‘Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication Since 1500’ [Book Review], Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge, 2004) (original) (raw)

Reviewes

A history of New Testament lexicography. By John A. L. Lee. (Studies in Biblical Greek, 8.) Pp. xiv +415 incl. 13 figs. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. £26 (paper). o 8204348 o 9 ; o897 7828
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904212180
This work from John Lee, best known for his 1983 work A lexical study of the Septuagint, offers a thoroughgoing critique of the practice of New Testament lexicography since its beginnings. The historical account in the first half of the book follows the progress from the vocabularium of the New Testament, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus in the New Testament volume of the Complutensian Polyglot (1514), to the present. It is actually far more than a history - it is a thorough analysis of the problems besetting lexicographical method, so that one sees very early on the methodological deficiencies of those works which simply provide single word glosses, glosses which themselves have often simply been taken from the Vulgate translation. This, coupled with the fact that new editions are often heavily dependent on their predecessors, means that progress is seldom really made. Lee observes astutely how these new editions often change their authors over the course of a few years, giving the impression of a revision which is in fact only superficial: Pasor’s enormously influential 1619 lexicon - itself a collation of the New Testament material from Stephanus’s Thesaurus - becomes Pasor revised by Schöttgen (1717), which then in 1746 is attributed to Schöttgen alone. This pattern is repeated elsewhere. Thayer exerted a particularly strong influence on Preuschen’s work, which was then, on the latter’s death in 1920, given to Walter Bauer to revise. The lexicon of Bauer, the doyen of twentieth-century lexicographers, was then a source even for those works which tried to break out from the genre’s chequered past. ‘The breakthrough’ (the title of Lee’s chapter x) came with the introduction of what Lee regards as the sine qua non of a good lexicon, the definition, which attempts to provide a meaning for the entry, rather than merely single word glosses. Here, the work of J. Louw and E. Nida represents the watershed, although the 2000 revision of Bauer also contained a surprise in including definitions. The problem which Lee identifies with a number of definitions, however, is that they have simply been derived from the glosses. In any case, even Louw-Nida is heavily dependent on the lexical entries offered by Bauer. Lee offers in his final chapter a vision of ‘the way ahead’, whereby the mass of data available electronically could, by a combination of collaboration and ‘the lone scholar’, be condensed into a digestible form. Next (pp. 193-320), the book consists of a number of lengthy case studies, on ParseError: KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '́' at position 44: …pi \eta \tau o ̲́ s, \dot{\alpha… pıov, α˙vατασ˙σω\dot{\alpha} v \alpha \tau \alpha \dot{\sigma} \sigma \omega, уvvaıкápıov, ParseError: KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '́' at position 92: …a ı \alpha v v ̲́ \omega, εiδεε˙α,εξ1ς,κρατ˙τos\varepsilon i \delta \varepsilon \dot{\varepsilon} \alpha, \varepsilon \xi 1 \varsigma, \kappa \rho \alpha \dot{\tau} \tau o s, oìkovouia, ParseError: KaTeX parse error: Expected 'EOF', got '́' at position 18: …i \lambda \eta ̲́ v and

σ∪vαγ˙γω\sigma \cup v \alpha \dot{\gamma} \gamma \omega. These provide excellent illustrations of Lee’s contentions, and further show how lexicography also needs to take cognisance of developments in textual criticism. Finally, there are chronological lists of lexicons, and four appendices drawn from older comment on lexicography. In brief, this is a fine piece of scholarship which should be read by all biblical scholars, but which also implicitly issues a caveat lector to unwary users of dictionaries in any field.

University of Aberdeen
Simon Gathercole

The encyclopedia of Christianity, III: 7-O. Edited by Erwin Fahlbusch, Jan Milič Lochman, John Mbiti, Jaroslav Pelikan and Lukas Vischer, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. (Trans. of Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1996, 1997.) Pp. xxxi +884. Grand Rapids, Mi.-Cambridge: Eerdmans/Leiden-Boston-Cologne: Brill, 2003. ¿65 ($100). o 80282415 3; 9004126546
7EH(56)7 E H(56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904222187
This is the third of a five-volume work which is being published over a period of five years. The first two volumes were published in 1999 and 200I. The encyclopedia is an enlarged English version of the Evangelisches Kirchenlexicon: internationale theologische Enzyklopaedie. Among the additions are articles of special interest to American readers, expanded English bibliographies, recent statistical information on religious affiliation in all but the smallest countries in the world and biographical articles on important figures in church history. The work contains 342 articles many of them written by established scholars in the area. The articles cover a wide range of topics. They include the traditional subjects one might expect to find in an encyclopedia of Christianity. For example, separate articles are devoted to individual books of the Bible, and there is an extended article on the New Testament era. Although some of the biblical articles might not be acceptable to more conservative biblical scholars, the article on Jesus Christ is fair and balanced. The article on the Jesus Seminar is critical, but also fair. Lutherans are given a good deal of attention with seven articles on matters concerning them including an excellent and reasonably detailed article on Martin Luther. Articles, on various countries, are enhanced by statistical information on the current situation which is presented in boxes and tables accompanying the entry. The encyclopedia reflects modern concerns and includes separate articles on mass media, manipulation, marginalised groups, Marxism, narcissism, new age, new self, optimism and pessimism. As has been the practice throughout these volumes other faiths are included in the coverage. This volume includes a series of articles on matters affecting Jewish people and Judaism. In addition, Jainism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Krishna Consciousness, Mormons, nature religion and new religions are included. The ecumenical emphasis is found in an extended article on Jewish-Christian dialogue. This is clearly a valuable reference work and is an important addition to individual libraries.

