out of each word, and thinking
theoretically to best interpret the text. This is what all graduate programs in history
aspire to do, of course, but this volume testifies to what that sort of pedagogy looks
like in the hands of someone whose own deep intellect and expansive worldview is
evident in every word of scholarly tribute. No one in this collection needs an introduction. In addition to seventeen essays by former students, now distinguished professors in their own right, the volumes is bookended by tributes by Jordan’s colleagues: an eloquent foreword by John W. Baldwin and a witty, warm, and
genuinely affectionate afterword by Teofilo Ruiz.
There is literally something in this volume for everyone, and both the authors
and their essays are top-notch. The geographic focus is largely on in France,
Spain, and Italy, but the range of interests of Jordan’s former students is extensive.
Interested in French royal power? Insightful studies on Louis IX by Jonathan
Elukin and Anne E. Lester, and on the Crusades by Erica Gilles and Christopher
MacEvitt, are found herein. More interested in Jews and Muslims in Spain and
France? New works here by David Nirenberg, Maya Soifer Irish, E. M. Rose, and
Hussein Fancy that push the field beyond questions of hybridity and conflict will
delight. More interested in peace, not war? There are essays that touch on the
Franciscans, the Peace of God movement (Richard Landes), street performance in
Italy (Katherine L. Jansen), and rescuing hostages in Spain (Jarbel Rodriguez).
Adam J. Davis, Holly J. Grieco, and Michelle Garceau take a wide view of religious institutions in their discussions of hospitals, canonization, and miracles,
whereas G. Geltner looks at the Black Death in Italy through court records. The
book ends, fittingly, with two broadly theoretical and methodological essays.
Emily Kadans prompts a reconsideration of current thinking on Christianity and
law, and Mark Gregory Pegg considers the challenges historians face in the light
of recent turns in postmodern theory. This is a book that many scholars will no
doubt dip into here and there, reading a particular essay that touches on an immediate research or teaching question. But it is worth reading straight through to get
a sense of what a research seminar with Jordan was like: wide-ranging in theoretical perspective and subject matter, and offering a lively and provocative openended discussion that considers the history of the European Middle Ages as an act
of intellectual creativity.
It is safe to say that this collection of essays will have a very long library shelf
life. It will be a book that we return to again and again to read essays that push us
beyond what we think we know. The authors give us a nuanced analysis of both
method and theory that goes beyond any idea of center or periphery. It is a fitting
coda to a career that began with Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages (Princeton,

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1976), the Festschrift that Jordan, together with Teofilo Ruiz and Bruce McNab,
presented to their mentor, Joseph Strayer.
Seattle University

THERESA EARENFIGHT

Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and
Contexts. Edited by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson. (Rochester, NY:
York Medieval Press in association with Boydell Press. 2013. Pp. xx, 351.
$90.00. ISBN 978-1-903153-44-4.)
The first Jews to settle in England arrived not long after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and the medieval phase of Anglo-Jewish history came to an end in
1290 with the expulsion of all of its members other than those who had converted
to Christianity. The final decade of the twelfth century looks to have been a major
turning-point in this relatively short history. This was the first time serious violence
occurred against Jewish communities not just in London but also in at least seven
other towns in East Anglia, the Midlands, and York. The present volume is the
outcome of a 2010 conference held in York that examined the wider context of the
York “massacre.”
The first section of this volume is rather misleadingly titled “The Events of
March 1190.” Three of the section’s five papers do indeed focus on providing an
immediate context for them: they are Joe Hillaby’s paper on the attacks on Jewish
communities elsewhere in 1189–90; Nick Vincent’s paper on the literary sources
behind William of Newburgh’s chronicle account of the York massacre; and Sarah
Rees Jones’s paper on what is currently known about the transformation of York
into a major royal center postconquest, Jewish settlement in York from the 1170s
onward, and the local inhabitants fined for the York attacks. But Robert Stacey’s
important paper specifically rejects the traditional connection made between the
1189–90 Jewish killings and the creation in 1194 of a network of official registries
(chests) for records of Jewish loans and the emergence of the Exchequer of the Jews
in 1198 and argues that both are connected with something rather different: the
assertion of a new royal jurisdictional monopoly over the Jewish community. The
second section (“Jews among Christians in medieval England”) includes a characteristically thought-provoking paper by Paul Hyams on some of the barriers to
social contact and trust between Jews and Christians in medieval England, a fascinating paper by Eva de Visscher using Hebrew and Hebraist texts from pre-1290
England to reconstruct how Christian readers learned Hebrew, and a paper by Pinchas Roth and Ethan Zadoff looking at the evidence for Talmudic study in England, with a particular focus on Rabbi Elijah Menahem. The third section (“Representations”) has an interesting paper by Heather Blurton on the chroniclers’ use
of biblical and other narratives of the destruction and expulsion of the ancient
Israelites as a model for their description of the violence against Jews in England,
another by Matthew Mesley on a miracle story allegedly involving a blind and
dumb Jewish woman at the tomb of St. Remigius of Lincoln and her subsequent
conversion, and one by Carlee Bradbury on the visual tradition in English art of the

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period from 1190 onward of dehumanizing a Jew present at the funeral of the
Virgin Mary. The volume as a whole makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the Jewish community in medieval England and its relationship with the Christian population and English royal government.
All Souls College
University of Oxford

PAUL BRAND

The Roman Crucible: The Artistic Patronage of the Papacy, 1198–1304. By Julian
Gardner. [Römische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Band XXXIII.]
(Munich: Hirmer Verlag. 2014. Pp. 516. $185.00. ISBN 978-3-7774-2385-2.)
Julian Gardner is an authority on the art and architecture of Rome between
the pontificates of Popes Innocent III (1198–1216) and Benedict XI (1303–04),
making this volume a welcome addition to the literature on the subject. In fact
the contents of the book are much more wide-ranging than the title suggests.
The author looks at artistic patronage not only of the popes of the period but
also that of the cardinals. He makes the influence of French styles on Italian art
a strong underlying theme of the study, while also mentioning the Byzantine
tradition. He includes architecture, sculpture, painting, mosaics, manuscripts,
English embroidered vestments (“opus anglicanum”), seals, and luxury liturgical
arts in other media such as metal and enamel. He goes beyond Rome to look at
the architecture of palaces in the hill-towns around the city, where the popes
resided for a few months of the year. He also considers churches beyond Rome
connected with cardinals, who either came from other European centers or who
served the Church there as papal legates. At every turn he includes pertinent
historical evidence—from wills, chronicles, letters, papal bulls, and other relevant documents.
An important part of the book is devoted to the patronage of cardinals. There
is a particularly interesting overview of surviving personal seals, small privately
commissioned works, which not only indicate the artistic taste of their patrons and
the varying styles of the time but also provide a well-dated body of evidence, which
can be used in some instances to further one’s understanding of more monumental
works of art and architecture. Similarly, papal and curial tombs, although interesting in themselves, help to underpin the stylistic trends of the time. As in other parts
of the book, the author includes fascinating biographical details about the men who
commissioned these works.
The most significant sections of the book are the discussions of major programs of mosaic and painting in Rome in the thirteenth century. These include in
the years between 1198 and 1276 the refashioning of the apse and façade mosaics
of Old St. Peter’s, the new apse mosaic of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, and the
murals in the Chapel of St. Sylvester at SS. Quattro Coronati. The recent restoration of the pope’s private chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum at the Lateran highlighted its innovative architecture and interior decoration, with murals and mosaics

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commissioned by Pope Nicholas III (1277–80), as a key monument of the time.
Gardner discusses a “final flowering” of art in Rome in the magnificent mosaics by
Jacopo Torriti and other artists at Saint John Lateran and Saint Mary Major; in the
work of Pietro Cavallini at S. Cecilia, S. Giorgio in Velabro, and S. Maria in
Trastevere; as well as in Giotto’s Navicella and Stefaneschi’s altarpiece at St. Peter’s.
In a postscript Gardner mentions the paintings in the “Gothic Hall” at SS.
Quattro Coronati, whose discovery must have postdated his writing of the rest of
the text. In fact, the final chapter of the book is an overview of recent scholarship
in the field, which seems to indicate that the publication of the book took a long
time. This overview is, however, very useful, as the author underlines important
new trends in research and some exciting recent discoveries. He also points out
many questions, which still need clarification. This means that this authoritative
scholarly work is not meant to be seen as the last word on the subject. It ends with
an openness to new possibilities for research and ways in which younger scholars
can continue to contribute to the understanding of this fascinating subject.
La Trobe University
Victoria, Australia

JOAN BARCLAY LLOYD

Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom. By Amanda Power. [Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2013. Pp. x, 303. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-521-88522-5.)
Richard Cross claims in The Medieval Christian Philosophers (New York, 2013,
p. 98) that Roger Bacon’s entrance into the Franciscan order “seems, in retrospect,
to have been a mistake.” If so, it was undoubtedly a “felix culpa” for Amanda Power
of the University of Sheffield and readers of her Roger Bacon and the Defence of
Christendom. Indeed, her keen interest in the Franciscan context of the Doctor
Mirabilis is the driving force of her monograph, as stated in the introduction (p.
28): “I hope to present a new and independent interpretation of what it could mean
to be a Franciscan at this time.” Thanks to this author, medievalists and Franciscanists alike can enjoy what will certainly be the standard historical reference work
on Bacon for years to come.
In addition to the introduction, where Power crafts a superb review and critique of past and present scholarship on Bacon’s life and work, this book contains
five substantial chapters and a brief, albeit thought-provoking, postscript titled “In
Memoriam.” The first chapter, “A Life in Context,” provides precisely what the
heading suggests: a careful cultivation of sources that includes Bacon’s education in
the vibrant ecclesial-academic climate of his native England, as well as his experience in Paris, the cultural-religious center of thirteenth-century Western Christendom. Robert Grosseteste, the famed bishop of Lincoln and lector for the Oxford
friars, and friar Adam Marsh were, most probably, among the most influential figures early in Bacon’s religious life. Although Power notes the difficulty in drawing
interpretative conclusions given the source material (p. 50), her estimation of

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Marsh’s impact on Bacon’s understanding of Christendom’s crisis and the enduring
significance to wisdom seems more than plausible given the writings and life trajectories of both authors. The pressing need for reform through the retrieval of the
age-old sapientia christiana animated Bacon’s intellectual efforts (Opus maius, Opus
minus, Opus tertium, 1266–68) within the Franciscan order. Written at the request
of his short-lived patron, Pope Clement IV, these wisdom texts are “. . . the works
of enduring power and novelty upon which his reputation rests” (p. 59).
Chapter 3, “Traces on Parchment,” and chapter 4, “From the World to God,”
treat two perennial Franciscan concerns: written texts and the book of the world.
Although one wonders if Bacon’s habit was gray, not brown (p. 85), the “flesh”
beneath the mendicant attire was formed, as Power writes, in the context of a conversio to religious life that was as unique as the individual, yet dictated by longstanding customs and established institutions. Power’s attentive examination of
what she later describes as Bacon’s “inward striving after models of perfection” (p.
164) fosters a most welcome, nuanced reading of Bacon’s wisdom texts that avoids
a simple treatment of well-known themes in the Opus maius. Here the author excels
in revealing traces of the Doctor mirabils inscribed in the “parchment” that formed
the “flesh” of his worldview. As a consequence, readers grasp Bacon’s variation on
the Franciscan itinerarium, which he grounds in select sciences informed by ethical
praxis and faith in the service of wisdom.
Bacon was not, however, in any hurry to leave the world; he endorsed the medical sciences in the quest for longevity and hoped to witness the transformation of
Christendom in his lifetime. Chapters 4 and 5, “The Crisis of Christendom” and
“Beyond Christendom,” consider Bacon’s engagement with the ecclesial-political
issues of his day or, as Power writes, “… the public world of his vocation” (p. 164).
Like many of his confreres, Bacon was steeped in the prevailing Joachmite milieu (p.
234) of apocalypticism and appeals for radical reform. Power artfully details his critique that included the corruption of the curial prelates, the desultory state of education, and the lax vanity of the highly touted “boys” of the mendicant orders. Such
obvious ills, combined with ill-fated Baltic-Near Eastern crusades and the massing
of Mongol armies, were unmistakable signs of chaotic decay preceding the ultimate
revelation of the antichrist. Bacon argued, as a friar and scholar of both scientia and
sapientia, that only a far-reaching moral-educational reform could reverse these
worldwide challenges. To this end, he proposed the retrieval of the ancient learning,
languages, and experiential knowledge in the wisdom works addressed to Clement
IV and in the later Compendium studii philosophiae (1271–72).
The final, brief postscript, “In Memoriam,” recalls the shifting image of
Bacon through the years and the author’s efforts to “… recover a fuller sense of
both Bacon and his milieux” (p. 265). There is no doubt that Power’s monograph
is incredibly successful on this front. One can only hope for similar study of St.
Bonaventure and other prominent confreres of the Doctor mirabilis. Absent, however, from these last three pages is a reference to her earlier desire…”to present a
new and independent interpretation of what it could mean to be a Franciscan at

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this time.” Although Power definitely offers an innovative, thoroughly resourced
view of Bacon as a Franciscan, the meaning of “independent” calls for comment.
If this approach simply means an interpretation that refuses to disadvantage Bacon
in favor of earlier biases regarding St. Francis, St. Bonaventure, and other prominent friars, then Power was again successful. Nevertheless, in a somewhat paradoxical response, this reader finished Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom
with even more questions about Bacon’s fraternal interdependence within the web
of philosophical ideas, institutional customs, theological doctrines, and pious
practices proper to the Franciscan order. For this unforeseen conclusion, a note of
gratitude is due to the author.
Flagler College
St. Augustine, FL

TIMOTHY J. JOHNSON

The Sanctity of Louis IX: Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and
William of Chartres. Translated by Larry F. Field; edited and introduced by M.
Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean L. Field. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2013. Pp. xviii, 197. $18.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8014-7818-5.)
Even in an age when kingship was especially imbued with sacred qualities,
very few medieval European kings ascended to the ranks of the saints. Louis IX of
France’s canonization in 1297, twenty-seven years after his death on crusade in
North Africa, therefore sets him apart as a subject of exceptional historical interest.
Although Louis’s long and momentous reign (1226–70) has always attracted attention from medievalists, this marvelous collection of documents shifts the focus
toward the king’s reputation for sanctity. By offering translations of two key early
hagiographies along with crucial contextualizing documents, the authors show how
Louis’s saintly image was cultivated over several decades in French mendicant and
court circles before Pope Boniface VIII officially affirmed it in his canonization bull
of 1297.
The Sanctity of Louis IX aims to reach both scholarly and undergraduate audiences. For students, it offers highly readable and idiomatic translations of texts that
have to date only been accessible in nineteenth-century Latin editions. Geoffrey of
Beaulieu was a Dominican who served as Louis’s confessor for some twenty years
and accompanied the king on his ill-fated crusades to Egypt and Tunis. His is the
earliest life of Louis IX that has come down to us—he started writing it in 1272,
just two years after the king’s death in the crusader camp at Carthage. Shortly after
Geoffrey died (probably in 1274 or 1275), William of Chartres complemented
Geoffrey’s vita with one of his own. William also belonged to Louis’s inner circle,
serving the king in a variety of sensitive judicial and political roles first as a secular
cleric and then, likely from around 1264, as a Dominican friar. Taken together, the
two texts offer a remarkably intimate portrait of a saint in the making. They can
support classroom teaching or student research projects on a wealth of topics in
medieval history, literature, and religious studies: lay piety and the revolutionary
impact of mendicant ideals; prayer, penance, confession and discipline; ideas of

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kingship, justice, and good governance; attitudes toward poverty, charity, and disability; the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authority; the place of the
miraculous in everyday life; crusading; and Latin Christian attitudes toward Muslims and Jews. Further increasing the value of these translations is a generous introduction that delves deeply into major themes while also laying out the historical
context in considerable detail.
Students and teachers will appreciate this book a great deal. So, too, will
scholars who work on Louis IX and his world. The introduction offers an authoritative guide to current scholarly literature in this area. More important still, the
editors carefully reviewed the manuscript and printing histories of Geoffrey and
William’s vitae and have managed to bring clarity to a confused state of affairs.
They discovered that, despite the claims of several early-modern and nineteenthcentury editors to the contrary, a single manuscript now housed in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France has provided the basis for every major printed edition of these
works. By checking the standard scholarly edition (which actually dates back to
1840) against this manuscript and by consulting a second early version of Geoffrey’s
vita that has never been used in any previous edition of the texts, they have been
able to make many important corrections to the original Latin. As a result, this
excellent set of translations is likely to transform teaching and research on one of
the quintessential figures of the European Middle Ages.
University of Minnesota

MICHAEL LOWER

Pope Gregory X and the Crusades. By Philip B. Baldwin. [Studies in the History of
Medieval Religion, Vol. XLI.] (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press. 2014. Pp.
xii, 247. ISBN 978-1-84383-916-3.)
Popes were the key to crusading because the concept of crusade was based on
papal authority. In their function as vicarii Dei popes were the legitimate authority
for initiating crusades as holy wars and the sole providers of plenary indulgences,
which formed the central motivation for most crusaders. Urban II stood at the
beginning of a long line of medieval popes who made it their business to promote
this particularly muscular institution of medieval Catholicism, which served to
impose papal authority throughout Christendom and rally the faithful in an
unprecedented manifestation of pious violence for the defense and expansion of the
Christian religion. The thirteenth century was the most intense century of crusading
with numerous campaigns fought throughout Europe, often in parallel, against all
kinds of enemies of the Church. For the popes this was a test of their skills of leadership and organization. Pope Innocent III, at the very beginning of the thirteenth
century, set the pace by preaching the cross against Muslims in the Holy Land and
in Spain, heretics in southwestern France, non-Christians in the Baltic, and his
political enemies in southern Italy. He also reorganized propaganda and finance for
crusading, making them more efficient and effective while placing the practice of
crusading in a firm legal framework. Popes of the later thirteenth century built upon
Innocent’s foundations, few more enthusiastically than Gregory X (1271–76).

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Philip Baldwin’s book on Gregory X’s crusade policies is a welcome addition
to thirteenth-century crusade studies. Based on the meticulous investigation of
Gregory’s correspondence conserved in the papal registers, Baldwin explores every
nook and cranny of the pope’s involvement with the business of the Holy Land and
other aspects of crusading during his short pontificate. It is a book that, in its intensity and attention to detail, tries the generalist’s patience but produces a wealth of
insights for the specialist. Gregory’s crusading plans were centered on his attempts
to prepare for a passagium generale by calling upon the whole of Christendom at the
Second Council of Lyons to join the campaign. But this was not enough for Gregory, who, before becoming pope, had dedicated a good deal of his life in curial
service to promoting campaigns in aid of the Holy Land. Baldwin chronicles Gregory’s efforts to prepare the battleground for the Holy Land by sending advance
relief forces, which were meant to prevent a repeat of the military defeats that had
befallen King Louis IX’s crusades. He also describes the diplomatic negotiations
necessary to settle the disputes over the imperial crown and gain the support of as
many leading heads of Europe as possible for the big push to the East. Finally,
Baldwin attempts to imagine what Gregory X’s crusade to the Holy Land would
have looked like, had the pope not died prematurely and had his immediate successors managed to hold on to the papal throne for any length of time.
Despite its narrow thematic scope, Baldwin’s study makes an important contribution to crusade studies. Next to Innocent III, Gregory X is the only thirteenthcentury pope whose crusading policies have been studied in depth and from a vantage point of modern crusade studies. Baldwin proves without doubt the
importance of papal leadership and forceful curial organization to the success of the
crusades, even if in this instance the failure of the crusade came about despite Gregory X’s intense efforts.
University of Zurich

CHRISTOPH T. MAIER

Julian of Norwich, Theologian. By Denys Turner. (New Haven: Yale University
Press. 2011. Pp. xxvi, 262. 2013. $40.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-30016391-9; $25.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-300-19255-1.)
Denys Turner’s Julian of Norwich, Theologian gives us Julian as a theologian of
the in-between. As an anchoress and a woman writing in the vernacular, Julian was
positioned between death and life, history and eternity, Latin formality and
“vibrant orality” (p. 15), unique as a visionary yet still a common “evencristen.”
Writing from the margins, Turner argues, gave her freedom to experiment in
responding to the problem of how sin can exist in a world created by love.
Turner’s book is divided into halves, organized around Julian’s two most conceptually difficult showings: the phrase “sin is behovely” (“sin is fitting”) and the story
of the Lord and Servant. In the first half, Turner sets out the terms for investigating
Julian as a systematic theologian rather than a mystic in the Jamesian sense. Her revelation was neither incommunicable nor a direct insight into the divine: Julian had to
fit “sin is behovely” with what she understood to be true. Her theology therefore pro-

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ceeds as a dialectic between the showings, which affirm the unreality of sin, and the
teachings of the Church on sin and Julian’s own experience of its human reality.
Turner is careful to emphasize that Julian understands this to be an epistemological
problem only and further identifies Julian’s “behovely” with arguments from the conveniens, or fitting, used by Ss. Anselm, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and others;
her “behovely”is like scholastic dialectic and monastic lectio divina together, an openended deepening of inquiry through the repetitions of meditation.
The second half turns to the Lord and Servant and Julian’s soteriology. “Sin is
behovely” does not preclude the existence of hell, and Julian, Turner suggests, did
not believe in universal salvation. At the same time, her vision of the Lord and Servant precludes a retributive soteriology: it collapses all the events of salvation history into one story of an absolute love that does not condemn. Turner shows how
this impasse refocuses Julian’s theology on the problem of how to live in the tension
of eschatological in-betweenness. Theologians will find chapter 6 useful for its clarification of the sensualite and substance, her anthropology of a humanity divided into
a fallen self, living in time and vulnerable to sin, and an unfallen self untouched by
sin. However, here Turner makes excursions into Julian’s relative orthodoxy that
are unnecessary, historically vague, and also give the impression that her theology
is more homogenous than it is.
This points up a limitation to Turner’s approach: there is little precise sense
of how Julian may be responding to her predecessors or contemporaries. If she
reads like Aquinas in some ways and like Dante in others, those similarities are
more “in the air” than in her thinking. Medievalists and theologians both might
wish that Turner had drawn on contemporary writings in Latin or in the vernacular
or taken more from recent scholarship such as that by Elisabeth Dutton, David
Aers, and Nicholas Watson. This absence of attention to historical context reinforces those misconceptions that Turner works to dispel: that Julian wrote alone, as
if with a direct line to God, alongside but not part of a community, responsive to
her evencristen in only the most abstract ways. Readers should also note that,
although the book is aimed at students, it is not an introduction to Julian’s writings.
However, its value to anyone with an interest in Julian’s writings, vernacular theology, or late-medieval theology in general cannot be overestimated. If it does at
times read more like Turner’s own sermons than like Julian of Norwich, this book
nevertheless resonates with the best in her theology: thorough but lucid, intellectually impressive but accessible, deeply humane, and often beautiful to read.
Providence College

MARGARET HEALY-VARLEY

The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England. Edited by Mary C. Flannery and
Katie L. Walter. [Westfield Medieval Studies, Vol. 4.] (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer. 2013. Pp. viii, 194. $99.00 hardback. ISBN 978-1-84384336-8.)
The study of inquisitio hereticae pravitatis in England has tended to go its own
way, separate from the historiography of continental inquisitions. In this, it follows

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its subject—with little heresy and persecution of it—in England before the lollards.
Moreover, the study of English heresy, much more so than its continental forms,
has occupied scholars of literature and culture. This collection of essays takes as its
departure that inquisitio had “discursive and cultural implications . . . as a concept
and a discourse . . . [it] penetrated the late-medieval consciousness in a broader
sense, shaping public fama and private selves” (p. 2).
This means great breadth in topics. To summarize: Henry Ansgar Kelly
sketches some exceptions in England to inquisitorial practice, which by 1400 was
riddled with deviations from, and violations of, its proper procedure. Edwin Craun
emphasizes denunciation’s interest in the sinner’s charitable correction, which he
contrasts to both accusatio and inquisitio, “with their drive toward punishment” (p.
36). Ian Forrest observes that the advent of heresy inquisitions, with accompanying
canon law, in the early-fifteenth century sparked a revival in English provincial
constitutions. Diane Vincent uses the case of John Oldcastle to treat reception and
understandings of inquisition after its institution in England, with both orthodox
clerics and lollards grappling over its theological and social meanings. Mary C.
Flannery and Katie Walter challenge an association of the internal forum of confession with interiority, by exploring how the recognized external forum of judgment, including community knowledge and reputation, complicated this. Inquisition, as well as confession, helped to reach and to shape individual interiority.
Interiority appears, too, in James Wade’s essay on The Erle of Tolous, with this
romance’s diverse inquiries and confessions forming exemplary selves.
Jenny Lee, Genelle Gertz, and Ruth Ahnert all investigate ways in which
inquisition was culturally and literarily productive, particularly for those accused of
heresy. Lee argues that Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love was a self-conscious
attempt to recuperate himself authoritatively amid the erasures of his earlier Appeal.
Gertz contends that defendants co-opted inquisition’s language for resistance via
written confessions of faith, whereas Ahnert posits Protestant prison writings as a
“literature of vindication” that actively redefined the meaning of a trial, whether it
ended in recantation or death. In conclusion, Emily Steiner argues for a dynamic,
“modern” reading of the seemingly un-modern inquisitio, a (perhaps counterintuitive) spur to imagination and invention.
Evidence is often distant from the historical practice of heresy inquisitions, its
mechanics, and its dailiness. This is sensible, amid the volume’s wish to trace inquisitio as expansive and transcendent cultural factor. But at its limits, the distinct legal
process of inquisitio shades into general “questioning” or “confession,” with resemblance or echoes at play rather than links or lineage. Relatedly, in inquisitorial practice the complexities of public/private, confession, and the ability of diverse actors
to seize and reinterpret the process—all explicit themes here—were most powerfully visible.
With these themes, we might encourage closer communication between
scholars of continental and English heresy and inquisition. Does Usk in the late-

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fourteenth century seeking to “reclaim his authority to tell his own story” (pp. 102–
03) compare to visionary Na Prous Boneta, proudly testifying in 1325? In earlier
continental inquisitions, both defendants and communities inverted inquisitorial
meanings of interrogations, abjurations, and even executions, whether by violent
resistance or by honoring the dead as martyrs. And if Chaucer, influenced by inquisition and thinking of fama, “imagines a readership past, present and future” (p.
169), so, too, did Bernard Gui, to whom records (past ones he consulted, and his
own, ready for the future) helped inquisitors to match the earthly judgment of the
accused with her transhistorical theological status. Andrew Roach and particularly
Mary C. Mansfield would be rich additions to the volume’s discussions of
public/private fora and confession.
The later medieval West’s transformation into an “inquisitional culture” (in
the phrase of Dyan Elliott, cited but not discussed) deserves more attention. The
contributors have admirably, if not always persuasively, sought to expand inquisitio’s reach. Moving forward, scholars of England and the continent might join
forces in confronting the disconcerting possibility that inquisition was a machine
for culture, creating as it destroyed.
University of South Carolina

CHRISTINE CALDWELL AMES

John Wyclif on War and Peace. By Rory Cox. [Studies in History, New Series.]
(Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society. 2014. Pp.
xiv, 200. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-861-933-259.)
In recent years, studies of the philosophical, theological, and political ideas of
the English thinker John Wyclif have proliferated. To this literature we may now
add this new volume by Rory Cox, which compellingly defends a striking thesis:
“that Wyclif should be regarded as the first medieval pacifist” (p. 159). According
to Cox, Wyclif not only rejected conventional Christian ideas about just warfare;
he also advocated for nonviolence and nonresistance in the face of aggression by
others. Wyclif’s reasoning, which Cox reconstructs in detail, may well have laid the
groundwork for the pacifist arguments of lollard and Hussite reformers in the latefourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Cox’s introduction makes it clear that war and peace have not been prominent
themes in academic writing about Wyclif, who scattered his comments about warfare, violence, and nonaggression across many of his works. Following a brief history of pacifism and a lengthier account of the development of Christian just-war
doctrine, the heart of Cox’s book comprises three closely argued chapters concerning Wyclif’s opposition to the pillars on which medieval conceptions of the just war
stood: just cause, proper authority, and correct intention. In his fifth chapter,
“Wyclif on Politics,” Cox examines Wyclif’s ideas about a range of issues connected
to law and government, such as just dominium, the right of secular governments to
engage in legal coercion, and the relationship between divine and human law.
Bringing all these findings together, the final chapter and brief conclusion seek to

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demonstrate that Wyclif’s pacifism went beyond merely the rejection of just-war
theory and instead encompassed a thoroughgoing “moral rejection of war” (p. 135).
Those familiar with Wyclif’s meandering, polemical, yet often original writings will especially appreciate the extent of Cox’s labor in this book. The analysis
here synthesizes passages from across Wyclif’s extensive corpus, utilizing both
printed and manuscript sources and showing for the first time how his ideas about
politics and warfare sometimes remained consistent and at other times changed
over the last decade or so of his life. Specialists may regret the lack of easy access
to Wyclif’s own Latin words; no doubt for reasons of space, this volume provides
primary texts only in translation. More substantive quibbles may be had with Cox’s
presentation of Wyclif’s doctrine of predestination. Recent studies, such as those of
Ian Christopher Levy, have increasingly made it clear that Wyclif, like other
medieval thinkers and unlike later Protestants, saw the predestined elect not as the
lucky winners of a mysterious divine lottery but as those whose morally good
actions God foreknows and rewards. Cox’s neglect of these trends in scholarship
leads him to make inferences about the relationships between Wyclif’s conception
of the elect and Wyclif’s views on nonviolence that may not be supported by the
sources, and his quotation of later lollard writings as if they were Wyclif’s own
undermines the credibility of his otherwise persuasive arguments.
These limitations aside, Rory Cox has done an important service in producing
the first book-length study of Wyclif’s views on perennial themes: violence, war,
and the prospect of peace. His generally limpid writing opens up Wyclif’s dense
and scattered arguments to a broad audience of readers, and his case for Wyclif as
the first medieval pacifist is credible and well argued. We can only hope that further
studies will join Cox, Levy, and others in plumbing the intellectual depths of one
of the Middle Ages’ most reviled—yet creative—thinkers.
Fordham University

J. PATRICK HORNBECK II

Conciliarism and Church Law in the Fifteenth Century: Studies on Franciscus Zabarella
and the Council of Constance. By Thomas E. Morrissey. [Variorum Collected
Studies.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2014. Pp. xviii, 346. $165.00.
ISBN 978-1-4724-2387-0.)
For more than thirty years Thomas Morrissey has been studying the life and
works of the great canonist Franciscus Zabarella (1360–1417). The perceptive
studies collected here touch on all aspects of Zabarella’s life, including his occasional diplomatic missions, but, as the title indicates, their main focus is on his role
as a canonist at the Council of Constance. And that is what Zabarella is principally
remembered for nowadays.
The council met in 1414 with the purpose of ending the Great Schism that
had divided the Church since 1378. But, in March 1414, the council faced a crisis.
Its pope, John XXIII, had fled from Constance, fearing that the council intended
to take action against him. To the members of the council it seemed essential to

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assert their own authority even against the pope. Accordingly, after a week of confused debates in which Zabarella participated, they formulated the crucial decree
Haec sancta, which declared that everyone, even a pope, was bound to obey the
council “in matters which pertained to faith, the ending of the schism, and general
reform of the church” (I.164).
Almost at once disputes arose about the meaning and significance of these
words and they have continued down to the present day. Morrissey discusses the
modern disputes, but they are not his main concern. He aims, rather, to understand
and explain what the decree meant to Zabarella in 1415.
This presents problems of its own. On March 30 Zabarella read out the text
of Haec sancta to the assembled council. But when he came to the words about
reform of the Church, he hesitated and then omitted them. At once cries of protest
broke out, and soon the council dissolved in uproar. However, a week later the text
of Haec sancta was presented to the council again. This time Zabarella declined to
read it, but he attended the session at which it was promulgated, and he made no
objection. And so, Morrissey asks, why did he first protest and then acquiesce?
Morrissey’s answer is that Zabarella’s attitude was determined primarily by the
juridical culture that had shaped his mind. In the end he would not obstruct the
process of reforming the Church, but he thought that the crucial text had been
pushed through too hastily and that its language about reform was too vague.
Zabarella wanted to achieve a “delicate balance” between pope and council, and, as
a learned canonist, he wanted it to be defined in a decree that was enacted “properly
and legally,” and was consonant with established constitutional principles. Also, as
a practical realist, he thought that only such a decree could produce the best outcome for the Church.
This reviewer has emphasized Morrissey’s treatment of Haec sancta because it
typifies his whole approach to Zabarella’s work. The characteristics that the author
attributes to Zabarella here—profound learning and practical good sense—are
stressed repeatedly in his discussions of other topics. They include the “unfortunate
case” of John Hus, the case of Jean Petit and tyrannicide, and the case of Paulus
Vladimiri and the rights of infidels—all very important for the future. In such cases
Zabarella always argued for procedures that were “legally sound and defensible,
practically viable, and therefore expedient” (X.733, n1.3).
Taken together, Morrissey’s studies provide an excellent account of Zabarella
as both a man of thought and a man of action, a friend of humanists, and above all
a consummate jurist. The author also nicely illustrates Zabarella’s practical realism
by editing and translating a little handbook of advice that the great canonist wrote
for the university teachers and students of his age. Most of it would apply just as
well to their present-day counterparts.
Cornell University

