THE CATHOLIC
HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOL. 103

WINTER, 2017

NO. 1

Reformation Conference Address
Europe in the Age of Reformations:
The Modern State and Confessionalization
PAOLO PRODI*
The author examines the effects of secularization and confessionalization on political states, the Catholic Church, and other religions since
the Reformation.
Keywords: confessionalization, creeds, modernity, Reformation,
secular
The End of Confessional History or History Writing?

A

s the 500th anniversary of the Reformation approaches, we are
reminded that history is one long transition. As with all civilizations
handing over the baton, it is not outside agencies that are killing the West
but the West killing itself. But what is specific to our times is that we have
lost sight of the shore from which we set out: at most, through a thick fog
we glimpse heaps of rubble that we have shed in the last century or so, from
the Decalogue to the atomic bomb and the Shoah. On a lighter note, you
will smile to hear (if it does not make you weep) how a third-year university student of colleague Claudia Pancino answered a question on the distinction between de praesenti marriage and de futuro marriage (a contractual
promise to celebrate a wedding at some other date):
*Dr. Prodi was professor emeritus of modern history at the Università degli Studi di
Bologna. He died on December 16, 2016. His obituary notice by Simon Ditchfield is below
on pp. 186–90. This paper was delivered in Italian at the October 2016 “Protestant Reformation in a Context of Global History: Religious Reforms and World Civilisations” conference
sponsored by the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, Italy (Scientific Committee
members: Paolo Pombeni, Bologna; Silvana Seidel-Menchi, Pisa; and Heniz Schilling,
Berlin). It was translated into English by Ralph Nisbet.

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EUROPE IN THE AGE OF REFORMATIONS
Even after the Council of Trent and its attempt to regulate marriage,
people failed to observe the distinction between verbs in the future and
those in the present. This was partly because people were poor and ignorant and didn’t know their tenses.

But all joking aside, the problem may be that today’s millennial
youth—not just students but those in Western society as a whole—don’t
do past tense and future tense but only see and understand a timeless present of 2.0 images.
In a previous publication I tried to show how we have been involved
these last few decades in the anthropological crisis of Homo europaeus,1 far
more than just another passing transition. The historical argument I wish
to develop here is that, as the strands linking confessional Churches and
modern states unravel after a five-century cycle dating from Martin
Luther’s 1517 protest, our whole surroundings are changing, not just in
terms of religion but politically and institutionally as well.
Much has been said in recent decades as to where institutions are
heading, most of the time seeing it as a one-way process of “secularization.”
It has been argued that modernity is basically just that, for politics and
society as much as for science and culture at large: throwing off the theological, and donning the human and worldly. By contrast, the point I have
been laboring to make is that modernity stems from dialogue and osmosis
between the two poles—call it dialectic, dualism, or what you will—and in
various ways this has hinged on the process of confessionalization (that is,
the changeover from a single creed, central to the liturgy and common faith
of all the Churches of Europe, to professions of faith that differ across
European regions). Churches and states are tied in life and death to this
common process. Historians—and still more analysts and political commentators—go very wrong when they overlook this point in tackling the
present-day aspects of crisis: the issue of secularism, of multiculturalism, of
our daily tragedy of migration and uprooted peoples. The problem is that
their analysis is boxed inside the modern period and its time frame. What
changes with this century is not that our view of history is better than our
forefathers’, but simply that now—as 2017 approaches—we can see this
pattern from outside and above the viewpoint of the masters who came
before us.
1. Hubert Jedin, “Section Five: European Counter Reformation and Confessional
Absolutism (1605–55),” History of the Church. Vol. 5: Reformation and Counter Reformation,
ed. Hubert Jedin and John Patrick Dolan (London, 1980), pp. 615–45.

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The claim I start from and intend vigorously to uphold is that, over the
last fifty years, the historian’s perspective has altered enormously, just as daily
historical events have changed with globalization and mushrooming technology. We now stand outside the long historical cycle that generated the
Europe into which my own generation was born. We have thrown off confessional—ecclessiastical historiography but are far from acquiring a historically appropriate awareness to guide our research and divulge its insights.
As for the unfolding of historical events these last fifty years, everything has changed around us. In the 1950s the panorama in which Western man grew up had been splendidly captured by Gabriel Le Bras in a
short study that I hail as one of the best things written in our field: L’Église
et le village (Paris, 1976). As though from a satellite, he viewed the
common identity of our plains and villages from Sicily to Scotland: the
parish church, the town hall or seat of government, the market square. I
have elsewhere described the course of the last half-century’s history in the
making (and in the writing), bringing us to this satellite viewpoint, released
from the force of gravity that was the modern era. But from the observation post or satellite we have now reached, that landscape no longer exists.
In viewing the historical course of modernity in the long term, my starting
contention is that we cannot understand the history of Europe without an
overview of all its supporting columns: state, church, and market. The sovereign nation-state (town hall) has vanished (not the state in a generic
sense, which still holds many powers and functions); the market has evaporated from the stock exchanges and condensed into “sovereign” funds that
cannot be geographically pinpointed or politically controlled; the churches
of all Christian creeds (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and so on) are daily
being sold and converted to mundane uses, while Churches (with a capital
“C”) seek other bonds with their remaining congregations, and sects are
springing up on all sides.
Territorial Churches and the Modern State
What has happened over the last fifty years or so is the collapse of three
pillars supporting European society in these last five centuries. We have
learnt that we cannot separate religious understanding from political, and
vice versa. If that is so, we cannot separate analysis of events inside European Christendom, whether in its ascending curve—the genesis of modernity and the rise of denominational States—or its descent through the
great European civil wars, the process of decolonization and globalization.
My claim is that, whether we observe from the standpoint of church history or modern state history, the focus of our historian’s telescope must be

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on Europe. That is the issue propounded by Hubert Jedin in 1973 as the
subject of the first seminar held at the fledgling Instituto Storico ItaloGermanico: “The Council of Trent as the Crossroads of European Politics.” The European theater and its scenery had been well known for
decades: the abuses of the medieval Church, the conflict between feudalism and modernity, and the hard-won balance achieved, with its aftermath
of religious wars that ranged from the Confessio Augustana of 1530 to the
Professio fidei Tridentina of 1564 and from Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V’s 1548 Augsburg Interim to the mid-seventeenth century Peace
of Westphalia.
That historians’ gathering was important, I feel, as a step forward from
the prevailing position of modern European historiography, whether ecclesiastical or secular. There were various different interpretations, of course,
lightly touched on by Jedin in his introduction to the concept of Catholic
reformation: a Europe that was about to be outmoded and defeated by the
incoming Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.2
In considering the process of confessionalization, church history naturally tended to put the spotlight on the creation of the territorial
Churches. When the world of medieval Christanitas entered into crisis, a
number of interlinked roads led to the modern era, mapping a range of
concrete solutions to the vexed relationship between power and the sacred:
the road of republican-civic religion; the road reviving monarchy as a
sacred principle; the road of the territorial Churches; the road of Roman
Catholicism.3 Naturally these are only signposts to the vast territory that
needs exploring. But quite clearly, if one fails to connect the declaration of
the rights of man and the citizen to the Revolutionary reign of terror, the
ensuing concordat, the crowning of Napoleon by Pope Pius VII, and so on,
one will understand nothing about European history. Out of such contradictions was modern Europe born.
As far back as the fourteenth century, the movement toward creation
of the territorial Churches, amid the crisis of Western schism and the rise
of new monarchies and principates, is evident across the map of Europe.
Gallicanism is obviously the best-known and most highly developed form,
but the trend is widespread. Sovereigns tended not only to seek elimination
of church surveillance and to become the “dominus beneficiorum,” con2. Paolo Prodi, “Dalle secolarizzazioni alle religioni politiche,” in Lo Stato secolarizzato
nell’età postsecolare, ed. Gian Enrico Rusconi, (Bologna, 2008), pp. 55–92.
3. Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, Le Cinque Piaghe della Santa Chiesa (Lugano, 1847).

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trolling the economy and thereby the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but also to
take over the social and political functions that previously fell under the
realm of the Church. From control over culture and the universities, to
development of grammar and the vernacular, and to reorganization of welfare functions, the fifteenth century was a great laboratory ushering in the
confessional age through the shaping of identities both political and religious, as well as transforming politics from an exercise of jurisdiction and
administration of justice into a tool for training, molding, and regulating
people’s lives from birth until death. Over and above its intrinsic theological content, the Reformation in this sense becomes the most consistent
and extreme manifestation of a process that was driven to compromise and
ambiguity in Catholic lands: “cura religionis” became one of the prime
functions of new sovereigns and their raison d’état, while the principle of
“cuius regio eius et religio” (the region and the religion) became the main
forge of collective identity in that early gestational phase of modern states.
All in all, perhaps the most interesting phenomenon was the “ideologizing”
of politics: a theological ideology gradually growing to the point where it
could cast off the robes of theology and embark on the new religion of the
nation, supplying the temporal and spiritual needs of the subjects. When
the solution afforded by the territorial Churches began to come unstuck
and the pressure of indirect papal power grew—the lattera new strategy of
the papacy—the debate over the divine right of kings came to a head in
King James I’s England, causing a maelstrom of conversions and disillusionment that embraced a whole cast of actors. It is usually described as
irenical waverings or a Nicodemite revival; although I think the drama of
those characters (men such as Giordano Bruno and Marcantonio de
Dominis) popping up in various European countries and religions of the
age is the quest for a solution to the vexed relation between the new-style
sovereign and the religious dimension entailing some re-employment of
materials that the papacy had already devised on the subject more than one
century earlier.
The rebirth of the papacy out of the council crisis—the 1440 “solstice”—is well known for the papal development of a new kind of center-to
periphery relationship that salvaged its universal role and hinged on political
relations with states via concordats and nunciatures rather than the traditional top-down connection with individual churches. By such devices and
through major sacrifice, the popes managed across broad swaths of Europe
to limit state appropriation of local churches and to preserve their own universal standing. But beneath the diatribes and agreements between states
and the Church of Rome, I think we should detect a subterranean flux
embodying the phenomenon of osmosis that is central to our interest.

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One process that should be noted is the ensuing politicizing of structures inside the Church that, belatedly of course, was in its turn forced to
assume concentrated sovereign power like modern states. In imitation of
these, and in a kind of inverted secularization, it styled itself the “societas
perfecta” right down to the Codex juris canonici promulgated in 1917. The
modern-era process of confessionalization caused a deep-seated alteration
in church structures as compared to the medieval era, as it borrowed an
internal system of faithfulness from the political sphere: Christians became
faithful no longer by sharing a common faith but by adopting a “professio
fidei”—an ideologically defined creed or “confession.”
Another phenomenon central to this process of the Church assuming
the trappings of a state was the development of spiritual jurisdiction over
people’s consciences; a system of rules was created paralleling the expansion of the state’s positive law with which it competed, especially in the
seventeenth century. I have discussed into this process elsewhere but here
wish to draw attention to its two-way quality: the secularizing of the moral
order and the “philosophication” (so to speak) of positive law form one of
the central features in this analysis of osmosis.
The wholesale demise of this process set in around the mid-eighteenth
century. Not only did a series of concordats restrict the scope of spiritual
jurisdiction left to the Church of Rome and the local Churches but also the
Catholic world reached a high point of internal compromise with the
powers of the epoch. When Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of
Jesus in 1773 across the globe and even within the pontifical state (reflected
worldwide in the abortive attempt to separate “spiritual conquest” and the
missions from state colonization, following the dispute over rites in China
and abolition of the indians Reductions in Latin America), it was far from
a marginal episode or simple secularization as occurred with other religious
orders but a measure accepted and conceived by the Church herself so as to
enable the two jurisdictions, temporal and spiritual, to converge in the new
state. The fact is that, in the eighteenth century, the politicizing of the
Church was one of the main factors leading, on the one hand, to a crisis in
the church principates (besides the decline of the pontifical state) and, on
the other, to the open sore of the “worldly” Church reduced to a puppet of
the state, which forms the central point in Antonio Rosmini-Serbati’s
denunciation after the first fury of revolution had subsided.4
4. Paolo Prodi, Profetismo e utopia nella genesi della democrazia occidentale, in Savonarola.
Democrazia, tirannide, profezia, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence, 1998), pp. 199–211,
repr. in Profezia vs utopia, Bologna, 2013.

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I by no means wish to demean the importance of radical Christian
movements—which between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries
rebelled against confessionalization and the creation of territorial Churches,
as well as against Rome’s proposal to co-govern these last—but if there is
any truth in this argument, those movements must be examined from both
political and religious angles. Politically, we are interested, above all, in
those that revert to the age-old principle of the sect that rejects the idea of a
worldly Church with its ensuing compromises, in the belief that a society of
perfecti may be set up on Earth, with saints for whom God’s justice entirely
coincides with earthly justice. The connections between millenarian and
apocalyptic movements and the development of modern revolutionary doctrines are well known and covered by a huge amount of scholarly literature.
But what seems to me to have been left in obscurity or rendered obscure is
the very real osmosis of men and institutions within the political bid to
change human nature and proclaim the possibility of collective historical
salvation inside the fabric of the modern state.
Historians are well aware of the importance of radical religious minorities
in developing the principles of liberty and democracy in the West. But when
we examine these modern theological-cum-political utopias, we should duly
note the element of discipline and repression that goes along with the “fundamentalist” ideal: on the one hand, the claim to religious freedom, freedom
of conscience and speech, and tolerance quite unlike the line of the official
Churches; on the other, repression of all internal deviation and denial of any
gap between political life and religious life, morals and law, and conscience
and group behavior. The contradiction clearly felt throughout the centuries of
the modern era between the demand for state and church to be separate, and
the creation of communities where religious obligations quite outweighed
political obligations, need to be analyzed in detail if the prevailing stereotype
is to be avoided of theological faith simply secularizing into revolutionary
faith. The idea, in a nutshell, is that, during the modern era, we do not just
have secularization of prophecy and transformation of it into utopia but the
end of prophecy, for prophecy presupposes a hiatus between ethical command
(holy or divine) and political power. That hiatus, however, is totally removed
by the modern revolutionary extension in which the two commands are unified and historically grounded in the will of the people.5 This process of
5. For a fuller summary, see Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious
Affairs (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) and the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America, “Declaration on the Way: Church, Ministry and Eucharist” (Washington, DC, 2015), http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-interreligious/ecumenical/lutheran/upload/Declaration_on_the_Way-for-Website.pdf.

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osmosis thus leads to a parting of the ways in the mid-eighteenth century: one
way—let us call it civic religion—takes its cue from Montesquieu, whereas the
road of political religion derives from Rousseau and leads (somewhat circuitously) to the political religions of the twentieth century, especially the secularized “salvationist” ideals of communism and Nazism.
Conscience and the Law
Such was the view of the West, states, and Churches when my own
generation set about studying history in the aftermath of World War II,
the Shoah, and the atomic bomb. Although the Catholic Church after the
Second Vatican Council and the reformed Churches did come to terms
with modernity theologically, it must be said that, like all attempts at ecumenism, this remained within the denominations, although dogmatic disputes had largely died down over the major issues that had unleashed the
tempest of the Reformation: divine grace and free will, the Church and the
universal priesthood of the faithful, the relationship with Holy Scripture,
the meaning of the sacraments, and the Eucharist.6
I am well aware that I lack the competence to enter the theological
arena of the effects of Luther’s 1517 protest, which the upcoming anniversary meetings will examine such as the the Lund conference with an ecumenical approach. But to an artisan of history like myself, the interweaving
of history and historiography on the issue of confessionalization was one of
the most exhilarating sensations of the last fifty years and a personal fillip
for the practicing historian, owing to the spur imparted by witnessing a
world in rapid evolution yet also a persisting past upon which our current
social and church structures were grounded. It was that conviction that
prevented me from siding either with those who saw the Second Vatican
Council as innovation and reconcilement with the modern age or (still less)
with those who were tackling the problem of confessionalization.
As a neo-graduate, I had my first dawn of awareness in 1956–57 with
an apprenticeship at University of Bonn under Hubert Jedin. His short
volume, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? (Lucerne, 1946),
represented a great interdenominational breakthrough and provided much
fodder for discussion. His History of the Council of Trent (London, 1957)
was just out in an Italian translation. From 1956–66, it was fundamental
that both the Second Vatican Council reforms and confessionalization
6. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in Essays in
Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1915; New York, 1946), pp. 323–59.

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came to coexist within the Catholic world as we sought a way out of the
black-and-white mentality that denominational historians had thrust upon
us for centuries—although it was also necessary to extend the coordinates
of time and space, and incorporate the new colonies outside Europe.
When it came to the time frame, we young apprentices went along in
general with Jedin’s insights: no longer a modern history of the Church
stretching from the religious rift, the Reformation and the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation but one long time span stretching from
the great Schism in the West and the rebirth of the papacy midway
through the fifteenth century and stretching to the French Revolution and
as far as our own times. This entailed reversing the traditional position to
some extent. It was no longer the picture of a Church consumed by malpractice but rather a process in which Christianity, riddled with medievalism in its institutions and spirituality, had to face up to the developments
of modernity on a cultural and political plane.
The great novelty lay in studying this transition in its internal complexity and its osmotic relations, quite apart from its religious wars, important
though those were. Even inside the Catholic world, both components were
present (reform and counter-reform), while evangelical and reformedchurch historians began to display a new interest in aspects of the so-called
Zweite Reformation—the second Reformation that consolidated the territorial Churches between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of
the seventeenth century. That new and longer view helped us to detect the
parallel—although discordant and often contrary— response by the Church
of Rome and the new churches to the challenge of modernity.
Within this frame of reference I was greatly influenced by Le Bras’s
work embracing institutions and canon law; likewise by the major insights
yawning in figurative arts and music as the fifties shaded into the sixties. I
set about a comparative study of the Tridentine reform in a number of dioceses (especially Milan and Bologna with their archbishops St. Carlo Borromeo and Gabriele Paleotti), as well as in their complex frictions with the
centralism of the Roman Curia in which power struggles were waged even
over interpreting the basic decrees of the Council of Trent.
A second chapter of my studies, from 1966 on, was primarily devoted
to the papal monarchy. With its twofold face of spiritual combined with
temporal power—and until it declined and was eclipsed altogether—this
seemed to me to transform the whole claim of politics to mold man down
to his daily behavior from the cradle to the grave: although very different,

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this road ran parallel to that followed by the countries that went over to the
Reformation and left it to the prince to manage the commandments of the
Decalogue (second half) and church discipline.
As I have written more than once, modern politics was not born out of
secularization of theology but rather from a dialectical meeting between the
two poles of religion and politics, entailing constant friction but also a
process of osmosis by which the Church tended to politicize (the high point
being the papal monarchy in the modern era) and the state tended to take
over the Church’s functions of molding the citizen-subject from the cradle
to the grave—an indoctrination that would culminate in the religion of the
Fatherland. A ferment of different currents ran right through the Catholic
and the Reformation worlds, involving politics (cross-alliances), culture, the
new science, literature, and the arts, borne on a constant exchange of people
and ideas; all of which left a deep cleavage in theology itself between the
various spiritual orders and movements. One has only to think of figurative
art or music to cut through the stereotypes of certain historians who, for all
their eminence, are nonetheless in the grip of a denominational obsession in
either a negative or a positive sense of the word.
This phase paved the way for investigation of the connection between
spiritual jurisdiction—with its claim to universality, as propounded by
Second Scholasticism and moral theology as an independent discipline—
and the positive law of the various European states making great strides on
the civil and criminal plane—a twofold regulatory plane upon which seventeenth-century civilization was governed and which opened the door to
the philosophy and theory of subjective rights, as well as modern constitutionalism that took off in the eighteenth century.
In the 1980s, the most fertile and, to my mind, exhilarating period
dawned at the Instituto Storico Italo-Germanico that involved a dialectic
between incipient natural law and its religious and ethical norms, on the
one hand, and positive state law, on the other. The “home team,” which
had begun to enjoy the extraordinary contribution of Pier Angelo Schiera
(he and his wife, Giuliana Nobili, were already linked to the classic
German school of history and the great theories of Otto Brunner), joined
up with the new German school of history that was propounding the
theory of social discipline (Sozialdisciplinierung). I cannot cite here the
many, many study weeks organized and the books we published together—
although a curious reader is free to leaf through the back numbers of the
ISIG Annals—down to the pooled ideas of the nineties on the formation
of collective identity. But I feel justified in claiming that that relationship

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went far beyond normal academic collaboration and left its mark on the
thinking of both schools of history. On the one hand, it helped give rise to
a less mechanical concept of social discipline, one not confined to the splicing of top-down written rules with emerging patterns of behavior on the
part of society; on the other hand, it probed deeper into the subject of individual and collective conscience, and the importance of ethics in our
description of that century-long process by which there grew inside the
modern state a degree of participation in the idea and body of the steadily
secularizing nation, and in the birth of codes and constitutions.
Without delving into the major output of Wolfgang Reinhard and
Heinz Schilling on the modern state, the territorial Churches, and the
expansion of that Europe across the world, one thing I can safely say: in my
own research career those meetings at Trento triggered the study of the
political compact; the institutional function of oath-taking in the transition
from the multiple law systems of the Middle Ages to the new professions of
loyalty linked to modern states and territorial Churches amid conflict, dialogue, and osmosis with the secularization process; and, lastly, the transition
from the multiple law systems of the Middle Ages to the modern era’s dualism between law and conscience as developed in modern constitutionalism.
As we turned the millennium, the bond with our German friends grew
weaker, but I sincerely believe the road we trod together enabled us to tackle
the great subjects of world history and globalization in a concordant and
similar way. We paid more attention than English-speaking historians to
the long time-span factor, as well as the slow unfolding of Christianity and
Western civilization (whether resorting to the concept of transition or not).
But, above all, I feel that our common road enables us to face the forthcoming fifth centenary of the Reformation in completely new terms. For October 2017 the Instituto Storico Italo-Germanico has scheduled a history
conference worthy of that major event. I would simply like to point out here
that de nobis loquimur; likewise to suggest that the path we have trodden
together may be instrumental in our rising above the old stereotypes of history writing and contribute signally to our approach to today’s problems,
not just for the Churches but also for our Western civilization in crisis.
Given the limits of this talk of mine, I merely seek here to extrapolate
some themes that have clearly emerged over the last fifty years from the
digging and delving we have done together, if only marginally. We do have
a duty to draw these themes—unfinished and unproven though they may
be—to the attention of those nonhistorians on whom our future depends
in a world where thinking and institutions are challenged by the major

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changes in progress. Ignorance of history is the chief danger I see in the
new generation.
Before and After the Second Vatican Council
In the last half-century, which began with the conclusion to the
Second Vatican Council, various themes have emerged for the historian.
The End of the Age of Confessionalization. As previously mentioned, Confessionalization here means the changeover from a single creed, central to the
liturgy and common faith of all the Churches of Europe, to professions of
faith differing across European regions; as well as creeds translated into
different formulas and catechisms, and linked to various symbolic and
iconic manifestations of belonging. Such “confessions,” beginning with the
Augustan version in 1530, sprang first from the new reformed Churches
and not from Rome: it would take decades and conclusion of the Council
of Trent before the latter would follow suit and explore the path of catechisms and professions of faith. In the ensuing centuries political and religious pluralism would gain ground in Europe, entailing differences of
interpretation and relationship vis-à-vis the secularization process
embarked upon by modern nation-states.
After five centuries the age of confessionalization has ended once and
for all. This applies not just to the “Tridentine paradigm” as an epoch in
the Catholic Church (as a recent book of mine takes for its title) but also
more broadly to the territorial Churches born from the last throes of the
Middle Ages.
One should also remember that the paradox and impotence of the
ecumenical movements that have tried to unify the Christian Churches in
recent decades lie in the fact that, whereas rifts in creed and theology are
being bridged or at least are losing importance—although, five centuries
ago, they led to religious wars and division, as over the issue of “grace”—
marked ruptures still observed in disciplines and institutions, while even
inside the individual Churches the structures were, more or less alike, in a
crisis, from theology faculties for the training of clergy and pastors,
parishes, and so on.
The Effects of State Religion on Democracy. If in the five centuries since the
Reformation we have had not just a process of secularization but also a
dialectical process of osmosis between the religious and the political
sphere, then the end of state religion or religion linked to ethnic origins has

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repercussions on both the institutions of the Bill of Rights and on democracy itself. If this dualism between political power and religious power was
a basic component in building the Bill of Rights and democracy, the end
of the age of confessionalization cannot fail to bring a devastating upheaval
in the identity processes of nations and intermediate social groups. The
failure of the most wide-ranging policies of multiculturalism and secularism over the last few decades is due precisely to their roots in the end of
this era of Reformation and the Tridentine Church.
The Effects of Radical Christianity. At the same time as confessionalization
set in around 1517, movements of radical Christianity sprang up that
belonged neither to the Church of Rome nor to the new territorial
Churches, although in the intervening centuries down to our day they
played a fundamental role in maintaining the dualism to which I have
referred. No need even to wait for events in England to unfold: the long
public rise and fall of St. Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy
over the Church of England, and More’s death on the scaffold in 1535.
Utopia was strictly connected with the new religious-cum-political movements; it transformed into ideology branching off from the path of radical
Christianity and the road that led to the founding of new territorial
Churches in their varying relations to princes or to up-and-coming republican communities. For its part, radical Christianity would split either into
sects that believed that utopia could be attained by a new society of perfecti,
a chosen people devoted to building the “Kingdom of Christ” on Earth, or
into those somehow remaining anchored to the world of Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More but who saw themselves increasingly debarred
from any kind of influence upon society except through the experience of
persecution and martyrdom: Francesco Pucci, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella (to name but a few). They were banished from Europe
and regarded with suspicion by all in political power, whatever their creed.
In persecuting them the Holy Inquisition seemed to perform a common
service in the new Europe of States (whatever their faith), preventing backsliding into the past of popes and emperors that the new denominational
states viewed with aversion.
Clearly, like all model utopias by religious sects claiming to set up the
City of God on earth, that model was rejected, defeated by the new state
system and scattered in various channels. It might be the ideal of an archaic
golden age, picking up that age-old myth but under a quite different guise
by its very utopianism and offering the prospect of a new age of justice and
equality; or it might be the myth of the “promised land” into which North
American Puritanism and other forms of millenarianism channeled their

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EUROPE IN THE AGE OF REFORMATIONS

yearning for a fresh start. Nowadays, with the end of confessionalization
and the spawning of evangelical or do-it-yourself pseudo-evangelical
movements, we must also reckon with the problem of losing another
important binding force of Western civilization: the end of all
prophecy/utopia upon which to base the vision of a future society where
justice may prevail.
The Vexed Relationship between Power and the Sacred. As previously noted,
modern politics did not stem from the secularization of theological thinking
but from a dialectical combination of the religious and the political pole, in
a process of rivalry and osmosis whereby the Church tended to politicize (the
high point being the papal monarchy in the modern era), and the state
tended to take over the Church’s functions of molding the citizen-subject
from the cradle to the grave—an indoctrination that would culminate in the
religion of the Fatherland. When the world of medieval Christianitas entered
into crisis, a number of interlinked roads beckoned toward the modern era as
they explored a range of concrete solutions to the vexed relationship between
power and the sacred: the road of republican-civic religion, the road reviving
monarchy as a sacred principle, the road of the territorial Churches, and the
road of Roman Catholicism (based on concordats and nunciatures). A ferment of different currents ran right through the Catholic and the Reformation worlds, involving politics (cross-alliances), culture, the new science, literature, and the arts, borne on a constant exchange of people and ideas; all
of which caused a deep cleavage in theology itself between the various spiritual orders and movements. Again, in the field of theological and philosophical speculation, the frontier—thought projected into the future, the gap
between prophecy/parrhesia on one side and power on the other—increasingly shifted from inside religions to the new currents of public opinion and
the press, whilst carrying over certain tenets of theology and ethics that gradually extended to the newly discovered and colonized continents. This, too,
is an area we have trodden for centuries and now find it is being challenged
as the era of confessionalization wanes.
What needs to be added to this recapitulation is that this was not only
a Europe still engrossed in culture and Latin, Roman law, the interweaving
of new literary genres, new tonal music, melodrama, and so forth but also
an integrated economic community, a “respublica mercatorum,” a land of
new financial capitalism whose frontiers can hardly be seen as coinciding
with the old religious fault-lines, even though they did assume a common
“fides” at the basis of credit: the atmosphere of trust among men of different religious beliefs that Voltaire himself noted as the air being breathed at
the London Stock Exchange in the 1720s.

PAOLO PRODI

15

The Distinctions between Sin and Crime. I believe that during the centuries
of the age of confessionalization an essential distinction formed between
sin, meaning disobedience to the law of one’s professed religion or code of
morality, and crime, meaning disobeying the state’s positive law. At the
heart of the process of the Church assuming state characteristics and politics
growing theological, running parallel with the expansion of positive state
law but quite separate from and competing with it, there formed an area of
spiritual jurisdiction over conscience—a system of norms within every community that, if infringed, was likewise deemed blameworthy, although not
subject to penalty: state law gradually became a defense against the outside,
the frontier of a territory that was governed by domestic rules of its own that
everyone recognized. The forms here diverged and contrasted, from the
confession of sins, defined as a sacrament by the Council of Trent, to public
airing of faults or private conferring with pastors. A great transformation
took place right across Europe, especially in the seventeenth century. I have
gone into this process elsewhere but here wish simply to stress its two-way
nature: secularization of morality and “philosophication” (as it were) of positive law via a bill of “human rights” formed a central feature in the development of this Europe of ours. I sense that this distinction between sin as
disobedience to ethical rules and crime as infringement of state or metastate positive law is now waning or has already vanished, equally among
international finance speculators and among new generations of schoolchildren (not just in the banlieues) who are blithely unaware of the Decalogue. I have already argued that this represents collapse of one of the two
pillars on which Homo europaeus was built. Law itself now perches on one
leg—as Jacques Ellul said years ago: it commits suicide when it identifies
with political or economic power. Attempts by neo-Illuministes to create
artificial legs by meta-law à la John Rawls or similar efforts seem to me no
substitute for religious support by Churches that is now on the wane. The
last century’s tragedies appear not to have vanished but to have spread their
net in new-millennium globalization.
The Effects of Monotheistic Religions of the Middle and Far East. The demise
of the age of religious creeds, the Tridentine Church, and the territorial
Churches shifts the identity boundaries from the heartland of the Western
system to the wide world and the other universal religions: monotheistic
religions born in the Mediterranean area and those of the age-old East.
This has given concrete reality to the brilliant comparison that Max Weber
suggested a century ago on the plane of theory, history, and anthropology.7
Failure to register this shift is causing terrible confusion not just in
reportage of ongoing wars but even in the analyses of experts. Obviously in
a few lines I cannot do justice to the complex issues that stem from this

16

EUROPE IN THE AGE OF REFORMATIONS

simple statement. I have tried to do so elsewhere. But amid the storms of
our present times it becomes a historian’s duty to point them out. Clearly
the major debate now running for decades as to the connection between
monotheism and violence seems a tendentious field at this time of mushrooming killings and atrocities in God’s name. To delve into past millennia
for the historical roots might prove a false trail.
More and more I have come to believe that, since the founding of the
Israeli State, the Jewish-Semitic world has become a prime case, the cutting edge of the West’s attempt to reconcile—as some think still possible—
an ongoing process of confessionalization of public life (strictly bound up
with religions and ethnic belonging) with the full guarantees of a Bill of
Rights. This formidable gamble involves us all in a welter of guilt for our
past of political religions that no longer exists except for the (clearly important) memory of the Shoah.
The Effects of Islam. As for the consequences of Western de-confessionalization at the interface with Islam, if we wish to understand the rise of the
latter and its attractiveness even within historical Christendom—something
we would never have imagined even thirty years ago—I would mention two
points that have emerged from history research in the last few years. First,
I feel that Islam stemmed from a heresy that germinated within Christianity, which then developed and diverged more and more doctrinally but contained at its heart rejection of the Church as an institution; there never has
been an institutional structure without its somehow identifying with political power. If, by way of a solution to the issues of secularism and cohabitation, one could create a responsible independent organization—a Church of
Islam, as it were—Islam would no longer be Islam. That is why today we
badly need a reminder of the long labor of war and conflict that Christianity
had to go through over the centuries, as well as the process of de-confessionalization. Historically, Islam has involved many experiments with relations between political power and the religious community (umma); there
have been countless theories purporting to solve the problems of compromise brought about by territorial expansion. In the Muslim religion, however, certain features have remained—rooted partly in Byzantine tradition
or Mosaic law tailored to desert-dwellers—whereby the political chief is
God’s representative on Earth without intermediaries or the limitation of
institutions, while legally there is no positive canonical legislation separate
(or nearly so) from the radical or moderate positions of the faith.
The second point is that Muslims living inside this Christendom
identified with the West but now witnessing the demise of creeds cannot

PAOLO PRODI

17

perceive the difference between right and wrong. Of course, we should not
ignore the causes due to social and economic conditions in the banlieues
and inner jungle of our cities, or the perhaps more widespread instances of
personal pathology; but the attraction of Islam, especially among the
younger generation, can only be explained by a void in the path of salvation
caused by a breakdown in the scheme of redemption that the Christian
Churches used to represent.
The Effects of Far Eastern Religions. The complexity grows—and, with it,
the superficiality of my present treatment—when it comes to the effects of
the end of confessionalization at the interface with religions of the Far
East. The loss of dualism between religion and politics, and hence
Europe’s inability—via permanent revolution, pluralism, and dynamism—
to outline a world different from the present, comes up against the various
contentions of Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Tao, and similar
philosophies, such that in an unchanging cosmos, heavenly and earthly
power coincide to form a universe where every creature has its appointed
place. As regards China in particular, until a few years back the problem
could be seen in the perspective of the two churches: the church remaining
faithful to Rome and the church controlled by the Communist Party.
Nowadays, with the extraordinary development of neo-Confucianism, the
problem has broadened onto the cultural and spiritual plane to the point of
involving the civilization of the Middle Empire in all its dimensions. The
old system largely inherited from European Marxism has dissolved, but in
the megalopolises and the countryside are we glimpsing a change of civilization going beyond the new technology? As I experienced for myself as
president of the central Board for History Studies, when Italian and Chinese historians convened to prepare the international conference held last
year in Jinan, the main concern of the Chinese delegation was to show
China’s perfect continuity from the empire 3000 years ago down to the
turbo-capitalism of today. The watchword was the alleged harmony of tradition and modernity, past and present; there was a pronounced tendency
to ignore all points of conflict, rupture, contradiction, or history as a
process of becoming. The problem is whether it is possible to alter the
“heavenly mandate” and whether man, European or otherwise, can choose
between good and evil, and select a personal road to salvation.
New Paradigms for Historians
The first motion I put forward today for discussion from the observatory of religious history is that the Second Vatican Council did not open a
new era but closed the Age of Trent by reconciling the Churches with

18

EUROPE IN THE AGE OF REFORMATIONS

modernity. That does not detract from its importance but makes the
debate sterile between the proponents of continuity and those of the clean
break such as characterized the ensuing decades.
The second motion is that the whole edifice of the West is collapsing,
pace those who claim that, with the end of the age of confessionalization,
the whole edifice of European civilization can stand upon the single platform devised by secularization during the Age of Enlightenment: the constitutional Bill of Rights. Let there be no misunderstanding. We cannot
put the clock back, but multiculturalism has proved itself impotent, and it
remains to be seen if—and with what—we can replace the dialectic and
distinction of powers that gave the West its identity during the confessional era.
Hence, 2017 is not just a fifth centenary. The impression remains that,
in recent decades, we have been through a most unusual experience in
which the history of events and the historiography of pondering them have
interwoven as rarely happens. On a small scale, that applies to Trento, the
place where the great crossroads of modern Europe was negotiated at the
outset of this cycle of centuries.
As my opening quote from a student illustrates, it is perhaps we who
have lost the ability to speak “de futuro.” We are quite unable to predict the
future, any future. We do not see a situation of war such as we witnessed
in centuries past, when hostilities were declared, armies were ranged
against each other, and so forth. We continue to speak of war, but we are
well aware that the daily assaults on our complex society go beyond all
frontiers, physical or ideological. New technology has not only brought
conflict into daily life but also, by media coverage, has cancelled the distinction between real death and imaginary death, especially among individuals whom loss of collective identity has rendered psychologically fragile.
Belonging to a class, a nation, or a religious community is as nothing, for
all the (no doubt legitimate) arguments of the sociologists, anthropologists,
and psychiatrists as to the reasons behind each suicide-bomb attack—a
jumble of claims that confound the traditional Islamic line of thinking
upon which our specialists expend their breath.
What is unleashing youngsters against the West is the future void. It
is also the point on which the mono- and multicultural approaches collapse
in contradiction. The old coordinates have come adrift not only in the
West but also within Islam. We historians should be the first to say that if
we are unaware of our denominational past these last five decades, we

PAOLO PRODI

19

cannot build our own future. But the opposite is also true: without a guideline linking past to future, we are unable to survive. If there is any truth in
all of this, then it is quite mistaken to harp on terrorism alone and try to
distinguish moderate Islamism from extremism. Of course, we must fight
with every weapon we have against attacks on our democratic institutions
and our civil rights. But the central issue is for the young to be able to
glimpse an identity and a future for themselves, a story of redemption, a
forum inside which their arbitrium (in its various meanings) can be drawn
upon, over and above the law in accordance with Luther’s appeal: the call
of conscience, of the right to find one’s own road to salvation, is certainly
the greatest legacy bequeathed by the Reformation to Europe that we are
expected to carry over into the scenarios of the future.

What Was the Catholic Reformation?
Marian Piety and the Universalization of
Divine Love
DAMIEN TRICOIRE*
This article has three aims. First, it reacts to the doubts expressed
recently about the possibility of making generalizations about Catholicism after the Council of Trent. Second, it discusses the different uses of
the term “Catholic Reformation” and proposes a definition that
involves a movement toward the universalization of divine love. And
third, it also discusses the success of confessionalization in some parts of
Europe and the reasons why it was not a top-down process. The
emphasis on disciplining endeavors in the analysis of the history of confessionalization misses the integrative character of various devotional
practices in Baroque Europe and fails to pay sufficient attention to the
religious constraints affecting political actors.
Keywords: Baroque piety, Catholic Reformation, Counter-Reformation, confessionalization, Marian devotion

I

n 1630 French Jesuit François Poiré published “The Triple Crown of
the Mother of God,” a thick treatise in two volumes about the Virgin
Mary.1 Poiré’s central idea was that the Holy Virgin is the queen of heaven
and earth in a triple way. She is perfect (“first crown”), she is almighty
(“second crown”), and she is most benevolent with her servants (“third
crown”). Since she is the “most beloved daughter of God,” the “spouse of
the Holy Spirit,” the “elder sister of all pure creatures,” the “only immaculate,” the “queen of all virtues,” the “honor of Heaven and earth,”2 she has
been chosen to have power even over the Almighty. As the mother of God,
she has authority over her son; as the spouse of God, she shares the same
rights with her husband. She is “leader of the church,” “general of its
*Dr. Tricoire is a privatdozent in the early-modern period at Martin Luther University
Halle-Wittenberg, email: damien.tricoire@geschichte.uni-halle.de. Unless otherwise noted,
the author has provided the translations in this article.
1. François Poiré, La Triple Couronne de la bienheureuse Vierge mère de Dieu, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1630).
2. Ibid., I, 1st treatise.

20

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

21

armies,” “treasurer . . . of the divine graces,” and “queen and mistress of the
universe.”3 Her power is “eternal. . . , changeless. . . , boundless, . . . admitted both on earth and in Heaven.”4
Poiré’s book is an excellent summary of Marian doctrine in seventeenth-century Catholic Europe. At the same time, Poiré placed his own
particular accents by drawing some conclusions. For him, Mary’s infinite
goodness to the pious believer was not only a great treasure and the “principle of [the believer’s] eternal felicity.”5 The love given by the Virgin was
also the sign that he or she has been chosen by God to be among the elect.
In turn, the sign of Mary’s predilection for the devout believer was the love
that person felt for Mary. In other words, being devout was an unequivocal
proof of predestination.6 For the faithful who really felt love for the
Mother of God, such a message may have been a reassuring, and perhaps
an uplifting, one.
As the doctrine of predestination is commonly associated with Calvinism, it may be surprising to see a Jesuit author drawing on the theme of
Providence so much as to affirm the existence of the elect. Yet Poiré was
clearly not considered as a heterodox thinker within the Society of Jesus.
“The Triple Crown of the Mother of God” was a highly successful book
that was issued in several editions and translations. It seems to have helped
its author to make a good career in the order. In 1632, two years after its
publication, he was named rector of the prestigious Collège de la Trinité
in Lyon.7 Furthermore, Poiré was not the only one to assert that devotion
toward the Holy Virgin was a clear proof of salvation. Many authors of
seventeenth-century Marian pietistic literature, whether or not they
belonged to the Society of Jesus, showed in their publications a similar
highly optimistic view of divine love, even if they developed various theological systems. There was clearly a movement within the Roman Church
aiming at reassuring the devout but imperfect faithful.
This article relies on such observations as the development of an optimistic predestination doctrine to make a general point about the nature of
Catholic Reformation. It aims to give an overall picture about endeavors to
change ideas about the relationships between heaven and earth in Catholi3. Ibid., I, 2nd treatise, pp. 1–231.
4. Ibid., I, 2nd treatise, pp. 232–33.
5. Ibid., II, 3rd treatise, p. 270.
6. Ibid., II, 3rd treatise.
7. Hugues Beylard, “Francois Poiré,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique,
ed. André Rayez and Marcel Viller, vol. 12 (Paris, 1984), p. 1830.

22

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

cism around 1600. Like all generalizations, the one proposed here is fragile
because some counter-examples can always be found. Recently, Bridget
Heal even raised doubts whether it makes sense at all to generalize about
the shape and nature of Marian piety in post-Tridentine Catholicism.
Heal argues that diversity was too great: whereas a new Baroque Catholicism emerged in some places, in others a much greater continuity existed
with the late Middle Ages.8 This does not serve to deny diversity in
Catholicism or to imply that a sudden religious revolution took place
everywhere in Europe. However, it is possible to identify broad tendencies
in the religious endeavors of Catholic elites at the end of the sixteenth and
in the first half of the seventeenth century.
There are two reasons that make it necessary to draw a general picture
of Catholic Reformation. First, notional confusion still predominates in the
research about Catholicism in early-modern times. The Protestant Reformation is defined easily as a movement of renewal of the Roman Church
that eventually led to the foundation of new confessions and confessional
churches based on a theology of justification by faith alone, free grace, and
recourse to Holy Scripture alone as the criterion of truth. In comparison, it
is anything but easy to summarize the ecclesiastical and religious evolutions
of the Roman Church in the early-modern period. The troubles begin with
the naming of these changes. Indeed, the terms abound—“Counter-Reformation,” “Catholic Reformation,” “Catholic Renewal,” “Baroque Catholicism,” “post-Tridentine Catholicism,” “early- modern Catholicism”—and
historians often have difficulties in choosing one. The nineteenth-century
German confessional contest led to the creation of several terms and
counter-terms that, precisely because of their apologetic origins, should be
employed with great care. Refusing to reduce Catholic regeneration to
Counter-Reformation—that is, to religious reaction—German historians
introduced the terms “Catholic Reformation” and “Catholic Reform” in the
second half of the nineteenth century. For Ludwig von Pastor and Hubert
Jedin, these terms were attractive because they implied that the movement
of renovation of the church took roots before Martin Luther. Jedin insisted,
above all, on the Council of Trent that was, according to him, the moment
when the reform achieved official recognition. Thus, thanks to the notion
of “Catholic Reformation,” Catholic historians intended to break the
Protestant monopoly on reformation.9
8. Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany. Protestant and
Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (New York, 2007), p. 3.
9. Hubert Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? Ein Versuch zur
Klärung der Begriffe nebst einer Jubiläumsbetrachtung über das Trienter Konzil (Lucerne, 1946);

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

23

A recent attempt to avoid the polemic and apologetic implications of
these different notions was made by John W. O’Malley. According to the
Jesuit historian, the terms “Counter-Reformation” and “Catholic Reformation” can bring only limited aspects of Catholic history to the fore. As the
history of Catholicism is marked by a great diversity and a tension between
continuity and change, we should use the more neutral term “early-modern
Catholicism” as an umbrella under which “Counter-Reformation,”
“Catholic Reform(ation),” “post-Tridentine Catholicism,” and “Confessional Age,” among others, could coexist. In O’Malley’s view, the term
“Catholic Reform(ation)” should, like the very word reformatio on which it
is based, designate the efforts to “improve” the Church since the fifteenth
century. However, as O’Malley has explained, the word reformatio had been
already used for many centuries, and even between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries the reform approaches were very diverse.10 Thus the term,
as it is understood by O’Malley, has many meanings and cannot be used to
designate phenomena of a particular epoch in Catholic history. On the
other hand, if the use of “Catholic Reformation” is restricted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then a parallel is suggested between
Protestant and Catholic confessions, as was intended by the German historians who invented it. In this article, the question of the correct application
of the term “Catholic Reformation” is addressed and the term is accepted as
an appropriate concept when writing the history of early-modern Catholicism. The argument is based mainly on the evolution of Marian piety and
it demonstrates that these and other characteristics of refashioned Catholicism enable one to draw a parallel between Protestant and Catholic history.
It seems necessary to generalize about religious endeavors in Catholicism around 1600 because it is important to reconsider some of the reasons
why this church was successful. Of course, an analysis of all reasons that led
to a strengthening of Catholicism is well beyond the scope of this article.
However, it seems essential to react to the undifferentiated view developed
in the so-called “confessionalization” research. Originating in German
social history, the concept of “confessionalization” highlights the instru-

John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 19–71. In this article, the term “Catholic Reformation” is used rather
than “Catholic Reform,” because the former is more common in English. However, both
terms have similar meanings, as Jedin insists, and were created to affirm the existence of a
genuine reform movement in the Roman Church, and not only among the Protestants. A
slight difference is that “Catholic Reform” suggests a bit less a parallel between both reform
movements; see Jedin, Katholische Reformation, p. 32.
10. Ibid., pp. 119–41 (especially 130–34).

24

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

mentalization of church life by political agents who aimed to build up state
authority. It sees the confessional evolution largely as an effect of disciplinary measures imposed by the state. Postulating that confessional identity
has been a tool to create territorial identity, research on confessionalization
has shown little interest in religious contents as such. Wolfgang Reinhard
has even consciously excluded religion from his research design.11 To be
sure, Heinz Schilling, the other father of the confessionalization thesis, has
paid more attention to religious patterns in the last years and has diagnosed
a turn to “confessional fundamentalism” in Calvinism as well as in Catholicism around 1600.12
The point here is not to claim that political actors did not use coercion
or did not try to use religious ideas and practices to strengthen their
authority—indeed, this was an essential part of politics in Baroque
Europe—but that they were bound to religious patterns that were not arbitrary and have their own history. For example, one cannot understand the
recourse to the Virgin Mary as a patroness of the state without studying the
religious dynamics of Marian piety in general.13 Political actors defined
their interests and acted in a religious framework that they could stimulate
but hardly create. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the relative success
of the confessionalization policy in territories of the Holy Roman Empire
like Bavaria without comprehending the religious needs of at least a significant part of the population and the devotional practices promoted by the
Church. For this reason, in the past years, the “top-down” approach of
confessionalization research has been often criticized. Scholars like Marc
Forster have challenged the old view according to which we can clearly differentiate between a popular and an elite religion, demonstrating that the
needs of the elite and those of persons belonging to ‘lower’ strata of society
were convergent.14 It has also been recently established that the re-

11. Wolfgang Reinhard, “Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?” in Katholische
Konfessionalisierung. Wissenschaftliches Symposium der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus
Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1993, ed. Wolfgang Reinhard and
Heinz Schilling (Münster, 1995), pp. 419–51, especially 426–28; Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft: Profil, Leistung, Defizite und Perspektiven eines geschichtswissenschaftlichen Paradigma,” in ibid., pp. 1–49.
12. Heinz Schilling, “Gab es um 1600 in Europa einen Konfessionsfundamentalismus?
Die Geburt des internationalen Systems in der Krise des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Jahrbuch
des historischen Kollegs (2005), 69–93.
13. Damien Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen. Katholische Reform und politisches Kalkül in Frankreich, Bayern und Polen-Litauen (Göttingen, 2013), esp. pp. 71–80, 171–94, 269–85, 319–27.
14. Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of Baroque. Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (New York, 2001), pp. 11–15.

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

25

Catholicization of territories like the Upper Palatinate and Bohemia was as
much the effect of persuasion as of coercion.15 Therefore, this article aims
to provide some reflections about the nature of these devotional practices
and the religious demand that enabled the success of Catholic elites in converting and confessionalizing people. In doing so, it shows that Schilling’s
thesis, according to which there was a turn to “confessional fundamentalism,” hardly grasps the evolutions of Catholicism around 1600, which on
the contrary was marked by a sharp decline in apocalyptic fears.
After having given an overview about the history of piety in medieval
times and the early sixteenth century, this article will discuss the problems
of the term “Catholic Reformation.” It will then examine the features of
the Marian cult in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and
show the overall coherence between its evolutions and other trends in
Catholicism, before making some concluding remarks.
In doing so, it will defend three theses: first, Marian piety and other
devotional and religious practices show that Catholicism experienced
around 1600 a movement, taking up, emphasizing, and generalizing certain late medieval approaches and inventing new ones, with the result of
asserting the universal character of divine love, that is, the idea that virtually everybody is called to piety and salvation, regardless of his social condition or national identity. It will show that Catholic elites propagated
optimistic doctrines about human salvation and tried to integrate different
social groups and nations in Europe and overseas into a universal structure
encompassing earth and heaven. As a loving mother having power over her
Son, and beloved by Him, the Virgin Mary played a central role in giving
men and women, families, social groups and nations a place in the hierarchy of divine love. Furthermore, it will focus on the various means of salvation promoted by church leadership in order to grasp the thrust of
Catholic Reformation. A detailed study of local reception processes cannot
be presented here, but it is clear that local populations on the whole
accepted and adopted the Church’s devotional practices. Even so, it is
generally very difficult to make a distinction between the religion of the
educated and that of a vast part of the population.
Second, the use of the term “Catholic reform,” which at first glance
seems problematic because of the fundamental differences between the
15. Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia. Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (New York, 2009); and Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles. The
Counter-Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Burlington, VT, 2009).

26

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

Protestant and Catholic theologies, is justified to designate the universalist
endeavors to develop more positive relationships between earth and
heaven. Third, “Catholic Reformation,” understood as a movement toward
a universalization of divine love, barely begins with Trent but rather in the
last quarter of the sixteenth century.
*****
Well into the sixteenth century, the dominant religious discourse in
most parts of Europe condemned the world as the kingdom of sin. This
idea often went hand in hand with a widespread and strong eschatological
fear.16 For numerous preachers, the corruption of society was a clear sign
of God’s wrath. Thus, in the late fifteenth century, during the French invasion of Italy, Girolamo Savonarola took power in Florence on the ground
of a program of religious and moral purification. Eschatological fears even
led to the emergence of millenarian mass movements in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. The radical wing of the “Hussite revolution” in
Bohemia had a marked millenarian character.17 In the second half of the
sixteenth century, the French kingdom experienced a destructive apocalyptic dynamic that peaked in the mystical experience of the Parisian Ligue.18
To be sure, most religious reforms and movements related to late
medieval asceticism were not violent. One can note the concentration on
the Passion of Christ, which was also related to the condemnation of the
world and the fears it provoked. To show the suffering of the God-man
was to point out that even if men were generally unworthy of Him, salvation was possible: the oblation of the God-man signified His infinite
mercy.19 In the search for salvation, the disciples of the devotio moderna
tried to imitate Christ in his self-sacrificial sufferings. Several religious
orders were reformed in order to enforce the Observant ideal in cloisters,
the earthly place of expiation par excellence. Other reformers were less rad16. Jean Delumeau notes that this thesis is in large part accepted by scholars. See Jean
Delumeau, La Peur en occident (XIV e–XVIII e siècles): Une cité assiégée (Paris, 1978), pp. 19899, 218–23, 232–53; Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu : La violence au temps des troubles de
religion, vers 1525-vers 1610, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990), I, pp. 102–235; Eschatologie und Hussitismus, ed. Alexander Patschovsky and František Šmahel (Prague, 1996).
17. Ibid., pp. 11–23.
18. Crouzet, Les Guerriers, II.
19. Dupront, “Vie et création religieuses,” 494; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The
Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), p. 351; Bernd Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‘reformatio’ zur Reformation: Der Prozeß normativer Zentrierung von Religion und Gesellschaft in Deutschland,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 84 (1993), 7-82,
here 25.

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

27

ical, but insisted, like Jean Gerson, on personal devotion and feelings.20
The strong Eucharistic piety of that time was closely related to all these
pious movements. The Eucharist was an expiatory sacrifice restoring the
good relationship between believers and God; it thus had the function of
turning away God’s wrath. As a sacrament, it demonstrated the union of
Christianity with its Lord, especially during the annual communion at
Easter and the Corpus Christi processions.21 In a religion emphasizing the
corruption of men, it was also considered to give salvation. For these reasons, movements asking for frequent, weekly communion, developed in
France and the Holy Roman Empire, especially in Prague.22
Another way to try to avoid God’s punishment was to turn to the
Queen of Heaven. As several scholars have noted, in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, the function of the Marian cult was generally
related to the dominant “religion of fear”: The Mother of God protected
humanity from God’s wrath.23 Her participation in Christ’s Passion made
her intercession especially effective.24 Therefore, iconographic representations of the Mother of Sorrow, of the Mater misericordiae and of the Sheltering-cloak Madonna were very popular at the time.25 The common condemnations of the world as an empire of sin and the related fears of an
imminent divine punishment inspired a massive Marian cult: because God
was considered a severe father and His mercy was uncertain, only His
mother could be counted on to return the love she was given, helping men
to have worldly as well as spiritual success.
As several scholars have pointed out, Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations were also movements aiming to overcome eschatological fears.
Luther’s doctrine considered human salvation as free (sola gratia), which
meant greater security for the believer (sola fide).26 Through the affirmation

20. Hamm, „Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‚reformatio’,” 11–23, 27–28, 31–32.
21. John Bossy, “The Mass as a social institution, 1200–1700,” Past and Present, 100
(1983), 29–61, here 59; Concerning late medieval Eucharistic piety, see Rubin, Corpus
Christi.
22. Bossy, “The Mass,” 59; Thomas A. Fudge, Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social
Revolution in Bohemia (London, 2010), pp. 151–163.
23. Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‘reformatio’,” 25–26; Alphonse Dupront,
Du Sacré: Croisades et pèlerinages, images et langages (Paris, 1987), pp. 163-70.
24. Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‚reformatio’,” 25.
25. Jean Delumeau, Rassurer et Protéger: Le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois
(Paris, 1989), pp. 261–89; Dupront, “Vie et création religieuses,” 511; Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‘reformatio’,” 25–26.
26. Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‚reformatio‘,” 11–23, 27–28, 31–32.

28

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

that the Almighty was radically different than men and His grace totally
free, Calvin’s doctrine can be interpreted as a reaction to the panicky search
for the signs of God’s wrath.27
*****
In this context of strong eschatological fear, when can one determine
the beginning of a new Catholic reform movement and what were its characteristics? In recent historiography, the use of the terms “Tridentine” or
“post-Tridentine Catholicism” is common, suggesting the Council of
Trent as the beginning of Catholic Reformation.28 Whereas most scholars
are skeptical about the idea of a continuous reform movement between
1500 and 1600, they often seem to follow implicitly the narrative of Jedin
that sees an epochal break in the Council of Trent. For this reason, the
term Catholic Reformation mostly denominates the Council of Trent and
the endeavors to apply its decrees on an international scale along with the
founding of new orders.29 But such a definition may appear far from satisfying. One can identify two reasons for that.
First, even if the Tridentine endeavors to define and enforce norms
were a decisive step in the establishment of a Catholic confessional church,
the very notion of “reformation” suggests a parallel to Luther’s work in the
fields of theology and piety that is problematic. The scope of the Tridentine decrees seems hardly comparable to what was at the core of the Protestant Reformation. In fact, the Lutheran Reformation was not just about
eradicating abuses or disciplining and educating the clergy. As Bernd
Hamm has put it, it was a “movement disrupting the whole system of religion and religiously determined medieval society, through the recourse to
the norm and the legitimacy principle of the Holy Scriptures.”30 Obviously,

27. Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu, I, pp. 143–62, 219–22.
28. Some examples are R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770
(New York, 2005), p. 80; and Simon Ditchfield, “Tridentine Catholicism,” in The Ashgate
Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Geert H Janssen, Alexandra Bamji, and
Mary Laven (Farnham, UK, 2013), pp. 15–31.
29. See, for example, the outstanding overview of the Catholic reformation by Michael
A. Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (London, 1999). By contrast, a recent relativization of
Trent’s centrality is Ditchfield, “Catholic Reformation,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the
Reformation, ed. Peter Marshall (Oxford, 2015), pp. 152–85, here 168–71.
30. Bernd Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‘reformatio’ zur Reformation,” 7:
“eine Umbruchsbewegung gegenüber dem System von Religion und religiös bestimmter
Gesellschaft des Mittelalters in der Rückbesinnung auf die Norm und das Legitimationsprinzip der Hl. Schrift.” Similar ideas in Bernd Hamm, “Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation—oder: was die Reformation zur Reformation machte,” in: Bernd Hamm, Bernd

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

29

the same cannot be said of the Tridentine decrees. Even if Trent clarified
many points of doctrine, it above all confirmed traditions; this may not be
sufficient to consider it as an equivalent of such a revolution as the
Lutheran Reformation has been. To justify the use of the term Catholic
Reformation, it would be necessary to search for religious patterns fulfilling
at least a similar function to that of Protestant sola gratia theology—that is,
as has been here shown, to reassure believers of the path to salvation.
Second, there are significant differences between the style of piety that
predominated at Trent and the highly optimistic one of seventeenth-century Jesuits like Poiré, as historians of mentalities have shown. As
Alphonse Dupront put it, after Trent most Catholics turned away from a
“religion of the suffering God” to a “religion of glory.”31 In his view, the
council fathers lived in a world of religious fear. St. Charles Borromeo, the
first Theatines, and the first Jesuits called for repentance, condemned
worldly life, and were uncertain about their salvation.32 These rather ascetic ideals of the Tridentine reformers were hardly something new, as we
have seen.
In comparison to the sixteenth-century proliferation of movements
drawing on and reacting to eschatological fears, seventeenth-century
Catholic history seems much more serene. Even if eschatological fears did
not disappear, the dominant discourse and iconographic representations
suggested more security in matters of salvation. Strikingly, violent mass
movements emerging from millenarian expectations largely disappeared
from Catholicism after 1600. This observation seems valid even for the

Moeller, and Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformationstheorien: Ein kirchenhistorischer Disput über
Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation (Göttingen, 1995), pp. 57–127, here 64–65.
31. Dupront, “Vie et création religieuses dans la France moderne,” in La France et les
Français, ed. Michel François (Paris, 1972), pp. 491-577, here 494. Further: Peter Burschel,
“Schöne Passionen: Zur Konfessionalisierung des Leidens in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Religion
und Gewalt: Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen, 1500–1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim
Siebenhüner (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 249–64; idem, “Paradiese der Gewalt: Martyrium, Imagination und die Metamorphosen des nachtridentinischen Heiligenhimmels,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs (2001), pp. 139–81; Matthias Pohlig, “Konfessionskulturelle Deutungsmuster internationaler Konflikte um 1600—Kreuzzug, Antichrist, Tausendjähriges
Reich,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 93 (2002), 278–316; Bruno Maës, Le Roi, la Vierge
et la Nation: pèlerinages et identité nationale entre guerre de Cent ans et Révolution (Paris, 2003),
pp. 167–72.
32. Alphonse Dupront, “Autour de saint Filippo Neri: de l’optimisme chrétien,” in
Genèses des temps modernes: Rome, les Réformes et le Nouveau Monde (Paris, 2001), pp. 207–35,
here 26–27.

30

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

FIGURE 1: The Holy Virgin as Immaculate and Mighty Empress, on the top of the
Munich Marian column (sculptor: Hubert Gerhard, late 16th century; placed on
the column since 1638; photograph of the author).

Thirty Years’ War period in the Holy Roman Empire: as Matthias Pohlig
has shown, this great conflict was preceded by only few pamphlets drawing
on apocalyptical themes in Catholic Germany.33
*****
The evolution of Marian piety is a good indicator of changes in the
dominant religious discourse, practice, and iconography. Seventeenth-century religious art shows a different image than the late-medieval one: very
often, the Mother of God appears as the glorious Queen of Heaven and
Earth, praised by the whole celestial court, and as the Immaculate, the
victor over evil.34 The iconography of the Assumption, the Coronation,

33. Pohlig, “Konfessionskulturelle Deutungsmuster.”
34. Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen ‚reformatio‘,” 44.

