Heresy Trial Research Articles

PRINCIPLE AND PRINCIPAL: The Other Side of the Rev Dr Peter Cameron Heresy Trial

PRINCIPLE AND PRINCIPAL: The Other Side of the Rev Dr Peter Cameron Heresy Trial

The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin

Reviewed by: The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin David H. Price Kenneth Austin. The Jews and the Reformation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 288 pp. Providing substantially more than the title promises, Kenneth Austin’s The Jews and the Reformation surveys Christian theological and political reflection on Judaism, Jews, and Hebrew Scripture from the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. This is a long and complex period, one that marks the nadir of Jewish fortunes in western Europe (before the Holocaust) as well as the significant, if uneven, improvement in the conditions for Jewish life in many places, a turning point that began in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The great value of this new book is its simultaneous focus on Catholic and Protestant writers and governments across central and western Europe; its impressive scope encompasses the Iberian expulsions, the inquisitions (especially in Spain, Portugal, and Rome), the humanist movement (especially the Jewish book controversy and Christian Hebraism), Luther and his movement, the radical Reformation, Reformed Protestantism (especially Calvin and the biblical scholar Immanuel Tremellius), and the Tridentine Catholic response to Judaism as well as the early history of the new Jewish communities in the United Provinces and in England during the Commonwealth. Austin, admirably, is reluctant to draw general conclusions as to which Christian denominations were more or less favorably disposed to supporting legal toleration. Nonetheless, his inclination to strike a “balanced” position occasionally results in apologetic tendencies. For example, he claims that “Portugal proved a much more hospitable home for Jews” (125), just one sentence before mentioning the traumatic bloodshed of the 1506 Lisbon massacre (which cost ca. 1,000 to [End Page 188] 4,000 Jewish lives), as if it were an inconvenient historical detail. There is also a reluctance to fully acknowledge the harshness of the end of Sicut Judeis (the medieval protection of Jewish rights under canon law) initiated by Paul IV, a transformation that ultimately resulted in censorship, expulsions, strict ghettoization, and expanding papal support for inquisitional persecution. Austin does not mention the horrifying execution of twenty-four Jewish Marranos in papal Ancona in 1556 (nor the emergence of substantial, but temporary, Jewish resistance to the papacy organized by Gracia Mendes Nasi). The overall analysis adopts Kenneth Stow’s valuable but one-sided position that papal policy changed in order to promote conversion to Christianity, and also the commonly expressed view that Jewish culture was able to thrive to a limited degree under ghettoization in Italy, at least for a while and especially in Venice. Austin sees considerable impact from Christian Hebrew studies. This is an exceedingly difficult innovation to assess because Christian Hebraists used their expertise variously to create benevolent portrayals of Judaism and also to construct anti-Jewish polemics, sometimes of great severity. One of the harshest and most substantial anti-Jewish books ever published—Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judentum (1700; Judaism Uncovered)—goes unmentioned, even though the author was a major Calvinist Hebrew scholar and the text’s extreme hostility provoked intense theological and political controversy at the highest levels of power in the empire. Similarly, on the other side of the ledger, the strongly favorable and influential accounts of Judaism by the great Catholic biblical scholar Richard Simon (who also translated and promoted Leon Modena’s History of the Jewish Rituals) are not mentioned. In some cases, Austin’s optimistic portrayal of Christian Hebraism is not accurate. He claims, for instance, that Johannes Reuchlin, the founder of Christian Hebrew studies, “persuaded the emperor to reverse his position” (3) on the stunning policy initiative to confiscate and destroy all Hebrew books in the empire except the Bible. In fact, the emperor reversed his position under pressure from the Frankfurt Jewish community. Reuchlin’s defense of Jewish writings, which resulted in a heresy trial (he was convicted of being “impermissibly favorable to Jews”), galvanized Europe but ultimately contributed only modestly to a gradual shift in Maximilian’s policy of eradication of Jews back to a more traditional one of legal toleration in return for fiscal exploitation. The portrayal of imperial politics overall seems somewhat constrained. Austin does not comment on the...