BRIAN TIERNEY

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Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval
Europe. By Michael D. Bailey. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013.
Pp. xv, 295. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8014-5144-7.)
“Superstitious” is an adjective often bandied about with little concern in
modern culture. People who check their daily horoscopes to see what the day has
in store or who bury a plastic statue representing St. Joseph to sell their homes,
examples that Michael D. Bailey, an expert scholar of medieval magic, uses to start
and end his book, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in
Late Medieval Europe, are often deemed by their peers and contemporaries to be
engaging in “superstitious” behavior. In our supposedly “disenchanted” modern
world, few people would expect civic or religious penalties to befall them by engaging in such behavior. For individuals living in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Latin Christian world, this was not the case. Bailey provides a powerful study
regarding the parameters of what constituted superstition and superstitious behavior in the late-medieval Christian world.
Ancient and late-antique Romans considered excessive religious devotion of
any stripe superstitio. Whereas Ss. Augustine of Hippo and Isidore of Seville grappled with the meaning in the early Middle Ages, by the fourteenth century and particularly the fifteenth century, the term was applied to a range of popular magical—
especially divinatory—practices largely due to late-medieval theologians’ wrangling
over its meaning. Bailey evidences mastery over his sources through his meticulous
investigation of fifty-seven anonymous and authored theological treatises from the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over the course of six chapters, Bailey demonstrates how late-medieval theologians and exegetes, particularly the chancellor of
the studium generale of Paris, Jean Gerson, debated the nature of superstition in
relation to folk magical practices. This late-medieval wrangling over the definition
of superstition would lay the foundation for early-modern witch hunts.
For the first five chapters, Bailey convincingly demonstrates how the medieval
boundaries of superstitious thought and behavior were fluid and contested. Yet his
sixth and final chapter is the most important. Here he turns his critical gaze upon
the Weberian assertion of a modern world defined by “disenchantment.” For
Bailey, this fails to hold up when read in the light of late-medieval discussions surrounding superstition and superstitious practices, and Bruno Latour’s theories are
particularly useful for Bailey’s argument. According to Latour, any sharp
dichotomy between the sacred and profane or the ethereal and carnal, crucial to
modernity’s definition of itself, does not hold up to scrutiny when applied to the
premodern world. The “complex and at times confusing thought” (p. 247) of latemedieval authorities is hybrid within Latour’s system and therefore resists those
sharp dichotomies characteristic of modernity. As a result, the narrative and analytical structure underpinning Bailey’s study is allowed to achieve its own teleological end. Bailey’s overall argument might have been better served had this chapter
been placed earlier in the book. Scholars already familiar with Bailey’s excellent
scholarship may find much of the information contained within the first chapter

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familiar, but it is necessary in tracing the foundations drawn upon by late-medieval
theological authorities for their own condemnations of superstitious actions. Minus
the occasional purple turn of phrase, Bailey’s writing throughout is crisp, clean, and
elegant. Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies is a groundbreaking work, suitable for graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses on premodern magic and
witchcraft. It exemplifies why Bailey is one of the best scholars writing about the
Middle Ages today.
University of New Mexico

MICHAEL A. RYAN

EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN
Ignacio de Loyola. By Enrique García Hernán. [Españoles eminentes.] (Madrid:
Taurus. 2013. Pp. 568. €20,00 paperback. ISBN 978-84-306-0211-7.)
Writing a new biography of St. Ignatius Loyola requires great courage and
scholarly fortitude, as well as gumption, for there are more than thirty major biographies and thousands of original documents to wade through, including more than
7000 letters written by Ignatius himself. Moreover, there is an additional daunting
challenge to take into account: the fact that in these first few years of the twentyfirst century, seven new biographies of Ignatius have already appeared.
Given this situation, every reader and reviewer is forced to question the need
for yet another biography. What is truly new here? What does this biography have
to offer that others have not? How does it interpret Ignatius for our age?
This biography by prolific author Enrique García Hernán is part of the Eminent Spaniards series (Españoles Eminentes). As such, its approach to Ignatius is
historical rather than hagiographical, and its main focus is the Spanish context of
the saint’s life and work rather than the inner workings of the early Jesuit order.
Not surprisingly, García Hernán pays a great deal of attention to those years
when Ignatius lived in Spain, and one of the distinguishing features of his narrative
is the way in which he traces the evolution of a brawling, womanizing Basque
courtier and soldier named Iñigo—who seemed destined for relative obscurity—
into the towering figure now known as St. Ignatius, one of the most important
leaders of the Catholic Reformation.
Another distinguishing characteristic of García Hernán’s approach is his consistent focus on the people who helped shape Ignatius’s character and made his
accomplishments possible. This Ignatius is a master at networking, and this is a
biography full of mini-biographies. In other words, the life of the central figure is
never viewed in isolation: Iñigo evolves into St. Ignatius in response to a very specific environment, in symbiosis with the lives of those around him.
This is not to say that the biography lacks balance, but rather to call attention
to its unique emphasis. The amount of detail provided here is considerable, sometimes even overwhelming. This is a book written with experts in mind, not neo-

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phytes or a wide reading public, not even in Spain or the Spanish-speaking world.
The research is as impressive as it is exemplary, and the narrative is beautifully
crafted, even though the attention paid to figures other than Ignatius can sometimes seem more distracting than illuminating.
The Ignatius portrayed in this book is a complex figure, with a life shaped by
contradictions. A consummate negotiator, immensely flexible and adaptable, and
something of a genius when it comes to attracting followers, Iñigo nonetheless
stumbles often and makes plenty of enemies, even after he begins to call himself
Ignatius. A man who had a formidable coterie of female followers known as iñigas
and whose spirituality and religious thought were shaped by some beatas (holy
women), Ignatius ends up barring women from his religious order. García Hernán
pegs Iñigo as a quasi-heretic—an alumbrado—who managed to escape unscathed
from several encounters with the Inquisition. He also correctly portrays Ignatius as
an innovator who never fully convinced everyone during his lifetime that he and his
Society of Jesus were truly Catholic.
García Hernán sums up his complex Ignatius as follows:
he knew how to find a via media between the dialectical extremes that were
so much a part of his life and times. . . . and to some extent, he figured out
how to be an Erasmian alumbrado and at the same time a staunch supporter
of the Roman hierarchy. . . . (p. 448)

Some devotees might have difficulty recognizing this Ignatius, who is not portrayed as a saint or mystic, but as a man of his age whose shortcomings were outweighed not so much by his holiness as by his peculiar genius for networking, negotiating, organizing, managing, and leading. Although the publisher touts it as
“definitive”—one of the most overused of adjectives—this biography is very much
a product of our day and age, no more immune to eclipsing than any of the previous
ones that the author constantly relies upon, analyzes, compares, or corrects.
The ultimate impact of this meticulously researched and stunningly erudite
biography is difficult to predict, but it should definitely become required reading
for specialists. Ironically, although it is not written for beginners, or even for those
with some knowledge of early-modern history, this book contains a hidden gift for
nonspecialists: its bibliography is a perfect starting point for anyone who wants to
delve more deeply into Ignatian studies.
Yale University

CARLOS EIRE

Erasmus and the Renaissance Republic of Letters. Edited by Stephen Ryle. Foreword
by Lisa Jardine. (Turnhout: Brepols. 2014. Pp xviii, 474. €110,00. ISBN 9782-503-53030-7.)
This collection of essays represents the proceedings of a conference held at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on September 5–7, 2006, to celebrate the centenary of the first volume of P. S. Allen’s masterful edition of Erasmi Epistolae. The

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topics are grouped under five headings: P. S. Allen and Current Erasmus Scholarship, Erasmus and His Contemporaries, Literature and Philosophy in the Renaissance Republic of Letters, Erasmus and His Spiritual Legacy, and Erasmus and
Literary Tradition. No one who has worked with Desiderius Erasmus beyond the
most casual of readings is ignorant of Allen’s edition. Not only have scholars all
benefitted enormously from a critical edition of this quality and scope, but much of
twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship is inconceivable without it. What
this volume offers, especially taken as a whole, is an opportunity for readers to
revisit Allen’s work with fresh eyes.
Stephen Ryle’s introduction emphasizes what was new at the outset about
Allen’s approach: presenting the letters not grouped together as literary works, but
organized chronologically, with extensive notes documenting the people and events
that were their historical context. His introduction and the last essay, by Mark
Vessey, function as bookends to the collection. Vessey, whose essay is the entirety
of the final section (“Erasmus and Literary Tradition”), examines the work of G.
E. B. Saintsbury, a literary scholar of a generation prior to Allen’s. Although
modern scholars tend to be casual in their treatment of disciplinary boundaries,
Saintsbury is rigorous in what he regards as true literature. This is the setting
against which we can contrast Allen’s historical Erasmus.
The essays within these bookends range from discussions of Erasmus’s epistolary relationships with individuals such as Juan Luis Vives (Charles Fantazzi) and
Wolfgang Capito (Erika Rummel), to more general discussions of Erasmus as an
editor and translator, and as a citizen in the Republic of Letters, in company with
his contemporaries and expanding on the legacy of his predecessors. Throughout
the volume, a reader is invited to consider the ways in which Erasmus as scholar,
religious reformer, and man of letters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is
brought into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Allen, who himself
becomes an object of study to those building on his work in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. In the first section, James McConica’s essay, “The Englishing of P. S. Allen,” describes the relationship between the Allen edition and the
“Collected Works of Erasmus” translation, prompting an appreciation for what has
been involved in both utilizing and building upon Allen’s scholarship. The two
other essays in that section (by Michel Magnien and Christine Bénévent) offer
examples of amendments to Allen. Magnien has recovered a previously unknown
preface to a significant letter to Erasmus from the French humanist Germaine de
Brie, whereas Bénévent presents revisions to Allen’s chronology as well as newly
discovered letters to include.
In the fourth section, “Erasmus and His Spiritual Legacy,” Jane Phillips illustrates St. Jerome’s influence on Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Luke, whereas Gregory
Dodd shows the continued importance of Erasmus’s call for concord in the work
of seventeenth-century English Calvinists Joseph Hall and Thomas Fuller. In all
of the essays, readers can appreciate Erasmus in conversation with distant and
more recent predecessors, contemporaries, and descendants, as a source of illumi-

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nation into his own context as well as an invitation to stimulating scholarship in
our own time.
St. Olaf College

LAUREL CARRINGTON

Réforme catholique, religion des prêtres et “foi des simples”. Études d’anthropologie
religieuse (XVI e–XVIII e siècles). By Dominique Julia. [Cahiers d’Humanisme et
Renaissance, Vol. 118; Sous-collection Ad Deum nº 2.] (Geneva: Librairie
Droz. 2014. Pp. 525. €75,00/$98.40 paperback. ISBN 978-2-600-01753-4.)
Now that the quarante glorieuses of postwar French historiography are themselves becoming an object of increasing historical curiosity, several scholars who are
little known to a wider public have been gaining the recognition they deserve. The
golden age of the French historical sociology of religion, as it was called, was
inspired primarily by the distinguished medievalist Gabriel Le Bras; the subsequent
shift toward religious anthropology was the work of an early modernist who was
the radical opposite of Le Bras, Alphonse Dupront. Dominique Julia managed the
feat of being a disciple of both men! It was Dupront, who published scarcely anything during his lifetime, that founded an influential research institute, the Centre
d’Anthropologie Religieuse Européenne (CARE), of which Julia, an indefatigable
researcher and participant in collective projects, has been a pillar over the years.
The essays in this collection cover only part of his oeuvre, as Julia has been active
in several other major fields of research without ever abandoning his earlier terres
d’élection. These include the history of schooling, literacy, reading habits, universities, colleges, teaching orders, pedagogical credos, childhood, pilgrimages, miracles, and historiography. Nor is this all: from the outset, his publications have been
accompanied by the hard-graft of inventorying and editing extant sources. Hardly
any of this enormously varied output, which runs to approximately 200 items, has
been in book form, apart two early forays—one with Michel de Certeau and
Jacques Revel on language politics during the French Revolution, another with
Roger Chartier on education in early-modern France.
This reviewer has long considered Julia a master of the extended and thoroughly researched monographic article, which has become so rare in any language
today. Indeed, the volume under review contains two such publications—“La
Réforme post-tridentine en France” (pp. 137–231) and “Un miracle à Paris en
1725” (pp. 343–410)—both of which have hitherto been available only in Italian
publications that can be difficult to find. The first of them dates from 1973 and
remains the most comprehensive and lucid synthesis of the research done by Le
Bras’s disciples on pastoral visitations as a source for the history of popular religious
practices. It is supported here by two further essays on the Tridentine reform’s
campaign to separate popular “profane” culture from authorized religion and on the
culture of the French clergy in Champagne, one of whom, the famous Jean Meslier,
was a secret atheist. A major debate of the 1970s concerned the subject of deChristianization before 1789. Julia’s long essay on that question deals with the evolution of the eighteenth-century Diocese of Auxerre, where the religious culture

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imposed by a Jansenist bishop and clergy led to bitter divisions by the 1760s, prefiguring similar changes elsewhere in France. A third essay examines the political
questions—an unusual subject for Julia—which produced an ever-widening gap
between church and monarchy under Louis XV. By contrast, the essay on the 1725
miracle in Paris, which dates from 2007 and arose from more recent research
inspired by Dupront on pilgrimages and miracles at the CARE, is unfortunately
the most isolated of the collection and would have benefited from being flanked by
one or more essays from Julia’s pen on this subject.
Finally, as Julia is also a learned and astute guide to historians’ methodology,
with an impressively wide range of interdisciplinary reference, it is no surprise that
the volume opens with three essays on historiography, but with a characteristic
focus on sources and their relative value. One of the essays reprinted here was first
published in the celebrated 1970s collection Faire de l’Histoire. In 1995, Julia
coedited Passés recomposés, to which he contributed (with Jean Boutier) a typically
comprehensive essay—“à quoi pensent les historiens?”. That essay has proved the
inspiration for the title and contents of a recent volume by several historians of the
younger generation. Indeed, the present volume would be an invaluable introduction to anyone seeking to understand the thinking and methods of a brilliant generation of historians.
University of Manchester

JOSEPH BERGIN

Repertorium poenitentiariae Germanicum: Verzeichnis der in den Supplikenregistern der
Pönitentiarie Kirchen, und Orte des Deutschen Reiches. Edited by Ludwig
Schmugge. Vol. 9 in 2 parts. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 2014. Pp.
XXXII, 453, VII, 252. €129,95. ISBN 978-3-11-037584-8.)
With this volume the Repertorium poenitentiariae Germanicum fully enters the
sixteenth century. Following the death of Alexander VI (Borgia) on August 18,
1503, the College of Cardinals elected Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, a
nephew of Pope Pius II. He reigned for mere days, from election on September 22
to his death on October 18, 1503. The cardinals next elected Giuliano della
Rovere, a nephew of Sixtus IV and an old foe of Alexander, who took the name
Julius II. His tumultuous pontificate of nearly a decade saw wars, art patronage on
a grand scale, and an effort to depose him made by a council at Pisa convoked by
his enemies in 1511. Alongside these great events, the Apostolic Penitentiary continued granting graces, dispensations, and absolutions to the faithful, serving as the
papacy’s “well of grace.” Entries pertaining to Germany from the registers for these
pontificates are calendared here by Ludwig Schmugge.
The petitions to the Penitentiary are grouped here in certain categories. One
category, De matrimonialibus (Concerning Marriages), involved marital impediments under canon law, frequently absolutions for violating the rules of consanguinity. These were so common as to be registered in a telegraphic style. De diversis
formis (Concerning Different Forms), a catchall category for special favors, and De
declaratoriis (absolution of offenses reserved to the Holy See), are grouped together,

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each entry fairly detailed because of their diverse contexts. Petitions for dispensations De defectu natalium (Concerning Defect of Birth) and De uberiori (permitting
promotion of the illegitimate to higher clerical ranks) also were received frequently
and rarely registered in detail. Petitions De promotis et promovendis (Concerning
Those Promoted or to Be Promoted), aimed at removing impediments to priestly
ordination, reflect a variety of issues. Among them were lack of sufficient age for
ordination, physical defects of the candidates—such as injury to the fingers and
fraudulent claims made in order to be ordained. Petitions De confessionalibus (Concerning Confessions) asked that individuals be allowed to choose confessors other
than their own parish priests; but they are fairly rare for the pontificates of Pius and
Julius. Researchers new to this project will need to consult the lists of dioceses and
table of abbreviations to interpret the entries in the registers of the Penitentiary.
The introductory material includes listings of the volumes of registers
employed, explanations of the categories of petitions, and the names of officials of
the Penitentiary from cardinals to scriptors, as well as those of the procurators
whose names were listed. The separate index volume provides detailed access to the
entries from the registers. Almost anything a researcher seeks can be located by
consulting these indexes to persons, places—including diocese, patron saints, religious orders mentioned, and dates in the registers, especially the detailed listing of
words and phrases in the registers. Fees paid, certain papal decrees, degrees of consanguinity, and a few words in German all have entries. Few resources offer such
insights into the lives of Christians from the highest levels downward in the fifteenth and now the sixteenth centuries.
Rutgers University

THOMAS M. IZBICKI

Priestly Resistance to the Early Reformation in Germany. By Jourden Travis Moger.
[Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World, No. 15.] (Brookfield, VT:
Pickering & Chatto. 2014. Pp. xii, 205. $99.00. ISBN 978-1-848-93454-2.)
In this study Moger offers a new view of the Reformation—“from the bottom
up,” as it were. The result is a view of the history of the Reformation in Frankfurt
am Main less influenced by the traditional thinking of the Evangelical Church. Just
as Martin Luther’s teachings were influenced by his pervading faith in the established order, so most recent histories up to Sigrid Jahns have concentrated on the
role of the state. Moger is less interested in the prominent theologians of the time
(Johannes Dietenberger, Johannes Cochlaeus, and Friedrich Nausea were active in
Frankfurt) and more in what he calls “the losers in history,” here embodied in
Wolfgang Königstein, a simple priest clinging to his faith in troubled times, whose
diary provides the basis for this study.
In the first part of his book (chapters 1 and 2) the author provides a remarkably thorough and precise picture of Königstein’s world, origins, and times. Chapter 1 is dedicated to the political, economic, social, and religious structures in
Frankfurt. Chapter 2 describes the Liebfrauenstift (Foundation of Our Lady),
Königstein’s institutional and religious home.

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The main body of the study (chapters 3 to 5) chronicles the development of
the Reformation in Frankfurt and the reaction of the Catholics to this development. Moger is critical of the depiction of the social movement of 1525, which had
also reached Frankfurt, as a “revolution” (by Peter Blickle and Hans Rosenberg, for
example); he characterizes the results of this movement in Frankfurt as, in general,
a positive development that was successful in three ways; there was no loss of blood
and no punishment.
The summary in chapter 6 views the cultural impact of the Reformation as
viewed through Königstein’s eyes.
Possibly the most surprising facet of this investigation is the author’s view that
the Reformation seems to have brought about no fundamental changes in the political, economic, or social structures of the Reichstadt (imperial city). The old established oligarchies, consisting of the patrician families and the guild masters, retained
their former influence and privileges. The economic structures of the city, based
largely on the two Reichsmessen (imperial fairs), and the general economic conservatism of the oligarchy resulted in a slow transition to the Reformation. The city
retained its privileged place at the side of the emperor and even became the official
city for coronations after 1561. Change came about chiefly in the sociocultural structures of the city: the founding of the Allgemeine Almosenkasten (common alms chest);
abolishing many church holidays, fasting, and many processions; new forms of the
“Rites of Passage”; and instituting changes in the role of women (such as emphasizing their status as wives and mothers). The Reformation replaced old rituals with
new ones, including the completely new tradition of congregational singing. The
most obvious result of the New Teachings was that from 1533 to 1548 the Catholic
service and all other instances of public Catholic life in Frankfurt were forbidden.
Then, dating from the Interim of Augsburg (1548), the Catholic Mass was again
allowed, and Catholicism was able to establish itself in the city as a minority religion.
We should probably not expect fundamentally new information here about
the Reformation in Frankfurt, a subject that has already been so thoroughly investigated. The sources have been known for some time now. In particular, the main
source used by Moger, Königstein’s diary, appeared in printed form in 1888. The
author has, however, succeeded in extracting new information from this document.
In particular, his skillful translation from the early-modern German into English
highlights many unfamiliar details of Königstein’s narrative. The author also makes
use of several sources that have not received the attention they deserve. A source
appendix is not provided, but extensive citations from these sources are offered in
the footnotes. The author is an Evangelical pastor, yet is clearly interested in
understanding the Catholic position and does not treat it as something antiquated
and outdated. In this, he is possibly more objective than Jahns, the leading historian
of the Reformation in Frankfurt, who tends to treat the Catholic position much
more critically in her exhaustive study.
Whereas Jahns tends to concentrate on the many intertwined strands of the
city’s macro- and micropolitics, Moger directs his gaze at the everyday life of the

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city and is less interested in the theology of the learned and humanistically inclined
than in the religion and belief of the common man. Through this approach the
author succeeds in extracting new information along a well-trodden path. His main
thesis is that in imperial cities such as Frankfurt the Reformation seems to have had
more impact on the culture and personal lives of the citizens than on the political
institutions. The abolishment of the “Old Teachings” in Frankfurt took place step
by step, without appreciable resistance. After Dietenberger, Cochlaeus, and Nausea
had fled Frankfurt and the Barfüsser community had accepted the “New Teachings” of Luther, there remained only a handful of citizens who clung to their older
beliefs and were thus without a voice—or much protection—in the life of the city.
Such a citizen was Königstein. As he was neither a humanist nor a controversial
theologian, he would seem to have been overlooked by historians. The Reformation had an impact on his belief in a personal way (“it hurts so much in my heart,”
he stated). His diary gives the “losers in history” at long last a voice of their own.
Institut fur Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt

ROMAN FISCHER

Les registres des consistoires des Églises Réformées de France—XVI e–XVII e siècles: Un
inventaire. By Raymond A. Mentzer. [Archives des Églises Réformées de
France, No. IV; Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, No. DXXVI.]
(Geneva: Librairie Droz. 2014. Pp. 170. $71.82. ISBN 978-2-600-01786-2.)
Over the past few decades, historians have increasingly come to realize that
the registers of consistories, institutions created to promote morality and discipline
among Reformed Protestants, are extremely rich sources that shed precious light on
the piety, mores, and everyday life of common folk, both men and women, who for
too long have been largely left out of the historical narrative of the Reformation.
Raymond Mentzer, the dean of historians of French consistories, has provided a
most valuable tool for scholars. He has painstakingly scoured archives, libraries, and
private collections to provide this superb inventory of all known surviving registers
of consistories from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Part 1 of this work consists of a lengthy and quite useful introduction, in
which Mentzer discusses the origin, structure, and responsibilities of consistories.
The prototype for these institutions was the consistory of Geneva, created by John
Calvin and entrusted with enforcing Reformed morality. Calvinists placed great
emphasis on discipline, and certain Reformed leaders went beyond Calvin and
insisted that discipline was one of three marks of the true church (the other two
being the right preaching of the gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments). Starting in the 1550s, consistories were established wherever Protestant
communities developed in France. Presided over by a pastor, the consistories ordinarily met once a week and consisted of the pastors, elders, and deacons. Among
the consistories’ most important responsibilities was overseeing the worship service,
with special attention paid to the celebration of communion or, as Calvinists preferred to call it, the Holy Supper, which was celebrated four times a year. Consistories determined who was worthy of receiving the Supper and excluded those who

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were poorly instructed in matters of the faith or had not repented of serious sins
they had committed. Church finances and poor relief were also under the purview
of consistories, which also oversaw lessons for instruction in the catechism for both
children and adults.
Extant consistorial records represent a small fraction of the records that
existed prior to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; Louis XIV’s campaign to
eliminate all traces of the Reformed faith was the greatest obstacle to their survival.
Nothing is extant, for example, from La Rochelle, the most famous Protestant city
in seventeenth-century France. Mentzer’s exhaustive efforts uncovered 309 registers originating from 156 different churches. More than a third of these are found
in Paris, mostly in the Archives Nationales or the Bibliothèque du Protestantisme
Français; 179 are found in municipal or provincial (départementales) archives,
whereas a few are now housed outside of France, in places such as Geneva and even
Charleston, South Carolina. The best preserved registers are those of the consistory
of Nîmes, which, apart from a lacuna covering 1563–78, are extant for the period
1561–1685. Mentzer notes that the registers of a few consistories remain in private
hands and are, unfortunately, inaccessible to researchers. He adds that with very
few exceptions, most notably of Nîmes, the extant consistorial registers are generally too fragmentary to lend themselves to extensive quantitative analysis.
Mentzer offers a good brief discussion of the historiography of consistories.
Some historians, including those who embrace the confessionalization paradigm,
stress the consistories’ role in imposing social discipline. Others view the consistory
as more a form of mandatory counseling service than a tribunal; such scholars find
that consistories above all promoted harmony in the Reformed community and that
there was a certain negotiation between authorities and the rank and file in defining
appropriate behavior.
Arranged alphabetically by town, the inventory is quite detailed, indicating
the location of all registers, the number of folios, and the dates they cover. This
work is indispensable for anyone interested in consistories, especially for those
interested in conducting research on them.
University of Mississippi

JEFFREY R. WATT

Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century
Italy. By Sarah Rolfe Prodan. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2014.
Pp xvi, 251. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-107-04376-3.)
It is fair to acknowledge that Michelangelo’s art, life, and tormented soul have
produced a multitude of readings—biographical, historical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, religious, and others less prominent. Few studies, however, have tried to look
at Michelangelo “the poet” to obtain a deeper understanding of his art and spirituality. Sarah Rolfe Prodan’s fine book on Michelangelo’s Christian mysticism combines a literary, historical, and aesthetic approach to highlight the Augustinian
matrix at the heart of the protagonist’s religious life. In eight highly erudite chap-

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ters interrelated in two micro-studies (Part I: Michelangelo and Renaissance
Augustinianism; Part II: Michelangelo and Viterban Spirituality), the uniqueness
of Augustinian mystical theology, as well as the pneumatological aspect of piety
within the Viterbo circle, are considered authoritatively in order to enhance our
understanding of Michelangelo’s spiritual writings.
Part I offers an enthralling reading of key imagery in St. Augustine’s soteriology (“the sea,” “the mountain,” “the fire with the sword”), which can also be discerned in Michelangelo’s rime. The author discusses how these allegorical images
have been absorbed by Michelangelo not just from the Confessions and other
selected works by Augustine but also from Dante’s Commedia and Cristoforo
Landino’s Comento. Although this reading is not new to Michelangelo scholars,
Prodan’s intellectually rich discourse places emphasis on those poems which best
bring to light the similarity of spiritual identity with the journey of Dante’s pilgrim
and Augustine’s description of the spiritual consequences of concupiscence in terms
of the ascent of spiritual gravitation. Chapter 4 in particular (“The Fire with Sword:
Grace and Divine Presence”) provides a stimulating analysis of how the allegorical
interpretation of the flaming sword in the Bible, in Augustine, in the Commedia
(Purg. VIII, 25–27) and in Landino’s Comento (specifically in relation to his interpretation of Purgatorio VIII) have contributed to the illumination of the allegorical
significance of images of fire in some of Michelangelo’s poems.
Part II explores Michelangelo’s poetry and aesthetics in the context of the
spirituality of the reform-minded intellectuals who animated the Ecclesia Viterbiensis in the mid-1540s. In this section Prodan has largely left aside the matter of
Michelangelo’s contribution to poetic or artistic innovation in the context of the
so-called Italian Reformation, acknowledging, however, that it has already been
well represented in recent scholarship (Alexander Nagel, Antonio Forcellino, Abigail Brundin, and Ambra Moroncini are among the scholars to which the author
refers). Her investigation, therefore, is mainly focused on examining the influence
of the Italian lauda tradition—specifically the Quattrocento Florentine lauda—and
the contemplation of religious images in relation to Michelangelo’s poetry. Her
scholarly discourse is once again elegantly conducted, helping the reader to understand the connection forged among lauda singing, preaching, devotional images,
and personal piety. She concludes that the “poetry of reform-minded Catholics in
Italy came to echo the poetry of mystical writers, especially those who composed
lauds” (p. 155). Hence, Michelangelo’s Christian mysticism is read with a prise de
position that favors his Catholic orthodoxy.
Reading is facilitated by English translations of all quoted poems, and copious
notes are provided with generous bibliographical references. Textual anomalies
such as “devozione erotica” instead of “erotica” in relation to Forcellino’s study (p.
159n7; p. 206n2; p. 232) and some reservations about Matteo Residori’s article—
“E a me consegnaro il tempo bruno: Michelangelo e la Notte”—referenced in the context of the Italian Reformation (p. 159n7), stand in contrast to the overarching tone
of Prodan’s book, which is without doubt a commendable study on Michelangelo’s

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complex spirituality. It won the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne
Scaglione 2013 Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.
University of Sussex

AMBRA MORONCINI

Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England. By Brooke Conti. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. x, 225. $55.00. ISBN 978-08122-4575-2.)
What historians usually mean by the “confessional age” of the late Reformation has long seemed tangential, even antithetical, to the study of English literary
imagination in the Age of Shakespeare and Milton: the dissemination of the continental confessions and Thirty-Nine Articles; the attempts at “harmonizing” the
creeds of the Reformed, Lutheran and English churches; and the sundry guides to
professing the faith, printed in England from 1550 onward. In Confessions of Faith
in Early Modern England, Brooke Conti adopts a new, although equally tangential,
approach to this subject. Her book forgoes the ambitious corpus implied by its title
in favor of a close reading of seventeenth-century literary and spiritual autobiographies from James I and John Donne to John Milton, Thomas Browne, and John
Bunyan, with a brief afterword on James II.
Conti’s six author-centered chapters explore “confessions of faith” as public
statements of individual belief that constitute a biographical yet fundamentally
“disnarrative” genre in Stuart England, forensic attempts “to explain or clarify
[authors’] beliefs that wind up doing very little of either” (pp. 22, 51). This flexible
definition allows Conti to trace forms of confessing and professing across such
diverse canonical texts as James I’s Basilikon Doron and Apology for the Oath of Allegiance, Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr and Devotions, and Milton’s Defenses and
antiprelatical tracts of the 1640s, as well as Browne’s Religio Medici and Bunyan’s
Grace Abounding. It also finds rhetorical and textual nuance in controversial prose
frequently demoted to historical anecdote. Chapters 1 and 2 read the polemical
writings of James I and Donne against the rhetorical ambiguities of the Oath of
Allegiance, showing how both writers distanced themselves biographically from
their Catholic ancestry through anxious professions of English Protestantism that
resist denominational or narrative closure. “Anxiety” and “ambiguity” are indeed
keywords of the study, as chapters 3 to 4 move from Jacobean conversion to the
loosely termed “Personal Credos” of Civil War-era prose. Although Conti alludes
to the shifting irenic, conformist, and Laudian policies bridging this period, her
method of close reading subordinates ecclesiological questions to personal or psychological ones. Donne’s confessions thus stem from filial regret, whereas Milton’s
stem, not from a theory of prelacy or Church, but rather stylistic patterns of selfscrutiny in the political tracts, where the “half-formed expression of uncertainty is
quickly followed by an assertion of confidence” (p. 82).
This theme of uncertainty in Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England has
the unfortunate effect of leaving uncertain what, precisely, the creedal nature is of

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the “confessions” uniting its six chapters. Despite references to the work of Jaroslav
Pelikan and Ian Green, the bibliography does not list any of the doctrinal confessions—officially sanctioned or otherwise—printed in England between 1550 and
1650, nor important recent studies of English and continental confessionalism, like
those of Tom Betteridge or Robert Stillman. At the same time, Conti’s textual
analysis illuminates that strange rhetorical category early-modern English believers
preferred to call, if not their confession, their “religion.” Chapter 4 on Browne
anchors the book in this respect, providing a painstaking collation of the 1635,
1638, and 1643 manuscript and print versions of the Religio Medici that shows how
Browne’s reluctant “divorce” of reason and confession signals a move, even in heterodox prose, from the recitation of personal to “communal beliefs” (p. 127).
Whether or not this augurs an “end to the confession of faith”—as the fifth chapter
on Bunyan and a six-page coda on James II conclude—the book charts a growing
gap between personal and polemical autobiography in seventeenth-century England. It is a welcome perspective, highlighting the need for further sustained study
of the links among literature, creeds, and confessions in the period.
Southern Connecticut State University

JOEL M. DODSON

Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Natalie Mears
and Alec Ryrie. [St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xii, 250. $124.95. ISBN 978-1-40942604-2.)
It is a commonplace that in early-modern Britain religion fundamentally
shaped daily life, yet we still know little about what went on in the parish church,
the arena where British people received their religious education and where the
principles of the Protestant faith were hard-wired into the minds of the laity. This
welcome collection of essays, whilst acknowledging the difficulty of trying to
recover the ways in which religion knitted with people’s lives, seeks to fill in some
of the blanks by exploring the “lived experience” of worship in Britain.
The collection is not intended to share any unifying vision, but there are some
recurring aspects. As may be expected, a particular concern for the contributors is
the liturgy. For example, Hannah Cleugh does an admirable job of elucidating the
mismatch between official doctrinal positions concerning soteriology and the theology conveyed in the Book of Common Prayer. Judith Maltby investigates set,
conceived, and extempore prayers in England, suggesting that the minimalist
liturgy of the Directory during the Interregnum probably led to a downturn in
quality of worship, though it was also an unprecedented opportunity for liturgical
experimentation.
Close attention is paid to continuities, particularly with the Catholic past. On
occasions, bitter theological controversies did not always translate into radically
divergent lay experiences. Alec Ryrie shows that the attempt to reform and retain
the well-established practice of fasting resulted in something “remarkably similar to
what had gone before,” an experience shared by Puritans, conformists, and Laudi-