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

31

FIGURE 2: The Immaculate Virgin in glory (stucco, design of Fischer von Erlach,
Salzburg, Kollegienkirche, around 1700; photograph of the author).

and especially the Immaculate Conception—very common in engravings,
paintings, and sculptures of the time—highlighted both her universal rule
and her infinite kindness.35 (figs. 1 and 2) Such pictures carried a message
to the devout: great favors awaited from such a powerful and good
patroness, benevolently governing heaven and earth. More than late35. Kyra Belán, Madonnas. From Medieval to Modern (New York, 2001), pp. 134–40;
Wincenty Odymalski, Wizerunek doskonałey świątobliwości . . . (Kraków, 1660); Wojciech Grabiecki, Triumph niezwyciężoney krolowey . . . (Warszawa, 1660), folio 3; Jan Nieliski, O
Najświętszej Bogarodzicy . . . (Kraków, 1636); Ėtienne Binet, Tessera salutis . . . (Augsburg,
1618); Benedict Gonon, Chronicon SS. Deiparae . . . (Lyon, 1637). See also the following engravings in the Polish National Library: Czytelnia Zbiorów Ikonograficznych, T.I-100, G.66197;
Sz. 7, G.2231, T.I-57, G.22.432; Sz. 7, G.2208. The Marian columns of Munich, Freising,
Münster, Vienna, Prague, and of a great number of other central European towns show the
Immaculate Virgin: Susan Tipton, “‘Super aspidem et basilicum ambulabis. . . .’ Zur Entstehung
der Mariensäulen im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des Barock, ed.
Dieter Breuer, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden, 1995), pp. 375–97. Regarding such paintings, see Emile
Mâle, L’Art religieux après le Concile de Trente: Étude sur l’iconographie de la fin du XVI e siècle, du
XVII e, du XVIII e siècle. Italie—France—Espagne—Flandres (Paris, 1932), pp. 29-48.

32

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

medieval expressions, seventeenth-century Marian iconography enhanced
the universal power and glory of the Queen of Heaven as such, not pointing out her protection from God’s wrath or her participation in her son’s
oblation, but glorifying heaven through her in general. The critical role
played by the Virgin Mary suggested a more optimistic vision of the relationship between heaven and earth and a greater security for the devout.36
Thus, artists made efforts to give the impression to the spectator that he
himself was a witness of the miracles of Mary’s assumption or coronation:
painters and sculptors used both a realistic manner of portrayal and dramatic compositions in order to elicit emotions.37
As the example of Poiré’s treatise shows, similar motifs can be found
in Marian devotional literature. Beyond all diversity, there was a clear tendency to emphasize very strongly and emotionally the incommensurable
goodness and sovereignty of the most powerful empress of heaven and
earth.38 An overview of some of the numerous titles published about the
Virgin in the first half of the seventeenth century show a similar emphasis
on the figure of an almighty patroness: “The Holy Treasure of the Prerogatives and Greatness of the most Holy Virgin Mary,”39 “God’s Masterpiece
or the Perfection of the Holy Virgin,”40 “The Triumph of Our Beloved

36. Mâle, L’Art religieux, p. 32.
37. Rosemary Muir Wright, Sacred Distance: Representing the Virgin (Manchester, UK,
2006), pp. 108–10.
38. In addition to those previously cited, some more representative texts from PolandLithuania, Germany, and France are the following: Szymon Starowolski, Diva Claromontana
. . . (Cracow, 1640), especially pp. 1–3; idem, Oratio de gloriosa assumptione Augustae Mariae
(Cracow, 1638); idem, Wieniec Niewiędniejący Przeczystej P. Mariey . . . (Kraków, 1649,) especially pp. 8–10; Jan Nieliski, O Najświętszej Bogarodzicy. . . (Kraków, 1636); Szymon
Stanisław Makowski, Thronus immaculatus . . . (Kraków, 1646); Albrycht Stanisław
Radziwiłł, Żywot Przeczystej Panny . . . (Warsaw, 1650); Wincenty Odymalski, Wizerunek
doskonałey świątobliwości . . . (Cracow, 1660); Jacynt Skrakówski, Wieniec rożany Krolowey
niebieskiey . . . (Cracow, 1644); Jacob Balde, Ehrenpreis der Allerseligsten Jungfrawen . . .
(Munich, 1640); Maximilianus Sandeus, Maria Patrona . . . (Mainz, 1630); Hieremius Drexelius, “Rosae selectissimarum virtutum,” in idem, Opera omnia, duobus voluminibus . . . (Mainz,
1645), pp. 1145–61; Louis Gaberot, Paraphrase sur le cantique de la Vierge: Magnificat anima
mea Dominum (Paris, 1628); Nicolas Frenicle, Hymne de la Vierge (n.p., 1641); Nicolas
L’Archevesque, Les Grandeurs suréminentes de la très sainte Vierge Marie . . . (Paris, 1638);
Guillaume Gibieuf, La Vie et les grandeurs de la très sainte Vierge Marie, mère de Dieu (Paris,
1637); Jean Deslyons, L’Enlèvement de la Vierge par les anges. . . (Paris, 1647); and Jean Regnier: La Vie, les Travaux, la Grâce. . . (Paris 1636).
39. Jacques Jeanne, Thrésor sacré des prérogatives et grandeurs de la glorieux et tres-saincte
Vierge Marie. . . (Paris, 1620).
40. Étienne Binet, Le Chef-d’œuvre de Dieu, et les souveraines perfections de la saincte
Vierge sa mère (Paris, 1643).

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33

FIGURE 3: Adam and Eve enslaved by sin call out to the Virgin Mary and Christ
child; the caption reads: “Clamat Adam Christum; prensans rogat Eva Mariam;
Mater ut haec nobis; hic velit esse Pater” (copper engraving, engraver R. [?]
Sadeler, printed in Albertinus, Unser Liebfrau Triumph, 1620).

Lady,”41 “The Image of Perfection or the Life of the Glorious Virgin Mary
Mother of God,”42 “The Holy Virgin, Cause of all Good and Sign of Salvation,”43 and “The Royal Crown, where the Subject of the Greatness and
Excellence of the Virgin is treated.”44 In all these works, the accent is put
on the glory, the triumph, the privileges, the greatness, the perfection, and
the power of the Queen of Heaven.
41. Aegidius Albertinus, Unser L. Frauen Triumph. Erstlich ihr Leben begreiffent; Folgents wirdt erwiesen, daß der jenig, der ein wahre Andacht zu ihr hat, außerwöhlt und fürsehen seye
(München, 1620).
42. Pierre Deveze, L’Image de la perfection, ou la vie de la glorieuse Vierge Marie mere de
Dieu (Paris, 1643).
43. Alard Le Roy, Beata Virgo, causa omnium bonorum et nota salutis (Tournai, 1621).
44. Charles Roussel, La Couronne royale, où il est traicté au long des grandeurs et excellences
de la Vierge et des merveilles et prerogatives de son saint rosaire (Evreux, 1615).

34

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

“The Triumph of Our Beloved Lady,” by Aegidius Albertinus, is a
good example of this genre. Albertinus was the librarian of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. Although he was not a cleric, he was a fervent supporter
of Catholic Reformation. His book Unser Lieben Frauen Triumph was published in 1620, the year of his death. It is composed of three parts: a life of
the Virgin Mary, prayers to the Virgin, and a treatise showing that “the one
who has a true piety to her is elected and predestined.” Here again, we find
similar ideas to Poiré’s. According to Albertinus, devotion toward the
Mother of God is a “beautiful sign of predestination.”45 Mary’s compassion
is so great that she does not reject anyone. Those who are truly devoted to
her can have no doubt about their salvation. People should fear just three
things: their death, the Last Judgment, and eternal damnation. But “we are
safe from all these, if the most holy Mother protects us, and this is precisely
what she intends to do.”46 Mary’s victory over the slavery of sin (a consequence of the original sin) is exposed in an engraving (fig. 3). Albertinus
defends himself against accusations according to which he would “flatter
the sinners” with his optimistic statements. In his opinion, sinners should
not think that a few Ave Marias are sufficient to be saved. Nevertheless,
everybody who truly repents and loves the Virgin Mary in the moment of
his death will know the infinite mercy of the Mother of God. So Albertinus concludes: “If you fear to be damned [. . .] throw yourself down at the
feet of this Virgin, and you will be safe.”47 The message is clear: thanks to
Mary, absolutely no one is outside the reach of divine love.
Similar statements could be found throughout Europe. In Portugal,
Francisco Mendoça, a celebrated Jesuit and professor at the College of
Coimbra, did not hesitate to assert that “it is certain that those who render
a cult to the Virgin cannot be damned.”48 In Poland, Franciszek Fenicki
taught a similar doctrine in Lublin. In his book Marian Servitude, which
has been published in many editions in different European countries, he
develops the idea that everybody is a servant of the Mother of God. People
had only to acknowledge this fact and give themselves to her, and they will

45. Albertinus, Unser L. Frauen Triumph, p. 210: “ein schönes zeichen der praedestination oder erwöhlung. . . .”
46. Ibid., p. 233: “Vor solchem allem seind wir versichert, wofern die allerheiligste
Mutter uns in ihren schutz nimbt, und eben dises ist das ienig, darnach sie verlanget.”
47. Ibid., p. 244: “Förchest du dich verdambt zu werden [. . .], so wirff dich vor den
Füssen diser Jungkfrawen nider, so wirst du sicher.” .
48. Francisco Mendoca, Viridarium sacrae ac profanae eruditionis (Lugduni, 1632), p.
40: “dico periculosam non esse, sed securam huiusmodi loquutionem, impossibile est damnari
eum, qui B. Virginem colit. . . . Virgini devotus in aeternum perire non potest.”

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

35

know grace.49 To him, such a subordination to the Queen of Heaven
would bring the greatest personal advantages. Or, as Jan Dionizy
Łobżyński, his fellow countryman and a Paulinian monk, asserted: to be a
slave of the Mother of God means to be a king.5 By such a reassuring message, these clerics clearly wanted to persuade everybody to join a mass
movement toward salvation.
For this reason, books of Marian piety addressed different social
strata. Indeed, one can observe a clear diversification of publications concerning the Holy Virgin. Both booklets for individual devotion and thick
reference books were printed. In the case of Marian piety books, one finds,,
among others, booklets for sodalists, compilations of miracles classified by
place or by date, collections of sermons, “atlases” of pilgrimage sites and
books promoting certain pious practices like the rosary or addressing some
professional groups like physicians.51
The affirmation of the universality of Marian love went hand in hand
with specific religious practices that clerics in the seventeenth century
sought to establish and indeed succeeded in propagating in many places.
The religious orders of Catholic Reformation tried to reach a great number
49. Franciscus Stanislaus Phoenicius [Fenicki], Mariae mancipium sive modus tradendi se
in mancipium Deiparae Virgini (Lublin, 1632).
50. Jan Dionizy Łobżyński, Przenosiny triumfalne naycudownieyszego w krolestwie Polskim obrazu Bogarodzice Panny Maryey na Iasney Gorze Częstochowskiey abo Panegiryk koscielny
(Kraków, 1644), p. 89.
51. Booklets for sodalists: Maximilianus Sandeus, Maria Patrona sive Orationes ad
sodales habitae, de patrocinio Deiparae (Mainz, 1630); Ėtienne Binet, Tessera salutis (Augsburg,
1618). See on this topic: Louis Châtellier, L’Europe des dévots (Paris, 1987), pp. 48–49.
Another booklet: Geistliches Zeughaus : In welchem Mittel wehr und massen Gott Zuversöhne[n],
die Ketzereye[n] Zubestreite[n], die Sünd und laster wie auch andre Anfechtungen Zuuberwinden
(München, 1634). Reference books: Toussaint Bridoul, Le Triomphe annuel de N. Dame où il
est traité chaque jour de l’an des honeurs que la Vierge a receus du Ciel et de la Terre (Lille, 1640);
Gonon, Chronicon; Pierre Courcier, Negotium saeculorum Maria, sive Chronologica epitome ab
anno Mundi primo ad annum Christi millesimum sexcentesimum sexagesimum (Dijon, 1662);
Józef Bartłomiej Zimorowic, Hymny na uroczysty święta Panny nad Matkami . . . (Kraków,
1640); Nicolaj van der Meulen, “Kartenbild und Gnadenbild. Zur Kartierung und Konsolidierung einer Tierra mariana im 17. und 18. Jh.,” in Maria in der Krise. Kultpraxis zwischen
Konfession und Politik in Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Agnieszka Gąsior (Köln, 2014), 31–49. Sermons:
Szymon Starowolski, Vestis Mariana seu Oratio sacrum Reginae Coeli habitum (Kraków, 1640);
Krótki sposob mowienia psałterzyka Panny Maryey. Rozanki abo rozany wianek P. Maryey (n.p.
[1611]); and Jean Deslyons, L’Enlèvement de la Vierge par les anges, homélie prêchée le jour de son
Assomption . . . (Paris, 1647). For physicians: Guillaume Du Val, Litaniae de beatissima Virgine
Maria deipara, domina et patrona nostra. Oratio ad sanctos et sanctas, medicinae professione . . .
(Paris, 1642).

36

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

of believers and to make them supplicants of heavenly figures. In order to
achieve this, one of the principal means was the foundation of confraternities, especially Marian brotherhoods such as the Jesuit sodalities or the
Dominican Confraternities of the Rosary. Sodalities formed a transnational network covering virtually all major and medium-sized Catholic
European towns. At some places they were so successful that they shaped
the life of the city. Thus the vast majority of male inhabitants of Munich
and Ingolstadt became supplicants of the Queen of Heaven and earth.52
The early modern brotherhoods relied on the idea of a personal commitment to the Marian cult and not only on duties as members of an estate in
society, as medieval confraternities of corporations largely did.53 It was
especially within the framework of sodalities that the idea of personal election was propagated, as expressed in the practice of Marian servitude.
Transnational networks of the religious orders and confraternities created an overlapping of local and universal identities. For example, Jesuits
produced copies of some Roman paintings of the Holy Virgin and sent
them, along with relics,54 throughout the world, not only for the members
of Marian congregations, but also for other believers. These paintings
sometimes became the object of new local cults: this was especially the case
of the Mater ter admirabilis of Santa Maria Maggiore, which probably had
“a wider currency than any other religious image on earth”55 and gained a
cultic significance on its own in the Jesuit college of Ingolstadt, among
others.56 Conversely, icons from the peripheries of European Catholicism
could become important cult objects in Rome, as shows the example of the

52. Châtellier, L’Europe des dévots, pp. 29–44, 67–83; Tobias Schönauer, Ingolstadt in
der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Soziale und wirtschaftliche Aspekte der Stadtgeschichte
(Ingolstadt, 2007), 240–43; Die Jesuiten in Ingolstadt, 1549–1773: Ausstellung des Stadtarchivs
(Ingolstadt, 1991), pp. 210-11.
53. Châtellier, L’Europe des dévots, pp. 63–123; Jiři Mikulec, “Religious Brotherhoods
in Baroque Bohemia,” Historica. Historical Sciences in the Czech Republic, 32 (1995), 123–37;
idem, “Wallfahrer und Sodalen. Die barocke Wallfahrt im Leben der religiösen Bruderschaften in Böhmen,” in Wallfahrten in der europäischen Kultur, ed. Daniel Doležal and Hartmut Kühne (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 483-93, at 483.
54. Simon Ditchfield, “Catholic Reformation,” p. 153.
55. Gauvin Alexander Baily, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–
1773 (Toronto, 1998), p. 8. For other examples of the “translation or diffusion and appropriation” of the Salus populi romani and other European pictures, see Ditchfield, “Catholic reformation,” pp. 153–56.
56. Kirstin Noreen, “Replicating the icon of Santa Maria Maggiore: the Mater ter
admirabilis and the Jesuits of Ingolstadt,” Visual Resources: An International Journal on Images
and Their Uses, 24 (2008), 19–37. On the cult of this icon in the Middle Ages, see Gerhard
Wolf, Salus populi romani: Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter (Weinheim, 1990).

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

37

picture which the Carmelite Domenicus a Jesu Maria found in Bohemia
and carried during the Battle of the White Mountain: to host the miraculous picture, the Roman Carmelites quickly renamed their new church
Santa Maria della Vittoria and placed the icon on the main high altar.57
Wilhelm Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus (1655), a world-wide catalogue
of places of pilgrimage, shows that the clerics of the Catholic Reformation
considered the vast range of Marian miraculous pictures to create unity.58
The pilgrimage sites often offered an interweaving of the local, the
national, and the universal. Stará Boleslav, Bohemia’s main pilgrimage, for
example, intertwined the cult of the kingdom’s main patron saint, Wenceslas, with that of the Mother of God: the local Marian picture was considered to have been revered by Wenceslas. Furthermore, the Jesuits organizing the pilgrimages named this painting Palladium Bohemiae, thus
nationalizing it.59 In 1650, when the Prague Marian column was erected in
order to thank the Virgin for having repelled the Swedes and for the
burghers of the capital having remained faithful to their Habsburg king,
Ferdinand III, who put a copy of the Palladium on the plinth of the
column, gave furthermore national significance to the picture.60
On a global scale, clerics of the Catholic Reformation made efforts to
integrate local societies into a universal network of pious faithful. However, local initiatives to create new pilgrimage sites were often met with
skepticism; the fear of religious syncretism and unorthodox practices was
too great, as it is best illustrated by the example of the birth of the cult of
the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico.61 But on the whole, the Marian cult

57. Siegfried Hofmann, “Maria de Victoria—Nachruf auf die einstige Kirche der Kongregation Maria vom Sieg,” Sammelblatt des historischen Vereins Ingolstadt, 85 (1976), 81–138,
here 86, 92–95.
58. Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus sive de imaginibus Deiparae per orbem christianum miraculosis, 2 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1655); Van der Meulen, “Kartenbild und Gnadenbild”.
See also the recent French edition: Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Marie mondialisée: L’Atlas marianus de Wilhelm Gumppenberg, ed. and trans. Nicolas Balzamo, Olivier Christin and Fabrice
Flückiger (Neuchâtel, 2014).
59. Anna Ohlidal, “Die (Wieder-)Einführung der Wallfahrten nach Sankt Johann
unter dem Felsen und Altbunzlau um 1600—ein Verdienst der Prager Jesuiten,” in Jesuitische
Frömmigkeitskulturen. Konfessionelle Interaktion in Ostmitteleuropa 1570–1700, ed. Anna Ohlidal and Stefan Samerski (Stuttgart, 2006), pp. 207–23.
60. Damien Tricoire, “‘Sklave sein heißt herrschen’: Die Münchner und Prager
Mariensäulen in ihrem religiösen und politischen Kontext,” in Transregionalität in Kult und
Kultur. Bayern, Böhmen und Schlesien zur Zeit der Gegenreformation, ed. Marco Bogade (Köln,
2016), pp. 59–70.
61. Miri Rubin, Mother of God. A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven/London,
2009), p. 391.

38

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

was considered an instrument to convert religiously foreign populations.
For this purpose, Jesuits and Franciscans consciously used the similarities
between the Mother of God and Mexican or Chinese fertility goddesses.62
In many countries where the Iberians created trading posts or colonies,
important pilgrimages developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in places that had already been sacred before the coming
of the Europeans: beneath the shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe mentioned above, the cults of Our Lady of the Rosary in Chiapas, the Virgin
of Copacabana on Lake Titicaca in Peru, or Our Lady of Health in
Velankanni on the Coromandel coast (India) are representative of such a
trend.63 Furthermore, Marian confraternities were founded in America
and Asia, addressing diverse social groups such as Chinese women or
African slaves in the American colonies.64
Marian cults had already fulfilled the function of reassuring the devout
in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe, but the new seventeenthcentury emphasis on the universal power and love of the Queen of Heaven,
the assertion that the devout will surely be saved, and the impressive
endeavors to integrate a large part of the population as well as different
European and world regions into a relationship of patronage with heaven
indicate an overcoming of religious fears of God’s wrath. There was a
strong correlation between the evolution of Marian iconography, devotional literature, and religious practices, which conveyed a clear message:
through Mary everybody can receive God’s grace and love.
*****
One can wonder, however, if this message was limited to Marian
piety. For this reason, it is necessary to examine other common cults, artistic innovations and, more generally, ideas about salvation around and after
1600. Of course, within the framework of this article this can be done only
on a very basic level. The following paragraphs point out several evolutions
in the variety of devotional practices promoted by church leaders that correlate with the changes in the Marian cult.
To begin with, at least two other major cults on which clerics and the
devout put special emphasis around and after 1600 seem to have fulfilled a
62. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610
(Oxford 2011), p.88–89; Rubin, Mother of God, pp. 390–3.
63. Rubin, Mother of God, pp. 390-9; Matthias Frenz, Gottes-Mutter-Göttin. Marienverehrung im Spannungsfeld religiöser Traditionen in Südindien (Würzburg, 2004), pp. 82–122.
64. Ditchfield, “Catholic reformation,” pp. 183–84; Rubin, Mother of God, pp. 394–5.

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

39

similar function to the Marian piety, namely, of reassuring the faithful by
asserting the universality of divine love. First, the veneration of angels
flourished. For the devout, angels had clearly an integrating function
because they were creatures serving as links between earth and heaven. One
can highlight especially the growing cult of guardian angels, allowing every
Christian to have a personal heavenly companion. Cities and kingdoms
also had their angels. The cult of angels conveyed an optimistic message,
especially the figure of St. Michael the Archangel, who was particularly
popular in devotional literature: in it he announces the coming triumph
over evil, as does the figure of the Immaculate Conception.65
Second, changes in Eucharistic piety were also in accord with the evolution of Marian cult. One characteristic of the style of piety propagated by
the Jesuits and the French Oratorians was the frequent display and reception of the Eucharist. Here, Catholic Reformation generalized particular
practices of some late medieval movements while inventing new ones. In
France, Pierre de Bérulle, traditionally regarded as the founder of a typically French school of spirituality, but actually much influenced by Jesuit
authors,66 linked the practice of frequent communion with a highly heartwarming idea: the Eucharistic sacrament “divinizes” man. Several authors
followed him in his optimistic statements about the union between God
and His creatures.67 In Baroque Europe, the regular exposition of the consecrated host in the Forty Hours’ celebration, and indeed its permanent
exposition in a monstrance in a special chapel, should be understood in this
context. It was a complement to the old Corpus Christi processions:
whereas the latter staged the Christian community, the former facilitated
personal devotion, strengthening the link between the believer and the
One who sacrificed Himself for human salvation.68 Eucharistic piety was
thus another means of getting earth closer to heaven.
65. Bartholomy Quarré, Garde angélique, au roi, à la France et à la ville de Dijon (Dijon,
1631), pp. 79–95; Geistliches Zeughaus; Yves Durand, L’Ordre du monde: Idéal politique et
valeurs sociales en France du XVI e au XVIII e siècle (Paris, 2001), pp. 117–34; Benoist Pierre, Le
Père Joseph: L’éminence grise de Richelieu (Paris, 2007), p. 161;. Jean-Marie Le Gall, Le Mythe
de Saint-Denis entre Renaissance et Révolution (Paris, 2007), pp. 184–8; Karl Suso Frank,
“Engel,” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 11 vols. (Freiburg, 1992–2001), vol. 3, pp. 646–
55, here 651.
66. Yves Krumenacker, L’École française de spiritualité: Des mystiques, des fondateurs, des
courants et leurs interprètes (Paris, 1998), pp. 15–210.
67. Krumenacker, L’École française, pp. 218–20; René Taveneaux, Le Catholicisme dans
la France classique, 1610–1715 (Paris, 1980), p. 375; Karl-Heniz Selge,“Messopfer,” in
Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 11 vols. (Freiburg, 1992–2001), vol. 7, pp. 178–84.
68. Isabelle Brian, “Catholic Liturgies of the Eucharist in the time of reform” in A
Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, ed. Lee Palmer Wandel (Leiden, 2014), pp.

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WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

The suggestion of the universality of divine love also greatly influenced
the field of art history. Baroque art was meant to be a “theology of the visible,” as Robert Bellarmine has put it; it had to enable the devout to experience sanctity through means of an overpowering sensuousness.69 For this
reason, religious art was conceived as belonging not so much to the realm
of aesthetics, but rather of rhetoric. In the case of Jesuit art, Evonne Levy
has convincingly argued that it should even be considered as propaganda.
This endeavor to use art as a tool for religious reform is particularly observable in the evolution of church architecture, which was marked by several
innovations aiming mainly to unify church space. These innovations are
best seen in the sacred buildings of Jesuits and other reform orders. First,
the main altar was mostly better enhanced and more visible than in the late
Middle Ages. It was higher than ever and, at least in churches with
pilasters, it could be seen from almost any place within the interior space.
Rood screens were no longer erected and indeed they were removed from
old churches. The choir was now an open space, and the main altar nearer
to the laypeople. Second, numerous churches with pilasters were erected,
which meant that the abandonment of aisles created a single space. Third,
in new churches, simple niches harboring an altar often replaced the lateral
chapels. They no longer constitute separate rooms with their own architecture and iconography. Even if their design was not centrally planned, in
Jesuit churches the commissioners were not free to choose the patron saints
of the chapels. There was thus an endeavor to impose an all-encompassing
theological program. Fourth, there was often a unified iconographic program in the church, creating a link between the altar theme and other
topics. Fifth, great efforts were made to integrate different artistic genres
such as architecture, painting and sculpture. Stucco enabled soft transitions, and this is why it was so popular in Baroque architecture. Sixth, the
boundary between walls and vault was deliberately blurred. Illusionist
paintings on the vault could prolong architectural elements, and stucco
reliefs or statues on the walls took over motifs from the vault paintings.
Seventh, cupolas became very popular.70
185–203; Costanzo Cargnoni, “Prière des Quarante-Heures,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité
ascétique et mystique, 17 vols. (Paris, 1937–95), XII, p. 2702.
69. Jens Baumgarten, “Jesuitische Bildpolitik zwischen Überwältigung und Überprüfbarkeit am Beispiel der Jesuitenkirchen in Breslau und Graz,” in Jesuitische Frömmigkeitskulturen, pp. 63–92, here 64; Taveneaux, Le Catholicisme, pp. 447–82; Hsia, The World of Catholic
Renewal, pp. 159–71.
70. Stephan Hoppe, Was ist Barock? Architektur und Städtebau Europas, 1580-1779
(Darmstadt, 2003), pp. 25–28, 59–63, 182–200; Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit
Baroque (Berkeley, 2004); Matthieu Lours, L’autre temps des cathédrales. Du concile de Trente à
la Révolution française (Paris, 2010), esp. pp. 83–90, 104–14, and 125–64.

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41

The point of all these innovations creating a singular setting was that they
brought heaven and the mysteries of faith nearer to the believer. The innovations mentioned above had a practical and a rhetorical aspect. They enabled
everybody attending the Mass to hear and see better the priests, and in this
sense, they made of the Mass and the Eucharist a spectacle for all the faithful.
To be sure, the elevations of the host and the chalice were already in the later
Middle Ages “a major focus for popular devotions,”71 but the Eucharist was
basically still “enacted in secret behind a screen.”72 Furthermore, the transformation of sacral space created scenarios of divine love: illusionist paintings and
their integration into the architectural space deleted the boundaries between
heaven and earth. In Italian and central European Baroque, the cupola and the
vault were often used to host a large fresco representing the glory and triumph
of heavenly figures. There was no sharp border between the most sacred figures
(Trinity, Virgin Mary) and the devout: many circles of holy persons create the
impression of an all-encompassing hierarchy. Although some figures were represented as statues on the wall, nearer to the believer, they were also part of the
scene. In this unified space, angels proliferated, creating an additional link
between the faithful and heaven. As churches were intended to impress and
persuade the believer, there was a sincere effort to take the subjective point of
view of the spectator into account when designing the interiors. Leading
Baroque architects and painters took into account the curvature of the ocular
globe and perspective distortions. They tricked the observer’s eye through illusionist effects. Their goal was to bring the faithful out of their passivity. The
complex decorative ensembles, obliging the eyes to slip from one object to
another and from one form to another, did not invite the beholder to contemplation but rather to a “transitory understanding.” Through this movement,
the faithful were expected to take an active part in the scenario of universal
glory and triumph.73

71. Gary Macy, “The Medieval Inheritance” in A Companion to the Eucharist, ed.
Wandel, pp. 15–37, here 19.
72. Bossy,“The Mass,” 323–3. Hosts considered as relics were shown only during special feasts: Gerhard Lutz, “Late medieval sacred spaces and the Eucharist”, in A Companion
to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Christopher Levy et al. (Leiden, 2012), pp. 471–
97. By contrast, in the late sixteenth-century, treaties for the faithful explained to them the
symbolical meaning of all the gestures of the priests, turning the Mass into a kind of theater
play repeating the Passion of Christ: François Coster, Le Livre de la Congrégation. . . (Pourrentruy, 1594), pp. 86-91.
73. Baumgarten, “Jesuitische Bildpolitik,” 87–88; Władysław Tomkiewicz, “Polska
sztuka kontrreformacyjna,” in Wiek XVII—Kontrreformacja—Barock: Prace z historii kultury,
ed. Janusz Pelc (Wrocław, 1970), pp. 70–94; Hoppe, Was ist Barock?, pp. 191–93, 211; Levy,
Propaganda, pp. 110–83.

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WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

The efforts to integrate people into a universal hierarchy of divine love
and to proclaim a more optimistic vision of the relationship between earth
and heaven also incited authors of pious books to develop more reassuring
ideas about human salvation. In response to the Augustinian view on salvation, most proponents of Catholic Reformation, like Luis de Molina,
recognized that free will played a role in salvation. Their basic idea was that
God wants all to be saved and that the faithful, responding to the gift of
grace that brings salvation, can cooperate through piety and good deeds.
Certainly, there was no theological uniformity among these authors. As
has been seen, some Jesuits did propagate a doctrine of predestination.
Nonetheless, there was a commonality among the authors of Catholic Reformation: they rejected rigorist theology like that of the Jansenists.74 Many
searched for an equilibrium between moral severity and humanism, and
affirmed the value of lay life.75 Philip Neri and the Oratorians, as well as
St. Francis de Sales and Cardinal Armand du Plessis de Richelieu, did not
seek salvation in contemplative life, asceticism, or the rejection of the
world. They stressed that everybody could be a good Christian without
abandoning the way of life of his own estate.76 Jesuit authors also thought
about ways to reconcile the imperatives of lay life with religious ones. On
the basis of probabilistic moral theology,77 they developed casuistry and
wrote treatises about the way a soldier could live in a Christian way or
about the theory of “reason of state” in order to show how politics could be
made compatible with religion.78 To a certain extent, the plurality of

74. Jennifer Hillman, Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France (London,
2014), pp. 1–46; Anthony D. Wright, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic World and the NonChristian World (Aldershot, UK, 2005), pp. 163–95.
75. Alphonse Dupront, “D’un humanisme chrétien en Italie à la fin du XVIe siècle,” in
Genèses des temps modernes: Rome, les réformes, le Nouveau monde (Paris, 2001), pp. 237–38;
Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the CounterReformation (Washington, 1999), pp. 175–81.
76. Dupront, “D’un humanisme chrétien,” pp. 207–42; Krumenacker, L’École française,
p. 88; Françoise Hildesheimer, Relectures de Richelieu (Paris, 2000), pp. 41–49.
77. Probabilism is a system of moral theology exonerating the conscience and conceding individual freedom, more than did other schools in sixteenth and seventeenth century
Catholicism. It postulates that in cases of conflicting norms a law is not binding if one can
formulate reasonable doubts about it, even if more probable reasons speak for its binding
character (lex dubia non obligat; in dubio pro libertate): Konrad Hilpert, “Moralsysteme,” in
Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 7 (Freiburg, 1998), p. 462.
78. On casuistry, see Maryks, Robert A., Saint Cicero and the Jesuits. The Influence of
Liberal Arts and the Adoption of Moral Probabilism (Aldershot, 2008); Taveneaux, Le Catholicisme, pp. 430-32; Vincenzo Lavenia, “Tra Cristo e Marte. Disciplina e catechesi del soldato
cristiano in età moderna,” in Dai cantieri alla storia. ‘Liber amicorum’ per Paolo Prodi, ed. Gian
Paolo Brizzi and Giuseppe Olmi (Bologna, 2007), pp. 37–54; Damien Tricoire, “To Fight or

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43

lifestyles was legitimized and the necessity of a renunciation to world put
into question.
Probabilistic moral theology and the Aristotelian distinction between
essence and accident also enabled some of the missionaries overseas, especially the Jesuits, to reflect on cultural differences in ethnographic treaties79
and to “accommodate” Roman Christianity to local cultures.80 Matteo
Ricci in China and Roberto de Nobili in southern India created a synthesis
of Catholicism and Confucianism as well as Catholicism and Brahmanism
respectively.81 Paradoxically, in order to integrate foreign populations into
not to fight: Piotr Skarga S.J., the Catholic Ideal of the Christian soldier, and the reform of
Polish nobility (around 1600)” (this article will appear later this year in an issue of the Journal
of Jesuit Studies edited by Vincenzo Lavenia). On the Catholic theories of the reason of state,
see Harro Höpfl, Jesuit political thought: The Society of Jesus and the State (Cambridge, 2004)
and William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, 1972).
79. To be sure, the ethnographic knowledge had a primarily apologetic function. Cultural alterity was accepted only in narrow limits. Nonetheless, missionaries produced such
works as José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Girona, 1591) and Joseph
François Lafitau’s Mœurs des sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (Paris,
1724); See also Andreas Motsch, Lafitau et l’émergence du discours ethnographique (Sillery,
2001).
80. The principles of the accommodation strategy were formulated above all by José de
Acosta and Alessandro Valignano: José de Acosta, De promulgatione Evangelii apud barbaros
sive De procuranda Indorum salute (Salamanca, 1588); Claudio Burgaleta, José de Acosta, SJ: His
Life and Thought (Chicago, 1999), pp. 78, 80–1; Pedro Lage Reis Correia, “Alessandro Valignano’s Attitude Towards Jesuit and Franciscan Concepts of Evangelization in Japan (1587–
1597),” Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies, 2 (2001), 79–108. Simon Ditchfield considers
that “it was only thanks to the expanded missionary imagination, and set of practical skills,
developed in response to the challenge of evangelizing the New World that the Old World
came to be (re-)Christianized in the way that it was. Put simply, the New World converted
the Old. . .”: Ditchfield, “Catholic Reformation,” p. 163. However interesting this thesis is,
it is too one-dimensional; the missionary work in some overseas regions should not obliterate
the fact that the bulk of European clerics had no experience with non-European contexts, and
read books written by Europeans for Europeans. The probabilist and accommodationist
approaches were not only the result of experiences in overseas regions, but probably especially
in Europe.
81. Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City; Nadine Amsler, “‘Sie meinen, die drei Sekten
wären eins’: Matteo Riccis Aneignung des sanjiao-Konzepts und ihre Bedeutung für
europäische Beschreibungen chinesischer Religion im 17. Jahrhundert,” Schweizerische
Zeitschrift für Religions—und Kulturgeschichte, 105 (2011), 77–93. Eadem, “Gender and Religion in Cultural Exchange: Norms and Practices in Chinese Christianity, 1583–1724” (PhD
diss., Universität Bern, 2013); Sven Trakulhun, “Kulturwandel durch Anpassung? Matteo
Ricci und die Jesuitenmission in China,” Zeitenblicke, 11/1 (2012), http://www.zeitenblicke.
de/2012/1/Trakulhun; Antje Flüchter, “Pater Pierre Martin—ein ‘Brahmane aus dem
Norden’. Jesuitische Grenzgänger in Südindien um die Wende zum 18. Jahrhundert,” in
Zeitenblicke, 11/1 (2012). http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2012/1/Fluechter.

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WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

universal cults, the Society of Jesus in India was ready to break with universalistic principles at the very heart of Christianity: it founded distinct
churches for the different castes. Furthermore, the Society renounced the
use of wine in the Mass because the Brahman elite considered it to be
impure.82 Such adaptations of Catholicism provoked violent conflicts
because competing religious orders often rejected the Jesuit adaptations as
too far-reaching.83
The limit of what could legitimately be done in order to integrate
overseas populations was thus subject of discussion. Equally, clerics of the
Catholic Reformation were not sure about the proper way to involve
women into the project of the Christian reform of the world. The reassuring devotional practices promoted by Catholic leaders were primarily
designed by men and for men: for example, with few exceptions,84 women
were not admitted into Jesuit sodalities. Orders of the Catholic Reformation also supported the efforts to strengthen paternal authority as a means
to impose virginity on unmarried girls.85 Whereas the Marian cult implied
that a woman, the Mother of God, had considerable power even over the
Father, only a few authors drew a parallel between the universal authority
of the Virgin Mary and the situation of women.86 Above all, the church
hierarchy did not accept feminine orders without enclosure, opposing all
endeavors to create a female equivalent to the Society of Jesus. Therefore,
contrary to their name, the Visitation Sisters were forced to the contemplative life, and Mary Ward could never fully realize her vision.87 Nonetheless, new feminine orders were allowed to engage in education for girls in
cloisters: the Ursulines in France or Ward’s Institutum Beatae Mariae Virginis (known in German as the Englische Fräulein) in southern Germany

82. Flüchter, “Pierre Martin,” esp. paragraphs 1–5, 24–37.
83. There was a wide range of “rite controversies” concerning not only China: Hsia, A
Jesuit in the Forbidden City, pp. 287–97; Antje Flüchter, “Pierre Martin,” paragraphs 38–47;
Cesare Santus, “La communio in sacris con gli ‘schismatici’ orientali in età moderna,” Mélanges
de l’École française de Rome—Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, 126/2 (2014),
www.revues.org
84. In Ingolstadt, women could be member of the sodality of the burghers: Hofmann,
“Maria de Victoria,” pp. 81–83.
85. Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity. Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern
Catholic State (Ann Arbor, 2004).
86. An exception is Guerry, Traicté de l’excellence du sexe foeminin et des prerogatives de la
Mère de Dieu (Paris, 1635). We do not know anything about the author of this treaty, which
was perhaps written under a pseudonym.
87. Dieter Albrecht, Maximilian I. von Bayern 1573–1651 (München, 1998), pp. 319–
21; Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, pp. 37–45.

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

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came to play a decisive role in the establishment of a Catholic society.88
Taken as a whole, Catholic elites sought to integrate women into their new
model of piety, but this model clearly implied a gender hierarchy.
All in all, despite some uncertainties and limitations, there is considerable evidence that enables one to generalize about the religious endeavors of
Catholic elites in the first half of the seventeenth century. The features of
Marian piety did correlate with efforts in the field of other cults, of art, and
of discourses about salvation. Of course, Bridget Heal is right in pointing
out the diversity of Catholicism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As she noticed, the new religious patterns were not propagated at the
same rate in all German towns.89 In some cases they did not even reach the
countryside before the eighteenth century.90 The new religious movements
influenced some countries more than others, and there are good reasons to
think that, for example, Poland-Lithuania was less affected by Catholic
renewal than France.91 Furthermore, it is also certain that the different religious orders did not propagate exactly the same patterns of piety. The definition of Catholic Reformation developed in this article relies principally
on the devotions favored by the non-monastic reform orders and congregations founded in the sixteenth century like the Society of Jesus and the Oratory. But the religious world of other mendicant orders such as the Dominicans and the Capuchins was generally significantly closer to late-medieval
piety.92 Particularly, most of the old monastic orders holding land, like the
Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Hermits of Saint Augustine, and the Premonstratensians, reacted rather slowly and even reluctantly to the demands
and religious practices of the new orders.93 Furthermore, Rigorists and

88. Ibid.; Ziegler, Walter, “Reformation und Gegenreformation 1517–1648,” in Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, vol. 2: Von der Glaubensspaltung bis zur Säkularisation, ed.
Walter Brandmüller (St. Ottilien, 1993), p. 50. In 1715, 900 Ursulines lived in France in 400
cloisters: Gérard Michaux, “Ordres religieux,” in Dictionnaire du Grand siècle, ed. François
Bluche (Paris, 1990), pp. 1126–29.
89. Heal, The Cult of Virgin Mary, pp. 148–261.
90. Andreas Holzem, Religion und Lebensformen. Katholische Konfessionalisierung im
Sendgericht des Fürstbistums Münster (1570–1800) (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 456–58.
91. Damien Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen. Katholische Reform und politisches Kalkül in
Frankreich, Bayern und Polen-Litauen (Göttingen 2013), pp. 86–101.
92. Hillard von Thiessen, Die Kapuziner zwischen Konfessionalisierung und Alltagskultur.
Vergleichende Fallstudie am Beispiel Freiburgs und Hildesheims. 1599–1750 (Freiburg, 2002),
pp. 473–74.
93. Helga Penz, “‘Jesuitisieren der alten Orden’? Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis der
Gesellschaft Jesu zu den österreichischen Stiften im konfessionellen Zeitalter” in Jesuitische
Frömmigkeitskulturen, pp. 144–61.

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WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

Jansenists, who became influential in the mid-seventeenth century among
some of the Belgian and French elites, were resolutely opposed to the idea
according to which the devout would enjoy a relative security in their hope
for salvation, as described above.94 More empirical work should thus be
done in order to estimate properly the extent to which there was a movement toward a universalization of divine love. Still, one has enough evidence to think that it is plausible to consider the integration of humanity
into the still hierarchical but universalized structure of divine love as the
core of a new Catholic world. By means of piety, a certain security regarding
salvation was suggested to believers.
*****
What does this overview about changes in religious practices teach us
about the way we should write Catholic history? Does the observation that
they were endeavors to universalize divine love justify the use of the term
Catholic Reformation? How does the study of religious history modify the
picture drawn by the research on confessionalization?
If one searches for a theological revolution comparable to the Lutheran
one, it may not be appropriate to speak of a Catholic Reformation. On a
theological level, virtually none of the elements presented above were truly
new. Mary’s universal rule, her Immaculate Conception or her Assumption
were medieval ideas (even if the two last ones did not become dogmas until
1854 and 1950, respectively). Similarly, the theological justifications for
Eucharistic piety or the teaching about the hierarchies of angels were anything but new. Furthermore, the Tridentine teachings about justification,
sustaining the necessity both of good works and of divine grace, was the
result of a compromise;95 it remained a rather vague formulation, and did
not lead to a uniform theological position that could be identified with the
one of the Catholic Reformation. Some scholars use the term “Catholic
94. On the history of Jansenism in France, see Louis Cognet, Le Jansénisme (Paris,
1964); Brian E. Strayer, Suffering Saints. Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640–1799
(Brighton, 2008); Monique Cottret, Histoire du jansénisme (Paris, 2016); and Wright, The
Counter-Reformation, pp. 22–25. On Jansenist Marian devotion see: H.-M. Baron, “Le P.
Jean Crasset (1618–1692), le jansénisme et la dévotion à la Sainte Vierge,” Bulletin de la
Société des Etudes Mariales, 4 (1938), 135–67; Louis Cognet, Le Jansénisme (Paris, 1964); and
Janusz Tazbir, “Polonizacja potrydenckiego katolicyzmu,” in idem, Rzeczpospolita i świat.
Studia z dziejów kultury XVII wieku (Wrocław, 1971), pp. 99–129, here 126–27. An example
of Jansenist skepticism about the certainty that God would help the devout: Lettres de la
révérende Mère Marie Angélique Arnauld, Abbesse et réformatrice de Port-Royal (Utrecht, 1742)
II: Lettres [1651–55], p. 246.
95. Mullett, Catholic Reformation, pp. 29–45.

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

47

Reformation” for designating Augustinian and Erasmian tendencies in the
Roman church at the beginning of the sixteenth century,96 but after much
discussion a strictly Augustinian sola gratia doctrine on grace was rejected
by the fathers at the Council of Trent. The decrees they voted for were in
the end not far from the traditional attitude consisting of accepting a certain
theological diversity as long as no ‘sola/solus’ formulation was used. As has
been seen, most members of the Society of Jesus insisted on free will, but
others developed a doctrine of predestination.
Also on the level of piety and cultural practices, the features described
above did not emerge out of nothing. Piety toward the Virgin, the
Eucharist, and the angels had been growing stronger across the centuries.97
To be sure, the religious practices promoted by church leaders were based
on many traditions of medieval Christianity. However, on the whole, one
can observe clear endeavors to put new accents on certain pious discourses
and practices in order to reassure the devout of his salvation perspectives.98
For this reason, taking into consideration that Protestant salvation theology was also designed to reassure the faithful, one can think of the religious
endeavors of Catholic elites around and after 1600 not just as a reaction,
but also as a functional equivalent to the Protestant Reformation. In this
sense, it seems justified to speak of a Catholic Reformation, understood as
a movement born after Trent and promoting a new relationship between
earth and heaven, distinct both from the late medieval and the Protestant.
Approaching the Catholic Reformation from the viewpoint of religious history does not directly contradict the results of the research on confessionalization, but leads to a different appreciation of this process. More
than a top-down disciplinary action aimed at producing good subjects who
would respect norms and identify themselves with their territory, the
Catholic Reformation seems to have been a movement integrating all
96. According to Bataillon, there was “deep unity” between Pre-Reformation, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation. The Reformation was not only Protestant, but had also a
Catholic branch: Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne. Recherches sur l’histoire spirituelle du
XVI e siècle, 3rd edition (Genève, 1998), p. 2.
97. Miri Rubin, “Popular attitudes to the Eucharist,” in A Companion to the Eucharist,
ed. Levy, pp. 447–68; Rubin, Corpus Christi.
98. Followed here are Jedin, Dupront, Delumeau, and Bossy who all have acknowledged that early-modern Catholicism was tied to tradition in many ways, but at the same time
emphasized the new devotional practices promoted by Catholic elites. See, in addition to the
literature already cited above, Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris,
1971), pp. 43–119; John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), esp. pp.
115–52.

48

WHAT WAS THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION?

estates into a structure encompassing earth and heaven. ‘States’ were not
the only communities having a close supplicatory relationship with the
Queen of Heaven, and in this relationship the prince was one actor among
others—even if he often played a major role. The fact that confessionalization endeavors were part of a wider movement helps to comprehend better
why they were so successful in some territories. Largely ignoring religious
history, research on confessionalization does not convincingly explain why
the religious practices of church leaders corresponded to the real demand
of significant parts of the population. In the light of late-medieval eschatological fear, and considering the reassuring and integrative nature of the
Catholic Reformation, the reasons for the attractiveness of the new religious practices become clearer.
What is more, it is very important to take into account that state
authorities were perhaps even more subject to the new norms than ordinary
people. Rulers of the Catholic Reformation had to conform to a strict
model of the pious and just rule, costing a great deal of time and effort. For
example, Louis XIII of France and Maximilian I of Bavaria attended several Masses and other prayers every day, not to speak of their participation
in religious feasts and pilgrimages.99 Moreover, Catholic universalism also
set limits on policy making, as the example of Maximilian of Bavaria
shows. The expectation of godly help led the duke and then the princeelector of Bavaria to think he had opportunities to seize by fighting Protestant territories (especially in the late 1620s, as he proposed the restitution
edict). But this also meant that there were religious limitations to his
policy. In his view, he could not ally with France without risking a loss of
God’s grace. Furthermore, because of his political-religious expectations he
had in the 1630s great difficulties in making concessions to Protestant
princes. This had the effect of prolonging the Thirty Years’ War and devastating the country. Lastly, one should not forget that Catholic universalism provoked resistance to some policies. Fearing divine punishment, a
significant part of the French elite rejected the war their king was leading
against the Habsburgs. Such fears played a decisive role in the outbreak of
the uprising of the Fronde in 1648.100 Reality thus proves far more com99. Pierre Chevallier, Louis XIII (Paris, 1979), pp. 31, 45, 83, 87–90, 227, 258–59,
371, 373, 513, 558–59, 641–42 646; Lloyd A. Moote, Louis XIII, the Just (Berkeley, 1989);
and Albrecht, Maximilian I., pp. 285–96.
100. On the way religious representations of Catholic reformation influenced political
calculation, see Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen. About the Fronde, see Damien Tricoire, “La
Fronde, un soulèvement areligieux au XVIIe siècle ? De l’opposition « dévote » sous Richelieu
aux mazarinades de 1649,” XVII e siècle, 257 (2012), 135-47.

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

49

plicated than the theory of the Europe-wide “confessionalization process”
suggests. Princes and state authorities did not always manage to instrumentalize confession in order to strengthen their power. On the contrary,
the religious requirements developed in reaction to late medieval salvation
fears were also constraints for them. The endeavors to bring earth closer to
heaven, which were at the core of the Catholic Reformation, could have
contradictory effects to those implied by the confessionalization theory.

A “Spiritual War of Words”:
Lorenzo da Brindisi and Capuchin Polemical
Preaching in Early-Modern Prague
ANDREW J. G. DRENAS*
This article considers the little-known Italian Capuchin friar
Lorenzo da Brindisi (1559–1619), Roman Catholicism’s “Apostolic
Doctor.” An accomplished preacher, missionary, linguist, and leader of
his order, Lorenzo directed, beginning in 1599, the first papally commissioned Capuchin mission to the religiously divided Kingdom of
Bohemia. Based on a study of his surviving recorded sermons, sermon
plans, and autobiographical reflections, this article examines two
strategies employed by Lorenzo to combat heresy in Prague: routine
polemical preaching and engagement in theological disputations that
relied on verbal violence, constant appeals to Sacred Scripture, and
theatricality.
Keywords: Capuchin order; early-modern polemical preaching; da
Brindisi, Lorenzo; Kingdom of Bohemia; Leyser the Elder, Polykarp

D

uring the early-modern period, both Catholics and Protestants
believed themselves to be engaged in martial combat. Their war was
not necessarily one of infantrymen and artillery but, first and foremost, a
spiritual war of apocalyptic proportions over the souls of Europe. Among
the notable but understudied figures of the time was the Capuchin order’s
leading personality: St. Lorenzo da Brindisi (1559–1619), the Roman
Church’s “Apostolic Doctor.” The confessional struggles of the age manifested themselves across Europe: England, France, the Swiss Confederation, and the many states of the Holy Roman Empire. But it was in the
Kingdom of Bohemia, in the Prague of Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576–
1612), that Lorenzo found his principal battlefield, after Pope Clement

*Dr. Drenas is a visiting lecturer of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell,
email: Andrew_Drenas@uml.edu. The author thanks the following people who, through
their guidance and assistance, helped make this article possible: Costanzo Cargnoni, Christopher Carlsmith, Nicholas Davidson, Debby Friedman, Emily Michelson, Nelson H. Minnich, Rose Paton, Paolino Zilio, and three anonymous referees.

50

ANDREW J. G. DRENAS

51

VIII (r. 1592–1605) dispatched him to lead the Capuchins’ first mission
there in 1599.1
Catholic controversialists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
each had strategies that they employed while combatting Protestantism:
the Jesuit St. Peter Canisius (1521–97), for example, published influential
catechisms, and the young St. François de Sales (1567–1622) made abundant use of polemical tracts (published posthumously as his Controverses)
while on mission in the Chablais during the 1590s.2 These two men, and
others as well, sought to use the pen and the printing press to make their
arguments. But Lorenzo sought to wage spiritual war on heresy primarily
through preaching. His emphasis on oral delivery is hardly unique, but it
gives his role in Protestant-Catholic debate a particular twist. Based mainly
on his own accounts of his polemical activities in Prague and his surviving
homiletical materials, this article will examine how Lorenzo made use of
verbal violence, constant appeals to Sacred Scripture, and theatricality as he
preached routinely in the city’s new Capuchin church and engaged in a
theological disputation over good works and justification in 1607 with the
Lutheran preacher Polykarp Leyser the Elder (1552–1610). In so doing,
this study will shed much-needed light on the early-modern Capuchins’
significant efforts to roll back the gains of the Protestants in Europe. Furthermore, it serves as a case study of how a specific Capuchin—indeed, the

1. For the recent study examining the broader themes and questions related to
Lorenzo’s missionary work and tactics while in the Empire, see Andrew Drenas, “‘The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church’: Lorenzo da Brindisi (1559–1619) and Capuchin Missions in the Holy Roman Empire” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2014). That Lorenzo
remains obscure among scholars, and even religious Catholics, is largely due to the fact that
his order has not received nearly enough attention from historians, with what academic literature there is being dated. Indeed, the major study of the early-modern Capuchins, published almost ninety years ago, is still the two-volume work by Father Cuthbert (born
Lawrence Anthony Hess), The Capuchins: A Contribution to the History of the Counter-Reformation (London, 1928). The most comprehensive academic biography of Lorenzo continues
to be Arturo da Carmignano di Brenta, San Lorenzo da Brindisi, Dottore della Chiesa Universale (1559–1619), 4 vols. (Venice-Mestre, 1960–63). For Lorenzo’s printed works, see
Lorenzo da Brindisi, S. Laurentii a Brundusio opera omnia a Patribus Minoribus Capuccinis
Provinciae Venetae e textu originali nunc primum in lucem edita notisque illustrata, 10 vols.
(Padua, 1928–56).
2. For Canisius as a catechist, see Eugen Paul, “Petrus Canisius als Katechet und Pädagoge,” in Petrus Canisius—Reformer der Kirche: Festschrift zum 400. Todestag des zweiten Apostels Deutschlands, ed. Julius Oswald and Peter Rummel (Augsburg, 1996), pp. 194–201. For
De Sales’s missionary endeavors, see Ruth Kleinman, Saint François de Sales and the Protestants
(Geneva, 1962), pp. 59–62; Jill Fehleison, Boundaries of Faith: Catholics and Protestants in the
Diocese of Geneva (Kirksville, MO, 2010), pp. 53–64.

52

A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

order’s then-towering figure—worked toward challenging heresy in a
strategic location riven by religious conflict.
Lorenzo da Brindisi and the Capuchin Mission in Bohemia
Despite his present obscurity, Lorenzo was one of the most influential
religious in Europe during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. Over the course of more than forty years in the Capuchin order, he
became a renowned preacher whose dynamic, intensely emotional, and
theatrical oratory places him in the preaching tradition of Italy, and particularly the Capuchins and the Jesuits, described by Corrie Norman. He was
a biblical scholar thoroughly versed in the Bible’s original languages of
Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. He labored as a missionary among the Jews
of Italy and even preached regularly among the Jews of Rome from 1592
to 1594. While in the Holy Roman Empire, he served as a military chaplain at the Battle of Székesfehérvár in October 1601 during the Long
Turkish War (1593–1606) and inspired the Christian soldiers to victory
through his intrepid performance on the battlefield, armed with his cross
(see figure 1). On a number of occasions he played the role of diplomat as
well and sought to promote the interests of the Roman Church and her
allies in Italy, the Empire, and Spain. He also led his order both at the
provincial level, in strategic provinces such as Tuscany (1589–92) and
Venice (1594–97), and as its vicar general (1602–05). By the early-seventeenth century, his coreligionists had become convinced that he was a
thaumaturge and that he supposedly could perform miracles like restoring
sight to the blind, casting out demons, and seeing the future. After his
death in July 1619, Pope Leo XIII canonized him in 1881, and Pope John
XXIII proclaimed him a doctor of the Church in 1959. Clearly Lorenzo
enjoyed a prominent place among his contemporaries, and he continues to
hold spiritual and theological significance for the Catholic Church.3
Given his level of administrative and missionary experience by 1599, it
is no surprise that Lorenzo was selected that year to lead the Capuchins’
first mission into the Kingdom of Bohemia. Bohemia had been, from the
3. These themes from Lorenzo’s career and afterlife are covered at length throughout
Arturo, San Lorenzo da Brindisi, but are treated more succinctly, and with updated scholarship, in Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 28–74, 116–24. The latter
pages in Drenas focus specifically on Lorenzo’s preaching style. For a discussion of the Italian
tradition, see Corrie Norman, “The Social History of Preaching: Italy,” in Preachers and People
in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. Larissa Taylor (Boston, 2003), pp. 125–91,
here pp. 142–44, 156–62.

ANDREW J. G. DRENAS

53

FIGURE 1. Engraving of St. Lorenzo da Brindisi at the Battle of Székesfehérvár.
Unknown artist.

Catholic point of view, infested with heresy since the Hussite Revolution of
the fifteenth century. Despite the Jesuit arrival in Prague in 1556 and continued presence in the kingdom, the Catholic population remained a beleaguered minority. As Howard Louthan explains, before the Thirty Years’
War the vast majority of those living in Bohemia—almost 90 percent—
were non-Catholic. They included Utraquists, the more moderate Hussites
who demanded lay Communion under both kinds (sub utraque specie) and
made up most of the population; the Bohemian Brethren who were the
more radical Hussites; and Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist Protestants.
Yet of all these groups, only the Utraquists and Catholics were considered
legitimate under the terms of the Peace of Kutná Hora of 1485.4
4. Phillip Haberkern, “The Lands of the Bohemian Crown: Conflict, Coexistence, and
the Quest for the True Church,” in A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, ed.
Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock (Boston, 2015), pp. 27–35; Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (New York, 2009), pp. 4–5,
84–85.

54

A “S PIRITUAL W AR OF W ORDS ”

It was these overwhelming conditions then facing Catholics in 1597
that prompted Prague’s archbishop, Zbyněk Berka (in office 1593–1606),
to petition the Roman authorities to dispatch a small group of Capuchins
to Bohemia to assist the Church in its struggle against heresy there. Pope
Clement VIII responded favorably in May 1599, and so it was decided that
Lorenzo, who had a working knowledge of German, would supervise
twelve Capuchins as commissary general of the mission to Bohemia. After
arriving in Prague that November, Lorenzo first needed to establish the
first friaries of his order’s new Commissariate of Bohemia-Austria-Styria,
which were erected over the course of the spring and summer months of
1600 in Prague, Vienna, and Graz. The Prague friary was constructed in
the city’s Hradčany district, not far from Prague Castle. It served as
Lorenzo’s home base during his first mission, which lasted until 1602,
when he became vicar general, and for most of his second, when he was
ordered back to Bohemia by Pope Paul V in 1606 and remained until
1613. The pulpit of St. Mary of the Angels, that house’s church, was where
he launched his all-out verbal assault on heresy.5
While stationed in Prague during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, Lorenzo labored within the context of Rudolf II’s “aulic
Catholicism.” Like other Habsburg rulers of that time, Rudolf was firm
about asserting his control over affairs in the Empire. This resulted in
opposition to the Holy See—seen as a meddlesome foreign power—and
those allied to it, with his aversion for the papacy stemming from land disputes in Italy and what he saw as papal encroachment on his own imperial
authority. This emperor was, in particular, not on good terms with
Clement VIII. Also part of Rudolf’s aulic Catholicism was his confessional
moderation and religious ambivalence. This same Habsburg had been the
one to, for example, authorize the Capuchin presence in Prague, obviously
significant for Catholic renewal in Bohemia; yet he was also the one who,
during his power struggle with his brother, Archduke Matthias, issued the
Letter of Majesty in 1609 that granted religious liberties to both Lutherans
and Calvinists in Bohemia—a setback for Catholicism.6

5. For Berka, see Winfried Eberhard, “Berka von Duba und Leipa, Zbynko (Zbyněk
Berka z Dubé a Lipé) (1551–1606),” in Die Bischöfe des Heiligen Römischen Reiches, 1448 bis
1648: ein biographisches Lexikon, ed. Erwin Gatz and Clemens Brodkorb (Berlin, 1996), pp.
44–46. For the process to secure the Capuchin presence in Bohemia, Lorenzo’s knowledge of
German, his central role in founding the new commissariate, and his twelve companions, see
Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 75–113.
6. R. J. W. Evans coined the term aulic Catholicism; see Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: An Interpretation (New York, 1979), p. 59. For clarification, see

ANDREW J. G. DRENAS

55

Lorenzo, the Capuchin commissary general, is comparable to other
Catholic agents at work in Rudolfine Prague. This is especially the case
with the city’s Jesuits, with whom he enjoyed friendly relations—unlike his
fellow Capuchin, Valeriano Magni (1586–1661), an alumnus of their order
in Prague who, from the 1620s, clashed bitterly with the Jesuits over tactics
on how to restore Catholicism in Bohemia, their differing philosophical
worldviews, and the Society’s eventual exclusive control of theological
instruction at the city’s Charles University. For one, Lorenzo is comparable
to the English martyr Edmund Campion (1540–81), who taught at the
Clementinum, the Jesuit college in the city, from 1574 to 1580. Both were
skilled orators and preachers, although there is no evidence in Lorenzo’s
homiletical remains from the Empire that he resorted to the extreme rhetoric against the Protestants for which Campion was known, who called for
their utter, violent elimination. The Capuchin was also similar to the Olomouc-born Andreas Neubauer (1558/9–1618), the Jesuits’ German
preacher in Prague during Lorenzo’s two missions. Both men preached
against Polykarp Leyser in July 1607, although their sermons had different
emphases. Neubauer, while quoting the writings of various Lutheran
authorities, stressed that Leyser’s view of good works (that they are the
fruit of the new heart Christians receive by faith) contradicted actual
Lutheran practice, since Lutherans were not accustomed to doing good
works; whereas the highlight of Lorenzo’s diatribe, as we shall see, was a
theatrical stunt intended to belittle and discredit his opponent.7
Among Prague’s Catholics, Lorenzo is also comparable to another
non-Jesuit, Johann Pistorius (1546–1608). First a Lutheran and then a
Elaine Fulton, “‘Wolves and Weathervanes’: Confessional Moderation at the Habsburg
Court of Vienna,” in Moderate Voices in the European Reformation, ed. Luc Racaut and Alec
Ryrie (Burlington, VT, 2005), pp. 145–61, here p. 152; R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His
World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612, corrected ed. (London, 1997), pp. 86–88;
Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 81, 98.
7. For Lorenzo’s relationship with the Jesuits of Prague, whose discourses he used to go
listen to, and with whom he sometimes enjoyed meals, see Arturo, San Lorenzo da Brindisi,
2:48. For Valeriano Magni, see Howard Louthan, “Mediating Confessions in Central
Europe: The Ecumenical Activity of Valerian Magni, 1586–1661,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 55 (2004), 681–99, available at http://journals.cambridge.org/jsp/cjo/common/
icepdfviewer.jsp?fileName=S0022046904001484&aid=253051&fid=S0022046904001484&f
ilesize=117 (accessed July 8, 2016). For Campion’s activities in Prague, see Gerard Kilroy,
Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life, pp. 93–131; Louthan, Converting Bohemia, pp. 86, 93–94.
For Neubauer and his role in the disputation with Leyser, see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer
of the Roman Church,” pp. 206–11; Alois Kroess, Geschichte der böhmischen Provinz der
Gesellschaft Jesu, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1910–38), 1:564, 811–16, 931–33, available at https://
archive.org/stream/geschichtederbhm01kroe#page/n0/mode/2up (accessed July 8, 2016).