Evangelical “Others” in Ulster, 1859–1912: Social Profile, Unionist Politics, and “Fundamentalism”

AbstractThis article considers the existence of a distinctive form of fundamentalism in the northern-Irish province of Ulster. It does so by examining the Protestant minorities that grew significantly in the decades after the Ulster revival of 1859. These evangelical others are important because their members were more likely to have fundamentalist tendencies than those who belonged to the main Protestant churches. The existing scholarship on fundamentalism in Northern Ireland focuses on Ian Paisley (1926–2014), who was a life-long adversary of Irish republican separatism and a self-identified fundamentalist. Yet, the focus on Paisley draws attention away from the potential origin of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century that is associated with religious revival in the early 1920s and the heresy trial of a “modernist” Presbyterian professor in 1927. George Marsden's classic study defined fundamentalism as an American phenomenon, yet, with Paisley and developments in the 1920s in mind, he noted that “Ulster appears to be an exception.”1 To what extent was that true? Was there a constituency of potential fundamentalists in the north of Ireland in the early twentieth century? If there was, did the social and political circumstances of the region and period produce a distinctive Ulster variety of fundamentalism?

A peripheral heretic? An early fourteenth-century heresy trial from Sweden*

Abstract This article examines the inquisition against Botulf, the only person known to have been executed for heresy in medieval Sweden. It analyses the tactics of evasion that Botulf employed to escape detection and apprehension by tapping into common conceptions of the Eucharist to gloss his dissent. Through a close reading of the sentence in its historical, cultural and liturgical context, the article argues that it not only records a unique case in medieval Sweden, but that it performs clerical and elite identities by drawing on biblical and liturgical topoi, as well as antiheretical rhetoric to depict Botulf as a ‘membrum diaboli’.

The Excommunication of Martin Luther: Exsurge Domine (1520) and Decet Romanum Pontificem (1521)

The bull Decet Romanum Pontificem ("It is fitting that the Roman pontiff") officially excommunicated Martin Luther on January 3, 1521. Yet it barely evoked a response, nor did it see the light of day until later that year. It was merely the legal consequence of the June 1520 bull Exsurge Domine, which had cited Luther for forty-one distinct errors and had given him sixty days to renounce those errors publicly in Rome or face automatic excommunication. Luther's unwillingness to appear in Rome or to recant had already sealed his fate, ceremonially symbolized by his burning of Exsurge Domine in Wittenberg on December 10. In this sense, Decet Romanum served as the culmination of a process dating back to 1517, when Albrecht of Mainz sent a copy of the Ninety-Five Theses to Rome for opinion and direction. In the weeks and months that followed, a heresy trial began according to the conventions of canon law and ecclesiastical procedure, only to stall before being resumed in 1520 and leading to Exsurge Domine, Decet Romanum Pontificem, and Luther's excommunication as a "notorious" heretic.

Rüfner, Thomas, Recht und Religion in der europäischen Rechtstradition I: Sedes iustitiae und zweiter Dom im Rheinland. Die Konstantin-Basilika als Kristallisationspunkt von Recht und Religion in Trier

Abstract Seat of Justice and Second Cathedral of the Rhineland. The Basilica of Constantine as a point of encounter of law and religion in Trier. The Aula Palatina in Trier was part of the residence of the Roman Emperors and as such a place of legislation and jurisdiction. Notably, the trial of Priscillian of Avila, often labelled the first heresy trial in church history, was likely conducted in the Aula Palatina. Centuries later, the Roman building was converted into Trier's first protestant church. Caspar Olevianus, the Trier-born jurist and Calvinist reformer, is remembered nearby. The so-called Basilica of Constantine provides thus a peculiarly apt venue for exploring the mutual influences and entanglements of law and Christian religion in European history.

Lee, Bo Karen. Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. xiv+250 pp. $29.00 (paper).

