Early Modern Christian Research Articles

Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720 by Elizabeth C. Tingle (review)

Reviewed by: Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720 by Elizabeth C. Tingle Joseph Bergin Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480–1720. By Elizabeth C. Tingle. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xvi, 308. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-3823-6.) Nowadays it is hard to remember the excitement provoked in their time by the pioneering researches of French historians like Philippe Ariès, Michel Vovelle, François Lebrun, and Pierre Chaunu on attitudes—and the practices to which they [End Page 342] gave rise—toward death and the afterlife during the 1960s and 1970s. Their methods and vocabulary have given way to different questions and approaches, but as so often, such historiographical turns leave many loose ends when the newest fashion takes over. Elizabeth C. Tingle’s new book on purgatory and piety in early-modern Brittany reconsiders those early works with fairness and economy, and incorporates their findings within the framework of a study that is much more wide-ranging and interesting than its title alone would suggest. Her book focuses on three dioceses (Nantes, Vannes, and Saint-Pol-de-Léon) in western Brittany, rather than on the eastern or central parts of the province, which Bruno Restif studied a few years ago. A key point here is the reputation of west Brittany in particular as a haven for highly distinctive and barely Christianized Celtic customs concerning death and the dead, complete with their accompanying rituals and—lurking in the background—the strange skeletal figure of Ankou. Such an obsession with the dead as a threatening presence among the living helped to produce distinctive images in churches and burial practices. Tingle sets out to question such accepted views by a systematic study of the place of purgatory within the religious culture—as well as the wider social and ecclesiastical structure—of Breton society through the upheavals of the Reformation and Catholic Reformation. Her book is based primarily on the printed and especially archival materials that were often destroyed over the centuries and survive only in uneven quantities. The subject of the place of purgatory in late-medieval and early-modern Christianity is itself a problematic one, given its outright rejection by Protestantism and its qualified defense by Catholicism, as needing to be defined and regulated. Tingle provides a succinct analysis of how the doctrine and its practical implications were reworked over the centuries and, above all, how new spiritualities arose that emphasized living a good, virtuous life rather than relying on a good death and/or the accumulated treasure of “merit” of the Church to attain salvation. Understanding of purgatory and its function had direct consequences for the behavior of “ordinary” Christians when settling their accounts with God, as is so evident in the postmortem Masses and other provisions commonly found in their wills and other key documents. For the great majority, perpetual foundations were too expensive, but they could fall back on confraternities and indulgences. But attitudes gradually shifted, and by the eighteenth century the mostly town-based élites were less likely to rely on or found intercessory Masses for themselves or for the departed as they had in the past, whereas rural parishes moved more slowly. Along the way, the role of purgatory in the economy of salvation produced a veritable superstructure, with its own financial base, within Catholicism. Entire categories of lesser secular clergy made a living from saying Masses and attending funerals; they founded endowments for Masses themselves, which sustained the next generation of clergy. But this superstructure was hard hit by King Louis XIV’s taxes and virtually ruined by the crash of John Law’s financial policies in 1720. It is also to Tingle’s credit that she makes a systematic effort to examine Breton religious history and its supposed peculiarities in the context of the wider [End Page 343] French and European patterns of the period she studies. This is not merely historiographical road-mapping, but is a key thread in this book—namely, that even west Brittany was far more receptive to outside influences than usually imagined. It was not a remote island, and over the two centuries or so considered here its saints...

Des montagnards endiablés: Chasse aux sorciers dans la vallée de Chamonix (1458–1462) by Carine Dunand, and: De cognitionibus quas habent Daemones liber unus by Federico Borromeo (review)