56

A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

Calvinist, this fervent convert to Catholicism authored the Anatomia
Lutheri (1595–98), a polemical work intended to expose Martin Luther as
an abominable heresiarch based on the reformer’s own writings, and was
appointed the emperor’s confessor in 1601. After renewed, written contact with Leyser in September 1607, Lorenzo, too, took up the pen in an
effort to combat heresy. The result was the Lutheranismi hypotyposis (hereafter LH), or The Express Image of Lutheranism, his written refutation of
not only Luther but also Lutheranism and Leyser, published posthumously, from 1930 to 1933, as the tripartite second volume of his Opera.
Whereas Pistorius relied solely on Luther’s writings to attack him,
Lorenzo combined this tactic with constant references to scripture,
appeals to patristic authorities, and quotations from the writings of other
Lutheran authorities of the age.8 Indeed, between the LH and the
homiletical literature from his time on mission (to be considered shortly),
Lorenzo should be numbered among the noteworthy Catholic controversialists from after the Council of Trent. As such, he is particularly comparable to his contemporary and co-doctor of the Church, François de
Sales. Although they labored in different locations with different sets of
circumstances, both men are nonetheless representative of Catholics who
produced apologetic works as missionaries while engaging the enemy on
the ground.
Lorenzo’s Polemical Preaching
The existing evidence indicates that Lorenzo preached routinely
against Protestantism to both Catholic and Protestant audiences in
Prague. He stressed polemical issues with his coreligionists to fortify them
theologically, and among heretics in an effort to persuade them to abandon
their “false beliefs” and return to the Roman Church. In his Commentariolum de rebus Austriae et Bohemiae (1612), his autobiographical account of
his affairs as a missionary in the Empire, he reported the following (while
writing in the third person in imitation of Julius Caesar) after narrating the
foundation of the friary in Prague in 1600:
After the friars had prepared a sufficiently large room on that site in the
form of a church, there they celebrated Masses, and there they preached
with a very great gathering. Brother Lorenzo would preach with great
8. For Pistorius, see Evans, Rudolf II, pp. 89–91; Claudio da Solesino, L’apologetica di
S. Lorenzo da Brindisi: originalità, studio storico-critico (Rome, 1959), pp. 25–90. For the most
recent analysis of the origins, fate, and content of the LH, see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer
of the Roman Church,” pp. 205–48.

ANDREW J. G. DRENAS

57

liberty against the heretics, refuting their heresies; notwithstanding, no
injury was ever done to him as many feared might happen.9

Despite the Latin title later assigned to this document, it was actually written in Italian; and the Italian behind Lorenzo’s “would preach” is the
imperfect “predicava,” an indication that he preached habitually against
heresy early on while in Prague, presumably during regular Masses and at
other times of the liturgical year like Lent. He was also clear that when he
preached, he held nothing back: he said exactly what he thought about the
heretics and their “errors.”
The Capuchin Filippo da Soragna, guardian of the Capuchins’ friary at
Nocera de’ Pagani in southern Italy, also attested to Lorenzo’s regular
preaching against heresy. His testimony was recorded in 1627 for the
Neapolitan apostolic process conducted during the early stages of Lorenzo’s
beatification process. Filippo explained that, before becoming a Capuchin,
he had resided in Prague while in the service of Filippo Spinelli, the apostolic nuncio in the imperial capital during Lorenzo’s first mission. As such,
Filippo da Soragna was in the position to meet Lorenzo and become
acquainted with him and his activities. On the subject of Lorenzo’s preaching, Filippo recalled the following: “While I was staying in Prague . . . I saw
that Father Brindisi at different times would preach against the heretics,
refuting them and persuading them with sacred doctrine. And this was
public and well-known in this place.”10 Filippo da Soragna’s testimony pro-

9. For the Commentariolum, see Opera omnia, 10.2:353–415 (hereafter CDRAB). To
access the Commentariolum manuscript, see Milan, Archivio Provinciale dei Cappuccini
Lombardi in Milan, A 338. For the history and content of the Commentariolum, as well as an
English translation, see Andrew Drenas, “Lorenzo da Brindisi’s Commentariolum de rebus
Austriae et Bohemiae: An Introduction to, and Translation of, the Document in English,” Collectanea franciscana, 85, fasc. 3–4 (2015), 595–629. For Lorenzo’s description of his preaching
in Prague, see CDRAB, p. 361: “Havendo quivi i frati accomodato una stanza assai capace in
forma di chiesa, vi celebravano le messe, e vi si predicava con grandissimo concorso. Predicava
fra Lorenzo con liberta grande contro gli heretici confutando le loro heresie, ne con tutto cio
li fu mai fatto nissun oltragio come molti temevano.”
10. Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Congregazione dei Riti, processus 379,
fol. 120r: “Stando io in Praga, come di sopra ho detto, vedeva, che detto Padre Brindisi in
diversi tempi predicava contro gl’heretici confutandoli, e convincendoli con la sacra dottrina,
e questo era publico, e notorio in detto luogo.” Although this deposition is printed among the
many documents pertinent to Lorenzo’s career and afterlife that make up the two-part, fourth
volume of Arturo’s biography, the manuscript is cited because Arturo’s rendering is inaccurate. He mistook Filippo’s “con la sacra dottrina” for “con la sacra Scrittura”; see Arturo, San
Lorenzo da Brindisi, 4.2:263. An “apostolic process” was the investigation carried out, under
Roman authority, to establish the saintly reputation of a candidate for beatification. Preced-

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

vides further confirmation that Lorenzo was accustomed to preaching
against heresy in Prague and implies that he preached directly to heretics
while seeking to reason with them on the basis of doctrine. Unfortunately,
Filippo did not specify the location of these encounters in the city.
These accounts report Lorenzo’s regular and frank preaching against
heresy while in central Europe. They do not, however, reveal the content
of his polemical sermons or the methods he used in an effort to persuade
his audiences. The two sources that shed light on these questions are the
“Codex vindobonensis” (hereafter “CV”) and the “Quaresimale del Padre
Brindes” (hereafter “QM”). The CV, which is housed at the Capuchin
provincial archive in Vienna, is a collection of Lorenzo’s handwritten,
Latin plans for homilies that more than likely date to the early-seventeenth
century, while Lorenzo was in Bohemia. Its contents include plans for
Lenten and Easter homilies as well as homilies intended for saints’ feast
days, Advent, the Ascension, Pentecost, and other solemnities. They were
published between volumes 10.1 and 10.2 of Lorenzo’s Opera, the Quadragesimale quartum (1954) and the Sermones de tempore (1956) (hereafter QQ
and SDT).11 But although these plans offer insight into how Lorenzo
might approach arguing a point, it is quite difficult, as both Emily Michelson and Larissa Taylor acknowledge about written sermons, to determine
exactly how much they reflect those actually given by Lorenzo.12 That is
why the QM is such a significant source: it provides a record of sermons
actually given by Lorenzo while he was in Bohemia. Preserved at the
Capuchin provincial archive in Milan, this manuscript was the focus of an
article in 1954 by the Capuchin Silvestro da Valsanzibio, who argued
cogently that its original core is a substantial record of Lorenzo’s sermons
committed to writing as he preached in Prague during Lent 1607.13 He
ing it was the “ordinary process,” conducted under the authority of a local bishop or ordinary.
See Simon Ditchfield, “‘Coping with the Beati Moderni’: Canonization Procedure in the
Aftermath of the Council of Trent,” in Ite Inflammate Omnia: Selected Historical Papers from
Conferences Held at Loyola and Rome in 2006, ed. Thomas McCoog (Rome, 2010), pp. 413–
39, here pp. 419–20.
11. To access the CV, see Vienna, Provinzarchiv Wien der Kapuziner ÖsterreichSüdtirol, “S. Laurentii a Brundusio Sermones de Tempore: Ms. Originale Auctoris.” For the
history of the CV and why it should be dated to Lorenzo’s time as a missionary in Bohemia,
see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 125–32.
12. Emily Michelson, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy (Cambridge, MA,
2013), pp. 32–33; Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (Toronto, 2002), p. 8.
13. To access the QM, see APCL, A 52. The APCL also possesses a typed copy of a
transcript of the QM completed in Venice in 1961. Costanzo Cargnoni, the present archivist
in Milan, includes printed among his extensive collection of early Capuchin documents the

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59

gave them not in German, as might be expected given his location at the
time, but rather in his native Italian. At first glance, this might seem odd.
The reality, however, was that not only did early-seventeenth-century
Prague have a considerable Italian population living near the friary at the
Hradčany but also Italian remained one of Europe’s most widely known
languages and was undoubtedly familiar to the city’s Catholic elite in the
environs of Prague Castle.14
Lorenzo argued against Protestantism and defended Tridentine
Catholicism in at least fourteen sermons in the QM and more than forty
of his sermon plans in the CV. None of this material is purely polemical;
rather, the polemics appear as part of his pastoral attempts to elucidate for
a Catholic audience the meaning of scripture, the Christian mysteries, and
the proper conduct of good Catholics. Between both sources, he took on
the Protestants in some of the most vexed theological questions of the age,
including how one is justified, the place of Scripture and Tradition, the
nature of the Church, and the proper understanding of the sacraments—
especially the Eucharist.15
The CV and the QM also make manifest that Lorenzo frequently
resorted to mild verbal violence while arguing against heresy. The Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists were all targets of the Capuchin’s criticisms, with most directed to the first two groups. Curiously, he never mentioned the Hussites.16 His attacks against these enemies of the Roman
three final sermons in the QM. See Costanzo Cargnoni, ed., I frati cappuccini: documenti e
testimonianze del primo secolo, 5 vols. (Perugia, 1988–93), 3.2:2678–2708. For Silvestro’s
study, see Silvestro da Valsanzibio, “Un quaresimale italiano inedito di S. Lorenzo da Brindisi,” Collectanea franciscana, 24 (1954), 136–58. For Drenas’s discussion of the QM, see
Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 132–39.
14. For the Italian community in Prague, which included Lombard architects and
masons employed by Rudolf II to enlarge and renovate Prague Castle, see Marilyn Clark,
“The Community of Italian Building Masons in Prague, 1535–1720,” Mediterranean Studies,
8 (1999), 165–73.
15. For Lorenzo’s discussion of justification, see QM, fols. 3rv, 5v–6v, 10rv, 17rv, 33v,
41rv, 44r, 67rv; QQ, pp. 86–87, 145–46, 163, 198–200, 286–88, 697–98; SDT, pp. 10–11,
23–24, 145–46, 184–92, 211–16, 325–28. For Scripture and Tradition, see QM, fols. 34v–
35r, 37v–38r, 138rv; QQ, pp. 326–31, 519, 522–26, 695; SDT, pp. 157, 205–06, 239–44,
259–60, 319–20. For the Church, see QM, fols. 15v, 44rv; 51r; QQ, pp. 212–18, 312–16,
555–56; SDT, pp. 175–82, 188–89, 220–26, 230–36, 288–94. For the Eucharist, see QM,
fols. 99r, 113v–14v; QQ, pp. 376–84, 608–20, 625–36; SDT, pp. 341–50. For a fuller discussion of the polemical themes taken up by Lorenzo in his homiletical material and where they
can be found, see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 139–44.
16. One interpretation of Lorenzo’s virtual silence on the Hussites could be the
preacher’s minimal knowledge of them. But perhaps a better explanation as to the lack of a

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

Church came in a variety of forms. Like other Catholic polemicists of the
age, he insisted that the Protestant Gospel and libertinism went hand in
hand. For example, in his sermon for the first Sunday after Lent in the
QM, he asserted that whereas Christ, St. John the Baptist, and others had
founded their Gospel on fasting and penance, the heretics had founded
theirs on concubinage, drunkenness, and similar vices, signified by the
“etc.” in the text.17 He resorted to name-calling as well. For example, at
least twice in the CV he referred to his spiritual enemies as “nebulones,” a
term meaning “villains” or “good-for-nothings.”18
As Lorenzo attacked his theological opponents, he constantly pointed
out that the Protestants were innovators who, rather than acting as God’s
chosen agents to restore his Church to its pristine form, had instead introduced poisonous heresies into Christendom. This explains his label for
them— “these evangelists of the fifth gospel” (questi evangelisti del quinto
evangelo)—during his Ash Wednesday sermon in the QM.19 It is also why,
in both the QM and the CV, he consistently and mockingly attached
“new” to his references to them. In the CV, he ridiculed the “amazing
wisdom of these new and most divine theologasters” (mirabilis novorum
horum ac divinissimorum theologastrium sapientia), the Anabaptists. To the
Capuchin, the Protestants were “new reformers” (novi reformatores), “new
apostles” (novi isti apostoli), “new Christs” (novi Christi), and “new theologians” (novi isti theologi).20 As can be seen in these particular Latin references, the “novi” always precede the pejorative “isti”—Lorenzo’s very deliberate way of stressing that the heretics represented “novelty.” But in the
CV, Lorenzo’s favorite term of derision for the Protestants, which also
appears at least once in the QM, where it is also applied to Jan Hus (in his
prominent place for them in his homiletical works is because he did not perceive them as the
same kind of international “threat” to Catholicism posed by the Lutherans and Calvinists, as
their theological beliefs and liturgical practices were so close to that of Catholics. Richard
Rex makes a similar observation about St. Thomas More who, in his polemical works, did
not write against the Lollards in England despite their continued presence during the sixteenth century; Rex, “Thomas More and the Heretics: Statesman or Fanatic?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, ed. George Logan (New York, 2011), pp. 93–115, here
p. 110.
17. QM, fol. 15v: “Christo, S. Giovanni, etc. hanno fondato il loro evangelo sopra il
digiuno, sopra la penitentia, etc. per cio che hanno digiunato etc. Ma li heretici hanno fondato
il loro evangelo sapete sopra che? Sopra il concunbinato, sopra le crapule etc. et per cio sono
contrarij a Christo.”
18. QQ, p. 328; SDT, p. 191.
19. QM, fol. 3r.
20. For these mocking titles of novelty, see, in order, SDT, p. 280; QQ, pp. 108, 144,
522; SDT, p. 215.

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61

single reference to him there), is “new evangelists” (novi evangelistae, nuovi
evangelisti).21
Besides accusing the Protestants of innovation, Lorenzo accused them
of being minions of the devil, similar to Luther’s tactics with his theological opponents. In the CV, Luther and John Calvin, he claimed, were definitely not bishops of Christ’s Church but rather the “synagogue of Satan”
(synagogae satanae) mentioned in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9.22 He also called
them “evangelists of Satan” (evangelistae satanae) and “ministers of Satan
transformed into an angel of light,” the way St. Paul described his theological enemies in 2 Corinthians 11:13–15. They were, Lorenzo asserted,
“truly pseudochrists and antichrists” (revera pseudochristi et antichristi).
These “new evangelists,” he charged, were like the false prophets of Baal in
2 Kings—that is, sent by Satan to deceive souls.23 To us today, this kind of
rhetoric seems harsh and intolerant. We must keep in mind, however, that
this was the kind of language commonly employed by early-modern
polemicists who believed themselves to be in an apocalyptic, knock-down,
drag-out fight over “the truth.” If Lorenzo’s language seems fierce, it is not
nearly as violent as that of Luther and More, with their utterly nasty invectives and vulgarities still remaining notorious.24
But in the QM and the CV, Lorenzo relied on the Bible as his main
source in his refuting of Protestant teaching. That should not be too surprising, since truth for Tridentine Catholics could be found in equal part
in Scripture and Tradition, as defined by the Roman magisterium. It
appears, however, that Lorenzo was accustomed to using scripture almost
exclusively in his sermons—although with occasional references to patristic
authorities—likely because he believed that the best strategy to combat
heresy was to engage the Protestants on their own claimed turf of “Scripture alone.”25 But in so doing, he was not original. Catholic controversialists such as the Dominican Johannes Dietenberger (c. 1475–1537) and the
Franciscan Augustinus von Alveld (c. 1480–after 1532)—both opponents
of Luther—had been employing the same tactic since the early days of the
21. QQ, p. 16 passim, including SDT; QM, fol. 67r.
22. QQ, p. 217.
23. For these accusations of being in league with Satan in the CV, see, in order, QQ,
pp. 144, 108, 522; SDT, p. 289.
24. For the verbal violence of Luther and More, see Mark Edwards, Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531–46 (Minneapolis, 2005); Rex, “Thomas More and the
Heretics,” pp. 101–05.
25. For Lorenzo’s polemical use of the fathers while preaching, see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 158–61.

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

Protestant Reformation.26 Lorenzo’s reliance on the Bible in the pulpit
surely also stemmed from his order’s demand in its Constitutions that
preachers proclaim the Gospel plainly, and without art, from scripture.27
His homiletical works reveal that he took this all seriously as he quoted the
Bible continuously.
The extent to which Lorenzo usually relied on scripture to refute
heresy is manifest in his recorded Ash Wednesday sermon in the QM. For
this discourse, he dealt, appropriately, with the issue of fasting, basing it on
Matthew 6:16–21, where Christ gave instructions for fasting. After teaching that bodily and spiritual abstinence were, respectively, the first and
second rungs of a ladder extending from earth to heaven, much like Jacob’s
ladder in Genesis 28, Lorenzo asserted:
These evangelists of the fifth Gospel go saying that the fasting of the
Catholics is a superstitious thing, because God did not command it. Ah,
ignorant people, etc.! Tell me a little something, where it is found in
Divine Scripture that fasting is superstitious. It is true that Christ does
not command us to fast in this Gospel; but if in this Gospel Christ gives
the Church the Rules for fasting, how then does he not want it to fast?
Tell me, why does the Doctor order a sick person to follow a diet unless
he wants him to follow it? Only a madman would not follow it, etc.
Christ gives us the Rules: “When you fast,” etc., and how may we not
then take care to fast? Ah, miserable people, etc.!28

Here, Lorenzo’s focus was Protestant criticisms of the Catholics’ “superstitious” prescribed fasting allegedly not commanded by God. Relying on
Matthew 6, his response was scriptural, although coupled with a real-world
example to drive home his point. For rhetorical effect, he addressed the
heretics directly, demanding answers to questions as if wrangling with the
individuals in person. He continued:
26. For these early Catholic apologists’ use of scripture against Luther, see David
Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis,
1991), pp. 156, 166–67, 206.
27. Cargnoni, I frati cappuccini, 1:410–11, 417–18.
28. QM, fol. 3r: “Vano dicendo questi evangelisti del quinto evangelo che il digiuno
de chatolici è cosa superstitiosa, per che Iddio non l’ha comandato. Ah ignoranti etc. Dittemi
un pocco, dove si trova nella divina scrittura che il digiuno sia superstitoso. E’ vero che Christo non ci comanda il digiuno in questo evangelo, ma se Christo in questo evangelo da le
Regole a santa chiesa del digiunare, come donque non vuole che digiuni? Dittemi per qual
causa il Medico ordina la dieta all’infermo se non vol che la facci. Non sarebbe tenuto da un
pazzo etc. Christo ci da le Regole cum jeiunatis etc. et non poi non cura che digiuniamo. Ah
miseri etc.”

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63

Moreover, why does God speak in the prophet Zechariah, chapter
8[:19], of the fast of the fourth month, of the fifth month, etc.? How is
it possible that he speaks of such a thing, etc.? Did the Ninevites, then,
do badly [Jon. 3:5, 10]; that holy woman, Anna the Prophetess, about
whom we read that “She served the Lord with fasting and prayers” [Luke
2:37–38]? If it is a superstitious thing, how was it pleasing to God?
Therefore, the Apostles, St. John the Baptist, who began from the time
he was a boy, etc. Oh, what horrible monsters of heresy! St. Paul says,
while writing Romans 12[:1]: “I beseech you to present your bodies as a
living sacrifice, holy, your reasonable service.” “Service” in the Hebrew
Text means “worship,” and “worship” in Divine Scripture is called “service of God.” He wants, then, that the service of God be reasonable; and
St. Paul calls fasting service of God. . . .29

Unfortunately, the writer did not finish copying down everything said by
Lorenzo. His point, nevertheless, is perfectly clear in these multiple references from both the Old and New Testaments: the heretics could allege
that the Catholics were being superstitious when fasting, but God did not
condone or reward “superstition” in scripture nor were those great exemplars of piety in the Bible—Anna the prophetess, John the Baptist, the
apostles—behaving “superstitiously” with their fasting. The Catholics were
right, and the heretics were wrong, with scripture confirming this position
overwhelmingly. Such was typical of Lorenzo’s polemical preaching.

29. Ibid.: “Di piu per qual causa parla Iddio appresso Zacharia profeta all’8 del digiuno
del 4 Mese, del quinto Mese, etc.? Come è possibile che parli di cosa, etc.? Donque fecero
male Niniviti, quella santa donna Anna Profetessa della quale leggiamo che Jeiunijs et orationibus serviebat Domino? Se è superstitiosa, come fu gratta a Dio? Donque li Apostoli, S. Giovanni Battista, che comincio da fanciullo, etc. Che mostri horribili d’heresie. S. Paolo dice
scrivendo a Romani al 12 obsecro vos ut exhibeatis corpora vestra hostiam viventem sanctam
rationabile obsequium vestrum. Obsequium nel testo hebreo vol dir cultus, et cultus nella
divina scrittura si chiama servitio di Dio. Vole donque che il servitio di Dio sia rationabile. Et
S. Paolo chiama il digiuno servitio di Dio, ut...” It is worth comparing Lorenzo’s argument
here with that in the plan for his second homily for Ash Wednesday in QQ, p. 8. Structurally
speaking, the arguments are identical. Both speak to bodily and spiritual fasting; draw the
same conclusions from Matt. 6; cite identical biblical figures in support; and contain exasperated outbursts against the heretics, although the insults in each source are different. Cf. also
QQ, p. 145, and QM, fol. 33v. Both are based on Christ’s encounter with the Canaanite
woman in Matt. 15:21–28, and both treat, in the same order, arguments related to predestination, the intercession of the saints, and the Protestant tenet of sola fide. This strikingly similar material demonstrates that these manuscripts are more than likely related, with the CV
serving as the written basis for what Lorenzo would actually preach, with modification, in
Prague, recorded in the QM.

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

The Battle with Polykarp Leyser
As Lorenzo was a preacher who waged war on Protestantism regularly
from his pulpit in Prague through scriptural references and some verbal
violence, his sermon against the Lutheran Polykarp Leyser in July 1607,
during their theological disputation over good works and justification, represents a culmination of his efforts. Lorenzo presented his account of the
debate, and most of what we know about his philippic against his opponent, in the Commentariolum and the LH. Leyser presented his version of
what had happened in Prague in the preface of his Zwo christliche Predigten
(hereafter ZCP), wherein he published the two sermons he had given that
sparked the whole conflict. It was the provocative sending of this booklet
to Lorenzo that September that prompted him to begin writing the LH.30
Like Lorenzo, Leyser may be an obscure figure to us today, but he was
a highly influential figure within Lutheran orthodoxy during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries (see figure 2). Earlier in his career,
this Tübingen-trained theologian had served as ecclesiastical superintendent of Wittenberg and Braunschweig, taught theology at the University
of Wittenberg, and participated in the final editing of the Book of Concord in 1580. He was an adamant opponent of Calvinism and is famously
known to have observed that Lutherans had more in common with
Catholics than Calvinists. He reached the pinnacle of his career in 1594,
when he was appointed Erster Hofprediger, or first court-preacher, to the
young Elector Duke Christian II of Saxony (r. 1591–1611) in Dresden.31
30. NB, in CDRAB, p. 377; Lorenzo carelessly identified the year of the dispute as
1608 rather than 1607. For Leyser’s booklet, see Polykarp Leyser, Zwo christliche Predigten:
Eine, von den guten Wercken: wie dieselben gut Evangelisch, nach Christi Lehr, sollen gepflantzt
und getrieben werden. Die Andere, von dem Artickel: wie der sündige Mensch für Gott gerecht und
ewig selig werde. Zu Prag gehalten, als die Röm. Keys. May. Rudolphus II. Unser aller gnedigster
Herr, von dem Churfürsten zu Sachsen und Burggraffen zu Magdenburg, etc. Christiano II. unterthenigst besuchet ward. Jetzo aber in offenen Druck publicirt, von wegen des unnüzen Geschreyes
und Gespeyes, welches zween Münch, ein Lojolitischer und ein Capuciner, darwider erreget. Durch
Polycarpum Leisern D. (Leipzig, 1607). Lorenzo is, of course, the Capuchin referred to in the
title. The “Loyolite” is Andreas Neubauer. The ZCP reveals that Leyser, like Lorenzo, was
no stranger to verbal violence. For further details, see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the
Roman Church,” pp. 210–14.
31. For these details, and more, on Leyser, see Gaylin Schmeling, “Polykarp Leyser
(1552–1610): A Theological Bridge between Chemnitz and Gerhard,” Lutheran Synod Quarterly, 50 (2010), 187–207, available at http://www.blts.edu/wp-content/uploads/lsq/5023.pdf (accessed July 7, 2016); Wolfgang Sommer, Die lutherischen Hofprediger in Dresden:
Grundzüge ihrer Geschichte und Verkündigung im Kurfürstentum Sachsen (Stuttgart, 2006), pp.
115–33; Christian Peters, “Polykarp Leyser d. Ä. in Wittenberg: Eine Bestandsaufnahme,”

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65

FIGURE 2. Painting of Polycarp Leyser the Elder, c. 1602. Unknown artist. From
the Protestant theological college in Wittenberg, Germany.

In 1607 it was the elector’s visit to Rudolf II from Friday, July 6, to
Friday, July 13, that brought Leyser to Prague. The emperor lodged Christian, Duke Johann Georg (Christian’s brother), Leyser, and others of their
entourage at Rožmberk Palace, which was connected to Prague Castle.
Until Rudolf issued the Letter of Majesty in 1609, only Catholics and
Hussites could preach and practice their faiths publicly in that kingdom.
Despite this situation, Christian II had Leyser preach publicly from a
window in his quarters that faced into a courtyard of the palace on Sunday
morning, July 8. A crowd of Lutherans and those of other faiths amassed
to listen, as Leyser asserted in his sermon that good works were not necessary for salvation but rather were the fruit of a new heart received by faith.
As the discourse concluded, he asserted the following to warn his audience
of the Catholic “distortion” of Lutheran teaching:
in Die Theologische Fakultät Wittenberg 1502 bis 1602, ed. Irene Dingel and Günther Wartenberg (Leipzig, 2002), pp. 173–88. For more on Lutheranism during Leyser’s lifetime, see Eric
Gritsch, A History of Lutheranism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, 2010), pp. 83–139. For Christian II,
see Thomas Nicklas, “Christian I. (1586–1591) und Christian II. (1591–1611),” in Die Herrscher Sachsens: Markgrafen, Kurfürsten, Könige, 1089–1918, ed. Frank-Lothar Kroll (Munich,
2004), pp. 133–36.

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”
Therefore, if you people hear from our adversaries, or others, that we in
our churches forbid good works; or that the Gospel abolishes the teaching of good works; and that we, therefore, open the doors, gates, and
windows to every wanton pleasure: do not believe such a thing. These
people do us violence and wrong. You have now heard the opposite.

That was not the last the people of Prague heard from Leyser. Three days
later, on Wednesday, July 11, he took the liberty to preach again, this time
on justification. During that sermon, he summarized his main argument in
this way:
From all this, it is now crystal-clear and obvious that a poor sinner is justified by God; not his own works, the merit of saints, buying indulgences,
corporal mortification, and the such; but Christ alone, with his precious
merit and obedience, with his bitter Passion and death.32

The Catholics of Prague were scandalized and outraged. Among
them, Lorenzo, who had no patience for heretics, was especially eager to
provide an oral refutation of Leyser. Upon receiving permission to do so
from Antonio Caetani, the archbishop of Capua and the new apostolic
nuncio in the capital, Lorenzo prepared to head to the pulpit of St. Mary
of the Angels on Thursday, July 12, the day after Leyser’s second sermon.
His invitees included Caetani, Catholic ambassadors in Prague, and the
principal barons of the city. These prominent Catholics did attend the
sermon that Thursday, as did several gentlemen of the court of Saxony—
but not Leyser—and at least one Hussite, a baron.33

32. Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 173–80, 183–87. These
quotations from Leyser are in ZCP, p. 64: “Wenn demnach Euch Leute von unsern Widersachern oder sonsten höret, als wenn wir in unsern Kirchen die gute werck verböten, Oder,
als wenn dass Evangelium die Lehr von den guten wercken auffhübe, und wir also Thür, Thor
und Fenster zu aller uppigkeit aufftheten, so glaubet solches nit: Diese Leut thun uns Gewalt
und Unrecht: Ihr habt jetzo das Widerspiel gehöret”; p. 90: “Aus diesem allem ist nun Sonnenklar und offenbar, dass eines armen Sünders Gerechtigkeit für Gott ist, nicht seine eigene
werck, nicht den heiligen Verdienst, nicht erkauffte Indulgentzen, nicht eigne Casteyung des
Leibs, und dergleichen, sondern einig und allein Christus Jesus, mit seinem teuren Verdienst
und Gehorsam, mit seinem bittern leiden und sterben.”
33. The Catholic frustration with Leyser’s preaching is apparent in multiple sources. In
CDRAB, p. 377, Lorenzo stated: “Pero dispiacque a molti catholici questa novita, e grandemente a fra Lorenzo...” It is also evident in the numerous missives of July 1607 sent by Caetani to Rome and by the Catholic ambassadors of Urbino, Tuscany, Venice, Savoy, Mantua,
Modena, the Habsburg Netherlands, and Spain to their respective governments. For this and
the existing details on Lorenzo’s sermon, see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman
Church,” pp. 169–70, 180–83, 187–89.

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67

Like Lorenzo’s sermons in the QM, his diatribe against Leyser was
given in Italian.34 But unlike his Lutheran foe, whose sermons were reproduced in minute detail in the ZCP, Lorenzo, unfortunately, never left behind
any kind of record, whether handwritten or printed, as to exactly what he
said. All that we know about his sermon are a few select elements described
in the LH and the Commentariolum. In both writings, he reported that he
based his invective on Acts 13:10, where St. Paul confronted the sorcerer and
false prophet Elymas, who was trying to prevent Sergius Paulus, the Roman
proconsul of Cyprus, from hearing the Gospel: “O you who are full of all
deceit and falsehood, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness,
will you not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?”35 Lorenzo considered this verse appropriate for Leyser. As he pointed out in the Commentariolum, he could emphasize in this passage the phrase “enemy of all righteousness” specifically because Leyser had preached, in accordance with Lutheran
belief, that good works were neither necessary nor meritorious for salvation,
an idea that was pure heresy to Tridentine Catholics.36 But this verse choice
on Lorenzo’s part is indeed telling for another reason: if Leyser could be
equated with the “deceitful” and “diabolical” Elymas, then Lorenzo was
surely the equivalent of Paul in this situation—the champion of the “one true
Church” in this spiritual conflict comparable to the one fought by Paul
against Elymas, where peoples’ eternal salvation was at stake.
Lorenzo stated in the preface of the LH regarding his sermon, “I said
many things” (multa dixi). In the earlier draft of the preface published in
the Opera, he said that he hurled “many darts” at the Lutheran (multa in
ipsum iacula . . . contorsi). Surely he did. But, beyond the implication that
Lorenzo’s denunciation of Leyser was probably lengthy, these passages tell
us nothing about his actual arguments. The same is true for the Commentariolum, where all he recorded is that he had “thoroughly refuted” (haverlo
ben ben confutato) Leyser, with no further clarification.37 Despite this lack
of direct evidence, we can assume that he would have employed the same
tactics seen in his sermons and sermon plans. No doubt a barrage of Bible
verses and plenty of scathing and insulting remarks—this time about
Leyser and Lutheranism specifically—made up a large number of the
“darts” that he hurled in Leyser’s direction.
34. LH 3:6, 328.
35. Ibid., 1:5, 350; 3:3–4, 327; CDRAB, p. 377.
36. CDRAB, p. 377: “. . . Premè assai sopra le parole inimice omnis justitiae, perche
havea predicato che l’opere buone non siano necessarie ne di merito alcuno.”
37. For these extremely vague statements about the sermon’s content, see LH 1:5, 350;
CDRAB, p. 377.

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

Lorenzo may have omitted details about the content of his sermon,
but he did not leave us uninformed as to what he deemed its crescendo. In
the Commentariolum, Lorenzo stated that Leyser had used biblical quotations in his two sermons that were drawn exclusively from Luther’s
German Bible. (Presumably Lorenzo had heard this from reports of the
sermons brought back to him.) Leyser, therefore, had not referred back to
scripture in its original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. But,
Lorenzo continued, surely Lutherans were now supposed to have recourse
to the text in those languages, since they considered the Vulgate, the
Roman Church’s approved Latin translation, to be riddled with errors.38
Yet Leyser, too, had relied on a translation and one that, in Lorenzo’s
opinion, could best be described as “Luther’s dreams and figments”
(Lutheri somnia et figmenta), and “muddy and base” (lutosa et sordida).39
For the occasion of this sermon, Lorenzo brought to the pulpit the
Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In the Commentariolum, he
recorded that he made the following announcement to the audience:
I want you to know what a great man this preacher is who has dared to
preach openly against our Catholic Religion. Worse than that, he did this
at the residence of His Imperial Majesty, a Catholic prince, and all his
Catholic court; in the presence of two Apostolic Nuncios, ministers of
the Pope, the Supreme Head etc.; an Archbishop; and so many prelates,
who are heads of the Catholic Church in this Kingdom. He preached
before so many Religious, so many theologians, and so many preachers
of the Catholic faith. Almost like another Goliath, “he came to reproach
the armies of the living God” [1 Sam. 17]. Take these books that are the
Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—one only need be in accordance
with its doctrines and not believe or teach otherwise—and you will see
that he does not even know how to read it.

Lorenzo then took these texts and, with great theatricality, hurled them
from the pulpit into the midst of the audience.40 It is easy to imagine the
38. CDRAB, pp. 377–78: “Non haveva nelle sue prediche citato la scrittura il predicante
se non della Bibia di Luthero in thedesco, non admettendo i Lutherani l’edition vulgata della
Bibia della quale si serve tutta la chiesa catholica; perche dicono che sia piena d’errori. Pero
ricorrono sempre alli testi hebraici caldaici, e greci.”
39. LH 1:5.
40. CDRAB, p. 378: “Fra Lorenzo porto in pulpito le Bibie in queste tre lingue, et al
fine della predica disse: voglio che conosciate che grand’huomo sia questo predicante ch’ha
havuto ardire di predicare contro la nostra Religion catholica in faccia, anzi in casa di S. M.
C. principe catholico, e di tutta la sua corte catholica, alla presenza di due Nuntii Apostolici
ministri del Papa supremo capo etc. d’un Arcivescovo e di tanti prelati che sono capi della

ANDREW J. G. DRENAS

69

great thud they would have made as they landed on the church floor. The
congregation must have been astonished—undoubtedly the effect desired
by Lorenzo. He had now made it clear that he was waiting for the “great”
Lutheran to prove him wrong.
With this stunt, Lorenzo was seeking to use scripture again, although
in a manner different from what we observed in the CV and the QM, to
combat heresy. By focusing on Leyser’s reliance on a translation of the
Bible and his alleged inability to read scripture in its original languages,
Lorenzo was obviously trying to humiliate and discredit his opponent, portraying him as a hypocrite and someone who could not even abide by the
Protestants’ own hallowed tenet of sola Scriptura in its purest sense. It is
also interesting to note that Lorenzo made an additional biblical reference
here—one that fits superbly with his mind-set that he was in the thick of
a spiritual war. While citing 1 Samuel 17, he equated Leyser with another
of the Bible’s villains: the giant Goliath. Goliath was, of course, the champion of the Philistines, who were at war with Israel, the “armies of the
living God,” which in Lorenzo’s view were to be identified with Prague’s
Catholic prelates, religious, theologians, and preachers. If Leyser, the illustrious first court-preacher of elector of the Holy Roman Empire and duke
Christian II, was to be likened to Goliath, then it comes as no surprise that
Lorenzo would see himself as the David figure among the Catholics who
had now resolutely made his way out onto the battlefield to deal the fatal
blow to the heretics’ champion.41 On this occasion, however, the giant was
not taken down with stones but rather with Bibles.
It is obvious in both the LH and the Commentariolum that Lorenzo
was convinced that his stunt with the Bibles had really wounded Leyser. In
the preface of the LH, he claimed that it had “pierced the man violently”
(pupugit res vehementer hominem); and in the Commentariolum, he said
something similar, that it “pierced the preacher deeply” (trafisse grandemente il predicante).42 Lorenzo considered this the right conclusion to draw
chiesa catholica in questo Regno, in faccia di tanti Religiosi, di tanti theologi, e di tanti predicatori della fede catholica, e quasi un altro Golia venit exprobare agminibus Dei viventis.
Pigliate questi libri che sono la Bibia in hebraico caldaico, e greco, alla quale solo bisogna stare
secondo la sua dottrina, ne altro credere o insegnare, vedrete che non la sapra pur legere. Cosi
per farli gran vergogna getto que libri dal pulpito. . . .” The other apostolic nuncio referred to
here was Caetani’s predecessor, Bishop Giovanni Ferreri of Vercelli, who was preparing to
return to Italy; see LH 3:327.
41. Although he did not draw the parallel between himself and David in CDRAB, he
did in LH 3:57.
42. LH 1:5; CDRAB, p. 377.

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

since, as he put it so contemptuously in the Commentariolum, “after this
happened, the good preacher, dumber than a fish, departed from Prague
without uttering even a single word; which turned out to be to the great
satisfaction of the Catholics, and embarrassment of the heretics.”43 In
other words, because Lorenzo had exposed Leyser as a hypocrite and ignoramus, the Lutheran left Prague confounded, like the proverbial dog with
its tail between its legs. But the reality was that Christian II and his
entourage had departed from the capital early in the morning the day after
Lorenzo gave his sermon—that is, on Friday, July 13. The elector and his
brother, Johann Georg, needed to return to Saxony to prepare for Johann
Georg’s upcoming wedding ceremony. As Christian left, so the ministers
and courtiers with him would have to follow. There was no way that Leyser
had time to make any kind of apposite reply to the triumphalist Lorenzo
in person, although he would soon do so in writing.44 Still, Lorenzo
accomplished what he had set out to do that Thursday, namely to present
a genuine threat to Catholicism in Prague as no threat at all.
Although it might seem that Lorenzo had discovered Leyser’s great
weakness, he actually had not. The conclusion he drew about Leyser’s skills
with the biblical languages was completely rash, perhaps also based on
reports he heard. But had Lorenzo accessed some of Leyser’s works, he
would have learned that his opponent could actually work with Hebrew,
Aramaic, and Greek. This is most apparent in his six-part commentary on
Genesis, which composes an impressive 2805 quarto pages. This series was
published between 1604 and 1609, the same period in the first decade of
the seventeenth century as the clash in Prague, meaning it is a good gauge
as to what Leyser knew at that time.45 Throughout the commentary,
Leyser interacted not only with the original Hebrew text and the Aramaic
Targumim but also quoted the Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament. One place where he demonstrated his knowledge of all three lan43. CDRAB, p. 378: “. . . E doppo questo fatto il buon predicante, muto piu di un pesce
si parti da Praga senza far pure un minimo motto; il che riusci a grandissima sodisfattione, e
consolatione de catholici, e confusione de gl’heretici.”
44. For these circumstances that required Leyser’s departure, see Drenas, “The Standard-bearer of the Roman Church,” pp. 194–95. It is worth noting that in the preface of the
ZCP, Leyser demonstrated his knowledge of Lorenzo’s action with the Bibles, which he presumably learned about from Saxons who were in attendance. For his opinion of Lorenzo’s
sermon, which contains some unsavory humor and mockery, see ZCP, pp. 26–30.
45. For this commentary published in Leipzig, for which each part was named, in
chronological order, after one of Genesis’s six major patriarchs, see Polykarp Leyser, Adamus
(Leipzig, 1604), Noachus (Leipzig, 1605), Abrahamus (Leipzig, 1606), Isaacus (Leipzig, 1608),
Iacobus (Leipzig, 1608), and Josephus (Leipzig, 1609).

ANDREW J. G. DRENAS

71

guages simultaneously is his attempt in the second part of the commentary
to elucidate who the mysterious “sons of God” were that are mentioned in
Genesis 6:2.46 Clearly Lorenzo had been in error. Nevertheless, he always
remained convinced that, through his intense sermon, the cause of the
Catholic faith in Prague had won the day.
Conclusion
It is clear that Lorenzo, one of the Catholic Church’s notable spiritual
warriors of the Age of Reformation, employed preaching while seeking to
combat heresy in the Kingdom of Bohemia. First, the evidence reveals
that, while he was in Prague, he preached routinely and unreservedly on
polemical issues to both Catholic and heretical audiences.
It is apparent, based on the recorded sermons of the QM and the
sermon plans of the CV, that Lorenzo preached on the most controversial
theological questions of his time, including the nature of justification and
the place of Sacred Scripture and Tradition in the life of the Church.
Although he did have the ability to communicate his arguments in
German, he actually spent a great deal of time preaching in Italian. These
sources also reveal his strategies in his preaching against heresy. Like other
controversialists of the age, he frequently resorted to a belittling verbal violence and emphasized both the “novelty” and “satanic” origins of the
Protestants’ reform movements. In line with other Catholic apologists and
in the spirit of the Capuchin order, he based his theological arguments
almost exclusively on scripture—sometimes an overwhelming amount. In
so doing, he was determined to meet the Protestants in the arena of their
choice and to prove that they, although they claimed the Bible as their
own, were in reality utterly opposed to its teachings.

46. Leyser, Noachus, p. 3: “Considerandum itaque quinam illi [the “sons of God”]
fuerint. Primo quidem Judaei, atque alij quidam Iudaizantes interpretantur hoc de succubis &
incubis: & fabulantur, angelos descendisse in corpora, & libidinem exercuisse cum filiabus
hominum, ac proinde ex coelo exturbatos esse. Hoc confirmare nitantur ex libro Jobi, ubi
Satanas quodam die inter filios Dei adstitisse dicitur. Et vetustior quaedam LXX interpretum
versio, quam Philo & Eusebius Caesariensis secuti sunt, pro eo, quod hebraice legitur, ‫האלהים‬
‫בני‬, id est, Filij Dei, habent, οἱ ἄγγελοι τοῦ θεοῦ, id est, Angeli Dei. Quae versio multas quaestiones peperit, & varias sententias introduxit: quas tamen Chrysostomus, Ambrosius &
Augustinus sufficienter refutaverunt. Deinde Thargum Hierosolymitanum interpretatur
, hoc est, Filij Principum. Sicut in Psalmo habetur: Dixi, vos Dij estis, & filij excelsi
omnes. Et haec interpretatio est commodior.” There are also numerous Greek passages and
terms of the Bible in the ZCP, which means that Leyser may actually have quoted them
during his sermons in Prague. See, for example, ZCP, pp. 49, 71, 92.

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A “SPIRITUAL WAR OF WORDS”

Lorenzo also engaged directly in theological disputations with individual Protestants. After Polykarp Leyser had preached twice in Prague (an
illegal act in a technical sense), Lorenzo responded to him immediately
from the pulpit. Although the available evidence does not reveal the specific contents of this tirade, it still can be assumed, given the evidence from
his recorded sermons and sermon plans, that he based his arguments on
scripture and resorted to more derisive verbal violence. In the two verses of
the Bible that he cited, he equated Leyser with two biblical villains: the
sorcerer and false prophet Elymas, the “enemy of righteousness,” and the
giant Goliath who, despite his intimidating stature, was so easily defeated.
But what was most important to the Capuchin was the part of his invective
where he attacked Leyser personally, when he made known to all—incorrectly—that the great court-preacher could not even read the Bible in its
original languages, and dramatically concluded his presentation by hurling
the Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek from the pulpit into the audience so that attendees could take the books to Leyser to see his ignorance
for themselves. Like the many biblical quotations and references in his
homiletic works, he intended during this particular episode to take the
Bible, which the Protestants were supposed to esteem so highly, and turn
it into their greatest liability. Clearly Lorenzo recognized that this “spiritual war of words” had to be fought on the battlefield of Sacred Scripture,
and it was a war that he was determined to see the Roman Catholic
Church—the “true Church”—win.

“To Destroy Popery and
Everything Appertinent Thereto”:
William Chaney, the Jesuit John Bapst,
and the Know-Nothings in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Maine
DAVID DZUREC*
For the Jesuit priest John Bapst and newspaper editor William
Chaney, the populist impulse that marked American politics in the turbulent decade of the 1850s offered opportunities. For Bapst, it meant
engaging Catholics and Protestants throughout Maine in an effort to
spread the Catholic faith. For Chaney, it meant riding the wave of
Know-Nothing politics to secure a place for himself in coastal Maine
society. The efforts of both men would collide in a moment of violence
that ultimately marked an end to Chaney’s time in Maine and
strengthened Bapst’s missionary resolve.
Keywords: anti-Catholicism, Know-Nothings, populism, Society of
Jesus

I

n July 1854, the selectmen of Ellsworth, Maine, called for a town meeting to denounce a spate of anti-Catholic violence in the lumbering and
ship-building town. When the citizens gathered on July 8 at the Congregational Church, those responsible for much of the recent violence packed
the meeting, dashing the peace-seeking hopes of the Ellsworth officials.
The members of the “Cast Iron Band,” a branch of the larger anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement, proceeded to take
control of the agenda and vote out the sitting Democratic majority replacing them with members of their own number. Once in power the newly
elected selectmen passed a resolution threatening to tar and feather “one
John Bapst, S.J., Catholic Priest” and then ride him out of town on a rail
should he “be found again upon Ellsworth soil.” Passage of the legislation

*Dr. Dzurec is an associate professor and chair of history at the University of Scranton,
email: david.dzurec@scranton.edu. The author wishes to thank Kathleen Neils Conzen for
her feedback and Mark Honey for research assistance as well as the Jesuit Center at the University of Scranton for research support.

73

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“TO D ESTROY P OPERY AND EVERYTHING APPERTINENT THERETO”

was greeted with applause and signed by Cast Iron Band member William
H. Chaney, town clerk and editor of the Ellsworth Herald.1
The Cast Iron Band’s coup that July evening marked a strikingly swift
transition from secret society to governing body, driven largely by an animosity toward John Bapst. The group’s evolution from nativist fraternal
society to political party was emblematic of a larger shift for the “KnowNothing” groups throughout the United States during this period. Nationally, the rise of the “Know-Nothings” coincided with the breakdown of the
“second party system” as, in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, northern voters’ dissatisfaction with the Democratic and Whig parties peaked.
This growing and tumultuous dissatisfaction contributed to an expansion
of the nascent “Know-Nothing” Party as they worked to fuse an antiCatholic, nativist impulse with a reform-minded, anti-slavery message,
drawing many Northern Democrats and Whigs into their fold.2 While this
fusion of varied interests result in rapid success, the movement was also
very much a reflection of its confused time. As historian Ronald Formisano
described it, the movement was at once “populist and progressive and reactionary.”3 In short, the Know-Nothings were an opportunistic movement
that espoused opposition with little concern for coherence or consistency.
Yet, in this period of uncertainty for the young United States, KnowNothing defiance to the existing order seemed to be enough to attract
adherents across the nation.
The Know-Nothings were only one manifestation of what was a
period of profound transformation for the United States. In addition to the
political turmoil surrounding the breakdown of the “second party system,”
the loss of the founding generation left many Americans questioning the
future of the republic, waves of immigrants resulted in an increasing diversity in the religious and ethnic makeup of the population, and the expansion of capitalism resulted in increasing economic insecurity. Reaction to
this tumult, even beyond the Know-Nothing movement, manifested itself
in myriad forms ranging from efforts at self-improvement and temperance
to outright xenophobia. By 1851, Maine had emerged as one of the key

1. The resolution was republished in numerous newspapers including the Bangor [ME]
Mercury, October 21, 1854, 1 and “The Catholic Priest that was Tarred and Feathered and
Ridden on a Rail,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25, 1854, 1.
2. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics
of the 1850s (New York, 1992), p. xiii.
3. Ronald Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution
to the 1850s (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), p. 199, emphasis in original.

DAVID DZUREC

75

battlegrounds in these reform efforts with the passage of the “Maine Law,”
which enacted a strict regulation of alcohol and became a model for other
states throughout the nation. By the time of the state elections in 1853, the
reform impulse had only grown in strength with candidates and voters
open to new ideas and embracing a variety of anti-partisan and reform
movements.4
It was in this unsettled political environment that both John Bapst,
S.J., and William H. Chaney found ready-made constituencies for their
individual messages of reform. In both cases, the two men possessed a
seemingly intuitive understanding of the populist element of the national
mood which they aided in their reform efforts. Despite the similarities in
their approach the ultimate aims of both men were diametrically opposed.
For Bapst, the unsettled nature of mid-nineteenth-century America provided the ideal moment to win converts while strengthening the faith of
existing Catholics. For Chaney, the Know-Nothing movement provided a
home that he had lacked for much of his life and provided a lifelong outsider with access to the heart of the community. The collision of Bapst’s
and Chaney’s strains of populism, culminating with the attack on Bapst,
reveals the depth of the anxiety induced by the turmoil facing the United
States during this period. Yet, for as much as the tarring and feathering of
the Jesuit missionary offers insight into the depth of American anxiety in
the mid-nineteenth century, the response of Bangor’s Protestant population is as instructive as the attack itself. The denunciation of what many
came to call the “outrage at Ellsworth” demonstrates the limits of Chaney
and the Know-Nothings’s brand of intolerance. Ultimately Bapst’s efforts

4. On the loss of the founding generation, see Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea
Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 1999), pp. 180–81; and Simon Burrows,
Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War (New
York, 2008), pp. 229–37. On immigration and nativism, see W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic
Republic: An American Tradition (New York, 1979); Katie Oxx, The Nativist Movement in
America: Religious Conflict in the Nineteenth Century, [Critical Moments in American History], (New York, 2013) pp. 15–31; Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, pp. 3–10; John T.
McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern
Catholicism Global (Princeton, 2015), pp. 20–25; Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures
of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (Baltimore, 2002), pp. 107–08;
Scott See, “Variations on a Borderlands Theme: Nativism and Collective Violence in Northeastern North America in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in New England and the Maritime
Provinces: Connections and Comparisons, ed. Stephen Hornsby and Hon Reid (Montreal,
2005), pp. 125–43; David Brion Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion for the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY, 1971); Formisano, For the People, pp. 198–
212; and Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset
of the Civil War (New York, 1999), pp. 778–800.

76

“TO DESTROY POPERY AND EVERYTHING APPERTINENT THERETO”

FIGURE 1. Image of John Bapst, S.J., n.d. Boston College Faculty and Staff Photographs, 1872–2012, Box 1, Folder 23, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, no.
BC.2000.005ref15028.

to reform American society would continue long after Chaney and the
Know-Nothings had been denounced by their one-time supporters.5
***
The Swiss-born Bapst entered the Jesuit order in 1835 and was
ordained in December 1846. Following the Sonderbund War, a civil war
between the Catholic and Protestant cantons, Bapst fled Switzerland for
France. In spring 1848, shortly after arriving in France, Bapst and many of
his exiled Swiss colleagues received orders to travel to the American missions. Bapst made his way to New York before arriving at his assigned post
5. For a comparison between American and European religious intolerance, see
McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World, pp. 21–25. McGreevy argues that, despite the
United States’ higher level of tolerance than many European countries, the anti-Catholic climate of the nineteenth century convinced Catholics of the need to develop a distinct Catholic
subculture in the United States. For a discussion regarding American secularism in the wake
of World War II, see McGreevy, pp. 211–13. It is argued here that Bapst’s engagement with
American secularism and his efforts at reform only grew stronger as time passed rather than
retreated into a distinctly Catholic subculture.

DAVID DZUREC

77

in Old Town, Maine, to minister to the Penobscot Indians. Faced with a
variety of challenges, including a complete lack of training in either English or Abnaki (the Penobscot language), Bapst adapted quickly during his
first years in Maine. With the help of a French-speaking Penobscot
woman, Bapst developed a basic knowledge of Abnaki and within months
of his arrival had learned enough Abnaki to minister to the people of Old
Town. With his new skills, he was soon hearing confessions, working to
establish a temperance society, and acting to facilitate a settlement between
rival factions within the tribe.6
After three years in Old Town, Bapst relocated to Eastport, Maine, to
minister to the established French Canadian and growing Irish immigrant
populations in the region. Joined in his efforts by two other Jesuits, John
Force (Voors) and Hippolyte De Neckere, Bapst and his confreres faced a
daunting geographic challenge. Their territory spanned hundreds of miles
from Eastport to Waterville and encompassed the parishes of eight
churches and thirty-three chapels—some 9000 Catholics—and included
the Passamaquoddy people at nearby Pleasant Point. In 1852 alone, Bapst
performed 110 baptisms and officiated at twenty marriages. Bapst’s travels
were nearly constant—answering sick calls, making financial appeals to aid
in the construction of churches, giving instruction to those seeking to convert, overseeing Sunday schools, and founding temperance societies
throughout the state.7
Despite the challenges of his assignment, Bapst met with a great deal
of success. As a result of his temperance efforts, local Protestant officials in
Waterville and Skowhegan, citing a downturn in alcohol consumption in
their communities, repeatedly asked the Jesuit to establish permanent residence in their towns. Bapst noted that “the Protestant magistrates themselves . . . reward me with great favor and are making every possible effort
to effect my permanent residence in their midst.” Included in the proffered
invitations was generous aid from “many of the most distinguished”
Protestants in the Waterville region and support for the construction of a
Catholic church. Bapst was convinced that, with a better command of the
English language, he would be able to “dispel the rest of their prejudices,
to awaken their slumbering consciences and to effect, perhaps, a veritable
6. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World, pp. 28–32; Raymond Schroth, The American Jesuits: A History (New York, 2007) and Anatole Baillargeon, “Father John Bapst and the
Know-Nothing Movement in Maine” (M.A. thesis, University of Ottawa, 1950), pp. 27–31.
7. Baillargeon, “Father John Bapst and the Know-Nothing Movement in Maine,” pp.
36–38.

78

“TO D ESTROY P OPERY AND EVERYTHING APPERTINENT THERETO”

religious revolution.” All of this was facilitated, Bapst wrote to a friend in
Europe, by “the bright side of American liberty.” He believed that “I could
preach the doctrines of the Catholic religion in the most Protestant town,
before an audience entirely of Protestants, and I feel sure that I would not
suffer a single interruption.” Buoyed by these successes, Bapst eventually
turned his attention to Ellsworth.8
Because of the town’s central location among nearly a dozen Catholic
missions in the state, Bapst wrote to his Provincial Charles Stonestreet, S.J.,
in September 1852 calling for a “good preacher who speaks good English
and who is above all a virtuous man,” to be stationed at Ellsworth to establish an additional mission.9 The Provincial acceded and in January 1853,
Bapst took up residence in Ellsworth. Bapst’s reputation likely preceded
him to Ellsworth as one of the local newspapers, the Ellsworth Freeman,
noted his arrival and declared, “We are glad to give Mr. B. a good welcome
as we doubt not his labors will result in much good to the flock of his charge
and be a great moral benefit to the village.”10 The Jesuit rented a small house
at the edge of town and began his work. Bapst’s arrival coincided with a
period of growth for Ellsworth’s Catholic population, which had long since
outgrown the small building that had served as their site of worship and had
already begun preparation for the construction of a new church. One of
Bapst’s first tasks in his new town was to help oversee the construction of
the new church to house their expanding population. In the earliest days of
Bapst’s tenure in Ellsworth, there was no reason to expect that the success
he had experienced in Waterville and Skowhegan would not be replicated
in Ellsworth. The warm welcome for the Jesuit missionary would, however,
be short-lived—with tensions over the version of the Bible that was to be
used in the Ellsworth public schools drawing the community into a contentious debate that would devolve into violence.11
***
Chaney, in contrast, was a native of Maine. Born in the town of
Chesterville, just west of Waterville, Chaney endured a difficult childhood
8. Letter from John Bapst to Charles Billet, April 27, 1850, Woodstock Letters, 17,
(Woodstock, MD, 1888), pp. 363–67.
9. Letter from John Bapst to Charles Stonestreet , S.J, September 12, 1852, Woodstock
Letters, 18 (1889), 90-91; McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World, pp. 36–37; Schroth, The
American Jesuits, p. 74.
10. Ellsworth [ME] Freeman, January 14, 1853, 1.
11. Woodstock Letters, 17 (1888), pp. 361–72. Bapst was also joined briefly by the priest
Augustin Kennedy who was called away to serve at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, within weeks of his arrival in Ellsworth.

D AVID D ZUREC

79

following the death of his father in 1830 in a sledding accident. At age nine,
Chaney bounced between the homes of several different relatives and neighbors, developing a reputation as a surly and combative child. At age sixteen,
Chaney set out on his own, finding work on a fishing schooner in Penobscot
and Frenchman Bays. After two years aboard the fishing vessel, Cheney
enlisted in the navy but, in July 1840, deserted the receiving ship, Columbus,
in Boston Harbor after only nine months of service. Following his desertion,
Chaney lit out for the American West. He envisioned himself as a “refugee,
a price set on my head, every man’s hand against me.” Although initially
intending to head for New Orleans, Chaney made it as far as Ohio before
falling ill and finding himself without options: “I counted my money—
$1.27; had no baggage—not even a spare shirt; sick and in a strange land; not
yet twenty years old—really my prospects looked gloomy.”12
The people of Sciota Furnace, Ohio, came to Cheney’s aid, nursing
him back to health and helping him to obtain a teaching position in Porter
Township in early 1841. In the wake of this kindness, Cheney reimagined
his future and gave over his life as a refugee to a life of self-improvement.
He spent the next few months scraping by, often “boarding around” with
the families of his students, before meeting rich Virginian Ephraim Pollock, who recommended Cheney to Morgan Nelson, a wealthy lawyer and
city councilor in Wheeling. Based on Pollock’s recommendation, Nelson
took Chaney in and offered him room and board while he read law under
Nelson’s guidance. In addition to his studies, Chaney was an active
member of his new community, writing poems and essays for the Wheeling
Times and Advertiser and taking an interest in Whig politics.13
After he completed his studies and was admitted to the bar, Chaney
moved to Burlington, Iowa, in September 1846. After a rocky start that
involved his mishandling of several criminal cases (including one criminal
defendant who was allowed toescape Chaney’s custody), Chaney settled
into his new home, receiving an appointment as city recorder in July 1850,
serving as secretary of the Burlington Hook and Ladder Company, and
participating in a Burlington mass meeting to support the Compromise of
1850. Although he lost his bid for re-election as city recorder, the city
12. William Chaney, Chaney’s Primer of Astrology and American Urania: Old Rules Simplified, New Rules Added. With Improved Nomenclature and Numerous Tables Never Before Published (St. Louis, 1890). See also Allan R. Whitmore, “Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing’:
William H. Chaney, His Early Years and His Role in the Nativist Controversy 1853–1854,”
Maine Historical Society Quarterly, 14 (1974), 1–57.
13. Ibid.

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“TO DESTROY POPERY AND EVERYTHING APPERTINENT THERETO”

council appointed him city solicitor the following spring. In July 1851
Chaney married a local woman, Jane McGeary. For the briefest of
moments, it seemed as though Chaney had finally found a place for himself in the world; however, it was not to last.
Within only a matter of months, Chaney’s life again seemed to come
apart. At the end of September, his wife fell ill. Within a matter of days,
she died, mostly likely of cholera. Only a month later, following a failed
defense of the city in a civil suit, the city council removed Chaney from his
office as solicitor. His world crumbling, Chaney left Iowa to return to
Maine where he responded to an advertisement by Charles Lowell of
Ellsworth, who was looking for a law associate. The partnership of Lowell
and Chaney began officially on May 1, 1852, but was unstable from the
start. Professionally, Chaney disdained legal precedent and the profession
as a whole, and his courtroom manner led Judge J. W. Hathaway to interrupt Chaney during an argument to a jury, noting, “it is a filthy bird that
fouls its own nest.” The partnership dissolved after only five months, with
each man deciding to pursue an independent career.14
Although Chaney continued to practice law after the fall of the partnership, his legal training had been unsystematic and largely self-directed,
and he had never developed a sense of professional etiquette. Rather than
work within the existing system, Chaney sought to find ways to reform the
legal system. He declared the grand jury to be a “humbug” relic of medieval
ignorance and argued that irresponsible prosecutors, jurors, and witnesses
could destroy even an innocent person’s reputation. Not surprisingly,
Chaney’s practice foundered, and he was forced to take up employ as a
lumber store clerk, “weighing out pork, drawing molasses, and triming
[sic] greasy lamps.”15
While he took up menial work to make ends meet, Chaney—like his
period in Ohio and Iowa—continued to pursue the life of the mind. He
published stories in Maine and Massachusetts newspapers, regularly
attended dramatic shows and lectures, and helped organize the Ellsworth
Debating Club (for which he was elected secretary). Employing the connections made in these intellectual pursuits, Chaney applied for and was
hired to teach in the Ellsworth school district during summer 1853. By all
accounts, Chaney was an effective teacher and had a good rapport with his
students; when the school committee visited Chaney’s classroom, they

14. Chaney, Chaney’s Primer of Astrology and American Urania, p. 145.
15. Whitmore, “Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing,’” pp. 16–18.

