The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform by Stefan Bauer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform by Stefan Bauer William J. Connell The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform. By Stefan Bauer. [Oxford-Warburg Studies]. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 288. $110.00. ISBN: 9780198807001.) Onofrio Panvinio was a great scholar in a century of great scholars. His expert studies of antiquity, resulting from an extraordinary care for chronology, won nearly universal acknowledgment. Joseph Justus Scaliger even called him the "father of all history." Panvinio had a remarkable mastery of non-narrative sources (monuments, inscriptions, coins) that enabled him to supply background and to correct the narratives of Roman history both of the ancients and of his more recent predecessors. The chronological lists and tables in his books became helpful tools of reference precisely in the decades when antiquarianism was becoming a serious enterprise in Europe. Already by his early death in 1568, at the age of 38, this Augustinian hermit had published ten books under his own name, plus an edition and continuation of Platina's Lives of the Popes. Panvinio's work on Roman history was treated as "safe" in an age of religious controversy, and it served as the foundation of his later reputation. But a great deal of his writing in ecclesiastical history remained in manuscript, including a number of important books that were completed or nearly so. Unfortunately, after Panvinio's death, although his remarkably detailed work was advanced by supporters, official authorization of selected works was slow in coming and then only for texts that were censored. The records of the Congregation of the Index, established in 1571, now make it possible to examine the procedures by which these manuscripts were reviewed and censored. [End Page 402] Stefan Bauer's splendid new book comprises four rich chapters: the first two are biographical; the third explores Panvinio's history of papal elections; and the fourth looks carefully at the procedures and goals of Church censorship as revealed by the not especially welcoming reception of Panvinio's writings by the Congregation of the Index. A biography of Panvinio has been very much needed, as the only prior attempt was Davide Aurelio Perini's book of 1899. In my own copy of this volume, one that formerly belonged to the Collegium Leoninum in Bonn (now a hotel), an unknown German scholar once littered the margins to a shocking degree with penciled corrections of Perini's transcriptions of documents. In more recent years, the Augustinian Karl A. Gersbach has published numerous well-documented articles on Panvinio that do much to expand our knowledge and to set the record straight. Bauer, for his part, adds much that he himself has found, while offering needed general considerations of Panvinio's aims and, most usefully, of the extent to which Panvinio, in his early conclusions concerning the medieval Church, anticipated modern historical research. Bauer makes a compelling case for Panvinio's role as the most important writer of Catholic history between Platina (d. 1481) and Baronio, the first volume of whose Annales was published in 1588. Most importantly, Panvinio abandoned the humanist mode of historical writing, which, in imitation of the ancients, resulted in finely structured narratives, and instead privileged evidence over narrative, discussing and quoting documents in his text in the fashion of the first Church historian, Eusebius. Thus Panvinio, who edited Platina's humanistic Lives of the Popes—its censorship was studied in a previous book by Bauer—pointed the way to the methodical source criticism adopted by Baronio. Yet Baronio would represent something different: "a confessionalized view of history … in which theological and historical truth could not diverge" (pp. 13–14). As Bauer emphasizes, when Panvinio was writing in the 1550s and '60s, he was able to bracket theological concerns in order to pursue the traces left by the past wherever they might lead. Panvinio's talent was recognized early on by Girolamo Seripando, the prior general of the Augustinians, who commissioned his first major work (at the age of 19), a history of the Augustinian Order that was printed in 1550. He soon entered the well-established circle of Roman scholars under...