Lee, Bo Karen. <i>Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon</i>. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. xiv+250 pp. $29.00 (paper).

Admissibility of Scientific Evidence and Expert Testimony: One Potato, Two Potato, Daubert, Frye

The goal of scientific research is to increase our knowledge. As knowledge grows, previously well-accepted theories are cast off and replaced by new theories, which in time may be refined or rejected. Though the world was once believed to be flat, we believe it to be rather round today. Newton’s discovery of gravity still holds, so far.Expert testimony has been admitted in America since the 1600’s; for example, a Dr. Brown gave “scientific” testimony at a heresy trial that the defendant had “bewitched” several persons.’ How should trial judges filter which scientific and other expert evidence is admissible?

Heretic or rebel? The heresy trial of Albert Geyser

During September 1961, a charge of heresy was laid against New Testament scholar and antiapartheid activist Prof. A.S. (Albert) Geyser. The charge was brought by three senior theological students of the University of Pretoria. They accused Geyser of interpreting Philippians 2 in such a way that it undermined the church’s doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence. The heresy trial started on 24 October 1961 under massive public interest. The trial lasted 6 months and the proceedings covered 2672 typed pages. Reporters of 25 national and international newspapers attended the trial. The heresy trial caused widespread international condemnation of what was regarded as an orchestrated attempt to get rid of Geyser, because of his public and radical opposition to apartheid. In this contribution, Geyser’s theological critique of apartheid as well as his conviction of heresy is discussed. The proceedings of the trial, minutes of the moderature, media coverage and Geyser’s publications serve as primary sources. It concludes with a critical evaluation of Geyser’s theology and his role as a public theologian.

Avctoritas Apostolica St. Martin in Trier AD 385/386

Abstract Avctoritas Apostolica - St. Martin in Trier AD 385/386. The transformation of the Christian church into the Roman Empire’s state-church in the 4th century gave rise to the question of how the relation between church and secular governments should to be ordered. It was partly answered AD 385/386 at Trier in the trial of the heretic bishop Priscilian before Emperor Maximus Magnus. Whereas Bishop Saint Martin maintained that the church should regulate its inner-ecclesiastical conflicts by its own sanctions only, the majority of bishops requested the emperor’s help in their fight against heresy. Martin’s protest was in vain. Maximus Magnus condemned and executed Priscilian. This case was the first Christian heresy trial by a secular-government in European history.

Daniel Bensaïd's Joan of Arc

The French philosopher Daniel Bensaïd (1946–2010) bequeathed an extensive political and philosophical oeuvre which mixes classical Marxist references with authors like Walter Benjamin and Charles Péguy. Concerned with reconstructing strategic thinking for today's world, he sought inspiration in uncommon places for Marxist thinking, such as medieval religious heresies, Marranism, Messianism and figures like Joan of Arc. The Maid of Orléans, situated halfway between history and legend, was officially turned from heretic to saint and became a French national myth. There has been a host of interpretations and re-appropriations of her. Bensaïd disputes her memory with the French right and the petrified memory of the French Republic, and he sees her as a figure inherent to a transitional period between the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the modern world. She is the emblem of a policy of resistance to an oppressive power, as shown by her steadfastness during her heresy trial. Concealed behind her figure is also a proto-feminist dimension defending the role of women in society.

Strategic Action Fields inUSHigher Education: The 1939Mercer University Heresy Trial

AbstractThis paper usesFligstein andMcAdam's (2012, 2011) theory of the strategic action field, or “SAF,” to highlight the ways in which individuals can act within cultural and material constraints to shape social processes. It applies these concepts to theMercer University heresy trial of 1939, in which a group of students backed by fundamentalists from the conservative Protestant movement accused members of the University's faculty of unbelief. By understanding the organization, the social movement, and the higher education industry as “SAFs,” the theory explains how the trial reached its unusual outcome, and suggests implications for broader understandings of organizational change.