Reviewed by: Des montagnards endiablés: Chasse aux sorciers dans la vallée de Chamonix (1458–1462) by Carine Dunand, and: De cognitionibus quas habent Daemones liber unus by Federico Borromeo Armando Maggi Des montagnards endiablés: Chasse aux sorciers dans la vallée de Chamonix (1458–1462). By Carine Dunand. [Cahiers lausannois d’histoire medieval, 50.] (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, Section d’histoire, Faculté des Lettres. 2009. Pp. iii, 208. €24,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-940110-63-8.) De cognitionibus quas habent Daemones liber unus. By Federico Borromeo. Edited by Francesco di Caccia. [Accademia Ambrosiana: Classe di studi Borromaici: Fonti e studi, Vol. 9.] (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana; Rome: Bulzoni Editore. 2009. Pp. 282. €20,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-7870-436-7.) These two recent studies testify to the significant vitality of our contemporary interest in medieval and early-modern Christian witchcraft and demonology. These volumes represent the two most frequent approaches to this complex thematic. On the one hand, Dunand presents a historical examination of a specific case of witch craze in late-fifteenth-century France through a detailed analysis of the social and cultural foundations that led to the execution of at least thirteen citizens of the valley of Chamonix. Dunand also transcribes some of the most fascinating documents related to these disturbing events. Di Caccia, on the other hand, publishes an accurate edition of De cognitionibus quas habent daemones liber unus (1624), one of Federico Borromeo’s treatises on demonology, which represents a sophisticated reinterpretation of some of the key concepts of Renaissance views of demonic knowledge. Borromeo’s book is a late representative of a philosophical and theological genre that dominated fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. Borromeo’s daring and fascinating conclusions about the limits of demonic knowledge can be understood only if read as a reaction to a set of received ideas that had remained unchallenged for several decades. As Dunand points out in the introduction to her volume dedicated to a series of executions between 1458 and 1462 in the valley of Chamonix, it is rare to find documents related to a “crisis of witchcraft in the diocese of Geneva,” and this is why she was led to investigate the archives in High-Savoy and other close-by locations, with a unquestionably interesting results (p. 3). Dunand underscores that an understanding of this historical event requires consideration of the contemporary political tensions in that region. In the first chapter the author offers a historical survey of the historical conditions and geographical isolation that led to the transformation of the valley of Chamonix into an independent community at the end of the thirteenth century. Although the valley fell under the jurisdiction of a priory, its inhabitants resisted this political arrangement. In Dunand’s words, the “wave of witchcraft” between 1458 and 1462 reflected a deep fracture between the citizens of the valley of Chamonix and their rulers (p. 25), who tried to limit political rights—first, in criminal justice, which often had unclear jurisdiction (p. 30). The prior, Guillaume de Ravoire, who displayed morally questionable conduct, tried to transfer all political decisions to members of his family, triggering anger in the valley (p. 38). Particularly interesting is the second part of the volume, which reproduces a series of legal documents connected to the witch hunt of those years, such as the death sentences of the victims of the inquisition’s persecution. [End Page 341] Francesco di Caccia’s volume is first and foremost a critical edition and Italian translation of Borromeo’s little-known Latin treatise. In his brief introduction, di Caccia makes it clear that he primarily intends to highlight the genesis and the main points of interest of this seventeenth-century volume. According to di Caccia, Borromeo decided to compose a treatise on the complex topic of demonic knowledge while writing a text on ecstatic and delusional women (De ecstaticis mulieribus et illusis, 1616). Considering how easily he had uncovered the demons’ deceptions against feeble-minded women, Borromeo came to the conclusion that demons’ intelligence was limited in actuality (p. 15). Although demons have all the ontological characteristics of any angelic being, in Borromeo’s view God must have somehow blurred...

Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles by Isaiah Gruber (review)

Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the of Troubles. By Isaiah Gruber. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2012. Pp. xi, 299. $48.00. ISBN 978-0-875-80446-0.)Isaiah Gruber's new book offers a lively account and an exciting analysis of Russia's Time of Troubles, 1598-1613-a period of dynastic collapse, social upheaval, and foreign invasion.The book is built in carefully planned layers. After a general stage-setting introduction, it opens with an exploration of the trope of Russia as Israel, or God's Chosen People, imbued with particular sanctity but also burdened with weighty responsibilities. Gruber notes that most, if not all, earlymodern Christian states invoked New Israel imagery, but in Muscovy these ideas gained heightened trenchancy because of Russia's status as the sole surviving Orthodox state.The second chapter switches gears, documenting the ups and downs (mostly ups) of monastic business ventures, especially the salt trade, the inflows and outflows of their accounts, and their favored position relative to the tsarist administration.This chapter, in combination with its sequel, chapter 4, will prove essential to the layered argument that Gruber builds. The bottom-line finding is that the monasteries and the patriarchate were widely, and accurately, viewed as in cahoots with the tsarist administration, cushioned from economic hardship by their great wealth and unsympathetic to the desperate plight of starving Muscovites. This reputation would contribute to the most important religious trend that Gruber highlights as the book progresses: the disintegration of any shared sense of Orthodox truth and the opening of a cacophonous space for conflicting and competing claims to representing divine will.If the even-numbered chapters explore ecclesiastical wealth, political insider status, and lack of charitable activity, the odd numbered chapters follow the political ideologies and rhetorics of legitimation concocted by church leaders through the dizzying sequence of regime changes of the Troubles. When the ancient tsarist line died out with Ivan theTerrible's last son in 1598, the newly created patriarch, Iyov, manufactured what Gruber casts as a startlingly novel set of justifications for the elevation of Boris Godunov to the throne. Iyov experimented and tinkered, ultimately producing a game-changing set of criteria. Along with familiar elements of tsarist succession such as divine will and clerical affirmation, Gruber identifies the innovative introduction of legitimation through popular choice (voxpopuli) and the bestowal of the throne by a woman (vox feminina)- in this case, the widow of the late tsar and sister of Boris. …

Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) by Daniel Jütte (review)

