Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy: Selected Articles by John Monfasani

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS95 sentiment and scolds him for ignoring die positive aspects of Mary's brief reign. Moreover, medieval Catholicism was not totally bankrupt. According to Duffy, "It has been one of the principal contentions of this book, however, diat into the 1 530s the vigour, richness, and creativity oflate medieval religion was undiminished, and continued to hold the imagination and elicit the loyalty of the majority of the population" (p. 479). Duffy presents his arguments is a convincing and intelligent manner and successfully chaUenges some accepted tenets of Reformation historiography. His description of traditional religion, especially the chapters on die Mass and die saints, is exceptionally good and shows the vitality of die pre-Reformation church. Keith Thomas's book on refigion and magic makes an excellent companion volume to Duffy's discussion on liturgy. The local or parish environment was the arena where the reforming policies touched the lives of the people, and the audior's description ofparish life, worship, and the opposition to the new Tudor policies is entertaining and informative. In addition to an impressive list of secondary sources, Duffy skUlfuUy uses wills, churchwardens' accounts, parish and gild records, primers, and a weakh of contemporary printed evidence to support his arguments. He does not rely exclusively on die printed word. The faithful also learned the fundamentals of their faith from paintings, carvings, and the glass in their churches, and die inclusion of photographs of ecclesiastical art which has survived gives important pictorial proof to Duffy's contention that parish life on the eve of the Reformation was not in decay. This is an important book and a significant contribution to Reformation studies. No serious student of the period can avoid confronting the arguments presented in uiis work. Rene Kollar St Vincent Archabbey Language andLearning in RenaissanceItaly: SelectedArticles. ByJohn Monfasani . [Variorum CoUected Studies Series, CS 460.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Company. 1994. Pp. xii, 338. Í8995.) John Monfasani himselfnotes diat this collection reflects two ofhis interests, Renaissance rhetoric and the cultural world of his earliest subject, George of Trebizond. Variorum has given him a chance to coUect these studies and to update them with Addenda et Corrigenda. Since some of these articles are very technical, it is well that he has placed die studies ofmost general interest at eidier end to frame the rest. Readers unwiUing to embark on discussions of topics like Anti-Quintilianism should, nonetheless, read the first study, "Humanism and Rhetoric." For the ecclesiastical historian, the pay-off comes at die end, where rhetoricians prove to have written on homiletics and where rhetoric plays a role in die earliest curriculum for Jesuit schools. On the way to die last article, readers might want to read the two reviews of editions of 96BOOK REVIEWS Lorenzo Valla, whose writings from his Neapolitan days challenged not just die pretensions of the religious but even the fllioque. (Interested scholars also should read Riccardo Fubini, "Lorenzo VaUa tra U Concilio di BasUea e quello di Firenze, e il processo deU'Inquisizione," in Conciliarismo, stati nazionali, inizi dell'umanesimo [Spoleto: Centro di Studi suU'Alto Medieoevo , 1990].) Also of importance are "A Description of the Sistine Chapel under Pope Sixtus IV," which helps us date die construction and the earlier works of art more accurately, and "Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in MidQuattrocento Rome," which casts light on "the Renaissance unmasking of the Dionysian corpus as apocryphal." I caU particular attention to the concluding study, "The Fraticelli and Clerical Wealth in Quattrocento Rome," because it highlights the tensions between the professed ideals of the vita apostólica, represented by the mendicants, and the curial ethos, "which differed little in its attitude toward wealth and display from the courts ofprinces. Anyone who has read Pius IPs unsympathetic account ofNicholas ofCusa's outburst against curial opposition to reform is aware of how this conflict of values helped undermine Rome in the period culminating in the Reformation crisis. (A bit more might have been done with die FraticeUi problem during die reign of Nicholas V, especiaUy the trial in Fabriano; see Charles Burroughs, From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome [Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990].) Some of Monfasani's...