The Provenance of a Book by Jean Calvin, bound in a Carolingian Manuscript Fragment in Amsterdam University Library (Band I E 22)

Germain Colladon (1508-94), a refugee from France and a prominent lawyer in Geneva, was the owner of a rare copy of the Ioannis Calvini in viginti prima Ezechielis prophetae capita praelectiones (1565), Jean Calvin’s last commentary, which discusses the first twenty chapters of the prophet Ezekiel. Colladon may have met Calvin, the leading reformer of Geneva, already during their years as students at the faculty of law in Orleans and Bourges. Germain, his older brother Leon, and the latter’s son Nicolas frequented the public Bible studies of the Company of Pastors on Friday mornings, as is testified by a list of witnesses for the prosecution in the case against the physician Jerome Bolsec. Germain is also featured at the beginning of the heresy trial against Michel Servet, which invites an inquiry into a rare copy of Servet’s Christianismi restitutio, once owned by a member of the Colladon family. Court cases from the Genevan archives show Germain Colladon as a strict, even severe, lawyer who stuck to the penal code of his time. A number of medieval manuscripts, the provenance of which can be traced to Colladon’s library, testify to a rich collection, in which the preciously bound copy of Calvin’s last publication was no exception.Germain Colladon (1508-94), a refugee from France and a prominent lawyer in Geneva, was the owner of a rare copy of the Ioannis Calvini in viginti prima Ezechielis prophetae capita praelectiones (1565), Jean Calvin’s last commentary, which discusses the first twenty chapters of the prophet Ezekiel. Colladon may have met Calvin, the leading reformer of Geneva, already during their years as students at the faculty of law in Orleans and Bourges. Germain, his older brother Leon, and the latter’s son Nicolas frequented the public Bible studies of the Company of Pastors on Friday mornings, as is testified by a list of witnesses for the prosecution in the case against the physician Jerome Bolsec. Germain is also featured at the beginning of the heresy trial against Michel Servet, which invites an inquiry into a rare copy of Servet’s Christianismi restitutio, once owned by a member of the Colladon family. Court cases from the Genevan archives show Germain Colladon as a strict, even severe, lawyer who stuck to the penal code of his time. A number of medieval manuscripts, the provenance of which can be traced to Colladon’s library, testify to a rich collection, in which the preciously bound copy of Calvin’s last publication was no exception.

The case of the incorrigible canon: Dublin's first heresy conviction, 1310, and the rivalry between its cathedral chapters

Dublin's atypical arrangement of two neighbouring cathedral chapters, St Patrick's and Holy Trinity, was a source of ongoing conflict. The conflict became more sinister in the early fourteenth century after Thomas de Chaddesworth, the dean of St Patrick's and the vicar of the archbishop-elect of Dublin, served as the primary inquisitor in the trial of the Templars and in 1310 initiated heresy proceedings against Philip de Braybrook, a canon of Holy Trinity. This article explores the conflict between the two chapters and how it shaped Philip's trial; it also examines the exceptionally irregular circumstances in which he became Dublin's first convicted heretic. Introduction In 1310, Dublin experienced its first heresy trial, part of the international proceedings against the Knights Templar, instigated primarily by Philip IV of France.1 Before the year was out it saw its second, or some semblance thereof. Shortly after becoming inquisitor in the Templar trial, Thomas de Chaddesworth, the dean of St Patrick's, brought an old rival, Philip de Braybrook, a canon of Holy Trinity (now Christ Church) to the notice of Richard de Haverings for a relapse of heresy.2 Haverings, after three years still the ever-absent archbishop-elect of Dublin, replied to his vicar Chaddesworth on 4 September 1310, informing him that, after examining the letter's report, he had found Philip guilty, apparently for refusing to accept the sacrament in both * Author's e-mail: maeve.callan@simpson.edu doi: 10.331 8/PRI AC.20 13.113.05 1 See Malcolm Barber, The trial of the Templars (1978; reprint, Cambridge, 2006); Helen Nicholson (ed.), The proceedings against the Templars in the British Isles, 2 vols (Burlington, VT, 2011), and Maeve Callan, The Templars, the witch, and the wild Irish: heresy trials in medieval Ireland (forthcoming). 2 Medieval names often take a range of forms. Chaddesworth is also rendered as Chedworth and Cheddisworth, and Braybrook as Braydock and Braibrook, among other forms. Chaddesworth and Braybrook are here preferred as the most common forms among authoritative sources. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 113C, 163-191 © 2013 Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 207.46.13.85 on Sat, 28 May 2016 06:47:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