Reviewed by: Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) by Daniel Jütte Dean Phillip Bell Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) Daniel Jütte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. 420 pp. In this revised dissertation, Daniel Jütte provides an impressive study of an emerging theme that allows him to explore a broad range of intriguing and important issues in the history of early modern Jewry and early modern society more generally. Focusing on the meaning, function, and dissemination of what he terms the economy of secrets, Jütte offers well-crafted insights into Jewish economic and cultural history at the same time that he provides new conceptual frameworks for understanding interactions between Jews and Christians. Jütte’s theme is particularly significant as Jews were often seen to possess and utilize secrets (endowing them with perceived negative qualities as well as a certain degree of power). Indeed, the early modern [End Page 173] concern with Judaizing, the phenomenon of crypto-Judaism, and the perception by early modern Christians that Hebrew was a secret language—one that made kabbalah and other Jewish intellectual and practical systems appear simultaneously foreign and magical—fit well into the conceptual structure outlined by Jütte. Jütte pays particular attention to early modern economics, politics, and technology, allowing him to engage more traditional themes such as state formation, the court, and growing interest in arcane knowledge, as well as more recently developed topics such as early modern categories of knowledge, communication, and the development of the concept of the “public.” The volume includes a rigorous review of scholarship on the theme of secrecy and evinces a deep familiarity with an impressive array of studies and themes in early modern history. Jütte places the notion of secrecy in its philosophical and theological context, but he is careful to maintain focus on the practical implications of secrecy (with attention to the economic and political uses of secrets). In reviewing the various facets of secrecy in early modern society, Jütte quite naturally begins with an overview of alchemy, an activity that occupied Christians as well as Jews. Here Jütte covers the basic ground by reviewing some of the central figures that have been discussed in the secondary literature. He next turns to medical arcana, examining various salves and cosmetics and, more menacingly, accusations of Jews concocting poisons for a variety of purposes. Jütte also gives ample space to discussions of cryptography, espionage, and the procurement of information, as well as the development of and traffic in technology (for both civil and military purposes). In the latter category he presents an intriguing range of Jewish personalities involved with weapons and other military technology. Jews, like other early modern people, were also involved in what appear to us today to be more fanciful engagement, speculating and trafficking in magical potions and products. Logically, Jütte next turns to Jewish involvement with and perceived mastery of magical arts and sorcery, the quintessential secrets. In discussing the economic dimension of the arcane, Jütte profitably examines the world of the political court, paying particular attention to alchemy and the related activities of metallurgy and currency production as well as financial reform in the nascent states. In his extensive fifth chapter, which covers some 140 pages, Jütte turns to the little-studied but intriguing figure of Abramo Colorni (1544–1599), fashioned to some extent by himself and his contemporaries as a professor of [End Page 174] secrets (legitimated for some by his Jewish background). Jütte reconstructs an extensive biography, reviewing along the way Colorni’s intellectual development and migrations before serving as an engineer at the court in Ferrara. Known particularly for his work on weapons, Colorni was a mechanical expert with technical know-how, and for Jütte a classical representative of an individual expert in the economy of secrets. He reflects for Jütte the fine lines separating science and magic, astrology and palmistry, mathematics and mysticism, and practice and theory in the early modern world. Colorni was familiar with Christian theology, and his own work was received far beyond...

»…welches alle Menschen erleuchtet«?

Europe is in crisis, but what sort of crisis is it? Should it be explained in terms of leaving Europe’s Christian heritage? In this paper, the European crisis is described as a crisis which has its origins within early modern Christianity. This crisis can be made visible through the study of the reception of the Johannine prologue. All the dominant streams in the Reformation, both the mainstream and the radical Reformation, privilege John as a primary source of their doctrines, but differ strongly in their interpretation. The spectrum of interpretation that can be reconstructed through the study of the reception of the prologue sheds light on the present European crisis. The European crisis since the Reformation can be characterized as a tension between a universal and a particular understanding of salvation. The first can be found in radical humanism such as the theology of Michael Servetus or Sebastian Franck, in which church and faith ultimately become superfluous. The second can be found in Anabaptist and Reformed theology, in which salvation is exclusively bound to specific religious communities. Luther’s theology is then construed as an attempt to hold the two extremes together.

A Political Necrology of God

For early modern Christian subjects, Christ’s crucifixion and death fixes at the heart of things a momentary submission to decreation and destruction, replenished by the Resurrection and the promise of the Second Coming, but present all the same as a kind of absolute eclipse in ontotheology. With reference to the reworked “Nicene Creed” that closes Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, this essay asks: what happens to political ecologies of vibrant matter when they confront the corpse of God? How might Renaissance political ecologies speak to contemporary political dynamics, and what stands to occupy the vacant place of suicide, then and now, within this communal nexus? This essay pursues answers to these questions by placing an early modern text on suicide, John Donne’s Biathanatos, into conversation with a contemporary theorization of community—Roberto Esposito’s Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Donne’s scandalous, even blasphemous, presentation of Christ as a “self-killer” in Biathanatos raises the possibility that Christian community is founded in the shadow of an originary yet occulted moment of self-destructive will, at once inferred yet unrepresentable. The socially binding consequences of this sacrificial dynamic are further explored in relation to contemporary politics, with reference to the focalizing effect of the suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation catalyzed the “Arab Spring” of widespread popular revolt.

SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany.

Although the subdiscipline of the history of emotions is a fairly recent development, judgments about the ways in which religion enlisted, spoke to, and exploited the human emotions have long played a role in the questions scholars have asked about late medieval and early modern Christianity. Much of this work has often come to distinctly negative conclusions. In Jacques Toussaert's Le sentiment religieux en Flandres à la fin du Moyen Age (1963), the late medieval church was a lax taskmaster that failed to stir much emotional commitment; an arid ritualistic formalism thus bred indifference and ignorance. Those that followed Toussaert debated his judgments, but few saw much positive about the emotional climate of the late medieval church or the successor churches produced by the Protestant and Catholic reformations. For Lawrence Stone, the English Protestant world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a grim place where parents failed to invest their children with love. In Jean Delumeau's works treating the continent, by contrast, both late medieval and early modern Christians were victims of clerics obsessed with inculcating excessive guilt. And although Eamon Duffy concluded that the late medieval church in England had a sunnier disposition—its rich liturgical tradition channeled human feelings and granted expression to a lush variety of emotions—he saw that idyll destroyed by the juggernaut of Tudor politics and harsh Protestant reforms.

Mediating Jewish Knowledge: Menasseh ben Israel and the Christian Respublica litteraria

Cooperation between Christian and Jewish scholars was common in the world of Early Modern Christian Hebraica. Ever since Christians decided to study the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the Kabbala and the commentaries and treaties of the Medieval Jewish philosophers there were rabbis to teach them or to help them edit the Hebrew books they needed. Still, outside of grammars, only a few rabbis went as far as authoring books for Christian audiences. Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), the famous Amsterdam rabbi known above all for his negotiations with Oliver Cromwell and the London parliament about the renaturalization of the Jews to England, was one of the first systematically to publish Latin books for a Christian audience and to “translate” Judaism into Christian contexts. In my essay I explain how Menasseh proceeded, how he merged Jewish knowledge into the knowledge of the Christian Respublica litteraria, and how he finally interconnected his scholarly and his political activities. Of special interest is Menasseh’s idea of an Abramite theology, a common subset of shared Jewish and Christian teachings which could be used as something like a “third space” in intercultural translation processes. Finally, I discuss some aspects of the failure of Menasseh’s project, reflected in the ambivalent reactions of the Christian world, and reconsidered with regard to the conditions early modern cultural mediators generally had to meet, but which Menasseh didn’t.

Grief and Consolation in Early Modern Lutheran Devotion: The Case of Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619)

This article seeks to make an original contribution to the study of early modern Christian devotion by examining a source that has received no scholarly attention of any kind: Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement(1619). Oelhafen, a prominent Nuremberg lawyer, composed thePious Meditationsshortly after his wife, Anna Maria, died. He did so in order to console himself and his eight children in the midst of their considerable grief. Drawing on well-known rhetorical devices and consolatory remedies, Oelhafen produced a work of private devotion that is remarkable in terms of its rich affectivity and considerable artistic skill. ThePious Meditationswas never published, rather Oelhafen intended it for a private circle of intimates, especially his children and their posterity. The work illustrates especially well the theme of spiritual self-care that was so prominent in early modern Lutheran devotion. ThePious Meditationsalso demonstrates how creative and resourceful early modern Christians could be as they sought to contend with mortality, loss, despair, the obligations of parenthood, and the frequently mysterious workings of providence.

Isaac Casaubon, Hebraist

A review essay of Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinbegr’s remarkable ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’. The essay seeks to pay homage to their exemplary contribution to our understanding of Early Modern Christian Hebraism – and of erudition more generally – by expanding on their pioneering study through reflection on three themes: Casaubon’s early Hebrew studies; the motivation and scope of his learning; and his posthumous reputation as a Hebraist.

La coexistence confessionnelle à l’épreuve: Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne (review)

