Thomas M. Izbicki

Humanity and divinity in Renaissance and Reformation : essays in honor of Charles Trinkaus

The volume contains studies by eleven distinguished scholars, concerning changes in ethical and religious consciousness during this important era of Western culture - themes consonant with the scholarship of Charles Trinkaus. It begins with three general essays: the Renaissance discovery of human creativity (William Bouwsma), the Renaissance and Western pragmatism (Jerry Bentley), and the new philosophical perspective (F. Edward Cranz). The remaining contributors deal with similar issues in Petrarch (Ronald Witt), Nicholas of Cusa (Morimichi Watanabe), Lorenzo Valla (Salvatore Camporeale), Marsilio Ficino (Michael Allen and Brian Copenhaver), Savonarola (Donald Weinstein), Battista Carioni (Paul Grendler), and Calvin (Heiko Oberman). The volume opens with a tribute to Trinkaus by Paul Oskar Kristeller and concludes with bibliographies of Trinkauss publications and of works on Valla in English (Pauline Watts and Thomas Izbicki). Publications by Charles Trinkaus: * Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print)

Introduction: A Gathering of People and Ideas

The Council of Basel (1431-1449) tried defending the faith and reforming the Church. In conflict with Pope Eugenius IV over supreme ecclesiastical power, it attempted his deposition. The ensuing struggle only ended when Basel closed under pressure from the princes.

Repertorium poenitentiariae Germanicum: Verzeichnis der in den Supplikenregistern der Pönitentiarie Kirchen, und Orte des Deutschen Reiches ed. by Ludwig Schmugge (review)

figuring similar changes elsewhere in France. A third essay examines the political questions—an unusual subject for Julia—which produced an ever-widening gap between church and monarchy under Louis XV. By contrast, the essay on the 1725 miracle in Paris, which dates from 2007 and arose from more recent research inspired by Dupront on pilgrimages and miracles at the CARE, is unfortunately the most isolated of the collection and would have benefited from being flanked by one or more essays from Julia’s pen on this subject.

Ten Popes Who Shook the World, and: Christian Churches of the Eastern Mediterranean, and: Jerusalem on the Hill: Rome and the Vision of St. Peter's in the Renaissance (review)

This short, illustrated volume of captivating essays began as a series of BBC radio programs in 2007. Eamon Duffy starts by declaring, “The papacy is an institution that matters, whether or not one is a religious believer” (p. 9), and moves easily from Walter Ullmann’s determinism—even as Duffy tells a more decentralized, messy tale—to Thomas Hobbes’s dismissal of the papacy as “not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned on the grave thereof” (p. 17). There follows quite a pleasant read with all sorts of jewels—very few church historians could get away with calling Roman polytheism’s acceptance of other faiths “a sort of symbolic scalpcollecting” (p. 35) or the Holy Roman Emperor “God’s policeman” (p. 62) without losing perspective and gravitas. Why these ten and not others? Duffy states that he did not try to choose the “ten ‘best’ nor even the ten most influential. . . . [E]ach of the men discussed here encapsulates one important aspect of the world’s most ancient and durable religious institution” (p. 24). Much of his accessibility and appeal lies in the ability to take what can be an insider’s history and place each pope on a broader canvas, rendering compelling even familiar stories. The first six essays (on Peter, Leo I, Gregory I, Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Paul III) function in this way as episodes in a Western civilization survey course. Some might then find it abrupt to jump between Paul III, the surprising sixteenth-century reformer, to four popes of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries: Pio Nono, Pius XII, John XXIII, and John Paul II. Duffy captures well John Paul II’s essential paradoxes, which in a sense define the church’s intramural struggles and efforts to remain a witness to the world today. CHRISTOPHER M. BELLITTO (Kean University)

Verzeichnis der in den Supplikenregistern der Pönitentiarie Innozenz' VIII. vorkommenden Personen, Kirchen und Orte des Deutschen Reiches 1484–1492. 1. Teil: Text; 2. Teil: Indices (review)

these texts are only briefly (and somewhat unevenly) introduced, a concerted effort is made in arguing that Appelmans was a Friar Minor. If that was the case, then he can hardly be associated with the later Franciscan heyday.The fourth category is composed of “female mysticism,”a label that remains somewhat amorphous.Represented here are such well-known authors as Alijt Bake and Sister Bertken, and such important anonymous works as The Evangelical Pearl and The Temple of Our Soul.