&lt;em&gt;The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000&lt;/em&gt;, by Richard Griffiths

Reviewed by: The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000 by Richard Griffiths Frederick S. Roden (bio) The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850–2000, by Richard Griffiths; pp. xii + 260. London and New York: Continuum, 2010, £19.99, $34.95. In The Pen and the Cross, Richard Griffiths gives us a very effective survey of modern English Catholic literature. This book is a good introduction for the general reader, providing a particular breadth in canonical authors. For the Victorianist, Griffiths offers an overview that locates the nineteenth century as the point of origin for the genre, tracing a trajectory from John Henry Newman to David Lodge. In the process, Griffiths focuses on the strictly literary. As cultural history, while the work pays attention to questions of class, it is primarily concerned with a rather narrow group of writers in its genealogy. Griffiths, coming out of French studies, differentiates the particularities of English versus French Catholic identity. He further limits himself to Roman Catholic literature in England, as opposed to works by Anglo-Catholics (Anglicans). My main objection to this book, a worthwhile guide, is what Griffiths doesn’t talk about rather than what he does. It makes sense to begin a readable study of Roman Catholicism in English literature with the Oxford Movement, and Griffiths stops short of mythologizing or sentimentalizing that historical moment as iconic. Rather than celebrating the return of Romanism to English shores (with the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy), Griffiths delivers a useful discussion of Newman. As he notes in the introduction, his subject is not the Catholic identity of these writers but the “coherent system of imagery” and “specific forms of expression” that define Catholic literature as a genre (3). As social history, Griffiths’s book provides most insight into the peculiar kind of Catholicism found in English literature, generally that of the (middle-class) convert, standing in some relation to the old recusant aristocratic families. Stylistically this phenomenon led to literary concentration on sacramental theology, rather than the [End Page 337] mysticism, miracles, or sentimental piety seen in the Catholic literatures of other countries. Griffiths also argues that English Catholic discourse is marked by its resistance to “centralization and regimentation” and “the triumph of ultramontanism” (16). He suggests an individualistic artistic tradition emerging out of a history of marginalized gentry and the modern bourgeoisie. For example, Griffiths calls Gerard Manley Hopkins “a very modern poet in his form, and also a very modern Christian in much of his content” (41). This question of convert Catholicism reaches its climax with the Decadents at the fin de siècle. Griffiths distinguishes between the “dilettantism” of the attraction to Catholicism exemplified by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which Griffiths blames on Walter Pater’s aesthetic legacy, and the faith of a “number of young poets, including Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Gray, [who] were converted to Catholicism and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity in this” (47, 48). Griffiths opposes the good convert (sincere) to the bad convert (solely drawn to the exotic and beautiful). Acknowledging the debt to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), Griffiths characteristically sacrifices Wilde in a chapter that is ambivalent about whom to praise and whom to blame in this era. Regarding the notoriously eccentric Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, he states that “his idiosyncratic, ornate and mannered style is strangely effective and he stands out as one of the most curious and original figures in the literature of the period” (51). Yet leading to a discussion of Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, and Alice Meynell, Griffiths poses their “revival in serious religious poetry” in “contrast to the aesthetic dilettantism of the circle around Wilde” (52). He values Johnson and John Gray as Catholic poets only after they have rejected Wilde’s influence. No mention is made of Wilde’s deathbed conversion or lifelong writings on Catholicism. Griffiths constructs a heresy trial for art that’s been done many times before, distancing so-called sincere conversion from aesthetic appeal in a manner that is far too simplistic. As he self-stylized with camp awareness in his prose, Wilde...