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ans alike (p. 108). Reversing the model, Jonathan Willis demonstrates that
Catholics and Protestants of all shades enjoyed a shared inheritance of musical discourse that acknowledged both the dangerous and seductive power of music but
extolled its ability to edify and ennoble the soul. Here theological consensus
resulted in divergent practice.
We also encounter migrations across the blurred divides of the sacred and secular, and public and private. This is the case in two fascinating chapters that perhaps bring us closest to lay experience. Christopher Marsh’s exploration of bell
ringing demonstrates the growing popularity of the activity for “recreation,” particularly amongst groups of male youths. Marsh suggests that ringing in a sacred setting might be seen as a new outlet for socio-religious instincts that had previously
been channelled into guilds and church ales. John Craig charts the ways in which
the mechanics of prayer changed over time, noting the meanings that were associated with ritual gestures. In the practice of capping and kneeling the secular and
sacred were one, for the Elizabethan requirement that men kept their heads covered during the service allowed them to doff their hat both to their social superiors
and to do courtesy when the name of Jesus was spoken.
The extent to which lived experience of the parish was constantly evolving is
particularly striking, a reminder that despite the prescriptive pattern of worship set
out in the Book of Common Prayer, there was still plenty of room for flexibility
and irregularity. There were decisions to be made about gesture and etiquette,
timely ringing of bells, the place of music, and the ornamentation and orientation
of church furniture. But it was not just local clergymen, churchwardens, and parishioners who complicated the meaning of “conformity”; the local bishop or the
incumbent monarch might also intervene to introduce the relative novelty of special
forms of prayer or even alternative liturgies, as Natalie Mears shows in her chapter
on nationwide worship. We are left with the impression of an interaction or continuing conversation, where change took place both in response to “official” dictates
but also according to lay preferences and popular fashions, resulting in an ongoing
process of adjustments, amendments, and experiments in worship.
This is a varied and engaging collection that does much to improve our understanding of what happened in the early-modern parish church, and the themes
delineated here suggest many fruitful avenues for future research into a topic of
fundamental importance.
University of Exeter

LAURA SANGHA

Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of
Thomas More. By Thomas Betteridge. [ReFormations Medieval and Early
Modern.] (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 256.
$38.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-02239-6.)
To recover the “traditions within which [St. Thomas] More wrote” (p. 7),
Writing Faith slips past its author’s interests in Tudor literature to snatch up four-

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teenth- and fifteenth-century texts. The concerns addressed by More in works
ranging from his early epigrams to the polemical and later devotional treatises, Betteridge says, are reflected in works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, William
Langland, Reginald Pecock, and others. When Betteridge is at his best, his parallels are striking, and readers will be glad to have his suggestive run at More’s telling
tales and striking arguments against the early English evangelicals. Yet Writing
Faith may often leave readers clamoring for more of the late-medieval context, as
when Betteridge sifts the effects of the Peasants’ Revolt on the political opinions of
Langland and Chaucer.
Betteridge’s careful handling of More’s polemical works will be especially
appreciated. Some of his conclusions lean on James Simpson’s work where Brendan
Bradshaw’s appraisals should have given pause; yet this is a quibble. Writing Faith
does an impressive, insightful job with the pragmatism of More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529) and Confutation (1532–33). Betteridge’s analysis of the latter
accommodates several memorable observations and assessments: “in its sheer size
and messiness,” Betteridge suggests, More’s Confutation “can be seen as an image
of [his] church as a place for religious thought” (p. 146). By then, Writing Faith has
already set up More’s reliance on “the community of the church” in which “religious
meaning” is—and ought to be—“constrained” yet also is a conversation that is not
always swift to discern “the truth of Christ’s teaching” (pp. 141–42). On this front,
early evangelicals were guilty first of impatience, then of error.
By staking defensible yet contestable claims, Betteridge’s approach to More’s
Utopia invites informed readers to replay familiar interpretive controversies. Were
the first and second books of that enigmatic text circulated “to unsettle the given”
(p. 87), as Betteridge alleges, or to give it (the given) an inevitability that would discourage radical initiatives? Writing Faith imagines that More improvised the second
book as a root-to-branch attack on private property—and as a serious proposal for
“an equalitarian (sic) community produced in and through the act of storytelling” (p.
87). The prefatory material in the various Latin editions would seem to support that
assessment, although Writing Faith overlooks the parerga, perhaps because the exaggerated tributes attached by some prominent others in Desiderius Erasmus’s circle
could also be cited to prove Utopia’s assault on private property was a feint or ruse—
to prove that the position assigned to More’s persona in the first book was a serious
rejoinder to Hythloday’s “unsettling” prejudices about public service and social
organization. More might well have been committed to “unsettl[ing] the given,”
but, arguably, his make-believe could have been composed to exhibit what would be
lost in the pursuit of “equalitarian” alternatives to the given.
Betteridge needlessly apologizes for having deprived More of “a place in the
emerging conflicts and debates of the Reformation” (p. 208). Writing Faith contributes strikingly at just that point. It substantiates Betteridge’s opinion that
More ought to be put alongside Shakespeare and Montaigne “who shared [his]
skepticism toward totalizing confessional discourses” and who devoted himself to
“the maintenance of a space for engaged Christian thought” (p. 208). Mainte-

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nance, alas, required clearing some unfortunate colleagues who did not share that
skepticism.
University of Richmond

PETER IVER KAUFMAN

National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation. Vol. I: Special Prayers, Fasts
and Thanksgivings in the British Isles, 1533–1688. Edited by Natalie Mears,
Aladsair Raffe, Stephen Taylor, and Philip Williamson, with Lucy Bates.
[Church of England Record Society, Vol. 20.] (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press,
an imprint of Boydell and Brewer. 2013. Pp. clxx, 766. $170.00. ISBN 9781-84383-868-5.)
This first volume of a three-volume reference work has been compiled by a
group of four early-modern historians (with assistance from another) working in
various universities and institutes in Great Britain. The goal of the work is to provide the official decrees and actual worship texts issued for national use in England,
Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and colonial territories from the establishment of an
independent Church of England until 2012.
The editors have attempted to provide a comprehensive resource for instances
of national worship. Volume I contains all extant examples of special worship from
the announcement of a thanksgiving service to mark the birth of Princess Elizabeth
in 1533 to an order for prayers throughout the country because of the danger of
invasion by William of Orange in 1688.
The introduction is both for this volume and for the whole series. It offers a
detailed description of the organization of the edition, providing for each service
the date and occasion, a commentary on the event and prayer, bibliographical
information, the text of the order, the text of the prayer (if available), other versions
of the prayer, other texts associated with the prayer, additional sources used in the
commentary, and examples of sermons given for the event. For each prayer there
are two main primary sources: the order establishing the prayer and the actual
prayer text.
The introduction then explores the question: what is national worship? This
genre emerges from forms practiced in the medieval Catholic Church in England
and then evolves within the Church of England (and its related bodies in Scotland,
Wales, and Ireland) until the reign of James II. Discussed are the authority of the
orders, the geographical extent of the orders, and the similarities and differences
among them. This is followed by a detailed overview of the forms of the orders and
the kinds of worship ordered by reign and by territory, divided in half by the period
of the Commonwealth. There is a detailed description of the forms of printing used
and the methods of transcription and patterns of distribution.
A detailed list of all the forms of national worship (1533–2012) then follows,
allowing the reader to get an overview of the whole range of events and prayers
types with their geographical extent and the cause for the order.

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A helpful section describing the ordinary forms of worship in the Book of
Common Prayer allows the reader to be able to situate special forms of national
worship within the normal pattern of praying. Whether the special form is a brief
prayer inserted within a regular service or a more elaborate reworking of a prayer
form can be traced with the information in this section. Finally, there is a list of the
official publishers of the forms of national prayers.
The bulk of the volume is taken up by the texts of the orders and of the prayers
(when these latter are available). One example may suffice to give a sense of the
whole: The first national prayer included that still retains the text of the prayer is
from 1544, “Services and processions during the military campaign in France.” The
commentary details Henry VIII’s military plans and situates the prayer within his
overall strategy. The order is a “Royal mandate to archbishop of Canterbury, 8 June
1544.” The “Form of prayer” begins with a lengthy “Exhortation to prayer,” followed by “The letany and svffrages,” and a series of versicles and prayers.
This volume (and the whole set) will be a great resource to historians of various types: social, political, military, economic, printing, liturgy, devotion, and so
on. The amount of material gathered is substantial, the detail of its presentation
and commentary thorough, and the layout conducive to easy access. Thanks for
such painstaking work are owed to the editors, their assistants, and the publisher.
The Catholic University of America

MICHAEL G. WITCZAK

Pierre Viret et la diffusion de la Réforme: Pensée, action, contextes religieux. Edited by
Karine Crousaz and Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci. (Lausanne: Éditions
Antipodes. 2014. Pp. 421. €37,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-88901-054-7.)
Although hardly forgotten, Pierre Viret is among the less appreciated early
leaders of the Reformed movement. Born in the Pays de Vaud around 1511, he
studied at Paris before returning to his native land. After a short-lived, turbulent
stint ministering in and around the Vaud, he joined Guillaume Farel at Geneva in
1534 and two years later moved to Lausanne where he assisted in that city’s reform
and eventually became chief pastor. Viret remained at Lausanne until 1559. Then,
following a bitter quarrel with the municipal magistrates over control of church discipline, he moved briefly to Geneva before going to southern France. He served
churches at Lyon, Nîmes, and Pau during the decisive decade of the 1560s, dying
at Pau in 1571.
The collection of eighteen essays at hand had its origins in a conference held
at Lausanne in 2011 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Viret’s birth. The editors
and contributors, whose ranks include both established and younger scholars, seek
to revise approaches to and appreciation of Viret along three principal axes. To
begin, Viret ought to be valued as a reformer in his own right and not simply as a
popularizer of John Calvin’s understandings. Second, Viret was an international
figure; his interests and activities reached well beyond local Swiss cantons. Finally,
Viret was a prolific author whose entire oeuvre—not merely one or two works—

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warrants close study. The present volume’s re-evaluation of these issues divides
roughly into two parts. The first nine chapters consider Viret’s theological views
and literary output; the remainder examines his reforming endeavors in the Swiss
and French orbits.
Olivier Millet opens the discussion with an illuminating essay on Viret’s surviving sermons and his writings on homiletics. Lee Palmer Wandel follows with a
close analysis of his distinctive conceptualization of the Eucharist. The crucial
issues surrounding Viret’s anti-Nicodemism and his advocacy of resistance to the
tyrant are the subject of Carlos Eire’s chapter. Reaching beyond Christian circles,
Karine Crousaz—one of the volume’s coeditors—elaborates upon Viret’s unique
views on Islam and the Turks. The role of Viret as church historian is the subject
of essays by Olivier Pot, Frédéric Amsler, and Irena Backus. This section concludes
with chapters by George Besse on Viret’s first spiritual writings and by Pierre
Dubuis on his comparison of the nature of animals with human behavioral traits.
The next nine essays begin with Michael Bruening’s perceptive observations
on the new information that has emerged from his recent edition of Viret’s previously unpublished letters. Continuing in this vein, Jean-François Gilmont details
Viret’s relationship with his publishers. A wonderful portrait of Viret as pastor,
preacher, and public disputant emerges from the essays of James J. Blackeley,
Geneviève Gross, and Olivier Laberthe. Claire Mountengou Barats explores Viret’s
views and accomplishments in the realm of social welfare, whereas Christian Moser
offers a close reading of his epistolary exchange with the Zurich reformer Heinrich
Bullinger. Finally, collection coeditor Daniela Salfaroli Camillocci and Philippe
Chareyre propose fresh insights into Viret’s time at Lyon and in Béarn.
Altogether, these contributions on Viret as theologian and controversialist,
preacher and pastoral organizer help better locate him in the age of the Reformation. They correct some mischaracterizations by earlier scholars, establish Viret as
an historical figure eminently worthy of study, and suggest future possibilities for
the advance of our knowledge of this largely unheralded figure.
University of Iowa

RAYMOND A. MENTZER

The Medicean Succession: Monarchy and Sacral Politics in Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s
Florence. By Gregory Murry. [I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History.]
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 347. $49.95. ISBN
978-0-674-72547-8.)
In The Medicean Succession, written with ambition and brio, Gregory Murry
studies Cosimo I de’ Medici (Duke of Florence from 1537 to 1569, then Grand
Duke of Tuscany to his death in 1574) as an example of how one early-modern
ruler used religious themes and a sacred politics rooted in Florentine tradition to
establish assent and legitimacy for a reign that began almost accidentally, when the
city’s patricians plucked the seventeen-year-old Cosimo from obscurity and
selected him to fill the ducal office. The accomplishment of Cosimo in forging one

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of sixteenth-century Europe’s best-run states has long attracted the attention of
historians, although, Murry argues, most of them have focused on questions of
diplomacy, officeholding and bureaucracy, and political economy. The sort of
“sacral politics” that the late Richard Trexler studied in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Florence has been relatively neglected by modern historians of the midand late-sixteenth-century city (although art historians have had a field day with it),
and when religion has been investigated, the emphasis has been on heterodoxy and
resistance (Savonarolism, evangelicals) rather than on mainstream Catholicism and
the ways in which Cosimo and his court interacted with it.
In his first chapter Murry takes up the theme of apotheosis, arguing that the
imagery propagated in Cosimo’s court that referred to him or portrayed him as “a
god” deserves to be treated as a serious aspect of Cosimo’s striving for legitimacy.
The fact that Cosimo succeeded so well was owing, Murry says, to a longstanding
tradition, prominent in fifteenth-century humanist culture, concerning the ability of
exceptional human beings to become “divine.” Whereas John O’Malley and others
have found that in the Renaissance Christ (and, therefore, God) was seen as increasingly human, Murry has man becoming not only “divine,” “like a god,” or “a God
on earth” (citing Pico della Mirandola and others) but now, in the case of Cosimo,
simply “a god.” How seriously this was meant at the time remains an open question,
and possibly Murry takes it too far, but the imagery was certainly there. The second
chapter shows how contemporary debates over divine Providence offered arguments
that could be used to explain Cosimo’s unexpected success as a manifestation of
divine will. Machiavelli and Savonarola are treated in subsequent chapters that challenge the received view—by now a historical topos—of Cosimo as a ruthless prince
who was following Machiavelli with every step. Here Murry shows the extent to
which Cosimo’s court nurtured a bevy of anti-Machiavellians, and he demonstrates
that Cosimo’s legislation on morals was obviously cribbed from Savonarola’s playbook. Chapters on Cosimo as a “patron”—involving some helpful, fresh digging in
the sources concerning church benefices—and as a defender of “the sacred,” underline the extent to which Cosimo relied upon and manipulated traditional modes of
government and social control in the wielding of princely power in formerly republican Florence.
The book’s narrative soft-pedals the brutal means that this Medici duke sometimes employed. Historians on the Left in Italy used to liken Cosimo I to Josef
Stalin, thinking this a compliment to both men. Here instead we find soft power,
gift-giving, and a morals campaign. Murry treats Cosimo as eager to be seen as a
“peacemaker” (p. 128), although the Sienese surely thought of him the way presentday Ukrainians think about Vladimir Putin. But the propagandistic strategies that
Murry persuasively documents were clearly essential to Cosimo’s success. Murry has
done particularly fine work on a series of sixteenth-century treatises and elogia, on
the archival documents concerning church benefices, and (in the manner of Samuel
Cohn) on the pious bequests in testaments. In the notes the only significant study
missed by this writer was Arnaldo d’Addario’s massive Aspetti della controriforma a
Firenze (Rome, 1972). At volume’s end, a “Glossary of Names” offers a series of

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thirty or so brief biographies of the dramatis personae (Paolo Giovio, Bernardo Segni,
Benedetto Varchi, Giorgio Vasari, et al.). Alas, since the subjects of these biographies are not named in the extremely short index, the only way for the reader to
locate what Murry has written about them is to page through the book again.
Thankfully, it remains an enjoyable read.
Seton Hall University

WILLIAM J. CONNELL

Mad Tuscans and Their Families: A History of Mental Disorder in Early Modern Italy.
By Elizabeth W. Mellyn. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2014. Pp. xiii, 290. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4612-4.)
The Italian jurist Filippo Decio (1454–1535) defended a father’s bequest to an
illegitimate son, disadvantaging the legitimate heir, with the argument that a father
equally could deprive his heir by throwing all his belongings into the sea. According
to Elizabeth Mellyn’s fine study of madness in Tuscany, the heir would have had
recourse to the courts to have such a profligate father declared mentally incompetent. Ironically, Mellyn points to a similar case faced by Decio that did not allude
to waterlogged belongings.
Mellyn mined Florentine judicial records of the magistrates over guardians
and wards (Pupilli) and criminal courts. The result is a database of 300 cases (most
from 1540–1609). These cases came from families trying to protect themselves
from the folly of insane kin, but also from magistrates concerned with public order
and from persons seeking to demonstrate their sanity. Mellyn exploits her material
skillfully to derive a sense of what Florentines saw as insane behavior, the rich
vocabulary they employed, and the largely ad-hoc arrangements that applied to
those deemed mentally incapacitated.
Chief among mad behaviors was undue prodigality. Increasingly, what she
terms patrimonial rationality was the standard of behavior. Or, as Mellyn succinctly
puts it, “in the fourteenth century, the spendthrift was a sinful man. By the sixteenth century, he was a patrimonial saboteur” (p. 10). Given the far greater access
to and control of resources by men, it is not surprising then that men figured in
more than 80 percent of civil and criminal cases of insanity.
The first chapter deals with civil cases and guardianship. The second chapter
hinges on criminal records and the concerns of families to safeguard their honor
from the socially disruptive acts of individuals, often becoming the effective jailers
of their mentally incompetent members. The centralization of criminal justice with
the Medici dukes led to increased confinement in the city’s jail or ducal galleys.
Chapter 3 explores the patrimonial context. Ability to manage a patrimony was
taken as a fundamental capacity by legal professionals. Mentally handicapped were
incapable of such behavior, but also of concern were mere spendthrifts (prodighi)
who just would not act correctly. It took well into the sixteenth century before the
pupilli conflated mental incapacity and prodigality, although Florence’s statutes had
long allowed families to seek judicial help against misbehaving children.

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Chapter 4 takes a more conventional turn to the conceptual treatment of madness, to trace its increasing medicalization, as revealed in the court records. Here
one encounters humoral theory of disease, diet, hygiene, and more, mainly through
the lens of Faustina Galeotti’s case in 1598 concerning her son’s “melancholy.” The
entry of medical constructs into court is the subject of the fifth chapter. Here
Mellyn reveals a fine understanding of law and legal processes. She finds that medical explanations for mental incapacity were accepted and discussed in Florentine
courts two generations before Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659) issued his treatise on
medico-legal questions. The case of Maria de’ Placidi, whom the courts had a hard
time seeing as mad, despite her gift of all she had to an unrelated male, is illustrative of protracted squabbling over transfers of property. In the end Mellyn cannot
decide if de’ Placidi was mad or ruthlessly avoiding claims on her property.
Santa Dorotea dei Pazzerelli was founded in 1643 solely for the care of mentally ill. Its establishment furnishes Mellyn with a fitting end point. An institution
other than family was now on hand to deal with madness. Mellyn has given us a
highly readable account of the centuries before that. Some may wish that she had
grappled at length with Michel Foucault and other metahistorical visions of madness and rationality, but Mellyn’s interest is resolutely historical. Her feel for often
difficult legal sources is informed and refined. Mad Tuscans is a fine book and
deserves a wide readership.
Clemson University

THOMAS KUEHN

“And Touching our Society”: Fashioning Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England. By
Thomas M. McCoog. [Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval
and Early Modern Periods, Vol. 3.] (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. 2013. Pp. xiv, 476. $95.00. ISBN 978-0-88844-183-6.)
Over the last twenty years, the study of post–Reformation English Catholicism has experienced a lively renaissance. Once a cottage industry monopolized by
scholars writing from within the Catholic fold, it has now migrated from the margins to the mainstream and become one of the busiest and most vibrant fields of
early-modern inquiry. Prefaced by a brief historiographical survey, this volume of
collected essays by Thomas McCoog is a timely and substantial contribution to
this enterprise. It brings together hitherto unpublished essays with revised versions of others that have appeared in print previously (although several of them are
here translated into English for the first time). Complementing and extending
McCoog’s two important books on the history of the Society of Jesus in the
British Isles between 1541 and 1597, the current collection underlines the vital
role played by the Jesuits in the struggle to reclaim the countries that composed
them from Protestantism and to reconvert their inhabitants to the Catholic faith.
It explores the challenges and opportunities the Jesuits faced in extending their
activities into a region where heresy had taken firm hold, and it charts the accommodations and adaptations necessitated by living in an environment in which persecution was a fact of life. Whereas much recent work on Catholicism has sought

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to recover the experience of the laity, McCoog’s essays rightly remind us of the
continued importance of understanding developments from the perspective of the
clergy themselves.
In the first two essays in this collection, McCoog emphasizes the pronounced
reluctance of Superior General Everard Mercurian to sanction a Jesuit mission to
England for fear that it would compromise the Society’s characteristic “way of proceeding.” He suggests that Mercurian changed his mind in the context of anticipations that the project to secure a match between Elizabeth I and the French Duke
of Anjou would transform Catholicism’s political prospects. Nevertheless, Mercurian’s predictions about the complications and discords that would ensue came true:
had he lived beyond 1581, McCoog concludes, the mission to Scotland would
probably have been cancelled (p. 54). Likewise we learn that the celebrated martyr
Edmund Campion initially resisted the call to leave Bohemia (whither he had been
sent to counteract the “pestilential heresies” sown by the “first instrument of the
devil” in that kingdom, John Wyclif, p. 90) and to join Robert Persons in traveling
to England. It was “out of obedience, not preference [that] he crossed the Channel”
(p. 99). The volume also includes transcriptions and translations of a valuable cache
of letters written by Robert Southwell to Superior General Claudio Aquaviva
between 1585 and 1590 that illuminate his reactions to the persecution of
Catholics by the Elizabethan regime, his anxiety about mysterious prodigies, and
his hatred of that “compendium of iniquity” and “monster of crimes,” Robert
Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (p. 183).
McCoog’s research also reveals some significant tensions beneath the surface
of the early Society. He investigates the case of James Bosgrave, whose arrival in
England from Poland provoked scandal among his colleagues when he went to a
Protestant service (ostensibly to improve his understanding of English) and denied
the papal deposing power, showing how later writers subtly erased the memory of
his mistakes and recast him as one of the founding fathers of the English mission.
McCoog also probes the frictions between English and Spanish Jesuits in Seville
between 1592 and 1605, shows how the different strategies adopted by Robert Persons and William Crichton in relation to the problem of the succession fostered
disharmony within the Society’s ranks, and assesses how the Jesuits reconciled the
biblical mandate to “render unto Caesar” with their religious and political objectives. In chapter 12 he argues persuasively that the development of vernacular martyrologies was in large part a by-product of the internecine disputes unleashed by
the Appellant Controversy, although he may underplay the rapid spread of martyr
cults among the laity through manuscript tracts and oral tradition. Another essay
engages with Christopher Haigh’s contested claim that the strategic decisions
made by the Jesuits contributed to the failure of the mission, stressing instead the
“prudence” and “discreet charity” (p. 226) that led them to conduct their operations
from the safety of a fixed abode with the Catholic nobility and gentry. The same
theme emerges from McCoog’s intriguing investigation of how members of the
Society “dressed for success,” setting aside their soutanes and birettas in favor of
fashionable apparel that would deflect suspicion about their real identity. This

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“necessary dissimulation in things of themselves indifferent” (p. 240) was another
reflection of the flexibility that was a hallmark of the order everywhere it went.
Deepened and enriched by McCoog’s unparalleled knowledge of the Jesuit
archives in Rome and the United Kingdom (of which he himself served for many
years as the custodian), the essays in this volume shed significant light on some
neglected facets of the early history of the British Province of the Society. They
highlight the disproportionate impact made by the handful of Jesuits who arrived
in Elizabethan England and present us with a more complicated picture of their
endeavors than the histories and hagiographies they have bequeathed to us suggest.
University of Cambridge

ALEXANDRA WALSHAM

Peace and Authority during the French Religious Wars, c. 1560–1600. By Penny
Roberts. (New York: Palgrave. 2013. Pp xiv, 264. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-13732674-4.)
This book’s author believes in the adage “it is easier to make war than to make
peace,” demonstrating its truth in this thorough study of the process of peacemaking during the French Wars of Religion. From the beginning of organized violence in 1562, the French monarchy sought to find a modus vivendi between
Catholics and Huguenots that would end the fighting and achieve a permanent
peace. After each period of civil war, the crown issued an edict of pacification that
was expected to end the violence and reintegrate the two religious groups in a
peaceful realm under royal authority. It took eight periods of civil war and eight
edicts of pacification over thirty-six years before a permanent peace was achieved.
Roberts concentrates on the monarchy’s efforts to make the edicts of pacification work in the face of the extensive resistance they encountered. The edicts were
intended to provide for limited toleration for the Huguenots until they could be persuaded to reunite to the Catholic Church; the kings were always firm believers in the
dictum “One Faith, One Law, One King,” and that one faith was Catholicism. That
assumption underlay one flaw in royal policy: since the Huguenots also expected that
their one true faith would be the sole one allowed in the realm, they were not prepared to make the concessions that the monarchy wanted from them to make the
edicts effective. Certainly most Catholics were not willing to accept even the limited
toleration provided in the edicts. Thus the pattern was established for more than
three decades: a relatively brief period of violence ended by an edict of pacification,
followed by a brief period of peace or near-peace, then another outbreak of war.
The author devotes close attention to the royal practice of sending out commissioners to see to enforcement of the edicts. Based on extensive archival research, it is
the most original aspect of the book. Chosen largely from royal officials with strong
legal backgrounds who had already proven their loyalty to the monarch, they were
given an almost impossible task. They were too few to cover the realm effectively and
confronted entrenched local authorities—whether nobles or urban elites, Catholics or
Huguenots—who refused to accept any diminution of their prerogatives.

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An especially trying issue was finding sites for Protestant worship and cemeteries. The Huguenots were adamant that a peace settlement providing no local sites for
worship and places to bury their beloved dead was not worthy of being obeyed,
whereas Catholics were equally determined to prevent “heretical pollution” from desecrating their sacred space. Roberts demonstrates the extreme difficulties of the commissioners in trying to negotiate between two such mutually exclusive positions, and
until 1598 they largely failed. A second major problem created by the edicts developed out of the clauses that required all injuries suffered during the violence be forgotten. That was especially difficult for the nobles, who often carried on blood feuds
for generations; they were quick to return to arms to take revenge for prior injuries.
Roberts concludes that despite the three decades of failed edicts of pacification, they helped to prepare the way for the final and, for a time, largely successful
Edict of Nantes of 1598. She shows that Henry IV drew extensively on the previous ones for his and also recognized where they had failed and thus how to fashion
a more effective one. She argues also that although the traditional view presents the
monarchy’s policy as largely incoherent and vacillating, it was in fact highly consistent in seeking peace, albeit unsuccessfully until 1598. Ultimately, she proposes, the
monarchy’s peacemaking efforts strengthened the monarchy by creating a royal
presence throughout the realm through the use of the royal commissions, helping
to create the absolutism of the next century.
This is an erudite book, based largely on an impressive range of archival
sources. At times it is so closely argued that it becomes a bit difficult to follow;
nonetheless, it is a major contribution to the study of the French Wars of Religion.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

FREDERIC J. BAUMGARTNER

Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615). By Silvia Mostaccio. Translated by Clare
Copeland. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2014. Pp. xvii, 200.
$124.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-5706-0.)
This book purports to be a sustained examination of the concept and practice
of obedience of Jesuits in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a worthy
and important subject. Unfortunately, it does not do this. Instead, the book republishes in translation with some changes the author’s previously published articles
with a thin connecting narrative. Publishing one’s articles between the covers of a
book is a good idea, because articles often appear in widely scattered places and are
hard to locate, especially when North American libraries do not buy or provide electronic access to very many books and journals published abroad. The problem here
is that the book does not deliver what it promises, a sustained and developed analysis
of Jesuit obedience. Sometimes the material touches on obedience only tangentially.
Chapter 1 deals with Jesuit and non-Jesuit writings about political obedience,
broadly conceived. It analyzes some Jesuit catechisms for soldiers, especially Antonio Possevino’s Il soldato cristiano, which argues for blind obedience to superiors.

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The author cites Jesuit sodalities and catechisms as emphasizing absolute obedience
to ecclesiastical and temporal superiors, with the major exception of Bellarmine’s
catechism. Mostaccio also sees Giovanni Botero’s argument for obedience to a virtuous prince (virtuous because he was Catholic or guided by a priest) as exemplifying a Jesuit concept of obedience. However, Botero wrote these works years after
he was dismissed from the Society in 1580.
The best part of the book is chapter 2 in which the author argues that there
was a simultaneous tension and equilibrium in the Jesuit Constitutions and other
works. The tension was between the obligation of obedience to men, especially
to superiors, and obedience to the Holy Spirit, which is made manifest in the
individual’s feelings. For example, a Jesuit was obligated to make his dissent
known if convinced that a command was damaging to the Society or to another
Jesuit. The author looks closely at the Jesuit concept of representation (making
one’s dissent known).
Chapter 3 consists of an incomplete look at a French Jesuit who denounced
Ignatius Loyola’s famous letters on obedience of 1553, plus Jesuit differences with
Pope Sixtus V (1585–90). Chapter 4 explores how undertaking the Spiritual Exercises led Mary Ward and Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi to venture into new paths of
spirituality and action, a form of disobedience. It is an interesting chapter, but has
little to do with Jesuit obedience. Overall, the author provides some interesting
material and usually provides both the original texts and an English translation.
There is a very full bibliography.
Although there are useful insights, more needs to be done. A thorough investigation of Jesuit obedience during the generalate of Claudio Acquaviva definitely
needs to be written. It would have to discuss the two major obedience issues, not
mentioned here, during his generalate. The first was the unsuccessful attempt by
many Spanish and some Italian Jesuits to curtail drastically the authority of the
general. The second was the successful campaign by Spanish, Portuguese, and
some Italian Jesuits to bar entry into the Society of recruits from converso background and to dismiss from the Society those discovered to be of converso ancestry.
The Jesuits who favored these measures disobeyed both Ignatius, whose views were
the opposite, and major programmatic documents of the Society.
University of Toronto
and Chapel Hill, NC

PAUL F. GRENDLER

The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy, c. 1590–1640. By Thomas F. Mayer.
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. vi, 361. $79.95.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4573-8.)
Thomas Mayer’s penultimate book, issued posthumously, opens with a phrase
identifying a fundamental question in the institutional history of the Roman Inquisition: “Heresy-hunting probably always had a political dimension” (p. 1). This
sentence synthesizes the content of the volume, which treats a half-century of relations among popes, the Holy Office, and civil authorities in Spanish Naples,

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Venice, and Florence, three of the most important Italian states. In time and subject, the book follows closely on his previous one, The Roman Inquisition: A Papal
Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo (Philadelphia, 2013). The Roman
Inquisition: Trying Galileo (Philadelphia, 2015) completes the series. The author
used an impressive number of documents from regional and central archives (particularly the Decreta Sancti Officii from the latter) to show the frequency of disagreement between inquisitorial and state authorities and the extent to which the
state attained its desired aims. It becomes clear that political authorities in general,
not only those of the Venetian Republic, could influence inquisitorial activity (supporting or limiting it according to the necessities of the moment), the importance
of the accused, and the rigidity or pliancy of the judges of the faith.
One might say that there were as many versions of the Roman Inquisition as
there were Italian polities. Before this book, that was a logical assumption, made in
many studies; now it is a documented reality, with all imaginable gradations and
distinctions. Mayer examined many important, well-known cases (Tommaso
Campanella in Naples; Giordano Bruno, Cesare Cremonini, Marcantonio De
Dominis, and the theologians who opposed the Interdict in Venice; Rodrigo and
Mariano Alidosi in Florence), as well as various more modest ones. He stressed
that in this study he had deliberately concentrated on political factors, according
others little attention. Another crucial point that emerges here is that when the
pope failed to achieve satisfactory results through the Holy Office, he employed
diplomatic channels—that is, nuncios, responsible to the Secretariat of State—to
overcome obstacles posed by political authorities. Thus, during the 1630s, the nuncios in the three polities examined here came more or less to dominate Inquisition
tribunals. The author concludes: “the Inquisition, perhaps inevitably, came to serve
the popes as a legal and political institution” (p. 224).
The merit of this book is that, for the first time, it examines the decisions of
the Congregation of the Holy Office regarding cases in three tribunals over a relatively long period of time. Whether Mayer used all the congregation’s decisions on
matters in those three tribunals is uncertain. Among trial documents preserved on
the local level, one finds many pertaining to suspects and accused on a much more
modest sort, in whose cases it is difficult to identify a political dimension except in
the very general sense that all control of religious ideas and behavior reflects the will
of the society. This reviewer also disagrees with Mayer on two points: in the
Serenissima, the nuncio “dominated” Inquisition proceedings from the beginning,
not only in the 1630s; and it is quite untrue that “the metropolitan Venetian tribunal contained three lay members, who in effect directed its business” (p. 65).
The book, furthermore, gives the impression that the center’s control over the
periphery was of fundamental importance and that centralization was a pervasive
phenomenon. It is doubtful that this was the case. As Giuliana Ancona and Dario
Visintin show in “Centro e periferia. Correlazione fra lettere e processi del Sant’Ufficio in Friuli tra il 1557 e il 1653” (in The Roman Inquisition in Malta and Elsewhere, forthcoming), a systematic comparison between the trial records of a periph-

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eral tribunal and letters from the congregation reveals that the local inquisitors
informed the cardinals in 5 percent of the cases and decided on their own in the
remaining 95 percent.
Università degli Studi di Trieste
University of Virginia

ANDREA DEL COL
TRANS. ANNE JACOBSON SCHUTTE

Jesuits and Fortifications: The Contribution of the Jesuits to Military Architecture in the
Baroque Age. By Denis De Lucca. [History of Warfare, Vol. 73.] (Boston:
Brill. 2012. Pp. xxiv, 389. $176.00. ISBN 978-90-04-216518.)
Although historians now recognize the important role played by the Society
of Jesus in many aspects of the early-modern world, they have largely ignored one
important realm in which many Jesuits were active: military architecture. De
Lucca’s book seeks to rectify this lacuna by exploring Jesuit contributions to fortification mathematics, a key area that furthered the so-called European military revolution of the period. De Lucca makes the case that Jesuits were lively participants
in the period’s military culture in the classroom, in political courts, in active service,
and in the overseas missionary activities of the order.
Chapter 1 offers an overview of Jesuit interest in military matters, tracing such
enthusiasm to the ex-soldier and founder of the order, St. Ignatius of Loyola
(1491–1556). Here, De Lucca lays the foundation for the remaining chapters
through an analysis of Loyola’s rhetoric, a survey of Jesuit mathematical teaching,
and a discussion of internal arguments regarding the appropriate role of individual
Jesuits in secular political and military conflicts. Chapters 2 and 3 move from these
more general observations to specific accounts of where and how Jesuit mathematicians taught military architecture. Arguing for the strong links between the Jesuit
order and the European nobility, De Lucca explores programs of study established
in Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain, as well as the role of Jesuit mathematicians in
providing instruction and practical advice in overseas missions in the Americas, the
Philippines, and Ming and Qing China. Chapter 3 offers a more in-depth examination of the content of Jesuit treatises on fortification, which continued to be written and taught despite repeated warnings from Rome and a 1648 ban issued by
Superior General Vincenzo Carafa (1585–1649). A case study of the career of Giacomo Masò (1626–74), who taught and advised on military architecture in Malta
before leaving the Jesuit order in 1664, is the subject of chapter 4; De Lucca argues
that Masò’s career exemplifies the internal tensions experienced by many Jesuits
between their spiritual calling and their interest in military matters. Finally, chapter
5 considers the contributions of ex-Jesuits to works on military matters after the
order’s suppression in 1773.
De Lucca succeeds in demonstrating that a good many Jesuit mathematicians
had an interest in fortification, established programs of study to teach the subject,
and wrote extensively on it. The book’s main strength is in its archival finds and
detailed descriptions of programs of study and treatises on military architecture.

