Sacred History. Uses of the Past in the Renaissance World ed. by Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (review)

Abstract

Sacred History. Uses of Past in Renaissance World. Edited by Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. Pp. xxiv, 339- $125.00. ISBN 978-0-19- 959479-5.)In her preface to this important volume, Katherine Van Liere rightly points out that its subject-the historiography of Christianity in Renaissance- is an emerging in scholarship (p. vii).The first four chapters in volume, therefore, aim to give an introduction to this field. Anthony Grafton, in opening chapter History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation, issues a warning: beginning of wisdom in such a vast field is to recognize how little we actually know about precise practices of ecclesiastical scholarship and how they mutated from generation to gen- eration, community to community, and to subject (p. 8). He gives a helpful summary of how modern scholars have usually seen differences between Renaissance humanist historians and church historians. According to this view, Renaissance humanist historians set out to discover an unknown past, whereas church historians looked for support for pre-existing theses. Humanists looked at human actions (as opposed to providence) as decid- ing factors in history. They felt, in their present, a historical distance from past (not a presence of tradition); and they applied new critical methods to historical sources (p. 5). Grafton shows that these distinctions are true only up to a point, because there was much cross-fertilization: Renaissance schol- ars were far more interested in church history than is usually acknowledged. Examples of this are Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, and Desiderius Erasmus. Grafton then looks at church historians proper and how they took up and expanded Eusebius of Caesarea's model in their writings.Euan Cameron gives an introduction to Protestant visions of early Christianity in Renaissance. Beginning his discussion with idea that the reformers were in some senses humanists and in others anti-humanists (p. 27), Cameron sees a development from humanist-inspired to doctrinal- apocalyptic Protestant church history in sixteenth century. The key issue for Protestants was to explain why error came into after apostolic times. Prevailing models of church history did not suit Protestant view of grand-scale theological defection of medieval Church (p. 31), and so historians of Reformation had to reinvent their discipline.The human- ist-inspired histories (such as those by Swiss Reformers Joachim Vadian and Heinrich Bullinger) emphasized human fallibility and deterioration of what had been, initially, good intentions in religious life.The doctrinal-apoca- lyptic variants, on other hand (such as Magdeburg Centuries), main- tained that wrong teachings and dilution of ideas of Gospel inevitably led to degradation from early on. According to Cameron, for Protestants ecclesiastical history was not sacred, since they rejected notion that anything in human life could be made 'sacred' or imbued with holy properties through association with religion (p. …