Wheaton, Rudolphi W. Heinze
Illinois

Persuasion and dissuasion in early Christianity, ancient Judaism and Hellenism. Edited by Pieter W. van der Horst, Maarten J. J. Menken, Joop F. M. Smit and Geert van Oyen. (Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology, 33.) Pp. 214. Leuven: Peeters, 2003. €35 (paper). 90429 I280 4
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904232183
This volume contains a series of papers delivered at a conference held between 7 and 8 January 2002 in the University of Utrecht. The conference was organised by the members of a new research project connected with that university, entitled ‘Judaism, Christianity and hellenism in interaction’. This volume could be said to constitute an early airing of some of the project’s concerns. There are ten papers in all on a diversity of subjects but all more or less linked to the theme of persuasion and dissuasion in religious writings in the ancient world. There is one paper on straightforwardly pagan material (Jan den Boeft on ‘Propaganda in the Isis cult’), four on Jewish subjects (Pieter van der Horst on ‘Anti-Samaritan propaganda in early Judaism’; G. Schimanowski on ‘Der Aristeasbrief zwischen Abgrenzung und Selbstdarstellung’; F. Siegert on ‘Protreptik und Polemik bei Josephus: eine Einleitung in sein Contra Apionem; and B. Koet on ‘Trustworthy dreams? About dreams and references to Scripture in 2 Maccabees I4-I5, Josephus’ A7 II.302-347, and in the New Testament’); and a further five essays on New Testament themes (J. Smit on ‘Propagating a new OIKOS: irony as propaganda in Mark I5:39?’; G. Van Goyen on ‘Irony as propaganda in Mark I5.39?’; B. Lietaert Peerbolte on ‘Romans 15.14-29 and Paul’s missionary agenda’; R. Feldmeier on ‘Die Aussenseiter als Avantgarde: gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung als missionarische Chance nach dem i. Petrusbrief’; and M. Menken on ‘Fulfilment of Scripture as a propaganda tool in early Christianity’). Inevitably the contributors engage with such questions as missionary activity amongst pagans, Jews and Christians, and the complex methodological issues such a subject throws up. Different modes of persuasion and dissuasion are examined as well as their effects. The volume would have benefited from the presence of some essays of a more introductory and wide-ranging character. Little, for instance, is made of John North’s theory that the hellenistic world, precisely as a result of the creation of international cities, became a place where religious propaganda was in some sense endemic. A general essay on rhetoric and its role in religious propaganda would also have been helpful; and it might have been useful to have had a clearer statement than the reader in fact receives on the relationship of the theme of the volume to the theme of the project in general. But the fact that we have some detailed and interesting analysis of individual texts in the context of the discussion of a central and important subject from scholars of standing is to be welcomed.

Peterhouse, James Carleton Paget
CAmbridge

Lord Jesus Christ. Devotion to Jesus in earliest Christianity. By Larry W. Hurtado. Pp. xxii +746 . Grand Rapids, Mich./Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003. £39.95 ($55). o 802860702
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So02204690424218X
In a self-conscious alternative to Wilhelm Bousset, Larry Hurtado analyses ‘Christdevotion’ in the period c. 30-170 CE. This book is an extensive survey of diverse

individuals, movements and literature, for example Judean Jewish Christianity, Paul, ‘Q’, synoptic Gospels, Johannine literature, non-canonical Gospels, Gnostics, Marcion and Justin Martyr. Hurtado argues that ‘mainstream’ witnesses advocated what was an extremely distinctive belief dating from as early as the first few years after Jesus’ death, namely that Jesus was worshipped in ways in which the Jewish God was worshipped and that this was a ‘mutation’ of Jewish monotheism.