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were impressed by his teaching and the students’ efforts. Despite this success, a new opportunity in journalism enticed Chaney to make yet another
career change, as Elijah Couillard, publisher of the Ellsworth Herald,
approached Chaney about filling an upcoming editorial position at the
paper.16
James Belcher, pastor of Ellsworth’s Baptist church, had served as
editor of the Herald since its founding in 1851. Throughout its first two
years of existence, the newspaper struggled financially, and in the face of his
own failing health, Belcher decided to cut ties with what he believed to be
a doomed enterprise. In the wake of Belcher’s departure, Couillard turned
to Chaney. Chaney initially declared that he had “no ambition or pretention
as an editor”; however, he reconsidered and assumed his role with gusto.
Chaney laid out an independent course for his paper, declaring the right to
consider any issue and stating that he would not bow “to any party or sect—
political or religious.” He also declared that the Herald would “never consent to their [sic] being used as a medium for personal abuse, crimination
or recrimination, or a means whereby one party or sect may vent its spleen
upon another, and thus stir up our citizens to strife and dissention.”17
From the first, Chaney’s editorial efforts seemed to embody the
reform impulse that would be at the heart of the Know-Nothing movement. Chaney’s ability to tap into this emerging popular sentiment drew
the notice of John Shannon Sayward, the editor of the Bangor Courier, who
remarked that “the new editor [of the Herald] has a sprightliness and
force—is a live man and will jump into the current of time where he finds
it, and give his energies to the popular impulses.”18 Part of Chaney’s energy
seemed to stem from the opportunity the paper provided to challenge and
reform the power of established institutions. Echoing his iconoclastic
efforts in the legal profession, Chaney criticized the formal procedures and
etiquette of American society, condemning the legal and medical professions, journalism, religion, and government officials. Chaney’s impulsiveness and temper, however, also led him to mistake the bold editorial comment and banter of contemporary newspapers for malicious character
assassination. In the face of this misperception, his energy could not make
up for a lack of experience. After only two months as editor of the Herald,
Chaney stepped down in late August 1853 to the role of associate editor.19

16. Ibid., pp. 21–22.
17. Ellsworth [ME] Herald, October 1, 1852, 1.
18. Bangor [ME] Courier, June 14, 1853, 1.
19. Whitmore, “Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing,’” pp. 25–26.

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Although Chaney’s editorial replacement was announced publicly as
George S. Raymond, the new editor informed his associates that his real
name was “Don Carlos R. Kearney,” that he was the son of a commodore
in the United States Navy, and that he had been a revolutionary in South
America. Chaney believed that the worldly Kearney could be a worthy and
competent editor. He soon discovered, however, that Kearney’s real name
was not any of the monikers that he had assumed but instead was Charles
R. Ketchum. He was a bigamist and con man. As the story of Raymond/
Kearney/Ketchum’s identity fraud broke in Maine papers, the new editor
fled to Boston. Only a month after stepping down, the inexperienced
Chaney was back in the editor’s chair of a financially struggling newspaper
that was accepting subscriptions paid in “butter, eggs, potatoes, apples,
beans, poultry, and in fact anything that can be used in a family.”20
Once again at the helm of the Ellsworth Herald, Chaney returned to
his iconoclast vitriol. What began as an airing of grievances between
Chaney, writing in the Herald, and his former law partner Charles Lowell,
writing for Ellsworth’s Eastern Freeman, soon erupted into a full-scale conflict between the Ellsworth newspapers. The back-and-forth left each side
accusing the other of “low and vulgar behavior.” By fall 1853, Chaney
again found himself on the margins of local society, engaged in a
metaphorical shouting match with all of those around him. Yet even as it
seemed that Chaney’s personality might doom both his personal and professional prospects, Chaney’s distinct editorial perspective found new purchase in a brewing scandal centered on the use of the Bible in the
Ellsworth public schools.21
***
Much as Chaney worked to establish a place for himself in Ellsworth
society through his efforts with groups such as the Ellsworth Debating
Club, Bapst worked to make his presence felt in a series of public debates
of his own. Upon his arrival in Ellsworth in January 1853, the Jesuit missionary had begun a series of Sunday afternoon lectures on the doctrine of
the Catholic Church. The lectures were well attended not only by the
town’s Catholic population but also by a number of curious local Protestants who had come to see what “could be said in defense of a religious
system which in their opinion had long before been thoroughly exploded.”
According to Bapst, the attendees included several young women from
prominent local families, who found his message so persuasive that they
20. Ellsworth [ME] Herald, October 21, 1853, 1.
21. Eastern [Ellsworth, ME] Freeman, September 16, 1853, 1.

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FIGURE 2. Map of Maine indicating the places mentioned in the article.

converted to Catholicism. These conversions proved unsettling to a
number of local Protestant ministers, who denounced Bapst from their
pulpits, warning him to stop his work of proselytizing and “of reducing
free-born Americans to Rome’s galling yoke.” Simultaneously, Bapst’s successful proselytization efforts and his work in helping to build the new
church in Ellsworth emboldened the Catholic population to take a stand
against policies traditionally accepted by them, such as the use of the King
James Bible in public schools, which laid the foundation for the nativist,
anti-Catholic explosion that was to follow.22
Prior to 1853, all of Ellsworth’s public school students had made use
of the Protestant King James Bible in their class work. On the eve of the
new school year, in the late summer of 1853, Bapst actively encouraged
22. “Fr. Bapst’s Narrative,” Woodstock Letters , 18 (1889), p. 133.

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Ellsworth’s Catholic families to have their children refrain from using the
Protestant Bible. In the face of these refusals some of Ellsworth’s teachers
simply excused their Catholic students from participating in the reading
exercises; others, however, were more stringent and demanded that their
students participate in all class exercises. By October, the Ellsworth School
Committee had weighed in on the nascent controversy, declaring that all
students must use only the King James Bible or leave the school. Bapst
reacted bitterly to the news, writing to his provincial that the School Committee had created this new rule “out of bigotry.” In response to the committee’s official policy, Bapst collected more than one hundred signatures
calling for an end to the Bible policy, laying them before the committee.
The school officials rejected the petition, declaring that the all students
were to “read the Protestant Bible or be dismissed from the schools; and
should we find them loafing around the wharves we will clap them into
jail.” School officials, led by committee spokesman Seth Tisdale, made
good on their threat when on November 14, following a visit to the city’s
largest school, they expelled sixteen Catholic students who refused to participate in the Bible reading. 23
In the face of the mass expulsion, Bapst organized a Catholic school
in the old chapel and hired a teacher to oversee the students’ education.
The family of one student, Bridget Donahoe, billed the state of Maine for
her tuition and followed with a lawsuit against the Ellsworth School Committee when the state failed to deliver. The Donahoe lawsuit raised the
issue of both public funding for parochial education and the right of nonProtestant students to refuse instruction from the King James Bible. The
suit reflected ongoing national debates about public funding for religious
education and the use of the King James Bible in the classroom. Debates
over the use of public funds for Catholic schools had begun a decade earlier
in immigrant hubs like New York and Philadelphia, and, by the 1850s, had
spread throughout the United States as immigrant numbers increased. In
1853 alone, the “school question” became the “all-absorbing topic” of the
spring elections in Cincinnati. In Detroit, Whigs and Democrats joined
together to resist the bishop’s request for state funding for parochial
schools. The Indiana state legislature passed a bill prohibiting the use of
public funds for parochial schools, with similar legislation nearly passing in
the New York state legislature.24

23. John Bapst, S.J., to Charles Stonestreet, S.J., October 1853, cited in Baillargeon,
“Father John Bapst and the Know-Nothing Movement in Maine,” p. 43.
24. Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, pp. 24–25.

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FIGURE 3. Political Cartoon from the Ellswsorth Herald, February 24, 1854, entitled “John Bapst, S.J., Catholic Priest of Ellsworth, Closes the Door of the Public
School against the Children of Papists.”

In all cases, the cause of public funding for parochial schools and the
right of non-Protestants to refuse the use of the King James Bible proved to
be a losing one. In Donahoe v. Richards, the Maine Supreme Court ruled in
favor of the defendant, refusing to “subordinate the state to the individual
conscience.” Furthermore, writing for the court, Chief Justice John Appleton noted that “if the common version of the Bible is to be objected because
of denominational objections, so might the works of Locke, Bacon, Newton
and Galileo.”25 The precedent set in the Donahoe case, declaring that a student might be expelled for refusing to read a text regardless of a student’s
religious views, would be in effect until 1890, when the Edgerton case in
Wisconsin finally elevated the rights of conscience of a minority group over
the traditional religious practices of the majority.26
25. Daniel Piar, “Majority Rights, Minority Freedoms: Protestant Culture, Personal
Autonomy, and Civil Liberties in Nineteenth Century America,” William and Mary Bill of
Rights Journal, 14 (2006), 1016–107.
26. Thomas C. Hunt, “The Edgerton Bible Decision: The End of an Era,” The Catholic
Historical Review, 67 (1981), 589–619.

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As the Donahoe case made its way through the courts, the members
of the Ellsworth School Committee placed blame for the entire incident
on “Mr. Bapst.” The committee members declared that the Jesuit was
“responsible for the agitation of this subject, and all of the evil that has
resulted.” Prior to the arrival of “the Rev. Mr. Bapst, a Catholic priest, of
the order of the Jesuits,” they argued, “all was undisturbed harmony on this
subject.” Worse still, they contended,
He is a foreigner by birth, education, and allegiance. Under his dictation
a portion of our fellow citizens have deprived their children of the benefits of our schools, many of them stating to us that they themselves had
no objection to the rule we have retained in reference to the Bible.27

In responding to these charges, Bapst attempted to reduce the question “to its simplest expression,” seemingly banking on his faith in “the
bright side of American liberty” that had arisen from his earlier experiences
with Maine officials in places like Waterville and Skowhegan. Writing in
the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, he questioned:
Has the School Committee the constitutional power to force on the
Catholic children the reading of a version of the Bible, which is forbidden by their Church and their conscience, and in case of refusal, to dismiss them, for that reason alone? If the Committee has such a power
under the Constitution, then the Committee is right and the Catholics
are wrong. But if the Committee has no such power, then the Catholics
are right, and the Committee is answerable for the whole agitation.—But
the question has not yet been decided by a competent tribunal. Therefore
let us wait.

Ultimately, of course, Bapst was to be disappointed by the ruling. Yet even
before the constitutional issue was decided, tensions in Ellsworth would
reach new heights.28
Initially, it appeared as though the Bible controversy might simply be
allowed to resolve itself in the courts as Bapst had hoped. Chaney’s initial
reaction to the dispute mirrored that of Bapst in calling for restraint.
Chaney’s Herald offered only limited coverage of the Bible controversy,
reprinting accounts from the Belfast Journal and the Augusta Age along with

27. The school committee remarks were reprinted in the Bangor [ME] Daily Whig and
Courier, December 24, 1853, 1.
28. Bapst’s response to the committee appeared in the Bangor [ME] Daily Whig and
Courier, January 5, 1854, 1. On the “bright side of American liberty,” see Bapst’s letter to
Billet, (1888), pp. 362–76.

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an extended statement by the superintendent of public instruction in New
York, who declared that no child should be forced to read a particular version of the Bible in school.29 In a November editorial Chaney went so far
as to urge calm from all sides, noting that “the discussion of any sectarian
question, through the columns of a newspaper, never yet did any good, but
in our opinion has always resulted in evil.” He hoped that “like a little fire,”
the controversy “may be easily extinguished if taken in time, but if left to
itself will soon kindle into a devouring flame.”30 These early calls for
restraint, however, were soon replaced by a far more vitriolic tone as violence erupted on both sides of the controversy.
Within days of Chaney’s call for calm, someone broke into a schoolhouse on the western side of town and destroyed fourteen King James
Bibles. This act of vandalism was followed by name calling and threats of
violence by Catholics against members of the Ellsworth School Committee. In the face of this Catholic violence, Chaney changed his tone, declaring the “Catholic Bible Question” part of an elaborate Roman Catholic
conspiracy to undermine the American republic. The School Committee
defended its actions and placed blame for the Catholic violence on Bapst
in a letter to the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier. The Jesuit was quick to
respond to the newspaper attacks, counseling patience and declaring that
the charges leveled against him were entirely false.31
The Jesuit’s response, however, only seemed to agitate Chaney further.
The editor of the Herald would later admit that “when angered . . . my voice
is loud and harsh my features become rigid, my little eyes set and seem to
glow with the fierceness of a demon more than a human.” Furthermore,
Chaney declared, “I hold that a compromise implies a surrender of something that should be retained.” Within a matter of weeks, an issue that
Chaney had argued should remain out of the columns of a newspaper had
become a personal crusade splashed across the pages of his publication.32
In addition to his concern for the future of the Republic, Chaney’s
change of heart may have resulted in part from financial concerns. The

29. For Chaney’s coverage of the controversy, see Ellsworth Herald, December 9, 1853,
1; December 23, 1853, 1.
30. Ellsworth Herald, November 11, 1853, 1.
31. Chaney’s editorial appears in the Ellsworth Herald of December 9, 1853, January 6,
1854, and January 13, 1854. The school committee’s letter is published in the Bangor [ME]
Daily Whig and Courier, January 5, 1854. The American and Foreign Christian Union, vol. 6
(New York, 1855), p. 17. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World, pp. 40–41.
32. Chaney, Chaney’s Primer of Astrology and American Urania, pp. 123, 147.

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Eastern Freeman noted that, during its initial restraint in covering the Bible
controversy, the Herald was losing nativist subscribers at a rate of six to
fourteen per day. The editors at the Freeman surmised that this decline had
played a key role in the development of Chaney’s anti-Catholic position,
chiding, “Friend Chaney, you are not the first zealot that love of filthy lucre
has made.”33 Yet, if increasing circulation was a factor Chaney’s efforts, it
was only a part of the Chaney’s growing zealotry, as his efforts extended
well beyond the pages of the Herald.
Beginning in late January 1854, Chaney organized a series of mass
gatherings at Lord’s Hall in Ellsworth to discuss the Catholic threat. At
one meeting, following a series of anti-Catholic speeches given by a
number of prominent members of Ellsworth society (including Chaney;
Dr. Moses Pulsifer; the minister J. French; and J. S. Hawes, the principal
of Ellsworth’s high school), the group declared its intent to “destroy popery
and everything appertinent thereto” and adopted the name the “Cast Iron
Band.”34 Chaney’s efforts did not end with the creation of the Band. In the
weeks that followed the organization of the anti-Catholic nativist group,
Chaney traveled throughout the neighboring villages of Hancock, Reed’s
Brook, Morgan’s Bay, Blue Hill, Southwest Harbor, Surry, and Gouldsboro, speaking on behalf of the growing nativist forces gathering supporters throughout Hancock County. In the Know-Nothing movement
Chaney finally seemed to have found his place.35
Throughout spring 1854 Chaney’s editorial efforts mirrored those of
his public speaking engagements. Presenting issue after issue, Chaney railed
against the Catholic threat. Employing thinly veiled satire, political cartoons, and outright attacks, Chaney decried the efforts of Bapst and the
“Jack Catholics”—his label for those who supported the Jesuit, including
newspapers that appeared sympathetic to Bapst’s cause such as the Bangor
Mercury and the Ellsworth Freeman. By April, Chaney went so far as to publish a notice declaring that “1000 men [were] wanted” and issuing a call to
“Protestant laborers everywhere” to “come to Ellsworth, and come quickly!
for your services may yet be needed in more ways than one.”36 Chaney’s call

33. Eastern [Ellsworth, ME] Freeman, February 24, 1854, 1.
34. Baillargeon, “Father John Bapst and the Know-Nothing Movement in Maine,” p. 54.
35. An account of the gathering appears in the Ellsworth Herald, February 24, 1854, 1.
Whitmore, “Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing,’” pp. 33–37.
36. For Chaney’s attacks on competing newspapers, see Ellsworth Herald, January 20,
1854, 1; February 24, 1854, 1; March 10, 1854, 1. The call for “1000 men” appeared on April
14, 1854, 1 and was reprinted in the Boston Pilot on May 6, 1854.

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for a “1000 men” came as members of the Cast Iron Band marched through
town taunting and threatening Catholics. Catholic women who worked in
Protestant households daily were ridiculed and heard their employers
mocking the Catholic fish-and-egg diets on Fridays and slandering Bapst.
For their part, Catholics cursed Chaney in the streets, and Irish women
asked God to save them from the “devil Chaney.”37
Before long, the tension simmering in Ellsworth and environs boiled
over into outright violence. In mid-April, a rumor spread throughout
Ellsworth that a group of Catholics had resolved to “blot out” Chaney and
his press. When the attack on the Herald did come, Chaney and members
of the Cast Iron Band, who had been keeping watch over the press as the
rumors grew, defended the newspaper building and surprised the wouldbe Catholic vandals. A month later, Chaney was confronted by a fist-shaking Irish-Catholic named Tim Doyle who threatened to knock Chaney’s
teeth down his throat. The two men squared off, and Chaney beat Doyle
until spectators managed to pull the editor away. By June, Bapst became
the target of Cast Iron Band violence. Initially, the mob had hoped to seize
Bapst in an attack on his home on June 3. When his housekeeper informed
the members of the Band that the priest was away on a sick-call, they
expressed their disappointment by shattering a window with a large stone.
Three days later, the mob again returned, and unaware that Bapst had
returned to Ellsworth, focused its anger on the town’s new church, shattering every window in the building. Following this wave of violence, the
bishop, fearing for Bapst’s safety, reassigned the Jesuit to Bangor and
ordered that he not return to the town even for Sunday Masses.38
In the wake of Bapst’s departure, the Eastern Freeman offered a review
of the recent “excitement.” Authored by Lowell, Chaney’s former law partner, the review was as much a revival of the two men’s long-running feud as
it was a condemnation of the recent violence. Lowell declared that “there is
no more firm and decided Protestant in America, nor an individual with less
sympathy with the Catholic Faith, than the humble writer of this review.”
Lowell added, however, that “any religion is better than none at all,” and he
therefore “wishes every person to worship God according to his own con-

37. Mary A. Tincker, The House of Yorke (New York, 1872), pp. 128–29, Whitmore,
“Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing,’” pp. 39–40.
38. Ellsworth Herald, May 26, 1854, 1; Eastern Freeman, May 26, 1854, p. 1; “Fr.
Bapst’s Narrative,” Woodstock Letters, 18 (1889), pp. 133–36; McGreevy, American Jesuits and
the World, p. 26; Baillargeon, “Father John Bapst and the Know-Nothing Movement in
Maine,” pp. 55–56.

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victions of right and duty.” It was in this framework that Lowell offered his
“review.” In examining the root cause of the controversy, Lowell blamed a
“sectarian spirit” and the “indiscrete language and temper” of leading
Catholic officials; however, after the initial unsettlement, he argued that the
controversy had “since been kept alive, extended, and greatly aggravated . . .
by William H. Chaney.” According to Lowell, Chaney’s attacks had “kept
up and aggravated the situation.” His “prostituted press, a weak brain, and
perverse spirit, have been able to impose on so many well-meaning citizens,
and to excite and inflame the masses.” Although Lowell certainly held a
personal grudge again Chaney, his sentiments reflected the view of
Ellsworth’s non-nativist Protestant population.39
Far from bringing an end to the Cast Iron Band’s activities in
Ellsworth, Bapst’s departure was viewed as a victory by the nativist group,
sparking further violence. The activities of anti-Catholic mobs only
increased in the ensuing period, with Catholics fearing to leave their
homes after dark. On the night of June 13, members of the Cast Iron Band
detonated a bomb on the steps of the old Catholic chapel that served as the
home for the Catholic school, blowing the door from its hinges and shattering every window in the structure. This spate of increased violence drew
the condemnation of many town residents, including Lowell, and the town
selectmen called a meeting for July 8 at which they planned to denounce
the Cast Iron Band and its supporters. Instead, the emboldened nativist
band seized control of the town meeting, elected new selectmen, and
passed a resolution offering Bapst
an entire suit of new clothes such as cannot be found at the shops of any
Tailor; and that when thus appareled, he be presented with a free ticket
to leave Ellsworth upon the first railroad operation that may go into effect.

Within a month of the Jesuit’s relocation, the Cast Iron Band had reached
the height of its power.40
The following week, someone set fire to the new church, which,
according to the Eastern Freeman, “if not timely discovered might must have
proved the destruction of that building and the adjoining Catholic School.”
Although the nativist impulse seemed to have a firm grasp on Ellsworth and
the surrounding communities, there was a growing regional backlash
against the violence. The Augusta Age denounced the attack on the church,
blaming Chaney for much of the violence and declaring that the attack was
39. Eastern Freeman, June 9, 1854, 1.
40. Eastern Freeman, July 14, 1854, 1. Emphasis in original.

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the “fruit of a bitter campaign waged for months by the Ellsworth [H]erald.”
The Bangor Mercury echoed these sentiments, declaring that “we cannot
believe that the numerous outrages in Ellsworth against the Irish Catholic
population are countenanced by the people.” Like their counterparts in
Augusta, the editors of the Mercury criticized the “bitter crusade which the
Ellsworth Herald has waged for many months.” Whatever the cause, the
Bangor paper declared, Ellsworth stands “disgraced in the eyes of all good
citizens,” particularly because the acts of violence violated the religious freedom that “is carefully protected by the constitution under which we live,
and which protection has ever been regarded as the dearest right of the citizens.” All of these assertions served as prelude to the peak of both the violence in Ellsworth and the backlash against it in fall 1854.41
***
In early October 1854, Bapst was called to Cherryfield, fifty miles
southeast of Bangor.. Believing the nativist furor in Ellsworth to have run
its course, Bapst decided to spend the night in Ellsworth (which was
halfway to Cherryfield). On the evening of October 14, word spread
throughout Ellsworth that the Jesuit had returned. This news elicited an
immediate reaction. Local nativist leaders called a special meeting of the
Cast Iron Band, while dozens of men and boys assembled in the Post
Office Square. Shortly after 9:00 that evening, members of the Band
donned masks, met in Post Office Square, and led the crowd through a
driving rain to the Kent home where Bapst was hearing confession.
Accounts vary as to what happened next. Some said that Bapst was
dragged from the house by the mob; others stated that the Jesuit came of
his own volition to protect the residents of the home. Either way, at long
last the Cast Iron Band could make good on its selectmen’s threat.
Although the mob initially debated how best to proceed, it eventually
decided to follow through on the threat issued in the town meeting. Bapst
was stripped of his clothes, robbed of his wallet and watch, tarred, and
feathered him, with the group swearing at him. According to a Bangor
newspaper, one mob members jeered, “why don’t you call on your Virgin
Mary for help?” Bapst then was placed on a sharp rail, carried for half a
mile to the Tisdale shipyard, tossed unconscious upon the wharf. At that
point, despite some calls to hang the priest, the leader of the mob called an
end to the attack. A group of heavily armed Catholics who had been
41. Eastern Freeman, cited in Baillargeon, “Father John Bapst and the Know-Nothing
Movement in Maine,” p. 58; The Augusta [ME] Age, July 27, 1854, 1; Bangor Mercury repr.
in the Boston Pilot, July 29, 1854, 1.

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searching for Bapst since the attack rescued him, carrying him back to the
Kent home. The next morning, Bapst insisted on celebrating Mass for his
former parishioners before he was taken to Bangor to recover. He never
would return to Ellsworth.42
The widespread outrage over the bombing of the Ellsworth parish
church was only amplified by news of the attack on Bapst. Throughout the
Northeast, newspapers decried “the Ellsworth Outrage.” Initial reports as
far away as western Pennsylvania suggested that Bapst had been killed in
the attack as well as that the “ruffians” had stolen $50 from the priest and
during the attack made “disgusting personal assaults . . . using various
degrees of foul language.” In Amherst, New Hampshire, the Farmers Cabinet reported that, before “this outrage,” Bapst had “done much good
among the Catholic population, and has brought about many useful
reforms, winning commendation on all hands.” The Sun in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, decried the attackers as “wretches” and expressed the hope
that they would “be able to chronicle the hanging of every one of them.”43
Reaction against the attack intensified with proximity, with some of the
most strident outrage coming from Bangor. The Bangor Daily Whig and
Courier not only decried the attack as “an abominable outage” but went so
far as to argue that it was an affront to the core of what it meant to be an
American. The editors of the Whig and Courier declared that
such outrages as this array themselves not merely against Mr. Bapst, or
the church of which he is a priest, but against the laws of the land, and
all the pledges of a civilized society and the securities of our Constitution
and the whole spirit and aim of our system of government.

In addition to their discussion of Constitutional freedoms, the Bangor editors decried the attack as a violation of the character of all New England:
“No hearty New Englander, no right minded person should think for a
moment of any other weapon in a case like this than that of debate and the
ballot box.” Resorting to violence was “a gross and wanton outrage, for
which they can have no justifiable reason, nor even a plausible excuse.” If

42. “Outrage at Ellsworth,” Bangor [ME] Daily Journal, October 17, 1854, 1.
43. “Death of the Catholic Priest Who Was Tarred and Feathered,” Washington [PA]
Reporter, October 25, 1854, 2, and “The Late Outrage at Ellsworth, Maine,” Washington
Reporter, November 1, 1854, 2; “The Outrage upon the Rev. Mr. Bapst,” New York Times,
October 27, 1854, p. 1; Farmers Cabinet [Amherst, NH], October 26, 1854, 1; Sun [Pittsfield,
MA], October 26, 1854, 3; “The Catholic Priest That Was Tarred and Feathered and
Ridden on a Rail,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 27, 1854, 1.

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there was any threat to the Republic coming from Ellsworth, the Bangor
editors believed it to be the nativist bands rather than a Catholic priest.44
In the face of this widespread criticism the Cast Iron Band was defiant.
Chaney called a meeting of the Band on the evening of October 24. The
minutes of the meeting, which were widely published, provided a defense
of the attack, declaring that Bapst had been “exiled by force of public
opinion for his treasonable interference with our free schools” and that
Bapst had brought the attack upon himself, although his “indiscretion and
bravado in returning here after having made himself so exceedingly
obnoxious to all respectable Protestants and lovers of their county and its
glorious institutions.” As for attacks on the character of the members of
the Band, the group passed a resolution declaring that “we still hold ourselves as American freemen, accountable to law, and that we hurl back the
charge of being ‘rowdies, ruffians, and pirates’ to the base source whence
it emanated.” Finally, according to printed accounts of the meeting,
Chaney rose before the Band, speaking for “three-quarters of an hour,
giving a history in short of the Roman Catholic trouble in Ellsworth,
being often interrupted by the cheering of the audience, which was never
larger in the hall.”45
In the months that followed, Chaney’s dedication to nativist politics
continued to ensure his place in the Ellsworth community. The spirited
defense of the attack on Bapst was only a beginning. His newspaper
columns derided efforts to punish anyone for the attack on Bapst. As the
November elections grew nearer, Chaney continued his efforts to drum up
support for Know-Nothing candidates. It had been Chaney who had traveled to Boston in June 1854 to register the Hancock County chapter of the
American Party; by that fall, the county had become a party stronghold in
Maine. In the November 1854 elections Hancock County delivered hundreds of votes to American Party candidates, and Chaney was elected to
serve as one of twenty-two state delegates representing Maine at the
national convention in Cincinnati. Chaney’s final act of dedication to the
nativist cause in Ellsworth came in January 1855 when he purchased the
Herald (made possible in part with loans from his cousin, Josiah Chaney,
of Portland and Ellsworth nativist John True) and renamed it the
Ellsworth American. Running under the new name on the masthead, the
paper declared, “Americans can govern America without the aid of Foreign

44. “An Abominable Outrage at Ellsworth,” Bangor [ME] Daily Whig and Courier,
October 17, 1854, 1.
45. “Mass Meeting at Ellsworth,” Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, October 28, 1854, 1.

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“TO D ESTROY P OPERY AND EVERYTHING APPERTINENT THERETO”

Influence.” Despite an initial reticence, Chaney, in taking up the nativist
cause, had made himself a pillar of the Ellsworth community.46
Yet as the nativist wave in Maine crested and retreated, so, too, did
Chaney’s place in Ellsworth society. As the new Republican Party began to
draw away members of the Know-Nothings, Chaney denounced those
who fled the party, declaring,
when we left the old Democratic Party it was not to return again, like a
dog to his vomit, nor was it to go into the arms of the dying Whig Party,
but it was to help build up a new party and adhere to it.

Those who “profess friendship with the self-styled Republican party . . . are
committing adultery with the deformed nondescript.”47 Chaney’s cries for
loyalty went unheeded, and he began to look elsewhere for opportunities
as he realized he was fighting a lost cause. Only twelve months after purchasing and renaming the American, Chaney left for New Bedford, Massachusetts, in December 1855, abandoning his second wife and two sons.
Faced with the political adultery of Ellsworth partisans, Chaney hoped to
find nativist sympathizers in Massachusetts. In February 1856, he established the Know-Nothing New Bedford Evening Express. As in Maine,
however, the diminished nativist impulse left Chaney without much of an
audience for his new endeavor, and Chaney, without any expression of
embarrassment, abandoned the American Party. In a presidential election
year, Chaney—keenly aware of the shifting political winds—renamed his
paper the New Bedford Express and endorsed James Buchanan and the
Democratic Party.48
***
The anti-Catholic violence in Ellsworth was not unique. Just days
before the attack on Bapst, about 100 miles south of Ellsworth, the “Old
South Church” in Bath, Maine, had been destroyed as the result of a
series of nativist, anti-Catholic sermons delivered by John Orr, an itinerant preacher who went by the name of the Angel Gabriel. In the months
that followed the attack on Bapst, scattered outbreaks of such violence
occurred in places like Manchester, New Hampshire; Dorchester, Massachusetts; and Louisville, Kentucky. In Louisville on August 6, 1855,

46. Ellsworth Herald, October 20, p. 1; October 27, p. 1; November 3, p. 1; and
December 28, 1855, p. 1; Ellsworth [ME] American, January 12, 1855, p. 1.
47. Cited in Herbert Silsby, “Looking Backward,” Ellsworth American , August 22,
1996, 20.
48. Whitmore, “Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing,’” pp. 44–45.

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Know-Nothings inspired by nativist editorials in the Louisville Journal set
fire to blocks of dwellings tenanted by the Irish, with entire families being
roasted to death or shot as they attempted to escape. Even in Ellsworth,
the final act of anti-Catholic violence occurred on April 27, 1856, with
the destruction of the Catholic Church that Bapst had helped to construct
three years prior.49
Yet, the attack on Bapst was in many ways the denouement of the vitriolic strain of Know-Nothingism that Chaney had fostered in Ellsworth
and Hancock County as a whole. The public interplay between Bapst and
Chaney, the Donahoe court case, the rise of the Cast Iron Band (most
notably its takeover of the Ellsworth town government), and the brutality
of the tarring and feathering of the Jesuit generated a great deal of public
attention and helped to turn public opinion against this anti-Catholic
impulse. Bapst himself believed that regret over the attack would “be
extremely useful to the cause of the Church in Maine.”50 True to Bapst’s
expectations, the people of Bangor called a special meeting mirroring that
of the Cast Iron Band’s defense of the Ellsworth attack; this gathering of
Bangor’s Protestant population passed resolutions lauding the Jesuit for his
“admirable patience,” his “Christian forbearance” and his “courageous zeal”
and declaring Bapst to be a “blessing” and an “honored” resident of Bangor.
Following the reading of the resolutions, the chair of this meeting, “amid
deafening applause,” presented Bapst with a “well filled purse” and a gold
watch to replace the timepiece that had been stolen from him during the
attack. The engraving on the cover of the watch read:
TO REV. JOHN BAPST, S.J.
FROM THE CITIZENS OF BANGOR, MAINE
AS A TOKEN OF THEIR HIGH ESTEEM
In many ways, the attack in Ellsworth only helped to entrench Bapst in
eastern Maine. He would remain in Bangor for another five years, overseeing the construction of St. John’s Church, the largest in the state at that
time. He was transferred to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,
Massachusetts, in 1859. During his final years in Maine, Bapst witnessed
a political sea-change.

49. See, “Variations on a Borderlands Theme,” p. 132; Baillargeon, “Father John Bapst
and the Know-Nothing Movement in Maine,” p. 72.
50. John Bapst to John Fitzpatrick, October 20, 1854, cited in John McGreevy,
Catholicism and American Freedom (New York, 2003), p. 61.

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“TO D ESTROY P OPERY AND EVERYTHING APPERTINENT THERETO”

This political shift ranged from the partisan to the personal as members of Ellsworth’s newly formed Republican Party—many of whom had
been Know-Nothings—sought to distance themselves from the antiCatholic violence that had gripped Ellsworth. In attempting to assign
blame, the Ellsworth Republicans found their target in recently minted
Democrat Chaney. The former editor of the Herald, now American, they
argued, was responsible for the core of the anti-Catholic tumult and violence. Chaney, for his part, not only monitored the news from Ellsworth
but also responded in his characteristic style. Writing from New Bedford,
Chaney offered “A Litany for Ellsworth, Me.,” in which he condemned his
former town:
May fire and brimstone never fail
To fall in showers in Ellsworth, Maine;
Mayall the leading fiends assail
The thieving town of Ellsworth, Maine.
May beef or mutton, lamb or veal,
Be never found in Ellsworth, Maine,
But garlic soup, and scurvy kail
Be the food of Ellsworth, Maine.
May fame resound a dismal tale
When ’er she lights on Ellsworth, Maine;
May Egypt’s plagues at once prevail
To thin the knaves of Ellsworth, Maine.
May frost and snow, and sleet and hail
Benumb each joint in Ellsworth, Maine;
May wolves and bears trace and trail
The cursed crew of Ellsworth, Maine.
May want and woe each joy curtail,
That e’er was found in Ellsworth, Maine;
May no coffin want a nail
That wraps a rogue in Ellsworth, Maine.
Oh! may my couplets never fail
To find a curse for Ellsworth, Maine;
And may grim Pluto’s inner goal
Forever groan with Ellsworth, Maine.51

51. William Chaney, “A Litany for Ellsworth, Me,” New Bedford [MA] Evening
Express, April 8, 1856, 1. Somewhat ironically, Chaney’s poem was republished in Boston’s
Catholic newspaper, the Boston Pilot, on April 19, 1856.

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The former Ellsworth editor went on to distance himself from the violence
in a series of editorials in his Massachusetts newspaper, pointing to his initial calls for calm in the Herald when the Bible controversy had first
erupted, neglecting all of the vitriol and rage that would follow. Rather
than accepting blame, he denounced the people of Ellsworth and argued
that he had “a clear record in reference to the Ellsworth outrage.”52
By 1856, many of the former members of the Cast Iron Band were
fleeing from the legacy of the once-powerful group. Although larger xenophobic, populist, and reform forces were in play throughout the United
States driving the rise of the Know-Nothing movement, it was the role of
individuals driving this latent impulse to the heights of violence and these
acts of violence that alienated many would-be supporters. For Chaney, his
1856 endorsement of Democrat James Buchanan marked the final turn
from his Know-Nothing advocacy and an end to the height of his political
influence—he would spend the rest of his life attempting to find a place for
himself before dying in Chicago in 1903.53
By way of contrast, Bapst continued the work he started in Maine for
much of his life. Unlike Chaney, who abandoned his populist efforts following the collapse of the Know-Nothings, Bapst continued to employ a
populist approach in advancing his Catholic missionary work in the United
States. Key to these efforts was an active interest in Catholic education
with a specific goal of engaging Americans of every faith. Following his
time at the College of the Holy Cross, Bapst went on to serve as the first
president of Boston College. As president of the newly established college,
Bapst declared that “our zeal should not be restricted to the Catholics
alone, but should be extended to all.” Reflecting his own missionary
approach, he argued that scholastics at Boston College should be actively
educated in the issues of the day, if only to be able to answer directly
Protestant objections to the Catholic faith. Failure to train scholastics to
engage in such dialogue would leave them “to the past,” making them
“strangers to the present,” and prevent them from engaging in their work.54
As Superior of the New York and Canada Mission, Bapst wrote Jesuit
Superior General Peter Jan Beckx in 1870, supporting the creation of a
52. New Bedford Evening Express, August 16, 1856, 1; September 9, 1856, 1. Whitmore, “Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing,’” pp. 45–46.
53. Whitmore, “Portrait of a Maine ‘Know-Nothing,’” p. 46.
54. Chestnut Hill, MA, Burns Library, Boston College, John Bapst to Fr. Angelo
Paresce, January 29, 1863, John Bapst Papers, Box 1, Folder 7; McGreevy, American Jesuits
and the World, pp. 59–62.

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new college in Jersey City, New Jersey. “Conditions there,” Bapst declared,
“will soon make it one of the most important cities in the union.” A college
“situated in the central part of the city and easily accessible” could serve the
growing immigrant population. Despite the many challenges facing the
Jesuits in America, Bapst continued to recognize the opportunities available to the Jesuits in the United States and the level of engagement
required to realize those opportunities. By 1879, Bapst’s mental and physical health was failing, and he left his post. He ultimately resided at Mount
Hope Retreat near Baltimore where he died in 1887.55
***
For both Bapst and Chaney, the populist impulse that marked American politics in the turbulent decade of the 1850s proved a moment of
opportunity. Each man worked in his own way to take advantage of this
climate. For Bapst, it meant engaging Catholics and Protestants throughout Maine in an effort to spread the Catholic faith. For Chaney, it meant
riding the wave of Know-Nothing politics in an effort to secure a place for
himself in coastal Maine society. The efforts of both men ultimately
became entangled in local and national politics. At the peak of their entanglement, Chaney and his supporters, in a fit of populist outrage, resolved
that Bapst be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail. Although
the Band ultimately made good on this threat, the violence marked the
beginning of the end for its movement, which Chaney himself would disavow only a few years later. For Bapst, the widespread outrage that followed the attack provided evidence that his popular outreach could succeed
eventually. The Ellsworth attack, far from ending Bapst’s missionary
efforts, only served to reinforce his resolve to strengthen the place of
Catholics in United States by engaging the people of the young nation.

55. John Bapst to Jesuit Superior General Peter Jan Beckx, cited in Schroth, The American Jesuits, pp. 75–76; “Father John Bapst. A Sketch,” Woodstock Letters, 20 (1891), pp. 409–
11; McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World, pp. 59–62.

Book and Film Reviews
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
Journeys in Church History: Essays from the Catholic Historical Review. Edited by
Nelson H. Minnich. (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America
Press. 2016. Pp. viii, 135. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8132-2834-1.)
In 2007 the Catholic Historical Review initiated a series of essays inviting colleagues who have made distinguished contributions to church history to reflect on
their own professional lives and work. Edited by Nelson H. Minnich, this book
reprints the first fruits of this program, essays by Elizabeth Clark, Caroline Walker
Bynum, Jean Delumeau (as translated by Daniel V. Frascella), John W. O’Malley,
S.J., Margaret Lavinia Anderson, and Philip Gleason. It is an intellectual treasure
to have these six essays between the covers of a single book.
Minnich organizes the volume in the chronological order of the periods which
the essayists have made their own: Clark on patristics, Bynum on medieval Christian
thought and practice, Delumeau and O’Malley on early modern Catholicism,
Anderson on political Catholicism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Germany, and Gleason on American Catholicism. Beyond clarifying their chosen
subjects’ cultural and historical contexts, each essay reprises how the contributor’s
own publications have made these topics part of the historiographical mainstream.
As a group, the essays show both the utility for church history, and the limits, of
insights drawn from areas as diverse as ethnography, network theory, post-modern
theory, gender studies, cliometrics, social history, neo-Scholasticism, art history, and
rhetoric. Apart from Delumeau, whose story takes us into the uplands of French
academia, the contributors’ careers offer a capsule history of the fortunes of church
history in American higher education from the 1960s to the present. Gleason has
spent his whole career as student and teacher at one institution, the University of
Notre Dame, assisting its development into a nationally regarded research university. While O’Malley has taught at a series of Jesuit institutions, his early career, as
he tells us, benefited richly from Harvard’s old boy network. The lack of similar
mentoring there for women was a factor moving Bynum away from Harvard, eventually holding chairs at Columbia and the Institute for Advanced Study. Both
Anderson and Clark thrived at private liberal arts colleges that enabled them to
shape their own early programs, before moving respectively to Berkeley and Duke.
Readers will be intrigued by the autobiographical features of these essays.
Some contributors found and developed their subjects and methodologies basically
on their own. Others had their research topics handed to them by their professors.
In some cases it was reading a particular book, or accepting an invitation to speak
99

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at a conference on a hitherto unrehearsed topic—or eating a gelato in Florence—
that proved to be a professional game-changer. The essays of Bynum and Anderson
tell us more about their own subject-matter findings than do the other essays. But
readers will learn much from all of them, as well as having the decided pleasure of
making new acquaintances even as they re-encounter old friends and much-revered
authorities.
It is to be hoped that the editor of CHR will continue the series so auspiciously
launched in 2007, and that reprints of the essays of other luminaries in the field will
take their place side by side with the collection so warmly welcome in the volume
under review.
Yale University

MARCIA L. COLISH

God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert.
By Terry Lindvall. (New York: New York University Press. 2015. Pp. xi, 347.
$35.00. ISBN 978-1-4798-8673-9)
Writers with an inclination to satire invariably encounter the challenge of
where to draw the line between admissible and excessive expressions of mockery
and derision. Terry Lindvall’s ebullient and wide-ranging survey of the satiric tradition within Christian literary culture begins precisely by drawing lines. Conceding that the concept of a Christian satirist always approximates an oxymoron, he
proposes a model for evaluating satirical texts in the form of two intersecting axes,
the x axis running from ridicule to moral purpose and the y axis from rage to
humor. This cruciform graphic appears once in each of his ten chapters, offering a
useful visual measure of authors’ didactic intent (or lack thereof) and what Lindvall
terms the “affective nature of the discourse,” that is, the emotions from which the
satire originates and the responses it elicits (p. 8). Lindvall offers this “Quad of
Satire,” not as an empirical evaluation, but as a helpful graphic for mapping out the
perennial tension between the genre’s corrective and its destructive potential during
various periods of Western history.
The historical scope of Lindvall’s study is panoramic, beginning with brief
chapters on the Hebrew and Roman antecedents to the satires of Christianity and
concluding with an account of the recent migration of the literary tradition of religious satire into mass media—whether in the irreverence of Monty Python’s Life of
Brian or The Onion or in the “indirect satire” of the Sunday school–teaching, latenight TV host Stephen Colbert (p. 264). Lindvall’s argument assumes two guiding
lights for Christian satire, which at its best, he believes, “combines laughter and a
vision of reform” (p. 7). This uncontroversial, modest pair of claims—that piety
must be moderated with laughter and that ecclesial corruption deserves mockery—
at times fails to allow for the application of more fine-grained theological or historical scrutiny. For example, the conciliatory placement of the verbal adversaries
Martin Luther and Thomas More together at the intersection of the Quad of Satire
begs the question of whether vying Protestant and Catholic accounts of grace and

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justification have different aesthetic and moral resonance in the history of satire (p.
80). The capacious notion of “reform” as the licit fruit of satire also results in the
perhaps surprising choice to discuss the anticlerical satire of Voltaire and the antiChristian satire of Nietzsche. If this is a study of “religious satire,” it is principally
a study of Christian satire but not at the exclusion of satires of Christianity, whose
purposes range from upbuilding to demolition.
Lindvall’s rollicking compendium of religious satire rightly proposes that a
history of Christian humor belongs alongside, or within, our histories of Christian
art, architecture, poetry, and literature. Given the often political and social nature
of satiric discourse, this book offers the historian a rich companion to periods from
the early Church to the Reformation and Enlightenment, from the flourishing of
satire during the first half of the twentieth century in Britain to its apparent demise
of late. Lindvall’s language at times replicates the humor of the texts and writers he
discusses, bringing to life the historical contexts in which jokes were first cracked
and satiric wounds first inflicted. Whether satire is, as Lindvall implies, inevitable
in Christianity, his wide-ranging discussions of great Christian satirists—including
Tertullian, Erasmus, Swift, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and many more—is a
reminder that human levity is a cultural-historical force not to be taken lightly.
Villanova University

HELENA M. TOMKO

The King James Bible: Across Borders and Centuries. Edited by Angelica Duran.
(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. 2014. Pp. x, 398.
$60.00. ISBN 978-0-8207-0477-7.)
Carrying the momentum established by 400th anniversary publications and
conferences, this book bodes well for the direction of KJV studies, as it becomes a
cohesive field in its own right—and not one for just English professors any more.
The “world literature” focus of the essay collection helps it bridge the gap between
English literary approaches and biblical studies, creating a space for reception history of the Bible to unfold in accordance with individual scholars’ prior areas of
expertise and new research directions.
All of the essays make valuable contributions, while one stood out to me as
particularly noteworthy and representative of the kind of helpful work that now can
be done, building on the foundation laid out in KJV anniversary volumes c. 2011.
In “Words of Justice in a Secular Society: the KJV in Australia,” John Harris ranges
in historical focus from colonialism to today, to show the KJV’s role in a not “particularly Christian” place, a British penal colony from the late eighteenth century.
While informing the reader of the essentials of Australian Christian history, Harris
examines the experience of Aboriginal peoples, who have inhabited the land for
40,000 years, suffered oppression under European colonization, and yet today, after
generations of Protestant missions and biblical education, call for the completion
of the Bible’s translation into Aboriginal Kriol. This is in part due to the positive
influence of Christian advocates for Aboriginal justice in Australia, including

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Roman Catholic Ben Chifley, of whom one wishes more had been said in the essay,
and his use of the Douay-Rheims Bible (p. 166). Harris writes that biblically-educated Aboriginal political activists from the nineteenth century onwards “expressed
their frustration with Anglo-Australians whose very descendants had introduced
the language and culture that came with the KJV to their ancestors, because many
of them seemed so unmoved by it and even ignorant of it” (p. 168). This point resonates with my own experience in undergraduate teaching at an elite American liberal arts college, where students of color are more likely than students of European
descent to have prior knowledge of the KJV. This compelling essay, which I will
assign in my undergraduate courses, overall represents the exciting and relevant
directions of KJV scholarship today and in this volume specifically, where informative and well-researched colonial case studies invite us to reflect on broader issues
of so-called “post biblical culture” in all areas of the globe shaped by Christian
European colonization.
Other essays show positive developments in KJV research as biblical studies,
English literature, and global religious history. Gordon Campbell, a major author
and respected lecturer in the 2011 celebrations, explores the sounds and musicality
of the KJV—its “rhythmical flexibility”—as heard by seventeenth-century listeners.
Campbell acknowledges that most of them could not read, enhancing the significance of the heard aspects of the KJV and challenging still-popular assumptions that
sola scriptura Protestantism, having supplanted hierarchical Catholicism, quickly
resulted in a much more widely literate population in England. Patricia Demers
offers a beautifully researched essay on the KJV in children’s literature, with attention (among many other authors) to the prolific nineteenth-century writings of
Charlotte Tucker, who “specialized in novels about abandoned, neglected, but spiritually resourceful waifs in the industrial centers of London and Manchester” (p.
279). Katherine Clay Bassard attests to the continued preference for the KJV in
today’s African American churches and congregations and examines it as “a wellspring of linguistic, imagistic, and cultural resources for African American writers”
(p. 195). Trevor Cook’s essay explores the role of the KJV in Mormonism, where
twenty-four-year-old, self-taught Joseph Smith published his own “plagiarized” (in
LDS teachings, inspired) version of the text, known as The Book of Mormon.
The volume’s weaknesses include lack of systematic attention to the following:
Catholic Bibles in relation to the KJV, Catholic readers of the version, the reasons
for Tridentine Catholic opposition to Protestant Bibles, the continued importance
of the Vulgate in scholarly or listening contexts of English religious and cultural
life, or comparisons of Protestant missions to Catholic missions in the colonial
essays. As a volume appearing between major anniversary years, there could have
been some anticipation of the quincentenary celebrations of Erasmus’ Greek NT in
2016 and Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 2017.
Overall, the volume successfully extends and deepens the recent scholarly conversations about the KJV, carried out by an increasingly diverse group of learned
voices. The emerging field of KJV studies is well on its way to becoming a well-

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defined scholarly discipline, and with the appearance of this fine essay collection,
we have hope that this transition will be complete by the time we celebrate the
quincentenary of Tyndale’s NT in 2026.
ELLIE GEBAROWSKI-SHAFER

Middlebury College

ANCIENT
Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion. By Stephen J. Shoemaker. (New
Haven & London: Yale University Press. 2015. Pp xi, 289. $38.00. ISBN:
978-0-300-21721-6.)
Stephen Shoemaker’s excellent book makes an important contribution to our
knowledge of Marian devotion in early Christianity. Indeed, he is probably the first
to undertake the academic task of recreating the development of Marian piety and
cult up to the fifth century with a clear sense of timeline and the incorporation of
a diverse range of sources.
Shoemaker uses the historical evidence convincingly to dismiss two oversimple answers to the question. The first, which may be a popular Roman Catholic
or Orthodox viewpoint, is that devotion to the Virgin Mary extends back unbroken
to her lifetime. There is simply no evidence for this. The gospels of Luke and John
honor Mary in their different ways, but there is no indication of underlying cultic
practices in the early period (such as prayers or hymns invoking her, pilgrimage to
her shrines, feast days in her honor, and reports of apparitions). The secondcentury Protoevangelium of James and the writings of the apologists Justin Martyr
and Irenaeus extend the belief in her personal holiness and special place in the divine
plan of redemption, but once again, these are textual rather than material pieces of
evidence. Prayers and feast days do not appear until at least the third century.
The second and diametrically opposite viewpoint, which Shoemaker relates to
a Protestant-based critique of the cult of Mary, is that devotion to her did not arise
until the Council of Ephesus in 431, which declared her to be the Theotokos due to
the campaigns of Cyril and Proclus in opposition to Nestorius. Shoemaker argues—
and I think his evidence brings to an end any doubt on the matter—that Ephesus’
designation of Mary as Theotokos was made possible by widespread Christian Marian
devotion in the Roman Empire by this date and was not the cause of it.
Shoemaker’s scope is comprehensive; he draws upon a range of sources that help
to strengthen our knowledge of the development of early Marian veneration. First of
all, he cites texts that appear in his previous work, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin
Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (2002), in which Mary’s death is remembered
through ritual and story, dating from the third century. Secondly, he puts more
emphasis than previous authors on the apocryphal, heterodox corpus in which “Mary”
is named as a teacher of the divine mysteries because of her special intimacy with
Jesus. While many of these references are regarded as referring to Mary Magdalene,

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Shoemaker feels, with much justification, that where Mary is not designated specifically as Magdalene or Mother, then a conflated figure results whom early Christians
could have understood as either. Finally, Shoemaker considers Mary within the more
general context of the devotion to non-martyr saints, especially Thecla.
There is a lacuna in Marian doctrinal sources between the second-century apologists and the fourth-century establishment of Christianity as the state religion, when
Mary became the ideal virgin and intercessor in the writings of Church fathers. Shoemaker offers two answers to this, which he considers equally plausible and could both
be true in some measure: first, that devotion to Mary emerged in heterodox and esoteric circles, and was ignored for a time by orthodox theologians; second, that popular
devotion to Mary, as it often does, preceded doctrinal development.
This is a well-written and valuable book which will be enjoyed by the general
reader as well as the scholar, as Shoemaker takes great pains to summarize and clarify
the content of each chapter. Both general reader and scholar will embrace it as a definitive account of the development of devotion to Mary from first to fifth centuries.
St. John University and Centre for Marian Studies

CHRIS MAUNDER

Alms: Charity, Reward, and Atonement in Early Christianity. By David J. Downs.
(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. 2016. Pp. ix, 340. $59.95. ISBN 978-160258-997-1.)
Despite its title, this book is not about what early Christians did for the poor,
but studies the texts deployed by early Christian writers from the first to the third
century to articulate the meritorious or atoning power of almsgiving. In contrast to
Roman Garrison’s 1993 Redemptive Almsgiving in Early Christianity, David Downs
argues that avowal of the atoning power of almsgiving was not opposed to “avowal
of the unique, atoning death of Jesus” (p. 6). Since Christians drew extensively on
the Septuagint, the book is as much about how we read key Jewish as well as Christian texts.
An introduction distinguishes between “meritorious” and “atoning” almsgiving, sketches how wealth was unequally distributed in the empire, and identifies
“two different models of almsgiving”: the “philanthropic,” which envisages gifts
“along a vertical axis from those with an abundance of assets to those with minimal
resources”; and the alternative model of “mutualism” with “a more horizontal
exchange of resources among those of lesser means” (p. 17).
Chapters One to Three concern the reward for care of the poor in the Jewish
Scriptures. Chapter One examines first Prov 16:6 (LXX Prov. 15:27), where
human or divine compassion is linked to atonement, and then Deut 24:13 and Dan
4:24, where the Hebrew for “righteousness” was replaced by the Greek word for
“merciful action” (eleemosyne) that may later refer specifically to almsgiving. Chapter Two examines the sense of eleemosyne in the Greek versions of Tobit (pp. 58–
70) and Sirach (pp. 71–81), and what is meant where they speak of merciful acts

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that purify or expiate sin. At several points (e.g., Tob 12:9 and Sir. 29:11–13) fresh
readings are proposed against those of Gary Anderson in recent publications.
Chapter Three rebuts the widely-held notion that atoning almsgiving develops out
of the so-called “prophetic critique of sacrifice” (p. 84).
Chapters Four to Six consider the New Testament, and Jesus’s promise that
those who assist the poor will be rewarded by treasure in heaven. Downs rejects the
traditional translations of Mt 6:1–3 and Acts 10:2 as treating of “alms” rather than
“merciful deeds” (p. 115). Of particular interest is his reading of Lk 11:41, where
he argues for the translation “give alms with respect to the things within,” so that
“Jesus offers almsgiving as a means of purifying the [Pharisees’] greed and wickedness” (pp. 126–27). Pauline texts on the care of the poor, such as Gal 2:10, are likewise re-assessed to establish the apostle’s concern for meritorious almsgiving that
includes but goes beyond collections for the Jerusalem church. Chapter Six specifically concerns the assertion at 1 Pet 4:8 that “Love covers a multitude of sins” and
its second-century reception.
Chapters Seven and Eight consider what is said of almsgiving more widely in
Christian texts from the second and third centuries to show how “practices of and
discourses about almsgiving . . . stood at the centre of competing conceptions of
Christian identity, solidarity, and community” (p. 232). Cyprian in particular is to be
credited with a concept of almsgiving as atoning for post-baptismal sins rooted in a
prosopological reading of LXX Prov 15:27 and Sir 3:30 together with Lk 11:40–41.
Downs’ study forms a valuable “prequel” to Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the
Soul. It offers fresh, persuasive readings of numerous texts to challenge a Protestant
prejudice that the concept of atoning almsgiving must be unscriptural or at the
expense of atonement by the death of Christ, while also challenging anachronistic
readings of those Jewish and Christian Scriptures which have so often been heard
to speak of almsgiving when they referred more widely to works of mercy.
Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford

RICHARD FINN, O.P.

Il divino senza veli: La dottrina gnostica della ‘Lettera valentiniana’ di Epifanio,
Panarion 31 5-6. Testo, traudzione e commento storico-religioso. By Giuliano
Chiapparini. [Studia Patristica Mediolanensia, vol. 29.] (Milan: Vita e Pensiero. 2015. Pp. xiii, 278. €30.00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-343-2918-4.)
Scholars are often (begrudgingly) grateful to Epiphanius for his preservation
of otherwise lost texts in his massive heresiology, the Panarion. In particular, those
interested in “Gnosticism” have benefitted from Epiphanius’s documentary practices, especially for Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora and portions of Irenaeus’s Against
Heresies in their original Greek. While there is a growing body of recent scholarship
interested in studying Epiphanius in his own right, there is also a long-standing
scholarly practice of mining his writings for information on those whom he condemned as heretics. The learned study under review here fits into the latter category and will be of particular interest to scholars of Valentinian Christianity.

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Ensconced in the entry dedicated to the Valentinians in Panarion 31 is an
anonymous letter, identified by Chiapparini as the Lettera dottrinale valentiniana
(LDV). Scholars have marginalized or even dismissed the significance of this letter
because the text is perceived to be in such a mangled state—the result of multiple
recensions—that it lacks coherence and is thus not useful for understanding early
Valentinian theology. In addition, the contents of the letter seem to exhibit significant variance with other known writings in the tradition, in particular a strong and
consistent sexual component, and so scholars have pushed the date of the text closer
to the end of the second century. However, through careful philological and theological analysis, Chiapparini offers a completely different dating, context, and
interpretation of the text. He suggests that much of the problem lies with the
modern textual tradition of the Panarion, in particular the edition of Karl Holl, first
published in 1915. Scholars have long been aware of Holl’s penchant for conjecture
and unnecessary emendations to the text; and in the case of the LDV, Chiapparini
argues that Holl’s choices have had a problematic impact on the scholarly reception
of the letter, evident most poignantly in faulty translations of the text into modern
languages. And so Chiapparini returned to the manuscript tradition, revised the
text, and has recovered what appears to be a more coherent theological exposition
that exhibits rhetorical sophistication, intertextual engagement with the New Testament, and evidence for a lively intra-Valentinian cosmological debate. Furthermore, he has untangled the bewildering list of aeons found at the end of the letter,
by suggesting that the names were originally in an early Syriac that became distorted in transliteration. This in turn suggests that the provenance of the letter
might be better situated in the east, and because of its esoteric contents intended
for an audience deeply familiar with the teachings of Valentinus
Chiapparini argues that the LDV belongs to the period 160-165, subsequent
to the expulsion of the Valentinians from Rome, but before they polemically separated themselves from their accusers and drew much sharper distinctions between
the “psychic” and the “spiritual.” Chiapparini carefully examines and compares the
writings of both the accusers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Epiphanius) and
the accused, and in the LDV finds a more “optimistic” outlook, one that accommodates a wider swath of people and their potential access to salvific knowledge.
This same sense of optimism is reflected in the letter’s revelatory cosmology and
view of theodicy. According to Chiapparini’s analysis, absent from the LDV are the
sexual undertones identified by earlier scholars, any roles assigned to the Demiurge
and the devil, and any anthropological or ethical concerns. It is at its heart, as Chiapparini proposes, a “mini-apocalypse” in the form of a letter, intended for an internal audience.
It remains for other scholars of Valentinian Christianity to accept Chiapparini’s
date, context, and interpretation of the LDV, but they can rest assured that his arguments are built on careful philological work and insightful theological analysis.
Calvin College

YOUNG RICHARD KIM

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MEDIEVAL
Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages. Essays to Honor John Van Engen. Edited
by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton. (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 522. $68.00. ISBN 978-0-268-03533-4)
The chapters assembled in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages explore
European history across centuries and regions. The volume’s coherence and charm
arise from the hommage offered by each contribution to an inspiring historian and
teacher—John Van Engen. Van Engen’s work has treated diverse areas of medieval
religious life, as the list of his publications offered on pages 501-506 shows. He has
impressively studied twelfth-century monastic life and thought, as well as religious
initiatives developed by and for lay people—often women—in the cities of north
west Europe in the later Middle Ages. He also wrote an influential article „The
Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem”1 which forms the
volume’s leitmotif.
Part I, “Christianization,” includes four ‘think pieces’ which cut across the
centuries: R I Moore offers a masterly historiographical survey of the term ‘cathar’
since 1849; Lisa Wolverton combines historiographical reflection with analysis of
written and material sources to support a new reading of the Christianization of
Bohemia, highlighting regional influences on religious culture; Catherine Caldwell Ames reflects historiographically on the emergence of a diverse “medieval religion,” especially through attention to what used to be called “popular religion,” in
the later twentieth century.
Part II, “Twelfth Century Culture,” opens with three nicely honed lessons in
reading texts and images. Maureen Miller calls for the discipline of context to be
applied in the treatment of twelfth-century art, as against the search for “art of
reform”; Jonathan Lyon observes the use by Otto of Freising of classical language—
especially the term “tyranny”—to describe new institutional and political dilemmas
in the twelfth-century Empire; Rachel Koopmans nicely identifies networks of
influence and patronage in the testimonial letters incorporated into collections of
Becket miracles. The section ends with two chapters based on broad themes: Dyan
Elliott explores how bold intellects imagined counter-factually in fruitful ways,
while Giles Constable shows–often in similar communities—the continuing centrality of the Cross in devotional and liturgical lives.
Part III, “Jews and Christian Society,” is made of three chapters each demonstrating a fruitful approach to the study of Europe’s Jews. Susan Einbinder juxtaposes a Hebrew lament and a cantiga to compare their treatments of the fall of a
court Jew in 1279; William Jordan reminds us how much work is yet to be done in
the interpretation of images contained in private books like the Christina
1. American Historical Review 91(1986), pp.519-52.