La coexistence confessionnelle a l'epreuve: Etudes sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne. Edited by Didier Boisson and Yves Krumenacker. [Chretiens et Societes: Documents et Memoires, No 9.] (Lyon: Institut d'Histoire du Christianisme, Universite Jean Moulin- Lyon III. 2009. Pp. 261. euro22,00 paperback. ISSN 1761-3043.) Much as ecumenism and interfaith dialogue offer hope for lessening the religious tensions of the twenty-first century, so early-modern Christians throughout Western Europe pursued confessional coexistence as a potential solution to the unrelenting, murderous conflict that accompanied the Reformation. To be sure, coexistence was not the same as toleration, but at least it presented possibilities for containing conflict. Chief among the places where this important if not always successful experiment unfolded was France. There the religious divide pitted a powerful Catholic majority against a determined Protestant minority. The nine essays gathered in this volume span three centuries; explore the economic, political, religious, and social dimensions of confessional coexistence; and bring an array of historical sources to bear on the subject. Denis Crouzet and Pierre-Jean Souriac's essays are the most politically oriented. The former focuses on the Queen Mother Catherine de Medici's oscillation between patience and anger, dissimulation and openness, deception and violence in her efforts to realize concord and stability. Souriac examines the oft-cited, though little-studied, surety towns where armed Huguenot garrisons protected Reformed worshipers, concluding that the provisions offered security but meant that the urban bourgeoisie was unlikely to take up arms when the Protestant Henri, duc de Rohan, rose against the Catholic monarchy in the 1620s. A second set of essays examines the various arrangements for confessional coexistence in the seventeenth century. Philippe Chareyre surveys developments at Nimes, a southern Protestant bastion. Drawing on a close reading of church disciplinary records, he emphasizes the practical need for coexistence to maintain social cohesion and economic prosperity. Michelle Magdelaine and Edwin Bezzina also direct attention to particular communities, in this instance Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and Loudun.The former investigates the contours of confessionally mixed marriages, while the latter presents the results of an exhaustive analysis of wills. …

At the Origins of Mission and Missiology: A Study in the Dynamics of Religious Language

The term “mission” was first used to describe Christian evangelization in the sixteenth century, probably by Ignatius of Loyola. The theological sub-discipline missiology dates from the nineteenth century. This paper compares these innovations to understand them better and appreciate how religious language that describes religious practice works. Early missiology's distinctive rhetorical structure—namely its organization around missionaries as the “subject” of mission and those evangelized as mission's “object”—reveals the implications of Ignatius's innovation and explains the rapid proliferation of the term in early modern Christian Europe. “Mission” captured Europe's emergent self-understanding decisively shaped by the new awareness of the Americas, discursively placing Europe at the world's center, both geographically and morally. These innovations in Christian terminology exemplify metapraxis, a philosophical explanation of religious practice. Comparing them provides insight into how metapraxis evolves in new circumstances to legitimate religious practices both implicitly and explicitly.

“Eigentlich Teutsch?” Depictions of Yiddish and its Relations to German in Early Modern Christian Writings

Discussing the unique phenomenon of Christian literature on Yiddish, written and published between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries in the German-speaking lands, the present article focuses on the depictions of the Jewish language in Christian works. It demonstrates the various ways in which the Christian authors described Yiddish via its relations to the German language—both in the linguistic dimension, which relates to the structure of the language, and in the functional dimension, relating to the social functions of Yiddish within German society—and discusses the social and cultural determinants that shaped the German-Christian perceptions of the language of the German Jews.

Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and religion in Enlightenment Europe, The History of Medicine in Context, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. ix, 267, illus, £55.00 (hardcover 978-0-7546-5638-8).

Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and religion in Enlightenment Europe, The History of Medicine in Context, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. ix, 267, illus, £55.00 (hardcover 978-0-7546-5638-8).

Catholic Prophylactics and Islam's Sexual Threat: Preventing and Undoing Sexual Defilement in The Renegado

Philip Massinger's The Renegado (1624) stages a confrontation between Christians and Muslims the cross-cultural North African port city of Tunis. The plot revolves around two potential interfaith unions and the recuperation of a renegade pirate who has previously denounced Christianity and now seeks repentance. Although the play attempts to establish a clear opposition between and Turk, its dramatic action arises from the ultimately porous boundary that divides them-a boundary mediated by sexual seduction and conversion. Two central Christian characters, a brother and sister, both risk sexual defilement and subsequent conversion as the result of potential unions with Muslim characters. The renegade pirate similarly calls attention to the permeable boundary between and Turk through his denunciation of the Christian faith and his adoption of a life of piracy. While conversion to Islam is mediated across a slippery threshold, both physical and spiritual, it implies a transgression from which there seems to be no return. And yet, despite the tragic repercussions linked with Islamic conversion-its association with permanent and irreversible consequences-The Renegado produces a comic ending for each of its Christian protagonists. These comic resolutions, however, turn out to be contingent upon the efficacy of a surprising model of Christian faith and resistance, and reveal a logic of redemption that differs for men and women.Although The Renegado overtly posits the triumph of Christian spirituality over Islamic carnality, it anchors Christian resistance Catholic objects, ceremonies, and bodily practices, and repeatedly marks spiritual redemption outward, visible, and material ways. For example, a relic purported to have magical qualities successfully protects the Christian heroine's virginity from her Turkish captor's carnal designs (1.1.147).1 Similarly, the renegade pirate assures his readmission to the church by making his confession to a Jesuit priest-a most unlikely hero on the English Renaissance stage-who is dressed in a cope, like a bishop (4.1.72).2 Enacting the ritual stages of confession and penance, the renegade reverses his former act of apostasy, which was carried out through his disruption of a Catholic mass and desecration of the Eucharistic host. And the play extends Christian conversion to the Muslim princess by requiring her participation an elaborate baptism ceremony that is performed by a layman, her husband-to-be.These details position the play explicitly against the practices and beliefs of English Protestantism, and yet the play was given official license for public performance and appears to have been popular and uncontroversial its time. I want to suggest that The Renegado's depiction of Christian triumph over Muslim conversion involves a complex negotiation of spiritual and material, inward and outward, and Protestant and Catholic models of faith. In turn, these tensions between spirituality and materiality reveal the ways which Islam's threat to early modern Christians was perceived to be not just religious nature, but bodily as well. More specifically, the play's recourse to material, Catholic practices to resist or undo Islamic conversion reveals how Islam was perceived to be a sexual threat, how it was understood to involve a bodily conversion, and how this conversion carried potential racial consequences. It is partly because of Islam's perceived sexual and bodily threat to Christians, I argue, that the stage resurrected older, Catholic models of Christian resistance, which, unlike the more spiritualized and disembodied notions of Protestant faith, were tangible and embodied.As part of the recent wave of interest early modern encounters with Ottoman Turks and the religion of Islam, The Renegado has attracted a burst of critical attention. Following the publication of Daniel Vitkus's modern edition (2000), critics including Bindu Malieckal, Barbara Fuchs, Jonathan Gil Harris, Jonathan Burton, Valerie Forman, and Vitkus himself have explored the play's dramatization of contemporary anxieties about Mediterranean commerce and English contact with the Ottoman Empire. …

