Papal States Research Articles

The theatre of social change: nobility, opera industryand the politics of culture in Bologna between papalprivileges and liberal principles

In Bologna, after Rome the second biggest city of the Papal States, the TeatroComunale played a major role in the city's cultural self-representation from theeighteenth century. After the Unification of Italy local politicians and the rising middleclass used the theatre - together with the famous university, the Liceo musicaleand the Pinacoteca - to present Bologna as one of the young nation-state's culturalcapitals. A study of Bologna's opera house as a social institution highlights social, culturaland political processes and conflicts which marked the transition from the papalregime to the liberal nation-state. Bologna's nobility, which owned the theatre's prestigiousprivate boxes, opposed the idea of democratically elected politicians and professionalexperts determining the fate of their theatre, the theatre which for centurieshad provided the preferred backdrop for staging their social status.

Justice et délits champêtres dans le Comtat d'Ancien Régime : un état des source

Justice and field offences in the Ancien Régime Comtat : a statement of sources. The drafting in progress of a statement of judicial sources for the Comtat Venaissin during the Ancien Régime reveals the great diversity of papal and seigneurial jurisdictions during the old Papal States of France. The minor jurisdictions - nearly eighty of them, have left relatively abundant archives from 16th to 18th century, homogeneous in their content (manuals and certificates of cases, books of termination, procedures and deed of the registry office of the court). These documents enable to understand the work of the field police and justice, which is shared between community consuls and baron and papal judges, in the local implementation of superior law and communal statuses.

Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte (review)

Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte. By Christoph Weber, with the collaboration of Michael Becker. [Papste and Papsttum, Bande 29,1,2.] 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann. 1999. Pp.cxxxii, 438; 439-980 EUR100.00; EUR100.00.) Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte. By Christoph Weber, with the collaboration of Michael Becker. [Papste und Papsttum, Binde 29,3,4.12 vols. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann. 2001. Pp. xcii, 555; 558-981-EUR132.94; EUR90.00.) Here are the first four volumes of a projected six-volume genealogy of the Italian nobility and its family connections to the Roman Catholic Church. All the more than five hundred families here delineated were related by blood or marriage to high office in the hierarchy. The overall impression of these stout tomes is stunning-from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, the Italian ruling classes were, in effect, the leadership and administration of the universal church. The secular nobility and the ecclesiastical nobility were indistinguishable. The implications are vast-for church history, for Italian history, for European history-but I will confine myself here to a mere description. The indefatigable author, Christoph Weber, cites the technical assistance of Michael Becker in finding the graphic schemes which made the publication of these tables feasible, but the hard work of tracking down all of these families, the many thousands of names, through the libraries and archives of was all his. It is difficult to imagine that he has accomplished this in one lifetime, even though he is adding this masterpiece to a long list of publications. The first two volumes concentrate on Rome and the Papal State, Tuscany, and northern Italy, deliberately postponing inclusion of sovereign houses of Italy and important families such as the Gonzaga, Este, de'Medici, Farnese, Pico, and others (1, xxi). Volumes III and IV cover Piedmont and Monferrato, Sicily, the Venetian mainland, and Naples. These last also cover the remaining papal families-Cossa, Piccolomini, Borgia, de'Medici, Farnese, Carafa, and Ghislieri, so that we approach a complete series of papal families from 1404 to 1922(111, vii). Some few popes who rose to the throne as 'homines novi' are not included (111, vii). Remaining celebrated church-connected families-Colonna, Orsini, Caracciolo, Sanseverino, Gonzaga, Este, Ferrero, Gambara, Bentivoglioand others await the publication of Volumes V and VI. The introduction to Volume I includes a trenchant analysis of the literature, both printed and manuscript, with numerous insightful comments on the authors and their productions. …

Italy and the Invention of America

According to a venerable historiographic commonplace, when the Genoese Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, he sailed out of the Middle Ages and into early modern Atlantic modernity. Meanwhile, back in Italy, the death in that same 1492 of the Florentine Lorenzo de' Medici, "Il Magnifico," marked the end of an epoch as well, and the beginning of a period of severe political crisis. The Florentines had long occupied (especially since the rise of the Medici) the central and mediating position in the peninsula politically, culturally, and linguistically. Lorenzo was, as they called him, "the needle in the balance" (l'ago della bilancia) and had held things together politically during the roughly half-century of delicate equilibrium struck between the five principal Italian powers (Florence, Milan, Venice, the Papal States, and Naples) that had followed the Peace of Lodi (1435). It all began to unravel [End Page 17] with Il Magnifico's premature death at the age of 43. Successive waves of war, beginning with the descent of Charles VIII of France in 1494, who took Italy, as Machiavelli was to remark ruefully, "with chalk" (his troops simply marking with chalk the doors of the houses they would occupy) rolled down upon the peninsula over the next thirty years or so. The struggle between France and Spain for dominion over Italy eventually ended, following the infamous Sack of Rome in 1527 (by then the capital of an irreparably broken Christendom), with the victory of Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and king (as Charles I) of Spain. He would dominate Italy from around 1530 (following the Peace of Cambrai in 1529 and his papal coronation by the Medici Pope Clement in Bologna in 1530) and rule over an empire, including recent American conquests (Mexico in 1521, Peru during the 1530s) upon which "the sun never set."