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Although De Lucca gestures toward Jesuits’ involvement in political and military
engagements in the period, the vast majority of his analysis focuses on theoretical
contributions to military architecture. What Jesuits taught and when is more clearly
defined than the more controversial activities of individual Jesuits who advised on
warfare and consulted in political matters. Historians familiar with the broader historiography on European universities of the period may be frustrated by De Lucca’s
close focus on Jesuit teaching and the book’s lack of extensive comparisons with
other institutions, for fortification was also a common topic taught by university
professors of mathematics more generally, especially in private courses to the nobility. Treatment of locales outside Europe also could be better contextualized with
greater attention to local circumstances and sources.
University of California, Irvine

RENÉE RAPHAEL

Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno.
By David Frick. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. Pp. xxvi, 529.
$69.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5128-7.)
In Kith, Kin and Neighbors, David Frick analyzes the ethno-confessional relations between the inhabitants of Wilno (Vilnius) in the seventeenth-century
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although well known for its ethnic and confessional diversity, the city and its intertwined social networks have rarely been
treated as extensively as in this book. Based on an impressive range of source material collected over years of research, the book surveys the Vilnians’ sphere of life,
private and social, from birth to earth, baptism to deathbed, and everything in
between.
What makes reading the sources particularly enthralling is the topographical
setting re-created for each story. The place, house, or street is depicted not only as
background but also, in a way, to serve as one of the characters: it corrals people
together, generates confrontations, and forces them to look for ways to coexist. The
royal quartermaster’s surveys (“lustrations”) of the intramural houses of Wilno as
potential lodgings during the king’s visit provide the basis. These reports have been
drawn into maps of the city, the houses numbered and referred to throughout the
book. Frick’s technique of placing the people and their negotiations of confessional
and religious differences on the physical map brings to life the daily reality of
Wilno, where Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans, Orthodox, Uniates, Jews,
and Muslim Tatars were inextricably entangled in networks of family, friendship,
trade, cooperation, and confrontation across ethnic and confessional lines.
Seventeenth-century Wilno emerges as an exceptional mix of cultures and
identities whose coexistence was conditioned by practical needs rather than ideological tolerance. It is particularly enlightening to see how, even in the aftermath of
the great confessional earthquakes of the sixteenth century, which is often viewed
in historiography as the basis for intense antagonism, the Vilnians looked for
mutual understanding in their daily interaction. This did not necessarily mean amicable relations between individuals, but their readiness to face each other, even in

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court. This makes one of the main arguments of the book: “the society that litigates
together stays together” (p. 274). The Vilnians were welded together through conflicts as well as coexistence. A strong testimony to the sense of community is presented in the analysis of documents from the period of the Muscovite occupation
of Wilno (1655–61) and the exile into which many Vilnians chose to enter
together, regardless of their ethnic or religious heritage.
Frick manifests an unparalleled familiarity with his sources. From tiny fragments of documentation he builds up a multidimensional picture of a society with
its various functions, leading from microhistorical cases to a compelling story of a
bustling early-modern city. The range of languages used for the investigation is one
indication of the multilingual reality of the seventeenth-century Wilno, and their
reading is something Frick truly masters, pointing out nuances in the choice of
words or tongue. By extending his sources from court books to memoirs, private
letters to church records, he also gives voice to those that often remain unheard; the
abused and victims of discrimination and violence, both domestic and public.
Frick’s work is an inspiration and a treasury of information to any scholar
dealing with almost any aspect of early-modern European history. It is exuberant
in detail, yet not overburdened; such a book could have been written very differently. Frick leads the reader by the hand through the streets of a city throbbing with
life, echoing to the sounds of bells from different churches and an almost Pentecostal variety of Vilnian voices. The book is an exciting time-travel guide besides
its scholarly excellence.
University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu Campus

MARIA TAKALA-ROSZCZENKO

Playing before the Lord: The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn. By Calvin R. Stapert.
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. 2014. Pp. xxii, 282.
$24.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8028-6852-7.)
Playing Before the Lord: The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn is a highly informative, impressively documented, up-to-date, and engaging biography of the most
famous composer in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Its author, Calvin
R. Stapert, is professor emeritus of music at Calvin College in Grand Rapids,
Michigan.
The book’s title reflects the devout Catholic faith of Joseph Haydn (1732–
1809) as well as the words “Laus Deo” that the composer usually wrote at the ends
of his scores. In addition to discussing Haydn’s most important works (including
his best sacred music), the biography’s twenty chapters offer an open and honest,
chronological account of his life, not hesitating to touch upon some of the darker
elements (e.g., his few shady dealings with publishers and his melancholy). The
biography ends with a chapter of reflections upon Haydn’s reception and what his
music can do for listeners in our troubled age today (offering a “deeper reality” and
a “revelation of grace,” pp. 257, 258). For Stapert, Haydn’s music is “art that makes
[our world] a happier place” (p. 255).

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Carefully grounded upon the best secondary literature about Haydn, the
book is thoroughly documented with frequent references that cite most of the distinguished Haydn scholars from the past century (e.g., H. C. Robbins Landon,
Karl Geiringer, and David Wyn Jones). There are ample quotations from these
authors as well as from primary sources on the composer’s life. The book also
includes a selective bibliography and a glossary of commonly used musical terminology, as well as separate indexes for names/places/terms and for Haydn’s works.
Curiously, the names of important Haydn scholars C. F. Pohl and Jens Peter
Larsen are absent.
Among the book’s positive features are the extended analytical discussions of
particular compositions. Through carefully selected musical illustrations (with
notated examples and formal diagrams), readers learn about the details that have
made Haydn’s music so successful. Substantive analyses are found for selected symphonies, keyboard sonatas, string quartets, art songs, oratorios, and operas. Despite
the challenges of such prose analyses for readers, the author’s effective, concise
analyses reflect his keen awareness of how descriptive analysis “may help guide a listener’s ear to be more perceptive” (p. 58).
One small drawback in the narrative is that the author does not always state
the year in which some event happens, so that the reader must often backtrack several paragraphs to verify the year to which the author refers. Adding a chronology
for Haydn’s life to the appendix would have provided helpful temporal orientation.
In addition, there are numerous illustrations (music examples and formal diagrams)
that would be more instructive if they had a caption that identified the work, rather
than giving just an Example/Diagram number that makes the reader search
through the text to ascertain the piece’s identity.
Each chapter opens with two or three eye-catching epigraphs, which can be
quite inspiring or occasionally distracting—the latter when the quotation seems
disconnected from the topic or period of the chapter that follows. Usually,
epigraphs are supposed to reflect a theme for the chapter; however, their purpose
in Stapert’s volume seems to be, in some cases, intellectual ornament.
Surprisingly, Stapert agrees with Charles Rosen’s concerns about the musical
character of Haydn’s late Masses being sometimes at “odds with the text.” He
remarks (p. 236) at the two-tempo slow/fast Kyrie settings that Rosen terms
“inaptly jolly” without realizing that Haydn was following a long-established twotempo Kyrie convention, rather than relying on his slow/fast symphony movement
practices.
In sum, Stapert’s biography is an enthusiastic, candid, and thorough account
of the life of one of the first internationally known living composers of Western
music. Making fine use of the best Haydn scholarship from the past century, its
304 pages will provide any undergraduate music major with a first-rate, accurate,
and multifaceted introduction to the composer, his music, his musico-historical

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environs, and the main elements of his style (and wit!) in the most significant musical genres.
Conservatory of Music of Brooklyn College
City University of New York

BRUCE C. MACINTYRE

Al Servizio della Repubblica di Venezia: Le lettere di Massimiliano Buzzaccarini Gonzaga, Commendatore di Malta, inviate alla Magistratura dei Cinque Savii alla
Mercanzia 1754–1776. Edited by Victor Mallia-Milanes. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2014. Pp. 637. €34,00. ISBN 978-88-209-9273-6.)
The study of the history of the Catholic Church is often thought of in terms
of the history of the development of the faith—the Christian faith, within the specific framework of Catholic theological doctrine. However, the richness of Catholic
history goes beyond issues of faith. It also is composed of the history of its own
institutions. This is what Victor Mallia-Milanes has attempted successfully with
his book Al Servizio della Repubblica di Venezia.
Mallia-Milanes is a leading world expert on the history of the Knights of St.
John during early modern times. In this book, he traces their diplomatic relations
with the Republic of Venice. The Knights of St. John were (and still are) a religious
order of the Church. Their professed members took religious vows (and still do)
but, although considered friars—their origins predate the history of the mendicant
orders of the thirteenth century—they do not say Mass. Instead, they dedicate their
lives to the sick, and, in the Middle Ages, they became warriors or fighting knights.
Today, the latter is not considered germane to a religious body. What is important
about this book is that the history of this order goes beyond the fighting spirit that
characterized the wars of religion in the Mediterranean from the rise of Islam until
the arrival of Napoleon.
Mallia-Milanes seeks to portray how a religious order of the Catholic Church,
which had assumed statehood by early-modern times, conducted its diplomatic relations. He introduces the reader to unique diplomatic experiences through the work
of one ambassador accredited to the Order of St. John in Malta. From 1530 until
1798, the Knights of St. John were in possession of the island of Malta and hence
their subsequent name as the Order of Malta. Yet, being accredited to this island
state required, at the time, two peculiar requirements. The ambassador had to be a
knight of the order, hailing from a Catholic state that had established ambassadorial
relations with the Convent, as the State Council in Malta was known to the Knights.
This meant that the Knights held diplomatic relations at ambassadorial levels only
with Roman Catholic states. The other states were relegated to a consular status. The
protagonist in this book, Massimiliano Buzzaccarini Gonzaga, was a Venetian
Knight who became resident ambassador representing the Republic of Venice.
The author allows the documents to speak for themselves. He has published
Buzzaccarini Gonzaga’s correspondence, which he unearthed at the State Archives
of Venice, and backs it with an extensive analytical introduction, wherein he gives

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the general framework of diplomatic relations between Malta and Venice from
1530 until 1796.
These letters deal with issues of trade and disputes that broke out between the
two countries from 1754 to 1776. They recount vividly the protests of Venetian
merchants against what they considered illicit and wrongful behavior by those who
have been incorrectly termed Catholic pirates. The war of the corso meant authorized
naval expeditions by both Catholic and Ottoman vessels against each other. The
Knights felt they were duty-bound to police the Mediterranean waters to render
them secure against their mortal enemy: the Ottomans. Merchandise was the focus
of this ongoing battle. Venice used the Ottoman flag or, more important, the
Greek navy to bypass the existing Catholic embargo against trading with the
Ottoman Porte. The Order of St. John was highly suspicious of Venetian merchants who were suspected of breaking the trade embargo on the Sublime Porte.
Thus, Venetian merchandise from Ottoman harbors was subjected to what was
seen as legitimate raids from Maltese corsairs checking on whether the cargo destined for what was known then as the Piazza di Venezia (p. 185) was covered by
the correct documentation, stating clearly its provenance.
For its part, Venice was compelled to protect its merchants, irrespective of
their actions and trading interests. This task fell to the Magistratura dei Cinque
Savii alla Mercanzia or the entity in Venice that regulated trade disputes, with
whom Buzzaccarini Gonzaga corresponded, with great reverence, in support of the
Venetian traders.
In this beautifully presented work, Mallia-Milanes has gone to great pains to
bring to light yet another aspect of yesteryear.
SIMON MERCIECA

University of Malta

LATE MODERN EUROPEAN
Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern
Faith. By Carol E. Harrison. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014. Pp.
xvi, 328. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5245-1.)
Carole Harrison explores the lives and significance of a small cohort of
Catholics in France who belonged to a generation that was born in the first two
decades of the nineteenth century and whose religious devotion was shaped by a
desire to reconcile faith and modernity after the upheaval of the French Revolution.
They include Pauline Craven, Charles de Montalembert, Amélie and Frédéric
Ozanam, Léopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guérin, and Victorine Monniot. These
“enfants du siècle,” as Alfred de Musset described the generation who came of age
without a firsthand memory of the French Revolution, were progressive and,
according to Harrison, romantic in their aspirations. Her overarching goal is to resurrect this group of men and women whom historians have allegedly neglected and
who were in many cases linked to one another through kinship, friendship, and

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marriage, in order to challenge a historiography that she argues oversimplifies the
heterogeneous nature of French Catholicism in postrevolutionary France.
The book, which is divided into six chapters and an epilogue, charts the
coming of age of the principal protagonists, with the opening chapters devoted to
how they became part of the Catholic faith as boys and girls through ritual and
education. Chapters 3 to 6 examine how they entered adulthood and reacted or
adjusted to the tumultuous events around them, which included the revolutions of
1830 and 1848, the Second Empire, as well as to political issues, such as the
“Roman question.” She ultimately concludes that the hopes and aims of this generation of romantic Catholics were frustrated by intransigent anticlericals, conservative Catholics, and a reactionary church hierarchy, which forced them to retreat,
even if they were not wholly defeated.
Although some of the central figures in this book have long been the subject
of scholarly attention, including Felicité de Lamennais and Henri Dominique
Lacordaire who were not technically “enfants du siècle,” as well as Charles de
Montalembert and Frédéric Ozanam, others have been largely forgotten. The
most powerful parts of the book are those that rely on their written work as well
as on a rich trove of private papers and correspondence that Harrison has culled
from archives that range from the Archives du Collège Stanislaus, Musée Victor
Hugo, the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the Assumptionist Archives in
Rome. This documentation allows her to bring her individuals to life while illuminating how they were connected to one another in ways that have not previously been explored. Moreover, her discussion of the dilemmas that they faced
and of the religious and political conflicts that they attempted to resolve sheds a
whole new light on a period that runs from the Bourbon Restoration to the
Second Empire.
However, it is important to put these Catholic romantics in perspective.
They represented a minute segment of the population, and all of them came
from privileged economic groups, some even from prominent aristocratic families. A significant number of them died very young. Indeed, Léopoldine Hugo
died in a boating accident before she reached the age of twenty-one. This is not
to say that they are unworthy of our attention, and the book is important for
what it reveals about a small group of Catholics who cannot simply be dismissed
as reactionary and retrograde defenders of the faith. It does, however, lead one
to wonder about how widely shared their ideas actually were. Moreover, it is
unfortunately marred by its mischaracterization of existing scholarship and by its
overly grandiose claims. Harrison suggests that the prevalent view of the period
is that there were “two Frances”—a monolithic Catholic France and a secular
France—and that much of the historical literature on Catholicism in the nineteenth century, especially that which has focused on the “feminization” of
Catholicism, has been shaped by the writings of Jules Michelet, minus the
misogyny. This is simply a distortion of the rich, varied, and nuanced literature
on the question and leads her both to caricature and to call the phenomenon of

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the feminization of Catholicism itself into question. She even asks if “female
numbers” (p. 18) in church pews or the presence of women in pilgrimages and
processions really matter. It may have served the purposes of republican anticlericals to invoke the specter of the fanatic female in order to exclude women from
the political sphere, and it may have served some conservative Catholics to see
in the pious women of France the constant threat of victimization in their battle
with the state, but this does not necessarily mean that the feminization of
Catholicism itself was their invention and a myth.
University of California, Los Angeles

CAROLINE FORD

Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900. By
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
2014. Pp. x, 300. $39.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-02238-9.)
Miriam Burstein makes two overarching points in this engaging book. First,
controversial fiction played a major role in popular religious and literary culture in
the nineteenth century; and second, studies of religion and culture that privilege
“canonical” works over popular works result in a “skewed” or partial (in both senses
of the word) understanding of the Victorian religious landscape. So, she turns to
novels that were read and even reached bestseller status, but that today are ignored
by all too many literary scholars and historians. These popular works lay out a “universal plot” of spiritual struggle leading to conversion. However, this is a struggle
of individuals, not of groups, whatever the historical period may be. This emphasis
on the individual has led scholars from Georg Lukács to the postmodernists to
define the historical novel as a secular, post-Enlightenment, proto-anthropological,
realist, and materialist awareness. Burstein challenges these interpretations by
paying careful attention to the interface between literary and historical discourses.
After this introduction, Burstein devotes six chapters to the heart of her book.
Chapter 1, using as its source Sir Walter Scott’s The Monastery and The Abbot (both
Edinburgh, 1820), argues that the early-nineteenth-century religious historical
novel celebrated the birth of Protestant modernity from the collapse of Roman
Catholicism. Chapter 2 analyzes Victorian attempts to locate the Reformation in
the Middle Ages. For example, William Howitt, the author of the popular book
The History of Priestcraft Throughout the Ages (London, 1833), saw John Wyclif and
the lollards as proto-Protestant martyrs; their suppression was a foretaste of what
would happen should a revivified Roman Catholicism come to power. This argument breaks Scott’s connection between the Protestant Reformation and modernity. Moreover, the Victorians claimed that only those lollards with spiritual goals
were the true lollards; those who challenged the existing social order were false.
Chapter 3 discusses representations of vernacular Bible reading during the sixteenth century. These attempted to recreate the shock of reading the biblical text
for the first time—whereas in the nineteenth century, the Bible was omnipresent
(and hence just another book) but privatized and feminized. Chapter 4 argues that

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Protestant novelists used John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to show the connection
between Bloody Mary and the revivified Roman Catholicism of the nineteenth
century. To achieve this, however, Protestant authors rewrote Foxe’s work to
increase the number of female martyrs. Feminizing martyrdom enabled Protestants
to eroticize martyrdom and to fear a return to persecutions should Roman
Catholics ever regain power in England. Chapter 5 treats Roman Catholic and
Anglo-Catholic novelists of the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic
novelists turned to Elizabeth’s persecutions and expressed the hope that England
eventually will be reconverted. They deconstructed the connection between modernism and Protestantism, and denied that Protestantism had an historical sense.
Further, they argued that the study of history demonstrated the absence of Protestantism. In contrast, the Anglican novelists were trapped between Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism, especially when it came to accepting the miraculous.
Both Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism reveled in the miraculous; AngloCatholicism had trouble accepting it.
Finally, Chapter 6 turns to Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (London, 1841).
Dickens here rejected both the Scottian historical novel and the model of historical
memory advanced by Evangelical novelists. Instead, he celebrated the silencing of
history in favor of contemporary events. The book ends with a coda treating Victorian representations of Girolamo Savonarola, including George Eliot’s Romola
(London, 1862–63). These represent a strand of Victorian fiction that fears that the
Protestant Reformation’s victory was not necessarily victorious.
Burstein has written an engaging study of the varying ways in which the
Victorians used the Protestant Reformation to pursue their religious controversies. Well-organized, well-supported by primary sources, and well-argued, it is a
welcome addition to the scholarship on Victorian anti-Catholicism and religious
controversy.
University of North Texas (Emeritus)

DENIS PAZ

Herbert Hensley Henson: A Biography. By John S. Peart-Binns (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press. 2013. Pp. 212. $50.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-7188-9302-6.)
Any new biographer of the English ecclesiastic Herbert Hensley Henson
(1863–1947), bishop of Hereford (1918–20) and Durham (1920–39), faces two
significant challenges. The first is Henson himself. One of the outstanding figures
of early-twentieth-century English Anglicanism, Henson had almost uncontrollable propensities to self-documentation (he authored both a triple-decker
memoir—unpromisingly titled Retrospect of an Unimportant Life [London,
1942]—and a manuscript diary running to more than 100 volumes) and uncompromising public statements that frequently made him the center of national controversy. Alongside these he exhibited a pained reserve about his early life and
subsequent psychological and spiritual complexities; these helped fuel an unsettled
theological and ecclesiological position and identity. His life is consequently one

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of twists and turns in allegiance and advocacy that could perplex and frustrate contemporaries, even as they remained in awe of his capacity to articulate with unrivaled clarity key dilemmas facing the Church of England, in some instances (such
as the case for and against establishment) from both sides of the fence. The prize
for the successful biographer is thus an exceptional insight into the modern history
of Anglicanism; the test to offer a convincing account which makes coherent sense
of his eventful career. Peart-Binns is not the first to try; and herein lies the second
challenge. Ecclesiastical historians need courage to tread again a path taken by the
late Owen Chadwick, whose Hensley Henson: A Study in the Friction between
Church and State (Oxford, 1983) the London Times judged possibly “the best
ecclesiastical biography of the century.” A reviewer is therefore forced into a comparison with the earlier work.
Peart-Binns certainly brings new material to light, having gathered a significant body of reminiscence and archival material (now deposited with the Henson
papers in Durham). He takes due account of relevant scholarship that has appeared
since Chadwick wrote, although he puzzlingly makes no reference to Robert Lee’s
important study of relations between clergymen, capitalists, and colliers in The
Church of England and the Durham Coalfield (Rochester, NY, 2007). His work is
also characterized by more extended quotations from Henson’s writings, well
chosen to demonstrate his rhetorical skills, and a greater interest in setting the
wider context for those unfamiliar with the history of Anglicanism. Peart-Binns’s
volume is nevertheless much slimmer than Chadwick’s and perhaps inevitably
cannot match the high style of his predecessor (which he occasionally reproduces
where he judges it to offer an unmatchable rendition); the author is no mean stylist
himself, however, as his book is highly readable. There are differences of emphasis.
The Chadwick work is preferable for its discussion of Henson and divorce, and his
time as dean of Durham. The Peart-Binns book is strong in its attention to
Henson’s role in the Lambeth conference of 1920; in its treatment of his response
to the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics, and Citizenship (COPEC);
and in its firsthand accounts of his relations with clergy in Durham.
In terms of overall interpretation, however, this does not seem as significant a
reappraisal as the publishers suggest. Peart-Binns makes more of Henson’s chippiness about class in his interactions with those more naturally at home in the English establishment than this son of a member of the Plymouth Brethren (which
makes Peart-Binns seem the less sympathetic biographer), but is less inclined than
Chadwick to psychological speculation as to the legacy of his unhappy early years.
He is also more impatient with Henson’s theological and ecclesiological development, to which he devotes less attention and is consequently a less illuminating
guide. The two books otherwise offer largely compatible accounts. Thus PeartBinns does not replace Chadwick; but the student of early-twentieth-century
Anglicanism can nevertheless usefully supplement the earlier work with material
only to be found in this new study.
King’s College London

ARTHUR BURNS

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Freie Anerkennung übergeschichtlicher Bindungen. Katholische Geschichtswahrnehmung
im deutschsprachigen Raum des 20. Jahrhunderts. Beiträge des Dresdener Kolloquiums vom 10. bis 13. Mai 2007. Edited by Thomas Pittrof and Walter Schmitz.
[Catholica, Band 2.] (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag. 2010. Pp. 531.
€68,00. ISBN 978-3-7930-9600-9.)
This edited, interdisciplinary, 500+-page volume about how Catholic intellectuals perceived history in the German-speaking world of the twentieth century represents one of those works impossible to summarize. The fruits of a conference in Dresden from 2007, its twenty-five chapters were penned not just by historians but also
by theologians, political scientists, and literature experts. Their diverse array of chapters accordingly focuses on not just the narrow world of professional Catholic historians but also how leading intellectuals in the Catholic milieu reflected on history.
Making the editors’ task more difficult was the reality that, as they admit, at
the turn of the twentieth century, there had yet to exist a coherent subculture of professional Catholic historians—or even a specific Catholic “culture of history.” Professional Catholic profane historians were few and far between in a Protestant-dominated university system, and even these were forced by necessity to adopt the
professional standards and methodologies of their Protestant colleagues. Hence this
volume’s focus on Catholic intellectuals who were not trained historians is understandable. For writers such as Reinhold Schneider, Gertrud von le Fort, Stefan
Andres, Enrica van Handel-Mazzetti, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Karl Ottens,
Elisabeth Langgässer, and Theoder Haecker, as well as converts like Ilse von Stach
and Alfred Döblin, the past became an inevitable part of their reflections.
To what extent, the book queries, were these intellectuals constructing
counter-narratives to dominant Protestant narratives? How did they reconcile their
historical understandings with the tropes of salvation history, which argued that
God remains active in history? To what extent did they buck tides of ultramontanism and establish discourses that ran contrary to those of ecclesiastical leaders?
And more broadly: where were the intellectual roots of their historical interpretations, visions, and narratives? What aesthetic forms did they use in reconstructing
the past? To what extent did many of these writers articulate a “resistance against
the dissolution of reality into a total immanence of the earthly and the historical?”
Understandably, in light of the tremendous range of subjects and perspectives,
neither editors nor authors offer uniform answers to these questions. The responses
of some like the poet Schneider evolved. Known for his literary resistance to the
Third Reich, Schneider underwent a transformation between the 1930s and 1950s
as a result of what he perceived to be restorative tendencies in Konrad Adenauer’s
Germany and attacks against him from the Catholic press. His work became melancholic and focused on the suffering Christ, whose kingdom was not of this world.
On occasion, this volume lapses into internal inconsistencies. The editors
claim that an “aversion to history” had made itself manifest, particularly by the end
of the 1950s. But this observation is belied by the powerful chapter offered at the

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close by Olaf Blaschke on the network of Catholic historians assembled beginning
in 1962 in the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, a historical organization based first
in Munich and then in Bonn. The dozens of professional historians who became
members in this nexus for historical research that Blaschke describes are proof that
there was anything but an aversion to history within its ranks. This was true not
just in the decade preceding its founding in 1962 as well. Seminal events like the
fight before Germany’s Constitutional Court in 1956 over the validity of the
Reichskonkordat and historical controversies launched in 1961 by the young jurist
and historian, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, forced intellectuals to engage with
the Catholic past in both its alleged glory and ignominy.
Blaschke’s analysis of the interwoven networks undergirding the Kommission
für Zeitgeschichte is, in many ways, an anomaly. The majority of the chapters focus
on Catholic literati and their output from 1919 to 1949. Here is this wealth of this
book. The reader will find compelling overviews of Catholic literati from scholars
who have often invested decades of research into their subjects. These sketches are
accompanied by meticulous footnotes that offer a wealth of references to the vast
secondary literature on these intellectuals. Even though the questions posed at the
close of this volume’s introduction as often as not remain unanswered, German literature scholars and intellectual historians will profit tremendously from its hundreds of pages of literary exegesis and intellectual biographies.
Saint Louis University

MARK EDWARD RUFF

The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism. Edited by Rajesh
Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer. [KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and
Society, 7.] (Leuven: Leuven University Press. Distrib. Cornell University
Press. 2010. Pp. 211. $42.50 paperback. ISBN 978-90-5867-714-3.)
This strong collection of essays fills an important niche in Maritain studies.
Through its consideration of the interwar period during which Jacques and Raïsa
Maritain first launched their apostolate to culture, these authors do much to illuminate the interplay of the aesthetic, religious, philosophical, and political aspects
of the crucial decades preceding World War II. The Maritain works best known to
American readers were written during the two decades after World War II. Therefore, this collection of essays would assist such readers to appreciate the broader
perspectives as well as the origins of Maritain’s later work.
The collection includes both overviews of the Maritains’ work and studies of
particular relationships and specific trends and movements. These essays are well
informed, and they unearth new details about the important relationships of the
age. Most of all, the authors develop fresh interpretations of their life and work.
The editor, Rajesh Heynickx, seeks to break with the “schematic” and “myopic”
views (p. 14) of Maritain that either consign him to irrelevance because of his
Catholicism and Thomism, as well as those who lionize him as the privileged way
into the recovery of revitalized philosophy. What they both miss, he claims, is the
concrete historical dimension that would make possible such a tremendous impact

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of a philosopher of “fixed principles” (p. 14) and eternal perspective on the practices
and discourse of the modernists who celebrated change and fragmentariness.
Exploring Maritain’s own paradoxical claim to be both antimodern and ultramodern, the many essays in book considers how Maritain’s Thomism and devout
Catholicism led him to friendships and significant dialogue with many of the leaders of modern art, literature, and culture. Stephen Schloesser’s “The Rise of a
Mystic Modernism” presents a nice summary of the discoveries and hypothesis of
his book Jazz Age Catholicism (Toronto, 2005). In sum, he explores how the very
distinction between matter and form opened Maritain to a variety of ways of manifesting the form in diverse materials, style, and approaches. Rather than imitate
the past in a neo-Gothic style, modernism could be seen as a way to explore new
manifestations of the personal being, the search for God, and the conflict of good
and evil. In addition, the modernist struggles with the guilt of war would lead to a
“reparation” for the dead in fitting tribute to the young lives sacrificed in the horror
of war. Philippe Chenaux writes on “the Neo-Thomistic Infrastructure.” The
retreats and literary engagements gathered around the Maritains offered an alternative to the nihilism and positivism. Maritain’s early works defining his mission,
such as Art and Scholasticism (New York, 1923), Three Reformers (London, 1925),
and Primacy of the Spiritual (aka The Things That Are Not Caesar’s, New York, 1931)
found a ready audience who sought a “bridge between the Catholic tradition and
the innovative literary and artistic currents of the time” (p. 51). Each of the essays
devoted to specific writers, artists, and critics is solidly researched and extremely
insightful about the significance of Maritain’s aesthetic and the meaning of the various trends in interwar Europe. There are affinities, conflicts, and confrontations
between Maritain’s philosophy and the modernism of this period to be discovered
in the string of essays dealing with an impressive list of many people not well
known to American audiences along with a few justly celebrated: Michel Seuphor,
Albert Servaes, Pieter van der Meer de Walcheren, Gino Severini, Walter Benjamin, Brian Coffey, André Gide, Joseph Roth, and Anton van Duinkerken. Each
essay masterfully carries forward the hypothesis posed by Heynickx in the introduction concerning the historical and spiritual conditions that offered to Maritain a
way into modern culture. The final essay, by Jason Harding, considers the problem
of culture and Christian philosophy through a comparison of Jacques Maritain and
T. S. Eliot, who both agreed that the impending crisis of European war and totalitarianism signified the frightful condition of modern humanity whose disordered
soul and culture were so bereft of theocentric orientation and prey to the powers of
state and technology. Eliot admired Maritain’s Thomistic aesthetic as well as his
defense of democracy, as he set out on his own account of Christian culture.
This book is a treasure trove for scholars of the Maritains; it offers a rich supplement to the biographies of the Maritains as well to their own autobiographical
writing. For example, the essay on Pieter van der Meer fills in much of the sketch
we behold in We Have Been Friends Together (New York, 1942). His disputes with
Gide and later with Jean Cocteau receive much elaboration and contextualization.
Most important, Maritain’s response to the crisis posed by the Vatican condemna-