Hurtado’s view of Christ-devotion as a mutation of Jewish monotheism is probably a correct way to describe ‘orthodox’ Christology in its highest form and many will find this convincing. However, it is unlikely that this occurred as early as he suggests. I suspect that this critical issue will prove to be a major bone of contention and it requires some attention. Hurtado makes much of language associated with God being applied to Jesus in early pre-Pauline statements (for example pp. 108-18). But language closely associated with God, as Hurtado is aware (for example pp. 360-I), could be applied to figures other than God in Jewish thought so it does not follow that the earliest Christians were necessarily making a radical shift. However, Hurtado stresses the consistent pattern of worship as opposed to occasional references (p. 137). But this too can be explained without having to resort to full cultic worship of Jesus. Given the sectarian nature of earliest Christianity, it is not difficult to see why Jesus would take such a central role in the identification of the earliest Christians. Jesus, and no other, was to be Israel’s king, Israel’s anointed and so on. Therefore Jesus (alongside God) was to be the sole object of praise for the early Christians working within a Jewish context. Hurtado frequently observes that much of the language used concerning Jesus is unparalleled. But such parallel free language does not automatically entail cultic worship as Hurtado comes close to assuming (cf. p. I49).

Hurtado’s reading of John’s Christology (pp. 349-426) is the most plausible New Testament evidence for Christ devotion in the strongest sense. But here we get the first unambiguous conflicts over ‘high’ Christology and the extremely close association of Jesus and God. There is nothing like the Johannine material in the earlier documents, thereby suggesting they did not have such a ‘high’ Christology. Consequently this would imply that Hurtado is wrong to reject the view that John’s Gospel reflects the significant Christological split between Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the first century (for example pp. 137 n. 132, 349-407, 425-6). A comparison with the Gospel of Mark is instructive. Here Hurtado pushes the evidence too far, particularly in his use of the miracle stories as evidence of Christ worship (pp. 285-90, cf. p. 346), and does not discuss similar acts attributed to other Jewish figures such as Elisha, the Messiah and certain rabbis. As none of these figures was thought to compromise Jewish monotheism we cannot automatically assume that Mark held a binitarian view for using similar and non-controversial stories. Compare the feeding miracles in the Synoptics with the bitter Christological problems and Jewish opposition in a parallel section of John vi (for example vi.4I-2, 52,60−6)52,60-6) : this is surely an indication that Johannine Christology is significantly ‘higher’.

Hurtado does attempt to show that there was Jewish opposition to Christ devotion in pre-7o Christianity. This would provide strong evidence in favour of his early dating but this is also the weakest point of his thesis. For example, the persecution of Christianity by those such as the pre-Christian Paul is because Christians held a view

of ‘Christ-devotion that is basically reflected in what he embraced and advocated after his conversion’ (p. 176). Leaving aside the problematic view that Paul’s ‘Christ devotion’ was a mutation of Jewish monotheistic worship (was there really Jewish opposition to Paul’s Christology?), it is far from clear that the pre-Christian Paul persecuted the Church because of ‘high’ Christological claims. As Hurtado notes (for example pp. 93-7, 175-6), the language of ‘zeal’ in which Paul described his former life echoes Jewish defences of the Law. Is it not possible that Paul persecuted the earliest Christians over legal issues? This does not mean a retreat to the mistaken ‘Law’ versus ‘Gospel’ approach where biblical laws were supposedly rejected by the first Christians, a view Hurtado rightly rejects (for example pp. 207-14), but rather an intra-Jewish dispute over the interpretation of biblical law as found in the synoptic tradition (for example Mark ii.28-iii.6; vii.I-5; x.I-12; Matthew v.2I-47; Luke xiii.10-17; xiv.I-6).

Hurtado notices (p. 176) that the opposition to Stephen’s speech was because of a Christological statement (Acts vii.55-8). But again this makes sense as an intra-Jewish legal dispute, hence the problems start after the allegations against the Temple authorities for not obeying the Law (Acts vii.53-4, cf. i Kings 8; 2 Chronicles 6-7; Psalm cxxxii[cxxxi].I2; Isaiah lxvi.2, 5). Stephen is, of course, stoned after his Christological statement but this could be understood as a dispute over ultimate authority for Stephen’s claims, over who was really doing the will of God and not over the details of Christ’s being (cf. Mark ii.10; ii.28; iii.22-30; xiv.65; Acts iv.I-22; v.27-42). Hurtado also points to blasphemy allegations in Mark ii. 7 and xiv. 65 as evidence for Jewish opposition to Christ devotion (for example p. 206, cf. p. 288) but again authority is the key issue. Moreover, too much weight should not be placed on blasphemy charges because blasphemy was, as Hurtado notes (for example p. 404 n . 112), a broad category and disputes such as Mark xiv. 65 are paralleled in rabbinic literature where the debate is clearly intra-Jewish (e.g. b. Sanh. 38b).