The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 by Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield

MLR, 104.2, 2009 545 on Chaucer, MR His Parliament of Fowls ismined for political-theoretical and allegorical-romantic moieties' (p. 132) on doings atWestminster. Also examined are his attitudes to theWonderful Parliament of 1386 and the grim consequences of theMerciless Parliament in 1388, which included the lynching of a Chief Justice (pp. 164-67). Biographical facts being few, the author then challenges comment by calling Chaucer's pilgrims a parliament, summoned from every shire's end, and with a vote on stories as theirbusiness (p. 170). In Chapter 5Piers Plowman and theGood Parliament of 1376 receive attention, with emphasis on 'reformof the public voice'. Chapter 6 indicates the disillusion ment (p. 239) that set in after 1400, where petitions from the people, Crowned King, Richard theRedeless, andMum and theSothsegger are diverse evidence for the malaise ofHenry I V's times, but also (a healthier sign) the ascendancy of English. Matthew Giancarlo has written a serious, professional work. Itwill be an es sential guide to the no man's land between the legislative assemblies and poetry of latemedieval England. It offers varied insights on how parliament was viewed and what ideologies its members possessed, thereby usefully complementing Jenni Nuttall's The Creation ofLancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language, and Politics in LateMedieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), reviewed in MLRy 104 (2009), 159. She discusses theCrown, Giancarlo lords and commons, but they together portray an age when courtiers,MPs, and civil servants read political poetry, and sometimes even wrote it. University of Navarre, Pamplona Andrew Breeze The Religions of theBook: Christian Perceptions, 1400-1660. Ed. byMatthew Dim mock and Andrew Hadfield. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. xv+ 213 pp. ?45- ISBN 978-0-230-02004-7. This compelling and innovative collection of essays commemorates a one-day con ference on 'Religions of the Book\ which convened at the University of Sussex in September 2005. Its eight essays plus an introduction and afterword will be of interest tohistorians and literaryscholars working on earlymodern representations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as the history of the book. As is to be expected in a collection of this kind, some material ismissed. One looks in vain for sustained discussion of the onstage figureof the Jew,for instance?but the new questions raised in thisvolume have more than compensated for any deficiencies. The overarching claim is that religions of the book existed in a shared cultural and semantic fieldduring thisperiod, and, as a result, it isnot useful for scholars to employ a clearly demarcated 'us' vs. 'them' binary in explaining earlymodern Chris tianity's relationship with Judaism and Islam. The documentary and literaryrecords are much more nuanced than is often supposed; Christian writers often advocate intolerance while simultaneously expecting readers to share inunderstanding of the similarities between these three faiths.One of the strengths of this collection lies in its ability to revise existing approaches to Renaissance self-definition while laying down models for continued research. Christian selfhood only emerged following 546 Reviews highly sophisticated processes of theological exchange and adversarial confronta tion. The essays gathered here lodge a compelling case formodern scholars' need to increase comparative research across cultures, to investigate archives thathave not fullybeen tapped, and to expand the limits of earlymodern material culture beyond written texts. Anthony Bale opens the collection by investigating the sources of anti-Semitism in The Book of Margery Kempe. Kempe conflates her English opponents with 'Jews', whose attributes come to her through cultural memory and mediation rather than codices. Next, Colin Imber selects themid-fifteenth-century Crusade of Varna in order to examine crusading ideology more generally. He concludes that this cam paign, which represented a loose political (rather than religious) alliance, co-opted the idea of crusade inorder to legitimize a host of largely secular motives. Matthew Dimmock follows with a penetrating analysis of how early modern Christianity portrayed Islam, and especially Muhammad, as monstrous aberrations. Islamic monstrosity signifies contagion and a departure from normative Christian order'. Theological difference invariably translates into grotesque physical manifestation. In the succeeding chapter, Raphael Hallett argues thatMartin Luther's late treatise 'On the Jews and their Lies' (1543) shares with his earlier work 'That JesusChrist was Born a Jew' (1523...

Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. By Frances E. Dolan

Frances Dolan's Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture artfully models what we might see by resisting the allure of binaries. Instead of insiders versus outsiders, she identifies her subjects as “proximate others”; instead of (Catholic) virginity versus (Protestant) marriage, she focuses on Catholic wives and couples; and instead of delineating the difference between private and public, she exposes the porousness of the boundary. Dolan does not claim that these sorts of categories are reductive or generalizations inadequate, nor does she simply banish anything tarred with a binary brush. Instead, by dwelling on the cross-hatch of oppositional identities, she reveals a historical picture that theorizes the interaction between religion, politics, and gender. For scholars who study other religions and time periods, Dolan's book usefully demonstrates how and why closely-related religious groups deploy gender to mark difference. For specialists in early modern Christianity, Whores of Babylon provides convincing arguments about why Catholic women and (even more surprisingly) the Catholic couple so fascinated pamphleteers, preachers, playwrights, and polemicists as they promoted a white, Protestant, masculine, English national identity.

Adrien Gambart's Emblem Book (1664): the Life of St Francis de Sales in Symbols, and: Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Reviewed by: Adrien Gambart’s Emblem Book (1664): the Life of St Francis de Sales in Symbols, and: Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Wendy M. Wright (bio) Adrien Gambart’s Emblem Book (1664): the Life of St. Francis de Sales in Symbols. Facsimile edition with a study by Elisabeth Stopp. Edited by Terence O’Reilly with an essay by Agnés Guiderdoni-Bruslé. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2005. xi + 373 pp. / 113 Illustrations. $60.00 (cloth); Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. By Ralph Dekoninck. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2006. 116 pp. / 81 Illustrations. $45.00 (pb.) So you thought graphic novels were something new? Or perhaps as you've studied or taught Christian spirituality you've left the visual evidence to the art historians or seen such as marginal to the tradition. Think again. Two beautifully produced new books from Saint Joseph's University Press will introduce you to the visually symbolic world of emblem books and, more intriguingly, to emblematic thinking, an important expression of early modern Christian humanist culture. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, emblem books thrived in Europe and in the mission field. As one learns, the term "emblem" covers a broad range of phenomena but in its canonical form an emblem typically has three parts: a motto, a symbolic picture, and an accompanying text. At the heart of an emblem is a metaphor or trope to which all elements of the emblem relate. All elements of the emblem, according to humanist theory, were also essential, for the theory held that an image is a body without a soul if not accompanied by its sister, poetry. Emblems rested upon the cognate assumption that hidden truths are ascertainable under the form of visible signs. While there were many types of emblems, the genre that is the topic of the two books under review—Adrian Gambart's Emblem Book and Emblemata Sacra—is sacred emblems. Such emblems were understood to be revelatory of hidden meanings, moral lessons, and divine truths. The invisible was assumed to be made manifest through the visible. Or, to put it in Ignatian terms, one could find [End Page 104] God in all things. Emblems also schooled one in the spiritual art of doing that very seeking and finding. Emblamata Sacra is the catalogue from an exhibition of selected emblem books from the extraordinary collection of Jesuitica at the Maurits Sabbe Library at Leuven exhibited at Saint Joseph's University early in 2006. But it functions as much more than a catalogue as it contains brief essays by noted European and American scholars on the theology, rhetorical theory, function (catechetical, meditative, educational, rhetorical, apologetic, evangelistic), production of and spiritual practices associated with sacred emblems. Emblematics saturated every facet of early modern life: the theatre, public life, court life, architecture, and religious procession. Especially interesting is the way in which emblems were linked to Jesuit spirituality, pedagogy, and catechetics as well as to wider humanist theory. Those quintessential early modern men, the Jesuits, were the great producers and disseminators of emblem books. Emblem books were used extensively in catechetical instruction and the foreign missions: Jerome Nadal's emblematic meditations on the Gospel were foremost among these. In some cases the pedagogical intent was overt: the various pictorial elements of emblems might be carefully numbered and accompanying comments would enable the ones instructed to discern an intended spiritual meaning. Jesuit schools were seedbeds of emblem culture. Not only were emblems used in schools to help hone the intellect (images cement abstract ideas in the mind, memory, and senses) but emblematic thinking itself was encouraged. There were contests in which students vied to create the most clever and insightful emblems. Most significantly, emblems mirrored the very techniques of spiritual formation employed by the Society of Jesus. The tripartite structure of the emblem correlates to the technical aspects of Ignatian prayer which acknowledges the distinction between composition of place, meditation, and colloquy; to its psychological dimension which appeals to the three faculties of the soul (memory, understanding, and will); and to the classic Christian spiritual progression of purgation, illumination...

Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale, and: Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo antico al concilio di Trento (review)

Reviewed by: Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale, and: Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo antico al concilio di Trento E. Ann Matter Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale. By Anna Benvenuti, Sofia Boesch Gajano, Simon Ditchfield, Roberto Rusconi, Francesco Scorza Barcellona, and Gabriella Zarri. [Sacro/Santo, 9.] (Rome: Viella. 2005. Pp. 427. €28.00 paperback.) Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo antico al concilio di Trento. Edited by Anna Benvenuti and Marcello Garzaniti. [Atti del IV Convegno di studio dell'Associazione italiana per lo studio della santità, dei culti e dell'agiografia. Firenze, 26-28 ottobre 2000.] (Rome: Viella. 2005. Pp. viii, 501. €39.00 paperback.) No academic culture is more welcoming to the study of sanctity and holy people in Christian history than that of Italy, where even some secular universities have faculty chairs dedicated to hagiography, and where faculty in general departments of history can make careers based on the study of saints and sainthood. Anna Benvenuti, the force behind these two volumes, a professor of medieval history at the University of Florence, has long been an expert on the role of holy people in medieval Italy, just as her colleague at Florence, Gabriella Zarri, has blazed a trail for the study of different forms of Christian sanctity in the early modern period. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Roberto Rusconi, who teach, respectively, medieval history and the history of Christianity at the Università di Roma Tre, are also well known for their work on Christian saints and the role of sanctity in Christian culture, especially in medieval Italy. The first volume under review here, Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (The History of Sanctity in Western Christianity) brings this remarkable quartet together with Francesco Scorza Barcellona, who teaches the history of Christianity at the Università di Roma Tor Vergata, and Simon Ditchfield, who teaches modern history at the University of York in England, to offer a detailed and thoughtful overview of changing ideas of holiness and the roles of those we call the saints in Christian history from the beginning of the Christian cultus to the pontificate of John Paul II. The material is divided chronologically, and to some inevitable extent, by theme. Francesco Scorza Barcellona begins with a chapter entitled "Origins," that brings the discussion up to the beginning of the fourth century. This chapter [End Page 105] starts with the idea of martyrdom in Second Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity, and traces the development of the Christian holy person through the beginnings of church hierarchy, the rise of the ascetic communities, and the development of sacred biography, pilgrimage, cults, and iconography specifically associated with saints. The second and third chapters cover the Middle Ages. In the second chapter, Sofia Boesch Gajano considers the "structuralization" of Christian hagiography after the development of Christian political states, from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, as seen in monastic reforms, the role of the Papacy, holiness associated with visionary activity, and the rise of new forms of sanctity associated with holy war. Anna Benvenuti then takes over for a chapter on her specialty, late medieval urban life, in which she develops themes of local patronage as opposed to the centralized authority of Rome, new forms of religiosity among the laity, the rise of the Mendicants, and the development of a formal system of canonization. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on Renaissance and early modern Christianity. Gabriella Zarri takes the story to the late sixteenth century, through the Council of Trent, focusing on the christianization of society and the rise of Christian Humanism, the development of formal hagiographical literature, the rise of Marian cults, and the role of political prophecy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the "Sante Vive" of Renaissance courts, and culminating in the figure of Girolamo Savonarola. In the fifth chapter, "The World of the Reform and the Counter-Reform," Simon Ditchfield considers how ideas of Christian sanctity were formed by confessional identity (considering briefly, and for the only time in this volume, Christian sanctity in a Protestant context). Ditchfield's essay focuses on the development of saintly cults, the Congregation of...

THE OTHER CONFESSIONAL HISTORY: ON SECULAR BIAS IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

ABSTRACTThe rejection of confessional commitments in the study of religion in favor of social‐scientific or humanistic theories of religion has produced not unbiased accounts, but reductionist explanations of religious belief and practice with embedded secular biases that preclude the understanding of religious believer‐practitioners. These biases derive from assumptions of undemonstrable, dogmatic, metaphysical naturalism or its functional equivalent, an epistemological skepticism about all truth claims of revealed religions. Because such assumptions are so widespread among scholars today, they are not often explicitly articulated. They were overtly asserted by Emile Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), however, and are implicit in the claims of two other thinkers influential in the study of early modern Christianity in recent years, namely Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault. The use of such theories in the history of religion yields secular confessional history, parallel to traditional religious confessional history only with different embedded metaphysical beliefs. If scholars want to understand religious persons such that the latter would recognize themselves in what is said about them, rather than impose their own metaphysical convictions on them, then they should reject metaphysically biased reductionist theories of religion no less than confessional religious assumptions in the practice of their scholarship. Instead, a study of religion guided not by theories but by the question, “What did it mean to them?” and which is particularized in metaphysically neutral ways offers a third alternative that avoids confessional history, whether religious or secular. When carried out consistently for multiple traditions, such an approach can reconstruct disagreements that point beyond description to historical explanation of change over time.