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Psalter; and David Mengel develops a detailed analysis of Charles IV’s attitude to
Jews through a comparative study of urban communities.
Particularly strong is the fourth and longest section, “Late Religious Medieval
Life.” Here authors are inspired by Van Engen’s article “Multiple Options: the
World of the Fifteenth Century,” published in 2008.2 Close studies of interesting
texts show institutions in constant flux and change: Walter Simons introduces the
Count of Flanders’ petition to John XXII on behalf of “his” beguines, long-established and orthodox; William Courtenay extracts from the register of bishops evidence on the uptake of university study by parish priests and its possible effect on
religious instruction; James Mixson evaluates the Observant Giovanni Dominci’s
polemic against classical learning, the elegant The Firefly, penned in response
to Salutati; Marcela Perett introduces the vernacular polemics developed by
John Pribram against Hussites. The apocalyptic mood of the fifteenth century is
discussed in a text introduced —and edited—by Daniel Hobbins, while Roy Hammerling concludes the volume with a tale by Luther for his Augustinian brothers,
in which he encouraged them to become “spiritual beggars.”
This rich and well-written volume offers something of interest for every
medievalist. It also reminds us how often good medievalists are at creating graceful
and learned “emotional communities.”
Queen Mary University of London

MIRI RUBIN

Monastères et espace social: Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval. Edited by Michel Lauwers. (Turnhout: Brepols. 2014. Pp. 620.
€75,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-503-5381-4.)
This extensive collection of specialized articles on seventh- to fifteenth-century monasteries and social space covers models, places, movement, hierarchy,
functions, and settings at Saint-Gall, Cluny, Marmoutier, Fontevraud, and other
famous abbeys in Western Europe and the British Isles. Michel Lauwers notes that
Western monasticism moved from fourth-century solitude to seventh-century
community, with a standard architectural structure of a cloister surrounded by specialized buildings. Ninth-century monasteries included laypersons: patrons, laborers, pilgrims, possibly armed men, resulting in a complex society and accompanying
physical structure, which Sofia Uggé divides into community spaces: church, cloister, refectory, dormitory, and chapter; property spaces: cellar and sacristy; separate
spaces: infirmary, guest house, and novitiate; and work spaces: workshops, kitchen,
and garden. In Italy Federico Marazzi and Élisabeth Lorans add an abbot’s house,
library, school, stables, forge, cemeteries, churches, and chapels. Moving forward,
Uta Kleine shows the twelfth-century monastery engaged in production and trade,
both a retreat from the world and a dominating center of real-estate holdings. Jean-

2. Church History 77(2008), pp. 257-84.

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Michel Picard and Paul Fermon note that monastic maps and architectural drawings imposed a social hierarchy on the landscape, depicting the monastery as a
sacred celestial center with a profane terrestrial periphery of granges, manses,
towns, parish churches, and fishing stations, with complicated economic rights.
Fragmentary information in cartularies and foundation stories can be contextualized within this framework of monastic construction and expansion. JeanMichel Picard notes the recent use of magnetic gradient survey, revealing linear
anomalies in the soil at the sites of cloisters or buildings and showing the construction process. Nicolas Reveyron and Cécile Caby find little and marginal change in
monastic space to preserve the quiet of the house. Monasteries were shaped by earlier lost structures, site constraints, water resources, and a heritage of respect for the
initial gift, venerated tombs, and the terms of property ownership. Relocation
rarely occurred. Hans Rudolf Sennhauser notes the pre-eminence of the opus Dei
led monks to prefer building around an existing worship center. Foundation stories
describe twelve monks sent to build a monastery in a wilderness, but records and
survey often show previous occupation of the property, the founders’ provision of
masons, and the monks’ arrival with building plans based on site inspection. Lorans
shows Marmoutier’s progressive construction beginning with the abbatial church
and proceeding to the claustral square, guest house, infirmary with a chapel and
cloister, service buildings, specialized cemeteries, peripheral churches, and a distant
abbot’s house. Étienne Louis and Luc Bourgeois describe enclosures determined by
natural boundaries, ditches, walls, and defensive fortifications.
Internal spatial organization imposed boundaries between sacred and secular
spaces and accommodated the movement of persons of different statuses within the
same space. Caby notes the church and claustral buildings were used exclusively by
the monastic family on its daily rounds. Alain Rauwel, Anne Baud, and Sébastien
Bully describe formal mobile liturgies: perambulations of the property, processions,
circuits of the altars, and stations of the cross, sometimes facilitated by long galleries. Separation was achieved by horizontal and vertical space (terraces and hilltops) and by scheduling time. Monks were separated from nuns by balconies and
grills, from laymen by conversi passages, and from pilgrims by crypts. Daniel Prigent shows that twelfth-century Fontevraud contained four separate monasteries
for the abbess and nuns, monks, female penitents, and lepers, with strict enclosure,
divisions in worship, and a great cloister to accommodate processions. Gisella Cantino Wataghin and Eleonora Destefanis show monastic burial places reflected both
hierarchy and community.
As a composite this collection provides a penetrating overview of monastic
construction and operation. Individually, it includes studies of famous monasteries
with fine illustrations, architectural drawings, and maps.
Georgetown University

RUTH HARWOOD CLINE

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The Formation of Christian Europe: The Carolingians, Baptism, and the Imperium
Christianum. By Owen M. Phelan. (New York: Oxford University Press.
2014. Pp. ix, 312. $ 105.00. ISBN 978-0-19-871803-1.)
This is a welcome book. The author argues how reformers under Charlemagne used baptism, understood as sacramentum, as the fundamental organizing
principle for Carolingian imperial society—a development that would shape the
European world throughout the medieval period and beyond. One of the great
strengths of this book is how it combines the study of intellectual history, ritual
theory and practice, the framing and legitimizing of political power, and the development of a particular religious identity within an imperial framework. Chapter 1
offers a genealogy of sacramentum as an ordering concept from Antiquity to the
early Middle Ages. Key here was the overlap between legal and theological meanings. Indeed, sacramentum’s Roman origins as a military oath of allegiance later
proved remarkably useful to Carolingian reformers keen to link expectations of loyalty to the imperial regime with the spiritual transformation of baptism.
The next three chapters provide a sustained analysis of sources from Charlemagne’s reign, when intellectuals worked to transform baptism conceptually and
ritualistically into a program for imperial Christian identity formation. Chapter 2
examines how sacramenta, especially baptism, gave Carolingian leaders ways of
framing their political authority in religious terms in order to envision the imperium
christianum as a polity. The chapter largely explores Frankish interactions with
“others,” such as Spanish heretics in the Adoptionist Controversy, Saxon pagans
who repeatedly rejected their coerced baptisms and Frankish political domination,
and Jews who were expected to take non-baptismal pledges of loyalty in order to
enjoy protections and privileges within the empire. Chapter 3 focuses on the intellectual Alcuin’s efforts to develop a program for producing Christian imperial subjects. Here Phelan investigates Alcuin’s missionary theories, his concerns for moral
education, his influential interpretation of the rite of baptism (the Primo paganus),
and his circle of important allies and correspondents who embraced his baptismal
program. Chapter 4 analyzes the Carolingian machinery of Christian identity formation at work through a series of sources from Charlemagne’s last years, in particular his encyclical letter on baptism (811/812) and the numerous episcopal documents created in response to that questionnaire. Central to the author’s argument
is that Alcuin’s approaches to baptism provided the basis for theological unity in
these later discussions, while still allowing for ritual and liturgical diversity.
Chapter 5 examines how ninth-century authors—in particular Bishop Jonas of
Orléans and Dhuoda of Septimania—adapted Carolingian conceptions of baptism
for lay readers. Since infant baptism predominated, godparenting, confirmation,
and the sacrament of penance became crucial to maintaining baptismal promises,
thereby serving to shape Frankish Christian identity formation after imperial
expansion ended. Phelan’s choice of ninth-century authors and texts is strategic and
necessary due to the tremendous increase in theological writings after Charlemagne. The conclusion turns to Notker the Stammerer’s Gesta Karoli in order to

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illumine how this particular late ninth-century author criticized Charlemagne’s
descendants for failing to understand baptism’s theological and ritualistic power to
expand the imperium christianum.
Phelan’s findings are convincing. It is refreshing to see Frankish Christianity
linked so unreservedly to Carolingian imperial ambitions. Future studies of other
sources, including ninth-century biblical commentaries and handbooks for priests,
may complicate the author’s view of the creation of imperial Christian subjects not
only from the standpoint of theologians and bishops, but also of common priests
active in pastoral care. Overall, this thoughtful study persuasively casts the Carolingian Empire as a fundamentally religious enterprise in the medieval exercise of power.
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

MATTHEW BRYAN GILLIS

Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval
Iberia. By Simon Barton. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press. 2015. Pp. viii, 264. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4675-9.)
In Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines Simon Barton analyzes the varied and
complicated ways in which group identity, interfaith sexuality, and power interacted in medieval Iberia—centering on relationships between Muslims and Christians. He focusses on interfaith sexual liaisons showing how they were “conducted,
perceived, manipulated, and above all, controlled” (p. 4), and how attitudes towards
this mixing changed over time, as a reaction to local circumstances and general
trends. Even though the book centers on the medieval period, both within alAndalus and the Christian dominated lands, it also explores the reverberation that
the cultural memory of those relationships had in Iberian culture. Indeed, the popular festivals that continue to be celebrated in some towns even today serve as a
reminder of the deep sense of cultural difference that exists in Spain, and the exoticism it has been endowed with thanks to the region’s Islamic past.
The book is divided into four chapters framed by an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One, “Sex as Power,” centers on early medieval Iberia from the
eight to eleventh centuries, a time in which Muslim lords took Christian women as
wives and concubines. These unions have to be understood not only as a tactic for
building diplomatic alliances, but also as a means for Muslim lords of showing their
superiority, and even as a tool of psychological warfare. The remaining chapters
deal with the central and late medieval period, that was characterized by a progressive shifting of power in favor of the Christian-ruled realms that eventually manifested itself at the end of the fifteenth century in the form of policies of mass conversion or expulsion, and the establishment of an Inquisition dedicated to ending
religious heterodoxy in Iberia. Chapter Two, “Marking Boundaries,” examines why
after about 1050 interfaith marriage declined and how religious and secular Christian authorities harden their positions, and condemned and discouraged interfaith
unions and sex—a development that came partly as a consequence of the new balance of power, the reform of the papacy, and the development of canon law. From

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the twelfth century onwards, sexual intercourse between Christian women and
“outsiders,” which is to say Muslim and Jewish men, provoked great anxiety—in
Spain, as it did across the Latin West. The following chapter, “Damsels in Distress,” also examines Christian political and cultural discourse against interfaith sex,
but focuses on narratives that presented Christian women as vulnerable, unprotected, victims of Muslim men’s voracity. The final chapter, “Lust and Love on the
Iberian Frontier,” analyzes a series of mostly literary texts that display interesting,
parallel narratives. On the one hand, there are stories of Christian women who
sought Muslim sexual partners and who therefore were disgraced, and, on the other
hand, there are tales of Muslim women as gaining social standing precisely because
they had engaged in relationships with Christian men, and converted to Christianity—which served also as a symbol for submitting to righteous and virtuous Christian power.
This book is an important contribution to the field of medieval Iberian studies. Barton engages with an array of sources as diverse as laws, charters, letters,
polemical texts, legends, hagiography, and diverse literary texts and through them
constructs a very detailed and nuanced picture of the complexities of interfaith miscegenation. He lucidly illustrates “the symbolic importance of the relationship
between sex, power, and cultural identity” (p. 142). This book is going to be of
interest not only to scholars focusing on specific academic fields, such as medieval
Iberia and the Mediterranean, or gender studies, but to any scholar or student
interested in the history and literature of Europe in the Middle Ages.
University of Colorado at Boulder

NÚRIA SILLERAS-FERNÁNDEZ

Fälschung als Mittel der Politik? Pseudoisidor im Licht der neuen Forschung:
Gedenkschrift für Klaus Zechiel-Eckes. Edited by Karl Ubl and Daniel Ziemann.
[Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Studien und Texte, Band 57.] (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2015. Pp. vii, 268. €48.00. ISBN 978-3-44710335-0.)
Gefälschtes Recht aus dem Frühmittelalter: Untersuchungen zur Herstellung und Überlieferung der pseudoisidorischen Dekretalen. By Steffen Patzold. [Schriften der
Philosophisch-Historischen Klasse der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band 55.] (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2015. Pp. 76.
€24.00. ISBN 978-3-8253-6511-0.)
These two books outline recent thought and current lines of enquiry on the
origins and dissemination of the great canon law forgeries widely known as
Pseudo-Isidore, which today are commonly believed to have begun life at or around
the monastery of Corbie in the 830s. The Pseudo-Isidorian decretals are often considered one of the most influential forgery collections of the Middle Ages; many
Pseudo-Isidorian concepts would go on to provide a platform for the “Gregorian
reform” and the growth of papal power in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Recent Pseudo-Isidorian studies have been galvanized by the work of Klaus
Zechiel-Eckes, who died in 2010 and is honored by the collection Fälschung als

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Mittel der Politik?, edited by Karl Ubl and Daniel Ziemann. In 2000, ZechielEckes’ discoveries shattered an old consensus on Pseudo-Isidore’s origins; since
then, the field has been developing rather quickly, as these two volumes attest. Both
works are oriented firmly towards specialists, and the uninitiated will probably want
to chase up some of the introductory references provided to grasp the full import
of this latest scholarship.
Fälschung is based on a colloquium held in 2013 in Zechiel-Eckes’ honor.
According to the editors, contributors were asked to test Zechiel-Eckes’ hypotheses
concerning the provenance of Pseudo-Isidore, to interrogate the relationship
between the various versions and combinations of the forgery complex, and to consider the role of forgery in political culture more generally. Abigail Firey tackles the
question of Corbie origins head on with an exemplary paleographical analysis of a
canon law collection usually deemed to have been an early product of PseudoIsidore’s workshop. She shows how Corbie’s role in the Carolingian economy of
book production presents a methodological problem in the pursuit of manuscript
provenance. Eric Knibbs uncovers evidence for what looks to be a hitherto unnoticed early recension of the corpus in the manuscripts of the so-called “A1” version.
Semih Heinen and Steffen Patzold argue from different perspectives that the forgery project was stimulated not, as Zechiel-Eckes believed, by the rebellion against
Louis the Pious of 833–835, but by the earlier rebellion of 830–831. Gerhard
Schmitz searches for common sources in Pseudo-Isidore and the False Capitularies
of Benedictus Levita, while Clara Harder asks whether papal jurisdiction was more
than simply a means to an end for the forgers (her arguments are now available in
full in her Pseudoisidor und das Papsttum [Vienna: Böhlau, 2014]). Patrick Breternitz and Courtney M. Booker each turn to prominent figures of the 830s who have
been implicated in the Pseudo-Isidorian project at some stage. Breternitz looks at
Paschasius Radbertus, the abbot of Corbie famously identified as the forger-inchief by Zechiel-Eckes, and the second book of his Epitaphium Arsenii, a work
sometimes invoked as evidence for his own involvement, stressing that this text
must be read as a product of the time it was composed (c. 850). Booker, meanwhile,
examines how Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims—deposed in 835 for his role in the
rebellion against Louis—was long implicated in the forgeries by virtue of a reputation for wickedness and treachery that was cultivated over the course of a millennium. Wilfried Hartmann concludes the volume by paying tribute to ZechielEckes’ talents as a researcher of canon law and reflecting on his legacy.
In addition to contributing to Fälschung, Steffen Patzold has also written
Gefälschtes Recht aus dem Frühmittelalter, a short book (indeed, it is the length of an
extended article) on the origins of the relatively neglected “C-class” recension of
Pseudo-Isidore. Patzold argues that C—long presumed to be a much later version
because no surviving manuscript of it predates the twelfth century—in fact represents a ninth-century recension produced at Corbie. He further suggests that Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims had access to something resembling C by comparing
its contents with Hincmar’s canonical citations in his Opusculum LV capitulorum
(870). Patzold’s fresh study succeeds in bringing the C version into the discussion

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on Pseudo-Isidore’s genesis and transmission, though he has probably not had the
last word on the provenance of C. Readers of Fälschung will doubtless wish to seek
out Gefälschtes Recht and vice-versa. These two insightful volumes are fine tributes
to the ingenuity of Klaus Zechiel-Eckes. They represent the state of the art in
Pseudo-Isidorian scholarship and set the stage for continued investigation of the
origins, dissemination, and influence of the forgeries.
University of Liverpool

EDWARD ROBERTS

Psellos and the Patriarchs: Letters and Funeral Orations for Keroullarios, Leichoudes,
and Xiphilinos. Translated by Anthony Kaldellis and Ioannis Polemis. [Michael
Psellos in Translation.] (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
2015. Pp. x, 242. $35.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-03328-5.)
By its translations in numerous languages, Michael Psellos’ Chronography
made the text accessible to audiences not necessarily familiar with the medieval
Greek of one of the most sophisticated Byzantine authors. On the grounds of style,
rhetorical vividness, and especially of the authorial-self that pervades it, the text is
deservedly considered a major achievement of the eleventh-century Byzantine literary production. In contrast to the Chronography, access to the rest of Psellos’
œuvre, which comprises almost all literary genres, displays a variety of stylistic
levels and rhetorical devices, and predominantly sets the subject matter within a
theoretical framework, has long been exclusively available to the specialists. In this
regard, the series “Michael Psellos in Translation” offers to historians of the Middle
Age as well as to the informed public and students a valuable tool for assessing the
intellectual aspirations of a key-figure in the development of medieval thought.
The first volume of the series presented texts in which are evidenced Psellos’ perception of and attitude toward family bonds; the second introduces the long funeral
orations he wrote for three successive mid-eleventh century patriarchs of Constantinople, Michael Keroullarios, Constantine Leichoudis, and John Xiphilinos. Letters he addressed to Keroullarios and Xiphilinos complete the selection of texts
comprised in the volume.
Aspects of the specific thematic choice are insightfully analyzed by Anthony
Kaldellis and Ioannis Polemis in the introductory chapter of the book.
The Funeral Orations were composed to celebrate the memory of the deceased
patriarchs on the anniversary of their death. Whether they were actually orally
delivered in public or read to a limited group of relatives and friends, the texts,
remark Kaldellis and Polemis, are the earliest examples of encomiastic speeches for
ecclesiastics, who were not sanctified and therefore did not deserve hagiographical
encomia. Indeed, none of the three Patriarchs had manifested any significant religious vocation in the early stages of their lives; instead, they were deeply involved
in secular activities, political (as is the case of Keroullarios), administrative (Leichoudes), or heading high-level schools of Constantinople (Xiphilinos). Moreover,
all of them were chosen to lead the Patriarchate of Constantinople and later

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deposed by imperial resolution. These substantial changes in the course of their
lives served Psellos for constructing the orations “in two movements” and exploring
the abstract notions of “virtues and states of being” (p. 2).
In the “Historical and Interpretative Essay” (pp. 10–35), Kaldellis and
Polemis contextualize Psellos’ relation with the patriarchs and thoroughly discuss
the different ways by which he approached each of them. They also consider the
framing of the discourses on the secure, for Psellos, philosophical ground and their
stylistic elegance, which supports the appreciation of Leichoudes’ personality as the
“harmonious mixture of all the best elements of human life,” but barely veils criticism toward Keroullarios and Xiphilinos—the former for his bigotry and false NeoPlatonic reasoning, the latter for moving away from the true philosophy to adhere
to conservative positions.
Transposing a text from one language to another is a delicate endeavor, especially in the case of the writings of Psellos, who was relishing allusiveness and constantly dialogued with his subjective perception of persons and events with the
assistance of ancient authorities. Yet, the excellent translations of the Letters and
the Funeral Orations render the subtleness of the texts and enable the modern
reader to follow effortlessly the, often complicated, argumentation of Psellos. The
volume concludes with the bibliography of sources and secondary literature, and a
useful index.
Institute of Historical Research
National Hellenic Research Foundation
Athens, Greece

CHRISTINE ANGELIDI

Money and the Church in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200: Practice, Morality and
Thought. Edited by Giles E. M. Gasper and Svein H. Gullbekk. (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2015. Pp. xii, 292. $124.95. ISBN 9781-4724-2099-2.)
We have come a long way in the last half-century in our understanding of the
Church’s involvement in and influence on medieval economic life and thought.
The thirteen essays in this volume present excellent examples of this sophisticated
understanding.
The contributors come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds: economic
history, economic theory, numismatics, religion, and literature. Although the collection is admirably focused on the subject announced in its title, the presentations
are decidedly heterogeneous. Some provide bibliography for the kind of general
information useful to college students, some provide only technical monographs on
their particular subject, some no secondary sources at all. Some essays provide
extensive citations from primary sources, with the Latin in the footnotes, and some,
whether citing directly or paraphrasing, provide no Latin in the notes. Some are
clearly pointed toward a general introduction of use in college classes, while others,

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primarily those with a numismatic focus, assume a background in the subject. Some
essays are three or more times longer than others. As the Introduction notes, the
focus is entirely on Northern Europe, with Scandinavian studies well represented
and none venturing south of Normandy. This is fine, and it serves as a balance to
the more common southerly focus, but it would have been helpful, and I think
advisable, to have included the word “Northern” in the book’s title.
Given the period that the essays cover, it is not surprising that most are directed
toward the active role of the Church in the momentous process of European monetization. As virtually all the authors are aware, this theme sits somewhat awkwardly
beside a parallel development, which saw churchmen expressing a growing suspicion
(often shading into a fierce critique) of the ever-expanding place and power of
money in their world. Recognition of the awkward balance between these dual (and
dueling) processes is one of the strengths of recent work in medieval economic history, and it adds a level of intriguing complexity to many of the essays in this collection. A few examples can illustrate the place of this theme in the collection overall.
At a number of points in the book’s final chapter, “The Church and Money in
Norway c. 1050–1250,” Svein Gullbekk describes the Church as the “driving force”
in the process of monetization, providing evidence to support the claim that in this
process, “a commodification of religion, monetization of vocabulary, and an increasing awareness of financial matters from an ecclesiastical and vernacular perspective
can all be observed” (p. 238). Rory Naismith’s contribution, “Turpe Lucrum: Wealth,
Money and Coinage in the Millennial Church,” makes use of a wide range of
source—miracle stories, saint’s lives, chronicles—to provide evidence that a profound
fear in church circles of money’s power grew right alongside the ever-increasing
rationalization of monetary management and collection on the part of ecclesiastical
institutions of all kinds. Giles E. M. Casper illustrates other aspects of this theme in
his essay, “Contemplating Money and Wealth in Monastic Writing c. 1060–1160.”
His investigation of a half-dozen monastic chronicles reveals their author’s increasing
concern with and consciousness of the economic changes affecting their institutions,
leading to their evolving attempts to anticipate and “navigate market fluctuations” to
the benefit of their houses. But he goes one step further when he writes (p. 42) that
monastic writing of this period “highlights not only the monetisation of the economy,
but also of contemporary conceptual frameworks. . . .” Greti Dincova-Bruun’s essay,
“Nummus falsus: The Perception of Counterfeit Money in the Eleventh and Early
Twelfth Century,” takes this insight yet further by tracing sharp shifts in the
metaphorical uses of the coin in theological writings.
In “A Herald of Scholasticism: Alan of Lille on Economic Value,” Odd Langholm gleans evidence of Alan’s understanding of the implications of monetization
from a reading of his surviving writings. Langholm makes the decision to rely
exclusively on Alan’s writings, neglecting the rich secondary literature that exists on
both Alan and on the fear of avarice among clerics (which Alan shared) that mushroomed in the twelfth century. Langholm’s survey reveals a number of attitudes
common to the twelfth century but one gem in particular (p. 102), found in an allegorical poem within Alan’s Liber parabolarum:

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Things are not bought dearly by the law of markets (my emphasis)
Seller and buyer are there equal regarding the goods:
But nothing under the sky is bought more dearly
Than what long entreaty buys with downcast brow.

Langholm does not, for some reason, provide the Latin for either this or any other
of the selections he offers, so we are left to wonder about the phrase “the law of
markets,” especially its early appearance here in the twelfth century, but he assures
us that he has made a literal translation, and he adds that these words reveal Alan’s
recognition that “supply and demand establish a just market price which buyer and
seller both accept” (p. 102). Since there are contemporary historians of medieval
economics who still maintain that talk of a “market price” in the medieval period is
“anachronistic,” this early poem represents an important finding and recognition.
Space considerations determine that I can only give brief mention to the five
essays above, but there are many in this collection that are notable for their general
interest and the strength of their research and presentation. Given the heterogeneity of the collection, I hesitate to say that the book as a whole would work as a class
text, but there are numerous individual articles here that certainly would.
Barnard College/Columbia University

JOEL KAYE

The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity: 1050-1500. Edited by R. N. Swanson. [Routledge Histories.] (New York: Routledge. 2015. Pp. xxvi, 344.
$205.00. ISBN 978-0-415-66014-3.)
As the spate of movies and television programs attests, the popular fascination
with things medieval shows no signs of abating. A challenge for medievalists, especially those who teach, is to harness and educate this enthusiasm without diminishing
it. Aptly, a goal of The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity: 1050–1500, edited
by R. N. Swanson, is to present the history of medieval Christianity as a living discipline. The most thought-provoking essays in the volume highlight new research and
show how strategies for studying Catholic Christianity continue to change.
Like other recent works tackling Christianity’s history over a long span of
time, the volume is the fruit of many hands. Twenty-two scholars produced the
twenty-three essays and introductory overviews. Although neither the temporal
nor the geographical framework for the volume is controversial,1 the introduction
explains the chosen parameters; Western Europe from the mid-eleventh century
to the Reformation shared a religious culture. It is this culture, as it “impacted on
virtually every aspect of human existence” (p. xxi), which is the focus of the
volume. Essays are arranged thematically, the choice and arrangement of themes
reflecting the concern to adopt neither a top-down nor a two-tier model. Part
1. See, for example, Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, eds., Christianity in Western
Europe c. 1100–c. 1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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One, “Structures,” introduces the “organizational systems and mechanisms that
allowed [Christianity] to function and gave it a kind of unity and coherence” (p.
1), including not only the chief personnel (papacy, clergy, and religious) but also
administrative units (bishoprics and parishes.) With this skeleton in place, the following sections (“Forming the mindset,” “Catholicism in practice,” Challenges,”
and “Shaping Catholic society”) provide the flesh. Through discussions of schooling, worship, pastoral care, ritual, material culture, law, heresy, gender, holy war,
economic life, literature, and magic, the essays aim to depict Catholicism as “a
vibrant and significant cultural force, whose influence reached into and helped to
shape every individual existence across these four and a half centuries of Catholic
Europe” (p. 280).
As the essays are independent works of scholarship, they differ in their
approaches, tones, and in the degree to which they point readers to future study
through bibliography. None is strictly a survey. While not all can be described here,
essays such as James D. Mixson’s on religious orders, Peter D. Clarke’s on canon
law, Catherine Rider’s on magic, and Kim M. Philip’s on gender and sexuality integrate substantive overviews of their topics with discussions of recent scholarship,
interpretive turns, and areas of current speculation. Thus Clarke characterizes contemporary scholarship in canon law as “resembl[ing] a battlefield,” although the
“skirmishes” over the viability of long-held assumptions have been mostly “amicable” (p. 77). Peter Biller’s treatment of heresy and dissent puts interpretive debates
at the center of his essay. Framing his survey of medieval heretics as a longaccepted story now subject to attack, he warns that it is no longer sufficient to learn
a standard narrative such as that in Malcolm Lambert’s classic Medieval Heresy. He
lays out the types of evidence that are behind its construction as well as the historiography and methodology employed by challengers. Other essays, like Christopher Tyerman’s on violence and holy war and Jonathan Elukin’s on Christianity
and Judaism, exemplify new approaches to their respective topics. Tyerman contextualizes crusading by analyzing the roots of Christian-sanctioned violence; Elukin
provides an argument questioning portrayals of Jewish/Christian relations as characterized by persecution and victimization. In several cases, more extensive bibliography would be welcome, especially since the targeted audience includes undergraduates. As a whole, however, the volume succeeds in demonstrating the vitality
of medieval Catholicism and its study.
Fordham Medieval Fellow

SUSAN R. KRAMER

William of Malmesbury: The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Edited and translated by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. [Boydell Medieval Texts.]
(Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, imprint of Boydell & Brewer. 2015. Pp.
lxvii, 154. $115.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-016-3.)
In the 1120s and 1130s, English Benedictine monks produced an influential
and remarkable set of collections of the miracles of the Virgin Mary. Unlike earlier
Marian miracle collections produced on the Continent and the more usual type of

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miracle collection being compiled at English shrines in the period, the stories in
these English Marian collections were cosmopolitan, ranging widely in time and
place, with stories of the Virgin’s miracles in Italy, Spain, and the eastern Mediterranean as well as in northern Europe. William of Malmesbury’s lengthy text of
some fifty-three chapters holds an important place within this flowering of Marian
collections: it represents, as the editors of this text put it, “the culmination of this
first creative impulse, before its spread to the Continent and incorporation in much
larger collections, from the late twelfth century onward” (p. xviii).
William’s collection has been edited twice before, once in 1959 in an unpublished Ph.D. thesis and again in 1968. This edition, including a facing-page translation, is the first title in the “Boydell Medieval Texts” series. It was undertaken by
two scholars, Rodney Thomson and Michael Winterbottom, who have edited and
translated nearly all of William of Malmesbury’s other works. Their combined
efforts have given William’s Marian collection the edition it deserves, and will
make this important text far more widely available and accessible.
Much of the edition’s introduction is taken up by a discussion of how the editors decided to order the chapters of the collection, necessary because there are only
two manuscripts that preserve William’s text, and both have problems. The first
manuscript is a preliminary version of the collection which appears to include a
“pending file” of stories that William planned to integrate into a text at a later date.
The second manuscript, though it is clearly William’s later, revised version of the
text, is missing quires and badly fragmented. In addition to their painstaking comparative analysis of these two manuscripts, the editors draw on a number of other
manuscripts that contain selections and abbreviations of William’s stories to aid
them in their reconstruction of the text as a whole.
The introduction’s extensive discussion of the manuscript tradition and structure of the collection leaves little room for discussion of the text itself. Aside from
a few spare paragraphs noting the collection’s internationalism, virulent anti-Semitism, and arrangement of stories by rank (starting with bishops and ending with lay
men and women), the editors say little more about its contents. It is left to others
to explore the text’s many other fascinating aspects, such as its stories regarding
images of the Virgin, liturgical celebrations, pregnancies, alms-giving, monasticism, the deaths of children, miracles that strike William as trivial, and the fact that
a number of the miracles do not concern the Virgin at all. Some of the most interesting passages in the collection signal William’s hesitations regarding the content
of some of the stories he found in his sources. Though the editors comment on the
often “significant differences” between William’s source texts and his own retelling
of the miracles, the nature of these differences is not discussed in detail in the introduction nor in the footnotes to the individual stories: readers will have to consult
William’s sources on their own. The laconic nature of the edition’s footnotes and
abbreviations is something to be regretted. Though the footnotes are a very rich
reserve of references and cross-references, they can be difficult to follow. For example, though there are frequent references to the English Marian collections “MB,”

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“HM,” and “TS,” the reason for these abbreviations is never given, and the reader
is directed to short footnotes in the introduction for discussion of this key source
material. The edition also, rather surprisingly, lacks a bibliography.
Such regrets aside, Thomson and Winterbottom have provided readers with
the first fully reliable edition and translation of an important text that has presented
significant editorial challenges. More work lies ahead in the analysis of the collection’s contents and its place within the Marian miracle tradition, but the editors are
to be warmly congratulated and thanked for their labors on this collection and on
William of Malmesbury’s œuvre as a whole.
York University, Toronto

RACHEL KOOPMANS

The Making of the Historia scholastica, 1150-1200. By Mark Clark. [Studies and
Texts, 198; Mediaeval Law and Theology, volume 7.] (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies. 2015. Pp. xvi, 322. $95.00. ISBN 978-088844-198-0.)
The Historia scholastica of Peter Comestor, Chancellor of Notre-Dame until
around 1178, has been unjustly neglected as an exegetical masterpiece of the later
twelfth century. Clark seeks to overturn an assumption made by Martin Grabmann
and others that Peter Comestor should be bracketed more with so-called “biblicalmoral” teachers like Peter the Chanter than speculative theologians like Peter
Lombard. Such a dichotomy, Clark argues, does a profound disservice to Peter
Comestor, who he argues was a close and loyal disciple, not just of Peter Lombard,
but of the Magna glosatura on the Bible, which Peter Lombard played a key role in
establishing. Given the wide influence of the Historia scholastica, the task of editing
and contextualising this work of exegetical synthesis is no easy task.
Clark has two principal goals: to examine the literary influences that shape the
way in which Comestor identified historia that he saw as the foundational narrative
of Scripture and always aimed at students in the schools, and the way in which
Stephen Langton used, lectured on, and revised the Historia from before 1176 until
around 1193. He argues that the Historia scholastica, dedicated by Comestor to
William of Whitehands, Archbishop of Sens, sometime between 1168 and 1173,
implements a Victorine conception of historia as a foundation for both allegorical
and tropological readings, while selecting from a mass of glosses on Scripture that
a succession of masters had compiled, following the pioneering achievements of
Anselm of Laon and his immediate disciples in the early twelfth century. In particular, Clark places great emphasis on Comestor’s reliance on the Magna glosatura on
most books of Scripture as it stood after the death of Peter Lombard in 1160.
While only Lombard’s glosses on the Psalter and the Epistles of St. Paul are
known, Clark is keenly aware of the fact, known through Stephen Langton, that
Peter Lombard also lectured on much else of the Old Testament as well as on the
Gospels. The Historia is one of the earliest texts to draw heavily in its exegesis on
what it refers to simply as “the Gloss,” a vast collection of comments culled from

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the writings of the Fathers, Josephus, as well as some later masters. Comestor was
thus providing an enormous aid to students of exegesis, by providing a synthesis of
Scripture as a historical narrative as well as quick access to those glosses that helped
expound historical matters. Given that Augustine’s approach was often allegorical,
while Gregory gave most attention to its moral message, Comestor was extending
the historical perspective of Hugh and Andrew of St. Victor with the wealth of
information given in these glosses, above all as synthesised by Peter Lombard.
After exploring Comestor’s unpublished lectures on the Four Gospels (itself a
project of major significance, given the priority often accorded by theologians to the
Pauline Epistles), Clark considers not just the organizational achievement of the Historia, but the various presentations and reading of its text offered by Stephen Langton. He leaves us in no doubt that Comestor played a central role for Langton, who
he argues was responsible for editing the Historia to make it accessible to students.
Clark does not comment on the potential contribution of Peter of Poitiers (who took
over from Comestor as teacher of theology in 1169) in closing the Historia with an
influential set of genealogical diagrams, preserved in key manuscripts of the work, or
the polemical claims about Lombard and Peter of Poitiers made by Walter, Prior of
St. Victor, as late as 1178. Nonetheless, Clark clearly explains how Langton ensured
that the Historia would be respected as an introduction to Scripture.
Monash University

CONSTANT J. MEWS

Scottish Episcopal Acta, Volume 1: The Twelfth Century. Edited by Norman F.
Shead. [Scottish History Society, 6th series, Volume 10.] (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. 2015. Pp. lxxxvi, 410. $70.00. ISBN 978-0-90624540-8.)
Norman F. Shead’s new edition of the 259 surviving episcopal acta from
twelfth-century Scotland is extremely welcome. Although many articles have
appeared on individual bishops and the foundation of cathedral chapters (by G. W.
S. Barrow, Dauvit Broun, A. A. M. Duncan, and, of course, those by Shead himself), historians of the emerging medieval Scottish episcopate are still reliant on the
much earlier work of Gordon Donaldson and—now more than a century old—that
of John Dowden. The texts of many twelfth-century episcopal acta were also only
available in nineteenth-century editions, of which many are problematic. This new
edition does not disappoint. There is an efficient yet wide-ranging introduction
setting out major narrative issues for the Scottish church, including: the yet-to-befully-discarded notion of a “Celtic church,” the supposed increase in the number of
bishoprics under David I (1124–53), relations with new and old monasticism, and
between the institutional church and the Scottish kingship and aristocracy. There
are two extremely useful empirical appendices: lists of attested episcopal absences
from the Scottish kingdom, and tables of acts (and how they survive) listed according to bishopric and bishop, which any working scholar will appreciate. There is
also a glossary at the end, so that scholars who are not familiar with the technicalities of twelfth-century Scotland can use this edition more easily.

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The acta themselves survive as seventy-two single sheets and 182 medieval
copies (mostly in cartularies) and five as antiquarian transcripts. Shead does not
firmly identify any forgeries among the originals (p. xli), a conclusion that other
scholars might take on elsewhere. The diplomatic introduction is brief but useful,
concentrating on the internal form of the documents, and produces interesting
observations (such as the variety of ways the small bishopric of Dunblane had for
safeguarding its rights). But there is no discussion of the hands among the seventytwo single sheets, so the reader remains uninformed about the production context
and, given the importance of monastic houses in preserving the large proportion of
surviving episcopal acta (particularly so given that many acts focus on that relationship), more could have been said on the archival context and its significance.
There are some real gems among the acta. Some will delight the specialist (the
bishop of Dunblane, for example, being titled “bishop of Strathearn” in no. 38).
The relationship between the bishop of Brechin and Arbroath Abbey is something
which comes out particularly clearly. Most of the fifteen surviving episcopal acta
(nos. 12-27) from Brechin (of which the earliest dates from the episcopacy of
Turpin, March 1179–1191/98, and the latest to that of Ralph, 1198/9–1212/14)
have some reference to handing over churches and church land to the nearby abbey
of Arbroath, a royal foundation set up by King William after his defeat and capture
in the 1173-74 Great Rebellion against Henry II. This gives one a sense of the
intrusion of these major foundations into local society and their effect on developing episcopal jurisdiction (no wonder salvis episcopalibus appears so frequently
among the acta). But there is also wider relevance: the relationship between secular
and ecclesiastical courts (e.g., no. 113); the performance of homage to make peace
(no. 108).
In addition, it is possible (through the generosity of the editor himself) to link
this new edition to new digital search platforms, which themselves can create new
research agendas. In 2007, the editor, Norman Shead, provided the new AHRCfunded project, “The Paradox of Medieval Scotland,” headed by Dauvit Broun at
the University of Glasgow, with his then near-complete edition. That project
(together with “The Breaking of Britain”) produced the combined charter-factoid
and prosopographical database, “The People of Medieval Scotland, 1094-1314”
(www.poms.ac.uk). Shead’s edition of charter texts can thus be combined with the
major search engine which PoMS provides, allowing for further and large-scale
data collection and analysis of the links between institutional production, social
networks, and charter diplomatic. Shead’s edition is a remarkable achievement; by
its publication, it will allow new research questions to be asked, make the material
more accessible to other scholars, and will enrich study of this place and period.
King’s College London

ALICE TAYLOR

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Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria. By Anna Welch. [The
Medieval Franciscans, volume 12.] (Leiden: Brill. 2015. Pp. xii, 270. $142.00.
ISBN 978-9-0042-427-8837.)
At its heart Anna Welch’s volume is the study of a Franciscan missal produced
in Umbria in the late thirteenth century. She writes that she began with the assumption that in the course of her project she would identify distinctive liturgical characteristics that in turn would reflect distinctive Franciscan identities. She found something quite different and produced a volume that those of us who work on
illuminated manuscripts need to consider as we ask how illuminators worked with
their clients including religious orders. Indeed she concludes, “I have argued that
liturgy was not the primary means of establishing (or attempting to establish) a
common identity within the order” (p. 216). Moreover, her effort to connect liturgy
to community identity ends with a convincing revision of the theory that the Latin
liturgy evolved in a linear manner across the thirteenth century, in what she calls “the
implementation of a uniform liturgy” (p.13). This concept, developed in the middle
of the twentieth century by Stephen J. P. van Dijk, O.F.M., and Joan Hazelden
Walker, remains fundamental to the study of Italian liturgical manuscripts.
The missal at the center of her project is the Codex Sancti Paschalis, a late
thirteenth-century missal that belongs to the Order of Friars Minor at St. Paschal’s
College in Box Hill, now on permanent loan to the Rare Books Collection of the
State Library of Victoria at Melbourne. She describes it as one of five missals that
in turn belong to a larger group of manuscripts decorated by the Perugian ateliers
of the Maestro di Deruta-Salerno and Venturella di Pietro. Among a number of
virtues Welch’s volume successfully argues several points: that art historians,
anthropologists, liturgists, and historians must work together; that art historians
should be circumspect in attributing the styles of painters to religious orders whose
works they may have decorated; that a call for a unified liturgy does not indicate
that one existed earlier, but, more logically, that it had not; and that the call for the
reform of a text does not mark the moment of its introduction.
She observes that at times scholars engage in circular argumentation; liturgists
often date manuscripts by their ornamental style, while art historians often depend
on liturgical history for dates. She observes that art historians have tended to overgeneralize when speaking of the relationship between the order and the manuscript
illuminators, given that many of the painters appear to have been lay professionals
rather than members of religious orders. Indeed Welch convincingly questions the
theories of scholars who have attempted to identify what might be called a Franciscan style of ornament, characterized by a small figure style. Yet while she stresses
the choices made by individual painters and scribes, I would argue that she doesn’t
push individual agency far enough. Decisions about the form of a manuscript might
also fall to clients or patrons, whether the heads of communities, or the lay commissioners of manuscripts, willing and able to pay for luxury manuscripts. Ultimately Welch reminds us that beyond this individuals and individual communities
had multiple, intersecting, “layered” (p. 46) identities.

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There are just a few things I wish Welch had done differently. To begin, the
discussion of issues in the early chapters is dense and at times difficult to follow.
And it would be helpful if she had explained what a missal is at the start of her discussion. This is especially important since the missal is a relatively late liturgical
format. Finally, I regret that she did not consider musical notation at least in passing and what that might tell us about the process of producing liturgical books.
Bates College

REBECCA W. CORRIE

Bonifaz VIII. (1294–1303). Erster Halbband: Benedikt Caetani. By Peter Herde.
[Päpste und Papsttum, Band 43,1.] (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersermann Verlag.
2015. Pp. x, 295. €158,00. ISBN 978-3-7772-1508-2.)
The book is the first part of a two-volume planned biography of Pope Boniface VIII. This volume is dedicated to the life of Benedetto Caetani up to his coronation as pope on January 23, 1295, and to his first public acts as such. The biography as a whole finds its place in a series (Päpste und Papsttum) that since its
beginning in 1970 has been expressly conceived to collect the popes’ lives and studies about the papacy as an institution. In fact, this work was announced already in
1980 by its author, Peter Herde, who as a prominent connoisseur of papal history
was also one of the editors of the series itself. The work is therefore the result of
thirty-five years of research.
The theme in itself is huge, many-sided, and difficult. Also recently it does
not cease to be object of historiographical attention, spawning many essays, while
the last monograph on Boniface VIII was published by Agostino Paravicini
Bagliani in 2003.
This first volume, based on a rich documentation, provides a wide and complete look on Benedetto’s days before his pontificate. Firstly, it surveys his life and
career stage by stage and in great detail, trying to point out the very moments in
which the most relevant issues of his later experience arose for the first time. In this
sense, since Benedetto’s experiences are read in the light of his pontificate and this
does seem to be the touchstone by which everything is evaluated, Boniface’s pontificate ends up as a sort of key to an understanding of the whole work. Secondly,
Herde puts Benedetto’s life in a broad political and ecclesiastical context. Thirdly,
and most meaningfully, through a critical use of contemporary sources the author
carries out a steady (and besides essential) confrontation with the many distortions
of Boniface’s image spread by tradition and proposes a careful revision of them.
The book is made of three chapters. The first of them (pp. 1–154), which is
also by far the most extensive part of the work, deals with the youth and the first
steps of Benedetto’s ecclesiastical career. The most ancient documentary evidences
report his presence in Anagni and Todi. Perhaps thanks to his family connections
he then entered the Roman Curia and found himself directly involved in some central political matters of the period, at first as a member of Cardinal Ottobono
Fieschi’s circle and as Urban IV’s chaplain, then as papal notary. These years

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allowed him to have many different experiences, which would have been important
in his later pontificate. When he was appointed cardinal in 1281, a new phase of
his career began. After some time spent in routine activities, he was entrusted with
weighty legations.
In the second chapter (pp. 155–209) Herde describes Benedetto’s experiences
“on the way to the papal throne” during the vacancy that followed Pope Nicholas
IV’s death in 1292 and then through Celestine V’s pontificate. The author reexamines here the relationship between the Pope and Benedetto and tries impartially to evaluate the cardinal’s role in Celestine’s resignation.
The third and last chapter (pp. 211–48) is first concerned with Benedetto’s
election as pope, referring to the various traditions that give an account of the event
and focusing on the people involved in the choice. The description of Benedetto’s
ordination and coronation follows as well. The volume is closed by a list of sources
and literature (pp. 249–78) and by an index of places and people (pp. 279-95).
University of the Sacred Heart, Milan

LUCIA DELL’ASTA

Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter & Hours of
Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family. By Lucy Freeman
Sandler (London and Toronto: The British Library and University of Toronto
Press, 2014. Pp. xxi, 383, 240 ills. $70. ISBN 978-0712357579.)
During the fourteenth century, Pleshey Castle in Essex was the locus of a
remarkable confluence of patrons, artists, and scribes. The patrons were members
of the wealthy and prominent Bohun family, and two of the artists, John de Teye
and Henry Hood, were Augustinian friars attached to their household. During the
second half of the century, the illuminators and scribes at Pleshey produced a
number of profusely-decorated manuscripts, of which twelve complete or fragmentary examples remain as witnesses to a large and coherent group. In Illuminators and
Patrons, Lucy Freeman Sandler places a prayerbook made for the last male Bohun
in the context of this important group.
The first part of Illuminators and Patrons addresses the historical background
of the Bohuns and their artists, and surveys the surviving manuscripts (pp. 1–36;
see also the appendix pp. 346–49). Sandler then turns to the titular manuscript, a
psalter and hours now in the British Library (MS Egerton 3277), which here
receives its first full scholarly description and analysis. She argues that the unusual
organization and subject matter of this prayerbook was informed by the synergy of
patron and illuminator at Pleshey. Here, as in other Bohun manuscripts, each verse
begins with a historiated initial that contains a tiny painted scene. These initials
provide the engaged reader with visual narratives drawn primarily from the Bible,
which proceed along their own course in a way that sometimes dovetails with but
is never captioned by the devotional texts. While Sandler’s overview of the illumination program explores the structure and the context of these paintings (pp. 37–
91), her analyses of each of the illuminations in the next chapter are the heart of

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this part of the book. Here, Sandler explores the interplay between the texts, the
biblical initials, and the other figural imagery that was painted in marginal complexes outside the “primary” material (pp. 92–158). The complex and literate relationships between these different elements are suggestive of the relationships
between the original readers and some of the artists, particularly John de Teye.
Illuminators and Patrons is the culmination of three decades of work by Lucy
Freeman Sandler, the doyenne of fourteenth-century English manuscript studies,
who since 1985 has published several shorter articles on various aspects of the
Bohun manuscripts as well as a monograph on one of the psalters. Several of these
are republished in the second part of this book, updated and furnished with more
color reproductions. This is a valuable compilation of both easily-available journal
articles and essays that can be harder to track down. Presented here in a thematic
organization, these studies present additional overviews of the group and its historiography, and either address themes, like political imagery, across several manuscripts (pp. 179-202), or individual members of the Bohun group, like the psalter
in Vienna (ÖNB cod. 1826*; pp. 290–306).
Illuminators and Patrons, like the manuscripts it discusses, is a copiously illustrated book, but it also includes a CD that provides images of every folio from
Egerton 3277 in files large enough to allow close inspection of the texts and images.
The manuscript is, at this writing, fully digitized at the British Library website
(http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Egerton_MS_3277), but the
disk is a more convenient adjunct to the analyses in the book. This volume, in conjunction with Sandler’s study of The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2004) provide by
themselves an essential library on this unusual group of illuminated manuscripts,
and will no doubt provide an important foundation for further studies.
University of Missouri

ANNE RUDLOFF STANTON

Giovanni di Rupescissa: Vade mecum in tribulatione. Edizione critica a cura di
Eleana Tealdi. Introduzione storica a cura di Robert E. Lerner e Gian Luca
Potestà. [Dies Nova: Fonti e studi per la storia del profetismo.] (Milan: Vita
e Pensiero. 2015. Pp. 330. €30,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-343-2998-6.)
This excellent addition to what one of the editors of this volume calls the
“Rupescissa renaissance” is more than simply an edition of one of John of Rupescissa’s
(ca. 1310–1366) shorter apocalyptic works. While manuscript survival alone is not
necessarily an indicator of popularity, the forty-six manuscripts bearing all or some of
the Vade mecum speak to widespread medieval interest in the Franciscan visionarycum-alchemist’s work, which only recently has been matched by scholars’.
The edition of the Latin text, edited by Eleana Tealdi, consists of just over fifty
pages, and includes a medieval synopsis of the contents. Written shortly after the completion of a lengthy magisterial prophetic work, the Liber ostensor (which stretches to
roughly 750 printed pages), the Vade mecum offers something closer to a synthesis of

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Rupescissa’s thought rather than any radical developments. Building on the work of
late medieval Joachites such as Peter Olivi and Arnold of Villanova, Rupescissa’s goals
in the Vade mecum are to demonstrate the imminence of the apocalypse by cataloging
the various signs of decline, make the case for John’s special role as the herald of the
coming tribulations, characterize enemies and champions of Christendom, and
describe those who will endure, if not necessarily survive, the end times.
While Rupescissa’s text is the heart of the volume, three introductory essays
(one in English and two in Italian) by Robert Lerner, Gian Luca Potestà, and
Tealdi precede the text. Lerner and Potestà, both long-standing experts on the history of medieval apocalypticism, offer contextual essays in a section devoted to historical introduction of the Vade mecum, while Tealdi focuses on the Vade mecum
itself. Lerner’s essay is a brief, but detailed biography of Rupescissa. While
Rupescissa often has been described as a Franciscan Spiritual, Lerner rightly complicates this idea, pointing out Rupescissa’s fidelity to Olivian views of poverty, but
also his obedience to and acceptance of Pope John XXII’s spiritual authority, which
had been rejected by even erstwhile moderate Franciscans in the tow of Minister
General Michael of Cesena. Potestà’s essay focuses on thematic continuities and
developments within Rupescissa’s own works and those that appear to have had the
most influence on his thought.
Tealdi’s longer introduction focuses principally on the manuscript tradition
and the ratio editionis, but she gives some attention to the content of the text itself.
Much of the discussion of the content is summary, but it is a nuanced one. For
instance, Tealdi skillfully recapitulates Rupescissa’s painstaking mental gymnastics
to avoid the title of prophet yet retain a kind of prophetic authority, and she does
so without compromising the subtlety (or messiness) of the friar’s argument.
If there is a fault in the edition, it may be the plurality of introductory essays.
There are some redundancies among them and none of them engages recent secondary scholarship overmuch. A longer co-written introduction may have served
the reader better, but it is difficult to quibble overmuch with the decision to include
more material rather than less, and it may well be that shorter essays on discrete
topics will be a boon to medievalists and early modernists whose interest in
Rupescissa or medieval apocalyptic is tangential. This commendable edition of the
Vade mecum is certainly brief enough to be accessible and is, in its own right, an
important and very welcome contribution to the study of medieval apocalypticism.
Boston College

ZACHARY A. MATUS

Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of
Constantinian Christianity. By David Aers. (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press. 2015. Pp. xix, 256. $35.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-26802046-0).
In this fine, provocative essay David Aers extends his previous studies of Piers
Plowman to explore Langland’s attitudes toward the theological and social issues of

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his time as set out in the final version of the poem, the C-text, and reflects on their
relevance to current concerns. He believes that those writing “grand narratives” of
the history of religious movements need to take fuller account of the poem, which
addresses a very modern topic, the dechristianization of society. Aers argues that
explorations of Langland’s position have been so concerned to demonstrate that he
was not a Wycliffite, as he was painted at the Reformation, that they have overlooked his very unorthodox views. Wyclif’s solution to the corruption of the
Church is voiced in the poem by Liberum Arbitrium reflecting on the Donation of
Constantine, by which, it was supposed, the Church was endowed with material
possessions, with disastrous results. Liberum Arbitrium proposes the transfer of
ecclesiastical possessions to the Crown. This vast addition to the king’s powers is
not Langland’s solution, though sixteenth-century readers marked out the passage
as a prognosis of what was to come, for the proposal is superseded by the narrative
of the last part of the poem. To appreciate this we need to grasp Langland’s method
of argument, which Aers describes very well as “a dialectic which is rooted in a logic
of disputation.” He continues: “It moves by expressing a range of positions and
their consequences. . . . Superseded moments are not simply abandoned to be forgotten. For they too, in their very supersession, remain constitutive of the total
dialectical moment” (pp. 98-99).
This insight helps to evaluate one of the key figures in the two final sections of
the poem. Conscience seems at first to be a trustworthy guide, set up by the Holy
Spirit (“Grace”) to lead the Pentecostal Church, called Unity, before Grace and
Piers Plowman set out as pilgrims to evangelize “wyde as the world is.” When first
Pride and then Antichrist attack the Church, Conscience commits a series of terrible
errors. He urges the people to stay inside Unity and build fortifications, not realizing
the presence of the enemy within. The problem of the erring conscience in a
dechristianized society was addressed in 1993 by Pope John-Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, where the faithful are advised to rely on the truth of “the Church and
her Magisterium,” advice, Aers argues, diametrically opposed to Langland’s views.
By the end of the poem Piers and Grace have left the institutional Church and Conscience sets off in search of them; for Langland, it seems, the Church is indeed
“beyond reformation,” and the true Christians are those few “fools” who are left to
fight Antichrist. Aers sees similarities with the theology of Ockham maintaining
that “the pope is not Christ’s vicar in any temporal matters whatever” (p. 30).
Aers’s dialectic resembles that of Langland himself, progressing through seventeen numbered sections in which arguments are recapitulated and quotations
repeated in different contexts. Some of the disadvantages of this to-ing and fro-ing
would have been minimized by providing fuller summaries of the action of the last
two passus of the poem for those less familiar with Langland, since Aers aims to
widen the readership of Piers Plowman. If he succeeds he will have performed a
useful service.
University of Nottingham

THORLAC TURVILLE-PETRE

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EARLY MODERN
Politics, Gender, and Belief: The Long-Term Impact of the Reformation. Essays in
Memory of Robert Kingdon. Edited by Amy Nelson Burnett, Kathleen M.
Comerford, and Karin Maag. [Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol.
121.] (Geneva: Librairie Droz. 2014. Pp. 320. $49.20 ; CHF41.00 paperback.
ISBN 978-2-600-01820-3.)
The ten essays gathered in the present collection had their origins in a series
of 2011 conference presentations honoring Robert M. Kingdon, who had passed
away the previous year. Authored by senior as well as younger colleagues, friends,
and former students, they attest to the strength of Kingdon’s influence and the
broad reach of his interests. The contributions are highly impressive in their own
right and serve as a fitting tribute to a pre-eminent scholar.
A number of the essays address subjects that were of immediate importance to
Kingdon, while others speak more to his concerns for the wider contours of the early
modern past. Falling into the former category is an initial clutch of studies assessing
the impact of the Reformed movement, a subject that figured prominently in Kingdon’s own work. Thus, Barbara Pitkin offers a comparative reading of John Calvin
and François Hotman’s employ of biblical texts as vehicles for understanding the
difficulties that sixteenth-century Reformed Christians faced. For its part, Martin
Klauber’s essay on the debate between Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and Cardinal
Jacques Davy du Perron over the nature of the Eucharist turns more on understandings of patristic writings. And James Tracy casts the net a bit wider in his analysis
of the manner whereby Reformed ecclesiastical authorities at Geneva and Zurich
sought to evaluate the strength of the Ottoman presence in Eastern Europe as they
formulated advice to Reformed co-religionists living there.
A second group of essays focuses on broader questions regarding church-state
relations. Kathleen Comerford examines Cosimo dei Medici’s reliance upon the
Jesuits in his efforts to strengthen the Florentine state. Together, they sought to
inculcate correct religious belief and ward off potential political opposition. Sean
Perrone directs attention to the Castilian orbit and the financial support that the
Church lent the state in a complicated European-wide network of monetary relationships. Church-state relations within Protestant territories were no less complex
than in Catholic areas, as elucidated in chapters by David Mayes and Timothy
Fehler. Mayes examines the role of governing authorities in resolving the clash
between Lutheran and Reformed communities in Hesse-Kassel and Hanau after
the mid-seventeenth century. The quarrel was over which confessional group had
the prevailing right to supervise and discipline the faithful. Fehler, on the other
hand, points up the extensive peaceful and fluid contacts between Anabaptists and
Reformed Christians in East Frisia. Remarkably, some individuals seem to have
moved effortlessly back and forth between the two communities.
The final three essays examine gender, family, and marriage—topics that
especially interested Kingdon and on which he published extensively. Marjorie E.

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Plummer provides a fascinating account of the circumstances surrounding former
Catholic nuns in the early years of the Lutheran Reformation. What, in particular,
were their legal rights regarding the dowries they had originally brought to the convent? Close inspection of women’s testimony in court cases involving marriage permits William Bradford Smith to help us better understand women’s articulation of
their honor and their understandings of marriage. Finally, William Naphy investigates accusations of infanticide brought against women in the Genevan criminal
courts between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. In the process,
we learn a great deal about the anxieties of unmarried pregnant women and society’s view of them.
Altogether, this is a lively and topical set of essays. They are well written and
address significant questions much under discussion among scholars of early
modern Europe. Their findings will be as stimulating and appealing to specialists
in the field as they would have been to Kingdon. The editors—Amy Nelson Burnett, Kathleen Comerford, and Karin Maag—are to be congratulated for a fine
volume.
University of Iowa

RAYMOND A. MENTZER

Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century
Mediterranean World. By Noel Malcom. (New York: Oxford University Press.
2015. Pp. xxx, 604. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-19-026278-5.)
Historiography has paid particular attention to Mediterranean history, which
is not surprising considering the importance this sea (surrounded by the coasts of
Europe, Asia and Africa) had as a business, political, and cultural trade area among
these three continents. Serving as a connecting zone between the confessional
states in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, during the modern age the Mediterranean has been the stage where numerous characters acted, and who, despite their
different responsibilities, contributed to connecting the Christian West with the
Muslim East. In this context, alongside the figures with institutional tasks at the
service of the States, there were also corsairs, spies, interpreters, religious people,
and political intermediaries who played a significant role, which historiography has
acknowledged only partially up to now. Considering this subject from this original
point of view, Noel Malcom focuses his research on two Albanian families, Bruni
and Bruti, which settled down and made a fortune in Ulcinj, a city situated in what
is present-day Montenegro.
In the sixteenth century, Albania was a barrier between East and West, which
is to say the Christian world and the Muslim one. It was a trade area which also
witnessed comparisons and debates among Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism,
and Islam. Formerly subject to the Republic of Venice, in the second half of the fifteenth century, Albania was under the influence of the Ottoman Empire. Taking
into account an unpublished manuscript composed by Antonio Bruni about the
history of his family, Malcolm focuses his attention on the political and cultural

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landscape which characterized the relationship between the European States and
the Ottoman Empire. Giovanni Bruni seems to have been a remarkable figure. An
Albanian orator born in Ulcinj, he became archbishop of the diocese of Bar, a city
situated on the border between the Ottoman territory and the areas under the
influence of Greek Orthodox and Lutheran confessions. Thanks to this experience,
which put him in touch with faiths and religious confessions different from
Catholicism, in 1562 he was summoned by Pius IV to the Council of Trent (1545–
1563), an occasion in which the Roman Church tried to define its confessional
identity after the Protestant Reformation. When he returned to his diocese, he put
into practice the Tridentine decrees. When control of Albania passed from the
Venetian State to the Ottoman Empire, Giovanni was taken prisoner and put into
the Ottoman galleys of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto.
Thus, Giovanni was killed by a group of Spanish soldiers, who, overlooking
his plea that he was a Catholic bishop, executed him. Together with Giovanni, his
brother Gasparo is also remarkable. In 1567, he joined the Knights of Malta and,
four years later, he took part in the Battle of Lepanto, playing a leadership role in
the Christian fleet.
Bartolomeo Bruti, cousin of Giovanni and Gasparo Bruti, worked as a translator at the Venetian embassy in Constantinopole. Surpassing national and religious
borders, Bartolomeo offered his linguistic and political diplomatic skills indiscriminately to Venice, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. Malcolm’s original and accurate
research, focusing on very interesting unpublished sources, helps us to understand
the unique role of the Mediterranean during the early modern age, before the main
political and trading routes moved to the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Thanks
to the coexistence of different factors, such as its small size and mild climate, the
Mediterranean became an area of cultural debate and confrontation, which contributed in shaping the identity of Europe and Asia in the modern age.
Thanks to trade, political relations, and war, the Mediterranean Sea brought
into close contact three continents, facilitating the dialogue and exchange of
knowledge between different societies, languages, religions, and cultures. Thus,
Malcolm’s work may serve for integrating the historiographical interpretation,
which focuses on geographic-political borders as a key element for understanding
modern Europe and their consequences for political and cultural relations between
the Christian West and the Muslim East.
The Catholic University of Milan

MARCO ROCHINI

Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe. Edited by Elizabeth C. Tingle and Jonathan Willis. [St Andrews Studies in Reformation
History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2015. Pp. xi, 219.
$124.95. ISBN 978-1-472-43014-4.)
During the past few years, cultural practices and beliefs associated with the
passing of life, and the ways in which they have been accepted, adapted, or rejected

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have been identified as being of importance in assessing the impact of the Reformation. Scholarly research on death and dying, particularly in the Reformation
period, has seen a number of new studies published as edited collections. Readers
of the recently published Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead (Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2015) will also be interested in this volume entitled Dying, Death,
Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe. It provides the reader with a
series of another ten in-depth studies on this broad theme characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, with contributions from different research perspectives,
such as history, literature, musicology, and theology.
The collection opens with a profound overview of the key areas of the topic
(e.g., dying well, funeral and burial, memorials and commemoration) reflecting the
current state of the research in this area. The editors justifiably give weight to the
fact that investigations in these fields reveal a series of important insights in terms
of the ways “in which the Reformation itself was negotiated by individuals and
communities” (p. 2). While the introduction states the intention to follow a broad
geographical perspective within a European context, readers will notice that the
contributions are dominated by the (Post-) Reformation period in England.
The first case study examines church orders of the Palatinate to show how the
process of dying, death, burial, and commemoration was accompanied not only with
pastoral care and consolation for the sick and dying, but also an opportunity to offer
instruction (some inaccuracies in the footnotes, e.g., Eike Wolgast as “Eika” or
“Wolfgast,” do not diminish the relevance of this contribution). Subsequently, the
following chapter emphasizes the importance of being well prepared for a godly
deathbed in post-Reformation England. Godly deaths provided useful exemplars for
the edification of audiences, whose prayers could no longer traverse the gulf between
living and dead. By investigating death-related pieces of music in Reformation England, the third contribution describes how these compositions became a vehicle for
delivering subjective feelings associated with death and burial by means of the modes
and tunes that were thought to correspond to feelings. The following case study
reports on measures against the Catholic minority in early modern England, and
focuses on families who had been denied the right to bury the deceased in the parish
churchyard, and in spite of the persecution by local authorities sought to sustain
Catholic beliefs and customs surrounding death and burial. A chapter about the
London Company of Drapers gives insight into the corporate traditions of a fraternity which found a way to recast their former rituals and continued to commemorate
their brethren throughout the sixteenth century by creating cultural practices that
met the needs of their members. The following contribution studies the change of
commemorative practices during the Reformation through the medium of French
funerary monuments by outlining the development of different types of tombs (with
six black-and-white illustrations), and traces religiously motivated violence targeting
these religious status symbols. A series of “Livres des Martyrs” is the subject of
another contribution. The authors of this genre of martyrology stressed commonalities between the martyrs and contemporary victims of religious massacres (members
of the Reformed Church in France and the Low Countries), which is why they

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included and commemorated those who had died in such killings alongside martyrs.
The chapter “Ghost stories” examines the role of accounts of apparitions from
beyond the grave in debates about the afterlife in sixteenth-century France. By
returning and bearing witness to the reality of the doctrine of purgatory, ghosts and
spirits also had become useful agents in the war for souls, before the clerical ghost
narrative as a didactic form declined by the end of the sixteenth century. As is frequently found in edited collections, some contributions are rather peripheral to the
main theme, which is the case with the last chapter about the veneration of a relic
attributed to Ildephonsus of Toledo in Spain.
Only five of the nine individual chapters are equipped with marked conclusion, but with its helpful index, the collection is a valuable resource and remarkable
contribution for anyone interested in the culture of death and dying, particularly
during the Reformation period.
Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Vienna

CLAUDIA RESCH

Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain: Saravia, Villalón and the Religious
Origins of Economic Analysis. By Michael Thomas D’Emic. (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. 2014. Pp. xxx, 277.
$126.00 Hardback. ISBN 978-0-7391-8128-7.)
The last decades have seen a remarkable revival of interest in the economic
thought of the so-called « late scholastics »—a variegated group of theologians and
canon lawyers, often connected to the University of Salamanca, who were particularly active in the Spanish empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The bulk of the secondary literature has investigated selected chapters on usury and
just pricing in the learned work, written in Latin, of some of the most famous representatives of this movement, such as Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto,
Luis de Molina, Leonardus Lessius, and Juan de Lugo. Through the seminal work
by Joseph A. Schumpeter and Majorie Grice Hutchinson, those moral theologians
have become known as the fathers of modern economic analysis. However, scholars
have become increasingly aware that the economic thought of the late scholastics
cannot be reduced to those famous authors alone. Instead, there are many lesser
known figures who, often long before the big names even published their work, had
already rendered a detailed account of the profound changes that occurred in
Spain’s economy and of the moral questions accompanying the rise of capitalism.
The work under review draws attention to two such lesser-known sixteenthcentury Spanish scholastic theologians: Cristóbal de Villalón and Saravia de la
Calle. Very little, if anything, is known about the lives of these men. Villalón studied at Alcalá and Salamanca before occupying a chair in the faculty of arts at Valladolid, the then seat of the imperial court. He was the author of a treatise on
money-exchange, commerce, and usury, the Provechoso tratado de cambios y contrataciones de mercaderes y reprovacion de usura, first published in Valladolid in 1541.