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tion of L’Action française is thoroughly covered. The book is essential reading for
all students of Maritain and serves as an important resource for students of culture
and Catholicism in Europe during the interwar period.
JOHN P. HITTINGER

University of St. Thomas, Houston

AMERICAN
Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783. By Robert Emmett Curran.
(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2014. Pp. xviii,
315. $29.95 paperback ISBN 978-0-8132-2583-8.)
Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once famously remarked that “anti-Catholicism was
the oldest prejudice in American history.” In a masterful work by a senior scholar
covering the first two centuries of history in British America, Robert Emmett
Curran illuminates what Schlesinger meant. Devoting his introduction to the
European background of this story, Curran demonstrates the long-term consequences of Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church in the 1530s. As England
struggled for the better part of two centuries to determine if it would be a Protestant or a Catholic kingdom, its colonies in the New World became caught up in
the turmoil. The effect of this history on American Catholics was enormous.
Once the scene shifts to America, Curran gives much attention to Maryland,
the closest thing there was in those lands to a “Catholic colony.” He traces the
doomed ventures of Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, to forge a pluralistic society in the Chesapeake. Those efforts ran aground in the light of an invasion by
Puritans in the middle of the seventeenth century and the imposition of the penal
laws in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. Nonetheless,
Maryland Catholics remained a distinct and viable community, albeit one forced to
keep much of its religious life hidden. Catholics in New York were less fortunate.
Jacob Leisler, a German Calvinist, took advantage of the expulsion of James II, a
Catholic, to expel New York’s Catholic leadership, appointees of the now deposed
Stuart king. What Catholics remained in New York had to endure close to a century of oppression and systematic denial of their religious and political rights.
Curran deftly recovers the overlooked plight of Irish Catholics of the West
Indies, some of whom were essentially enslaved after Oliver Cromwell had them
sent to Barbados and other colonies. As tragic, or worse, was the fate of the
Catholic Acadians. Caught between the struggle for power in America between
Great Britain and France, they were forcibly expelled from their homes in the
1750s, victims of a brutal process that today would be described as ethnic cleansing.
It was during that Seven Years’ War that anti-Catholicism in British America
reached a peak. What came next was truly stunning—a revolt against British rule
in America, one fueled in part by anger, especially in New England, over the
Quebec Act of 1774. That law granted to Catholics in lands gained from France

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full legal protection. The religious liberties of Protestants were also guaranteed, but
no matter. Curran explains how patriots in the thirteen colonies now saw George
III as taking a turn toward Rome similar to that of the Stuart kings. In the war that
followed, most American Catholics, having little stake in the status quo, supported
the Revolution. There were Catholics, notably in Pennsylvania, where the religious
climate had been more tolerant, who remained loyal to London.
The course of the War for Independence, involving as it did a patriot alliance
with Catholic France, changed the direction of history for American Catholics. It
also did not hurt their cause that none other than Benedict Arnold claimed his
defection came from principled opposition, as a good Protestant, to the entry into
the war of Catholic France. In one of the great ironies of the American Revolution,
Catholics benefited enormously from its results. Soon after British ships sailed
away from New York City in late 1783, for example, Catholics in that city emerged
from their isolation, took their newly recognized rights in hand, and established
their first parish.
One of the many strengths of Papist Devils is Curran’s deft use of recent scholarship on early American Catholic history, both published and unpublished. He
may have missed an opportunity or two to integrate this history somewhat more
into the general narratives of colonial America. Even so, Curran demonstrates in
convincing style why Schlesinger’s claim must be accounted for in any serious rendering of early American history.
Aquinas College
Grand Rapids, MI

JASON K. DUNCAN

An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States. By
Eric R. Schlereth. [Early American Studies.] (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. 2013. Pp. vi, 295. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4493-9.)
This nicely written and extensively researched book explores the political consequences of the “growing acceptance” during the early national period of the idea
that “notions of truth”— that is, religious truth—“were ultimately matters of opinion” (pp. 2–3). Americans’ collective move “beyond toleration” when it came to
religion has been well charted by scholars such as Chris Beneke (Beyond Toleration:
The Religious Origins of American Pluralism [New York, 2006]), Stephen Prothero
(Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t [New York,
2007]), and John Lardas Modern (Secularism in Antebellum America [Chicago,
2011]). The privatization of religious belief, these historians have argued, made the
American religious landscape more polite and peaceful—and, in the process, facilitated the development of a degree of ignorance about the traditional boundaries of
belief that, for well or ill, underpins our contemporary understandings of religious
pluralism in America.
But Eric R. Schlereth wants us to understand that, paradoxically, the privatization of religious belief is also what made it possible for our sometimes fiery polit-

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ical rhetoric—and, often, the laws that that rhetoric has produced—to reflect the
religiously-based understandings of justice and virtue that many Americans have
held over the years. The sense that religious truth was a matter of opinion “allowed
people of various beliefs to argue politically with each other about religious influence in American public life” (p. 3). In this sense, Schlereth argues, “the history of
religious knowledge in the early national United States is . . . a political history” (p.
2), and the formation of political parties was as much about what it meant to know
and love God as it was about the Constitution or the merits of slavery. Nowhere
was this overlap between politics and religious epistemology more apparent than in
the debates between evangelicals and free-thinkers over the foundations of good
citizenship in the new republic.
Evangelicals believed in a god who was personally, directly, and continually
involved in the world. They therefore could not see any difference between
Deists—who, Schlereth shows, were a small but loud and intellectually wellequipped minority in antebellum America—and people who had no god at all.
Deists were “infidels” (p. 8) whose unbelief had rendered them ill prepared to
accept the responsibilities that came with republicanism. Citizens, according to
Lyman Beecher, needed “the guidance of their own consciences, enlightened by the
word of God” in order for the experiment launched by the Founders—spoken of in
increasingly reverential terms—to work (p. 226).
Free-thinkers, however, looked not to the Bible, but to Tom Paine for their
understanding of what the Founders had had in mind. “Free enquirers argued that
one could possess the full rights and meet the full obligations of citizenship only if
one was mentally emancipated,” Schlereth informs us (p. 226). This is what their
journals and societies attempted to accomplish—not necessarily the eradication,
but the interrogation of religious belief.
An Age of Infidels is as fun to read as its cover—which features George Cruikshank’s rendering of the “topsy-turvy” world made possible by Paine—suggests that
it will be. Schlereth’s arguments about the role that free-thought played in the
shaping of the second-party system do seem a bit strained at times, and he probably
should have acknowledged that as important as evangelicals’ tussles with infidels
may have been in defining the parameters of republican freedom in early America,
those tussles were not nearly as important as the ones evangelicals had with the
growing Catholic population in the United States.
These criticisms, however, should not distract readers from the excellent
nature of this book, which provides scholars with a sense of the intellectual vibrancy
of “free-thought” in the early years of the republic and the role of strategic and
impassioned freethinkers such as Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen, as they set
out to reform the social, political, and moral landscape in America.
Brandeis University

MAURA JANE FARRELLY

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677

A Jesuit Missionary in Eighteenth-Century Sonora: The Family Correspondence of
Philipp Segesser. Edited by Raymond H. Thompson. Translated by Werner S.
Zimmt and Robert E. Dahlquist. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press. 2014. Pp. xxxix, 336. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-8263-5424-2.)
Early History of the Southwest through the Eyes of German-Speaking Jesuit Missionaries: A Transcultural Experience in the Eighteenth Century. By Albrecht Classen.
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2013. Pp. xi, 216. $80.00. ISBN 978-07391-7784-6.)
Over the last quarter-century the methodologies of ethnohistory have
enriched the one-dimensional histories of colonial missions in the Americas. The
vision of Catholic missions as a frontier institution that advanced the boundaries of
civilization among unlettered and barbarous peoples, reified in Herbert E. Bolton’s
phrase “rim of Christendom,” has given way to complex histories of the native peoples as historical actors whose calculus for survival under the demands of colonialism included permanent or itinerant residence in the consolidated pueblos that
were established under the auspices of the missions. Whether in the arid lands of
northern New Spain, the woodlands of Nouveau France, or the interior lowlands
of South America, histories focused on the missions or that employed missionary
texts from different religious orders increasingly reveal complex stories of cultural
encounter fraught with tensions and conflicts.
What is needed to complete these culturally nuanced interpretations of mission history are ethnographies of the missionaries themselves. The two books under
review here contribute to that effort for the Society of Jesus while they draw on an
extensive bibliography devoted to the literary and scholarly works by Jesuits who
served in different parts of the Americas and Asia. Works that highlight the Jesuits’
contributions to cartography, medicine, astronomy, and natural history include
John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank
Kennedy, eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto,
1999); Karl Kohut and María Cristina Torales Pacheco, eds., Desde los confines de
los imperios ibéricos: Los jesuitas de habla alemana en las misiones americanas (Frankfurt, 2007); María del Cármen Anzures y Bolaños’s scholarly edition of Juan de
Esteyneffer, Florilegio Medicinal (Mexico, 1978); and Guillermo Zemeño Padilla,
Cartas edificantes y curiosas de algunos Jesuitas del siglo XVII: travesías, itinerarios, testimonios (Mexico, 2006). Equally important, Theodore Treutlein’s translations of
selected German Jesuits’ writings into English, including Philipp Segesser (1689–
1762), Ignaz Pfefferkorn (1725–98), and Joseph Och (1725–73), contributed to
our knowledge about the missions, their indigenous neophytes, and the missionaries who served them.
Raymond H. Thompson’s well-researched edition of Segesser’s letters written
to his family over more than four decades provides a rich new source for scholars
who work on the colonial mission enterprise in the Iberian borderlands and the
Jesuits’ early-modern global network in the shadow of the Counter-Reformation.
The collection includes seventy-six letters that were conserved by the Segesser

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family and deposited in the Lucerne State Archive, of which forty-one letters were
written from different locations in Europe during Segesser’s religious training, and
thirty-five are penned from New World areas such as Cuba, central Mexico, and
Sonora. Seven of the letters were written in Latin, and the rest were in German.
The translators’ linguistic choices reflect the challenges of working from premodern texts in German and deciphering cryptic phrases in Latin that appeared
throughout the originals. The result, while maintaining the formality of Segesser’s
style, expresses poignantly the humanity of this Swiss Jesuit, who devoted his adult
life to the missions of the Upper and Lower Pimería in present-day Sonora
(Mexico) and Arizona (United States). We learn of his illnesses, his difficult
adjustment to the rigors of the Sonoran climate, the daily routines of mission life
that absorbed his time in temporal affairs, and his profound loneliness in relation
to the loving family that he would never see again. Segesser’s sense of isolation was
all the more acute due to the years’ long delays in receiving European correspondence. The longest letter, and the best known, was dated July 31, 1737 (St. Ignatius
Saint Day), from the mission of Tecoripa in the Pimería Baja. In it, Segesser fulfilled a promise to his family to describe his mission province, using the artifice of
a series of short dialogues with his houseboy, Nicolás. This letter was published in
modern German in 1886; Treutlein first published it in English in 1945. Segesser’s
comments on drought, crops, church construction, and skirmishes with Apaches
and Seris are informative of both the material conditions in which he lived and his
perceptions of Sonora. His final letters refer to the hide paintings that Segesser sent
to his family as a present in 1758, paintings that narrated in pictographic form military conflicts involving indigenous militias three decades earlier on the northeastern border of New Mexico. Segesser took care to ensure their arrival in Lucerne,
but he did not explain how these extraordinary paintings came into his hands.
(They now hang in the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe.)
Albrecht Classen’s synthesis of the careers and writings of five German Jesuits
who served in Sonora—including Segesser—provides context for Thompson’s
edited volume. As both Claussen and Thompson explain, “German” refers to
Jesuits from numerous principalities and linguistic regions of the Holy Roman
Empire who wrote in German, when not in Spanish or Latin, although their cultural origins were diverse. Classen includes in this overview an interesting summary
of Joseph Stoecklein’s Welt-Bolt, a collection of missionary reports from different
Jesuit mission fields that were translated into German. In each of the chapters
devoted to an individual biography as well as in the introduction, Classen weaves
an argument between unabashed praise of the Jesuits and a cautious note regarding
their biases in relation to their indigenous charges and to the Spanish vecinos and
officials with whom they dealt on a daily basis. The book’s subtitle announces “A
Transcultural Experience in the Eighteenth Century”; yet it is difficult to perceive
the quality of transculturation in the brief biographies and translated passages that
Classen has included in his study.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

CYNTHIA RADDING

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679

Daughters of Charity: Women, Religious Mission, and Hospital Care in Los Angeles,
1856–1927. By Kristine Gunnell. (Chicago: Vincentian Studies Institute,
DePaul University. 2013. Pp. 259. $18.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-93669606-2.)
By the mid-nineteenth century, the distinctive cornettes of the Daughters of
Charity had become emblematic of Catholic nurses and their work among the
poor. From the industrialized cities of France and Germany to the colonies and settler societies of the New World, the Daughters mobilized and structured the
impulse of women to serve the poor in the name of God and along the way established the foundation of twentieth-century health and welfare systems. Kristine
Gunnell’s history of the Daughters of Charity and their work in hospital care in
Los Angeles, 1856–1927, provides a deeply worked case study of that phenomenon
and builds on the growing scholarship on women and their historical contribution
to social institution building.
Gunnell’s work underlines both the constancy of the story of the sisters, as
well as its mutability and responsiveness. In terms of constancy, there is much here
that could be said of any of the sisters’ early communities. But other elements of
the story are distinctive, and Gunnell’s narrative serves to emphasize the contrasting local color. In Los Angeles the founding bishop was neither Irish nor French,
but a Spaniard. The first loyal Catholics were of the Spanish-Mexican elite and the
school bilingual. In this foundation being an American-born sister was an asset and
being a Spanish-speaking sister even more so. What was rather particular here, too,
was the way the relationship with medicine was mediated by the county. Although
this system allowed for the early foundation to thrive, it eventually hampered the
sisters’ independence and forced them into a relationship with the sick poor and
indigent that they felt conflicted with their mission.
As the nineteenth century rolled on and the early foundation gave way to a
larger and a more sophisticated operation, the sisters made ends meet by caring for
railway workers and sailors, forming partnerships with medicine, and exploring
health tourism. Gunnell highlights the adaptable and enterprising nature of these
women from their substantial farming operation to their oil and real estate expertise. By the early-twentieth century, the obligation to keep abreast of new developments in the field saw the sisters invest in training for themselves and their school,
and in upgrades to their hospital infrastructure.
What comes out most wonderfully in Gunnell’s work is the sophistication of
the Daughters of Charity as an organization. It is clear from the records that the
motherhouse had a penetrating grasp of the abilities of each sister and a profound
understanding of the talents and experience required by each assignment. The initial team sent to Los Angeles was a formidable group of three women, each with
the specific skills needed to take the lead on one aspect of the operation: nursing,
teaching and establishing the community. Later, when the sisters broke with the
county, the Los Angeles sisters were redeployed to wherever they could best serve

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the overall mission of the Daughters in the Americas, and a new team with a different set of skills was put in place to lead the next phase.
As Gunnell shows, the success of the Los Angeles Daughters of Charity foundation rested with its community’s enduring nature and vision. Sisters passed
through this and other houses in the United States, Mexico, and Latin America.
Along the way they gained experience, were mentored by others who had a wealth
of wisdom to share, and never lost the long-term goals in the day-to-day struggle
to create a lasting social institution to serve the poor. The sisterhood’s story is generations long and deeply intertwined with that of other foundations across the
country and region. Gunnell’s narrative provides a rare view of both the individual
accomplishments and struggles of the sisters, and the ties that bound the women
together into a single sisterhood over the decades.
University of Toronto

SIOBAN NELSON

Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in NineteenthCentury America. By Elizabeth A. Clark. [Divinations: Rereading Late
Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2011. Pp.
x, 561. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4319-2.)
Founding the Fathers explores the earliest decades of church history as an academic discipline in American higher education. Elizabeth Clark, a distinguished
historian of early Christianity (with its largely German early historiography), tells
this story about now-forgotten American church historians who, for complex cultural reasons, develop an interest in the early church but stand at a critical distance
from the German tradition that shaped later American scholarship. Her book carefully examines and critiques the nineteenth-century American tradition, showing
that “scholarly assumptions and personal convictions” would need to be “modified
or abandoned” in order for “a more advanced level of education in religious and theological studies [to] flourish in America” (p. 346). There is an intriguing triangulation happening in this account: as an American historian of early Christianity, Clark
very much stands generationally downstream from her subjects, even while she and
her profession have in many ways disowned them in favor of a German genealogy.
Clark’s principal concern is the formation of early Christian history as a scholarly discipline, and her work provides new material for understanding the seminary
roots of higher education in America. She makes a compelling case that her story
can be told through the careers of six church historians at four Protestant theological institutions: Samuel Miller at Princeton; Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock,
and Philip Schaff at Union; George Fisher at Yale; and Ephraim Emerton at Harvard. As a cohort, they recognized the importance of German scholarship for historical study even while most rejected the radical implications of German ideas.
Five of the six actually studied in Germany.
Clark provides a nuanced account of the considerable obstacles faced by her
subjects as they sought to understand early Christianity, obstacles that especially

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plagued the historians writing in the early and mid-nineteenth century. American
Protestant seminaries were then institutionally in their infancy, with “inadequate
textbooks and libraries, students untutored in history, [and] few colleagues . . . with
whom to organize a theological curriculum” (p. 1). Seminary professors were also
beholden to theological frameworks and assumptions, especially to the idea of a
divinely-inspired Bible and a Protestant reading of history in which the writings of
the Church Fathers (even St. Augustine) were mostly viewed as problematic. Thus
their approach to history was “apologetic, confessional, and moralizing” (p. 343).
Still, despite such obstacles, the story is one of subtle adjustment to German ideals.
The professors warmed to the notion of ecclesial development through the doctrine
of Providence, which safeguarded a Protestant rendering of church history, even
while their new familiarity with the Church Fathers immunized them from some
of the more reactionary forms of anti-Catholicism.
Emerton stands at the end of Clark’s account because, unlike the rest, he challenged some key tenets of Protestant and even Christian exceptionalism. He alone
avoided a confessional approach to church history, arguing for better and more historical sources over the right theological framework. In doing so, he opened up room
for a more thoroughgoing importation of German models of history and biblical
criticism into (some) American seminaries and institutions of higher education.
MacLaurin Institute
St. Paul, MN

BRYAN BADEMAN

Bishops, Bourbons, and Big Mules: A History of the Episcopal Church in Alabama. By J.
Barry Vaughn. [Religion and American Culture.] (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press. 2013. Pp. xvi, 264. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1811-6.)
“The legacy of the Episcopal Church in Alabama is rich” (p. 185). So began
the conclusion of J. Barry Vaughn, now a priest in Las Vegas, about the history of
Alabama’s Episcopal Church. An Alabama native with Divinity degrees from Yale
and St. Andrew’s College in Scotland, he served as rector at St. Alban’s church in
Birmingham from 2004 until his recent position. Although the number of Episcopalians is miniscule, four governors and many prominent Alabama politicians
belonged to this denomination. Celebrities such as writer Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
and actress Tallulah Bankhead were also Episcopalians. The book’s title is not mere
alliteration but reflects the church’s history. The word Bourbons refers to the
planters who, like the royalty in France who returned after Napoleon, survived the
Civil War to reclaim power: “In 1934, Governor Bibb Graves dubbed Alabama’s
industrial barons as the ‘Big Mules’” (p. 2). Many of these Bourbons and Big Mules
were Episcopalians.
Ideally a church history should include all members, and Vaughn valiantly
included certain laypersons. He also used vestry documents, although they are usually about paying bills and fund-raising. The author also made good use of the bishops’ papers and documents, along with other manuscript collections. Vaughn

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accessed the secondary literature as it relates to the national church and Alabama
history. His appendix lists the Episcopal bishops and the date when each parish
church was founded. The author also provides statistics on the U.S. population as it
compares with the Episcopal Church from 1830 to 2010. The same statistics are
provided for the same period on Alabama’s population and the state’s Episcopalians.
With the diocese finally established in 1830, Episcopalians waited fourteen
years for a resident bishop. Virginia native Nicholas H. Cobbs was the first bishop,
and Vaughn gives him high marks for his diligence, piety, and outreach to the
slaves; although, like most Southern churchmen, he did not challenge the peculiar
institution. Cobbs died the day Alabama seceded; his successor, Richard H.
Wilmer, was the only bishop elected during the Confederacy and took office in
1861. Wilmer, too, was a Virginian and a strong Southern partisan. He supported
secession and slavery, and closely identified with the Lost Cause throughout an
episcopacy that lasted until 1899. If Alabama had two prelates in the nineteenth
century, it has witnessed nine since 1900. In 1970, the southern one-third of the
state and the Florida panhandle were separated from the Dioceses of Alabama and
Florida to create a new Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast. Three bishops have
served in that post.
Although all the bishops have had their challenges, no doubt the reign of
Alabama’s second longest bishop was the most tumultuous. Bishop Charles C.
Carpenter, a Georgia native, led the diocese from 1938 to 1968. Some Episcopalians supported racial integration, but most whites—including Carpenter—did
not. Since the 1970s the Episcopal Church has rebranded itself from that of a conservative group to a liberal one: “Once known as ‘the Republican party in prayer’
the Episcopal church now more often resembles the left wing of the Democratic
party” (pp. 187–88). Although Vaughn maintains that issues like the Prayerbook
revisions and women’s ordination split the church in the 1970s, it has been the
battle over the inclusion of homosexuals and lesbians that has caused division and
desertion among Episcopalians since the 1990s.
This is a deeply researched, well-written, judicious account of the Episcopal
Church in Alabama. Although many Episcopalians were wealthy, Vaughn nevertheless believes that Alabama’s Baptists, Methodists, and Roman Catholics have done
more for education and social services in the state (p. 186). It is disappointing that
the author omitted the birthdates of every Episcopal bishop since 1900. Despite this
caveat, this is an important account of a liturgical church in the “Heart of Dixie.”
Georgia Southern University

JAMES M. WOODS

The Secular Spectacle: Performing Religion in a Southern Town. By Chad E. Seales.
(New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 238. $24.95. ISBN 9780-19-986028-9.)
Briefly stated, this is a book about religion, civic and social power, and culture
in the American South, as experienced in the relatively small North Carolina town

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of Siler City, from the latter 1800s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. Utilizing various concepts of “secularization” as defined by several contemporary sociologists, Seales explores the transformation of religious, civic, and community life, with special attention to race relations, in Siler City throughout the period
indicated. In particular, he studies and describes the changing status of African
Americans and immigrant Latinos in relation to a once-dominant white Protestant
political and cultural landscape. By 2000, he reports, Latinos—mostly Mexican
immigrants—constituted 40 percent of the population of Siler City. Employing
“thick description,” Seales both provides many examples of the theories provided
and often raises interesting questions about the relation of religion, race, and culture.
Chad Seales is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of
Texas at Austin. This volume apparently began as his PhD dissertation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is not situated far from the locus of
this study. There are sixty-one pages of detailed endnotes and a helpful index. There
are also several helpful photos interspersed throughout the text. Sadly, there are no
maps to assist the reader and only one chart, whereas more might have been useful.
Because of its heavy reliance on and description of sociological theories, this book
might best be considered for graduate students rather than a general readership.
This reviewer would have appreciated more theological depth in what is in the
main an interesting analysis. More attention might also have been given to the
(contrasting?) meanings of Catholic practices both from the perspective of formal
church doctrine and through the perspective of the immigrants of Siler City. More
analysis might also have been paid to the question of the various places of origin of
these same immigrants and the differences in customs, beliefs, and rituals that
might have resulted because of that variety. Finally, there is not enough historical
analysis or comparison with other Southern towns or regions, even within North
Carolina. But future studies might address these issues. This book provides a good
starting place from which to consider these questions.
Searles contends that a previously dominant liberal white Protestantism
actively participated in the secularization of public life in the course of the civil
rights movements of the mid- and late-twentieth century, and also in response to
the significant immigration of Latino Catholics. Seales holds that the religioussecular transitions studied in this book are best understood in terms of “spatial relationship” rather than in terms of a continuum. Thus, while public life and space in
Siler City were progressively “secularized” in response to changing demographics
and other societal factors, “religious feeling was portable” (p. 15) and could be taken
anywhere into the world. In the end, he concludes, “Southern secularism” (p. 144),
at least for the dominant white Protestant community, protects and preserves the
most sacred values.
Mount Olive, NC

JAMES F. GARNEAU

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Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States.
By William L. Portier. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2013. Pp. xxiv, 402. $39.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8032-2164-9.)
In Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the
United States, William L. Portier offers a new interpretation of the Roman
Catholic modernism crisis and its impact on American Catholicism through the
collective biography of four crucial American participants: John R. Slattery of the
Josephites, Catholic University of America rector Denis J. O’Connoll, and the
Paulists William L. Sullivan and Joseph McSorley. Although all four men garner
detail, McSorley emerges as Portier’s hero and unsung symbol of American
Catholic life between Pope Piux X’s Pascendi Dominici Gegis (1907) and the
Second Vatican Council.
Traditionally, Slattery and Sullivan’s response to Pius X’s Pascendi encyclical
condemning modernism earned the lion’s share of historians’ attention because of
its radicalism. Both men left the Church. Slattery, discouraged with lackluster
Catholic outreach to African-Americans and drawn to the modernist arguments of
Albert Houtin, left the Church, married, and entered the world of finance. Sullivan
embraced modernism, left the Paulists to become a Unitarian minister, and published broadsides attacking the Church he had abandoned. Historians have taken
both men’s self-imposed exile as signals that the post–Pascendi Church was bereft
of intellectual curiosity and that a pall fell over the American Catholic mind until
liberated by the Second Vatican Council. Portier revises this “lights went out” portrayal, rejecting the sometimes self-regarding defensiveness of Slattery and Sullivan
as the definitive word, and seeks “to redeem the time between 1907 and 1962” (p.
325). McSorley serves as the vehicle for that redemption. The New York Paulist,
deeply sympathetic to modernism, did not leave the Church and, rather than being
guilty of bowing to Church authority, adapted his ministry. “[A]n historian who
prayed,” McSorley labored over his biography of Isaac Hecker to redeem the
Paulist founder from the shadow of Americanism and, amidst his pastoral work in
New York, acted as Dorothy Day’s spiritual adviser (p. 365). With a vocation based
on “Holiness and History,” McSorley’s life shows that the lights did not go out in
American Catholicism after 1907 but still shone.
Portier skillfully mines a host of new sources in this book, including Slattery
papers in Europe and the Catholic World correspondence files housed by the
Paulists. He also offers an excellent outline of Pope Leo XIII’s neo-Thomism, the
Americanism controversy, and Catholic intellectual life before modernism. Divided
Friends deserves a close reading by Catholic historians and will become an essential
text for understanding modernism and twentieth-century Catholic life.
Purdue University North Central

MICHAEL J. CONNOLLY

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685

A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See between the Two World
Wars. By Luca Castagna. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of
America Press. 2014. Pp. xx, 193. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-813-225876.)
The intersection between politics and religion has a long history in the United
States, but generally it has been analyzed from an internal perspective, addressing
various issues associated with the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In
his ground-breaking monograph, A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and
the Holy See between the Two World Wars, the Italian historian Luca Castagna, writing from a more external perspective, has ably accomplished his stated objective of
presenting a comprehensive study of the relationship between the Vatican and U.
S. government between the two world wars. Castagna tells his story in a tightly
written and richly contextualized narrative that fills a significant lacuna in the
scholarly literature.
Through a preface and six chronologically based chapters, Castagna has provided the reader and the historical community, utilizing Roman and U.S. archival
resources as well as an exhaustive and rich collection of secondary literature, with
an insightful view into a little-known topic. Initially he provides an overview of the
relationship between the Holy See and United States in the nineteenth century
with its high point during the pontificate of Pope Pius IX when a series of five
diplomats represented the United States in Rome. When this relationship ended in
1867, however, a diplomatic blackout between these two entities would last for seventy-three years. Castagna notes that the appointment of the first apostolic delegate to the United States by Pope Leo XIII in 1893—seemingly a breakthrough in
the relationship—was not politically oriented, but rather an effort by the Holy See
to mend fences with the American hierarchy in the wake of the Americanism crisis.
The first three decades of the twentieth century saw little movement toward
the establishment of diplomatic ties between the Vatican and the American government. Castagna makes no secret of Woodrow Wilson’s anti-Catholic prejudice,
especially as manifested in his rejection of Pope Benedict XV’s Peace Note of 1917,
which was viewed as prejudicial toward the Central Powers. The author uses
Warren Harding’s famous words “a return to normalcy” (p. 61), and the statement
of the famous immigration historian John Higham that the 1920s brought a return
of Anglo-Saxonism and anti-Catholicism, to suggest that the decade did virtually
nothing to advance the stock of the United States toward the Vatican or vice versa.
The great breakthrough in Vatican-U. S. relations occurred when Franklin
Roosevelt entered the White House in March 1933. Roosevelt’s New Deal that
aided millions of “forgotten” people including Catholics, his appointment of two
Catholics to his cabinet, and his direct quotes from the 1931 social encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno played well with church members. Castagna views the U. S.
visit in fall 1936 of Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State and future Pope
Pius XII, as another significant factor in building the bridge between the Vatican
and the United States. The common fear of Roosevelt and Pacelli over the rise of

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the Nazi-Fascist ideology in Europe, as well as the December 23, 1939, appointment of Myron Taylor as the president’s personal representative to the Vatican,
helped to complete the bridge.
Castagna’s monograph is a significant contribution in an area that, save the
work of Gerald Fogarty, S.J., has not been fully analyzed. This reader would have
appreciated a short epilogue recounting some events leading to the eventual establishment of a U.S. ambassador in 1984, but Castagna’s thorough and insightful
scholarship and engaging writing style make this work valuable for scholars, students, and those interested in American Catholic history and church-state relations.
Stonehill College
Easton, MA

RICHARD GRIBBLE, C.S.C.

Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action before and after Vatican II. Edited by
Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly.
[Catholic Practice in North America.] (New York: Fordham University Press.
2014. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8232-5400-2.)
The name “Catholic Action” never became popular in the United States partly
because it seemed too European for American Catholic tastes. However, the concept of “the participation and the collaboration of the laity with the Apostolic Hierarchy,” as Pope Pius XI defined Catholic Action in the encyclical Non Abbiamo
Bisogno (1931), gained widespread appeal under many different names. This
volume offers a sample of eleven of them.
Patrick J. Hayes resurrects from the grave through extensive archival research
the forgotten story of the Catholic Club of the City of New York, which for more
than a half-century was the most prestigious and influential lay Catholic organization in the nation’s largest city. Katharine E. Harmon calls attention to the role of
American Catholic laywomen not only in fostering the liturgical revival but also in
keeping it faithful to its original close connection with social reform (aka Catholic
Action). William Issel demonstrates that in San Francisco for several decades in the
early-twentieth century, the combination of progressive bishops, priests, and lay
leaders (both men and women) imbued local politics and also organized labor in
California with the principles of Catholic social teaching.
The Jesuit John Courtney Murray was an ardent advocate of Catholic Action,
but he doubted that the neo-Scholasticism of his seminary education was capable
of providing the theological justification for laypeople to assume leadership roles in
Catholic social activism. Christopher D. Denny describes Murray’s efforts to establish a suitable theological grounding for Catholic Action. Mary Elizabeth Brown,
the leading expert on Italian American Catholicism in New York City, ventures
into new territory in her fascinating study of post–World War II Italian-American
Catholicism in Boston and Washington, DC. The evangelization efforts of the
Catholic Extension Society, which date from 1905, are well known, but Elizabeth
Duclos-Orsello focuses on an all-but-forgotten subgroup: the Extension Lay Vol-

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unteers, which was composed of some 2000 young Catholics (80 percent of them
women) who between 1961 and 1971 attempted to promote the aggiornamento of
the Second Vatican Council among some of the most disadvantaged American
Catholics on the parish level across the United States.
At the time of the Council, in the words of Sister Patricia Byrne, C.S.J.,
“Catholic education in the United States [was] the largest private educational
enterprise known to history.”1 However, within a decade of the Council, says Mary
Beth Fraser Connolly, “this dynamic would be in tatters” (p. 172). She offers a
revealing insight into this puzzling development by tracing the heroic struggle of
the Chicago Province of the Sisters of Mercy to explore new forms of ministry
while maintaining their educational apostolate, especially in inner-city neighborhoods. In an admirably balanced revisionist study of the National Council of
Catholic Women (NCCW), Mary J. Henold describes how her research into the
history of the NCCW led her to discover the unexpected evolution of this traditionally conservative organization into a source of support for a moderate form of
Christian feminism.
The most dangerous time for a bad government, Alexis De Tocqueville
claimed, is when it begins to reform. The last three chapters illustrate the wisdom
of that remark by describing the difficulties encountered by some of the most progressive U.S. bishops as they attempted to provide a role for the laity in the governance of a hierarchical Church. Jeremy Bonner concentrates on the efforts of
Bishop Victor Reed in the Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa; Samuel J.
Thomas traces the leadership role of Cardinal John Dearden both in Detroit and
nationally as the chair of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops;
Andrew S. Moore explores the limits of consensus-building in Atlanta where even
Archbishop Paul Hallinan and Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Bernardin failed to satisfy
the demands of the more radical reformers.
Empowering the People of God is the second volume in the new series Catholic
Practice in North America, which is edited by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and John
C. Seitz, both members of the Fordham University faculty. These eleven wideranging case studies are a reassuring augury for the future of the series.
Fordham University (Emeritus)

THOMAS J. SHELLEY

1. Patricia Byrne, Introduction to “Catholic Education in the United States: Foundations,” in Creative Fidelity: American Catholic Intellectual Traditions, ed. R. Scott Appleby,
Patricia Byrne, and William L. Portier (Maryknoll, NY, 2004), pp. 55–58, here p. 55.