The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (review)

Nonetheless, Rosemann strives in his presentation to keep as close as possible to the language of the Lombard—an important achievement when dealing with an author who himself went to great pains to be precise in his terminology—without overanalyzing the Lombard’s motives or speculating about the impact of his teaching on the broader ecclesiastical dynamics of the twelfth century. In all, Rosemann’s Peter Lombard is a book that will reward the reader not only with a lively, entertaining and informative read, but also a good basic grasp of the content and character of the chef d’œuvre of one of the leading thinkers of the medieval Church.

Erfurter Juristen im Spatmittelalter: Die Karrieremuster und Tatigkeitsfelder einer gelehrten Elite des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (review)

In this book Robert Gramsch focuses on the University of Erfurt as a nexus in professional careers. This does not occur in a vacuum. Gramsch looks at the larger university scene, especially the University of Cologne, to give the book a comparative dimension.Moreover,he looks at the connections of these jurists to other places of study, including Italian universities. The approach is prosopographical, and it casts light on the reception of the learned law into Germany in the fifteenth century.What the author does not attempt to do is to deal in depth with the intellectual aspects of the university milieu: study, teaching, learned opinion, and even book ownership, except when it casts light on careers. (The reviewer easily traced two manuscripts owned by Lambert Voss von Soest, one of the some 700 jurists mentioned in the book and profiled in the enclosed CDROM.) Each jurist is included in detailed statistical reports on place of origin,degrees achieved, and later careers.Most of these men are not well known,having served Church or secular government in their professional capacities, but a few achieved prominence in the period of the Basel Schism (1439–1449). Among these are Johannes Tolner,a friend of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II),and Johannes Lysura, a prominent adviser to the German princes in that crisis.

Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100-c. 1550 (review)

Recent study of the medieval West has emphasized, in the words of Robert I. Moore’s title, The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Cary Nederman has undertaken the bold effort of arguing for a greater degree of toleration in medieval thought than might be expected. His examination of this theme is brief, and it focuses mostly on figures he has studied before. Nonetheless, the reader is offered a group of interesting arguments—some more persuasive than others. Both the first chapter and the sixth offer some thoughts on the practical limits of any theory of a unified Christendom,but the greatest part of the book examines a few key intellectuals. In the second chapter, with its emphasis on ideas of inter-religious dialogue, a distinction is drawn between imaginary dialogues which demonstrate the truth of Christianity and those that leave off without a final conclusion—which can be seen as exploring issues in an open way. Unfortunately, Nederman does not examine the one major attempt at a dialogue, the Barcelona Disputation, the Jewish and Christian participants in which both later claimed to have prevailed. The chapter on William of Rubruck also falls a bit short, failing to provide an overview of the failure of the medieval West to develop a missionary enterprise in Asia, away from the support of Christian kings. More persuasive are the chapters on John of Salisbury, who admitted the limits of human knowledge,Marsilius of Padua,who accommodated heretics within civil society, and Nicholas of Cusa, who brought different nations (not just different “rites”) into an imaginary dialogue of “The Peace of Faith.” Some of these themes, especially Marsilius’s reasons for taking all coercive power away from the clergy,might have been developed at greater length; but all of these discussions offer opportunities for further study of toleration in a medieval context. Fortunately, Nederman also takes us beyond the Middle Ages to examine the ideas of Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose use of Cicero has been too little understood. In no case does Nederman pretend that these writers,even Las Casas,exactly anticipated modern ideas on religious tolerance and pluralism; but he does present a persuasive argument that persecution was not the only way in which medieval thinkers approached “the other.” More should be done in the future to balance ideas of persecution with such arguments for toleration.

Vom Apostelkonzil zum Ersten Vatikanum: Studien zur Geschichte der Konzilsidee by Hermann Josef Sieben (review)

Although the author addresses issues covering nearly two millennia, the heart of this book is the study of issues arising in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the first part, the focus indeed is on the councils of the Apostles and the Elders reported in the Acts of the Apostles and on the great councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. An intriguing aspect of this part is the attention given the legends which grew up around the early councils. Sieben also addresses in this part, as he does throughout the book, the question of the reception of conciliar decrees throughout the Church.