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Saravia de la Calle’s career remains a mystery, but in 1544 he is mentioned as the
author of a manual for merchants, the Instrucción de mercaderes muy provechosa, published at Medina del Campo, the center of gravity of trade and economic exchange
in Spain. Because they wrote their work in Spanish, the diffusion of Villalón’s and
De la Calle’s ideas beyond the Spanish empire remained limited. Villalón and De
la Calle did not share the glorious fate of the afore-mentioned scholastics who
gained eternal fame because they were still being cited by Protestant natural lawyers
such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf. Yet, if anything, their works bring
us even closer to the empirical reality of the transformation of economics and
finance at the dawn of capitalism than the learned treatises « On Justice and Right »
(De iustitia et iure) or the commentaries, in Latin, on Thomas’ Secunda Secundae.
Although they were working in the same scholastic tradition, drawing on the
same late medieval sources, Villalón and De la Calle held opposing views as to the
moral legitimacy of the fundamental changes that were happening in the marketplace. While both authors did not refrain from expressing contempt at merchants’
and bankers’ insatiable desire to make money, their analysis of the market and the
solution of specific cases of conscience differed considerably. The author of the
book under review rightly emphasizes that the contradictory analyses of the justice
of the market price in the Provechoso tratado and the Instrucción, respectively, defy
conventional historical wisdom about the free market orientation or not of the late
scholastics. Most historians have tended to consider the Spanish scholastics as the
first moral advocates of the free market, while others have noticed the origins of a
labor theory of value in the same scholastic sources. As a matter of fact, D’Emic
convincingly demonstrates that both views co-existed in the 1540s, since Villalón
emphasized the labor cost theory of value while De la Calle promoted a radical utility theory of value. It would seem, though, that in the long run, especially in Jesuit
scholastic sources from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, De la
Calle’s opinion prevailed.
KU Leuven

WIM DECOCK

John Knox. By Jane E.A. Dawson. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2015. Pp.
x, 373. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-300-11473-7.)
Jane Dawson’s long-awaited Knox biography draws on some previously
unknown source materials as well as significant advances in our understanding of
sixteenth-century Britain since the landmark treatments of Knox by Jasper Ridley
(1968) and Stanford Reid (1974). The subject is certainly neither unknown nor
noncontroversial, in part because of the very dramatic portrait Knox gave of himself
in his own rather polemical History of the Reformation in Scotland, published after
his death, using materials he had left behind. Dawson does an admirable job of cutting through some of that fog and presenting a portrait of Knox for the twenty-first
century, one which contextualizes his flaws without necessarily excusing them.
The major new primary source here is a small collection of letters between
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Christopher Goodman, held in the Denbighshire Record Office. Dawson uses
these to shed light on Knox’s movements, particularly during 1566-67, when he
was temporarily exiled from his pulpit in Edinburgh. Knox settled for a while in
Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland, and the letters reveal that Goodman, who had
accompanied Sir Henry Sidney to Ireland, was trying to lure Knox there to join the
effort to bring a Calvinist-style reformation to that island. Knox appears to have
considered but declined this offer. He returned to Edinburgh after the deposition
of Mary Stewart, but not before first paying a clandestine visit to northwestern
England and London. These contacts highlight Knox’s transnational nature. While
today he is generally associated with his native Scotland, he also held positions in
the Edwardine Church of England, and ministered to the “English” congregation
in Geneva. His first wife, Marjorie Bowes, was English, as was his close friend
Goodman.
Dawson is also keen to stress how Knox’s experience of the Church of England and its apparent overturning by Mary Tudor contributed to his inability to
consider what may have been pragmatic compromises through the twists and turns
of Scottish ecclesiology and politics between his return to his native kingdom in
1559 and death in 1572. Certainly, his rigid attitudes proved counterproductive,
and would-be allies found him exasperating. While Dawson is generally sympathetic to her subject, she does not paper over these flaws. Nor does she offer much
in the way of excuses for his most colossal miscalculation: the publication of The
First Blast of Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women from Geneva in
1558. With the death of Mary Tudor and the succession of her sister Elizabeth to
the English throne shortly after its appearance, this initially anonymous work
brought disrepute to the whole Genevan exile community and, in Dawson’s view
sent “the Protestant Churches of the two countries [England and Scotland] on
diverging paths that altered the history of the British Isles” (p. 317). Of course, the
charge most often leveled against Knox for the First Blast is misogyny, not poor
timing. Dawson does not overlook this, but turns away quickly to discuss Knox’s
friendship with the English exile Anna Locke, whose Meditation of a Penitent
Sinner was the only publication by a woman to come out of the English exilic community of Geneva.
Given Knox’s poor political instincts, Dawson sees his lasting influence more
in the areas of Scottish liturgy and ecclesiology, in which he authored or coauthored foundational texts. She also stresses his theatricality, which may have contributed to how he framed Reformed ritual, as well as how he presented himself in
the pages of his own History. But theatricality sometimes requires donning a mask;
in Dawson’s telling it becomes clear that Knox the confident prophet was subject
to deep depressions, and these particularly marked his later years.
University of Akron

MICHAEL F. GRAHAM

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Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life. By Gerard Kilroy. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2015. Pp. xxii, 458. $135.99. ISBN: 978-1-4094-0151-3.)
This is an outstanding book, a biography of the young Jesuit Edmund Campion, who was executed for treason at Tyburn on December 1, 1581. Thomas
Alfield, in his eyewitness account written for publication shortly after the events of
Campion’s trial and death memorably described him as “The flower of Oxford …
and an honour to our country.”
Gerard Kilroy’s intention, discussed in his introduction, is to re-imagine
through the documentary evidence available Campion’s scholarly and priestly life.
And he succeeds in doing so impressively and without a hint of hagiography.
Kilroy’s meticulous scholarship, careful reading of a vast range of historical, literary,
and visual sources—including several previously unknown, recently discovered
manuscripts—his perceptive analysis and interpretation of these, bring to life on
the page the boy, the scholar, the Jesuit priest, the missionary, and the martyr; the
man who as a young scholar, had been earmarked for preferment by Queen Elizabeth herself and whose death scandalised the whole of Europe. His findings, however, go much further. They notably clarify, add to, and in some cases change our
understanding of the Elizabethan settlement at this critical point as the Queen and
her counsellors negotiated the matter of the Anjou suit and the succession within
the immediate consequences of the bull, Regnans in excelsis, of Pius V and the
intentions of Nicholas Sander, the King of Spain, William Allen, Sir Francis
Englefield, and others in promoting rebellion in Ireland. In addition, they provide
new insight into the internal politics and factionalism of the Catholic community
at home and in exile.
Kilroy’s detailed re-creation of Campion’s early years provides clues to the
man. The son of a radical Protestant stationer, Campion was brought up among
the tight-knit print community who lived and worked in and around St. Paul’s
churchyard. This upbringing, he shows, exercised a potent influence throughout
his life. Campion’s intuitive understanding of the power of print characterised his
scholarly and missionary work. So too, this upbringing exposed him from an early
age to the culture of the spoken word: in sermons, most notably at Paul’s Cross, in
dialectic, and in oratory. It nurtured in him a lifelong devotion to disputation, “a
belief that intellectual argument was the only solution to the theological differences
of the period” (p. 15). Campion’s inherently sweet nature, combined with his wonderfully receptive intellect, Kilroy shows, singled him out early for patronage by the
city elders who ensured his education in its own schools: St Paul’s, Christ’s Hospital—and later St. John’s, Oxford.
The chapter on Campion’s Oxford career is outstanding. Kilroy’s identification and use of previously unknown material in his reconstruction of the Queen’s
visit in 1566 throws new light on this event. Campion’s skills in oratory and disputation famously so impressed Elizabeth on this occasion that she instructed Leicester to offer him “preferment and patronage on an unlimited scale” (p. 43). Kilroy’s
findings contextualize and clarify the anxieties, tensions, and factionalism in the

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regime during these days as the matter of the Queen’s marriage and the succession
became the fulcrum around which a series of complex diplomatic shifts and personal manoeuvres were executed. He shows too the consequences of Leicester’s
appointment as Chancellor of the university as, with the transfer of power from a
Catholic majority to a Calvinist minority, large numbers of Catholic scholars
swiftly migrated from Oxford to Louvain.
Campion’s formative time in Ireland, his scholarly work there, conversion, and
departure for Douai in 1571 are particularly well brought out. It is not possible in
a short review to do justice to Kilroy’s expert reconstruction of Campion’s career
which then followed. His use of known, and previously unknown archival sources
to reconstruct Campion’s pilgrim journey to Rome, entry into the Society, his novitiate in Brno, ordination and the six happy and fulfilled years spent in Prague, his
teaching and scholarship reveals much which is new.
All of this ended in 1579 when, with the expectations of Sander and William
Allen running high in relation to Ireland, Campion was called by his General to
Rome and the English mission. Kilroy argues convincingly that having witnessed
in Prague a successful Jesuit mission operating within a policy of religious toleration, Campion had anticipated a similar framework for his work in England. However, Kilroy’s further argument that from the time of Everard Mercurian’s request
Campion “showed himself detached from the political and strategic aims of the
mission” (p. 135) is more problematic. He had perhaps traveled as far as Rheims
with this intention because only then did William Allen tell him of Sander’s expedition to Ireland. But the situation he encountered on arrival was very different
from that which he had experienced in Prague. The exploits of Sander and the
Catholic rebellion in Ireland, the fear of imminent papal invasion and another
Catholic uprising in England exacerbated by a hostile reaction to the unpopular
Anjou marriage had created a dangerous climate for missionary activity. Campion’s
statement in the “Brag” suggests that his approach had been modified in the light
of the situation he encountered. Kilroy’s argument here needs further clarification.
The narrative of the mission is meticulously detailed, so too is the seamless
account of Campion’s capture, torture, disputations, trial, and execution. Kilroy is
to be congratulated for this superb narrative recuperation. Campion was the subject
of more torture warrants, of dubious legality, than anyone else in history and given
the savagery of torture he endured it is astonishing that not only did he refuse to
conform but that he revealed so little information. When torture failed, flattery was
tried but not even the Queen, who, Kilroy suggests, met Campion privately during
the trial and offered him an archbishopric, could move him. His trial, as Kilroy’s
detailed analysis of the proceedings shows, was a travesty in which justice was subordinated to the political interests of the crown. When Campion mounted the gallows he and all those who had gathered there to witness the execution understood
its significance. It was a stark signal by the State to those disquieted by the prospect
of the Anjou marriage and to Catholics alike, that it had a legal right to deal with
its Catholic subjects as it saw fit.

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Gerard Kilroy and his publishers, Ashgate, are to be congratulated. This is a
fine book of meticulous scholarship and astute analysis. With its detailed footnotes
and excellent bibliography, it will be an invaluable resource for everyone working
on the history, literature, and theology of the period.
Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge

ANNE DILLON

The Trial of Galileo: Essential Documents. Translated and edited by Maurice A.
Finocchiaro. [Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West.] (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. 2014. Pp. xii, 160. $34.95
clothbound: ISBN 978-1-62466-133-4; $12.00 paperback: ISBN 978-162466-132-7.)
In his acclaimed The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, published in1989,
Maurice A. Finocchiaro collected, translated, and edited the most important documents pertaining to the trial and condemnation of Galileo. The eighty documents
that he presented, together with the critical apparatus and notes, make up a book
of about four hundred pages. He has now selected the most important documents,
those that can be called crucial and essential to an understanding of the most dramatic episode in the history of the relations between science and religion. His new
book opens with an excellent introduction and a useful glossary of terms and
names. He has also taken the opportunity to correct a few minor oversights in the
earlier collection, and he has incorporated some items from his Retrying Galileo,
1633–1992, which appeared in 2005.
An essential aspect of the trial of Galileo concerns the legality of the proceedings, and Finocchiaro rightly stresses that what is legally pertinent in the twentyfirst century cannot be assumed to have been relevant in seventeenth-century Italy.
The weight played by ecclesiastic or canon law will not be familiar to the modern
reader, but it was decisive. An interesting case is the legal opinion solicited by the
government of the Republic of Venice and written by the Friar Paolo Sarpi, an
important figure in his own right. This document outlines a procedure to render
legally valid in Venice the decree of the Roman Congregation of the Index condemning Copernicus. From the evidence available, it would seem that the decree
of the Index never became legally valid in Venice, and that the situation was analogous in France.
Although the legal side of Galileo’s trial is of considerable importance, the
trial itself was not primarily or exclusively a matter of jurisprudence, as some
authors have been inclined to see it. At issue was also the theological problem of
the validity of scriptural arguments against scientific hypotheses. This question was
fraught with epistemological difficulties that were intertwined with social, bureaucratic, and political commitments, which were not always recognized. The documents make it clear, however, that Galileo was not challenging the magisterium of
the Church. He considered himself a staunch Catholic and was convinced that his
defencs of Copernicanism was in the interest of the Faith. The Roman inquisitors

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took a harsher line and found him “vehemently suspected of heresy,” a specific category of religious crime intermediate in seriousness between formal heresy and
slight suspicion of heresy. In effect, Galileo was being convicted of the second most
serious offense handled by the Inquisition. He was condemned to imprisonment
but this was immediately commuted to house arrest. He was made comfortable
enough to resume his work on the nature of motion and write the book that would
become the Discourses on Two New Sciences on which his fame as a physicist rests.
The Trial of Galileo: Essential Documents is a useful collection of material
related to the trial, and it can be warmly recommended not only to scholars and students but to the general public.
University of Padua (Emeritus)

WILLIAM R. SHEA

Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s
Tragedy. By Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens. [Studies in Modern British Religious History, Volume 32.] (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. 2015. Pp. viii,
395. $99.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-014-9.)
Readers familiar with the work of Peter Lake will be aware of his long-standing interest in early Stuart murder pamphlets, as a means both of shedding light on
the popular religious thinking of the period and critiquing the historiography of
English Protestantism, the first fruit of which was an article in Midland History
(1990): “Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire Axe-Murder.” The present
study, a brilliant work of history, written in collaboration with Isaac Stephens,
begins with another murder, this time from Northamptonshire, which leads on to
an investigation of the religious beliefs and practices of a selection of inhabitants
drawn from one of the most divided English counties. In 1637 a local Puritan minister, John Barker, was executed at Northampton, along with his niece (Beatrice)
and servant (Ursula), on a joint charge of infanticide. As with the earlier Shropshire
murder case of 1633, where the perpetrator was an allegedly Puritan farmer, Enoch
ap Evan, anti-Puritans sought to make religious capital out of the resulting discomfiture of the “godly”; in both instances the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional predestination was pilloried as a prime cause of the downfall of such self-deluded
“elect.” But whereas the Shropshire Puritans responded by denying that Enoch ap
Evan had ever been one of their number, the Northamptonshire Puritans, in the
event, co-opted the condemned Barker as an edifying spectacle of gallows repentance. These rival polemics, so Lake and Stephens convincingly argue, are a genuine reflection of two very different varieties of popular Protestantism on offer at
the time. Thus they are able to demonstrate that most of the views caricatured in
the fascinating anti-Calvinist manuscript pamphlet The Northamptonshire High
Constable really do feature in the extant sermons preached at the Kettering combination lecture, by the moderate Puritans Robert Bolton and Joseph Bentham. Such
“public” teachings, of the kind purveyed by Bolton and Bentham, also serve to
inform the “private” writings of Robert Woodford, a radical Puritan attorney and
Steward of Northampton, and the godly gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham of Lam-

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port in the same county. Lake and Stephens identify the author of The Northamptonshire High Constable as Peter Hausted, whose Ten Sermons (1636) include a
number of closely related doctrinal and ceremonial themes. Hausted’s “private”
counterpart is the Northamptonshire cleric and scourge of Puritans Robert
Sibthorpe, a clutch of whose letters survive from the year 1639 as the “personal
rule” of Charles I began to unravel. Here it is worth spelling out that the sermons
of Bolton and Bentham had been licensed for publication by chaplains of Archbishop Abbot in the early 1630s, before the complete clampdown on Calvinist doctrine, whereas the very different notions of Hausted, his sermons licensed in 1635
by a chaplain of Archbishop Laud, were characteristic of the new Caroline dispensation. While Lake and Stephens rightly criticize present-day historians who dismiss vast swathes of the religious writing of the time as mere “polemic,” they also
take to task those—often one and the same—who seek to collapse genuine and
deeply held religious differences into a “consensual” Protestantism or Anglicanism.
The idea of “Anglicanism,” they memorably write, “like Rasputin . . . seems impossible to kill” (p. 364), although their book certainly provides a formidable challenge
to the sort of myth- makers they have in mind. At the same time, our two authors
pay a heartfelt tribute to John Fielding, on whose first-rate edition of Robert
Woodford’s diary they draw extensively. The present reviewer also wishes to join
with them in expressing the hope that Fielding’s work on Peterborough diocese,
much of it still unpublished, may yet see the light of print. Likewise publishing The
Northamptonshire High Constable would be an eminently worthwhile task, since the
manuscript encapsulates so many Laudian preoccupations, such as altars and
bowing toward them, anti-Calvinist teaching on predestination, sermons at the
expense of liturgy, patristic scholarship, the alleged socially upstart nature of Puritanism and subversive threat posed by lecturing (fuelled by what Hausted claimed
to be an overproduction of university graduates), the benign nature of so-called
“good fellow” pastors, and the cult of neighborliness, even down to the short hair
ostentatiously affected by male members of the “godly” (p. 40) —the Roundheads
as they soon came to be called. The chronological focus of this splendid book is very
much the 1630s and the religious landscape conceived of as being peopled by Puritans radical and moderate, Calvinist conformists, and an avant-garde which
morphs into Laudianism, although there are some references back to earlier
decades, notably the beginning of James I’s reign and the portrait painted by Fielding of a group of “proto-Laudian” clergy (p.127) clustered around Bishop Thomas
Dove of Peterborough (1601-30). Many years ago now the late Patrick Collinson
postulated the existence of a widespread “Pelagianism” at the parish level and for
which, by implication, the traditional Catholic priesthood had sought to cater. In
an essay of 1994, Lake went on to develop this suggestion in terms of a countervailing “Manichaeanism” into which the Puritan clergy were able to tap. As a consequence it is possible to envisage both Laudianism and Puritanism as religious
movements with widespread appeal. Moreover while Lake and Stephens are understandably reluctant to read back the Civil War divisions into the 1630s, or indeed
earlier, it is none the less striking how polarized a vision even the “moderate” Bentham presents, recommending “a charitable Christian hatred” on the part of the
“saints” toward members of the wider society. While Bentham was to become a

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royalist, another erstwhile moderate, William Prynne, whose prosecution by the
Caroline authorities greatly exercised Northamptonshire Puritans, in his A Vindication of Psalm 105. 15 (1642) went on to deduce, from the doctrine of predestination, a right of political resistance as belonging to God’s “anointed” - that is to say
the “elect.” Such is just one of the many potential avenues for further research
opened up by this immensely rich and rewarding book.
University College London

NICHOLAS TYACKE

On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court. By
Erin Griffey. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art. 2015. Pp. xii, 372. $85.00. ISBN 978-0300-21400-0.)
This deeply researched and beautifully produced book differs from most arthistorical discussions of monarchs in paying attention not only to paintings and
other images but the whole range of material display that surrounded Charles I’s
consort, Henrietta Maria, at various stages of her life. Not that Griffey neglects
images: to the contrary she thoroughly examines painted and engraved portraits of
her subject from childhood until her final years, carefully charting changes in
iconography and suggesting meaningful comparisons to images of other contemporary monarchs. She also makes a strong case for this queen’s significance as a
patron of the arts and architecture, from her early interest in the painters Jan van
Belkamp and Orazion Gentileschi to her rebuilding of Somerset House in the
1660s. But the book also exploits an unusually full series of inventories reproduced
as appendices at the end, along with other evidence to reconstruct the décor of
Henrietta Maria’s palaces and many details about her wardrobe, her investment in
jewelry and luxury furnishings, and the arrangement of pictures and other objects
in her chapels and privy lodgings. As Griffey rightly argues, it was the total impact
of this opulence, rather than paintings and engravings in isolation, that projected
an image of the Queen to contemporaries. In addition to making a substantial contribution to the growing body of secondary literature on Henrietta Maria, On Display is the most complete and rigorous study yet published of the material culture
of a major baroque court.
Much of the book is organized around “passages” of the queen’s life, involving
both physical crossings of the sea and a transition from one state to another. The
earliest of these involved her marriage to Charles I in 1625 and voyage to England.
Griffey analyzes the magnificent proxy wedding in Paris and Henrietta Maria’s
progress to the French coast and then Dover and London, as well as the contents
of her trousseau, valued at £30,000, which emphasized the queen’s identity as a
Bourbon princess and devout Catholic. Three chapters deal with Henrietta Maria’s
subsequent years in England, one devoted to her first four years and two to her role
as a royal mother in the 1630s. Woven into the discussion is an account of the
queen’s investments in her chapels and increasingly assertive efforts to proselytize
on behalf of her faith.

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A final substantial section of the book deals with Henrietta Maria’s departure
for the continent at the outset of the Civil War, her court in exile in France, her
return to England at the Restoration, the rebuilding of Somerset House to designs
by the architect Hugh May under her auspices, and her final retirement to a quasimonastic existence at Colombes and Chaillot, near Paris. Griffey provides an excellent discussion of the queen’s iconography as a pious royal widow, while showing
that she continued to live in considerable luxury as she simultaneously advertised
her Catholic piety.
Griffey repeatedly demonstrates the many ways that Henrietta Maria advertised her Catholic piety through material objects and suggests that this would have
antagonized English Protestants. While this is undoubtedly true up to a point,
Henrietta Maria worked quite closely with committed Protestants at court through
most of the 1630s, often in pursuit of an anti-Spanish alliance. The degree to which
her Catholicism provoked negative reactions depended not only on displays of piety
but contingent political circumstances. But of course this was not Griffey’s subject
and her book makes a highly valuable contribution.
University of Massachusetts Boston

R. MALCOLM SMUTS

L’Atlas Marianus de Wilhelm Gumppenberg. Édition et traduction. Edited by Nicolas Balzamo, Olivier Christin, and Fabrice Flückinger. (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Éditions Alphil—Presses universitaires suisses. 2015. Pp. 512. CHF
49.00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-88930-031-0.)
This beautiful edition of the German original and translation into French of
Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus is of great interest to scholars of Catholic history
for several reasons. First, the Atlas Marianus was both a highly successful and peculiar book in seventeenth-century Catholic literature, which makes it an interesting
object of study for the history of piety. It is not an atlas, but a collection of legends
about miraculous images of the Virgin Mary, with engravings representing the
miraculous image. Whereas such books were usually confined to specific places,
regions, or polities, Gumppenberg’s project was to assemble all the known miraculous images and to show in this way that “the world is Marian.” His goal was to
defend Marian piety against Protestants, to help preachers and missionaries, and to
enable the readers to deepen their spirituality by making, so to speak, pilgrimages
in their mind. According to him, the copies of the images had something miraculous, so that the engravings helped one to get in touch with the Mother of God. As
a collection of legends from different countries, the Atlas Marianus gives insights
into the way Catholics conceived the Virgin Mary and their relation to her in the
seventeenth century. It displays a confident religion having gotten rid of the doubts
of the early sixteenth century, accepting popular religiosity, and endorsing an optimistic view of the relationships between believers and Heaven. It shows also that
Catholic culture was clearly universalistic.
Second, the Atlas Marianus is interesting from the point of view of information history. To realize his ambitious goal, the Jesuit Gumppenberg asked the

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provincials and college rectors of the Society for information about miraculous
images in their regions. He then integrated the material he received. The sample
of images is thus quite haphazard, including hardly-known images and ignoring
major ones. But the fact that the Atlas is a collective product of the Jesuit network
shows what a German Jesuit could know about the Marian cult in different parts
of Europe and the world. Gumppenberg always gives precise information about his
printed sources, and the names of Jesuits who have given him intelligence.
The editors have decided to edit the Atlas’ first edition (1657), which comprises 100 legends, not the augmented Latin version of 1672 with 1,200 legends
(but without engravings). They have added to the original engravings other
baroque reproductions of the miraculous images, enabling comparisons. The translation into French is of high quality. The introduction is informative and stimulating, even if it contains some hazardous assertions. It claims that the Atlas shows the
globalization of Marian cult in the seventeenth century although Gumppenberg’s
book contains only two American images, and no information about images in Asia
or eastern Christianity at all. To a modern reader, it is also striking that Gumppenberg thought Tenerife is in Chile. The Jesuit network obviously did not enable him
to realize his universalistic project, and this may be a sign for a lower grade of globalization of information than assumed by the editors. The “ontology of images”
developed by the editors is also somewhat bizarre because it suggests that, for the
believers, the Marian images had a personality and acted on their own. Gumppenberg’s text, on the contrary, clearly attributes the miracles to the Virgin, not to the
images. However, this does not diminish the great merit of this edition and translation which makes accessible and contributes to the exploration of a major product
of baroque Catholicism.
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in
Eighteenth-Century France. By Mita Choudhury. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 234. $64.95. ISBN 978-0-27107081-0.)
An examination of a dispute in eighteenth-century France that saw a young
woman and her supporters locked in a factual, legal, and public relations battle
against a Jesuit priest and his supporters, this work aims to be a case study of how
the formation of a public opinion critical of monarchical and ecclesiastical authority
foreshadowed the French Revolution. From 1728, Jean-Baptiste Girard, S.J., had
been the spiritual director of Catherine Cadière, in Toulon; but in 1730 she
accused him of witchcraft (of bewitching her), of touching her in indecent ways, of
impregnating her, and of inducing an abortion. Girard denied all of it and insisted
that she was a liar and a hysteric engaging in a false show of supposedly divinelygiven ecstasy and of sanctity. Choudhury does a good job of showing that hard evidence was lacking on both sides, though she speculates, perhaps less persuasively,
that the two did have a sexual relationship albeit a consensual one. The author

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notes, correctly, that by the 1730s an accusation of witchcraft had lost the kind of
credibility it could have had a century or so earlier, and thus it did not do much to
help Cadière’s case.
The royal law court (parlement) of Aix-en-Provence found neither party guilty
of anything. Choudhury highlights how this judgment did not please the large
crowds assembled in Aix, and the many other people that followed with keen interest the proceedings; she suggests, with some hyperbole, that “everyone in France
had an opinion about the affair” (p. 127). But some were more interested than
others in its details and outcome, and Choudhury shows, convincingly, that French
Jansenists used the controversy to promote their anti-Jesuit agenda. Jansenists were
only too happy to depict Jesuits as hypocritical in their vow of chastity, and as
deceivers and schemers never to be trusted. Anti–Jesuit polemic used images as well
as words, and such polemic could mimic or parallel anti-Semitism: Choudhury
includes among her excellent illustrations one in which “Father Girard’s features
follow conventions of anti-Semitic caricatures” (p. 139). Other images and texts
depicted Girard and his confrères as inhuman, as demons and animals, especially
wolves, and as deviants of various kinds and as sodomites. One may wonder if the
France Choudhury depicts was more a preview of 1930s Nazi Germany than of
1790s Revolutionary France. Girard left Toulon quickly after the parlement’s decision. His departure may have saved his life: crowds eager to exact what they
thought was justice burned him in effigy.
This work could have benefited from greater knowledge of Jesuit history.
Choudhury stresses that Jesuits were extremely close to the French monarchy, and
this was certainly true in some ways, but she seems unaware of tensions between
Jesuits and French monarchs, as in the Régale controversy of the late 1600s that saw
French Jesuits caught between differing papal and royal demands. The author also
imagines that Jansenists valued individual conscience, while Jesuits did not do so: a
simplistic dichotomy that will not withstand close scrutiny. From Choudhury’s
notes and bibliography, and from her analysis, it is obvious that she is wellgrounded in the Jansenist side of things; she appears largely unaware of the copious
Jesuit sources from the period, and of the current abundance of new studies on
Jesuit topics. Yet this remains a fascinating book and one I highly recommend, one
that will interest a broad range of scholars.
College of the Holy Cross

THOMAS WORCESTER, S.J.

Abbé Sicard’s Deaf Education: Empowering the Mute, 1785–1820. By Emmet
Kennedy. (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. 2015. Pp. xix, 212. $79.99. ISBN
978-1-137-51285-7.)
Emmet Kennedy’s newest book presents the fascinating account of the life of
Abbé Roch-Ambroise Sicard (1742–1822) and the early development of education
for the deaf in France. In fact, the originator of the new approach to such education
and the initiator of the first systematic language of signs was Sicard’s mentor, the

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much better-known Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée (1712-1789), who had been
active in Paris since the 1760s. But it was Sicard who struggled successfully to carry
on his predecessor’s work during the tumultuous events from the beginning of the
French Revolution through the Restoration of 1815, thus firmly establishing the
first Institution des Sourds-Muets. Kennedy follows Sicard’s efforts in considerable
detail, as he modified l’Épée’s techniques somewhat, found the funds and buildings
to maintain a viable institution, recruited students and patrons, and fended off
threats to the survival of the school. By the early nineteenth century, the Abbé had
won international fame, giving demonstrations of his students’ abilities to the
crowned heads of Europe and even to Pope Pius VII. Thereafter, through the
activities of his students and successors, his techniques were spread through much
of Europe and the United States—where they were influential, notably, in the
reform activities of Thomas and Edward Galludet.
But all such achievements were possible only through Sicard’s extraordinary
talents for survival, and in many respects Kennedy’s portrait of the Abbé’s sinuous
personality and remarkable knack for self-promotion is as interesting as the institutional history of the school itself. Although Sicard’s ultimate goal may well have
been the preservation of his institution, the good Abbé was always prepared for a
measure of personal glorification. He was also a political “girouette” par excellence,
adapting with consummate skill to the successive governments of the Old Regime
royalty, the Constitutional monarchy, the First Republic, the Terror, the Directory,
the Napoleonic Empire, and the Restoration. His itinerary was all the more
remarkable in that he always refused to take the clerical oath of 1791, never
renounced the priesthood—even in the midst of the anticlerical attacks of the
Terror and the Directory—and served as editor of the ultramontane Annales
Catholiques under the Directory.
Kennedy explores with some care the secrets of this survival. There can be no
doubt that a measure of luck was involved: notably when he emerged as one of the
extraordinarily rare priests imprisoned in Paris in the summer of 1792 who miraculously escaped the September Massacres—after a local sans-culottes intervened
and demanded his release as he was about to be executed. Sicard also won fame as
a theorist of grammar, an achievement for which he is all but forgotten today, but
for which he was lionized in the Napoleonic period and elected to the Académie
française. But perhaps most important was the extent to which the Abbé’s enterprise seemed the very embodiment of bienfaisance and the improvement of humanity, which were, after all, among the central goals of Enlightenment culture, both
before and after the Revolution. For centuries deaf-mutes had been widely imagined to be mentally handicapped, if not altogether insane. To see Sicard’s students
not only communicating with one another, but reading, writing, and discussing
religion and philosophy made an extraordinary impression on the age. By the early
nineteenth century, Sicard could charge admission for demonstrations and the
high-born and wealthy flocked to see the students “perform.” Indeed, Kennedy justifiably compares such demonstrations to those of Anton Mesmer at the end of the
Old Regime.

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The book is based on an impressive grounding in library and archival sources
in France, Britain, and the United States. Kennedy is to be congratulated for this
important achievement.
University of California, Irvine

TIMOTHY TACKETT

LATE MODERN EUROPEAN
The Holy See and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East: Benedict XV’s Diplomacy
in Greater Syria (1914-1922). By Agnes de Dreuzy. (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press. 2016. Pp. xiv, 303. $69.95. ISBN 9700-8132-2849-5.)
The pontificate of Benedict XV has been often studied through the lenses of
Vatican diplomacy deployed throughout the years of World War I with a particular
focus on Europe. Agnes de Dreuzy has shifted the attention to the Middle East,
presenting a work on a topic rarely discussed and proposing a positive view of Pope
Benedict XV, but, more importantly, showing the agency of Catholic institutions
in the Middle East. The Holy See and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East is
organized in two main parts and divided into eight chapters. De Dreuzy has relied
on a large body of material coming from the Vatican Archives and other Vatican
institutions; if on the one hand this is indeed the real strength of this work, on the
other hand the absence of non-Vatican material raises a number of questions about
the analytical solidity of the author’s arguments.
Geographically confined with the borders of Greater Syria—today’s
Lebanon, Syria, Palestine-Israel, and Jordan—the first part of the book deals with
the Vatican and Catholic interests in the prewar and war times. The first two
chapters set the context, discussing Pope Benedict XV and his attempt to stop the
war, and Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. In the long chapter dedicated to
wartime foreign policy, De Dreuzy suggests that Benedict XV was promoting a
stronger union with the local Catholic churches in order to protect Catholic interests in the region. Though this is indeed well proven by the sources used by the
author, questions remain unanswered in relation to the reaction of the local
churches. While discussing the protection of clergy and properties, the narrative
does not offer any hint of the conditions of the local population—a few pages are
dedicated to humanitarian assistance, but for the most part this is a debate about
the competition between Catholic and Protestant institutions. While the first part
of this work is certainly interesting and offers the Vatican perspective of the
Middle Eastern wartime events, the omission of some crucial secondary sources
and more importantly of other archival materials weakens the overall argument
and unintentionally seems to reinforce the view of a general lack of Vatican understanding of the region.
The second part is dedicated to the postwar era covering the years from 1917
to 1922. De Dreuzy has brought to general attention the apostolic letter Maximum

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Illud showing how this document radically changed the role of the Catholic Latin
Church in the Middle East as formation of local clergy, respect of local cultures,
and end of missionary nationalism were made a priority; nevertheless it is important to say that many in the Church disapproved of this approach. De Dreuzy then
suggests that Benedict XV in some way anticipated the decolonization era, though
it may not be too far-fetched, there is not much evidence supporting this. The two
chapters dedicated to the Holy See and its relations with Syria and Palestine are
indeed interesting but, as mentioned earlier, the lack of local or other international
sources and a limited choice of secondary readings have reduced the analytical value
and potential of this work. For instance, when discussing the Holy See and Zionism, it is immediately apparent that Vatican sources alone cannot answer the multitude of questions that may be asked on such a significant topic.
The Holy See and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East is indeed a welcome
contribution, one that shows the amount of work that still needs to be done in
order to understand the formation of the modern Middle East. De Dreuzy should
be praised for her work in the Vatican Archives and the new perspective offered to
readers and scholars: which is one step more in the right direction.
University of Limerick

ROBERTO MAZZA

Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II. By Jay P Corrin. (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. x, 523. $49.00 paperback. ISBN
978-0-268-02310-2.)
We English Catholics are well-trained in the art of keeping our heads down.
Perhaps it is the result of a long-history of state persecution of Catholics after our
home-grown Reformation in the sixteenth century. Or that most of us (a good 90 per
cent) can trace our roots back to more recent immigrant families, mostly Irish, and
therefore feel in some hard-to-define way that we are still outsiders, not quite as thoroughly English as our brothers and sisters in the established Church of England.
It is, granted, nowadays more of a collective memory than anything tangible,
but we are still a minority faith (fewer than ten per cent of the population, even by
the most optimistic estimates) and so are pleasantly surprised when anyone takes us
as a subject of serious study, as Professor Jay P. Corrin of Boston University has
done. He charts the troubled relationship in the 1960s among the Catholic hierarchy, the domestic Catholic press, and what he calls the “Catholic New Left,” a
small number of progressives, inspired by Vatican Council II to campaign to make
their local Church more outward-looking and socially and politically involved.
It is a story that is still very much within living memory, and several of the key
players—notably Terry Eagleton, the prominent academic and public intellectual—
are quoted extensively. And, as a tale of engaged, passionate lay Catholics, inspired
by gospel values, struggling against institutional apathy and clerical conservativism,
it is lively and will have strong echoes in other parts of the Catholic world.

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Indeed, Professor Corrin’s account of a group of progressive Catholics, some
left-leaning and attracted to Marxism, gathered around the Cambridge-based publication Slant in the middle and late 1960s, left me lamenting that such activism is
today once more lacking in our typically cautious, heads-down English Catholic
Church. For many of the leading lights of Slant ultimately either left, or found
themselves pushed to the very margins.
For some—especially the priests, monks, and nuns among their number—
disillusionment with the institution was mixed with a vocation to marriage. The
best-known example was that of Charles Davis, arguably the only theologian on
these shores at the time on a par with the great conciliar minds of continental
Europe. When Davis announced in December, 1966, he was leaving the Catholic
Church because he could no longer accept its claim to authority, he made frontpage headlines in the secular press. Some even hoped his defection might prompt
a revolution in English Catholicism. As it was, it fizzled out. Davis married, disappeared to teach in North America, and was largely forgotten by the resolutely
business-as-usual English Church by the time he returned home late in life, once
more attending the sacraments before his death in 1999.
There is much to admire in Professor Corrin’s painstakingly-researched
account, not least the invitation to recover and reconsider such names as that of
Davis and his close collaborators. And there is a particular interest in seeing how a
government measure—the 1944 Education Act which brought the Catholic
Church’s high-achieving secondary schools into the state-funded system—produced a whole new generation in the 1950s and 1960s of working-class, highlyeducated young lay Catholics, intellectually light years ahead of their bishops.
When these young idealists got caught up not only by the spirit of Vatican II
but also by the parallel political upheavals of the 1960s, symbolized by the anti-war
movement and the campaign against nuclear weapons, it proved to be a heady
cocktail. The historian Adrian Hastings, a fellow traveller, remarked of the Slant
circle, that they were “intellectual Beatles.”
One of the consequences of its introspection is that the English Church has
more than its fair share of idiosyncrasies, and on occasion Professor Corrin can
miss the nuances. He lumps together G.K. Chesterton and Graham Greene, for
instance, as part of a group of writerly converts to Catholicism, when their attitude
to the faith could not have been more different. And he quotes waspish comments
by the journalist Auberon Waugh, son of the novelist and convert, Evelyn Waugh,
as if they should be taken at face value, ignoring the younger Waugh’s habit of
saying the opposite of what he thought in an effort to stir up controversy.
More broadly, this is a book that requires persistence. Corrin’s prose can be
heavy and occasionally muddy, while his approach to structure is often to circle
round and round a subject before finally grasping it. But those who stick with it will
be blessed with rich rewards.
London, England

PETER STANFORD

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Galen: Wege und Irrwege der Forschung. By Joachim Kuropka. (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. 2015. Pp. 457. €29,90 paperback. ISBN 978-3-402-13153-4.)
On October 9, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI beautified Cardinal Clemens
August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster (1933–1946). The Church singled out
Galen for his piety and for his defense of Catholicism and Catholic morality in the
face of National Socialism. Though there is great support in and outside Germany,
especially in the Münster diocese, for Galen’s cause of sainthood, a significant
number of individuals, historians and non-historians alike, have challenged his
worthiness for such a distinguished honor. Joachim Kuropka, professor emeritus of
modern European history at the University of Vechta, cannot, however, be counted
among this number. For almost four decades, Kuropka has defended Galen’s honor
by refuting the many charges made by his critics. In his latest collection, “Galen:
Truths and Errors of Research,” Kuropka assembles twenty-six of his lectures and
articles, spanning the years 1989-2011, which examine Galen’s life and ministry
from a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. While there is significant overlap of
content, there is much to be gleaned from the evidence presented.
Kuropka argues that the majority of Galen’s critics have centered upon what
the bishop did not do rather than what he did. For him, such individuals suffer
from presentism and thus fail to comprehend the significant challenges Galen and
the Church faced under National Socialism. In particular, his tone is repeatedly
critical, even dismissive of many of his peers, especially Beth Griech-Polelle (Bishop
von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism [New Haven, 2002]), whom
he accuses of passing judgment on Galen through an “American self-assurance of
moral superiority” (p. 236). Kuropka observes that “it is always dangerous” for an
historian to “declare what contemporaries of seventy or eighty years ago should
have done” (p. 237). Rather, he suggests, historians must ask what actually could
have been done under the circumstances.
Throughout the essays, Kuropka endeavors to reveal what Galen actually did
to challenge National Socialism’s encroachment upon Münster’s Catholic milieu.
Already in November, 1933, only fifteen days after his enthronement as bishop of
Münster, Galen protested state intrusion in religious education. In his Easter letter
of March, 1934, Galen challenged the state’s “brutal force” as it “trampled over” the
legal rights of German citizens (p. 224). In the summer of 1941, Galen also spoke
against the Gestapo’s excessive force and the state’s euthanasia program through
bold, decisive sermons for which he will always be remembered. Yet, despite setting
the facts straight about what Galen did, Kuropka also attempts to convince his
readers that Galen spoke out for Jews. Here his argument does not convince. Even
Kuropka himself admits that the extant documents cannot offer us definitive evidence of Galen’s record in behalf of German Jews. There is evidence that Galen did
financially assist a few German-Jewish families and indirect evidence that after
Kristallnacht he issued a directive to his clergy encouraging them to pray publicly
for Jews. Yet, Kuropka’s efforts to persuade the reader that, in 1938, Galen instituted a catechetical campaign to refute the National Socialist’s racial ideology fall

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flat, especially in the face of the evidence presented by Ulrike Ehret in a 2010 article
in European History Quarterly (pp. 35–56).
Still there is much to learn from this collection, notwithstanding Kuropka’s
inability to take seriously the research of other historians, which centers upon the
limitations of Galen’s protests in the face of the persecution and murder of European Jews. This will lessen the impact of his insightful work. Kuropka also does not
convincingly address Galen’s nationalism. Even Walter Adolph, an avowed opponent of the Nazi regime, a priest of the Berlin diocese, and chancery advisor to
Konrad von Preysing, the bishop of Berlin, had doubts about Galen’s allegiances.
In December, 1937, Adolph wrote in his journal: “It is very difficult to have complete insight into Clemens August [von Galen]. We suspect that he does have an
affinity for the National Socialist system, after all” (Geheime Aufzeichnungen aus dem
nationalsozialistischen Kirchenkampf 1935–1943, Ulrich von Hehl, ed. [Mainz:
Matthias-Grünewald, 1987], p. 201). Clearly, a definitive study of Bishop Galen is
still to be fully researched and set down in writing.
Stonehill College

KEVIN P. SPICER, C.S.C.

Giuseppe Dossetti e le Officine bolognesi. By Paolo Prodi. (Bologna: Società editrice il
Mulino. 2016. Pp. 281. €24,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-15-26352-0.)
Paolo Prodi died on December 16, 2016, at the age of eighty-four. He taught
modern history, focusing mainly on the Counter-Reformation era, at universities
in Italy and abroad and served as rector of the University of Trent. He also served
as a deputy in the Italian Parliament’s eleventh legislature in the 1990s and was
widely known beyond academia as the brother of Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
Giuseppe Dossetti e le Officine bolognesi is something of a memoir or perhaps a personal history of a place and an era, Bologna, particularly scholarly Bologna, in the
1950s and 1960s, and heavily influenced by a man, Giuseppe Dossetti, the Christian Democratic politician-turned-priest. Prodi will not, he declares, engineer a
“general reconstruction,” but rather only provide “a few plugs” to the story (p. 98).
Prodi delivers a personal story about his scholarly development in postwar Italy,
where he struggled to develop a viable dissertation subject and negotiate that decision
with his supervisors, particularly Hubert Jedin and Delio Cantimori. Prodi needed to
justify his choice of Reformation-era Italy, focusing on the diocese of Bologna. Most
graduate students should recognize and appreciate this saga. Prodi weaves his personal account into politics and the foundation of what is now known as the John
XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies. From its start in the early 1950s the institution reflected the personality of its founder, Dossetti, a scholar, World War II
Resistance leader, Catholic politician, and, later, priest. Would this “workshop” (officina), called initially the Center for Documentation (Centro di documentazione), be a
place of scholarship or one of prayer and reflection? To what extent would it be connected to the University of Bologna? Prodi attributes the spring of 1955 as the beginning of major changes at the Center. In May Bologna’s archbishop, Cardinal Gia-

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como Lercaro, pushed Dossetti to launch a bid in upcoming communal elections,
hoping to get a Christian Democrat on the city council and challenging the city’s
popular Communist mayor, Giuseppe Dozza. Dossetti reluctantly acquiesced, an act
of submission that Prodi bitterly condemns as “contrary to the freedom of the Christian layman” (p. 65). Predictably, when the elections occurred the following year
Dossetti lost and he eventually abandoned politics and entered the priesthood, distancing himself more and more from the institute that he founded. Others, such as
the historian Giuseppe Alberigo took up most of the task of running it. Prodi continues the story through the Second Vatican Council, which he remembers as an
“adventure” and the most exciting time in the Center’s history. For young scholars it
opened new terrain for study, particularly in the areas of Scripture and religious history. By the end of the Council, furthermore, Dossetti had returned to the field, and
the organization morphed into the Center for Documentation – Institute for Religious Sciences. Although the Second Vatican Council ultimately disappointed Dossetti and Prodi, the subsequent years witnessed impressive scholastic accomplishments until 1972 which Prodi considers to have been the “apex” of the institute’s
influence. The narrative largely ends at that point although Prodi goes on to conclude
with a section devoted to passages from Dossetti or about him.
The University of Scranton

ROY DOMENICO

The Vatican «Ostpolitik», 1958–1978. Responsibility and Witness during John XXIII
and Paul VI. Edited by András Fejérdy. [Bibliotheca Academiae Hungariae,
Roma, Studia 5.] (Rome: Viella editrice libreria. 2015. Pp. 271. €32.00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-6728-582-2.)
The relationship between the Vatican and the Eastern European Communist
regimes during the 1960s and 1970s has been a topic vehemently discussed but
rarely studied sine ira et studio. The most controversial aspect of this relationship
has been a complex of diplomatic meetings, discussions, agreements, and their
ramifications in various countries under Communist rule, often subsumed as “Vatican Ostpolitik.” The very term goes back to West Germany’s diplomatic engagement since Willy Brandt aimed at finding a modus vivendi with Communist
regimes in Europe within the limits set by the Cold War confrontation.
Among the most hotly debated problems related to Vatican Ostpolitik are
those related to its effects on the Communist regimes and the Catholics who lived
under their rule: Did the Ostpolitik of Rome, did the efforts of Cardinal Agostino
Casaroli as the main diplomat entrusted with the delicate diplomatic task in Eastern Europe by Paul VI, favor in the end only the Communist regimes by raising
their international prestige and their national position while the oppressed
churches and believers were betrayed? Or were those negotiations with the Communist governments, as Casaroli claimed, the only possible way to solve urgent pastoral problems in an atmosphere of understanding? Until today, these questions are
debated, often even mixed with the other great controversy about the effects of the
Second Vatican Council.

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From the perspective of historiography one could conclude that while
debates in general could stimulate further research, in this case, the polarization
and formation of extreme positions on this main question have until recently
almost paralyzed historical research. Furthermore, the complexity of the historical problem and questions of Vatican Ostpolitik require broad and intensive international co-operation of researchers of the history of the Vatican, the Soviet
Union, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the United States—to name
only the most important actors in this global drama. Finally, half a century after
the most intensive phase of Casaroli’s diplomatic mission, both international cooperation and new various scholarly approaches are beginning to appear on the
horizon. Independently of each other, two new compilations have seen the light
most recently: Apart from the volume under review, Piotr Kosicki has edited the
book Vatican II behind the Iron Curtain (The Catholic University of America
Press, 2016) which studies the participation of a number of Eastern European
bishops in the Council.
András Fejérdy’s edited volume The Vatican «Ostpolitik», 1958–1978, based on
a 2014 conference at the Hungarian Academy of Rome, is a ground-breaking new
book that every scholar who is interested in subjects like Vatican diplomacy, the
role of religion during the Cold War, or the history of Catholics in Europe during
the 1950s and 1960s has to consult. The book offers so many new insights, highlights new, completely forgotten, or rather: never even considered events, personalities, documents, and archives, that, without exaggeration, it will change the
course of historiography in this particular field.
The thirteen collected essays—most of which are (not always good) translations—are divided into three groups: general diplomatic studies on the Vatican, the
Soviet Union, and Austria (Introduction, Pál Hatos, Roberto Morozzo della
Rocca, Adriano Roccucci and Thomas Gronier), new sources from Moscow,
Latvia, the United States, and Czechoslovakia (Nadezhda Belyakova, Adam
Somorjai, Inese Runce, Pavol Jakubčin), and four case studies of the negotiations
between the Holy See and Communist regimes (Fejérdy, Emilia Hrabovec,
Krysztof Strzałka, Roland Cerny-Werner).
The tension between historians who argue that Casaroli’s mission was not a
derivation from the long history of Vatican diplomacy and supported by all popes
including John Paul II (Morozzo della Rocca, Roccucci) and those who still believe
that it was naïve to negotiate with the Communist regimes (Hatos) can still be felt.
However, Hatos’ fascinating review of the “Cultural context of the Vatican’s Ostpolitik” rests on an exaggerated dichotomy between West and East and between
Pius XII and John XXIII, and it reduces Catholicism in Eastern Europe to nationalism. Gronier discusses Austria as a neutral country between East and West that
had a strong interest to contribute to an improvement of relations between both
sides of the Iron Curtain, and Cardinal Franz König, the Archbishop of Vienna,
became one of the most important messengers from the Pope to Eastern Europe,
in a time when Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was also engaged in bringing

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politicians from both camps together, also drawing from an older Central European mission of the country. Three chapters highlight the importance of new available primary sources, mostly from Communist archives of the former Soviet Union:
Belyakova analyzes Soviet studies of Vatican policies, and how they, within very
strict ideological boundaries, changed over time. Somorjai, O.S.B., studies, based
on primary sources related to Cardinal Mindszenty during his time in the United
States Delegation/Embassy in Budapest, various ideas and strategies among American diplomats. Jakubčin provides insights into the thinking of the Czechoslovak
Secret Services. A very exciting, although also very problematic source, the diaries
of Cardinal Julijans Vaivods of Riga (Estonia), are presented by Runce, who shows
how important the “softspoken” cardinal was, probably the most influential
Catholic bishop in the Soviet Union, who wanted to change “the hearts of human
beings,” that is, the Communists he negotiated with, when the Communist regime
seemed to be unchangeable. Did his conciliatory approach, his constant dialogue
with Communist functionaries lead to improvements for the oppressed Catholics
in contrast to the stubborn resistance of some older clergy? Or did the Latvian cardinal profit from the decline of the Soviet empire? His diaries offer fascinating
insights, as Runce shows, but have to be studied critically when new sources on the
fate of the Catholic Church in Latvia will (hopefully) be available one day.
The other four studies in the book are case studies: Fejérdy compares the
negotiations of Casaroli with Budapest and Prague, emphasizing a number of similarities in the strategy and aims of the Communist governments beyond the very
different atmosphere of negotiations (“almost cordial” in the Hungarian, “intransigent” in the case of Czechoslovakia). He concludes that while Moscow co-ordinated the activities of both countries’ diplomats, they had “substantial freedom to
shape their policies” (p. 206). At the time, it seemed as if the Communist governments gained much in the field of international recognition and legitimation of
their regimes while the Vatican could only hope that the specter of national
churches was banned. The case studies by Hrabovec (negotiations with Czechoslovakia, a very complex situation), Stzalka (1974 Polish-Vatican Agreement), and
Cerny-Werner (Casaroli’s visit to East Berlin, 1975) further contribute to a better
understanding of the ramifications of Vatican Ostpolitik.
ÁRPÁD VON KLIMÓ

The Catholic University of America

AMERICAN
In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783. By
Mark A. Noll. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 431.
$29.95. ISBN 978-0-19-026398-0.)
The Bible, according to the eminent religious historian Mark A. Noll, is by
far “the single most widely read text, distributed object, and referenced book in all
of American history” (p. 1). In the Beginning Was the Word is a sweeping, yet
nuanced, “public history” of that book in America, from the first European encoun-

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ters with the New World through the War for American Independence. Its focus
is on the Bible’s use for “political, imperial, and national purposes” (p. 5). This is
an ambitious project, given that Christianity and its sacred text are thoroughly
intertwined with the narrative of American history.
Noll begins his richly textured and well documented volume with a brief prelude on the first Bibles in the New World brought by Catholic explorers and priests.
What follows is mostly a Protestant story. The first three chapters examine the
place and critical role of the Bible—specifically the vernacular Bible—in European
Reformation culture and Protestant theology. The Protestant notion of the “priesthood of all believers” diminished the role of the Church and its priests as mediators
between God and man and made it essential for believers to have access to the
Bible, which Protestants regarded as authority in all matters of Christian faith and
practice, in a language they could read and understand. Noll then turns his attention in the remaining chapters to the Bible in Britain’s North American colonies,
with chapters on the Bible in New England’s Puritan colonies, mid-seventeenthcentury challenges to these Puritan Bible commonwealths, the Bible in an age of
religious awakening, the interaction between the Bible and “the population that
Christendom had enslaved” (p. 208), and the status of the Bible in a mid-eighteenth-century world shaped by the Enlightenment’s expanding influence. The
final two chapters examine the complicated rhetorical uses of and appeals to Scripture by opposing sides during the revolutionary era.
Noll emphasizes that, inherent in Protestant theology, each believer is authorized not only to read God’s Word but also to interpret the Scriptures as led by the
Holy Spirit. Thus, even though Protestants followed the Bible “above all other
human authorities” (p. 2), they were often deeply divided on how to interpret
Scripture and apply it to the concerns of this world. At one extreme within this tradition, Noll observes, there were ardent “biblicists,” such as the early New England
Puritans, who “questioned any authority except the Bible,” and at the other extreme
there were those who accepted authorities other than the Bible so long as they “did
not contradict Scripture” (p. 10). The Bible was at times invoked as explicit authority in matters regarding social order, economic life, and political principle, and at
other times it “operated in the background” (p. 15) to affirm, justify, and sanctify
principles and practices derived from extrabiblical sources. Noll recounts and amply
illustrates the changing influence of biblicism at various times and places and
among selected sects in the colonies.
Far too often, Noll opines, historians have recognized the ubiquity of the
Bible in American history “but have treated it as wallpaper, simply a backdrop for
more important objects of attention” (p. 19). In the Beginning Was the Word documents the Bible’s expansive influence on American public life and culture, revealing that the story of the Bible in America is, at once, the story of America. With
a focus on the Bible’s contributions to public life, Noll engagingly chronicles the
establishment of colonies and building of an empire, religious awakenings and a
revolution that gave birth to a nation, and passionate debates about slavery and the

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treatment of Native Peoples. This thoughtful, well-crafted study places the Bible
in the midst of America’s unfolding story, greatly enriching our understanding of
that story.
American University

DANIEL L. DREISBACH

Finding God in Solitude: The Personal Piety of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) and Its
Influence on His Pastoral Ministry. By Donald S. Whitney. (New York: Peter
Lang. 2014. Pp. vii, 178. $81.95. ISBN 978-1-4331-2444-0.)
There seems to be an endless supply of books on Jonathan Edwards. Ever
since the Harvard historian Perry Miller’s 1949 biography of the American minister and theologian, there has been a revived interest in the academy on Edwards,
leading to an increasing number of journal articles, dissertations, and published
books that appear annually. Edwards has been examined from nearly every possible
vantage point, from George Marsden’s award-winning Yale University Press biography in 2003 to Gerald McDermott and Michael McClymond’s 750-page tome
on The Theology of Jonathan Edwards published by Oxford University Press in 2012.
In addition to the interest generated by historians and theologians, Edwards has
been studied through the lens of psychology, literature, and pastoral experience.
With so many books available on Edwards, one has to wonder if there is any aspect
on the great American thinker that has not been explored. In Finding God in Solitude, Donald Whitney contends that Edwards’s piety has received scant attention
from scholars, arguing that the American minister’s personal spirituality was the
center of his ministry as a pastor and writer.
Whitney’s monograph is organized into three main chapters along with a
lengthy introduction and conclusion. Much of the first chapter is a rehashing of the
biographical details of Edwards’s life supplied by Marsden and other historians,
including Edwards’s conversion experience, his installation as a pastor of the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, his role as a revivalist during
the Great Awakening, his move to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as a missionarypastor to Native Americans, and his untimely death in 1758 shortly after becoming
the president of a college that would later be renamed Princeton University. There
are a host of secondary-source quotations of mundane information throughout this
initial section that should have been paraphrased, and there is not much in the way
of new information or new insight on Edwards’s life. Furthermore, although Whitney’s book was published in 2014, he somehow missed the latest scholarship provided by Ava Chamberlain on Edwards’s ancestors in her brilliant 2012 book on his
paternal grandmother entitled The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle, as well as important
details on the most popular book that Edwards wrote that is developed in John
Grigg’s 2009 monograph, The Lives of David Brainerd. There are also some glaring
deficiencies in Whitney’s descriptions of Edwards’s publications. For instance, he
makes the mistake of calling the 1738 Boston publication of A Faithful Narrative
the “second edition,” when it fact it was the third edition of that book, following
on the heels of two earlier editions published in London and Edinburgh.