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L ATIN A MERICAN
Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial
Brazil, 1500–1822. By Carole A. Myscofski. [Louann Atkins Temple
Women & Culture Series, Book 32.] (Austin: University of Texas Press.
2013. Pp. xii, 308. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-292-74853-8.)
Women constitute more than half of humankind, but that reality has not been
apparent in the historical writing that, until very recently, has been composed by
males, focused on males, and written for males. Historical records, either manuscript or printed, have similarly privileged men, no more so than in frontier societies such as colonial Brazil, which produced limited records and in which men
dominated. Any work that seeks to redress this bias is valuable, so Carole
Myscofski’s book is to be welcomed for what it adds to the English-language literature on women in Brazil. The work’s six chapters investigate specific aspects of
how Catholicism, the official religion during the colonial period, perceived and
treated females.
The opening chapter studies the two competing perceptions of indigenous
women by the early missionaries—the first viewing them as “innocent and compliant” (p. 23), and so susceptible to manipulation; and the second viewing them as
aggressive and dangerous, and so labeling them “amazons and cannibals” (p. 19).
The subsequent chapter, probably the most incisive and insightful, discusses the
perception of the ideal woman. She was the personification of “honor,” a virtue that
would transmute into “dishonor” if she acted in any way that asserted her autonomy
in thought and action. The third chapter, too short in length to be satisfactory,
looks at how the purpose of education was perceived to be the inculcation of
“virtue,” an approach that gave women sparse, even derisory, opportunities for education, whether academically or practically based.
The fourth chapter, “Before the Church Doors,” considers the role of women
played in the life cycle, being first daughters and then wives (if of European
descent) but more usually (for those of non-European descent) caught in often
enduring consensual unions, concubinage, or prostitution. An uncertain and
repetitive organization renders the discussion of this key topic much less effective
than it could have been. There follows a chapter that draws on archival sources in
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and examines the convents and the recolhimentos—
the two institutions in which women passed their adult life in seclusion, guarded
from the world. The two existed from the 1580s onward—the first receiving the
authorization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and accepting only the daughters of
the elite; the second being unofficial, more autonomous, and more open to
females of mixed descent.
The final chapter differs from the rest in looking at women not as objects but
as actors, since it treats of forty-two women investigated by the Holy Inquisition
for practicing magic. The focus of discussion is, however, much less on the women

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and their motivation than on the Catholic Church’s attitudes to magic and on the
types of magic practiced in colonial Brazil. Even more seriously, since the author
fails to compare the forms of magic used by women with those used by men, an
essential element in the analysis is missing.
As will be apparent, the book can be categorized more as a study of religious
(and so male) attitudes and treatment of women than of gender relations treated
from a feminine viewpoint. Given that the author is an academic specializing in
religion, this approach is understandable. However, the approach would have been
more effective and the chapters more forceful if the handling of the topics were
better organized and more conceptual, and the prose style less heavy. Myscofski’s
book will, accordingly, be of most use to scholars desiring to obtain knowledge
about attitudes toward and the treatment of women in colonial Brazil.
University of British Columbia

RODERICK J. BARMAN

Death by Effigy: A Case from the Mexican Inquisition. By Luis R. Corteguera. [The
Early Modern Americas.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2012. Pp, xviii, 222. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4439-7.)
In January 1569, King Philip II decreed the establishment of a tribunal of the
Inquisition in New Spain to “eradicate” from non-Indian society all heresy, heterodoxy, and offenses against the Christian God. Still on unsure footing in the viceroyalty, the Mexican Inquisition soon became involved in quarrels with both ecclesiastical and royal authorities over matters of jurisdiction and privileges over both
temporal and spiritual spheres. Inquisitors were sensitive to matters of etiquette, and
the breach of protocol by both ecclesiastic and secular authorities in Masses, meetings, and rituals of public punishment often triggered heated disagreements that
easily escalated into serious confrontations. Eager to establish its authority, the
newly established institution became particularly sensitive about the unauthorized
use of the Holy Office’s name and symbols to promote personal interests.
In Death by Effigy, Luis R. Corteguera offers a probing discussion of the challenges faced by the Holy Office to establish its authority in New Spain, through a
careful and nuanced analysis of a scandalous case of misappropriation of the Inquisition’s symbols in a colonial setting. Corteguera’s book revolves around an apparently insignificant incident that took place on July 21, 1578, in the small town of
Temachalco that is located in the present-day state of Puebla. On that day, a Franciscan friar found a two-faced effigy hanging from the town church’s door over a pile
of wood. Adorned with black feathers and a sambenito (the Inquisition’s penitential
garment), the doll had a tongue sewn into each one of its mouths (one with a forked
end, the other with a gag); two additional sambenitos were affixed to the building’s
facade, and three signs in gothic letters slandered a prominent town dweller by labeling him a Jew and warned others against removing these signs of infamy.
Hernando Rubio Naranjo, the victim of the anonymous slander, was a thirtyfive-year-old unmarried man who made a fortune by trading between Teca-

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machalco and Oaxaca. Although he had no Jewish ancestry, the merchant was
widely known as a “Jewish scoundrel” because of his widespread reputation as a
“usurer.” The antisemitic accusation was compounded by Rubio’s deeds as a deslenguado (“loose-tongued”); a hated man who had no problem defaming neighbors
who considered him a friend, spreading false rumors on several reputable women,
and cuckolding a fellow trader. Because of his exploits, he was once severely beaten
and his face was slashed with a knife. This time, however, his enemies decided to
teach him a lesson by slandering his “good name” with an effigy. The Inquisition
considered the scandal a “grave offense” not because of the false accusations against
the victim, but because the conspirators had appropriated the Holy Office’s symbols to carry out the slander. During the next four years, the tribunal conducted
nine different trials and interrogated dozens of suspects and witnesses to find the
culprits, accumulating in the process almost seven hundred pages of detailed information. The difficulty of resolving the case resulted in unusually harsh punishments against the leaders of the conspiracy, Juan de Molina and Francisco Yanez.
On July 22, 1582, the tribunal sentenced them to 200 lashes and five years as galley
slaves without pay; their co-conspirators, Ana de Figueroa and Juan de Lopez,
would each receive 100 lashes and banishment for five years from the Diocese of
Tlaxcala. As for Rubio Naranjo, he apparently decided to leave Tecamachalco for
Tlaxcala around 1581, perhaps realizing he had become a persona non grata in the
small town.
Drawing from inquisitorial documents in the Huntington Library and the
Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, Corteguera weaves a fascinating tale
of deception, revenge, and rumor politics in early colonial Mexico. By reducing the
scale of analysis in time and space, Corteguera not only unravels the twists and
turns of an intricate conspiracy but also offers a fine-grained analysis of the legal
culture of the time and the judicial proceedings of an embattled institution. What
counted as evidence in an “honor society”? What made a witness reliable? What
were the criteria to interrogate under torture? Corteguera addresses these larger
questions without losing sight of the petty politics and daily negotiations involved
in keeping and losing one’s “good name.” Clearly written and cogently argued, this
book will make an excellent addition to undergraduate and introductory courses on
colonial Latin America.
University of Illinois at Chicago

JAVIER VILLA-FLORES

Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes. By
Maya Stanfield-Mazzi. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 2013. Pp. xviii,
241. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8165-3031-1.)
Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes by
Maya Stanfiled Mazzi is a richly documented, well-illustrated book that studies the
proliferation of miraculous images in the southern highlands of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru. The author, an art historian, gives a social art-historical
account of some of the most important and enduring sculptures and paintings of the

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southern Andes. Some images, such as Our Lord of the Earthquake in Cuzco and
the Virgin of Copacabana, are relatively well studied and rather familiar. Others are
less well known, such as the Virgin of Pomata. She brings these images into dialogue
with one another by framing them within an analysis of their common historical
place as a part of Andean Evangelization. She begins her account by delineating the
differences between Andean (Inca) and Catholic forms of religious imagery so as to
understand the developments that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She dwells (rightfully so) on Andean ancestor worship and the cult of mummies as forms of veneration and communication. This is quickly followed by an
account of the extirpation of these forms during the early campaigns of evangelization carried out by various orders that evangelized this region. Much of this is welltrodden territory, including the early struggles of the Dominicans with the secular
church in the area around Lake Titicaca; however, her reading of church inventories
for Zepita and Juli reveals how, from very early on, liturgical objects, especially altar
cloths, were a combination of pre-Columbian and European motifs. This melding
of values expressed through iconography and media allows the reader to understand
the complex nature of Andean Christian devotion.
There are several problems in the book that give the reader pause in terms of
having confidence that the author has firm control of her data. In truth, this could
have been avoided if the readers’ reports and the editors had been a bit more thorough in reading the manuscript. The most significant problem is that the author
really does not have a firm grasp of the orthodoxy of Christian doctrine, or she at
least does not distinguish between orthodoxy and the heterodoxy of Andean Christianity. Thus the author consistently refers to the images of Jesus, Mary, and others
as images of Christian deities. For example, on page 3 she writes: “the statues represented the principal Christian deities believed to have taken human form, especially Jesus and his mother.” This is not a simple, one-time mistake but is a consistent form for addressing Christian religious imagery. The idea that the diverse
images represent a plethora of Christian deities is restated on pages 59, 65, 120,
and 156. Christianity is a monotheistic religion, although the concept of the Trinity may have been difficult to convey to the Andeans, and they may have interpreted it as three distinct entities. Whatever the case, the distinction is not made
by the author between doctrine and local interpretation. There are also other glaring factual mistakes. For example, Santfield-Maya identifies one of the three areas
that Charles V claimed as his own as being La Puna in Argentina. In fact, the area
claimed by Charles V was la Isla Puná in Ecuador, which was a major trading
center at the mouth of the Guayas river and more than 1000 miles distant. These
kinds of errors should have been caught by the reviewers of the manuscript, and
they mar what is otherwise a fine contribution to the study of Andean Catholicism
and art history.
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
Harvard University

THOMAS B. F. CUMMINS

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Translated Christianities: Nahuatl and Maya Religious Texts. By Mark Z. Christensen. [Latin American Originals, Vol. 8.] (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press. 2014. Pp. xv, 135. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-271-06361-4.)
Mexico’s first missionaries envisioned an American Church with Indian clergy
and indigenous-language rituals. However, against the background of the Reformation and the Council of Trent, Mexico’s First Provincial Council of 1555 turned back
from this position and restricted the production and circulation of religious writings
in native tongues. Mark Christensen shows us the extent to which an indigenous
Christian literature continued to evolve and thrive in the centuries that followed.
Translated Christianities is organized around a series of religious texts originally composed in the Nahuatl and Maya languages between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The documents are not widely known to the reading public,
nor are they easily accessible to scholars, and much of the book is based on the
author’s own archival discoveries and translations. This volume at first could be
mistaken for a sourcebook or for a monograph, but it is actually something in
between. The approach has much in common with books like William Taylor’s
Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque, 2011) and Louise
Burkhart, Barry Sell, and Stafford Poole’s Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theater in Colonial Mexico (Norman, OK, 2011). Christensen surrounds the translated texts with
explanations of their origins, transmission, and cultural context. The resulting work
is both rigorous and transparent.
The diversity of genres represented in this volume is striking. It include sermons, catechisms, guides to confession, and—perhaps most fascinating of all—
adaptations of biblical narratives and hagiographies. As Christensen emphasized in
his previous work, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms (Stanford, 2013), religious writings in native languages had multiple origins and functions: some were official
printed works, others were manuscripts circulated informally among European and
indigenous churchmen, and still others were written by Indians for Indians in a
realm of religious life that was flourishing beyond the walls of mission churches. All
are represented here. As one would expect, the majority of the documents are from
the early colonial period. However, there are also some valuable and unexpected
materials from later eras. Among these, a Maya Methodist catechism makes one
reconsider how Protestantism was first experienced amidst the diversity of beliefs
and practices in indigenous Catholicism.
The sixteenth century gave the world a remarkable generation of European
and indigenous linguists who preserved a written record of Mexico’s early contacts
between cultures. The beginning of the twenty-first century has given rise to a new
generation of scholars capable of more fully interpreting that record. This wave of
scholarship is often termed New Philology and associated with the tradition of
James Lockhart. Today, dozens of such scholars are bringing new methods to bear
on known sources, even as they discover new ones. Christensen has become a significant historian in this community. Much like David Tavárez and Peter Sigal in

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their recent works on culture and religion, Christensen raises subtle questions about
word choice and field-of-meaning. He asks us to consider what theological judgments were expressed when a colonial translator selected the nearest linguistic
equivalents for complex concepts like soul or devil. The implications for understanding both the expression and reception of Christianity are significant.
Those of us interested in global early-modern Catholicism might do well to
read Translated Chistianities beside standard works on the Chinese Rights Controversy, as we struggle to understand the role of language in the communication and
adaptation of religion in this age of intercontinental exchange. Readers who have
not yet encountered Christensen’s Nahua and Maya Catholicism may wish to read
both works. Despite similar titles and some overlapping arguments and texts, these
are distinct works, each with its own contributions to make. In retrospect, they
might have been brought to press as one combined volume. Be that as it may,
Christensen has turned out two very important publications a year apart. Both will
leave their mark in the fields of history and religious studies.
Southern Oregon University

SEAN F. MCENROE

The Politics and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. By George Antony Thomas.
[Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. vii, 144. $114.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-37697.)
Research on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51–1695) continues to increase
and produce innovative and provocative studies that uncover elements previously
ignored. George Antony Thomas has written one of these studies. In The Politics
and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Thomas analyzes an aspect of Sor Juana’s
work that others have only touched on when searching for individual instances in
which Sor Juana dedicated her writings to others–principally to New-Spanish
vicereines. Thomas goes far beyond regularly cited verses and focuses on Sor Juana’s
“occasional works” that include epithalamia or celebratory wedding poems, epitaphs to commemorate deaths, triumphal arches, epinicia or triumphal odes, poems
that accompany gifts, and birthday poems. Thomas depicts Sor Juana as a writer
who took advantage of various special occasions on which she attempted to present
her ideas, to effect change in both New-Spanish and Spanish societies, and to promote her thriving literary career.
Thomas clearly grasps the “occasional mode” and evaluates these texts from an
interdisciplinary perspective. He not only incorporates a traditional historical
approach but also integrates issues of gender and marginalization as well as
enhanced literary discursive analyses of classical forms. In the first chapter he gives
a thorough historical background of the stages through which nuns passed as they
took their final sacred vows to become brides of Christ. His mention of the “monja
coronada” or “crowned nun” paintings—a type of wedding portrait painted of the
nuns on their profession or deathbed—emphasizes the cultural importance of the
process. Additionally, he well defines and contextualizes the genre of the epithalamium as a highly employed form of occasional poetry. He describes it even further

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within the confines of the convent and portrays Sor Juana, like other early-modern
women, as a “wedding preacher” who could become a “theologian in verse.” Subsequently, Thomas compares Sor Juana with other Iberian nuns who contribute to
this poetic form: Sor Cecilia de Nacimiento (1570–1646), Sor Violante do Céu
(1601–93), Doña Ana Francisca Abarca de Bolea (1623–?), and Sor Marcela de
San Félix (1605–87).
Chapter 2 concentrates on the significance of the classical Roman poet
Horace to Sor Juana’s poetry written for imperial occasions such as epitaphs, epinicia, and triumphal arches. Sor Juana is the only woman known to design such an
arch in colonial history, and Thomas cleverly adds to and evaluates scholarship that
highlights her as a proponent of the importance of New Spain and the Americas as
opposed to a mere puppet who admires the Spanish metropolis. In chapter 3
Thomas continues to underscore Horace’s influence and devotes much time to Sor
Juana’s literary “self-fashioning” or self-promotion. He establishes her link to other
women writers and suggests her efforts to develop a community of women scholars.
Chapter 4 observes how Sor Juana used birthday verses and poems that accompanied gifts to viceroys and their wives to express her opinions on political matters.
She not only focused on kings or viceroys but also addressed queens and vicereines
as part of the ruling power in the public sphere instead of in domestic scenarios
alone. Thomas concludes with an examination of how the “political aesthetics” in
Sor Juana’s occasional works recur in her most read prose composition, the
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz.
Thomas’s book is a welcome, thought-provoking, and well-researched addition to Sor Juana studies, and it provides an unprecedented interpretation of Sor
Juana’s occasional writings that helps readers better understand her complete works
and those of other early-modern women writers.
University of Oklahoma

GRADY C. WRAY

Franciscanos eminentes en territorios de fronteras. Edited by Amaya Cabranes and
Thomas Calvo. (Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán and El Colegio de San
Luis. 2014. Pp. 235. $12.00 paperback. ISBN 978-607-8257-78-2.)
By the mid-seventeenth century, the enthusiasm and energy that characterized the first generation of mendicant friars who arrived in Mexico to Christianize
the indigenous population had declined for many reasons. Although the central
and southern areas proved to be more amenable to Spanish settlement and Christianization, in the far north and west the various nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes
proved a challenge for evangelizers. The swell of Christianization that seemed so
inevitable in the sixteenth century slowed down, and the missionaries had to fight
inch by inch to gain converts as well as territory. The personal recollections of two
Franciscans engaged in that process form the core of this work.
The documents transcribed and edited by the very capable team of Amaya
Cabranes and Thomas Calvo belonged to two men who had little in common except

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the desire to add numbers to the meager crop of converts to Christianity in lands
still in the hands of “apostates” and “gentiles.” Newly arrived missionary Juan
Caballero Carranco narrates a frustrating trip to the coast of Baja California in 1669
led by a man whose main interest was to find pearls. The Franciscan longed to assess
the potential for conversion among the scattered population but turned out to be
better at registering the incidents of the voyage, its men, and the geography of the
area than at proselytizing. He was also a frustrated policy maker. His description of
the spiritual and material needs of the Cora tribes in the Sonora and Nayarit area
reveal a well-thought plan to supplant the Jesuits and carry out a broad sweep to
attract and retain the resilient Indians into the fold of the Church. He represents the
idealistic men traveling from Spain to fulfill a personal as well as a religious mission
in the belief that all they needed was a well-planned policy to conquer all obstacles.
The second friar, Juan González Cordero, tended to his flock on the northwest frontiers of central Mexico (Queretaro, San Miguel, Celaya) from the 1630s
to the 1660s. He personified the established parish missionary who performed his
duties for years among people who, although official Christian converts, were still
engaged in what he called “superstitious” practices. His detailed description of how
he proselytized and attempted to guard the purity of Christian beliefs records the
practices of the indigenous flock and the endeavors of their guardian. It was an
unsettled situation that gave shamans the opportunity to continue practicing their
arts and made the missionary’s life one of constant struggle among presumed
Christians and non-Christians. González Cordero, almost unaware of his role, left
a rich source of information for future ethnologists.
The careful introductory comments of the editors underline the importance of
preconceived ideas among the evangelizers and the strong pull of the land on the
process of evangelization. Calvo and Cabranes define the work of the missionaries as
carving physical and spiritual frontiers. They have rendered a great service to historians
of the evangelization of northern and central Mexico with the publication of these rich
and previously unknown sources. Calvo has made a specialty of unearthing documents
about the northwest region of Mexico, which he has published in previous works on
the history of that region. Calvo and Cambranes call our attention to the fact that
these two narratives are as much mirrors of the missionaries as pictures of the fragility
of Catholicism. Still challenged by native “men-gods” attracting subversive practices,
the religious landscape of the area, 150 years after the conquest, was still in a state of
flux between acceptance and rejection, and between still-active old autochthonous traditions and the stubborn determination of men of the cloth to eradicate them, as they
believed their faith required. It was a confrontation that had not yet reached a resolution. As the editors point out, the sixteenth-century Franciscan utopia of creating an
independent “Indian republic,” although not totally dead, had changed into a form of
assimilation that demanded greater Hispanization, the material support of the crown,
and the incentive of trade and industry. It would take another century to achieve those
goals, but the records of these two missionaries capture the essence of a middle period
of struggle that historians will read with appreciation.
Arizona State University (Emerita)

ASUNCIÓN LAVRIN

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For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican
Huasteca. By Mark Saad Saka. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press. 2013. Pp. xxi, 186. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8263-5338-2.)
Over the past thirty years, major regional studies, mainly of Mexico’s southeastern states, have explored the way in which nineteenth-century civil and foreign
wars drew rural communities into politics as indigenous peasants took to arms in
support of regional and national causes in exchange for promises of constitutional
guarantees. For God and Revolution is a welcome contribution to this literature.
Well suited for undergraduates, this short book provides a fascinating case study of
the popular roots of Mexican liberalism, Catholicism, and republicanism.
Mark Saad Saka’s region is the Huasteca, encompassing the vast Panuco river
basin that includes segments of five states and serves as a natural boundary between
east-central and north-eastern Mexico. The first five chapters chart 400 years of
resistance of the region’s Maya-speaking Teenecks to Aztec, Spanish, and republican rule. The final two chapters explore the principal focus of the book: a peasant
rebellion between 1877 and 1883 led by indigenous leader Juan Santiago under the
banner of “death to all those who wear pants!”
Hard to reach from Mexico’s highland centers of power, even from its own
provincial capital of San Luis Potosi, the Huasteca provided sanctuary and a strategic reserve for forces opposed to colonial rule and later to foreign invasions. Saad
Saka traces a pattern of peasant guerrilla forces embracing national causes, manifesting first in the insurgency in 1811; continuing through the federalist movement
of the 1830s, the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, and the European Intervention of 1862-67; and culminating in Díaz’s rebellions against Juárez’s centralizing
liberalism during the 1870s. Santiago’s rebellion is explained as a response to secular changes facing much of rural Mexico during the final decades of the century:
the privatization of church land and town lands, the use of forced labor for constructing of roads and railways, the growth of large estates, mounting insecurity of
land tenure and worsening terms of sharecropping, the introduction of sugar with
its accompanying abuse of labor, and so forth. Particularly interesting is the
involvement of radical priest Mauricio Zavala who, after first promoting education
and social reform in the state capital, moved in 1873 to Ciudad del Maíz and promoted primary schooling throughout the region, paying close attention to the
needs of indigenous-language speakers, women, and field workers. Backing for villagers in their petitions and legal struggles brought Zavala in touch with indigenous
leaders as well as radical liberals, socialists, and anarchists in Mexico City. Adaptation of socialist and anarchist ideas to the traditions of indigenous communal politics and folk Catholicism is evident in rebels’ petitions and emblems (including the
black and red flag).
Specialists will be disappointed by the author’s reluctance to explore important questions more deeply. How, in contrast to other regions, was the Huasteca
clergy able to mobilize peasants in successive wars and popular uprisings? The

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region’s complex ethnic hierarchy—particularly divisions between Indians and
non-Indians, and between Nahuas and Teenecks—is underexplored. Why were
certain communities particularly rebellious? The agrarian trouble spot of
Tamazunchale’s barrio de San Francisco, Santiago’s home base, deserves closer
attention. Primary research was limited to the (admittedly rich) state archive in
San Luis Potosi. Yet the historical archive of the Ministry of Defense (now online)
would have helped clarify the relationship among armed groups in the Huasteca,
regional actors, and national actors, and sampling of local municipal archives
would surely have shed light on subregional and local differences in ethnic and
political allegiance. Murky maps, containing no keys or obvious reference to the
text, confirm this lack of attention to national context and local difference,
expected of a regional study.
This book represents more an exploratory sampling rather than a full exploration of a subject which deserves closer examination based on fuller research. Yet,
For God and Revolution tells a good story and, by documenting the Catholic clergy’s
contribution to the struggle of indigenous peasants for justice, represents an important contribution to the literature on Mexican popular liberalism in the nineteenth
century.
University of Warwick

GUY THOMSON

Notes and Comments
ASSOCIATION NEWS
The program for the annual meeting scheduled for Atlanta in January 2016
has been submitted to the American Historical Association for inclusion in its program announcements. The ACHA is grateful to its committee members (Martin
Menke, Maria Mazzenga, and James Carroll) for their work on the program. Registration for the meeting will begin in September. Nominations of candidates to
serve on the ACHA Executive Council should be sent to the Election Board Committee chair, Jay Carney of Creighton University, care of acha@fordham.edu.

CAUSES OF SAINTS
On April 21, 2015, the positio (a 1300-page summary of more than 6000 pages
of acta on life and ministry) for the canonization of the Servant of God Father
Patrick Peyton, C.S.C. (1909–92), was presented to the Congregation for the
Causes of Saints. Born in County Mayo, Ireland, he emigrated to the United States
in 1928, entered the Congregation of the Holy Cross, promoted religious programing on radio and television, and became known as the “Rosary Priest” who claimed
that “the family that prays together stays together.” Three possible medical miracles
attributed to his intercession are under investigation.
On May 5, 2015, Pope Francis approved decrees regarding miracles attributed
to the intercession of Blessed Vincenzo Grossi (1845–1917), Italian diocesan priest
and founder of the Institute of the Daughters of the Oratory; Blessed Maria of the
Immaculate Conception (née Maria Isabel Salvat Romero, 1926–98), Spanish
Superior General of the Sisters of the Company of the Cross; and the Venerable
Servant of God Giacomo Abbondo (1720–88), Italian diocesan priest. The pope
also approved the status of martyr for the Servants of God Mario Borzaga (1932–
60), Italian professed priest of the Congregation of Missionary Oblates of Mary
Immaculate, and Paul Thoj Xyooj (1941–60), lay catechist, killed together in
hatred of the faith in Laos. Pope Francis acknowledged the heroic virtues of the
following Servants of God: Jacinto Vera (1813–81), bishop of Montevideo in
Uruguay; Antonio Antic (1893–1965), Croatian professed priest of the Order of
Friars Minor; Juliette Colbert de Falletti di Barolo (1786–1864), French laywoman, widow, and founder of the Daughters of Jesus the Good Shepherd; Maria
Brigida Postorino (1865–1960), Italian founder of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate; Maria Rafaela Jesús Hostia (1915–91), Spanish professed nun of the Order
of Capuchin Poor Clares; and the Modenese lay couple, parents, and members of
the Secular Franciscan Order Sergio Bernardini (1882–1966) and Domenica
Bedonni Bernardini (1889–1971).
698

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699

On May 17, 2015, Pope Francis canonized as saints Sister Marie-Alphonsine
Dani Ghattas (née Mariam Sultaneh, 1843–1927), founder of the first Arab religious congregation, the Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary of Jerusalem; Sister Mary
of Jesus Crucified (née Mariam Baouardy, 1846–78), Melkite Greek Catholic Discalced Carmelite; Sister Jeanne-Emilie de Villeneuve (1811–54); and the Neapolitan Sister Maria Cristina Brando of the Immaculate Conception (née Adelaide,
1856–1906).
On May 23, 2015, in a ceremony in El Salvador Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo
Romero (1917–80) was declared a blessed.
On June 5, 2015, Pope Francis approved the miracles attributed to the Venerable Servants of God Francesco de Paola Victor (1827–1905), a Brazilian
diocesan priest, and Klara Ludwika Szczęsna (1863–1916), Polish cofounder of
the Congregation of the Handmaids of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. He also
approved the status of martyr for the Servants of God Frederic of Berga, O.F.M.
Cap. (1877–1937, born Martí Tarrés Puigpelat), and twenty-five companions,
Spanish Capuchin priests and lay brothers, who were killed in hatred of the faith,
1936–37; and for Joseph Thao Tiên (1915–54), a Laotian diocesan priest, plus
ten companions, who were professed priests of the Society of the Paris Foreign
Missions and Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and four lay companions, all killed in
Laos between 1954 and 1970 in hatred of the faith. The pope also recognized the
heroic virtues of the following Servants of God: Antonio Celona (1873–1952),
an Italian diocesan priest and founder of the Handmaids of the Reparation of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus; Ottorino Zanon (1915–72), Italian priest and founder of
the Congregation of the Pious Society of St. Cajetan; Marcello Labor (1890–
1954), Italian diocesan priest; and Maria Antonia of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
(1839–1914, née Rachele Lalia), Italian founder of the Dominican Sisters of St.
Sisto Vecchio.
On September 23, 2015, Pope Francis, in a ceremony outside the National
Shrine of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, will canonize as saint the apostle of California Friar Junípero Serra (1713–84).

FELLOWSHIP
The Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose “Giovanni XXIII” in Bologna,
Italy, has announced the availability of three fellowships worth €12,000 each in
its Alta Scuola europea di scienze religiose “Giuseppe Alberigo” to support
research in religious history, exegesis, and theology. Candidates must be under
twenty-six years of age and should possess a degree of laurea specialistica or
magistrale or its equivalent (that is, the American master’s degree). Documentation must be received by July 15, 2015. A pdf may be sent to segreteria@fscire.it,
but a hard copy with a postmark also must be sent to the secretary of the Fondazione by the deadline indicated. Recipients will be announced September 7–
11, 2015.

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P RIZE
The John L. Snell Memorial Prize in European History for 2015, valued at
$250 and sponsored by the European History Section of the Southern Historical
Association, will be given to a graduate student of a program at a Southern college
or university who submitted the best seminar paper written during the past academic year (including summer 2015) on a topic in European history from the prehistorical period to the present and encompassing any part of the entire continent,
including Russia. The paper should not exceed 50 pages, including foot- or endnotes, but excluding the appended bibliography, be in 12-point Times New Roman
font, and with a one-inch margin on all sides. The seminar paper should be accompanied by a letter of endorsement from a supervising faculty member or adviser.
Both paper and letter should be sent by August 1, 2015, to each of the following
three judges: Dr. Patricia Kollander, Department of History, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431 (kollander@fau.edu); Dr. Hunt
Tooley, Department of History, Austin College, 900 North Grand Avenue, Sherman, TX 75090-4400 (htooley@austincollege.edu); and Dr. Stephen J. Stillwell,
School of Information Resources and Library Sciences, 1515 East First Street,
Tucson, AZ 85719 (sjstill@email.arizona.edu).

REFERENCE WORK AND TOOLS
The Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques (DHGE) is making a
fresh start after the publication of fascicle 185 (Leyen-Licayrac), the final part of
tome XXXI. Since 1909, the Dictionnaire was the product of the Parisian publishing
company Éditions Letouzey et Ané. Publishing responsibilities will now be assumed
by Brepols (Turnhout), which has been providing an online version of the printed
dictionary for the past several years. The academic development of the new project
remains under the jurisdiction of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Université
Catholique de Louvain, with some important changes made. To offer a new article
to the editorial team, authors can now choose from the following options: (1) an
updated or revised version of a previously published lemma (letters A–L); (2) a new
article that serves to fill important lacunae in past installments (letters A–L); or (3)
new entries composing the letters M–Z, which were lacking up to now. Each new
lemma will be made available online without delay; paper fascicles, assembling the
latest new entries, will be published within the year (each fascicle in alphabetical
order from A to Z). Articles may be written in either English or French. A limited
number also will be published in Spanish, Italian, and German. Authors of accepted
articles will receive financial remuneration from Brepols.
The editorial team is seeking experts from all over the world to contribute to
the dictionary’s time-honored reputation and high standing: to bring older articles
up to date or to offer new articles, please contact the editorial staff via email
at dhge-teco@uclouvain.be. Further details will appear on the Web site
of the Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique (http://www.rhe.eu.com) and Brepols

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701

(http://www.brepols.net). Contributions will appear online immediately following
final approval, and they will be published in printed form within the year.
The University Libraries at The Catholic University of America is featuring a
weekly blog highlighting issues and items relating to the collections. In the
“Archivist’s Nook,” staff members of the archives blog to engage researchers and
other members of the public with text, images, and Web links. Entries have been
promoted via social media and can be accessed via the main blog site at
http://www.lib.cua.edu/wordpress/newsevents/category/acua/archivistsnook/.