SOCIETY, ECONOMY, AND POLITICS IN RESTORATION ITALY: TOWARDS A REGIONAL SYNTHESIS

Recent scholarship on the Restoration period in Italy (1815–60) has put the accent on regional diversity and on particular developments within the different pre-unification states. In particular, recent studies on the Kingdom of Sardinia have added much to our view of the Piedmontese nobility's peculiar character and ability to maintain its identity through time. Equally, detailed studies of the economy of nineteenth-century Tuscany have emphasized the importance of banking and silk manufacturing, whilst studies of governmental policies in the Papal State have shed new light over a particular administrative monarchy's attempt at pursuing a policy of reconciliation between modernization and conservatism. Whilst these studies have shown the significance of regional developments during the Restoration, other studies have argued that the process of ‘inventing’ the Italian nation-state has led to a conscious obliteration of regional administrative and juridical traditions and have shown the way to the construction of an up-to-date regional synthesis of a historical period which is much more than a simple prelude to the unification of the country.

Rituels et représentations du pouvoir dans une ville de l'état de l'église au XIV siècle

SUMMARY Simonetta Bernardi demonstrates that the representative mechanisms of a small Italian town in the later Middle Ages—Sant'Elpidio in the Marches of the papal states—differed little from those of the better known large city states. Sant'Elpidio's largely illiterate population needed a panoply of ritualistic demonstrations of the nature of urban power, such as summons by bell and town crier. This small municipality had a full range of democratic institutions, from the Podestà at its head, a stranger to the town elected for only six months, to a parliament in which sat all the citizens, i.e. those who paid taxes. There all matters affecting the whole body of citizens were debated. The governing councils, magistrates and officials were chosen by a complex system of direct and indirect elections, with some drawing of lots, even if the higher offices in practice passed down through the leading families of the town. Stringent controls were enforced on the performance of public duties at all levels. The sanctions were also visible ones, from confinement of the Podestà to his lodgings to torture in extreme cases. Documents were for the learned and for the archives, the symbols of power for those who experienced it.

The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914-1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (review)

The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914-1922) and the Pursuit of Peace. By John E Pollard. (London: Geoffrey Chapman. 1999. Pp. xv, 240. L16.99 clothbound; L12.95 paperback.) Benedict XV (1854-1922), born Giacomo Della Chiesa, was probably one of the most capable and best prepared for his high office of all of the Roman pontiffs of the last two centuries. Yet of the ten popes who have held the papal office since Pius IX's election in 1846 we known much less about him than we do about all the others, except for John Paul I, who died shortly after his election in 1978. Benedict XV's pontificate was to be obscured by the great catastrophe of World War I and the widespread political disorders that followed it. Like Leo XIII (1878-1903) and Pius XII (1939-1958) Benedict XV came from an aristocratic and urban background and from an earlier career in diplomacy. Before leaving his native city of Genoa he took a doctorate in civil law at its university. He then went on to Rome to study for the priesthood and next to enter the Gregorian University, where he would take doctorates in theology and canon law. However, the turning point in his career would come when he met Msgr. Mariano Rampolla, who would soon serve as the papal nuncio to Spain (1881-1886) and then become the papal secretary of state in 1887. Rampolla brought the young priest with him to Madrid to serve as his secretary and later took Della Chiesa into the secretariat of state after he became its head. Della Chiesa eventually secured the position of under secretary in that department, an important position in it. However, Rampolla suffered a deep tragedy in his career and life when Cardinal Puzyna of Cracow in Austria cast a veto ballot against him in the papal election of 1903. Cardinal Puzyna had made use in the election of a right that the Holy See had conferred on the Habsburg dynasty several centuries earlier.1 Naturally enough, Della Chiesa's career also experienced a setback because of his patron's historic defeat. 1Many years ago while in Germany I came upon a statement by a prominent PolishGerman nobleman who knew much about German Catholic affairs before World War I. He said that Cardinal Puzyna had cast his veto against Rampolla because he had come under the influence of Cardinal Georg Kopp, the archbishop of Breslau, Germany. I later learned that Cardinal Kopp had enjoyed the confidence of the German chancellors and Emperor William H until Leo XIII and Cardinal Rampolla began to cultivate close relations between the papacy and France. The author is undoubtedly right in saying that the seemingly serious setback to Della Chiesa's career in 1903 actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Old foes eager to push him out of Rome were apparently responsible for his appointment as archbishop of Bologna in central Italy in 1907. It would give him experience in domestic church administration to put alongside of his experience in diplomacy. He took up his new duties with the utmost seriousness and determination. His archdiocese contained nearly 500 parishes of which 100 were in the mountains and could only be reached on horseback. By December, 1913, he had visited all but sixty-five of them. He was certainly a concerned and active ordinary. His biographer implies, however, that the new archbishop had basically old ideas in his approach to modern social problems. The region in which his archdiocese lay, earlier part of the old papal states, was still mainly agricultural. While the agrarian and mercantile upper classes were usually well off, the tenant peasants, sharecroppers, and landless laborers often lived in poor circumstances. Trying to counteract the Social Democratic call to the working classes that they should engage in class conflict, the Archbishop preached the doctrine that the class system was of divine making and could not be altered. Still he did also preach that employers had to be just to their workers, and he early said that workers had a right to form and join class organizations. …