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Where Whitney’s monograph shines is in the last two chapters, devoted to
Edwards’s personal piety and pastoral ministry. Whitney explains in fascinating
detail how the Bible was the hinge on which Edwards’s piety turned. All Edwards’s
spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer, fasting, solitude, and journaling,
were formed out of his understanding of scripture. Edwards expected that his congregation should practice all the same disciplines of piety that he completed on a
regular basis, relenting only on the amount of time that he expected each person to
be able to devote toward these activities. The difficulty that Edwards had in transferring his expectations of piety to his congregation in Northampton is one of the
major reasons why he was ultimately fired by his church in 1750 and forced to move
to the remote frontier village of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, until being installed
as the college president at Princeton in 1758.
For those interested in understanding Edwards’s piety, Whitney’s book will be
essential reading. Putting aside the introduction and first chapter, the second and
third chapters offer deep insight into the relatively untapped field of Edwards’s
spiritual practices.
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

JONATHAN M. YEAGER

Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. By Kathryn
Gin Lum. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp. xviii, 310. $29.95.
ISBN 978-0-19-984311-4.)
Studies of American demonology are nearly as commonplace as the idioms
they aim to interpret. In a fraught time, there is nonetheless room for scholarship
that not only addresses fresh archives or renders the known elegantly but also clarifies and illumines. Kathryn Gin Lum’s superb monograph accomplishes each of
these objectives and is among the more compelling historical analyses published in
recent years. Looking to the early republic, Lum aims to show how “[t]he belief
that one’s own eternal safety was tied to the sins of others . . . invested Americans
in the welfare of their peers at home and abroad” (p. 233). This attention to interdependency and intersubjectivity, as well as to the fluidity of hellfire discourses, is
the chief distinguishing feature of this work.
Much scholarship focused in this area tends to concentrate on the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, scrutinizing the perhaps improbable longevity of these
tropes. Lum’s earlier chronological focus not only provides historical balance to the
literature but, more importantly, shows that fears of damnation were constitutive
of American identities all along. During each phase of her narrative, Lum focuses
not just on the geographic and demographic reach of the discourses but on their
fluidity. In the book’s first phase, Lum maps the discourse’s production and dissemination by preachers and theologians whose profound disagreements over issues
like free will, social engagement, and heresy exemplify the interpretive range that is
Lum’s concern. She convinces that political will-formation in the early republic—
in which “fear of the sovereign could be replaced by fear of God” (p. 29)—

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depended on these categories, eliding self-discipline with self-creation. In her reading of evangelical discourse—ripe with fears of atheism and declension—she
scrupulously avoids social control reductionism without abandoning a focus on
political order. Lum is attentive to the rise and fall of damnation rhetoric, tracing
the social implications of its diminution as carefully as the needs that shape its coalescence in print culture, sermons, proselytization efforts, and associational networks that debated techniques and outcomes alike.
This very fluidity, Lum contends, is what made for such close interleavings of
hellfire discourse with new religions, social reform, and national concerns alike.
Some of Lum’s most compelling work documents just these intersections, as with
her tracing of the national and global imaginaries produced via missionary activity
(the settling of frontiers always looked to “heathens” as justification) and to debates
about gender and racial difference (there is a marvelous reading of guidebooks
explaining gender and family roles). In one of the most fascinating sections, Lum
shows that hellfire language was central to discourses of religion and mental
health/insanity (p. 117). While Lum’s reading of slavery and the Civil War does
not possess quite the same creativity as the rest of her book, her broad investigation
of new religions and religious fusions—from Handsome Lake to Mormons to Swedenborgianism—is fresh and innovative.
It is an extremely impressive book, one that challenges scholarly and cultural
conceptions of the unidirectionality of hellfire discourse. Through rigorous archival
work, well-chosen themes and exemplars, and vivid writing, Lum produces a broad
new look at the nineteenth century that is attentive to the lived world of practitioners, not just to idea, and is alive with abiding tensions and blurred boundaries.
North Carolina State University

JASON BIVINS

Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the
English Atlantic, 1630–1690. By Antoinette Sutto. [Early American Histories.] (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 259. $39.50.
ISBN 978-0-8139-3747-2.).
Dr. Antoinette Sutto offers an English Atlantic history of seventeenth-century Maryland. She surveys the complicated relations between Maryland politics
and religion and the English state. Sutto uses religion as a means “to integrate the
disjointed events” of the seventeenth century. This is the story of the long, awkward
negotiations between the needs of the expanding English state, early modern confessional politics, and the peculiarities of the little Maryland colony. The Calverts,
who imposed no religious tests to vote and did not establish a state church, made a
“profoundly political and profoundly controversial move.” This overturned an
entire edifice of English assumptions about loyalty, law, royal power, and political
order (pp. 2, 3, 6–7).
The Calvert charter created an anomaly within the emerging seventeenth-century English empire. The charter was less problematic than the Catholic religion of

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the proprietors. Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore was too far out of step
with developments transpiring in England since the Restoration of Charles II in
1660. His allegiance to Catholicism and his lack of political wisdom led to the loss
of many of his charter rights. Catholic-dominated, Protestant-inhabited Maryland
did not fit the prevailing norms of the empire. In the end, the English government
restored the family’s proprietary rights only after they abandoned their religion.
Loyalist Protestants & Dangerous Papists does not celebrate Maryland’s religious toleration/freedom. Rather, it was a concept that entangled Maryland in a
long argument about religion, loyalty, and the state. Sutto assumes that this toleration in the early 1600s was not a principled withdrawal from a long and bloody
confessional struggle but an expedient move designed to further other motives (primarily family fortunes).
Protestants, “increasingly brittle,” saw Catholics as papists and servants of the
Pope; their first loyalty was not to the crown. Their ultimate goal was the destruction of Protestantism. The papists, greedy, wicked, and deluded, put the interests
of their religion first. They threatened the English government and the established
church (pp. 27-28). In England, Protestants feared James II’s Catholicism and his
strong ties to European powers; in Maryland, Protestants feared possible proprietary
alliances with hostile Indian nations.
To what degree were papists “Dangerous” and to whom? How much credibility
should the malicious and paranoid fears of “Loyal Protestants” be given? From the
1630s to the 1690s, but increasingly after 1670, Maryland Protestants took up their
poisoned pens to attack the proprietors, their religion, and their charter. After
noting that anti-Catholicism was a powerful destabilizing force, Sutto offers a compendium of the rumors and innuendos circulated by the Baltimores’ confessional
and political enemies. She does not verify the veracity of rumors that thrived on a
lack of information and the need to see evil human agents at work. These rumors do
not merely describe events; they also create them. The overthrow of the Catholic
Calvert “regime” (the term most frequently used for Maryland government) was less
the fault of what the leaders did, and more from what they did not do.
The third Lord Baltimore does not seem to fit the role of a dangerous papist.
Selfish, inept, and insensitive to the needs of the increasing numbers of Protestants
in Maryland, he played his cards badly. Charles seemed oblivious to the changes
swirling around him. He stood on his charter privileges when that was dangerous
position. This, more than other factors, opened the proprietorship to attack.
Charles Calvert lacked the political skills his father had demonstrated.
Charles’ interventions in Maryland politics fueled the already high tensions within
his colony and frustrated imperial leaders. Most likely, the loss of his colony came
as a surprise to the third and last Catholic Lord Baltimore.
Marquette University (Emeritus)

JOHN KRUGLER

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Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1 9 2 0 s. By
Mark Paul Richard. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
2015. Pp. x, 253. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-62534-189-1.)
Taking its title from the declaration of F. Eugene Farnsworth, King Kleagle
of Maine, that “this is not a Catholic nation” (p. 23), Mark Paul Richard’s new history of the Ku Klux Klan in New England is a useful addition to the literature. This
is, as Richard writes, a regional story of national phenomena, and the book persuasively illustrates how the regional mechanics of the New England Klan impact our
understanding of the organization as a whole.
For Richard, the story of the Klan in New England is the story of contemporary Catholic power. Catholic political and social muscle was evident both in the
conspiratorial fears that drew bigots to join the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire
and in the fight against the hooded band. Passionately defending the importance
of Catholic resistance for the ultimate decline of the Klan of the 1920s, Richard
risks overstating his case, particularly when he also provides vivid examples of the
Klan’s collapse as self-created. In Connecticut, for example, the Klan was destabilized not by external opposition but by leadership contests that led to secession and
competition from new offshoots of the organization.
Richard proclaims the importance of a “stand that was firm and consistent yet
not overly combative” (p.34) in defeating the Invisible Empire in Maine; yet that
resistance was insufficient to prevent the election of the Klan-backed Republican
Ralph Brewster as governor. The book is more convincing in its argument for
Brewster’s victory as a model of the Klan’s political engagement and in lauding
Brewster’s opponent, William Pattangall, as an example of principled opposition.
Richard finds a less principled but more effective example of political resistance in
the Irish-Catholic mayor of Boston, James Curley, who had aides secretly light
flaming crosses in an effort to draw public sympathy to his campaign and tie his
Republican opponent to the Klan.
This astute analysis of the Klan’s part in northeastern politics is one of the
major contributions of the book. Richard makes the compelling argument that the
Klan’s success in local politics, both in New England and nationally, was largely the
result of opportunism—waiting to offer an endorsement until almost certain success and then claiming responsibility for the victory. He is also convincing in the
assertion that, in attempting to affiliate themselves with the likely victors, the Klan
largely aligned itself with the Republican Party in New England. In doing so,
Richard argues, Klansmen helped drive ethnic Catholics in the northeast en masse
into the Democratic Party even before Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign.
Beyond politics, Richard highlights Klan violence against Catholics, furthering the recent work of historians like Thomas Pegram to restore the contemporary
controversy to the civic-activist model of Klan history. Richard goes a step further
on this front, arguing that nativism and religious prejudice were more important to
the group’s growth in New England than its functions as social, fraternal, or civic

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organization. This provocative argument is undercut somewhat, however, by the
difficulty of clearly delineating these appeals. Richard’s own absorbing discussion
of the Klan’s fight against parochial schooling in New England demonstrates how
blurred the lines were between the Klan as civic organization and as expression of
religious prejudice. Nonetheless, this is a well-researched and well-written effort to
apply a new lens to the subject, and as such will be of interest to historians of the
Klan and of American Catholicism more generally.
Emory University

FELIX HARCOURT

Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas. By Alan J.
Watt. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press. 2010. Pp. xii, 252.
$24.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-60344-193-3.)
Alan J. Watt addresses the important but neglected theme of Christian faithbased activism within the farm worker social justice movements in California and
Texas from the early twentieth century to the 1970s in this well-informed and
thought-provoking monograph. Watt is senior pastor at the Christ Lutheran
Church of York, Pennsylvania, and his book grew out of a Vanderbilt University
dissertation in church history, but it is not a dry-as-dust celebratory chronicle of
Catholic and Protestant institutional history. Instead, he offers a sympathetic but
not uncritical account of “the roles played by and the interactions among several
Christian traditions in the farm worker movement,” mindful that “human activity
lies at the heart of any meaningful historical narrative” (p.168). His use of this quotation from the late Ferenc Morton Szasz suggests that Watt sees traditions as
embodied and contextualized, and his methodology is accordingly an eclectic mix
of genres. Alongside the now old New Western History, with its attention to the
dynamic interaction of economic and political power with race, class, and gender,
Watt deploys the equally venerable New Labor History, with its goal of rescuing
ordinary working people from “the enormous condescension of posterity” in E.P.
Thompson’s classic formulation. The result is a salutary contribution that features
numerous, and for the most part, unsung priests, ministers, bishops, laymen, laywomen, and their now-forgotten Protestant and Catholic organizations.
Watt begins his study with three chapters on faith-based work with farmworkers in California from 1920 to 1970, followed by two chapters on the Texas
story from 1930 to 1969. Given the relatively more extensive and successful farmworker movement in the Golden State, California is allotted twice as much space
as the Lone Star State; a succinct historical summary of the social and political history of the pre-twentieth-century period is provided for each state, and black and
white illustrations follow each section, six pages of photos from California and five
pages from Texas. Within each of his two state-focused sections, and within each
chapter of each section, Watt demonstrates how institutional history and individual
biography interacted in the evolution of social networks that shaped the farm
worker movement. (Nature also played a role in Texas in the form of Hurricane
Beulah on May 20, 1967.) Readers of this journal will be interested to know that

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Watt goes well beyond familiar figures such as Cesar Chavez and Bishop Robert
E. Lucey, and organizations like the Spanish Mission Band and the Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish-Speaking. He provides a veritable “Who’s Who?” of
Catholic men and women “organic intellectuals”; he appreciates the importance of
“Mexican Devotional Catholicism” in mobilizing support for La Causa; and he
acknowledges the impact of each state’s distinctive historical political culture on the
Catholic Church’s role in deciding whether and how to assist the farmworker
movement in California and Texas.
Watt’s scholarship is thorough. In addition to using the relevant archival collections, which included oral histories, he conducted his own interviews with
movement activists, immersed himself in local and national newspapers and periodicals, and he mastered the extensive scholarly literature. His study adds research
depth and an important comparative dimension to earlier books by Frederick John
Dalton and Marco G. Prouty, and it complements but is not supplanted by more
recently-published books by Frank Bardacke and Miriam Pawel.
San Francisco State University (Emeritus)

WILLIAM ISSEL

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America. By Gretchen
Buggeln. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015. Pp. xxix, 345.
Library cloth, $140.00. ISBN 978-0-8166- 9495-2. Paperback, $40.00. ISBN
978-0-8166-9496-9.)
Gretchen Buggeln is an American Studies scholar who teaches in Christ College at Valparaiso University. She has broad interest in the relationship between the
Christian faith and material world, with a special interest in religious space. The
Suburban Church conveys research into church building projects of three significant
Midwestern architects: Edward D. Dart, Edward A. Sövik, and Charles E. Stade.
Buggeln is especially interested in discovering the socio-cultural influences that
motivated building design choices for suburban faith communities in the postwar
period. Seventy-five faith communities are examined in particular, the majority of
whom are Protestant. The churches examined for Dart and Stade are located primarily in Illinois; most of the churches examined for Sövik are located in Minnesota. At least eighty interviews were conducted by the author between 2005 and
2013, including several with Sövik. One hundred and thirty-nine black and white
photographs are spread through the various chapters.
Buggeln’s analysis is primarily descriptive and is accomplished in eight chapters. Chapter one provides an overview of several important movements at work in
the background during the post-war period. Mention is made of the dramatic
building boom of the mid-twentieth century, fueled by the growth and development of suburbs around major urban centers, yielding numerous new church buildings. She notes the influence of proponents of modernist design in denominational
agencies and among architects (especially through ecumenical activities), favored
(in part) for the rapid construction that could be achieved on a minimal budget.

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Chapter two provides an introduction to the three architects featured in Buggeln’s
research. A brief biographical sketch of each architect is provided conveying the
faith background, architectural education, and establishment of each architect in
relation to church design. Significant buildings and design awards for each architect, such as St. Procopius Abbey, Lisle, Illinois, by Dart, are also noted.
Chapter three outlines the process congregations pursued as they imagined,
planned, and constructed new church buildings. The role of the building committee is described. Frequently a sense of mission (desire for evangelism in the emerging suburb) fostered an urgency to build. Education of the building committee is
examined with visual and written artifacts. Chapter four provides a brief history of
“A-frame” design, a particularly popular building style for Protestants from the
1950s to mid-1960s. The A-frame was especially appealing to smaller congregations with limited funds. Buggeln demonstrates how quickly some modernist styles
rose and fell in popularity. Chapter five provides a deeper examination of the primary worship space. The gradual shift from axial to central plans for worship is
traced in historical context. The metaphor of “family of faith” grew in prominence
as an organizing principle for planning. A desire to build quickly, to remain flexible, and to relate to the contemporary culture influenced design choices. Catholic
and Protestant examples of modernist design from Dart, Stade, and Sövik are featured, with attention to the inclusion of symbol and beauty.
Chapter six features the rationale and process used for designing buildings to
accommodate education and fellowship. Suburban congregations prioritized education and fellowship for both members and the surrounding community. Models
of design from contemporary schools and recreational facilities were used by
churches in seeking relevancy, efficiency, and frugality. Chapter seven provides a
case study of planning for religious life in the suburb of Park Forest, Illinois (as a
new suburb of Chicago). Resident surveys, ecumenical co-operation, and optimism
characterized the location and density of buildings for worship. Seven Christian
and Jewish faith communities are examined. The author investigates connections/
contrasts in building projects and social critiques of suburban spirituality. Chapter
eight provides a concluding commentary on the legacy of postwar suburban design.
Changes in social and religious behavior from the late 1960s forward are highlighted and related to the impetus behind the development of suburban churches.
Racial diversity, generational mobility, religious commitment, and material
integrity are some of the issues noted.
Buggeln provides an important window into the establishment, growth, and
redevelopment of postwar American suburban churches. Her approach is sympathetic and appreciative, honoring the expressions she uncovers in primary and secondary sources. Most, if not all, of the congregations featured were composed
largely of white members. The author is aware of the realities of her context and
approach, but seeks to provide an accurate rendering of the faith life, motivations,
and choices made by these congregations. In a field of study that often features
extraordinary buildings designed by “starchitects,” Buggeln provides insight into

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the thought and workings of more modest architects and congregations. Her
research is thorough, and her book is a welcome addition to a growing understanding of twentieth-century church building.
Judson University

MARK A. TORGERSON

Russell Kirk: American Conservative. By Bradley J. Birzer. (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky. 2015. Pp. vi, 574. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8131-6618-6.)
Russell Kirk (1918-–1994) was one of the three or four most important figures
in the revival of American conservatism after World War II. Although he worked for
Barry Goldwater in 1964 and was a friend of President Reagan in the 1980s, his conservatism was more cultural and literary than political. Political activists on the right
regarded him as an impractical dreamer. Whimsical, mannered, a baroque stylist, he
gathered disciples and admirers at his out-of-the-way home in Mecosta, Michigan.
Bradley Birzer was one of them. He is now the Russell Amos Kirk Professor
of History at Hillsdale College, and there can be no doubt that this admiring, sympathetic, and generous biography is an inside job. He makes the common biographer’s mistake of overestimating his subject’s importance and implies, at times, that
the survival of Western civilization through the grimmest years of the Cold War
depended on Kirk’s wisdom. The upside is that he has enjoyed access to all of Kirk’s
papers and the sympathetic help of Kirk’s family and friends, giving us the fullest
account of his subject’s life hitherto.
Kirk, born in 1918 in Michigan, came of age in the Depression, took an early
dislike to academia during an M.A. program at Duke University, and was drafted
into the army in 1942. Bizarrely, he spent the whole of his four-year enlistment at
a chemical weapons testing station in the Utah desert, hated it, but had plenty of
time for the encyclopedic reading on which his erudition was based. To his own
astonishment the book version of his postwar Ph.D. thesis (from St. Andrews in
Scotland) became a best seller. It was The Conservative Mind (1953), which identified Edmund Burke’s protest against the French Revolution as the fount of
modern conservatism.
Birzer is at his best in tracing the intellectual influences on Kirk, which led him
first to Stoicism and then to a mid-life Catholic conversion. His greatest debts among
the moderns were to Irving Babbitt, Albert Jay Nock, and T. S. Eliot. What made
Kirk troublesome to many of his conservative contemporaries was that he detested
philosophical materialism, and regarded capitalism as hardly better than communism. This belief intensified. As Birzer shows, early editions of The Conservative
Mind paid tribute to libertarianism and praised one of its advocates, Isabel Paterson.
Later editions (there were seven in all) suppressed these passages completely.
Kirk’s name is often linked with that of William F. Buckley, Jr., as postwar
conservative pioneers. They became friends but could hardly have been more different: Buckley was urban, gregarious, combative as a writer and debater, and loved

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to be in the thick of political affairs, whereas Kirk was rural, shy, a loner. Buckley’s
journal National Review, founded in 1955, was irreverent and lively; it brought
together diverse conservative writers from many points of the ideological spectrum.
In its early years Kirk contributed frequent articles, mostly to deplore progressive
education, but he declined to let his name appear on its masthead.
Kirk’s own journal, Modern Age, by contrast, was stuffy and dull, not really
academic but not popular either, a point Birzer cannot bring himself to admit. Kirk
feuded with his co-editor and soon abandoned it, reverting to his preferred option
of working alone. He had abandoned a tenure-track position at Michigan State
University, his alma mater, in 1953 and set out to prove that a sufficiently hardworking individual could make his own way as a writer and lecturer.
He wrote gothic fiction and ghost stories, loved mysteries, tried to make his
home the Mid-Western equivalent of John R. R. Tolkien’s elfish fantasy-land,
Rivendell, and felt a powerful attraction to the non-rational aspects of Catholicism.
Vatican Council II appalled him, particularly its aesthetics. On rebuilding his home
after a fire in 1975, he incorporated many of the discarded furnishings, stained
glass, and statues from a modernized local Catholic Church. Cultivating the image
of himself as a man unsuited to the late twentieth century, he continued to hammer
out his books and correspondence on a typewriter, even when cheap and reliable
personal computers were ubiquitous.
Political conservatism in late twentieth-century America disappointed Kirk:
the failure of Goldwater in 1964 and the rise of neoconservative advisors in the
Reagan-Bush administrations. In his view, America should have returned to its traditional policy of isolationism after the Cold War, not to schemes for world-wide
democratic capitalism. In the 1992 presidential election, by now identified as a
“paleo-conservative,” he campaigned for Pat Buchanan.
Birzer’s indulgent editors at the University Press of Kentucky allowed him to
retain passages that should have been excluded, including a twenty-page digression
on the life and work of T. S. Eliot. Everyone interested in Kirk should read this
book but most will feel tempted to skim and to ask themselves: Was Kirk really
always right and his critics always wrong?
Emory University

PATRICK ALLITT

Refuge in the Lord: Catholics, Presidents, & the Politics of Immigration, 1981–2013. By
Lawrence J. McAndrews. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of
America Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 287. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-81322779-5.)
In this well-researched and interesting book, Lawrence McAndrews closely
investigates the relationship between Catholic leaders’ immigration positions and
presidential policies in contemporary times. The time period McAndrews has

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chosen is one of the most important for understanding significant changes in
immigration policies, from debates preceding the 1986 Immigration and Reform
through post-September 11, 2001, policies on immigration and refugees. Like
Cheryl Shanks’ politico-historical analysis of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act and the
1986 IRCA, McAndrews examines key debates, leaders, divisions, and negotiations leading up to major policies but with an exclusive focus on Catholic leaders
and the opinions of Catholic laypeople. Because the Catholic Church is a key institution in refugee resettlement and in providing aid and pastoral care to immigrants
of all types of legal status, this investigation fills in a crucial gap in the immigration
literature. For scholars of refugee matters, McAndrews’ examination of the beginning of the U.S. refugee program is particularly important as he provides a historically informed analysis of the beginnings of this program and debates surrounding
its expansion from the 1980s onward. In particular, he explores the plight of
Haitians, Cubans, and Central Americans—groups often designated as “economic”
refugees and therefore ineligible for refugee status. However, key leaders in the
Catholic Church contested this designation, attempting to change bureaucratic
rules and legislation on the one hand and calling for churches to offer sanctuary on
the other. The section on sanctuary in this book is in-depth and helps the reader
to understand how refugee policies were forged in this era. This political history is
also relevant today as churches continue to offer sanctuary while higher ranking
Catholic leaders are uncomfortable with what they perceive is a subversion of the
law. McAndrews’ investigation is arguably conservative in that he focuses on religious and political elites and uses language that some find problematic if not biased
(“illegal,” “irregular,” “alien”), even as he problematizes these terms in the conclusion. He also engages in a cost-benefit analysis of immigration that many authors
have decided is irresolvable. Nevertheless, even if these elements of the book are
conservative, the book is rich with historical material; explanation of the debates is
detailed and often nuanced, and the moral arguments are still clear—this is not a
conservatism that whitewashes the past or ignores failures, hypocrisy, or messy situations. The focus on debates and key figures makes the policy story rich and interesting. In the conclusion, McAndrews states that “throughout over three decades
of change and continuity, the Catholic power structure and many of its followers,
by admirably endeavoring to put principle ahead of politics, at times exaggerated
the former at the expense of the latter. The motives of these immigration advocates
were noble…but the results were too often the opposite of what they intended…”
(p. 227). While one could argue that this conclusion was a foregone conclusion,
given his subject material, I would urge the reader to pick up this book—it is a valuable, rich, and significant book that examines a crucial element of political history
and contemporary policy.
DePaul University

KATHLEEN R. ARNOLD

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LATIN AMERICAN
Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico. By Osvaldo F. Pardo. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press. 2015. Pp. x, 237. $70.00. ISBN 978-0-47211962-2.)
This book is about the meaningful role the mendicant orders, Franciscans,
Dominicans, and Augustinians, and the Jesuits played in transmitting ecclesiastical
and secular laws to the Nahuas of New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Educating the Indigenous people of colonial Mexico in matters of morals,
law, and social norms and attitudes toward ecclesiastical and civil authorities proved
to be a challenging task due to the contradictory demands of the two realms, the
religious and secular, upon the indigenous peoples and the missionaries’ conviction
that the Indians needed to be protected from the abuses of the secular authorities.
Mistrusting the influence of the Spanish corpus of laws upon the Nahuas, “The
friars envisioned a community of Christian Indians governed by a notion of justice
that was informed by moral ideas at odds with the moral and social notions underlying the Spanish legal system” (p. 162). Pardo examines the discussion among various secular authorities and clergy about how to educate the Indigenous communities in issues pertaining to the Spanish system of values. His study deals with topics
of possessions, honor, oaths, and punishments, concepts that were at the core of the
Spanish legislation and society. Pardo fleshes out the different, and often contradictory, interpretations of Spanish law in relation to these values, by high
appointees, judges, encomenderos, letrados, and the religious communities. Basing
his book on a vast array of archival documents, bilingual catechisms, ecclesiastical
and secular treatises, legislative treatises, bilingual grammar treatises, historical
accounts, letters, and a rich secondary literature, Pardo has produced a complex and
intriguing cultural study of colonial Mexico. When dealing with issues of honor,
the author provides good examples of the cacophony of voices among different
authorities. While viceroys usually defended the rights of Indians to expose their
grievances before the tribunals, encomenderos accused friars of misguiding Indians
in matters of the Spanish law, empowering them in legal issues, and eroding their
own credibility and reputation. Friars, on the one hand, found it difficult to reconcile Spanish legislation on honor with the indigenous concepts and practice of
honor. As demonstrated by the missionaries’ extensive cultural ethnographic work
in colonial Mexico, those societies had developed their own notions of worth and
fame, and they considered it a mistake to apply to them norms that had been forged
in different contexts and times. On the other hand, legal scholars such as Juan
Solórzano de Pereira, exhibiting his trust in the Spanish law system, wrote that in
the resolution of disputes between Spaniards and Indians, the latter’s condition of
honor should be taken into consideration to decide the penalties to be applied. The
same dissonance is visible in regard to the policies on oaths. Missionaries did not
welcome the teaching of Spanish legislation on oaths in the colonies, because they
served to judge and punish Indigenous people with alien parameters not clearly
understood by them. But after they came to be embedded in everyday life in the
colonies, the friars accepted them as valid judicial instruments.

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167

Pardo’s book provides original interpretations of important cultural aspects of
colonial Mexico. I highly recommend the book to scholars and graduate students
in the fields of history, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies.
University of Memphis

GUIOMAR DUEÑAS-VARGAS

Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between. Murals of the Colonial Andes. By Ananda
Cohen Suarez. [Recovering Languages and Literacies in the Americas.]
(Austin: University of Texas Press. 2016. Pp. xiv, 274. $29.95 paperback.
ISBN 978-1-4773-0955-1.)
Approximately twenty years ago the latest books regarding the Hispanic colonial
mural painting in the Andean context were published: two in Peru in 1993 and a
third one in Bolivia in 1998. These books treated the subject matter in general terms,
and their contributions were the first writings and considerations on Andean colonial
mural painting. In the last two ensuing decades, scholars have written some interesting articles to understand better this important artistic heritage, thus bringing new
perspectives as well as unveiling unknown groups of mural paintings. However, no
one had undertaken the task of synthesizing the scholarship’s progress on the topic
and make it available to a wider audience. Ananda Cohen Suarez’s book has come to
fill this lacuna. In addition, it is the first book in English on the subject, which will
allow a wider readership and ampler knowledge about this peculiar world of forms
and colors produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in the Andes.
Cohen Saurez’s book is not only the first English book on mural paintings from
the colonial period in the Andean area; it is also the only one on the subject published in any language in the last twenty years. Besides, the book presents new ways
of approaching the study of this unique artistic production. Her analysis focuses on
murals conserved in the southern regions of Cuzco, where some of the most striking
examples are found, as the author emphasizes. The images painted on the walls of
the churches of Andahuaylilas, Huaro, Urcos, Pitumarca, Ocongate, or Canincunca
are analyzed in all their complexity, allowing the reader to understand the diversity
of factors that came together in their realization. Themes including the strategies of
evangelization and catechesis, heterodox theological discourses, the weight of cultural practices of pre-Hispanic origin, the social tensions of the colonial Spanish
period, as well as the symbolic value of the material substrate of the paintings are
woven in the pages of this book to enrich understanding of the images in the murals.
Through the study of specific cases, the chapters of the book introduce the reader to
each of the factors that had to intervene in the conception and execution of the
paintings, providing suggestive conclusions and posing new questions.
The work of Ananda Cohen Suarez will allow an effective dissemination of
information on a wall painting tradition of exceptional interest, featuring the sustainable development initiatives that have been implemented in some of the villages
mentioned in the book. Moreover, research on Hispanic colonial art will be
enriched thanks to the repertoire of images and ideas contained in the publication.

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The reader will have in his hands a well-documented book, perfectly updated and
with new ideas about these old images. Its content and form should effectively meet
the demands of the specialists, as well as those of a wider audience. Finally, the
book is capable of easily captivating even a reader who has English as a second language, as is my case.
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
Santiago, Chile

FERNANDO GUZMÁN

The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War. By Gustavo Morello, SJ. (New
York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xviii, 221. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19023427-0.)
Dr. Gustavo Morello is an Argentine, a Jesuit, and a sociologist at Boston College. Morello’s background and training have prepared him to analyze the life of
Catholics during Argentina’s la guerra sucia or “dirty war” (1976–83). The Argentine
military seized power ostensibly to save the nation from the threat of leftist insurgents. During the self-proclaimed Process of National Reorganization, the military
regime and associated paramilitary groups murdered or “disappeared” 30,000 Argentines. Military officials actually boasted of plans to kill 50,000 citizens. The regime’s
barbarism was such that victims were apprehended, tortured, and then dropped,
while still alive, from aircraft into the frigid South Atlantic. Five-hundred young
women gave birth in military jails. The regime slaughtered the new mothers and distributed the infants to military officers and supporters of the regime. The military
ruler’s perverted reasoning was that brutality was required to save Western civilization
and Christianity. The military junta’s first leader, General Jorge Rafael Videla (1976–
81), once declared that “all necessary persons must die to achieve the security of the
country” (Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone [2016], p. 148). The regime especially
identified union organizers and Argentine Jews as threats to national security.
The vast majority of the military regime’s victims were, of course, Argentine
Catholics. More than 100 religious workers were killed, including Enrique
Angelelli, the bishop of La Rioja. Nonetheless, the Argentine Church emerged
from la guerra sucia with a tarnished reputation. No church leader publicly
denounced the regime’s radical evil, and priests collaborated with torturers. By
comparison, heroic prelates, like Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Brazil and Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador, organized resistance to murderous
anti-Communist tyrants. Morello explores these differences by examining the reactions of Argentine Catholics to the abduction in 1976 of five seminarians of the La
Salette order in Córdoba. Also abducted was the director of the seminarians,
Father James Weeks, a U.S. citizen. Pressured by the U.S. embassy in Buenos
Aires, the military subsequently released Weeks. The seminarians, who were suspected of subversion, endured torture but emerged alive, because Weeks and a nun
who witnessed the abduction, Joan McCarthy, who was also a U.S. citizen, organized a campaign on their behalf. Without this intercession, the seminarians would
have been murdered by the military.

BOOK AND FILM REVIEWS

169

The seminarians were not subversives but devoted youth who imbibed in the idealism of Vatican Council II (1962–65) and the bishops’ conference at Medellín (1968).
These committed Catholics were violently opposed by “anti-secular” Catholics who
rejected the concepts of the laity engaging in church work and religious workers pursuing a “preferential option for the poor.” Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI had
allegedly betrayed the faith. In the view of these anti-secular Catholics, like General
Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, the military commander of Córdoba, the Church’s
duty was to uphold traditional hierarchical values. Religious people who worked for
the poor were by definition subversive. General Menéndez has been subsequently sentenced to several life terms by Argentine courts for his crimes against humanity.
Standing between these groups were the “institutional” Catholics, like Bishop Raúl
Primatesta of Córdoba, who probably accepted the new directions in faith but wanted
to preserve the Church’s privileged role in Argentine life. The Church should neither
identify with nor be in opposition to the state. Bishop Primatesta spoke privately to
General Menéndez, but he declined to denounce the general’s savagery.
Morello’s impressive study, which is based on in-depth interviewing and
extensive archival work, may not explain fully the Argentine Church’s failure to
defend human rights. Catholics were presumably divided in other Latin American
countries. Yet, in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere, Catholic leaders
led the resistance to Cold War tyranny.
STEPHEN G. RABE

University of Texas at Dallas

FILM
Silence (2016). A film directed by Martin Scorsese; based on a novel by Shûsaku
Endô; written by Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese; cinematographer Rodrigo
Prieto; editor Thelma Schoonmaker; production companies: Sikelia Productions, Cappa/De Fina Productions, and Cecchi Gori Pictures. 161 minutes.
What is the value of the Scorsese film, Silence, to historians? It faithfully follows Shusaku Endo’s original novel (1966). Historians who seek factual accuracy in
the novel may marvel at Endo’s knowledge of the historical sources if they can overlook some obvious discrepancies. If they cannot, they should simply turn to scholarly works such as George Elison’s Deus Destroyed (1991) on Japanese persecution,
apostasy, and anti-Christian propaganda literature. The value of Silence resides in
the theological/missiological questions, which Endo asked during the Vatican II
era. Space does not permit a detailed analysis of these, but it is sufficient to state
here that the image of a triumphant Christ from the Baroque West did not speak
to the persecuted minority church of seventeenth-century Japan, but the “ugly,”
“worn,” and “trampled down” face of Christ did, and perhaps still does to those persecuted churches in the East today.
I will supply only some information about the European Jesuits that may help
historians appreciate Endo’s and Scorsese’s creativity. Among the four Jesuits in the
story, three are fictional. First, Alexandro Valignano (1539–1606) was not the Vis-

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BOOK AND FILM REVIEWS

itor at the Macau Seminary, who knew the difficult situation in Japan in 1638. It
would have been André Palmeiro (1569–1635). Liam Matthew Brockey’s The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (2014) provides analysis on Palmeiro’s
and his successor Manuel Diaz’s (1560–1639) dealings with Ferreira’s apostasy.
The main character Sebastian Rodrigues and his companion Francisco
Garupe are Endo’s creation. Unlike the storyline, in 1640, no Jesuits landed in
Japan. After the Amakusa-Shimabara uprising, the government’s extreme measures
prevented foreigners from entering the country. The authorities massacred the Portuguese emissaries from Macau upon arrival and cut Iberian trade and diplomatic
ties completely. Despite this, in August 1642, Visitor Antonio Rubino (1578–
1643) led five Jesuits and their assistants to enter Japan. They were immediately
arrested, tortured, and executed in March 1643. A second group of four Jesuits
with their assistants led by Pedro Marquez (1575–1657) was captured in June 1643,
and under torture, all apostatized. Among this group was Giuseppe Chiara (1602–
85), whom Endo used as the model for Sebastian. Unlike the character of Sebastian, Chiara would not have had time before his arrest to visit hidden Kirishitan
(Christian) communities to give the Eucharist. Like Sebastian, the shogunate gave
Chiara a Japanese name, Okada San’emon, kept him in the “Christian Residence”
in Tokyo with his Japanese wife, and employed him as the assistant to the Christian
Inquisitor Inoue Masashige (1585–1661). Chiara wrote some books (no longer
extant) explaining Christianity for the inquisition. Endo’s story ended with a hopeful note, that the apostate Padre Sebastian gives absolution after hearing the confession of Kichijirō, a weak Kirishitan with a history of multiple apostasies, and
remarks, “Even now I am the last priest in this land.” Endo added an appendix,
“Diary of an Officer at the Christian Residence,” for which he modified excerpts
from Sayō yoroku, the actual diary of one of the guards at the Christian Residence.
In these entries, one reads that the government remained suspicious about Kirishitan activities in the Okada household and made some arrests as late as 1676.
Although neither Endo nor Sayō yoroku indicated that Chiara (Okada) kept his
Christian faith until death, Scorsese’s film is suggestive of such, as his wife secretly
slips a Christian icon into Okada’s hands in his cremation barrel.
The dark looming figure of Cristóvão Ferreira (c.1580–1650), an excellent
missionary turned apostate and the Inquisitor’s best instrument Sawano Chūan,
was a true historical person. His activities were also attested in the diaries of the
Captains of the Dutch East India Company, which again Endo modified.
So why go see the movie? The cinematographic beauty of Southern Kyushu is
striking against the gruesome reenactments of torture scenes, stirring historians’
imaginations. The casting of Anglo-featured actors for Southern European missionaries maybe questionable but the film is entertainment, inspiring this historian
to investigate the voices of the more than 20,000 Japanese martyrs, symbolized in
“ugly” “worn-out” Mokichi, Ichizō, Omatsu and Monica, and many Garupes, who
chose to be with them.
Columbia Theological Seminary

HARUKO NAWATA WARD

Report of the Editor
Volume 102 of the journal consisted of 903 pages of articles, essays, book
reviews, brief notices, and the quarterly sections “Notes and Comments,” “Periodical Literature,” and “Other Books Received,” with an additional forty-nine pages
of preliminary material and Index, for a total of 952 pages. Subsidies from authors
and contributions from others made directly to the journal allowed for the addition
of pages above those budgeted. Professor Paul F. Grendler of Chapel Hill, NC
(emeritus of the University of Toronto and a past president of the American
Catholic Historical Association) once again generously made such a contribution.
Of the fifteen regular articles published, one treated a medieval topic, four
early modern European, four late modern European, four American, and two mission history. Two-thirds of their authors came from American institutions, the
other third from Australian, English, Irish, and Italian universities. One Forum
Essay, dealing with a late modern European topic, had contributions by scholars
from Canada, Italy, and the United States. The authors of the Review Article and
Review Essay came from the United States.
In 2016 the journal published 218 book reviews and two brief notices. The
book reviews can be subdivided into the following categories: general and miscellaneous (22), ancient (10), medieval (52), early modern (53), late modern (23),
American (35), Latin American (14), Asian/Australian (5), and African (4). Their
authors came mostly from institutions in the United States (134 or 61%), but those
in other countries were also represented: in England/Ulster (37 or 17%); Canada
and Germany (7 each or 3%); The Netherlands and Scotland (4 each or 2%); Italy
and Switzerland (3 each or 1%), Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Israel, and Spain (2
each or 1%), and one each for Argentina, China (Hong Kong), The Czech Republic, France, Mexico, New Zealand, Tanzania, Ukraine, and Wales. The two brief
notices were by authors at institutions in the United States. Please see Table 1.
The journal received thirty-eight new submissions of articles in 2016. They
came primarily from the United States, but also from Belgium, England (2),
France, Korea, Malta, South Africa, South Sudan, and Spain. Table 2 shows the
current disposition of these submissions. During the year 2016, fourteen articles
accepted mostly earlier were published.
Ms. Katya Mouris continued as the devoted assistant to Msgr. Trisco, who
resumed his primary role as the skillful book editor, while continuing to compile
the sections Periodical Literature and Other Books Received. After nine years of
expert assistance as staff editor Ms. Elizabeth Foxwell has left the journal for a full-

171

REPORT OF THE EDITOR

172

time position elsewhere. She will be much missed and leaves with our deep gratitude for her dedicated service.
NELSON H. MINNICH
Editor

TABLE 1
Book Reviews and Brief Notices Published in 2016.
Area

Winter

Spring

Summer

Autumn

TOTAL

General
Ancient
Medieval
Early Modern
Late Modern
American
Latin American
Far Eastern/ Australian
African
TOTAL

10
5
18
11
7
14
5
0
0
70

4
2
16
15
3
7
4
0
0
51

5
0
13
18
5
9
2
4
2
58

3
3
5
9
8
5
3
1
2
39

22
10
52
53
23
35
14
5
4
218

Brief Notices

1

0

1

0

2

TABLE 2
Manuscripts Submitted in 2016

Area

Rejected
(R) or
Conditionally Withdrawn
Published
Accepted Accepted
(W)
Pending in 2016 TOTAL

Ancient
Medieval
Early Modern
Late Modern
American
Latin American
Far Eastern
Middle Eastern
African
TOTAL

1
3
1

1
1
1
W‒1; R‒6
1
2
1

5

14

2
4
5
3
2
1
1
18

1

1

1
4
8
13
5
2
3
1
1
38

Notes and Comments
ASSOCIATION NEWS
The American Catholic Historical Association will hold its Spring meeting on
April 6–9, 2017 in Berkeley, California. It will be held jointly with the American
Society of Church History. For more informaion about the program, please contact
Randi Walker (rwalker@psr.edu). The ACHA 2018 annual meeting will be held
in Washington, DC, in January 4–7, 2018. Individual and panel proposals on any
aspect of Catholic history should be sent by April 17, 2017. For further information, please consult the Association’s website www.achahistory.org. At the Presidential Luncheon in Denver on January 7, 2017, the following awards were
announced and citations read:
2016 John Gilmary Shea Prize awarded to Katrina B. Olds, University of San
Francisco, for Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain
(Yale University Press, 2015)
In her scintillating Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation
Spain, Katrina B. Olds considers the complex story of a set of “false chronicles” of
the early Christian history of Iberia forged by a Spanish Jesuit in the late sixteenth
century. While accepted as genuine by many, they also aroused suspicions of their
authenticity almost from the time of their “discovery,” and by the eighteenth century
their spurious origin had been demonstrated. Still, the impact of the “false chronicles” endured, and their elements remained embedded in Spanish popular devotion
and religious practice. At first glance, this might appear to be no more than a quirky
historical footnote, but in her skilled telling, Olds connects it to broader themes.
More than simply an episode in Iberian Catholic and Jesuit history, it becomes a fascinating lesson in historiography. In dealing with her subject, the author deftly
examines her Jesuit forger’s skill at mixing fact with fiction to achieve verisimilitude,
as well as his possible motives in composing his texts, and offers intriguing insights
on the broader subject of forgery in the European Christian tradition. Forging the
Past serves as a model of a subtle, imaginatively conceived, and thoroughly engaging
examination of a subject, small in itself, but that allows the author and reader to
explore matters of universal interest and importance.
2016 Harry C. Koenig Prize for Catholic Biography awarded to Franz Posset,
Independent Scholar, for Johann Reuchlin, 1455–1522. A Theological Biography (De Gruyter, 2015)
Dr. Franz Posset (Marquette University Ph.D.) demonstrates a sophisticated
degree of Catholic Studies research and objectivity in Johann Reuchlin, 1455–1522.
173

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

A Theological Biography. In this first biography in English of Reuchlin, Dr. Posset
meticulously and even-handedly approaches a difficult but seminal subject:
Catholic-Jewish relations in the Early Modern European era. He allows the reader
to be immersed into Reuchlin’s Catholic world as the winds of reform and change
begin to gain strength in Western Christendom. A renowned Humanist scholar
and polyglot, Johann Reuchlin was a devoted student of the Hebrew language,
rabbinic literature, and the Hebrew Scriptures. Beginning in 1510, he wrote in
passionate defense of preserving Jewish books and learning. Dr. Franz Posset is
the first in the English-speaking world to utilize extensively the new critical edition of Reuchlin’s correspondence (Johannes Reuchlin Briefwechsel, Stuttgart:
Frommann-Holzboog, 1999–2013), which demonstrates the breadth and depth
in which Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were valued in theological and humanist circles, whether Catholic or Protestant. In this context, Posset sheds new light on
Reuchlin’s achievements as lay theologian to create a uniquely Catholic Cabala.
This theological biography is richly nuanced, deep in scope and vision of a still
relevant topic in Catholic Studies.
2016 Howard R. Marraro Book Prize presented to Andrew Berns for The Bible
and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
In a fascinating recreation of the intellectual world of sixteenth-century Italy,
Andrew W. Berns focuses on the relationship between the Bible and natural history, and how Christian and Jewish doctors at the time were actively engaged in
studying the Bible as both a religious text and a source of scientific and medicinal
knowledge. The book also highlights how Jewish and Christian doctors worked
together and exchanged ideas on matters pertaining to both medicine and religion.
The Peter Guilday Prize for 2016
The Peter Guilday Prize for 2016 is given to Dr. Christopher Riedel of
Boston College for his article “Praising God Together: Monastic Reformers and
Laypeople in Tenth-Century Winchester” which appeared in Volume 102, no. 2
(Spring 2016), 284–317. Using Lantfred’s Translation and Miracles of St. Swithun
(c. 972), Dr. Riedel argued that the cloistered Benedictine monks who replaced the
secular canons as the chapter of Winchester cathedral under St. Aethelwold interacted with the laity who came on pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Swithun to receive
miraculous cures. When these occurred, the monks (no matter what the hour of day
or night) would encourage the laity to join with them in public prayers of thanksgiving, thus modeling for them the proper response for such favors and providing
for them one form of pastoral care. Dr. Riedel places Lantfred’s text in the historical context of contemporary hagiographical accounts of miracles, the cult of saints,
monastic reform, the liturgical services at the three (Old, New, and Nunna-) minsters of Winchester, and the pastoral care of laity. By demonstrating that the monks
were not isolated from the laity, but provided a form of pastoral care, Dr. Riedel
has made an original contribution to the historiography of monastic reform in
Anglo-Saxon England and is thus awarded the Peter Guilday Prize for 2016.

N OTES AND COMMENTS

175

The 2016 John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award presented to Jennifer Binczewski
Washington State University “Solitary Sparrows: Widowhood and the Catholic
Community in Post-Reformation England”
This is an impressive and unique research project and approach to explain the
preservation of the Catholic faith following sixteenth-century Elizabethan reforms.
The innovative methodology, attention to gender and space, as well as the role
widows played in preserving English Catholicism, provide new insights into the survival tactics employed by Catholics after the Church was formally banned in 1559.
The ACHA 2017 Distinguished Scholar Award presented to Professor William
Issel of San Francisco State University
For over thirty-five, William Issel taught at San Francisco State University
(SFSU) in the departments of history, humanities, and urban studies. His scholarship has focused on the complex relationships that comprise urban life in the
United States, especially the West Coast.
Beginning with San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power and Urban Development (UC Berkeley Press, 1987), Issel, along with his SFSU colleague Robert
Cherny, explored the interaction and interconnectedness of competing political
entities in the Bay Area. In a review of this work, one reviewer noted, “By concentrating on political power, the authors reach conclusions that are exciting and controversial. Even if their conclusions must be regarded as tentative, Issel and Cherny
have set the historiographical agenda for studying San Francisco politics. That is a
major achievement.”
In For Both Cross and Flag (Temple University Press, 2010), Issel focused on
city dynamics, including the impact and influence of religion on the urban landscape and political polity. As one reviewer noted, Issel’s work “provides a dramatic
illustration of what can happen when parties to urban political rivalries, rooted in
religious and ideological differences, seize the opportunity provided by a wartime
national security emergency to demonize their enemy as ‘a potentially dangerous
person.’” His is a cautionary tale for the twentieth-first century.
In Church and State in the City (Temple University Press, 2012), Bill Issel
again returns to the city, exploring the role religion plays in marketplace of ideas.
Church and State in the City, while examining the Bay City’s twentieth-century
political culture, accentuates the influence Catholic social teaching had on those
who advocated for public policies that were based on a faith-based vision of the
public interest.
In his research and writing, Bill Issel has demonstrated the importance of
examining the role that religion has had on American political discourse. Ours is not
a secular society, devoid of religious influence. We have not yet reached that postmodern period. And while we profess a separation of Church and State in the
United States, the role of the Church, or any faith-based institution for that matter,
cannot be divorced from our everyday lives, be that in the countryside or in the city.

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N OTES AND COMMENTS

It is for his scholarly and intellectual contribution to the faith-based discourse
in academia that the American Catholic Historical Association is proud to
present its 2017 Distinguished Scholar Award to Professor William Issel of San
Francisco State University.
The ACHA 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award presented to Dr. Jeffrey M.
Burns of the Franciscan School of Theology and the University of San Diego
Receiving his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a
Cushwa Fellow and a student of Jay P. Dolan, Jeffrey Burns returned to his native
California, where he began his teaching career. He has taught at St. Patrick’s Major
Seminary in Menlo Park, the Franciscan School of Theology-Berkeley, and at a
branch of the University of California State system. Presently he teaches for the
Franciscan School of Theology, Mission San Luis Rey, Oceanside, California, and
for the University of San Diego.
While he did all this, he was also the archivist of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Later, he was asked to head the American Academy of Franciscan History.
Burns is a creative and popular teacher. His easy-going ways and his willingness to go the extra mile to help students has earned him much praise.
At FST–Oceanside, he currently teaches the “History of the Immigrant
Church in the US,” “Modern Social Justice,” and the “History of Evangelization
and Mission since 1492.” Because he is well grounded in US Catholic history and
the author of a number works of local and national import, he brings a depth and
a precision to his teaching. He has had a powerful impact on the lives of many of
the students who passed through his classes.
Jeff dedicates himself to an honest, but loving concern for “real history,” which
he understands “is an important tool for the Church.” As he explains: “We cannot
live in a make-believe past or approach the future with an inadequate historical
understanding. We must honestly confront the past. It is my hope that my courses
and scholarship provide this necessary tool.”
It is for his many years of service to the Church and its people as an instructor,
mentor and teacher of Catholic history that the American Catholic Historical
Association presents its 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award to Jeffrey M. Burns.
The ACHA 2017 Distinguished Service Award presented to U.S. National Park
Service
For the past one hundred years, the United States National Park Service has
maintained and preserved America’s heritage. Be it natural landscapes, historic
monuments, significant dwelling places, or notable lands, the NPS has been
responsible for ensuring that future generations come to know its past. For students
of colonial North American as well as Roman Catholic history, the NPS has participated in promoting, either directly or indirectly, the study of race, religion, and
people by maintaining El Camino Real de los Tejas, a series of Spanish missions and

NOTES AND COMMENTS

177

posts that connected the people of Los Adaes in present-day northwestern
Louisiana to the capital city of New Spain: Mexico City; as well as El Camino Real
de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail, which ran from Mexico City to Santa Fe.
In the state of Texas, the San San Antonio Missions are maintained by the NPS,
bringing to life colonial Catholic history in an area of the world
that witnessed some of the most significant events in Mexican and American history. For Creole Catholics of Louisiana, the “Cane River Creole” site provides
insight into a world of racial diversity as its inhabitants are descendants of European, African, and Native peoples. And American Catholic history is connected to
the National Park Service through two civil rights sites: the Lincoln Memorial,
where Catholics for the first time participated in public demonstrations in support
of jobs and freedom; and the Selma to Montgomery Highway, which commemorates the 1965 civil rights March where Catholic participation was notable.
For its contribution to preserving the diversity of our history and culture,
the American Catholic Historical Association honors the National Park Service
in its centennial year of service to the American people. Representing the NPS are
Joy Beasley, Deputy Associate Director for Cultural Resources, Preservation and
Science; and Sue Masica, Regional Director Intermountain Region.

RESEARCHTOOLS
The English Historical Documents series published by Routledge of the Taylor
& Francis Group, gives access to over 5,500 primary documents (chronicles, letters,
charters, etc.) online that includes 660 from Tudor Britain and others from the
Stuart, English Civil War, and Restoration periods. They are divided into such subtopics as Monarch and Government, Local and Social Life, The Church, and Economics and Trade. For more information, please contacxt ehd@email.routledge.com.

CONFERENCES
On March 29–31, 2017 the Pontifial Committee of Historical Sciences will
hold the first of two International Study Conferences commemorating the 500th
anniversary of Luther’s posting of the ninety-five theses. The first, entitled “Luther
after 500 Years: A Re-Reading of the Lutheran Reform in Its Historical and Ecclesial Context” will be held at the Vatican. Its inaugural session will feature talks by
Josep Ignasi Saranyana Closa on “Verso Lutero, il contesto teologico ed ecclesiale”
and Matthias Pohlig on “Lutero, l’uomo e il teologo.” The second session “Il contesto religioso” will hear the following talks: Alain Tallon, “Il concetto di ‘Rifoma
cattolica,’” Bernard Ardura, “Figure di vescovi riformatori e riforma degli ordini
religiosi,” Rob Faesen, “La dottrina della ‘Devotio moderna,’” Mirko Breitenstein,”L’influsso di san Bernardo di Chiaravalle sul tema della coscienza presso
Lutero,” and Enrico Dal Covolo, “Per una storia dell’indulgenza.” The third session is entitled “Il contesto socio-politico” and contains: Jean-Louis Gazzaniga,”Le
relazioni tra la Francia e la Santa Sede: il Concordato di Bologna del 1515,”
Emmanuel Tawil,”La dottrina delle relazioni Chiesa-Stato secondo Lutero,”

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Alexander Koller, “I grandi poteri dell’Impero di fronte a Lutero,” and Christopher
Ocker, “Gli interessi finanziari e la secolarizzazione dei beni ecclesiastici.” In the
fourth session “Lutero in discussione” the following papers will be given: Fermín
Labarga, “La ricezione di Lutero in Spagna,” David Abadías-Aurín, “La politica
della Corona spagnola per arginare la diffusione della Riforma protestante, durante
il XVI secolo,” Alicia Mayer González, “La ricezione di Lutero in Nuova Spagna,”
Bernard Dompnier, “La ricezione di Lutero in Francia,” Matteo Al Kalak, ”La
ricezione di Lutero in Italia,” and Berndt Hamm, “L’evoluzione del pensiero teologico di Lutero.” The fifth and final session will be an ecumenical round-table discussion that includes Cardinal Walter Kasper, Landesbischof Prof. Dr. Heinrich
Bedford-Strohn, Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., Karl Gervin, and some reporters.
For further information, please contact Segretario@historia.va.
On May 30 to June 1, 2017 the second international conference on Luther
sponsored by the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences (this one inconjunction
with the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Catholic University of America, The Metropolitan Washington, D.C., Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,
and with support form the German Embassy in Washington, DC, and the Gladys
Krieble Delmas Foundation) will be held in Washington, DC at the Catholic University of America with the title “Luther and the Shaping of the Catholic Tradition.”
At the inaugural session Wolfgang Thönissen will speak on the Catholic historiography of Martin Luther with a response from Kenneth Appold; and Cardinal Kurt
Koch will provide an overview on Lutheran-Catholic dialogues (International and
National) with a response from retired Lutheran bishop Eero Huovinen. The second
session is dedicated to the theme of justification, with Theo Dieter speaking on the
later medieval teaching on justification and Timothy Wengert on Luther’s evolving
understandings of justification. Michael Root will then trace Luther’s impact on
Catholic understanding of justification The third session will study how Eastern
Christianity affected the Reformation debates with Yuri Avvakumov speaking on late
medieval Latin understating of Eastern theology and practice; Nicolas Kazarian on
the extent to which Luther understood Eastern theology and practice and invoked
them to justify his positions; and William Cohen on the extent to which the Catholic
Church cushioned its responses to Luther based on its desire to respect the Eastern
Churches. The fourth session is devoted to the Eucharist/Mass. Among its speakers
are Bruce Marshall on late medieval Eucharistic theology and practice, Lee Palmer
Wandel on Luther’s changes to the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist/Mass,
and Robert Trent Pomplun on the Catholic response to Lutheran ideas on Eucharist.
The fifth and final session will deal with Ecclesiology. Nelson H. Minnich will speak
on late medieval ecclesiologies; Dorothea Wendebourg on Luther’s evolving ecclesiology; and Johanna Rahner on Catholic ecclesiology—evolving and in response. For
further information, please contact Ms.Crystal Campos-Rosales at camposrosales@
cua.edu or at cua-strs-events@cua.edu.
On October 26–29, 2017 the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference will
commemorate Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses with a conference in Milwaukee, Wis-

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consin. Proposals for papers (250-word abstracts) should be sent to the program
chair, KathleenCoimerford, at www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference by April 15,
2017. She can be contacted at conference@sixteenthcentury.org.

PUBLICATIONS
Several articles pertaining to the theme “Desiderium unitatis: Figure ed eventi”
have been assembled by Giuseppe Ruggieri in the second issue of Cristianesimo
nella storia for 2016 (Volume 37). Notable among them are “Cyprien et l’unité de
l’Église,” by Michel Fédou (pp. 257-72); “Historia salutis, desiderium unitatis e
chiesa in Isacco di Ninive,” by Paolo Bettiolo (pp. 273-322); “De pace fidei. Per una
rilettura del testo di Cusano,” by Giuseppe Ruggieri (pp. 323-42); “Karl Barth on
the Quest for the Church’s Unity,” by Christophe Chalamet (pp. 343-59); “Unification des Églises, une possibilité réelle. Les huit thèses d’Heinrich Fries et de Karl
Rahner, relues trente-deux ans après,” by Christoph Theobald, S.J. (pp. 361-81);
and “Unità nella dottrina sacramentale. Note sulla storia della genesi del Bem
[Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry text of the Faith and Order Commission of the
World Council of Churches, 1982],” by Luca Ferracci (pp. 383-99).
The eighth centenary of the Fourth Lateran Council is commemorated in
Number 2–3 for 2016 (Volume LXXXII) of Lateranum, which contains the papers
presented at a symposium held at the Pontifical Lateran University on November
30 and December 1, 2015. Following a prolusione of the editor, Nicola Ciola, “Le
ragioni del Lateranense IV e le sue possibili riletture ‘teologiche’” (pp. 267–78), are
the eighteen contributions: Giulia Barone, “Innocenzo III teologo e riformatore”
(pp. 281–96); Sergio P. Bonanni, “Teologia ed ermeneutica dell’alterità. Il dibattito
medievale fino al Concilio Lateranense IV” (pp. 297–312); Riccardo Ferri, “I sermoni tenuti da Innocenzo durante il Lateranse IV” (pp. 313–23); Antonio Pitta,
“Quali riferimenti e quale ermeneutica biblica al Concilio Lateranense IV?” (pp.
325–33); Pierluigi Sguazzardo, “ “I principali contenuti dogmatici del Lateranense
IV” (pp. 335–553); Danilo Mazzoleni, “L’iconografia del Concilio Lateranense IV
nei saloni sistini in Vaticano” (pp. 355-74 with 30 illustrations); Giuseppe Lorizo,
“La professione di fede (Firmiter credimus) ‘quarto simbolo della Chiesa’? Riflessione speculative” (pp. 375–408); Santiago del Cura Elena, “’Nemo nisi sacerdos’:
Sacerdote y Eucaristia en la profesión de fe del IV concilio Letrán (1215)” (pp.
409–53); Giovanni Tangorra, “Romano pontefice ed episcopato nel Lateranense
IV” (pp. 455–72); Antonio Sabetta, “I temi ‘recoepti’ del Lateranense IV in
prospettiva storico-teologica” (pp. 473–89); Natale Loda, “La legislazione del 1215
del Concilio Lateranense IV. I greci e i cristiani orientali fra tradizione ed innovazione del diritto canonico” (pp. 491–527); Renzo Gerardi, “’Regimen animarum’,
predicazione e disciplina dei sacramenti al concilio Lateranense IV” (pp. 529–63);
Roberto Nardin, “` Mores et acta clericorum’ al Concilio Lateranense IV” (pp 565–
74); Claudio Canonici, “Hoc salutare statutum frequenter in ecclesiis publicetur. La
ricezione del canone XXI De confessione nella normativa sinodale pre-tridentina
(secoli XIII–XV)” (pp. 575–99); Alvaro Cacciotti, “Gli Ordini mendicanti.
Riforme e innovazioni nella vita religiosa al tempo di Innocenzo III” (pp. 601–27);

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Luigi Michele de Palma, “Eresia e repressione: la Crociata contro gli Albigesi” (pp.
pp. 629–43); Philippe Chenaux, “Chiesa ed ebrei secondo le decretali del Lateranense IV” (pp. 645–53); and Lubomir Žak, “Il Lateranense IV. Bilanci e prospettive” (pp. 655–70).
Annales du Midi for April–June, 2016 (Volume CXXIX, Number 294), contains several “Regards Japonnais sur le Midi médiéval.” Among them are “À propos
des aménagements liturgiques de l’Antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Âge en
Provence,” by Yumi Narasawa (pp. 167–78); “Mise en scène juridique et liturgique
autour de l’autel et des reliques de l’abbaye de Moissac: la politique de l’abbé
Ansquitil (1085–1115) au travers des actes,” by Taiichirô Sugizaki (pp. 179–89);
“Formation des ‘comptes de l’anniversaire’ au sein du chapitre collégial Saint-Paul
de-Mausole (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence) au XIVe siècle,” by Tadao Inde (pp. 179–
89); and “Université et éducation dans l’ordre dominicain à la fin du Moyen Âge. Le
collège de Notre-Dame de la Pitié d’Avignon,” by Yoichi Kajiwara (pp. 247–67).
Under the heading “Regards médiévaux sur l’Islam” the Revue des Sciences
Religieuses in its issue for October, 2016 (Volume 90), contains several original articles: “El Op. 38 Cent noms de Déu de Ramon Llull como poesia anticoránica,” by Ó.
De la Cruz Palma (pp. 491–516); “Il quarto regno. L’Islam per Gioacchino da Fiore
e nella testualità profetica et apocalittica della Chiesa romana (sec. XIII),” by Gian
Luca Potestá (pp. 517–37); “Redécouvrir l’Orient après la conquête mamelouke.
Chrétiens, juifs et musulmans dans deux récits des années 1300, la Descriptio Terrae
sanctae de fra Giovanni di Fedanzola da Perugia et le Liber peregrinationis de Jacques
de Vérone,” by Camille Rouxpetel (pp. 539–60); “Regards contrastés sur les musulmans du sultanat mamlûk par des marchands chrétiens à la fin du Moyen-Âge,” by
Damien Coulon (pp. 561–81); and “Mehmet II le conquérant de Constantinople et
la foi chrétienne,” by Astérios Argyriou (pp. 583–602).
Several articles on “Unintended Reformations” are presented in the number
for September, 2016 (Volume 46), of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies. Starting with a thematic article on “Unintended Reformations” by the editors of this special issue, David Aers and Russ Leo (pp. 455–83), the full contents
are: “Geeraardt Brandt, Dutch Tolerance, and the Reformation of the Reformation,” by Russ Leo (pp. 485–511); “Implicit Faith and Reformations of Habit,” by
Joanna Picciotto (pp. 513–43); “Brad Gregory’s Unintended Revelations,” by James
Simpson (pp. 545–54); “Not Solely Sola Scripture, or, a Rejoinder to Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation,” by Paul C. H. Lim (pp. 555–82); and
“’Botched Execution’ or Historical Inevitability: Conceptual Dilemmas in Brad S.
Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation,” by Thomas Pfau (pp. 603–28).
“Preaching the Civilizing Mission and Modern Cultural Encounters” is the
theme of the issue for September, 2016 (Volume 27) of the Journal of World History.
Following a foreword written by the editors, Diego Olstein and Stefan Hübner, and
an introduction by Harry Liebersohn, are “Sartorial Settlement: The Mission Field
and Transformation in Colonial Natal, 1850–1897,” by T. J. Tallie (pp. 389–410);
“Civilization and Russification in Tsarist Central Asia, 1860–1917,” by Ulrich

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Hofmeister (pp. 411–42); “Singing the Civilizing Mission in the Land of Bach,
Beethoven, and Brahms: The Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nineteenth-Century Germany,”
by Kira Thurman (pp. 437–71); “From Transformation to Negotiation: A Female
Mission in a ‘City of Schools,’” by Julia Hauser (pp. 473–96); and two others.
The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitschrift, Number 2 of 2015 (Volume 28), has
a group of articles on “Resistance revisited and requestioned: Church and society in
Scandinavia and Europe”: “Confession—Emotion—Situation: On Resistance in
Churches and Religious Associations in Europe in the 20th Century,” by Gerhard
Besier (pp. 207–19); “On Resistance in Churches in 20th Century Europe,” by
Katarzyna Stokłosa (pp. 220–25); “Resistance or complicity? Balancing assessments
of German churches under Nazism,” by Robert P. Ericksen (pp. 246–61); “The
Danish State Church during the German Occupation 1940–45: State Collaboration and Resistance,” by Palle Roslyng-Jensen (pp. 262–77); “Church Resistance
againt Nazism in Norway, 1940–1945,” by Torleiv Austad (pp. 278–93); “The
Foundation of the Church: A Confession and a Declaration,” by Torleiv Austad
(pp. 294–99); and “Swedish anti-Nazism. and resistance against Nazi Germany
during the Second World War,” by Klas Amark (pp. 300–12).
The Journal of African American History has devoted its issue for summer, 2016
(Volume 101) to Black Catholics in the United States. Katrina M. Sanders and
Cecilia A. Moore have written the “Introduction—Faith in Action: Historical Perspectives on the Social and Educational Activism of African American Catholics”
(pp. 217–30). The other authors and their contributions are: Shannen Dee
Williams, “Forgotten Habits, Lost Vocations: Black Nuns, Contested Memories,
and the 19th Century Struggle to Desegregate U.S. Catholic Religious Life” (pp.
231–60); Diane Batts Morrow, “’Undoubtedly a bad state of affairs’: The Oblate
Sisters of Providence and the Josephite Fathers, 1877–1903” (pp. 261–87); Nancy
Van Note Chism and Andrea Walton, “Walking among all people: the Struggles of
Boniface Hardin as Priest, Social Activist, and Founder of Martin University” (pp.
288–311); and Sharlene Sinegal DeCuir, “’Nothing is to be feared’: Norman C.
Francis, Civil Rights Activism, and the Black Catholic Movement” (pp. 312–34).
The historiography of the Church in Latin America is treated in three articles
published in Volume 25 (2015) of the Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia: “Esbozo de
una historiografía de la historia de la Iglesia en Venezuela (1965–2015),” by
Oswaldo Ramón Montilla Perdomo (pp. 15–57); “Entre el avance y la insatisfacción: los últimos 50 años de historia de la Iglesia en Colombia (1965–2015),” by
Luis Carlos Mantilla Ruiz (pp. 59–89); and “La Iglesia católica en México desde
sus historiadores (1960–2010),” by Marta Eugenia García Ugarte and Sergio Francisco Rosas Salas (pp. 91–161).