CONFERENCES
On October 2–3, 2015, the Annual Congress of the Société canadienne d’histoire de l’Église catholique will meet at the Université du Québec à Montréal for a
conference on the theme “Mutations et recompositions des expressions culturelles
et populaires du catholicisme Québécois.” In the opening session Philippe Portier
will speak on “Catholicism and Culture: The Course of a Disassociation.” Panel I
is dedicated to “The Balance Sheet: Catholicism and Culture in Québec” and will
include “Religion populaire, religion de clercs: retour sur l’historiographie (XIXe–
XXe siècles)” by Catherine Foisy; “Sociologie des religions au Canada français:
déprise et constitution d’un savoir autonome? (1955–1990)” by E-Martin Meunier;
and “Catholicisme et culture dans la théologie québecoise: mode de connaissance,
paradoxe et retrait (1930–1980)” by Anne Fortin. Panel II is devoted to “(Re)inculturation of Catholicism in the XIXth Century” and will feature “Ignace Bourget, le
père d’une révolution culturelle au Canada français” by Roberto Perin; “Apogée et
déclin de l’ultramontanisme au Canada français: retour heuristique sur une périodisation en débat” by Jean-François Laniel; and “Sortir de l’antagonisme libéral-ultramontain. Le point de vue ‘réformiste’” by Éric Bédard. Session I on “Catholicism
and Politics” will feature “L’Église catholique québécoise et le suffrage féminin” by
Alexandre Dumas; “Pour la plus grande gloire de Dieu. Louis Veuillot dans les collèges classiques du Québec, 1840–1970” by Sébastien Lecompte; and “L’ordre
social dans les représentations promotionnelles de la Banque d’Épargne diffusées
sous l’égide de la Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste entre 1924 et 1944” by Olga Hazan.
Session II–Part I on “Catholicism and Literature” will feature “L’Église et les
bulles. Les représentations des catholicismes dans la bande dessinée francophone
(années 1990–2010)” by Sara Teinturier; and “L’envers de l’histoire contemporaine:
Anne Hébert, Les enfant du sabbat” by Anne-Élaine Cliché. Session II–Part II contains “La culture catholique du Canada français selon Jacques Ferron: Une lecture
du Saint-Élias” by Jacques Cardinal; and “Menaud maître-draveur, ou le catholicisme comme révélation d’un héritage en mutation” by Céline Philippe. Session III
on “Catholicism and the New Practices” includes “Corps et guérison chez les
catholiques charismatiques: une reconsidération de l’encadrement ecclésiastique
dans la religion populaire” by Guillaume Boucher and “Les croix de chemin du
Québec et la naissance du dévotionnalisme contemporain” by Hillary Kaell. Session
IV on “Catholicism and Patrimony” will feature “Territoires palimpseste. Expériences, recompositions, et réappropriations des lieux de culte catholiques québécois

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dans la région de Lanaudière” by Daniela Moisa and “Le patrimoine des communautés religieuses: quelques pistes de réflexion” by Étienne Berthold.
On October 15–17, 2015, the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences
will sponsor a conference at the Lateran University in Rome and at the Pontificio
Collegio Teutonico di S. Maria in Campo Santo in Vatican City to commemorate
the 800th anniversary of the Fourth Lateran Council addressing the issues of institutional reform and spiritual renovation. After welcoming addresses, the first session on foundations and historical contexts will feature talks by Johannes Helmrath
on “The Organization and Procedure of the Fourth Lateran in Historical Comparison to Other Councils” and by Kenneth Pennington on “The Fourth Lateran
Council and the Development of Legal Procedure: 1213–1400.” The second session dedicated to the theme of dogma and ecclesiology will include talks by Werner
Maleczek, “Innocenzo III, canonista o teologo? Le costituzioni dogmatiche di Lateranense IV”; Thomas Prügl, “The Fourth Lateran Council—A Turning Point in
Medieval Ecclesiology?”; Josep Ignasi Saranyana Closa, “Il male nel Lateranense
IV: Un dibattito con ripercussioni metafisiche,” and Stefan Burkhardt, “‘Ut sit
unum ovile et unus pastor’: The Fourth Lateran Council and the Variety of Eastern
Christianity.” In the third session on clergy and laity, David D’Avray will speak on
“Lateran IV, the Clergy, the Laity, and Marriage”; Catherine Vincent on “Il Lateranense IV e la vita pastorale”; Nicole Beriou on “Lateran IV and Preaching”; and
John Sabapathy on “Institutionalizing Accountability and Responsibility at Lateran
IV: Canon 8, Its Background, and Implications.” Session 4 on heresy, the Jews, and
the crusades will offer four talks: “La condanna del Libellus trinitario di
Gioacchino da Fiore: oggetto, ragioni, esiti” by Gian Luca Potestà; “La crociata
albignese, i domenicani e le disposizioni antiereticali del Concilio” by Jörg
Feuchter; “Lateran Council IV and the ‘Cura Judaeorum’” by Joseph Goering; and
“The Muslims, Reconquest and Crusade: The Islamic World at the Fourth Lateran
Council” by Nikolas Jaspert. Session 5 is dedicated to the theme of religious orders
and will host the following talks: “Nuove cornici per gli ordini religiosi e monasteri:
i canoni 12 e 13 del Lateranense IV” by Gert Melville, “Il concilio dopo il concilio:
Gli interventi normativi nella ‘vita religiosa’ fino al pontificato di Gregorio XI” by
Maria Pia Alberzoni, and “Nuovi ordini religiosi ed applicazione della normativa
del Lateranense IV: Il secondo Concilio di Lione (1274)” by Pierantonio Piatti. For
more information, contact Gert Melville at gert.melville@t-online.de.
On October 23–25, 2015, an international conference will be held at the
Catholic Faculty of Vienna University and at the Benedict XVI School of Philosophy/Theology of Heiligenkreuz Abbey (EUPHRat) in the Weinerwald on the
theme “Edith Stein’s Challenge to Current Anthropology.” The conference is
cosponsored by the Edith Stein Circle, Edith Stein Society of Austria, Vienna
Catholic Academy, Carmelites of Vienna, and the Edith Stein Society of Germany.
The theme will be discussed by presentations of thirty-four papers from Stein scholars. Time will be set aside for a discussion of new avenues of research into the writings and heritage of Edith Stein/St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. For further
information, contact Father John Sullivan, O.C.D. (projjs@gmail.com).

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703

On March 10–13, 2016, the twentieth biennial New College Conference on
Medieval and Renaissance Studies will take place in Sarasota, Florida. The program committee invites 250–word abstracts of proposed twenty-minute papers on
topics in European and Mediterranean history, religion, literature, art, and music
from the fourth to seventeenth centuries. It especially welcomes interdisciplinary
and wide-ranging topics. The deadline is September 15, 2015. For guidelines or to
submit an abstract proposal, visit http://www.newcollegeconference.org/cfp.
On May 26–28, 2016, the Sixth Annual RefoRC Conference will be hosted by
the University of Copenhagen and will have as its theme “‘Church’ at the Time of
the Reformation: Invisible Community, Visible Parish, Confession, Building …?”.
The conference will study the various ecclesiological perspectives of the Reformers
and the role of the Church in society. Proposals for twenty-minute paper presentations (in English, French, or German, with ten minutes for discussion) and registration are welcomed by February 15, 2016; for informal poster presentations (containing text; if accepted, also the digitized visuals) with a maximum of two
presenters by April 1, 2016. To register, an individual need not be a presenter. Registration closes on May 19, 2016. A selection of papers will appear afterward in the
series Refo500 Academic Studies (RSAS) published by Vandenhoeck & Vind or in
the Journal of Early Modern Christianity (JEMC). For more information, contact
Anna Vind, Department of Church History. Koebmagergade 44-46, DK-1150
Copenhagen or http://www.refo500.nl/rc/pages/600 sixth-reforc-conference20166-copenhagen.html.
On July 17–23, 2016, the XV International Congress of Medieval Canon Law
will be held at the University Panthéon-Assas (Paris II). The deadline for proposals
is September 30, 2015. For more information, visit http://www.icmcl2016.org or
http://icmac.rch.uky.edu/ or contact Greta Austin, ICMAC secretary, at
ggaustin@pugetsound.edu.
On October 12–14, 2016, the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences
will hold an international conference of study in Rome to commemorate the 500th
anniversary of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17). For more information on the
conference, contact Nelson H. Minnich at minnich@cua.edu.

PUBLICATIONS
“Genève, refuge et migrations (XVIe–XVIIe siècles)” is the theme of the three
articles published in the issue of the Revue de l’histoire des religions for February–
March 2015 (Vol. 232, Fascicle 1). Following a foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis,
“Geneva, Refuge and Migrations (16th–17th Centuries)” (pp. 5–8), are “Le refuge
des gens d’Église catholiques à Genève (1600–1620)” by Nicolas Fornerod (pp. 9–
36); “Genevois à Lyon, Lyonnais à Genève: itinéraires de migrants et de convertis
(XVIIe siècle)” by Monica Martinat (pp. 37–51); and “Refuge et migrations à
Genève au miroir de polémistes, missionaires et voyageurs (XVIe–XVIIe siècles)” by
Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci (pp. 53–81).

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Ostkirchliche Studien in its first number for 2014 (Vol. 63) has published the
proceedings of the Ostkirchenkundliches Symposium 2013, which was devoted to the
theme “Die orthodoxe Kirche in der Habsburgermonarchie im 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert.” Thomas Németh has provided an “Einführung” (pp. 3–5), and the
four contributors are Thomas Németh, “Die orthodoxe Kirche in der Habsburgermonarchie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der österreichischen Reichshälfte”
(pp. 6–19); Mihai Sasaujan, “Die Ministerkonferenzen des Wiener Hofes
bezüglich der Orthodoxen in Siebenbürgen in der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts” (pp.
20–34); Paul Brusanowski, “Die rumänisch-orthodoxe Volkskirche in der zweiten
Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und ihre Beziehung zum ungarischen Staat (bis 1918)”
(pp. 35–64); and Jovan Milanovic, “The Canon Law in the Seminary of Karlovci
(19th–20th century)” (pp. 65–79).
The issue of U.S. Catholic Historian for winter 2015 (Vol. 33, No. 1) contains
seven articles on “World War II and the Post-War Era: Conflict, Politics, and Identity,” as follows: Sean Brennan, “From Harvard to Nuremberg: Father Fabian Flynn’s
Service as Catholic Chaplain to the 26th Infantry Regiment, 1942–1946” (pp. 1–24);
Mark B. Chapman, “American Evangelical Attitudes toward Catholicism: World
War II to Vatican II” (pp. 25–54); Darra D. Mulderry, “Educating ‘Sister Lucy’: The
Experiential Sources of the Movement to Improve Higher Education for Catholic
Teaching Sisters, 1949–1964” (pp. 55–79); Kristy Nabham-Warren, “‘We are the
Church’: The Cursillo Movement and the Reinvention of Catholic Identities in
Postwar America and Beyond” (pp. 81–98); Stephen M. Koeth, “‘The mental grandchildren of Monsignor John A. Ryan’: George G. Higgins, John F. Cronin, S.S., and
the Role of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Postwar American Politics”
(pp. 99–135); Kathleen Holscher, “‘This is how I remember the finest man I ever
knew’: War Commemoration, the Politics of Healing, and the Miraculous in the
Cause of Emil Kapaun” (pp. 137–62); and Charles T. Strauss, “Quest for the Holy
Grail: Central American War, Catholic Internationalism, and United States Public
Diplomacy in Reagan’s America” (pp. 163–97).

PERSONALS
Joseph P. Chinnici, O.F.M., president of the Franciscan School of Theology
in Berkeley, California, and noted church historian will receive the Johannes Quasten Award from the School of Theology and Religious Studies of The Catholic
University of America.

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705

O BITUARIES

A n n e M. B u tle r
(1 9 3 8 – 2 0 1 4 )
Anne M. Butler, a member of the Association and Distinguished Trustee
Professor Emerita of Utah State University, died on November 10, 2014 at Northeast Florida Community Hospice. For many years Dr. Butler had edited the Western Historical Quarterly and was a respected historian of the American West. Survivors include her husband, John A. Butler; a son; a daughter; two stepdaughters;
and nine grandchildren.
She was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, on December 4, 1938. Her parents, Jean A. and Thomas F. Maroney, placed her in the foster care of Delbert
and Charlotte Theall of Weston, Massachusetts. She attended public schools in
Weston. She moved to Baltimore, attending Notre Dame Preparatory School
and Towson State University in nearby Towson, Maryland. She wrote her dissertation under the direction of Walter Rundell and completed her doctorate in history at the University of Maryland–College Park in 1979. Her academic postings
included, Gallaudet University for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., University
College of the University of Maryland, Towson State University, College of
Notre Dame of Maryland, Loyola College of Maryland, and the University of
Utah. Her work, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitution in the American
West (Urbana, IL, 1987) reflected the new directions in the history of the American West that had been percolating among scholars during the 1980s, contributed to a reframing of gender roles in the West, and promoted a rethinking
of the topic of prostitution. In 1989, her reputation in gender studies and the
desire of the Western History Association to become more inclusive in its leadership led to her to the editorship of the Western Historical Quarterly, the official
journal of the Association. She served in this sometimes difficult post with great

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distinction. She also served as a referee for National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright Awards.
Dr. Butler continued her studies in gender and the American West, writing
Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries
(Urbana, IL, 1999) and near the end of her life, Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012). The latter book won much positive attention as one of the few that integrated Catholicism into the wider sphere
of regional history.
She was an important consultant and “talking head” for television documentaries on PBS and the History Channel, serving as a commentator for the series
“Deadwood.” With renowned storyteller Ona Siporin, she presented “Uncommon
Women: Ordinary Lives of the West,” a lecture/narrative program that was also
transformed into a publication. Dr. Butler was also an amateur thespian, appearing
in various productions throughout her life.
Dr. Butler’s interest in American Catholic history came at a later stage of her
career. She worked with the late Brother Thomas W. Spalding, C.F.X., and the
Reverend Michael Engh, S.J. (the latter now president of Santa Clara University),
to produce, The Frontier and American Catholic Identities (Maryknoll, NY, 1999), a
volume in the American Catholic Identities series edited by Christopher Kauffman. Her essay, “The Invisible Flock,” appeared in Catholicism in the American
West: A Rosary of Values (College Station, TX, 2007). Her work focusing on American Catholic sisters was the capstone of her efforts in this field.
Dr. Butler was highly esteemed by her fellow historians of the American
West, and her role in advancing the scholarly study of gender in this region is monumental. Her migration to American Catholic history was a great boon for this
field as well. She was a generous, kind, and helpful fellow scholar who was a frequent presenter at meetings of the Western History Association. She took time
from her busy schedule to critique this eulogist’s writing on Catholics and the
American West—including a presidential address to the ACHA. Countless students, historians, and colleagues will be forever grateful to her. May God grant her
light, happiness, and peace.
Marquette University

STEVEN M. AVELLA

NOTES AND COMMENTS

707

Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.
(1930–2015)
Photo reproduced by permission of Saint Meinrad Archabbey Archives,
St. Meinrad, Indiana.

Clarence John Davis was born on September 9, 1930, in Washington, DC,
the first of two children of Clarence W. and Evelyn (Jackson) Davis, both school
teachers. From an early age he devoured history books, especially at Washington’s
Dunbar High School, where he fell in love with the Catholic past. This love drew
him into the Catholic Church. At fifteen years of age he was baptized a Catholic
at Washington’s Holy Redeemer Church.
During freshman year at The Catholic University of America he met a Benedictine monk who encouraged him to visit St. Meinrad Abbey (later Archabbey) in
southern Indiana. In September 1949, he entered the monastery and on August 1,
1951, professed simple vows and took the name Cyprian after the African monk
who had helped establish Western monasticism. At St. Meinrad Fr. Davis continued his education, professed final vows (the first black man to do so with this community), and was ordained a priest on May 3, 1956, a self-described “rather prim
and proper young man.”1 Cyprian earned a licentiate’s degree in sacred theology
from The Catholic University of America in 1957 and a licentiate’s degree in historical sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain in 1963.
Upon returning to the United States he visited his parents, participated in the
1963 March on Washington where he heard Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a
Dream” speech, and began to identify himself as a “black man”2 charged to confront
1. Cyprian Davis, To Be Both Black and Catholic (Dayton, OH, 2007), p. 12.
2. Ibid.

708

NOTES AND COMMENTS

the painful past of his people. Fr. Davis went to Selma to support King’s march to
Montgomery in 1965 and, after King’s assassination in 1968, helped to found the
National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, which denounced the Catholic Church as
a “white racist institution.” He worried what his abbot would think about the caucus’
manifesto, but “Church history saved me,” Fr. Davis explained. To his benefit, the
abbot readily recognized that the Church had not always lived out its mission.3
He taught at St. Meinrad for about a decade before returning to Louvain
where in 1977 he completed his dissertation, “The Familia at Cluny, 900–1350,”
and thus earned a doctorate in medieval history. After returning to St. Meinrad, he
contributed in 1979 to the second draft of Brothers and Sisters to Us, the American
Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on racism. In 1981 he published The Church: A
Living Heritage, a textbook for high school students. In 1984 he helped write the
initial draft of What We Have Seen and Heard, the Black Catholic bishops’ letter on
evangelization.4
After years of archival research, Fr. Davis published in 1990 The History of
Black Catholics in the United States, which gave a long-overlooked people a cultural
memory and won the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary
Shea Prize for the best book of the year. Advancing this monumental contribution,
he authored many articles and coedited two books: Taking Down Our Harps: Black
Catholics in the United States (1998) with Georgetown University professor Diana
Hayes and “Stamped with the Image of God”: African Americans as God’s Image in
Black (2003) with Dominican Sister Jamie T. Phelps.5
With St. Meinrad still his home, through several academic terms in the 1990s
he lectured mostly on monastic history at various West African monasteries and for
many years taught at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University
in New Orleans. Further advancing his dual interest in monasticism and Black
Catholicism, he wrote more articles and in 2004 edited To Prefer Nothing to
Christ—Saint Meinrad Archabbey: 1854–2004 as well as published Henriette Delille:
Servant of Slaves, Witness to the Poor.6 He, moreover, worked on the canonization
processes for both Henriette Delille and Father Augustus Tolton.
Fr. Davis received many awards, including the Johannes Quasten Medal for
excellence in scholarship and leadership in religious studies from The Catholic
3. Ibid., p. 16.
4. Cyprian Davis, The Church: A Living Heritage (Morristown, NJ, 1981).
5. Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York, 1990);
Cyprian Davis and Diana L. Hayes, eds., Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the
United States (Maryknoll, NY, 1998); and Cyprian Davis and Jamie Phelps, “Stamped with the
Image of God”: African Americans as God’s Image in Black (Maryknoll, NY, 2003).
6. Cyprian Davis, ed., To Prefer Nothing to Christ—Saint Meinrad Archabbey: 18542004 (St. Meinrad, IN, 2004); and Cyprian Davis, Henriette Delille: Servant of Slaves, Witness
to the Poor (New Orleans, 2004).

NOTES AND COMMENTS

709

University of America (2002), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Saint
Meinrad Alumni Association (2004), the Marianist Award from the University of
Dayton (2007), and the Acacia Award from the Archdiocese of Louisville (2010).
Five universities awarded him honorary doctorates, including the University of
Notre Dame (2001); the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago (2002), St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania (2003); The Catholic University of America
(2006); and Xavier University in New Orleans (2012). In 2012 the National Black
Catholic Congress gave Fr. Davis its Lifetime Achievement Servant of Christ
Award and the Indiana Historical Society granted him the Eli Lilly Lifetime
Achievement Award. In 2013 the ACHA honored him with the Distinguished
Teaching Award.
Fr. Davis was eventually named professor emeritus at St. Meinrad and at the
Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier. For many years he also served as
archivist for the Archabbey, the Swiss-American Benedictine Congregation, the
Black Catholic Theological Symposium, and the National Black Catholic Clergy
Caucus. On January 20, 2009, he braved 30-degree weather in Washington, DC,
to witness (via a gigantic TV screen) the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
“What would my father have said?” Fr. Davis wondered.7 He returned to St. Meinrad with a broad smile and a windbreaker bearing the presidential seal and the president’s autograph.
Fr. Davis continued to participate in St. Meinrad’s communal prayers, meals,
and recreations, growing frustrated when ill health kept him from being fully present. In spring 2015 he was able to attend a special celebration at Xavier to honor
the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The History of Black Catholics in
the United States.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on May 18, 2015, Fr. Davis died of a heart attack in the
emergency room at Memorial Hospital and Health Care Center in Jasper, Indiana.
This eulogist cherishes memories of his kindness and generosity, recalling the last
time he saw Fr. Davis: helping him off a New Orleans streetcar one stop beyond
Fr. Davis’s stop. They had been lost in conversation over the paper that the eulogist
had delivered at the 2012 ACHA spring meeting. He plans to continue his talks
with Fr. Davis in New Orleans, at St. Meinrad, and wherever his spirit may be
sensed.
Xavier University, Cincinnati

C. WALKER GOLLAR

7. Cyprian Davis, “Reflections on a Presidential Inauguration,” On the Hill, 48, no. 2
(2009), 6.

710

N OTES AND C OMMENTS

THOMAS F. HEAD
(1956–2014)
Dr. Thomas F. Head, professor of history at Hunter College and the CUNY
Graduate Center, died on November 12, 2014, in Narragansett, Rhode Island, at
age fifty-eight after an extended illness.
Born at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on August 1, 1956, Dr. Head was
largely reared in Rhode Island, a state that he loved for its ocean and its seafood.
After graduating from Portsmouth Abbey High School with a National Merit
Scholarship, he attended Harvard University, from which he received an AB/AM
(1978) and a PhD (1985). At Harvard he studied medieval history and religion,
developing a lifelong interest in hagiography and the cult of the saints. His scholarly work in those fields won him international recognition. His book, Hagiography
and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (New York, 1990), remains
an important model for the study of sanctity and hagiography in a local context. In
this monograph, Dr. Head elegantly demonstrated how the cult of the saints participated in the network of power relations clustered around several prominent
monasteries. In numerous articles published in journals and edited volumes, he
explored other vital aspects of the cult of the saints, including the practice of testing
the authenticity of relics through trial by fire. Although Dr. Head’s research largely
belonged to the late-twentieth-century surge in scholarship on saints’ cults that led
to the rehabilitation of hagiography as a historical source, he was also interested in
more general questions about power in medieval France. With Richard Landes, he
coedited an important volume of essays that reinterpreted the complex phenomenon known as the Peace of God, a series of efforts by clerics and laypeople alike to
stem the tide of knightly violence (The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious
Response in France Around the Year 1000 [Ithaca, NY, 1992]). In nuanced, insightful
articles published in leading journals such as Speculum, Dr. Head wrote about the
Peace of God and other aspects of the distribution and exercise of power in
medieval France. He was as adept with visual evidence as he was with manuscripts

NOTES AND COMMENTS

711

and printed sources; his often-cited article about two tenth-century reliquaries from
Trier is one of the rare essays by a non-art historian to have been published in
Gesta, the journal sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art.
Dr. Head shepherded into print two valuable anthologies of English translations of medieval hagiographic texts: Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from
Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 1994), which he
coedited with Thomas F. X. Noble; and Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New
York, 1999). As he intended, these collections have greatly facilitated teaching
undergraduates about the cult of the saints. Dr. Head, in fact, delighted in sharing
his prodigious knowledge of the subject with others. The robust hagiography section of the ORB (Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies; http://
www.theorb.net/encyclop/religion/hagiography/hagindex.html) is eloquent testimony to his generosity with the resources he amassed over decades of study. As the
editor and organizer of this part of ORB, Dr. Head contributed a series of essays
about the cult of the saints and included the compendious bibliographies that he
had compiled from years of research. This site remains immensely useful to scholars
and students alike.
Dr. Head’s participation in ORB is but one instance of his exceptional commitment to fostering intellectual community. It is no exaggeration to say that he
loved his work, loved to share that passion with others, and loved to put people
with mutual interests in touch with each other. He was among the founders of the
Hagiography Society and was its first program chair; he also helped to organize an
informal workshop of New England medieval historians that met for some years in
the 1990s. Perhaps most important, he energetically mentored many young
medievalists. Some were officially his students, whereas others were people he had
met at conferences and other venues, but all benefited from his generous and able
guidance.
Dr. Head’s excellent sense of humor, his erudition, and his kindness made
him a gifted teacher, as experienced by his undergraduate and graduate students at
Hunter and other institutions where he taught (the School of Theology at Claremont, Pomona College, Washington University, and Yale University). To them,
he communicated the importance of meticulous historical work as well as the ability to see the lighter side of academia. Colleagues still remember his presentation
at the Pseudo Society, a spoof session that is always a highlight of the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies, as one of the funniest ever delivered there.
On Dr. Head’s bookshelves, his superb collection of rare editions and scholarly
works vied for space with murder mysteries set in the Middle Ages, as well as travel
books about destinations scattered across the globe. Dr. Head spent much time
exploring France but also traveled extensively in the rest of Europe, the Americas,
the Middle East, and North Africa. From his many journeys he brought back beautiful objects for his friends, whom he loved to entertain in his Manhattan home and
his seaside house in Rhode Island. As much a master of the culinary arts as of the
historian’s craft, he could cook up a Rabelaisian feast with ease.

712

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Dr. Head is survived by cousins—and by those many medievalists fortunate
enough to have had this accomplished and humane man as mentor, colleague, or
friend.
AMY G. REMENSNYDER

Brown University

Louis B. Pascoe, S.J.
(1930-2015)
Father Louis B. Pascoe, S.J., returned to his Father’s house on Monday, April
27, 2015, after spending nearly his entire career at Fordham University in the
Bronx, NY. The day was the feast of the Jesuit saint Peter Canisius—a fitting date
given the reputation they both shared as gentlemen and scholars interested in
reforming the Church they loved.
Fr. Pascoe was born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, on May 26, 1930, and
planned a career as a teacher. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, after graduating from the University of Scranton in 1952. He studied philosophy at Shrub Oak and then medieval history at Fordham, completing an MA
thesis on St. Bernard of Clairvaux under Gerhart Ladner, who served as president
of the American Catholic Historical Association in 1963. Fr. Pascoe spent his
Jesuit regency teaching Greek and Latin at Georgetown, followed by theology
studies at Louvain, where he received his STB in 1963. Further theology studies
brought him to Woodstock College, then in Maryland; he was ordained to the
priesthood in 1964, followed by his theology licentiate’s degree the next year. Fr.
Pascoe was then sent to study again under Ladner, now at UCLA, where he earned
his doctorate in medieval history in 1970. Fr. Pascoe taught at Woodstock College,
now in NY, from 1971 to 1973, and was a lecturer at Union Theological Seminary.
In 1973 he professed his final vows as a Jesuit and moved to Fordham for the rest
of his long career, all the while engaged in New York City’s circle of medievalists
at Columbia and NYU. He was promoted to the rank of professor in 1981 and

NOTES AND COMMENTS

713

retired as professor emeritus in 2001, although he continued to teach for several
years and was researching until a few months before his death.
Fr. Pascoe’s scholarship is marked by the careful methodology drilled into
him by Ladner (who always addressed his student as “Father,” who in turn said
he’d never even dared to think of calling Ladner anything but “Doctor.”) Fr.
Pascoe focused on late-medieval reform, although his interests included the
related topics of apocalypticism, conciliarism, theology, universities, Cistercian
reform, and humanism. His first article, published while he was still in graduate
school, appeared in The Catholic Historical Review. His dissertation was revised
and published as Jean Gerson: Principles of Church Reform (Leiden, 1973), followed
by a series of articles on Gerson for Traditio, Viator, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and other journals. He then moved onto
Gerson’s own mentor, Pierre d’Ailly; Fr. Pascoe’s growing reputation brought
invitations to speak at Avignon on the 600th anniversary of the start of the Great
Western Schism and then throughout Europe. He served on the Executive Committee of the ACHA (1993–-96); a panel was held in his honor at the annual convention in 1997. Articles on d’Ailly followed, culminating in Church and Reform:
Bishops, Theologians, and Canon Lawyers in the Thought of Pierre d’Ailly (1351–
1420) (Leiden, 2005).
He was a demanding and precise teacher as well. A lover of languages who did
not use them lightly, Fr. Pascoe particularly made sure that his students had mastered Latin before mentoring their doctorates. Many graduate students at Fordham
tell the story of holding their breath as he flipped his index cards before calling on
one of them to recite his or her translation of texts handed out the week before.
Continuing Ladner’s practice, sometimes Fr. Pascoe would stop and instruct the
student to scan grammatically every word aloud, quietly sighing every now and
again to say, for instance, “pluperfect subjunctive?” We are told that this gentle
nudging and insight marked his Jesuit life, too. In his homily at Fr. Pascoe’s
funeral, his Jesuit friend and Fordham patristics scholar Joseph Lienhard related a
classic anecdote from the dinner table. Someone was lamenting the latest news
about a bit of Catholic trouble. Fr. Pascoe, in a low voice, observed, “Yes, that happened in Paris . . . in the thirteenth century . . . though worse,” before adding the
reassuring comment, “but the Church survived.”
It took Fr. Pascoe more than three decades to publish his second book—and
therein lies an essential part of this humble scholar’s life. Once he moved along in
his career, he said, it was time to put his students’ work first. Fr. Pascoe related that
whenever he had to choose between his manuscript and a doctoral student’s chapter—or even an undergraduate’s paper—he literally moved his pile to the side and
put the student work in the center of his desk. His students and colleagues, especially in the American Cusanus Society, recognized this very fact in their
Festschrift for him, Reform and Renewal in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(Leiden, 2000), noting that his influence cannot be measured by a curriculum vitae.
Scholars regularly sent him drafts of their own chapters and articles because they

714

NOTES AND COMMENTS

knew the kind of close and generous attention he would pay to their work—once
again, at the expense of his own. These efforts stemmed from what he identified as
the three joys of his life: his teaching, his priesthood, and his Jesuit vocation. Fr.
Pascoe was always a man for others—and everything he did was for the greater
glory of God.
Kean University, Union, NJ

CHRISTOPHER M. BELLITTO

St. Ambrose University, Davenport, IA

DANIEL MARCEL LA CORTE

Periodical Literature
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
Note sur la théologie de l’histoire. Emmanuel Durand. Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, 98 (Apr.–June, 2014), 353–78.
The Goal of Liturgical Language: An Analysis of the English Vernacular Debates
of the 1940s and 1950s. James G. Sabak, OFM. Worship, 89 (May, 2015),
238–57.
Religion is the Opium of the People. An Investigation into the Intellectual Context
of Marx’s Critique of Religion. E. O. Pedersen. History of Political Thought, 36
(2, 2015), 354–87.

ANCIENT
Irenaeus vs. the Valentinians: Toward a Rethinking of Patristic Exegetical Origins.
Lewis Ayres. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 23 (Summer, 2015), 153–87.
Bishop Callistus I. of Rome (217?–222?): A Martyr or a Confessor? András Handl.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 18 (Dec., 2014), 390–419.
Morning salutations and the Decline of Sympotic Eucharists in the Third Century.
Clemens Leonhard. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 18 (Dec., 2014), 420–42.
Pietro salvato dai Flutti. Un dimenticato rilievo di S. Callisto. Fabrizio Bisconti.
Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, LXXXVII–LXXXVIII (2011–2012), 11–25.
Martiri e soldati in Eusebio di Cesarea. Juri Leoni. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique,
110 (Jan.–June, 2015), 5–30.
Eusebius as Political Theologian: The Legend Continues. Devin Singh. Harvard
Theological Review, 108 (Jan., 2015), 129–54.
Basil of Caesarea’s Uses of Origen in his Polemic against Astrology. Adam D. Rasmussen. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 18 (Dec., 2014), 471–85.
Das griechische Bekenntnis des Akakios von Beroia (COG 6481) wiederhergestellt. Wolfram Kinzig. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 18 (Dec.,
2014), 486–508.
The Legend of Arius’ Death: Imagination, Space, and Filth in Late Ancient Historiography. Ellen Muehlberger. Past & Present, no. 227 (May, 2015), 3–29.
Les exorcismes dans la Vie d’Hilarion: entre intertextualité et originalité. Carine
Basquin-Matthey. Revue des Sciences Religieuses, 89 (Apr., 2015), 165–84.
715

716

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…Quid habuerit antiqua consuetudo: Zosimus of Rome and Hilary of Narbonne.
Geoffrey D. Dunn. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 110 (Jan.–June, 2015), 31–
53.
The Early Christian Reception of Genesis 18: From Theophany to Trinitarian
Symbolism. Bogdan G. Bucur. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 23 (Summer,
2015), 245–72.
The Donation of Zeno: St Barnabas and the Origins of the Cypriot Archbishops’
Regalia Privileges. Joseph P. Huffman. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66
(Apr., 2015), 235–60.
The New Self and Reading Practices in Late Antique Christianity. Guy G.
Stroumsa. Church History and Religious Culture, 95 (1, 2015), 1–18.
Ascension of Christ or Ascension of Mary? Reconsidering a Popular Early Iconography. Ally Kateusz. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 23 (Summer, 2015),
273–303.
Il battesimo di Clodoveo e le sue possibili ripercussioni in Italia alla luce del Liber
Pontificalis, ossia della chiesa romana di S. Martini ai Monti. Monika Ożóg
and Henryk Pietras, S.I. Gregorianum, 96 (1, 2015), 157–74.
La decollatio Pauli su un frammento di sarcofago da S. Sebastiano. La tradizione del
martirio paolino tra iconografia e topografia. Matteo Braconi. Rivista di
Archeologia Cristiana, LXXXVII–LXXXVIII (2011–2012), 27–70.
La pesca miracolosa di un frammentario coperchio di sarcofago di S. Sebastiano.
Note e novità sull’iconografia paleocristiana della pesca miracolosa. Dimitri
Cascianelli. Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, LXXXVII–LXXXVIII (2011–
2012), 71–100.
Tetrastyla. Ipotesi sull’origine del ciborio d’altare. Francesco Marcattili. Rivista di
Archeologia Cristiana, LXXXVII–LXXXVIII (2011–2012), 147–73.
The Early Christian Baptisteries of the Island of Cyprus. Rania Michail. Rivista di
Archeologia Cristiana, LXXXVII–LXXXVIII (2011–2012), 249–84.