The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries , and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries, and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century April Lidinsky (bio) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Mary Klages. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2004, 1384 pp., $45.00 paper. The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Shay Brawn. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2008, 1456 pp., $45.00 paper. While readers will surely gain upper-body strength from toting the splendid two-volume Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, their size also makes an argument: “Look how much we have been missing!” Academics sometimes assume that the white, male American literature canon has been corrected; after all, haven’t we been reading and writing about alternative voices for decades now? But students still commonly emerge from even good high schools nearly untouched by American women writers beyond Harper Lee, a small dose of Emily Dickinson, and perhaps a novel by Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison. The students entering our college literature classrooms may know only the narrowest range of American women’s literary voices. Further, gender and women’s studies departmental survey courses, often still canon-heavy, hardly leave room for lesser-known texts to add more than a dash of diversity to the feast of American literature. How many new voices are enough? And, O weighty judgment: Which voices? Who could envy the task before general editors Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, and Shay Brawn, who, along with their coeditors, set out to offer a fresh perspective on the varied landscape of American literature? The prefaces of the two volumes—Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries and Volume Two: The 20th Century—offer conversation-sparking reflections about “how fraught” the categories of “ ‘American’ and ‘Literature’ truly are” (Hogeland and Klages 2004, xxix). The editors explicitly build on feminist scholarship that works to “make these forgotten texts breathe again, knowing that their vitality will fundamentally alter the ways we think about American literature, American history, and the cultural constructions of identity, such as gender” (xxiii). With the cultural work of literature cast this way, they also remind us that the skeptical question beneath proposed revisions to the Grand Old Canon—“Is it any good?”—sidesteps what critic Jane Tompkins argues are more significant questions: “ ‘Good for whom?’ ‘When?’ and ‘Why?’ ” (1985, 2), and, I would add, [End Page 130] “According to whose opinion? In relation to what agenda?” The editors invite students to consider these big questions as they usefully lay bare their decision to select texts that “represent ways that women’s voices enter into public discourse” (xxiv), noting that they privilege “certain themes and topics that have been underrepresented” in other anthologies, such as sexualities, disabilities, and the rights of native peoples and people of color. For instructors, the texts have been selected “with an eye toward ways they might work together in provocative and teachable constellations” (xxviii), and the editors offer a range of topics and issues that would allow students to dwell in a specific historical moment or to make connections over centuries. In sum, this is a text for teachers, made transparently inviting for students. Volume One differs from most American literature anthologies, in which readers’ fingers trail far down a table of contents of male writers before happening upon some Anne Bradstreet poems. The Aunt Lute collection includes generous selections by Bradstreet, but opens with “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown,” an explosive record of the 1637 heresy trial. This fiery text makes evident that Hutchinson’s gender is on trial as well as her theology (“not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex” [1]), and launches this volume with apocalyptic energy. The editors include excerpts from Salem trials and a thick slice of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, along with lesser-known texts such as “The Life of Mary Read” and “The Life of...

Profezie di riforma e idee di concordia religiosa: Visioni e speranze dell’esule piemontese Giovanni Leonardo Sartori (review)