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OBITUARIES
Ellin M. Kelly
(1 9 2 4 –2 0 1 6 )

(courtesy of DePaul University Archives, Chicago, Illinois)

Ellin Margaret Kelly, a Daughter of Charity (1950–1961), Seton scholar,
author, and professor emerita in the English Department of the College of Liberal
Arts and Social Sciences of DePaul University, Chicago, (1969–1992), most generously endowed a British Literature Award for DePaul students. Dr. Kelly went
to her eternal reward, on February 20, 2016.
Originally from Grand Forks, North Dakota, Kelly earned her B.A. from St.
Mary-of-the-Woods College (1945); an M. A. in Speech and Drama from The
Catholic University of America (1948); an M.A. in English from University of
Wisconsin at Madison (1964), and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin (1970). Her dissertation examined the fifteenth-century Ludus Conventriae
plays. Dr. Kelly and Professor Stanley Bamberger co-authored “The Great Calvaries of Brittany and the Medieval Breton “Burzud Braz Jezuz,” Comparative
Drama 25, no. 1 (1991), 52–65.
In recognition of Kelly’s long-term collaboration in the education of students
from families lacking financial resources, and for her commitment to Vincentian
spirituality and ministries, the Daughters of Charity inscribed Kelly as an Affiliate
of the Company of the Daughters of Charity (1979).
Kelly had a life-long passion for learning, teaching, and writing. Her life illustrated her remarkable strength of spirit, generosity towards others, and deep religious faith permeated with Vincentian heritage, particularly through devotion to
and promotion of Elizabeth Bayley Seton and her legacy. In appreciation for her
scholarship on Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, Kelly received the Seton Founder’s
Award (1989), and the Seton Legacy Award (2009).

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183

In retirement, Kelly volunteered for ten years in the DePaul University
Archives and Special Collections department, bringing the precision of a scholar to
processing, accessioning, and transcribing materials for the DeAndreis-Rosati
Memorial Archives of the Western Province of the Congregation of the Mission.
Kelly also contributed her expertise as manuscript editor to the Seton Writings
Project, Regina Bechtle, S.C., and Judith Metz, S.C., eds., Ellin M. Kelly, mss.
ed., Elizabeth Bayley Seton Collected Writings, 3 vols. (New City Press: New York,
2000-2006).
Kelly’s publications include the following: Elizabeth Seton’s Two Bibles, (1977);
Numerous Choirs: A Chronicle of Elizabeth Bayley Seton and Her Spiritual Daughters,
2 vols.: volume 1, The Seton Years 1774–1821, (1981); volume 2, Expansion, Division, and War 1821–1865, (1996).
Vincentian Heritage Journal published several articles by Kelly, which may be
found on line at http://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj: “Elizabeth Seton: Key Relationships in Her Life, 1774–1809,” Ibid., Vol. 14, 2, Article 6; “The Vincentian Mission from Paris to the Mississippi: The American Sisters of Charity,” Ibid., Vol. 14,
1, Article 11; “The Sisters of Charity in Vincennes, Indiana,” Ibid., Vol. 27, 1,
Article 6; and “Elizabeth Bayley Seton’s Commonplace Book of Poetry Archives,
St. Joseph Provincial House, Rare Book 31,” Ibid.,Vol. 29, 1, Article 4.
Kelly and co-author Annabelle M. Melville (1910–1991), produced Elizabeth
Seton Spiritual Writings (1987). Kelly’s last writing project was her “Foreword” to
the updated edition of the definitive Seton biography: Melville, Annabelle, and
Betty Ann McNeil, ed., Elizabeth Bayley Seton 1774–1821, (2009).
“Every good work, good word we do is a grain of seed for eternal life.” (Elizabeth Seton) Students and scholars of American Catholic history owe Ellin Margaret Kelly a debt of gratitude for her many good works and words. May she rest
in peace!
Vincentian Scholar-in-Residence
DePaul University, Chicago

BETTY ANN MCNEIL, D.C.

Anthony J. Kuzniewski, S.J.
(1945–2016)
The Reverend Anthony J. Kuzniewski, S.J., professor emeritus of history at
the College of the Holy Cross, died on December 19 at the Campion Health
Center in Weston, Massachusetts. Kuzniewski was the older of two children of
Anthony J. and Alice E. (Tomaszewski). Born on January 28, 1945 in Carthage, a
town in southwestern Missouri near the Army Signal Core Base where his father
was stationed during World War II, Kuzniewski grew up in a predominantly
Catholic Polish American community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his parents
owned Quality Electric Service.

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

(courtesy of the College of the Holy Cross)

After attending parish schools with the Salvatorian Sisters and Marquette
University High, Kuzniewski enrolled in Marquette University in 1962. He
majored in history, graduated magna cum laude in 1966, and was inspired by his
professor, Francis Paul Prucha, S.J., to pursue graduate work at Harvard.
Kuzniewski returned to his roots at Harvard by focusing on Polish immigration to America in his dissertation. In the summer of 1969, Kuzniewski studied
Polish at the University of Warsaw on a Harvard grant. Kuzniewski completed his
dissertation on the ethnic politics of Catholic Milwaukee in the late nineteenth
century under the direction of Oscar Handlin in June 1973. At Harvard,
Kuzniewski distinguished himself as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Harvard
Graduate Prize Fellow.
The previous September (1972), Kuzniewski entered the Society of Jesus in
the New England Province. He finished his dissertation during his first year of
Jesuit novitiate. Kuzniewski spent his second year of novitiate at the Center of
Concern in Washington, D.C. and took his first vows in the fall of 1974 at the
College of the Holy Cross, where he was assigned to regency. Although the
Department of History was prepared to make Kuzniewski a tenure-track offer after
noting the successful course in immigration history that he created, Kuzniewski
moved on to the Jesuit School of Theology. On June 9, 1979, Kuzniewski was
ordained at St. Joseph Memorial Chapel at the College of the Holy Cross by The
Most Reverend Bernard J. Flanagan, D.D., J.C.D., Bishop of Worcester.
After a pastoral year in campus ministry at Loyola University Chicago,
Kuzniewski expected to be assigned to the Holy Cross faculty. The old position no
longer available, Kuzniewski returned to Loyola where he taught history. A year
later, the position in immigration history was unexpectedly open again at Holy
Cross. Kuzniewski applied, received the job, and became a fixture in the Department of History for four decades.

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185

“Father K,” as he was affectionally called by generations of Holy Cross students, taught several popular courses on American history, including “The Age of
Jackson,” “Lincoln and his Legacy,” “From Kennedy to Watergate,” and seminars
on the Civil War and the history of Holy Cross. Kuzniewski was well known for
the lecture format of his classes, at which he excelled using careful organization and
humor. In accepting the Distinguished Teaching Award at Holy Cross in 2002, he
said: “It’s axiomatic to remark that we make better choices when we base them on
an accurate and realistic sense of who we are and where we are coming from. Personal history teaches all of us that the significant people are those [who] have presented us with good choices by naming our gifts and challenging us to have the
courage of our convictions. We are called to provide that service for our students—
to model good habits of mind and heart for them, to take stands for their potential,
to live up to the privilege of being engaged with young people who are still ‘impressionable like wax.’”
When Edward O’Donnell, associate professor of history at Holy Cross and a
former Kuzniewski student, raised a toast at Kuzniewski’s retirement party in August
2016, he praised his professor now colleague for “living his own vocation to the fullest
and having helped countless Holy Cross students discover their vocations.”
Kuzniewski also encouraged students outside the classroom, particularly as
chaplain to Holy Cross athletic teams for over twenty years and in his preaching at
weekend and daily Masses. “As a priest, I don’t want our student-athletes to have
compartmentalized lives—‘This is what I do as an athlete. This is what I do as a
person of faith. This is what I do as a student,’ ” he told the Worcester Telegram &
Gazette in April when the college renamed Holy Cross Field in his honor. “Somehow they’re all interrelated and I like the chance to blend them a bit.”
Kuzniewski made several significant scholarly interventions into the historiography of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban America, particularly
regarding Polish America. “Father Kuzniewski’s classic Faith and Fatherland,”
explained Steven Avella, professor of history at Marquette University, “will always
be on the `must read’ list of any serious scholar of U.S. Catholicism and the history
of the city of Milwaukee.” The manuscript for his 1981 book, Faith and Fatherland:
The Polish Church War in Wisconsin, 1896–1918, was named best manuscript in
American Catholic Studies by Notre Dame’s Center for Studies in American
Catholicism in 1978. Kuzniewski was a past president of the Polish American Historical Association and was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the
Association. Kuzniewski, having served as archivist for the New England Province
of the Society of Jesus for eleven years, also published Thy Honored Name: A History
of the College of the Holy Cross, 1843–1994.
Kuzniewski served as Rector of the Jesuit Community at Holy Cross from
1998–2004 and on the boards of the Loyola University of Chicago, Cheverus High
School in Portland, Maine, and The Nativity School in Worcester, Massachusetts.
He was known to donate the honoraria he received for weddings and baptisms (of
which he did many) to the Nativity School of Worcester.

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He is preceded in death by his sister Susan Kuzniewski Reifsnyder and survived by his devoted niece Anne Reifsnyder of Milwaukee and nephews, Michael
Reifsnyder of Omaha, Nebraska and Tom Reifsnyder of Osaka, Japan. Wake and
funeral Mass for Kuzniewski were held in St. Joseph Memorial Chapel at the College of the Holy Cross on December 26. Kuzniewski was buried in the Jesuit cemetery on his beloved Holy Cross campus.
CHARLES STRAUSS

Mt. St. Mary’s University
Paolo Prodi*
(1932–2016)

(Foto Rensi)

“Modernity stems from dialogue and osmosis between the two poles [of religion
and politics]—call it dualism, dialectic, or what you will—and in various ways this
has hinged on confessionalization (italics in the original).” These words are taken
from the opening pages of Prodi’s last conference paper from October 2016, which
appears in this issue of the journal (vol. 103/1, 1–19). Appropriately enough, it was
delivered, in absentia owing to the author’s declining health, in the South Tyrolean
city of Trent, home of the famous Council (1545–63), which still shaped not only
the Catholic Church Prodi was born into but also his own abiding concerns as both
an historian and as a left-leaning Christian democrat (in the philological rather than
party sense of the word) and citizen of Europe. It can be no accident that his last
monograph was entitled: Il Paradigma Tridentino: un epoca della storia della Chiesa
(2010) since for Prodi this paradigm had only come to an end with Vatican II
*I am most grateful to Paolo Pombeni, Adriano Prosperi and Massimo Rosprocher for
saving me from several errors and the latter for securing the photograph of Paolo Prodi used
here. However, they should not be held responsible for my reading of Prodi’s career which at
points resists easy interpretation.

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187

(1962–65). However, it was characteristic of this most positive and generous of spirits that he believed, like his dear friend, the Austrian-born priest and social critic
Ivan Illich (1926–2002), whom he went to visit in Mexico where the latter ran the
famous Intercultural Documentation Centre (CIDOC) at Cuernevaca, that Vatican
II was not the culmination of a historical process, but the dawn of a new one.
In this he was of a different opinion from his brother-in-law, Giuseppe
Alberigo (1926–2007), though they shared not only the German doyen of historians
of the Council of Trent, Hubert Jedin (1900–1980) and the former Fascist turned
Communist and historian of the diaspora of Italian heretics of the sixteenth century,
Delio Cantimori (1904–66) as teachers, but also the charismatic DC politician
turned priest, Giuseppe Dossetti (1913–96) as mentor. In 1953 Dossetti had
founded the Istituto per le scienze religiose in Bologna to promote an agenda that
later became identified closely with that of Vatican II. Significantly, Prodi refused
to remain at the Istituto since, as he explained in the last essay collection he published before his death (Giuseppe Dossetti e le officine Bolognesi, 2016; reviewed above
on pp. 150–51), he always felt strongly that he was an historian, or ‘artisan of history’
as he described himself in his last conference paper, rather than someone who taught
specifically the history of the Church, which is a distinction that is as foreign to the
Anglophone world as it is of enduring relevance in Italy. By contrast, Alberigo
directed the Istituto for almost fifty years and although reconciled with Prodi at his
death, the brother-in-laws fell out more than once. This was because, to Prodi, the
Istituto had become not only responsible for the official history of Vatican II, (with
Alberigo as the single author of the Storia del Concilio Vaticano II, 5 vols, 1995–2001;
English trans. edited by Joseph A. Komonchak, 5 vols., 1996–2006) but also, he
believed, for turning the Council into a monument which was beyond criticism and
thus the solutions it proposed beyond further debate and development.
For dialectical development was a leitmotif which united Prodi’s magisterial
tetralogy: Il Sovrano Pontefice (1982, Eng. trans. The Papal Prince, 1987); Il Sacramento del Potere (1992); Una storia della Giustizia (2002) and Settimo non rubare
(2009). The importance of the first of these, and the one for which he is principally
known, (and not only because it is the only one available in English translation),
was set out pithily by the English historian of political theory Janet Coleman in her
review of the English translation:
This is an important, polemical study whose purpose is to argue and demonstrate that the history of the church of Rome and that of the papacy from the
mid-fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century has been almost
entirely disregarded in accounts of the origins of the political and social systems in Europe which gave rise to absolutist states.1

Here at a stroke, Prodi made it clear that he sought to exorcise the ghost of Max
Weber, a narrow reading of whose massively influential Protestant Ethic and Spirit
1. Historical Journal, 33, 1 (1990), 239–42 (at 239).

188

NOTES AND COMMENTS

of Capitalism (1905) had left Catholicism out in the cold as a contributor to the origins of modernity. As Prodi himself put it in his final article “Europe in the Age of
Reformations” (p. 10): “modern politics was not born out of the secularization of
theology but rather from a dialectical meeting between the two poles of religion
and politics.” However, the papacy’s precocious capacity to develop fiscal and
administrative innovations and turn the Papal States into a prototype absolutist
monarchy was only achieved because the pope united in one person both temporal
and spiritual authority (described in terms of “one body and two souls” in the subtitle to the book). Furthermore, the longer term outcome of this fusing of political
sovereignty and religious authority was political sclerosis and economic stagnation.
As a counterpart to this cautionary tale, Il Sacramento del potere traced the history of the oath from Ancient Greece to Fascist Italy in order to frame the significance of the oath to the Gregorian papal ‘revolution’ of the eleventh century and
the subsequent development of canon law in which this ritual became central to
negotiations not only between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, sacerdotium and imperium, but also to the many medieval modes of association, from
vassallage and the Peace of God to guilds and universities. With the coming of
confessionalisation in the post-Reformation age and the accompanying emergence
of the Papacy as a Renaissance state, the dualism central to the Christian oath
between Christian and Citizen, which was vital to the preservation of individual
liberties, disappeared. As a result, power became sacralized with consequences
which the twentieth century witnessed in the form of the totalitarian political religions that were Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.
With Una storia della Giustizia, Prodi’s argument is set out in its subtitle: “from
pluralistic legal forums to the modern dualism between conscience and law.” As with
the previous two studies, he saw the early modern period as a watershed, since it witnessed increased competition in the form, on the one hand, of the state’s move to secularize the moral order and, on the other, the attempt by all Christian churches to
develop, in different ways, spiritual jurisdiction over the individual’s conscience. With
the end of the Ancien Regime and the eventual triumph of a secular moral order, the
legal system became grounded in nothing but itself and had no external code of
behaviour to refer to. The final part of Prodi’s tetralogy, Settimo non rubare—or to
give it its full title in English: “The Seventh Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not steal’:
Theft and the Market in the History of the West”—made the parallel point that it
was only under pressure of economic development that theologians found that they
had to take over from the canonists and go beyond the Justinian Code of Roman law
to identify and define the notion of “contractual freedom.” This was all part, ultimately, of the politicization of the Church and the process whereby the State took on
functions that had previously been seen as the responsibility of the Church to look
after the citizen-subject from cradle to grave. For Prodi, therefore, what was distintictive to Western Europe and has shaped its destiny for over 1,000 years has been
the dynamic, dialectical relationship between state and church, in which neither has
been able to dominate completely the other, whose absence in either Orthodox
Christianity or Islam has consequences which are only too visible today.

NOTES AND COMMENTS

189

Paolo Prodi was born on October 3, 1932, in the small town of Scandiano,
half way between Reggio Emilia and Modena where the Po Valley meets the
Appenines. His father Mario (born 1895) was the first generation of his family to
be able to leave the land and make a professional career for himself, as an engineer.
His wife, Enrica Franzoni, had been a country school teacher before she got married. Paolo was fifth of nine children—seven boys and two girls—several of whom
went on to highly successful careers in the fields of psychiatry (Maria Pia); physics
(Franco), mathematics (Giovanni), medicine (Giorgio), Quintilio (architect), and
politics (Romano); the last one serving as President of the European commission
and then, briefly, as prime minister of Italy. Right from his adolescence, Paolo had
occasion to witness the sometimes lethal power of ideology: first, his own parish
priest, for whom he had served as an altar boy, was summarily executed by partisans
in the first days after the end of the war for alleged collaboration. Then, in October
of 1946, aged 14, Prodi rashly shouted to his classmates that they should not take
part in a local strike that had been called to protest the arrest of two former-partisans accused of the murder of a young seminarian in April the previous year:
“because it was necessary to distinguish between genuine partisans and common
criminals,” before being struck violently to the ground for his efforts.2 After attending liceo classico in Reggio, he won a scholarship to study at the prestigious
Catholic University of Milan in 1950–54, with the support of Giuseppe Dossetti,
whom he had met in 1947. He defied his mentor, however, by choosing political
science over jurisprudence. After graduation, he spent a difficult period working
out his relationship with Dossetti’s Istituto per le scienze religiose, but decided to
leave it early in 1955 owing to the fact his mentor seemed determined to turn it
into a religious community rather than one just of scholars when “I didn’t feel any
sense of religious vocation whatsoever.”3 Yet it was Dossetti who confirmed Prodi
in his choice of research topic: a comparative study of the attempts by two prelates
Carlo Borromeo and Gabriele Paleotti to reform, respectively, Milan and Bologna
in the wake of the Council of Trent, of which only the latter came to fruition with
the publication of a major biography of Paleotti, that was published eventually in
two volumes (1959–67). To co-supervise his research, he secured the agreement of
not only the Catholic priest and historian of Trent, Hubert Jedin—an obvious
enough choice—but also of the Marxist historian of heterodoxy, Delio Cantimori,
who was then based in Pisa. It is perhaps not too far fetched to speculate that
Prodi’s lifelong interest in dialectical dialogue and osmosis found its confirmation
during these years of apprenticeship under two such very different scholars. He also
spent a year with Hubert Jedin in Bonn (1957–58) where he joined his brother-inlaw, Alberigo who was already there. In Bologna in the 1960s and early 1970s
Prodi busied himself with numerous projects: from co-editing, with Alberigo and
other colleagues what remains the standard edition of the decrees of the ecumenical
councils, (Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, 1971; Eng. trans. by Norman Tanner,
1990) to acting as dean of the large faculty of education (1969–72), where he
2. P. Prodi, Giuseppe Dossetti e le officine bolognesi, (Bologna, 2016), 15.
3. Ibid., p. 50.

190

NOTES AND COMMENTS

employed as a younger colleague, Adriano Prosperi. He also found time (in 1965)
to help found the publishers Il Mulino as well as undertake work on the reform of
school districts for the Ministry of Education (1972–74), when his former colleague from the Catholic University, Riccardo Misasi, was minister.
The next important phase in his academic career began with the founding,
together with Jedin, of the Istituto storico Italo-germanico (ISIG) in Trent, in
1973, where Prodi remained director until 1997. The influence of this institute of
historical research under Prodi’s leadership, shared with Jedin until the latter’s
death in 1980, was out of all proportion to its relatively small size and location, far
from the traditional centers of intellectual influence in the Italian peninsula. For
example, the ceaseless outpouring of monographs and conference proceedings by
his students and associates combined with the publication since 1975 of articles in
both German and Italian in the Annali/Jahrbuch of the Institute has had a major
and sustained impact. From the outset it has published not only on topics of local
relevance to the South Tyrol from the Middle Ages to the present, but also on
those which touch upon themes of much wider interest to the Italo-German world
(and beyond), such as the essay collections edited by Prodi: Disciplina dell’anima,
disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna (1994) and,
with Wolfgang Reinhard: Il Concilio di Trento e il moderno (1997). As well as director of ISIG, Prodi taught history at the University of Trent, where he was rector
(1972–77) and later dean of the faculty of letters (1985-88).
During the course of his career, Prodi has received many honours both at
home and abroad. These include: Grand’Ufficiale dell’Ordine al Merito della
Repubblica Italiana (1975) as well as similar honors from the German and Austrian
governments in, respectively, 1992 and 1994. In 1992–93 he was briefly a member
of the lower house of the Italian parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, as a representative for the anti-Mafia party led by the charismatic Sicilian politican, Leoluca
Orlando. In 2000 he was made a corresponding fellow of the Accademia nazionale
dei Lincei and in 2007 he received the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Prize.
For many years he served as Presidente della Giunta storica nazionale. Over the
course of his long life Prodi’s kindness and generosity of spirit touched the lives of
numerous scholars, irrespective of creed or nationality. He died on December 16,
2016, and is survived by his wife and four sons.
University of York

SIMON DITCHFIELD

Periodical Literature
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
El rostro de Cristo en el arte. Fermín Labarga. Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, 25
(2015), 265-316.
“Religion des pères.” Le christianisme en Arménie des origines à nos jours. Aram
Mardirossian. Istina, LXI (Apr.-June, 2016), 145-67.
Evangelicals and Unevangelicals: The Contested History of a Word, 1500-1950.
Linford D. Fisher. Religion and American Culture, 26 (Summer, 2016), 184226.
Catholic nuns in transnational mission, 1528-2015. Anne O’Brien. Journal of
Global History, 11 (Nov., 2016), 387-408.
The Double Invisibility of Missionary Sisters. Sarah A. Curtis. Journal of Women’s
History, 28 (Winter, 2016), 134-43.
The Protestant Reception of Jan Hus in Great Britain and the American Colonies.
Tom Schwanda. Journal of Moravian History, 16 (2, 2016), 65-89.
Jan Hus in English-Language Historiography, 1863-2013. Thomas A. Fudge.
Journal of Moravian History, 16 (2, 2016), 90-138.
Monastische Kongregationen und Mission im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Cyrill
Schäfer, OSB. Erbe und Auftrag, 92 (2, 2016), 167-81.
Toyohiko Kagawa and Reinhold Niebuhr: The Church and Cooperatives. Brian
G. Byrd and John Paul Loucky. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 28 (1-2,
2016), 63-88.
Les débuts de la collaboration entre les Églises orientales orthodoxes au XXe siècle.
Dietmar W. Winkler. Istina, LXI (Apr.-June, 2016), 201-12.
Paolo VI e la libertà religiosa. Philippe Chenaux. Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia,
25 (2015), 193-207.

ANCIENT
Early Christianity in Light of New Religious Movements. Eyal Regev. Numen, 63
(5/6, 2016), 483-510.
Women and the Spread of Christianity. Angelo Di Berardino. Augustinianum, LV
(Dec., 2015), 305-26.
Pagans, Jews, Christians, and a Type of Book Divination in Late Antiquity. Robert
Wiśniewski. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 24 (Winter, 2016), 553-68.
Sobre el origen y la influencia de los Annales martyrum. Francisco Bautista. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 477-90.
191

192

P ERIODICAL LITERATURE

Greek Lists of the Apostles: New Findings and Open Questions. Christopher
Guignard. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 20 (Dec., 2016), 469-95.
Private Creeds and Their Troubled Authors. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz. Journal of
Early Christian Studies, 24 (Winter, 2016), 465-90.
De Higinio de Córdoba a Braulio de Zaragoza. Crónica del antipriscilianismo.
Diego Play Augusto. Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, LII (1, 2016), 346.
Herrschaft und Bekenntnis. Überlegungen zur imperialen Normierung des
christlichen Glaubens in der Spätantike. Wolfram Kinzig. Historische
Zeitschrift, 303 (Dec., 2016), 621-42.
The apostolic canons of Antioch. An Origenistic exercise. Alistair C. Stewart.
Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 111 (July-Dec, 2016), 439-51.
De Statuis: las fuentes cristianas sobre la “Revuelta de las estatuas”. Alberto J.
Quiroga Puertas. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 467-75.
Memory, Language, and the Making of Truth: Towards an Hermeneutic of
Augustine’s Conversion Narrative. Carmen Angela Cvetković. Augustinianum, LV (Dec., 2015), 479-512.
Augustine’s Punishments. Peter Iver Kaufman. Harvard Theological Review, 109
(Oct., 2016), 550-66.
A Critical Look and Evaluation of Augustine’s De haeresibus. Sydney Sadowski.
Augustinianum, LV (Dec., 2015), 461-78.
Questioning Christian baptism. Insights from Augustine’s correspondence.
Matthieu Pignot. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 111 (July-Dec, 2016), 452-82.
Questions liturgiques dans les “Canons de Shenoute”. Ugo Zanetti. Orientalia
Christiana Periodica, 82 (I, 2016), 67-99.
Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings. Ellen F. Arnold.
Speculum, 92 (Jan., 2017), 117-43. Speculum, 92 (Jan., 2017), 117-43.
Taking the Devil at his Word: The Devil and Languages in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. Charlotte Kingston. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (Oct.,
2016), 705-20.
Teodolinda: immagini e metamorfosi di una regina tra Medioevo ed età moderna.
Gabriella Maroni. Aevum, XC (May-Aug., 2016), 293-332.

MEDIEVAL
Furnished female burial in seventh-century England: gender and sacral authority in
the Conversion Period. Helena Hamerow. Early Medieval Europe, 24 (Nov.,
2016), 423-47.
Domino in domino dominorum: Bede and John of Beverley. Frederick M. Biggs.
Anglo-Saxon England, 44 (2015), 17-30.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

193

Dynamic intertextuality in the Miracula Nynie episcopi: remembering Arator’s Historia apostolica. Richard Hillier. Anglo-Saxon England, 44 (2015), 163-79.
The cleansing of the temple in early medieval Northumbria. Conor O’Brien.
Anglo-Saxon England, 44 (2015), 201-20.
On the Swearing of Oaths in Cemeteries. Charlene M. Eska. Cambrian Medieval
Celtic Studies, 71 (Summer, 2016), 59-70.
The Healing Shrines of St. Phoibammon: Evidence of Cult Activity in Coptic
Legal Documents. Gesa Schenke. Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 20 (Dec.,
2016), 496-523.
La donation d’Anouuareth à l’abbaye Saint-Maur de Glanfeuil: retour sur un
corpus d’actes (trop) célèbre. Anne Lunven. Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes,
170 (July-Dec., 2012), 343-75.
Sightlines, Hagioscopes, and Church Planning in Byzantine Cappadocia. Robert
Ousterhout. Art History, 39 (Nov., 2016), 848-67.
Le rituel monastique byzantin du πρόσχημα. Histoire d’une évolution inattendue.
Daniel Oltean. Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 82 (I, 2016), 41-66.
Nuevas aportaciones al estudio de las cofradías y hermandades en la Castilla
bajomedieval: el ejemplo de Jerez de la Frontera. Silvia María Pérez González.
Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 503-20.
Saint Grégoire de Narek, chantre de la miséricorde. Jean-Pierre Mahé. Istina, LXI
(Apr.-June, 2016), 169-92.
Pisan Perspectives: The Carmen in victoriam and Holy War, c. 1000-1150. Alasdair C. Grant. English Historical Review, CXXXI (Oct., 2016), 983-1009.
Bodies of Spirit and Bodies of Flesh: The Significance of Sexual Practices Attributed to Heretics from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century. Michael D.
Barbezat. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 25 (Sept., 2016), 387-419.
Reformist hagiography: the life of St Roding of Beaulieu and the struggle for power
in early eleventh-century Lotharingia. Koen Vanheule. Journal of Medieval
History, 42 (5, 2016), 511-34.
Affective piety and the practice of penance in late eleventh-century Worcester: the
address to the penitent in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121. Helen Foxhall Forbes. Anglo-Saxon England, 44 (2015), 309-45.
The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in
Central Medieval England. Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis. Speculum, 92 (Jan.,
2017), 36-84.
Miracle Children: Medieval Hagiography and Childhood Imperfection. Anne E.
Bailey. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 47 (Winter, 2017), 267-85.
Il culto del profeta Elia tra Oriente e Occidente. Davide Ferraris. Rivista di Storia
e Letteratura Religiosa, LII (1, 2016), 47-64.

194

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

‘Old wine in new bottles’? Gregory Palamas’ Logos on Saint Peter of Athos (BHG
1506). Mihail Mitrea. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 40 (Oct., 2016),
243-63.
La paternité spirituelle dans les cloîtres médiévaux. Christophe Vuillaume. Collectanea Cisterciensia, 78 (3, 2016), 253-68.
Language, Literacy, and the Saintly Body: Cistercian Reading Practices and the
Life of Lutgard of Aywières (1182-1246). Rachel Smith. Harvard Theological
Review, 109 (Oct., 2016), 586-610.
‘Water mixed with the blood of Thomas’: contact relic manufacture pictured in
Canterbury Cathedral’s stained glass. Rachel Koopmans. Journal of Medieval
History, 42 (5, 2016), 535-58.
Recreating the Judean Hills? English hermits and the Holy Land. Laura Slater.
Journal of Medieval History, 42 (5, 2016), 603-26.
The Eschatological Future of the Jews in the ‘Vine Diagram’ of Joachim of Fiore.
Gábor Ambrus. Irish Theological Quarterly, 81 (May, 2016), 171-94.
Pope Innocent III, the Fourth Lateran Council, and Frankish Greece and Cyprus.
Chris Schabel and Nickiphoros I. Tsougarakis. Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
67 (Oct., 2016), 741-59.
La iglesia y el convento de San Lorenzo (Valencia), antigua sede de la provincia
franciscana de San José de Valencia, Aragón y Beleares. Albert Ferrer Orts.
Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 491-501.
Magna Carta, canon law and pastoral care: excommunication and the church’s
publication of the charter. Felicity G. Hill. Historical Research, 89 (Nov.,
2016), 636-50.
The Crusade Against Frederick II: A Neglected Piece of Evidence. Gianluca
Raccagni. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (Oct., 2016), 721-40.
Conflicto jurisdiccional y competencia escrituaria entre la catedral de León y el
monasterio Sahagún: la elaboración de Becerros en el siglo XIII. Leticia
Agúndez San Miguel. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 521-31.
Concerning the Origin of the Meditations on the Life of Christ and its early influence on art. Joseph Polzer. Franciscan Studies, 74 (2016), 307-51.
Peter of John Olivi’s Allusions to the Condemnation of 7 March 1277 in Question
57 of His Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum. Dominic Whitehouse,
OFM. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 109 (Jan.-June, 2016), 47-98.
Gestes ascétiques: Le corps et sa voix. Le cas de la mystique Mechthild de Magdebourg (XIIIe siècle). Babette Hellemans. Revue de l’histoire des religions, (Dec.,
2016), 597-615.
Bonamic y el traslado de la Diócesis de Cartagena en el siglo XIII. Isabel García
Díaz. Carthaginensia, XXXI (Jan.-Dec., 2015), 89-110.

P ERIODICAL LITERATURE

195

Per una rilettura della storia della formazione e dello sviluppo del Messale Romano.
Il caso del Messale di Clemente V. Łukasz Celiński. Ecclesia orans, XXXIII (2,
2016), 383-403.
Uso devocional de las Confesiones de san Agustín. Evidencia manuscrita de la
Inglaterra medieval. Joseph Grabau. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXIX (May-Aug.,
2016), 389-411.
Necesidad del bautismo para la salvación. Entre el Papa Bonifacio VIII y el Concilio de Florencia (1302-1442). Ignacio Jericó Bermejo. Studium, LVI (1,
2016), 115-42.
‘Enslaving Christians’: Greek slaves in late medieval Cyprus. Aysu Dincer.
Mediterranean Historical Review, 31 (June, 2016), 1-19.
Agostinho de Ancona, OESA, e o opúsculo De Facto Templariorum. José-Antonio
de G. R. de Souza. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXIX (May-Aug., 2016), 433-53.
Nuove considerazioni sulla Cappella Bardi di Vernio nella Basilica di Santa Croce
a Firenze – Parte I. Francesca Fedeli. Città di Vita, LXXI (July-Aug., 2016),
381-400.
La religiosidad de los extranjeros en Jerez de la Frontera a través de sus testamentos, 1392-1550. José A. Mingorance Ruiz. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016),
541-66.
Nobles y monjes: los Osorio villafranquinos y los monasterios bercianos (siglos
XIV-XV). Gregoria Cavero Domínguez. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 58191.
Contextualising Reform: Colette of Corbie’s Relations with a Divided Church.
Anna Campbell. Franciscan Studies, 74 (2016), 353-73.
The English parishes and knights’ fees tax of 1428: a study in fiscal politics and
administration. Alex Brayson. Historical Research, 89 (Nov., 2016), 651-72.
Fra’ Antonio Balocco de Vercelli (†1483) tra sentimento a raziocinio. Remo L.
Guidi. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 109 (Jan.-June, 2016), 163-94.
Gli statuti del Capitolo di San Pietro di Bologna (1453). Riccardo Parmeggiani.
Aevum, XC (May-Aug., 2016), 451-91.
Sisters of Saint George: female membership and material remembrance within the
Crossbow Guild of late medieval Ghent. Laura Crombie. Women’s History
Review, 25 (Dec., 2016), 871-86.
The Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Piety, Politics and Plainchant at the
Burgundian-Habsburg Court. Emily S. Thelen. Early Music History, 35 (Oct.,
2016), 261-307.
La reforma religiosa y la confessionalidad católica en el reinado de Isabel I de
Castilla, la Católica. Tarsicio de Azcona OFMCap. Carthaginensia, XXXI
(Jan.-Dec., 2015), 111-36.

196

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Wie aus Agon Antagonismus wird. Scholastisch-humanistische Grenzpolitik um
1500. Jan-Hendryk de Boer. Historische Zeitschrift, 303 (Dec., 2016), 643-70.
El emprendimiento del cardenal Cisneros en el ámbito de la traducción y la edición. Juan Luis Monreal Pérez and Juan Monreal Martínez. Carthaginensia,
XXXI (Jan.-Dec., 2015), 173-95.
The Prospects for Holy War. Terence J. Martin. Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 36 (2, 2016), 195-217.
Santo Tomás de Villaneuva y Lutero. Javier Campos y Fernández de Sevilla,
O.S.A. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXIX (May-Aug., 2016), 467-501.
Ministry in the Margins: Thomas Swalwell, OSB, and His Marginal Notes for
Preaching on the Clergy. Anne Thayer. Sixteenth Century Journal, XLVII
(Fall, 2016), 599-627.
Penitence, preachers and politics 1533-47: Thomas Cranmer’s influence on church
teaching on penance during the Henrician Reformation. Eric Bramhall. Historical Research, 89 (Nov., 2016), 687-707.
The First Bible Printed in England: A Little Known Witness from Late Henrician
England. Eyal Poleg. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (Oct., 2016), 760-80.
Teresa de Jesús: la formación de la escritora. Francisco Javier Díez de Revenga.
Carthaginensia, XXXI (Jan.-Dec., 2015), 197-214.
Kirchenhistorische Hintergründe zur Entstehung der Normierung der Ausgabe
der Lutherbibel von 1545. Stefan Michel. Evangelische Theologie, 76 (4, 2016),
246-56.
La Iglesia católica y la lectura de la Biblia en lengua vernácula antes y después de
Trento. Wim François. Mayéutica, XXXIX (July-Dec., 2013), 245-73.
Two Unpublished Letters of Stephen Gardiner, August-September 1547
(Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. Th. B 2). Spencer J. Weinreich. Journal
of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (Oct., 2016), 819-33.
Die kleine Herde der 7000. Die aufrechten Bekenner in M. Flacius Illyricus’
konzeptionellen Beiträgen zur Neuformulierung des Kirchengeschichtsschreibung aus protestantischer Sicht. Vera von der Osten-Sacken. Zeitschrift für
Kirchengeschichte, 127 (2, 2016), 165-81.
Projecting Power: Cathedral Chapters and Public Rituals in Portugal, 1564-1650.
Hugo Ribeiro da Silva. Renaissance Quarterly, 69 (Winter, 2016), 1369-1400.
Notas sobre las fundaciones de vínculos y mayorazgos del alto clero de Murcia en
los siglos XVI y XVII. Antonio Irigoyen López. Carthaginensia, XXXI (Jan.Dec., 2015), 251-74.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

197

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
The Geographies and Methodologies of Religion in the Journal of Early Modern
History. Luke Clossey. Journal of Early Modern History, 20 (6, 2016), 545-58.
Evolución política y religiosa de la Monarquía Hispana durante el siglo XVII. José
Martínez Millán. Carthaginensia, XXXI (Jan.-Dec., 2015), 215-50.
Between Utopia and New Jerusalem: Eschatological Projectors and Lutheran Confessional Culture in the Seventeenth Century. Leigh T. Penman. Early Science
and Medicine, 21 (5, 2015), 470-91.
Hospital balneario franciscano de Los Baños (Laguna, Filipinas). Nuevos documentos para su historia. Cayetano Sánchez Fuertes, OFM. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 109 (Jan.-June, 2016), 251-308.
Demonios más bien vistos que españoles. Guerra, catolicismo y diplomacia hispánica
en la Gran Bretaña de Jacobo I Estuardo (1603-1625). Óscar Alfredo Ruiz
Fernández. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 603-17.
João Rodrigues Tsûzu, de lingüista a historiador. El Livro terceiro da história eclesiástica de Japão, un códice olvidado (siglo XVII). Giuseppe Marino. Anuario
de Historia de la Iglesia, 25 (2015), 381-404.
La orden hospitalaria de San Juan de Dios en Filipinas. Siglos XVII y XVIII. Adriana Rocher. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 619-30.
Performance, Edification and Education in a Confessional Context. Protestant and
Catholic Sacred Theatre in Early Modern Alsace. Simona Negruzzo. Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, 111 (July-Dec, 2016), 551-79.
Jesuit thalassology reconsidered: the Mediterranean and the geopolitics of Jesuit
missionary aims in seventeenth-century Ethiopia. Robert John Clines.
Mediterranean Historical Review, 31 (June, 2016), 43-64.
The sack that never happened: Little Gidding, puritan soldiers, and the making of
a myth. Trevor Cooper. The Seventeenth Century, 31 (3, 2016), 261-84.
Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia (1653), religious compendia and the seventeenth-century study of religious diversity. R. J. W. Mills. The Seventeenth Century, 31
(3, 2016), 285-310.
Les Remarques du Couvent de Sainte Claire d’Argentan. Pierre Moracchini. Archivum
Franciscanum Historicum, 109 (Jan.-June, 2016), 195-250.
Notizie Historiche (continuazione). Giancarlo Capti. Archivum Scholarum Piarum,
XL (2016), 3-32.
An inflammatory match? Public anxiety and political assurance at the wedding of
William III and Mary II. Catriona Murray. Historical Research, 89 (Nov.,
2016), 730-50.
Tory anti-exclusionism in church and state: Richard Thompson of Bristol in 167885. William Gibson. The Seventeenth Century, 31 (3, 2016), 357-74.

198

P ERIODICAL LITERATURE

Fray Pedro de Jesús en el Purgatorio: reescrituras de un pasaje historiográfico. Joan
Mahiques Climent. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 643-58.
El papel jugado por los misioneros jesuitas en la firma del tratado de Nerchinsk, en
1689, suscrito entre Rusia y China. Carlos Junquera Rubio. Estudios Eclesiásticos, 91 (July-Sept., 2016), 619-59.
Pobreza y formación religiosa en la diócesis de León durante la Edad Moderna.
Alfredo Martín García. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 567-79.
Father Confessors and Clerical Intervention in Witch-Trials in Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Germany: The Case of Rothenburg, 1692. Alison Rowlands.
English Historical Review, CXXXI (Oct., 2016), 1010-42.
La Santa Sede y los candidatos al trono de España en la estrategia propagandística
de la Guerra de Sucesión. David González Cruz. Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, 25 (2015), 319-48.
The Catholic Enlightenment: Some Reflections on Recent Research. Ritchie
Robertson. German History, 34 (Dec., 2016), 630-45.
Los libros como herramienta transforadora de la sociedad: la venta y distribución
de libros desde el Colegio San Andrés de la Compañía de Jesús en Bilbao
(siglo XVIII). Pedro Rayón Valpuesta. Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, 25
(2015). 349-79.
Regalismo y Patronato regio. La comisión de Ascencio de Morales en los archivos
eclesiásticos y municipales del obispado de Cartagena (1750-1751). Ma Gloria
Aparicio Valero. Carthaginensia, XXXI (Jan.-Dec., 2015), 285-318.
Un réquiem por los jesuitas de 1775. Agustín Boadas Llavat OFM. Carthaginensia,
XXXI (Jan.-Dec., 2015), 319-47.

NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Rethinking Monastic Suppressions in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Italy: how
women religious negotiated for their communities. Liise Lehtsalu. Women’s
History Review, 25 (Dec., 2016), 945-64.
Women as Diviners and as Christian Converts in Rural South Africa, c. 18001963. Sean Redding. Journal of African History, 57 (Nov., 2016), 367-89.
Manuscript XXX: The Letters of Pā. Niel Gunson. Journal of Pacific History, 51
(Sept., 2016), 330-42.
“Que buen provecho hagan al postor”. Fraude y oportunidad durante la desamortización del monasterio de San Prudencio de Monte Laturce en il trienio liberal:
el caso Manuel María García. Diego Téllez Alarcia. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138,
2016), 711-21.
Harmonist Society in Theory and Praxis, or Socialism and Capitalism under God.
Silvia Anna Rode. Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte, 114 (2014),
339-55.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

199

Francisco Martínez de la Rosa y las conflictivas relaciones iglesia-estado en España
(1834-1835). María José Vilar García. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 72334.
Venanzio Pistelli, lo Scolopio Patriota. Ilvano Quattrini. Archivum Scholarum
Piarum, XL (2016), 33-44.
Los profetas nunca tienen razón. O al menos ne se la dan inmediatamente. A
propósito del Venanzio Pistelli Sch. P. (1810-1890). José P. Burgués.
Archivum Scholarum Piarum, XL (2016), 45-60.
P. Gennaro Fucile de S. Andrés, Prepósito General de la Orden de las Escuelas
Pías (1841-1861) (continuazione). Adolfo García-Durán. Archivum Scholarum
Piarum, XL (2016), 61-199.
Religión y religiosos en la Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas. Pablo
Ramírez Jerez. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 693-709.
From Transformation to Negotiation: A Female Mission in a “City of Schools”
[Beirut]. Julia Hauser. Journal of World History, 27 (Sept., 2016), 473-96.
Learning Hygiene: Mortality Patterns by Religion in the Don Army Territory
(Southern Russia), 1867-1916. Noël Bonneuil and Elena Fursa. Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 47 (Winter, 2017), 287-332.
The politics of church land administration: the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem
in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, 1875-1948. Konstantinos Papastathis and Ruth Kark. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 40 (Oct., 2016),
264-82.
El I Concilio Provincial de Valladolid de 1887. Un intento de renovación de la
Iglesia en España a finales del siglo XIX (2. Teil.) Juan Vallinas García.
Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 45 (2, 2013), 241-482.
“Iene e leopardi in umane sembianze”. I cattolici italiani e la sconfitta di Dogali
(1887). Giovanni Cavagnini. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 111 (July-Dec,
2016), 581-602.
The Travels and Translations of Three African Anglican Missionaries, 1890-1930.
Emma Wild-Wood. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (Oct., 2016), 781-98.
Una representación visual de los Chiriguano en la exposición misional de Turín,
1898. Pilar García Jordán. Hispania Sacra, 68 (138, 2016), 735-45.
La Ley de Separación de 1905: luces y sombras en la génesis de la idea de laicidad
en Francia. Alejandro Torres Gutiérrez. Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, 25
(2015), 165-92.
The role of religion in the Dutch Scout Movement (1911-1973). Kristian Mennen
and Marijn Molema. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 111 (July-Dec, 2016), 63056.
Le Vatican face au génocide des Arméniens et des Assyriens (Syriaques). Fikri
Gabriel. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 111 (July-Dec, 2016), 605-28.

200

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Nathan Söderblom and His Successors: Swedish Archbishops’ International Footprints. Klas Hansson. Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 28 (2, 2015), 313-27.
Nikolai Berdiaev and the Origin of Russian Messianism. Ana Siljak. Journal of
Modern History, 88 (Dec., 2016), 737-63.
The Changing Geography of Christianity in China, 1918-2004. James W. Tong.
Religion, State and Society, 44 (4, 2016), 303-26.
Karl Holl als Zeitgenosse Max Webers und Ernst Troeltschs. Heinrich Assel.
Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 127 (2, 2016), 211-48.
Die “Rassenproblematik” als Thema der Congregatio Sancti Officii zwischen 1920
und 1945. Dominik Burkard. Römische Quartalschrift, 111 (1-2, 2016), 85142.
L’affirmation transnationale de la culture catholique française (années 1920-années
1960). Florian Michel. Revue historique, 679 (July, 2016), 605-28.
The Holy See, Italian Catholics and Palestine under the British Mandate: Two
Turning Points. Paolo Zanini. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 67 (Oct., 2016),
799-818.
La “crise religieuse des années 1960”. À propos d’un débat récent dans l’historiographie britannique. Guillaume Cuchet. Revue historique, 679 (July, 2016), 62944.
Recepción en España de las deliberaciones sobre la declaración de libertad religiosa,
Dignitatis Humanae. Jesús M. Zaratiegui. Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, 25
(2015), 209-37.
Nostra Aetate (1965): Historical Genesis, Key Elements, and Reception by the
Church in Australia. Raymond Canning. Australasian Catholic Record, 93
(Oct., 2016), 387-418.
La fameuse interview du Cardinal L.-J. Suenens du 15 mai 1969: L’appel aux
médias pour promouvoir l’autorité coresponsable et collégiale de l’Église.
Artur Antoni Kasprzak. Epheremides Theologicae Lovanienses, 92 (Sept., 2016),
439-68.
The role of religious leaders in anti-Apartheid mobilisation: implications for violence prevention in contemporary South Africa. Naiema Taliep et al. Religion,
State and Society, 44 (4, 2016), 331-48.
Channel 4 and the declining influence of organized religion on UK television. The
case of Jesus: The Evidence. Richard Wallis. Historical Journal of Film, Radio,
and Television, 36 (Dec., 2016), 668-88.

AMERICAN AND CANADIAN
Relación de los mártires de La Florida. Francisco Carranza Romero. Asian Review
of Latin American Studies, 29 (3, 2016), 75-77.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

201

Tucson: A Place-Making. John Warnock. Journal of the Southwest, 58 (Autumn,
2016), 361-616.
The Missionary Réductions in New France: An Epistemological Problem with a
Popular Historical Theory. Takao Abé. French Colonial History, 15 (2014),
111-33.
John Winthrop and the Shaping of New England History. Francis J. Bremer. Massachusetts Historical Review, 18 (2016), 1-17.
“Seeing Things Their Way”: The Lord’s Remembrancers and Their New England
Histories. Reiner Smolinski. Massachusetts Historical Review, 18 (2016), 1863.
To Secure her Freedom: “Dorcas ye blackmore”. Race, Redemption, and the
Dorchester First Church. Deborah Colleen McNally. New England Quarterly,
89 (Dec., 2016), 533-55.
Ann Branson and the Eclipse of Oracular Ministry in Nineteenth Century Quakerism. William F. Rushby. Quaker History, 105 (Fall, 2016), 44-69.
This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and
New France. Carla Cevasco. New England Quarterly, 89 (Dec., 2016), 56686.
Family, Spiritual Kinship, and Social Hierarchy in Early California. Paul Conrad.
Early American Studies, 14 (Fall, 2016), 661-87.
The Elements of Africa’s Redemption. The Beginning of the American Lutheran
Mission to Liberia. Timothy D. Grundmeier. Concordia Historical Institute
Quarterly, 89 (Summer, 2016), 9-28.
War, religion and anti-slavery ideology: Isaac Nelson’s radical abolitionist examination of the American civil war. Daniel Ritchie. Historical Research, 89 (Nov.,
2016), 799-823.
The Gothic Churches of the Dallas Diocese: A Photographic Essay. Steven T.
Landregan. Catholic Southwest, 27 (2016), 49-60.
What Medicine Could Not Cure: Faith Healings at the Shrine of Our Lady of
Consolation, Carey, Ohio. David J. Endres. U.S. Catholic Historian, 34
(Summer, 2016), 25-49.
Catholic Gatekeepers: The Church and Immigration Reform in the Gilded Age
and Progressive Era. William S. Cossen. U.S. Catholic Historian, 34 (Summer,
2016), 1-23.
Intellectualism and American Parish Priests: A Study of the Library of Monsignor
Bernard J. Beckmeyer. Stephanie L. Soule. American Catholic Studies, 127
(Fall, 2016), 35-56.
The Grand Old Man: Christopher Edward Byrne, Fourth Bishop of Galveston
(1918-1950). Sister Madeleine Grace, C.V.I. Catholic Southwest, 27 (2016),
42-48.

202

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Interethnic Catholicism and Transnational Religious Connections: Milwaukee’s
Mexican Mission Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1924-1929. Sergio M.
González. Journal of American Ethnic History, 36 (Fall, 2016), 5-30.
Appealing to the “Movie Mind”: The 1926 International Eucharistic Congress and
the Rise of Epic Film in America. Adrienne Nock Ambrose. U.S. Catholic
Historian, 34 (Summer, 2016), 51-73.
Liturgy and Justice: Ninety Years of Contributions of Orate Fratres and Worship.
Ruth Meyers. Worship, 90 (Nov., 2016), 492-512.
Alfred E. Smith and the Americanization of the Catholic Church. James P. Bruce.
U.S. Catholic Historian, 34 (Fall, 2016), 1-23.
Catholics, Communists, and Conservatives: The Making of Cold War Democrats
on the Pittsburgh Front. Kenneth J. Heineman. U.S. Catholic Historian, 34
(Fall, 2016), 25-54.
Navy Chaplain Raymond Charles Hohenstein. C. Douglas Kroll. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 89 (Summer, 2016), 29-44.
For God and Country: Religious Minorities Striving for National Belonging
through Community Service. Rosemary R. Corbett. Religion and American
Culture, 26 (Summer, 2016), 227-59.
The Interweaving of Pilgrimage and Tourism at the Santuario de Chimayó. Brett
Hendrickson. U.S. Catholic Historian, 34 (Summer, 2016), 127-45.
“Mexicans Might Someday be the Salvation of the Church”: The Work of the
Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish Speaking, 1945-1970. Todd Scribner.
Catholic Southwest, 27 (2016), 2-16.
Distractions and Repercussions of the Liturgical Movement in Mid-20th Century
Missouri Synod. John C. Wohlrabe, Jr. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 89 (Fall, 2016), 45-65.
“Operation Migratory Labor”: Braceros, Migrants, and the American Catholic
Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish Speaking. Gráinne McEvoy. U.S.
Catholic Historian, 34 (Summer, 2016), 75-98.
“Let the Cuban Community Aid its Haitian Brothers”: Monsignor Bryan Walsh,
Miami’s Immigrant Church, and the Making of a Multiethnic City, 19602000. Anita Casavantes Bradford. U.S. Catholic Historian, 34 (Summer,
2016), 99-126.
“When Joe and I went to the sacred walk … it seemed like you could feel her”: Pilgrimage Traditions and Devotion to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Kellie Jean
Hogue. U.S. Catholic Historian, 34 (Summer, 2016), 147-63.
Judge Leander Perez and the Franciscans of Our Lady of Good Habor: A School
Integration Battle in Buras, Louisiana, 1962-1965. David J. Endres. Catholic
Southwest, 27 (2016), 17-25.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

203

Sargent Shriver’s Spiritual Weapons in the “War on Poverty”. Robert T. Joseph.
U.S. Catholic Historian, 34 (Fall, 2016), 55-78.
How the Republican Party Used Supreme Court Attacks to Pursue Catholic
Voters. Dave Bridge. U.S. Catholic Historian, 34 (Fall, 2016), 79-106.
The Evangelical Mind in a Secular Age. Matthew S. Hedstrom. Modern Intellectual
History, 13 (Nov., 2016), 805-17.

LATIN AMERICAN
Programa iconográfico y material en las pinturas murales de la iglesia de San
Andrés de Pachama, Chile. Fernando Guzmán et al. Colonial Latin American
Review, 25 (June, 2016), 245-64.
The Evolution of Spanish Governance During the Early Bourbon Period in Peru:
The Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the Missionaries of Ocopa.
Cameron D. Jones. The Americas, 73 (July, 2016), 325-48.
In welcher Sprache missionieren? Diskussionen zwischen weltlichen und kirchlichen Vertretern im Chile des 18. Jahrhunderts. Luisa Ossege. Zeitschrift für
Kirchengeschichte, 127 (2, 2016), 183-210.
Los obispos de Guatemala y Nicaragua y la codificación del Derecho Canónico de
1917: los “postulata episcoporum.” Carlos Salinas Araneda. Hispania Sacra, 68
(138, 2016), 747-768.

Other Books Received
Allen, Prudence, Sister, R.S.M. The Concept of Woman. Volume III: The Search for
the Communion of Persons, 1500–2015. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2017. Pp. xxviii, 546. $55.00 paperback.)
Bellezza, Simone Attilio. Tornare in Italia. Come i prigionieri trentini in Russia
divennero italiani (1914–1920). [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in
Trento, Monografie, 66.] (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2016. Pp. 236.
€20,00 paperback.)
Benson, Robert Hugh. Confessions of a Convert. (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria
Press. 2016. Pp. xii, 110. $13.95 paperback.) The individual chapters were
first published in The Ave Maria in 1906–1907 and then reprinted in book
form in 1913.
Blanton, Thomas R., IV. A Spiritual Economy: Gift Exchange in the Letters of Paul
of Tarsus. [Synkrisis: Comparative Approaches to Early Christianity in GrecoRoman Culture.] (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2017. Pp. x, 227.
$85.00 cloth.)
Cook, Michael J. Marking a Crossroad in History: Marc H. Tanenbaum and Vatican
II. (Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives. 2016. Pp. 35.)
Day, Dorothy. Thérèse. (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press. 2016. Pp. xx, 201.
$15.95 paperback.) Originally published in 1960.
Delany, Sheila (trans. and intro.). The Woman Priest. A Translation of Sylvain
Maréchal’s Novella, La femme abbé. (Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta
Press. 2016. Pp. xxiv, 68. $19.95 paperback.)
Griffiths, Paul J. The Practice of Catholic Theology: A Modest Proposal. (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 2016. Pp. xvi, 142. $29.95
paperback.)
Gristwood, Sarah. Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe.
(New York: Basic Books. 2016. Pp. xxxii, 351. $28.99 cloth.)
Hollander-Lafon, Magda. Four Scraps of Bread. Translated by Anthony T. Fuller.
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2016. Pp. x, 111. $25.00
paperback.)
Julia, Dominique (ed.). L’École normale de l’an III. Une institution révolutionnaire et
ses élèves. Introduction historique à l’édition des Leçons. (Paris: Éditions Rue
d’Ulm/Presses de l’École normale supérieure. 2016. Pp. 654. €50,00 cloth.)
204

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

205

Julia, Dominique (ed.). L’École normale de l’an III. Une institution révolutionnaire et
ses élèves (2). Textes fondateurs, pétitions, correspondances et autre documents (janvier-mai 1795). Édition critique. (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm/Presses de l’École
normale supérieure. 2016. Pp. 335. €15,00 paperback.)
Mack, Burton L. The Rise and Fall of the Christian Myth: Restoring Our Democratic
Ideals. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2017. Pp. vi, 310. $28.00 cloth.)
Nichols, Aidan, OP. All Great Art is Praise: Art and Religion in John Ruskin. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 2016. Pp. xvi, 613.
$79.95 cloth.)
O’Callaghan, Paul. Children of God in the World: An Introduction to Theological
Anthropology. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press.
2016. Pp. x, 595. $39.95 paperback.)
Poulard, Elie. A French Slave in Nazi Germany: A Testimony. Translated and edited
by Jean V. Poulard. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2016.
Pp. xxiv, 142. $30.00 cloth.)
Saresella, Daniela. Tra politica e antipolitica. La nuova “società civile” e il movimento
della Rete (1985-1994). (Milan: Mondadori Education S.p.A. 2016. Pp. vi,
202. €16,00 paperback.)
Schmidt, Frantz. The Executioner’s Journal. Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial
City of Nuremberg. Translated by Joel F. Harrington. [Studies in Early
Modern German History.] (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
2016. Pp. lxiv, 171. $24.50 paperback.)
Solovyov, Vladimir. The Burning Bush: Writings on Jews and Judaism. Edited, translated, and with commentary by Gregory Yuri Glazov. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2016. Pp. xviii, 609. $65.00 cloth.)
Yarrow, Simon. The Saints: A Short History. (New York: Oxford University Press.
2016. Pp. xii, 176. $16.95 cloth.)
Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb. Moses: A Human Life. [Jewish Lives.] (New Haven:
Yale University Press. Pp. x, 225. $25.00 cloth.)