Metternich, Pope Gregory XVI, and Revolutionary Poland, 1831-1842

On June 9, 1832, in the aftermath of the Polish Revolution of 1830, Pope Gregory XVI addressed the brief Cum primum to the bishops of Russian Poland, reminding them of their duty to obey legitimate authority and to instruct the faithful in that obedience! The brief was among the most controversial acts of the nineteenth-century Papacy. It stirred up a firestorm of criticism, not only from the Poles, but from both liberal and Catholic opinion in western Europe, as well as later historians. This paper will examine the motives that led Gregory first to issue the brief and then gradually to retreat from it, with a particular focus on the role of the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich. The prime mover behind the brief was Tsar Nicholas I, for very good reasons. In 1772-1795, Poland had disappeared from the map, partitioned among Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The Poles, bitterly resentful, had welcomed Napoleon, who in 1807 won their loyalty by creating a Duchy of Warsaw in a small part of the former Kingdom of Poland. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Tsar Alexander I obtained most of the Duchy; but in hopes of placating Polish opinion, he had given it a separate status as the Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland) with himself as king. The experiment failed to satisfy the Poles while arousing the hostility of the Russians, and after Nicholas I became Tsar in 1825, he set about restricting the rights and special status of the Kingdom. He thereby provoked the Polish Revolution of November, 1830, put down only with difficulty. Among the reasons for the strength of the revolution was the strong support given it by the Polish clergy. It seemed obvious to Nicholas that the best way to end the clergy's support for the Polish cause would be a Papal directive to them to obey his legitimate authority; such a declaration would also be discouraging for the Poles in general. Nicholas made his first move immediately after Gregory XVI's election in February, 1831, ordering his minister at Rome, Prince Gregori Ivanovich Gagarin, to complain of the aid that Polish clergy were giving the rebels and asking him to remind them that they had no right to interfere in political matters, much less aid revolt against legitimate authority.' The request put the Pope in a difficult position. He could see reasons to agree, even aside from the normal Papal wish not to offend a powerful ruler whose anger could do great harm to the Church. He already knew of the part that the clergy were playing in the revolt, which offended his deep conviction that the Church should not become involved in political affairs, as well as his dislike of revolution, now being reinforced by the outbreak of revolt in the Papal States; he knew too that many of the Polish leaders were anticlericals whose revolt was inspired by liberal ideals rather than religious devotion.' At the same time, he was not without sympathy for the Poles and was well aware of the Tsar's persecution of Catholicism. In the end, he decided on a limited compliance: a brief, Impensa caritas, to the Polish bishops admonishing them in general terms to remember that they are ministers of the God of peace and should not take part in secular affairs, except to counsel the faithful to submit to lawful authority:'4 Limited to such platitudes, the brief is such as not to compromise us, the Secretary of State declared with satisfaction.5 However, for that very reason, the brief was too mild to satisfy the Tsar, who never published it.6 Meanwhile, the Poles too had begun to seek Papal support. In June a Polish emissary, Count Sebastian Badeni, arrived in Rome to ask the Papacy to persuade the Powers to hold a conference to discuss Polish independence. The Pope felt that compliance would take him too far away from his spiritual realm into the political. However, he decided that a second request, to urge Austria to use its influence to bring about a peaceful settlement, was in keeping with his spiritual character, especially since it was a question of the Poles,so praiseworthy for their fervent Catholicism, and since he had already addressed their bishops on the duties of obedience to a legitimate sovereign even if schismatic: Metternich, however, had no wish to embroil himself with the Tsar, whose alliance was vital to Austria, for the sake of a revolution whose victory would have been a major blow to the conservative order and a threat to Austria's position in Galicia. …

Passing the Keys. Modern Cardinals, Conclaves, and the Election of the Next Pope (review)

Passing the Keys. Modern Cardinals, Conclaves, and the Election of the Next Pope. By Francis A. Burkle-Young. (Lanham, Maryland: Madison Books. 1999. Pp. xxxi, 522. $35.00.) An unusual book. The introduction provides the mise-en-scene for what is to follow: a succinct account of papal elections from the early Middle Ages down to present times. It explains why, for almost the past thousand years, the election of the popes has been restricted by canon law exclusively to the choice of the cardinals. Such was the gravity of the crises that the papacy has had to ride out in the past, that on more than one occasion many doubted they would ever see another conclave, in 1799, for instance, after the death of Pius VI at Valence, in exile, hostage of the French Revolution, after the loss of the Papal State and the occupation of Rome, in 1870, and the death of Pius IX eight years later. And yet the succession continues unbroken, the keys of the kingdom have been passed securely from hand to hand. How? In six increasingly detailed and informative chapters the author narrates the conclaves of the past century, from 1878 until 1978. A long succession of popes and pontificates: Leo XIII (Gioacchino Pecci), in 1878; Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto), in 1903, Benedict XV (Giacomo Della Chiesa), in 1914; Pius XI (Achille Ratti), in 1922; Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), in 1939;John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli), in 1958; Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini), in 1963; John Paul I (Albino Luciani) and John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), both in 1978. For each conclave, a roll call is made of the cardinal electors and why they were ever aggregated into the Sacred College. Possible papabili are considered, sometimes immediately dismissed. An attempt is made to reconstruct the shifting phases of the balloting, down to the decisive count. All very interesting. Given the stringency of the norms binding the cardinal electors to absolute secrecy on what takes place during the conclave and the fact that the author declines to reveal his sources (p. ix), the work presumably depends on earlier published accounts based on able conjecture and surmise. Regarding more recent events, Andrew Greeley and Peter Hebblethwaite seem likely sources (p. 505), and John Cornwell is explicitly acknowledged (p. 261). One episode is lifted from Pontiff (p. 265), though this great work of fiction is not listed in the bibliography. No better than that, or is there something really fresh? Who can tell? These are followed by two chapters on the cardinals created since 1979, until the most recent consistory of 1998, a total of 155 porporati, the twenty-year span being divided into the earlier years of this pontificate, and the later years. This is not an exercise in adulation, and in assessing them, criticism is not spared. Not all come out with flying colors. …

Italia Judaica: Gli Ebrei nello Stato Pontificio fino al Ghetto (1555)