MEDIEVAL
Marvels in the Medieval Imagination. Michelle Karnes. Speculum, 90 (Apr.,
2015), 366–90.
Die Bedeutung der Geschichtstheologie in monenergetisch-monotheletischen
Streit des 7. Jarhunderts. Heinz Ohme. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche,
112 (Mar., 2015), 27–61.
Der heilige Gallus, Mönch und Einsiedler. Neues zu seiner Herkunft und Persönlichkeit. Ernst Tremp. Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 134 (2014), 5–42.
Gerechtigkeit in christlicher Verantwortung. Neue Blicke in die Fürstenspiegel des
Frühmittelalters. Monika Suchan. Francia, 41 (2014), 1–23.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

717

Contextualizing Constantine V’s radical religious policies: the debate about the
intercession of the saints and the ‘sleep of the soul’ in the Chalcedonian and
Nestorian churches. Dirk Krausmüller. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies,
39 (Mar., 2015), 25–49.
The creation of a model for the episcopal historiography: the Liber de episcopis Mettensibus of Paul the Deacon. Chiara Santarossa. Studi Medievali, LV (Dec.,
2014), 551–64.
The Carolingian afterlife of the Damasan inscriptions. Maya Maskarinec. Early
Medieval Europe, 23 (May, 2015), 129–60.
Double Predestination, Augustinian Tradition and Carolingian Ecclesiastical Politics. The Debate that Started in the Northern Realm. Diana Stanciu. Revue
d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 110 (Jan.–June, 2015), 56–100.
Antecedentes del clericalismo y anticlericalismo en España (De Nerón a Carlos
III). Una introducción (IV). Les reinos del Norte. Los reinos de Taifas. Victor
Manuel Arbeloa. Lumen, LXIII (Oct.–Dec., 2014), 389–420.
A saint, an abbot, his documents and her property: power, reform and landholding
in the monastery of Homblières under Abbot Berner (949–82). Fraser
McNair. Journal of Medieval History, 41 (2, 2015), 155–68.
Pious Foundation or Strategic Masterstroke? The Chronicon Mosomense and the
Reform of Mouzon by Archbishop Adalbero of Reims (969–989). Ortwin
Huysmans. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 110 (Jan.–June, 2015), 103–33.
Das Verstummen der Zaubertrommeln. Das Zwangschristianisierung des nordeuropäischen Volkes der Saamen und ihre Folgen. Peter Müller. Theologische
Zeitschrift, 70 (4, 2014), 310–36.
Benedictine reform and pastoral care in late Anglo-Saxon England. Francesca
Tinti. Early Medieval Europe, 23 (May, 2015), 229–51.
Entre mémoire carolingienne et réforme grégorienne. Stratégies discursives, identité monastique, et enjeux de pouvoir à Redon au XIe et XIIe siècles. Florian
Mazel. Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, 122 (1, 2015), 9–39.
Ein Bistum und zwei Bischöfe. Arles, die Provence, das Papsttum und der Erste
Kreuzzug. Stefan Weiss. Francia, 41 (2014), 75–99.
An unrealized cult? Hagiography and Norman ducal genealogy in twelfth-century
England. Ilya Afanasyev. Historical Research, LXXXVIII (May, 2015), 193–
212.
Attività di prestito di cinque enti religiosi dell’Italia nord-occidentale: spunti per
analisi comparate. Caterina Ciccopiedi. Bollettino Storico-Bibliografico Subalpino, CXII (2, 2014), 341–85.
The bishop, the prior, and the founding of the burgh of St Andrews. Matthew
Hammond. Innes Review, 66 (May, 2015), 72–101.

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Construction d’un mythe au Moyen Âge et à l’époque moderne. Nouvelles études
sur la cathédrale de Chartres au XIIe siècle. Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz. Francia, 41 (2014), 239–53.
Beispiele für Mischformen päpstlicher “Litterae” in der Kanzlei Alexanders III.
Mit einer Liste bislang datierter Briefe und Mandate. Ludwig Falkenstein.
Francia, 41 (2014), 335–80.
The Crusades. Jonathan Phillips. History Today, 65 (May, 2015), 26–34.
Les Byzantins vus par les chroniqueurs de la Première croisade. Valentin L. Portnykh. Le Moyen Âge, CXX (3–4, 2014), 713–26.
Historical Truth and the Miraculous Past: The Use of Oral Evidence in TwelfthCentury Latin Historical Writing on the First Crusade. Simon John. English
Historical Review, CXXX, (Apr., 2015), 263–301.
Les abbés de Morimond (1194–1213): nomenclature critique, entre affaires locales
et interventions européennes. Benoît Chauvin. Francia, 41 (2014), 381–401.
Vida de S. António de Lisboa. De Fernando Martins a frei António dos Olivais.
Henrique Pinto Rema. Il Santo, LIV (2–3, 2014), 247–55.
Per una biografia di Antonio di Padova. I Sermoni come fonte della vita di Antonio
e delle origini minoritiche. Antonio Rigon. Il Santo, LIV (2–3, 2014), 255–
77.
La tradizione agiografica antoniana come specchio dell’evoluzione dell’Ordine.
Maria Teresa Dolso. Il Santo, LIV (2–3, 2014), 339–55.
A New Approach to the Knighting Ritual. Max Lieberman. Speculum, 90 (Apr.,
2015), 391–423.
Saint François au Mont-Saint-Michel. Enquête sur la transmission mémorielle
d’une image disparue. Véronique Rouchon Mouilleron. Journal des Savants,
(July–Dec., 2014), 205–34.
Heresy, Law and the State: Forfeiture in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. P. R. Cavill. English Historical Review, CXXIX (Apr., 2014), 270–95.
Gouvernement et pénitence: Les enquêtes de réparation des usures juives de Louis
IX (1247–1270). Marie Dejoux. Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 69 (Oct.–
Dec., 2014), 849–74.
Poor Maternity: Clare of Assisi’s letters to Agnes of Prague. Clare Monagle.
Women’s History Review, 24 (Aug., 2015), 490–501.
Preaching laughter in the thirteenth century: the example of Arnold of Liège (d. c.
1308) and his Dominican milieu. Peter Jones. Journal of Medieval History, 41
(2, 2015), 169–83.
The Thessaloniki Epitaphios: Notes on Use and Context. Emilia Cortes. Greek,
Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 55 (2, 2015), 489–535.

P ERIODICAL L ITERATURE

719

Von der Lehre zur Lehrrichtung. Johannes Buridan, der ‘Buridanismus’ und die
spätmittelalterliche Schulphilosophie. Bernd Michael. Zeitschrift für
Kirchengeschichte, 125 (2, 2014), 145–68.
Das Schöpfungsportal des Freiburger Münsters. Michael Schonhardt. Freiburger
Diözesan-Archiv, 134 (2014), 43–70.
The Many Misattributions of Catherine of Siena: Beyond The Orchard in England.
Jennifer N. Brown. Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 41 (1, 2015), 67–84.
The Gift of Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination of Western Medieval
Christianity. Jessie Gutgsell. Anglican Theological Review, 97 (Spring, 2015),
239–53.
Die Kapläne an der Liebfraukirche in Neuenburg am Oberrhein. Absenzen und
Mehrfachbepfründung in einer Klerikergemeinschaft des 15. Jahrhunderts.
Jörg W. Busch. Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 134 (2014), 97–224.
“In Things”: The Rebus in Premodern Devotion. Jessica Brantley. Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45 (2, 2015), 287–321.
“Death-Spectacles” in Quattrocentro Life and Laude. Giola Filocamo. Journal of
Early Modern Christianity, 2 (Apr., 2015), 19–32.
“In omnem terram exivit nomen Constancie”—Zur Aktualität und Bedeutung des
Konstanzer Konzils für die Gegenwart. Thomas Martin Buck. Freiburger
Diözesan-Archiv, 134 (2014), 71–96.
John Wycliffe condemned as a heretic. Richard Cavendish. History Today, 65
(May, 2015), 8.
Frate Matteo d’Agrigento: fondatore dei primi conventi osservanti in Sicilia. Antonio Mursia. Antonianum, XC (Jan.–Mar., 2015), 81–100.
Leon Battista Alberti in der familia des Regens der päpstlichen Kanzlei Blasius de
Molino (April 1431 bis Ende 1435). Brigide Schwartz. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 125 (2, 2014), 169–97.
Caterina Vigri da Bologna clarissa minoritica. Una santa del passato che interroga
l’avvenire. Gabriele Della Balda. Miscellanea Francescana, 114 (3–4, 2014),
427–65.
La fondation de l’université de Bourges (1463–1474). Jacques Verger. Journal des
Savants, (July–Dec., 2014), 235–68.
Die Angst des Inquisitors—Zur Psychopathologie Heinrich Kramers im Speigel
seines Hexenhammers. Christian M. König. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 96 (2,
2014), 265–98.
Quelques enseignes de pèlerins et des moules de production de petits objets en
plomb découverts à Rennes. Françoise Labaune-Jean. Annales de Bretagne et
des Pays de l’Ouest, 121 (Dec., 2014), 7–22.

720

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

La querelle des reliques au temps de la Renaissance et de la Réforme. Nicolas
Balzamo. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, LXXVII (1, 2015), 103–31.

SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Yielding to the Prejudices of His [Erasmus’] Times. David M. Whitford. Church
History and Religious Culture, 95 (1, 2015), 19–40.
Luthers Ehekonzept. Ein geschichtshermeneutische Rekonstruktion im Kontext
der Debatte um die Orientierungshilfe des Rates der EKD zur Familie
(2013). Georg Raatz. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 112 (Mar., 2015),
100–39.
Making Bishops in the Malta of the Knights, 1530–1798. Fabrizio D’Avenia. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (Apr., 2015), 261–79.
Cranmer’s close shave. Derek Watson. History Today, 65 (June, 2015), 45–47.
Primus Truber (Primož Trubar), le “Luther slovène”. Anton Schindling. Revue
d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, 95 (Jan.–Mar., 2015), 59–70.
Jakob Andreae’s Preaching in the Public Arena (Augsburg, 1559). Robert Kolb.
Lutheran Quarterly, XXIX (Spring, 2015), 10–32.
Erasmus’ Heritage. Willem Frijhoff. Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 35
(2015), 5–33.
Catholic Biblical Studies after Trent: Franciscus Toletus. Luke Murray. Journal of
Early Modern Christianity, 2 (Apr., 2015), 61–86.
Reviving the Reconquista in Southeast Asia: Moros and the Making of the Philippines, 1565–1662. Ethan P. Hawkley. Journal of World History, 25 (June–
Sept., 2014), 285–310.
Debating the Literal Sense in England: The Scripture-Learned and the Family of
Love. Douglas FitzHenry Jones. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLV (Winter,
2014), 897–920.
De justa reipublicae christianae in reges impios et haereticos authoritate (1590). Questions of authority and heretic kings in the political thought of the Catholic
League Sophie E. B. Nicholls. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance,
LXXVII (1, 2015), 81–101.
“Local religion” in Corfu: sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Theodossios Nikolaidis. Mediterranean Historical Review, 29 (Dec., 2014), 155–68.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
Un manuscrito inédito del P. Juan Bautista Poza, Sj: Apología de los mártires de
Japón (1557–1628). Giuseppe Marino and Manuel López Forjas. Estudios
Eclesiásticos, 90 (Jan.–Mar., 2015), 75–128.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

721

Diplomacy from Below or Cross-Confessional Loyalty? The “Christians of
Algiers” between the Lord of Kuko and the King of Spain in the Early 1600s.
Natividad Planas. Journal of Early Modern History, 19 (2/3, 2015), 153–73.
“Illustre est Lovanium et Belgium Janssenio”: Textgenetische Analyse von Cornelius Jansenius’ Oratio de interioris hominis reformatione. Nicolas De
Maeyer. Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 2 (Apr., 2015), 33–60.
Enseignantes et cloîtrées: Les ursulines de la congrégation de Bordeaux en Bretagne au XVIIe siècle. A la recherche d’un modèle conventuel. Chantal Aravaca. Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 2 (Apr., 2015), 87–115.
Monasterio de san Vicente de Pino, Monforte de Lemos. María Noya Taboada,
Sandra Pérez Domínguez, and María Uxía Pérez Astral. Compostellanum, LIX
(July–Dec., 2014), 573–92.
Bishop William Laud and the parliament of 1626. Mark Parry. Historical Research,
LXXXVIII (May, 2015), 230–48.
A Matter of Judgment: Politics, Law, and the Trial of Bishop Thomas Watson.
Ruth Paley. Parliamentary History, 34 (June, 2015), 181–200.
Les bibliothèques des séminaires et collèges britanniques à Paris, de l’Ancient
Régime à l’Empire. Emanuelle Chapron. Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes,
169 (July–Dec., 2011), 567–96.
Le fonti per lo studio della storia dei Gesuiti presso l’Archivio Statale Russo degli
Atti Antichi di Mosca. Andrea Mariani. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu,
LXXXIII (II, 2014), 343–96.
English National Identity and the Readmission of the Jews, 1650–1656. Andrew
Crome. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (Apr., 2015), 280–301.
Kaspar Schott’s letters to Philip Vegelin 1661–1664. Thomas E. Conlon and
Hans-Joachim Vollrath. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIII (II,
2014), 273–305.
Notizie Historiche (continuazione). Giancarlo Caputi. Archivum Scholarum
Piarum, XXXIX (2015), 3–89.
A Drawing for Sebastiano Ricci’s Stories of Pope Paul III. Alessio Pasian. Master
Drawings, 53 (Summer, 2015), 225–28.
Febronia Ferdinanda di Gesù (1657–1718). Clarissa del monastero di S. Chiara di
Palermo. Mario Torcivia. Antonianum, XC (Jan.–Mar., 2015), 101–24.
Las cátedras suaristas de la Universidad Luliana y Literaria de Mallorca (1692–
1767). Rafael Ramis Barceló. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIII
(II, 2014), 399–424.
Women of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century High Church Tradition: A
Biographical and Historiographical Exploration of a Forgotten Phenomenon
in Anglican History. Robert M. Andrews. Anglican and Episcopal History, 84
(Mar., 2051), 49–64.

722

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Le cimetière des protestants étrangers (Paris, 1720–1803). Francis Garrisson. Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 161 (Jan.–Mar., 2015),
9–37.
Naufrágio de D. Frei João de Faro. Manuel Pereira Gonçalves. Itinerarium, LX
(Sept.–Dec., 2014), 833–49.
Fermenti antigesuitici nel Mezzogiorno settecentesco. Alberto Tanturri. Archivum
Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIII (II, 2014), 307–40.
John Trusler and the Culture of Sermons in Late Eighteenth-Century England.
William Gibson. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (Apr., 2015), 302–19.
Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche au miroir des Nouvelles ecclésiastiques. Claude Michaud.
Revue Historique, CCCXVII (Jan., 2015), 81–101.
Religion, politics, and patronage in the late Hanoverian navy, c. 1780–c. 1820.
Gareth Atkins. Historical Research, LXXXVIII (May, 2015), 272–90.

NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Christian Heroes, Providence, and Patriotism in Wartime Britain, 1793–1815.
Gareth Atkins. Historical Journal, 58 (June, 2015), 393–414.
Christianity and nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe. Hugh McLeod. International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 15 (1, 2015), 7–22.
Des Königs schwarzer Rock. Der evangelische Pfarrertalar zwischen preußischen
Reformen und Neukonfessionalismus. Anselm Schubert. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 112 (Mar., 2015), 62–82.
Mingrat: anatomy of a restoration cause célèbre. Andrew J. Counter. French History,
29 (2, 2015), 225–46.
Le “juste milieu”: entre le trône et l’autel. Pierre Paul Royer-Collard et la loi sur le
sacrilège de 1825. Corinne Doria. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 110 (Jan.–
June, 2015), 135–52.
A Neglected Giant among the Men of ’38, Fr Thomas Butler. W. T. Southerwood. Australasian Catholic Record, 92 (Jan., 2015), 16–26.
Afro-Catholic Baptism and the Articulation of a Merchant Community, Agoué
1840–1860. Luis Nisolau Parés. History in Africa, 42 (2015), 165–201.
P. Gennaro Fucile de S. Andrés, Prepósito General de la Orden de las Escuelas
Pías (1848–1861). Adolfo García-Durán. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, XXXIX
(2015), 191–216.
The British Luther Commemoration of 1883–1884 in European Context. J. M. R.
Bennett. Historical Journal, 58 (June, 2015), 543–64.
Reglamentos Escolares de la Escuela Pía de Catalunya (1694–1931) (continuación). Joan Florensa. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, XXXIX (2015), 107–89.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

723

W. T. Stead and the Civic Church, 1886–1895: The Vision Behind ‘If Christ
Came to Chicago!’. Stewart J. Brown. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (Apr.,
2015), 320–39.
“L’invasion noire” (1900–1905). La politique belge face à l’immigration des
congrégations religieuses françaises. Hendrik Moeys. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 110 (Jan.–June, 2015), 154–85.
People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa. Joel Cabrita. Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 57 (Apr., 2015), 557–92.
Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931). Dietz Lange. Lutheran Quarterly, XXIX (Spring,
2015), 33–61.
Antonino De Stefano (1880–1964) modernista: la teologia della storia. Salvatore
Corso. Laurentianum, 55 (2–3, 2014), 333–551.
Max Josef Metzger auf dem Weg zum Pazifismus. Ludwig Rendle. Freiburger
Diözesan-Archiv, 134 (2014), 267–96.
Fr. Finlay, Kevin Kenny and the Mystery Lady Investor. Colum Kenny. Studies, An
Irish Quarterly Review, 104 (Spring, 2015), 51–61.
Muscular Christianity and the Western Civilizing Mission: Elwood S. Brown, the
YMCA, and the Idea of Far Eastern Championship Games. Stefan Hübner.
Diplomatic History, 39 (June, 2015), 532–57.
Church Discipline Chronicled – A New Source for Basel Mission Historiography.
Anne Beutter. History in Africa, 42 (2015), 109–38.
Les Notes de guerre (1915–1918) du Pasteur Henri Monnier, aumônier de la 66e
division. André Encrevé. Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme
Français, 161 (Jan.–Mar., 2015), 39–59.
‘Martyrs as really as St Stephen was a martyr’? Commemorating the British dead
of the First World War. John Wolffe. International Journal for the Study of the
Christian Church, 15 (1, 2015), 23–38.
The Making and Unmaking of a French Christian Bolshevik: The Soviet Years of
Pierre Pascal. Jonathan Beecher. Journal of Modern History, 87 (Mar., 2015),
1–35.
Astonishing scenes at the Scottish Lourdes: masculinity, the miraculous, and sectarian strife at Carfin, 1922–1945. Alana Harris. Innes Review, 66 (May,
2015), 102–29.
Los proyectos de restauración de los órganos de la Basílica del Escorial durante el
reinado de Alfonso XIII. Pedro Alberto Sánchez Sánchez, P.A., O.S.A. La
Ciudad de Dios, CCXXVIII (Jan.–Apr., 2015), 197–240.
‘The Testimony Must Begin in the Home’: The Life of Salvation and the Remaking of Homes in the East African Revival in Southern Uganda, c. 1930–1955.
Jason Bruner. Journal of Religion in Africa, 44 (3–4, 2014), 309–32.

724

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Evangelical Spirituality, Science, and Mission: A Study of Charles Raven (1885–
1964), Regius Professor of Divinity, Cambridge University. Ian M. Randall.
Anglican and Episcopal History, 84 (Mar., 2015), 20–48.
Voir, juger, agir. Les mouvements de jeunesse d’Action catholique spécialisée et
l’Organisation Internationale du Travail. Aurélien Zaragori. Revue d’Histoire
Ecclésiastique, 110 (Jan.–June, 2015), 188–213.
Seeking the voices of Catholic Teaching Sisters [in Australia]: challenges in the
research process. Janice Garaty, Lesley Hughes, and Megan Brock. History of
Education Review, 44 (1, 2015), 71–84.
The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s)
in Braunschweig, 1933–1945. †Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen.
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (Apr., 2015), 340–71.
L’affaire Chenu (1937–1943). Étienne Fouilloux. Revue des Sciences Philosophiques
et Théologiques, 98 (Apr.–June, 2014), 261–351.
Protestantisme de Roland Barthes (1915–1980.) Bertrand Gibert. Bulletin de la
Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 161 (Jan.–Mar., 2015), 61–95.
‘Entirely Christian and Entirely African’: Catholic African Students in France in
the Era of Independence. Elizabeth Foster. Journal of African History, 56 (July,
2015), 239–59.
Conferencia de Xavier Zubiri para la historia. Niceto Blázquez, O.P. Studium, LIV
(3, 2014), 425–53.
How Did We End up Here? Theological Education as Ministerial Formation in
the British Baptist Colleges. Anthony Clarke. Baptist Quarterly, 46 (Apr.,
2015), 69–97.
El liderazgo carismático de Suenens y Lercaro en el Vaticano II. Santiago Madrigal. Estudios Eclesiásticos, 90 (Jan.–Mar., 2015), 3–39.
Les catholiques italiens et la guerre du Vietnam (1965–1968). L’antichambre de la
contestation. Alessandro Santagata. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 110 (Jan.–
June, 2015), 215–31.

AMERICAN AND CANADIAN
The Missionary Réductions in New France: An Epistemological Problem with a
Popular Historical Theory. Takao Abé. French Colonial History, 15 (2014),
111–33.
‘Now the mask is taken off’: Jacobitism and colonial New England, 1702–27.
David Parrish. Historical Research, LXXXVIII (May, 2015), 249–71.
L’énonciation divine dans les discours d’investiture des présidents américains. Rémi
Digonnet. Mélanges de Science Religieuse, 72 (1, 2015), 57–76.

P ERIODICAL LITERATURE

725

Church, State, Courts, and Law in Indiana to 1851. Thomas D. Hamm. Indiana
Magazine of History, III (Mar., 2015), 30–63.
A Plantation upon a Hill; Or, Sugar without Rum: Hawai’i’s Missionaries and the
Founding of the Sugarcane Plantation System. Lawrence H. Kessler. Pacific
Historical Review, 84 (May, 2015), 129–62.
The Baptist Colleges in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. David Bebbington. Baptist
Quarterly, 46 (Apr., 2015), 49–68.
A Young Scholar’s Essay: The Franz Julius Biltz Altenburg Settlement Beschreibung Manuscript (1842). Gerhard H. Bode Jr. and Russell P. Baldner. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 88 (Spring, 2015), 7–22.
The Missouri Synod and the Historical Question of Unionism and Syncretism.
Gerhard H. Bode Jr. Concordia Theological Quarterly, 78 (July–Oct., 2014),
39–58.
A Bethlehem Built by Poverty. James M. Thomas. Concordia Historical Institute
Quarterly, 88 (Spring, 2015), 23–46.
Institution, Structure, and Place: Revisiting the Historiographic Circumstances of
the Saxon Lutheran Lehranstalt – Log Cabin College (part 1). Russell P.
Baldner. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 88 (Spring, 2015), 47–64.
“He Does Not Profess, Until Today, any Religion”: Catholic Clergy and Intermarriage in Paso del Norte during the Nineteenth Century. Jamie M. Starling.
American Catholic Studies, 126 (Spring, 2015), 43–61.
Religion and the biographical turn. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Catherine A. Brekus,
Nick Salvatore, Matthew Avery Sutton, and Debby Applegate. Religion and
American Culture, 24 (Winter, 2014), 1–35.
Religion, ‘moral insanity,’ and psychology in nineteenth-century America. Jodie
Boyer. Religion and American Culture, 24 (Winter, 2014), 70–99.
Joseph Jessing, German-American Catholics, and National Myth-Making in Late
Nineteenth-Century America. Thomas Stefaniuk. American Catholic Studies,
126 (Spring, 2015), 1–24.
“A Bed of Roses Anywhere”? Becoming a Broad Churchman in the Late Nineteenth Century. Philip Harrold. Anglican and Episcopal History, 84 (Mar.,
2015), 1–19.
Holy Redeemer College: The Redemptorist House of Studies in Brookland.
Patrick J. Hayes. Potomac Catholic Heritage (Spring, 2015), 1–25.
New World, New Jerusalem, New Orleans: The Apocalyptic Art of Sister
Gertrude Morgan. Emily Suzanne Clark. Louisiana History, LV (Fall, 2014),
432–59.
Stages Along Life’s Way: House of Hospitality and the Development of Dorothy
Day’s Spirituality. Lance Byron Richey. American Catholic Studies, 126
(Spring, 2015), 25–41.

726

P ERIODICAL LITERATURE

White Protestants and the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky. Carolyn Dupont.
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 113 (Spring/Summer, 2015), 543–
73.
“How Does a Born-Again Christian Deal with a Born-Again Moslem?” The Religious Dimension of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Blake W. Jones. Diplomatic
History, 39 (June, 2015), 423–51.
Blessed are the Policy Makers: Jimmy Carter’s Faith-Based Approach to the ArabIsraeli Conflict. Darren J. McDonald. Diplomatic History, 39 (June, 2015),
452–76.
The politicization of family life: how headship became essential to evangelical
identity in the late twentieth century. Anneke Stasson. Religion and American
Culture, 24 (Winter, 2014), 100–38.

LATIN AMERICAN
Fray Pedro Juan Leonardo de Argensola y la Congregación de los Agustinos Recoletos. Fernando Campo del Pozo, O.S.A. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXVIII
(Jan.–Apr., 2015), 131–62.
Ornamentos Litúrgicos en la Iglesia Franciscana de Córdoba [Argentina] (Inventario de 1726). Beatriz Facciano. Nuevo Mundo, III (2, 2014), 85–106.
Historical Water Pulses in the Central Desert Region: Following the Paths of the
Missionaries’ First Explorations of Northern Baja California. Elisabet V.
Wehncke and Xavier López-Medellín. Journal of the Southwest, 57 (Spring,
2015), 145–62.
La Proclamación del Mensaje Salvífico desde 1810 a 1860. Juan Alberto Cortés
OFM. Nuevo Mundo, III (2, 2014), 9–48.
La música en los espacios franciscanos de Mendoz. Una reconstrucción histórica
(1863–1950). Juan Pablo Páez. Nuevo Mundo, III (2, 2014), 69–84.
El Movimiento Estudiantil Profesional (MEP): una mirada a la radicalización de
la juventud católica mexicana durante la Guerra Fría. Jaime Pensado. Mexican
Studies, 31 (Winter, 2015), 156–84.
Ignacio Ellacuría and the Salvadorean Revolution. Jeffrey L. Gould. Journal of
Latin American Studies, 47 (May, 2015), 285–215.

Other Books Received
Alfieri, Francesco. The Presence of Duns Scotus in the Thought of Edith Stein: The
question of individuality. Trans. George Metcalf. [Analecta Husserliana, Vol.
CXX.] (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG. 2015. Pp.
xvi, 184. $129.00 clothbound.)
Beer, Jeremy. The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American
Charity. [Radical Conservatisms.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press. 2015. Pp. x, 124. $19.95 clothbound.)
Behrend-Martínez, Edward J. Unfit for Marriage: Impotent Spouses on Trial in the
Basque Region of Spain, 1650–1750. [The Basque Series.] (Reno: University of
Nevada Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 208. $29.95 paperback.) Originally published in
clothbound, 2007.
Blankenhorn, Bernhard. The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in
Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. [Thomistic Ressourcement Series, Vol.
4.] (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2015. Pp.
xxxiv, 508. $65.00 clothbound.)
Burke, Cormac. The Theology of Marriage: Personalism, Doctrine, and Canon Law.
(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2015. Pp. xxx,
254. $34.95 paperback.)
Cadwallader, Robyn. The Anchoress: A Novel. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and
Giroux. 2015. Pp. vi, 310. $26.00 clothbound.)
Clarke, Peter D., and Patrick N. R. Zutshi (Eds.). Supplications from England and
Wales in the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1410–1503. Vol. III: 1492–
1503. Indexes to Volumes I–III by Kelcey Wilson-Lee and Patrick N. R.
Zutshi. [The Canterbury and York Society.] (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press.
2015. Pp. xvi, 396. $60.00 clothbound.)
Conley, Rory T. Witnesses to Jesus Christ: A History of the Catholic Church in the First
Millennium. (Createspace, Amazon.com. 2014. Pp. 192. $30 paperback.) This
attractively designed book is intended for general readers.
Daley, Brian E., and Paul R. Kolbet (Eds.). The Harp of Prophecy: Early Christian
Interpretation of the Psalms. [Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series.]
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2015. Pp. xvi, 332. $39.00
paperback.)
Dipper, Christof, and Paolo Pombeni (Eds.). Le ragioni del moderno. (Bologna:
Società editrice il Mulino. 2014. Pp. 453. €35,00 paperback.) Among the

727

728

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED
nineteen essays published here are “La religione nel moderno nella prospettiva
storica” by Christof Dipper (pp. 103–33) and “Le ragioni del sacro e quelle del
profano” by Emilie Delivré (pp. 267–81).

Hinze, Christine Firer. Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors: Women, Work, and the Global
Economy. [2014 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality.] (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Pres. 2015. Pp. xvi, 155. $13.95 paperback.)
Jackson, Ken. Shakespeare and Abraham. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 172. $27.00 paperback.)
Johnson, Mary, Patricia Wittberg, and Mary L. Gautier. New Generations of
Catholic Sisters: The Challenge of Diversity. (New York: Oxford University
Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 216. $29.95 clothbound.)
Kasper, Walter. Pope Francis’ Revolution of Tenderness and Love. Translated by
William Madges. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2015. Pp. x, 117. $16.95 clothbound.)
Kelly, Joseph F. The Origins of Christmas. Rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical
Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 167. $18.95 paperback.) Originally published in 2004.
Kim, Andrew. An Introduction to Catholic Ethics since Vatican II. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Pp. xxiv, 215. $29.99 paperback.)
Lee, Bo Karen. Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van
Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon. [Studies in Spirituality and Theology.]
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 250. $29.00
paperback.)
Levy, Ian Christopher. John Wyclif’s Theology of the Eucharist in Its Medieval Context. [Marquette Studies in Theology, No. 83.] (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 2014. Pp. 419. $32.00 paperback.) Revised and expanded edition
of Scriptural Logic, Real Presence, & the Parameters of Orthodoxy (2003).
Lorenz, Edward C., Dana E. Aspinall, and J. Michael Raley (Eds.). Montesinos’
Legacy: Defining and Defending Human Rights for 500 Years. (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield. 2014. Pp. xvi, 260.
$90.00 clothbound.) Papers read at a December 2–4, 2011, conference in
Washington, DC, to mark the quincentenary of the sermon delivered by
Antonio de Montesinos, O.P., in Santo Domingo on the rights of the
Amerindians.
Maritain, Jacques. Approaches to God. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2015. Pp. xvi,
79. $12.95 paperback.) First published by Harper and Brothers in 1954.
———. Existence and the Existent. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 130.
$16.95 paperback.) First published in 1948.
Merton, Thomas. Ishi Means Man: Essays on Native Americans. (Mahwah, NJ:
Paulist Press. 2015. Pp. viii, 81. $9.95 paperback.)

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

729

O’Collins, Gerald, and Mario Farrugia. Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity. 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xvi, 430. $29.95
paperback.) First published in 2003.
Rodriguez, Jarbel (Ed.). Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader.
[Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures: XVIII.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 440. $44.95 paperback.)
Sandell, David P. Open Your Heart: Religion and Cultural Poetics of Greater Mexico.
[Latino Perspectives.] (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2015.
Pp. xii, 228. $29.00 paperback.) An ethnography of Catholic religious practice
in Fresno, California, based on recent interviews and field research.
Saracino, Michele. Christian Anthropology: An Introduction to the Human Person.
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 2015. Pp. viii, 237. $29.95 paperback.)
Shaw, Elizabeth C. (Ed.). An American and Catholic Life: Essays Dedicated to
Michael Novak. (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University.
2015. Pp. xii, 131. $34.95 paperback.)
Stolpe, Sven. The Maid of Orleans: The Life and Mysticism of Joan of Arc. Trans. Eric
Lewenhaupt. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 2014. Pp. 275. $17.95 paperback.) Originally published in Swedish in 1956.
Taylor, Patrick. Only Wounded: Stories of the Irish Troubles. (New York: Forge.
2015. Pp. 282. $25.99 clothbound.)
Tremayne, Peter [Peter Berresford Ellis]. Atonement of Blood: A Mystery of Ancient
Ireland. (New York: Minotaur. 2015. Pp. x, 338. $16.99 paperback.) Originally published in clothbound, 2013.
Welborn, L. L. Paul’s Summons to the Messianic Life: Political Theology and the
Coming Awakening. [Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and
Culture.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 2015. Pp. xxii, 125. $85.00
clothbound; $28.00 paperback.)
White, Thomas Joseph. The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology.
[Thomistic Ressourcement Series, Vol. 5.] (Washington, DC: The Catholic
University of America Press. 2015. Pp. xvi, 534. $65.00 clothbound.)