Reviewed by: Profezie di riforma e idee di concordia religiosa: Visioni e speranze dell’esule piemontese Giovanni Leonardo Sartori Matthew Vester Profezie di riforma e idee di concordia religiosa: Visioni e speranze dell’esule piemontese Giovanni Leonardo Sartori. By Lucia Felici. [Studi e testi per la storia religiosa del Cinquecento, Vol. 16.] (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore. 2009. Pp. xi, 370. €39,00 paperback. ISBN 978-8-822-25822-9.) Specialists in Sabaudian institutional history know of Giovanni Leonardo Sartori, a ducal secretary from Chieri and treasurer of the county of Asti during the early-sixteenth century, last mentioned in bureaucratic records from 1541. Historians of heterodox sixteenth-century Italian religious figures are familiar with Johannis Leonis Nardi (sometimes also referred to as Sertorius or Sartorius), a visionary who, in the early 1550s, opposed coercive, institutionalized religion and sought to inaugurate a new age of a universal, invisible church. Lucia Felici, a historian of the Italian Reformation, argues (against Delio Cantimori) that these two individuals were the same person. Strangely, although this discovery appears to be the central contribution of this book, Felici buries the evidence for it in a footnote on page 252, which cites a chronicle entry by the Bernese theologian Johannes Haller: in 1554 “Joannes Leo Nardus, der sich auch Mosen secundum nampt, was vorzejten ein secretarius dess fürsten von Saphoij,” visited the city. Eight pages later, a second piece of evidence from Strasbourg city council records makes a similar identification. This evidence appears to seal Felici’s argument, but it is frustrating for the reader not to learn about it earlier and to have to take for granted the identification of Sartori and Nardi until the final twenty pages of the text. This finding also could have been more forcefully exploited for its relevance to Sartori’s thought (beyond the notion that Sartori opposed social disorder), or to the intellectual development of heterodox thinkers generally. How many radical Reformers were there who had begun their careers as state officials, and how did this affect their religious positions? Exploring these [End Page 592] questions could have enlivened debates in Italian religious history of the early sixteenth-century. Despite these missed opportunities, Felici offers an interesting study of Sartori’s life and ideas. After retiring from ducal service, Sartori returned to Chieri, where he likely encountered Reformed preaching, and then crossed the Alps to Geneva in late 1550 or early 1551. Thence he traveled to England, Flanders, back to Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Berne, Zürich, Strasbourg, and Stuttgart, claiming to have been appointed by God to spread a message of universal religious concord. This message was articulated in a series of texts: the Tabularum duarum legis evangelicae, gratiae, spiritus et vitae libri quinque (Basel, 1553), the Revelationes factae Iohanni Leonis Nardi (1554, a set of manuscripts in the Zürich state archives), and others that were lost. Along with a portion of the Tabularum, part of the Revelationes was published for the first time as an appendix to this book (the only citation to the text’s archival location is in a footnote on p. 217). For Sartori, being filled with the Holy Spirit was crucial for Christians, who together composed the true church, independent of any organized ecclesial structure (which was a mark of the antichrist). In contrast to many radical Reformers, Sartori affirmed Trinitarian doctrine and believed that a correct reading of the Koran and the Old Testament pointed to Christ’s position in the Godhead. For all believers, outward (although nonformulaic) behavior was the crucial sign of one’s spiritual position: Sartori did not believe that everyone would be saved. He was eventually captured on Sabaudian territory and, while his heresy trial was being prepared, died in prison in 1556. Felici wants to counterbalance a historiographic emphasis on social disciplining and confessionalization, seeing Sartori as a resister of discipline whose nonconformity could be related to Enlightenment Deism. However, Sartori’s radical individualizing of spirituality might be viewed as a necessary complement to the well-documented process of bodily disciplining in early-modern Europe. Matthew Vester West Virginia University Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press

The Trial of Martin Luther (1521): Selected Links and Bibliography

This is a bibliography of links focusing on the heresy trial of Martin Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1521. It includes links to selected works of Luther, the 95 thesis that he nailed to the church door in Wittenberg, links about Lutheranism and the Reformation and additional readings by and about Luther.

Book Review: Kepler and His God: Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother

Book Review: Kepler and His God: Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother

Kepler's witch: an astronomer's discovery of cosmic order amid religious war, political intrigue, and the heresy trial of his mother

An exploration of the life of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mathematician and astronomer who discovered the three basic laws of planetary motion focuses on the witchcraft trial of his mother and offers insight into the impact of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and other social upheavals on the modern world. Reprint. 15,000 first prin