Italia Judaica: Gli Ebrei nello Stato Pontificio fino al Ghetto (1555). Atti del VI Convegno internazionale, Tel Aviv, 18-22 giugno 1995. [Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, Saggi 47.] (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali a Ambientali, Ufficio Centrale per i Beni Archivistici. 1998. Pp. 307. Paperback.) This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference held at Tel Aviv under the joint auspices of the Italian government's Ministero per i Beni culturali a ambientali the Universities of Tel Aviv Jerusalem. The present installment of Italia Judaica, concerned with Jews in the Papal States until the establishment of the Roman ghetto in 1555, is the sixth in a series that dates back to the first congress held at Bari in May 1981. Fifteen papers were presented at the conference in Tel Aviv, but two, by Michele Luzzati on Jews in Bologna by A. Toaff on the Jewish bank in Umbria, are not included. English Italian are the official languages of the volume. There does not seem to be a thematic sequence to the order of the papers. Schlomo Simonsohn discusses the lot of Jews in the Papal States considers their condition to have been relatively favorable, despite ups downs, at least in contrast to their coreligionists elsewhere in Europe, until the advent of the Counter-Reformation such measures as the erection of the ghetto by Paul IV in 1555. Joseph Schatzmiller examines the papal monarchy as viewed by medieval Jews and the political expectations they nurtured-rightly or wrongly-regarding the Apostolic See (p. 30), focusing on the papal enclave at Avignon, which was the seat of the Roman Curia for part of the fourteenth century. Alberto M. Racheli, in a paper enriched with numerous plates, traces from an architectural viewpoint the transformations experienced by the Rione Sant'Angelo, the quarter enclosing the Roman ghetto. Simon Schwarzfuchs draws attention to the light shed on various aspects of Jewish life society in the Papal States from the late 1530's to 1569 by the response (judgments) pronounced by Rabbi Isaac Joshua ben Immanuel of Lattes in the course of settling marital morals disputes, controversies in the banking sphere, among many other matters. Micaela Procaccia, on a related theme, takes up Jewish encounters, not with rabbinical but with secular justice, specifically the criminal court of the Governatore in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century whose records are remarkably complete, despite occasional lacunae, concluding that the establishment of the ghetto in 1555 produced an increase in Jewish criminality. Sandra Debenedetti Stow, in a technical but elegantly presented paper, deals with the linguistic cultural mediatory efforts conducted by Jewish scholars both within their own community as well as with the outside Christian world, with principal attention on the literary efforts of the fourteenth-century Rabbi Jehuda Romano. Fausto Pusceddu reconstructs the lively Jewish presence in the fourteenth fifteenth centuries in the provincial papal city of Rieti situated just north of Rome. With his dense, richly documented paper, Fausto Parente analyzes closely the debate that raged within curial circles, following the burning of confiscated Talmuds in Rome, on September 9, 1553. The contenders were, on the one hand, the hard-liners, led by the Spaniard Francisco Torres, rabidly anti Jewish, who argued for the suppression of Hebrew books commentaries, the more moderate, humanistic wing that would have contented itself with their expurgation. The next two papers, by Anna Esposito Cesare Colafemmina, offer concise but solidly documented studies of the progressive deterioration in the status of the Jewish enclaves in two provincial centers, respectively the Patrimony of St. Peter in Tuscia, including the occasional papal seat of Viterbo (Esposito), Benevento (Colafemmina). …

Cusanus

Abstract More often than not Cusanus is interpreted in a theological manner, under strong theological presuppositions and within a religious range. This is understandable since he was a cardinal and had important functions in the Papal States. The inadequacy of this approach, however, is evident when one considers that not all of his texts are meant to assert traditional beliefs but instead to reflect upon their presuppositions. A word-for-word interpretation of the first proposition of the appendix of the dialogue De non aliud («Definitio, quae se et omnia definit, ea est, quae per omnem mentem quaeritur») reveals a shift in the concept of definitio during the dialogue. Cusanus begins in a quite traditional manner and ends in a supremely abstract and speculative intuition. The not-other determines itself in a vision, setting everything in its proper place; a vision we aspire to repeat in our mental life. In this way, Cusanus does what all great philosophers do: he reflects in a given set of traditions and beliefs upon their presuppositions.

Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES Giou,Antonella. Monumenti e oggetti d'arte nel Regno d'ltalia:Ilpatrimonio artístico degli enti religiosi soppressi tra riuso, tutela e dispersione. Inventario dei "Beni délie corporazioni religiose" 1860-1890. (Rome: Minist ère) per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio Centrale per i beni archivistici. 1997.Pp. iv, 317. Paperback.) This publication of the State Archives ofItaly describes and lists the works of art taken from religious corporations during the first thirty years of the Italian Kingdom. When the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia set out to unite the Italian states under its own leadership, it had already instituted a strongly anticlerical bias. A law championed by Urbano Rattazzi in 1855 led to the suppression of all reUgious communities not dedicated to preaching, education, or helping the sick. The "Rattazzi Law" was rooted in the Enlightenment mistrust of purely spiritual values (the intercessory prayer of cloistered nuns, for example), as weU as the desire to seize control of the artistic treasures and libraries in the churches and monasteries of depopulated religious communities. According to this statute, the possessions of any suppressed community became the properly of the state, to be administered by an "ecclesiastical fund" which "would pay pensions to the same dispossessed religious men and women and defray other expenses of worship. In Piedmont, this law resulted in the extinction of thirty-five orders, with 335 houses. As the wars of unification continued, this law was extended to those Italian provinces added to Piedmontese control by military conquest. Included were two provinces of the former Papal States, Umbria in December, I860, and the Marches in January, 1861. The Neapolitan provinces were added in February, 1861. By the end of 1877, enforcement spread to Sicily and the remaining provinces. Collectively, 4000 religious communities were closed down and their goods confiscated by the state. Gioli's book traces the entire process clearly, with good attention to detaU. The actual inventory of archival holdings takes up seventy-five pages, followed by an additional ten pages of the pertinent legislation. There are three useful indexes , employing reUgious congregations, names of persons, and names of 492 BRIEF notices493 places. This work could be a useful tool for those working in art history or monastic history. Leopold Glueckert, O.Carm. (Lewis University) McGlashan, M. Nona. O Days of Wind & Moon. (Santa Barbara: Fithian Press. 1997.Pp. 127. $10.95.) In an early landscape painting, Ming Huang'sJourney to Shu,human activity is the artist's pretext for his attempt to capture the mysteries of the natural world. The polarity of the brushwork entices the eye to travel the route of the Tang emperor. Bridges, waterfalls, and paviUons frame individual scenes requiring the viewer to stop and reflect on their significance. McGlashan has painted a landscape of her journey as a member of the Catholic Sisters of Social Service in China, 1946-1948. Written fifty years after her sojourn, and following her withdrawal from the community and the onset of blindness, her book is a meditation on the spirituality of the Chinese. She recalled seeing little arches, like gateways to houses. The builder, however, erected the arch to frame a pleasing scene, not to lead to a house. A microcosm of Chinese and American attempts to understand each other, McGlashan has painted a portrait of the polarities of service and superiority, attraction and repulsion , altruism and suspicion, ignorance and knowledge. Historical figures, activities of international agencies and Communists, inflation and black market, interaction with other religious communities and nationals appear as in a Chinese drama,which presumes familiarity with the story. Readers learn that the Sisters of Social Service originated in Hungary, expanded to California, China, and eventually Taiwan. The book, however, is not a history of the Sisters or the civil war. The author's characterization of her work as a "recoUection of how it was and how it seemed to me" and her purpose to present a "small segment of the total picture of China" aptly describe 0 Days of Wind & Moon. It is a work of memory and reflection and not the appUcation of historical method, despite the appended "Historical Perspective." Its philosophical perspective on her experience of Chinese culture and the...

Les Juifs et la justice dans l'état de l'église, problèmes de tolérance Exemples dans quelques villes des Marches (siècles XIV–XVI)

SUMMARY In this article, Simonetta Bernardi reviews evidence from legal records of the communes and ecclesiastical tribunals of the Marches of the Papal State, of cases involving members of the Jewish communities, from the fourteenth century to the issue of the papal Bull of 1555 ordering the confinement of the Jewish community in ghettoes. They show that prior to 1555 the Jews had enjoyed broad freedom to trade and participate in business, and did resort to the local courts to claim their rights, or alternatively were cited by Christian plaintiffs. The records suggest that while in some cases the Jews clearly suffered from prejudice and discrimination, the courts more commonly adopted a balanced and pragmatic approach, especially when this could be turned to the financial advantage of the local commune. It would appear that a Jewish litigant did have a reasonable prospect of getting satisfaction through the courts.

The Death Penalty. An Historical and Theological Survey by James T. Megivern

BOOK REVIEWS703 Finally, one wonders if Lang's attribution ofthe Lord's Prayer toJohn the Baptist and his movement (pp. 78-80) is more provocation than history. He seems correct in underlining the political nature of this prayer, but offers no convincing evidence that it should have come from the circle of the Baptist rather than from Jesus. This history of Christian worship contains a number of other features that are often lacking in standard liturgical histories. By providing essays on sermon and ecstasy the author draws a fuller picture of the experience of worship than can normally be found in such standard studies. In doing so Lang has written a book that will have to be dealt with by historians for a long time to come. John F. Baldovin, SJ. Jesuit School ofTheology Berkeley, California The Death Penalty. An Historical and Theological Survey. By James T. Megivern. (Mahwah, NewJersey: Paulist Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 641. $29-95.) Capital punishment, like slavery, was one of those institutions of Roman law that the early Christians accepted as an ordinary mechanism of civil society. Occasionally , Christians (e.g., Lactantius) taught that all killing was wrong. More often,bishops (e.g.,Ambrose and Augustine) rebuked the official authors ofparticular public executions or recommended mercy in particular cases. No established , coherent, fundamental opposition to the institution developed. At the beginning of the fifth century, Innocent I could say, "On this point nothing has been handed down to us."The Christian emperors (Theodosius,Justinian), codifying the law, freely incorporated the death penalty. The Gospel texts on forgiveness and love ofneighbor had not been made a barrier against such law, nor had the example of enormous official error in the execution ofJesus provided a deterrent. The Old Testament, with at least thirteen capital crimes including blasphemy, stood as a ready repository of authority affording divine approbation of the practice. The medieval Church got more deeply into its support as death became the punishment for heretics.Ad abolendam,X.5.7.9, of Lucius III in 1 184 provided that the unrepentant or lapsed heretic was to be "left to the judgment of the secular power to be punished by punishment of death." R. H. Helmholz, The Spirit of Classical Law, says," [N]o one doubted that the punishment being referred to was death" (p. 362). Megivern, relying on Edward Peters' Inquisition, sees the decisive step as Gregory LX's constitution of 1231,Excommunicamus. By this point the fiction that priests did not shed blood in turning heretics over to the secular power had been accepted without cavil by the canonists.Writing against this legal background, Thomas Aquinas's defense of capital punishment in general and of turning the lapsed over to the state to be killed sealed the official position with the prestige of a great theologian. 704BOOK REVIEWS The course was set for centuries. Spectacular examples of error—Jan Hus, Joan ofArc, Girolamo Savonarola—did not shake confidence in this way of fortifying the faith. The outbreak of revolt against the papacy in the sixteenth century only enlarged the number of executions. In the bull Exsurge Domine, Leo X condemned proposition 35 of Martin Luther,"It is against the will of the Spirit to burn heretics."The Roman Catechism and the great Counter-Reformation theologians endorsed the practice. Suarez in Defide Theologica, Disputation 23, asked,"Can the Church justly punish the heretics with the punishment of death?" and confidently answered affirmatively. There was now not even a fiction : it was the Church that punished capitally. In the Papal States, the death penalty was an ordinary part of criminal law enforcement, used against brigands and heretics alike. I draw the foregoing from Megivern's book. The author's method is a judicious use of secondary sources such as Peters supplemented by his own reading of texts such as Bellarmine's. He writes as an avowed critic of the death penalty today. His credentials include a doctorate in theology from the University of Fribourg and a licentiate's degree in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute. He currently teaches in the Department ofPhilosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina. He sets out the horrors...

Bishop Lynch's Civil War Pamphlet on Slavery

David C.R. Heisser* President Jefferson Davis in 1864 appointed Bishop Patrick Neison Lynch of Charleston, South Carolina, to be Commissioner of the Confederate States of America to the States of the Church. An ardent Confederate, Bishop Lynch undertook a mission to Europe to win recognition by the Holy See. As part of his contribution to the Southern cause he wrote a tract on slavery which was published in Italian, German, and French, but never in English.' This article discusses Lynch's participation in the Confederate propaganda effort, considers his ideas in the context of the time, and presents representative selections from his original English text. Lynch accepted appointment on March 3, 1864; on April 4 Secretary of State Judah P Benjamin instructed the Bishop to seek recognition and, more importantly, to work for enlightening opinions and molding impressions of European leaders. Lynch was to receive a monthly salary of $1,000 plus $500 for travel.2 In Patrick Lynch the Confederate government chose an acknowledged leader of the Catholic Church in America. Born in Ireland, he was brought up in South Carolina and studied for the priesthood at the seminary of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), the department of the Roman Curia that administered the Catholic Church in America. Lynch had received his doctorate in Rome and spoke fluent Italian. He knew Alessandro Cardinal Barnabo, Prefect of the Propaganda Fide and an influential advisor to Pope Pius IX.3 When Fort Sumter fell to the Confederates Lynch ordered a Te Deum sung in his cathedral.4 He championed Southern independence in a public exchange of letters with Archbishop John Hughes of New York.5 Jefferson Davis admired Lynch for his work with sick and wounded servicemen and prisoners of war, and the Bishop was a member of the President's entourage during the latter's 1863 visit to Charleston.6 In an appeal to his faithful for prayers for peace Lynch praised the Confederate government and armies.7 During April, 1864, the Bishop ran the blockade and sailed to Europe.8 In Paris he met with Confederate agent John Slidell and propagandists Henry Hotze and Edwin De Leon, a fellow South Carolinian. Emperor Napoleon III gave Lynch an audience on June 14, and a few days later the Bishop traveled to Rome, arriving on the 26th.9 He took lodgings in that city, where he was to entertain prominent people and acquire a reputation for hospitality.'o To Giacomo Cardinal Antonelli, Papal Secretary of State, he communicated the Confederacy's desire for recognition. Antonelli was polite but non-committal. On July 4 Pope Pius IX received Lynch in private audience as Charleston's ordinary, but not as Confederate representative. Pius said of North and South, It is clear that you are two nations, expressed willingness to mediate and opposition to sudden emancipation. But still, remarked the Pontiff, something might be done looking to an improvement in [the slaves'] position or state, and to a gradual preparation for their freedom at a future opportune time. The Bishop had subsequent, cordial conversations with Pius and Antonelli, but made no progress toward recognition. Antonelli assured United States Minister Rufus King that Lynch was received only as a bishop making his ad limina visit.12 Just after his first audience with the Pope, Lynch wrote Benjamin, I am now engaged in drawing up a paper on the actual condition and treatment of slaves at the South, at the request of Msgr. [Francesco] Nardi, one of the judges of the Rota, or supreme court of the papal States.13 All Confederate agents contended with the bad name slavery gave their country. These agents had organized a propaganda effort in Europe. Henry lotze edited and published the Index, a London newspaper presenting the Southern perspective. Across the Channel, the Emperor and his supporters generally favored the South, and progovernment newspapers reflected this, but Napoleon III had to pay close attention to French public opinion. …

The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

This book deserves the attention of every scholar interested in contemporary Italian historical studies. While I had surmised that it dealt with an interesting but relatively inconsequential case from the archives of Italian religious history, it is the most gripping and informative study of the years surrounding Italian unification (circa 1860) 1 have ever found. In addition, it is a romantic and tragic story of one family's loss of a child, written in as engaging a style as any work of social history I have encountered. This is a tour de force and more than deserves its status as finalist for the National Book Award. The plot seems at first a simple tale of the tragedy of one family. In 1858 Momola Mortara, a Jewish merchant, was living quietly in Bologna with his wife Marianna and their seven children. Though only two years hence Bologna would be part of the united Italy and under (relatively) secular rule, at that time it was still one of the papal states, and the Church exercised considerable direct control over civic life. This became particularly evident to the Mortaras when the police knocked at their door, one night in June, to inform them that their six year old son Edgardo had been secretly baptized several years earlier by a former servant in their house. Since he was now a Catholic, he could not be raised by Jewish parents, and the police had instructions from the local Inquisitor to bring the child to the Inquisition offices. Thus begins a tale that is eventually implicated in the decimation of papal power in Italy and the formation of the liberal state. It directly involves Pope Pius IX, Napoleon III of France, Camillo Cavour (the first prime minister of unified Italy), several members of the Rothschild family, the British Sir Moses Montefiore, and other elite figures of the nineteenth century. Giuseppe Garibaldi even wrote some of the details of the case into his novel, I mille (1982 [19331, Cappelli). Though few in our time have heard of Edgardo Mortara (including, according to Kertzer, surprisingly few Italian historians), this story was front-page news throughout Europe for much of 1859 and 1860. Edgardo Mortara was in fact removed from his home and taken off to Rome. He was placed in the House of the Catechumens, established 300 years earlier by Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, in order to aid in the conversion of Jews and Muslims. There Edgardo began a long stay in the arms of the Catholic Church, while his parents, the international Jewish community, and a variety of judges, police officials, and diplomats from several countries struggled over his fate. This is a detective story in part, as the legal authorities had to decide whether in fact the baptism had taken place, whether the Church had the right to seize the child in any case, whether the subsequent establishment of a new state invalidated the Church's actions, and whether the Church could or should be required at that point to return the boy to his family. This book provides further evidence for the fact that it is often in the apparent asides of history that good historians find the material for unraveling the most important political and social events of the time. Like Natalie Zemon Davis' The return of Martin Guerre (1983, Harvard University Press) and Carlo Ginzburg's The cheese and the worms (1980, Johns Hopkins University Press), The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara takes events that, though perhaps extraordinary, seem unlikely to have lasting historical significance. …

Castrati, Balzac, and BartheS/Z

Castrati, Balzac, and BartheS/Z Yvonne Noble [B]ut that I have a decent Regard for Posterity, I wou'd have cut away the only Credentials you have of Humanity, and made a walking Sign of you.—Charles Johnson, The Country Lasses (1715) The phenomenon of castrati singers was brought into the consciousness of the wide twentieth-century readership of critical theory in 1970 with the publication by the French structuralist Roland Barthes of his book S/Z.1 Making the book a showcase for his iconoclastic "writerly" critical interposition, he chose to analyze as his sample text a then-obscure novella by Balzac, Sarrasine —a frame tale, the inner and outer narratives of which are linked by the figure of a castrato. Barthes's importance as a theorist has naturally drawn much attention to his reading and, incidentally, to Sarrasine, but, doubtless owing to the sad insulation of academic communities, almost no contribution has come from Early Modern scholars, to whom the castrati are customary parts of the quotidian scene, not to say artists of outstanding interest for their central contribution to one of the major international art forms—the opera—during its glorious centuries from Monteverdi to Meyerbeer. Balzac's castrato therefore has been treated within SIZ (and within the trail of discourse flowing from it) almost entirely as a cultural and psychological symbol—a kind of hallucination. This assessment is true to major aspects of the text and has been very illuminating, particularly with regard to the psychology or "reading" by the outer and inner "subjects"— Balzac's narrator and Sarrasine. Adding a historical dimension, however, can highlight aspects of the text that have been overlooked : the castrato gains personhood, the readings deepen in irony. In Balzac's novella, Sarrasine, the subject of the inner story, is a young French sculptor. In 1758 he travels to Rome, where he becomes infatuated with an opera singer in whose form he recognizes the embodiment of ideal female beauty. He is unaware that in the Papal States no women are permitted to appear on 28 Yvonne Noble29 stage, that the object of his admiration is a castrato. Unable to assimilate this reality, Sarrasine perishes (violently). Balzac places this tale within a frame set in the fabulously wealthy Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, contemporary to his time of writing in 1830. His narrator has taken a young woman (whom he hopes to seduce) to a party at the residence of a family named Lanty. She becomes curious to know about a hideous old man belonging to the household who seems to have a particular affinity to the Lanty's young, lovely, talented daughter. The narrator's companion is also affected by the beauty of a painting of Adonis owned by the Lanty family. The next evening the narrator tells her the tale of Sarrasine. He reveals that the hideous old man is the same person as Sarrasine's castrato, that the Adonis image is of the castrato, and that the Lantys' wealth derives from the castrato ' s celebrated international career. These revelations are found offensive by the young woman. Directed by her to go away, the narrator makes one final, futile attempt to recover the situation: "In telling this story, ... I have been able to give you a fine example of the progress made by civilization today. They no longer create these unfortunate creatures" (253-54). Sarrasine and Balzac's narrator—and Barthes following them in his reading—see life before them as thoroughly sexualized in a strong masculine-feminine polarity. Efficacy for the subject is construed always as male sexual dominance. In Balzac this is represented explicitly in both inner and outer tale; in Barthes implicitly , by his reading of the castrato as outside life (as cold, emptiness, death) and by his invoking of a further, thoroughlysexualized vision in that of Freud. One aspect of Balzac's subject is the power of what is occluded—here, a mode of being commonplace elsewhere or in another time, veiled by the apparent hegemony of the male/masculine/dominant-female/feminine/subordinate antithesis. This necessarily implies a discrediting of essentialist notions about masculinity and femininity. Balzac invites us to consider the distinction between...

Grants in aid of research: Medieval glass in the Papal States 1200–1420

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Julius II: The Warrior Pope by Christine Shaw

Julius II: The Warrior Pope. By Christine Shaw. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell. 1993. Pp. vi, 360; 23 black and white plates. $39.95.) As the title of this book suggests, Christine Shaw views Julius II (ca. 1445-1513, pope from 150) as primarily a political figure whose preferred tools for achieving his primary goal of restoring the temporal authority of the pope over the Papal States were diplomacy and warfare. While her central thesis may seem to have come out of nineteenth-century historiography, her treatment is at times original because she has used new sources and challenged a number of oft-repeated dicta about this pope. Shaw's research has been conducted principally in contemporary diplomatic reports: mostly printed collections for Florence, Venice, Spin, France, and the Empire, and archival materials for Milan, Mantua, Ferrua, and Bologna. Her use of the previously neglected reports of the agents of the Sforzas and Gonzagas has allowed her to trace in detail Giuliano della Rovie's checkered career as a cardinal and to detect patterns of behavior that would continue into his pontcate. Because these reports concentrated on political affairs, the image of della Rovere that emerges is almost exclusively that of a political figure. Given h topic of the forty-two-year career of a cardinal and pope, her work in the Vatican Library and Archives is surprisingly limited-she provides only twenty references to five codices of papal briefs in the Vatican Secret Archives and cites not one of the over one-hundred Vatican Registers for the pontificate of Julius II. On the bass of firsthand diplomatic reports, Shaw is able to challenge some commonly held views about Julius II. She finds little evidence for the claim that as a young cardinal he was serious, studious, and sober, and notes instead his penchant for display, lack of academic interests, and affair with a mistress that begot his daughter Felice. While he later provided for Felice an Orslni husband and for a niece and nephew other Roman matches, he tempered his nepotism. He appointed never more than two nephews at a time to the Sacred College and was restrained in conferring on his ungrateful and disloyal nephew Francesco Maria delle Rovere fiefdoms in the Papal States. His relatives had little influence in shaping papal policy, and he seldom used them to win support for his plans. Nonetheless, his concern to further the interests of his family took precedence over his desire to free Italy of foreign domination The famous words, fuori i barbari, so often associated with Julius in history books, Shaw cannot find to have ever been spoken by him. Ironically, as Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, he had urged the French to invade Italy to depose Alarvlder VI and establish their rule in Naples. …

Legati e governatori dello Stato Pontificio (1550-1809) ed. by Christoph Weber

696book reviews Early Modern European Legati e govematori dello Stato Pontificio (1550-1809). Edited by Christoph Weber. [PubbUcazioni degU Archivi di Stato, Sussidi 7.] (Rome: Ministero per i Beni CulturaU e AmbientaU, Ufficio Centrale per i Beni Archivistici. 1994. Pp. 989.) This volume represents a useful reference work and suggests interesting research avenues in the history of the early modern Church and of early modern Italian society. The volume consists of a chronology and prosopography of provincial and local clerical administrators Ui the Papal State from the midsixteenth century to the Napoleonic age. The work includes an introduction, lengthy descriptions of sources and bibUography, the chronology arranged by sixty cities and towns, and a prosopography including biographical and famUy information about 2,308 administrators. The famUy information adds data about another 3,420 individuals. Christoph Weber collected this information from archival series Ui the Vatican , Roman, and provincial archives, as weU as from a variety of previous compUations , the works of local erudites, printed annuaries, and genealogical coUections and treatises. WhUe the chronology is as complete as these sources permit, in the prosopographyWeber offers selections from the huge amounts of avaUable information. In particular he chose to provide limited information of better-known individuals, those for Instance who ascended to Important bishoprics or the cardinalate, to the advantage of the middle level of papal administrators ,whose careers spanned local government and the Curia offices and who represented the "backbone" (p. 31) of the Papal State. Weber also by and large excluded lay administrators from his research. This volume is, then, a useful and important reference tool for the history of the early modern Papal State. Weber also suggests, Ui his introduction and through the organization of his work, possible uses and ???efGe?^?????ß of this material. FUst, the progressive weakening of the many special administrations and arrangenrents ?Geße?? Ui various parts of ??e ß?3?e, and the waning ofnepotism by the late ße?e??ee??? century, show the ?G?eeßßeß of centraUzation and stataUzation that transformed papal administration, similarly to what happened in other early modern states. ??Ge??eG,Wèb8r's focus, in his prosopography, on the famUy context of the Uves and eßGeeGß ??e documents, points to the crucial role of the early modern bureaucracy as a link between state and society. The papal administrators came in fact often from local nobiUties and patriciates, and from a "civU" group trained in the law. The p?e??eGß of this pow8r e^e, monopolizing local administration and constituting a "bonding ground" (p. 26) for the Italian episcopate, helped the development of state power and control, but they also ensured the resistance and survival of traditional local aristocracies and eUtes into the ninetÎ8nth century. Weber's collected data,then, usefuUy add book reviews697 to debates on die bureaucratic state, on the relationship between center and periphery, and on early modern ItaUan eUtes. Tommaso Astarita Georgetown University Cajetan et Luther en 1518:Édition, traduction et commentaire des opuscules d'Augsbourg de Cajetan. Edited by Charles Morerod, O.P. 2 vols. [Cahiers Oecuméniques, 26.] (Fribourg: Éditions Universitäres. 1994. Pp. iv, 423, xvü; iv, 425-676. Fr. s. 95. paperback.) The meeting at Augsburg between Luther and Tommaso deVio has long been recognized as one of the decisive moments of Reformation history. The Dominican theologian, better known as Cajetan, was arguably the most profound Thomist ofhis generation. Luther, not yet under ecclesiastical censure,could explain and defend his theological views without the polemical rhetoric that would characterize his later work. Luther had a sufficientiy mature theological program for Cajetan later to declare that the Wittenberg Augustinian was creating an entirely new church. This is an important observation from a member of the Thomist tradition. The question of the relation of Luther to Thomistic theology was forcefully posed by Otto-Hermann Pesch Ui 1967, and recent studies have continued to explore subtleties and dtfficulties. Cajetan himself Ui the meanwhUe has been the subject of investigations by Jared Wicks and Barbara HaUensleben, among others, and as a result has acquUed a more prominent place in the canon ofcontroversial theologians. Although several dogmatic treatises have been published Ui the Leonine edition...