Hurtado has provided an important and extensive approach to Christology which will no doubt be widely acknowledged in scholarship and welcomed in conservative Christian circles. However, in notable contrast to evidence from post-7o CE Christian movements, the crucial argument that Christ devotion was dominant in c. 30-70 CE is almost certainly incorrect.

BARROW-IN-FURNES
James G. Crossley

Apocryphal Gospels. An introduction. By Hans-Josef Klauck (trans. Brian McNeil). Pp. iv +236. London-New York: T & T Clark, 2003. £19.99 (paper). o 567 o839o X; о 567 o89ı8 5
fˉEH\bar{f} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904252186
This helpful introduction to the apocryphal Gospels originally appeared in German in 2002. Its author, an acknowledged authority on the early history of Christianity, briefly discusses the difficulties any scholar encounters when trying to define the term ‘apocryphal Gospels’. As Klauck notes, the term ‘apocryphal’ had at least two definitions in the early Church, one broadly positive (secret revelations which are not included in the generally acknowledged corpus of revelatory documents), and one negative (texts that are falsified or unreliable - here Klauck notes that the sixthcentury Gelasian Decree lists apocryphal works alongside ‘heretical’ ones. Klauck

could have complicated the matter still further by noting Jerome’s definition in terms of works that were in some sense theologically helpful but not canonical). Both of these definitions imply a relationship to the New Testament in terms of supplementation, supplanting etc. As Klauck notes, however, such a view can too easily assume the secondary character of traditions in apocryphal texts, something about which we should show a degree of caution. His selection has not been overly hampered by questions of definition and his treatments of texts are determined by questions of antiquity, content, significance, notoriety and historical influence.

The book divides itself up into twelve chapters in which texts are placed under various chapter headings: ‘The Agrapha’, ‘Gospel fragments’, ‘Jewish-Christian Gospels’, ‘Two Gospels of the Egyptians’, ‘Gospels about Jesus’ death and resurrection’ (included here are the Gospel of Peter, Nicodemus and Bartholomew), ‘Gospels from Nag Hammadi’ (Thomas, Philip and the Gospel of Truth), ‘Dialogues with the risen Christ’ (included here are the Sophia of Jesus Christi, Epistula apostolorum, the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John), ‘Non-localized dialogues with Jesus’ (included here are the Book of Thomas and the Dialogue with the Saviour), ‘Legends about the death of Mary’, ‘Lost Gospels’, and ‘An anti-Gospel: the Toledoth Yeshu’. In deciding to have a chapter on the Toledoth (he makes use of Schlichting’s translation of the version entitled Tam uˉ−uˉuˉuˉd\bar{u}-\bar{u} \bar{u} \bar{u} d ), Klauck appears broadly at least to adopt the view, associated with Samuel Krauss, that the traditions contained within this work could be as early as the fifth century, and its inclusion is certainly to be welcomed. There is a brief concluding chapter and a set of helpful indices. Klauck’s introductory remarks are well-informed, clear and scholarly, and he very helpfully takes his reader through individual texts. Each chapter has a manageable bibliography attached to it.

It is good to have a readable translation of this useful scholarly aid.
Peterhouse, James Carleton Paget
CAMPRIDGE

Lost Christianities. The battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew. By Bart D. Ehrman. Pp. xvii +294 incl. i2 ills. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. £16.99. o 19514183 o
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904262182
Ehrman addresses a general readership, accessibly describing the diversity of earliest Christianity, and emphasising the struggles involved in the formation and triumph of ‘proto-orthodox’ views. In the first four chapters, he recounts important examples of ‘forgeries and discoveries’: the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and the Secret Gospel of Mark (exploring some intriguing options on who may have forged this text). The next three chapters are readable accounts of various early types of Christianity: Ebionites and Marcionites, Gnostics and ‘the broad swath of Proto-orthodox Christianity’. Chapters viii-xi focus on some of the phenomena involved in the struggles among ‘winners and losers’, for example polemical treatises and slurs against opponents, forged texts (by heterodox and orthodox alike, e.g. 3 Corinthians), and the development of the New Testament canon.

His final chapter reiterates an interesting point repeatedly made in previous chapters that the whole of western history could have been considerably different

had there been an outcome other than the triumph of what became known as ‘orthodox’ Christianity. This very effectively illustrates how history ‘matters’.

For readers with little or no previous acquaintance with the texts and developments in view here, this will provide an informed, genial and readable introduction. There is also a select bibliography for those interested in reading further. But there is the occasional curious assertion. For example, was ‘the single biggest objection’ of pagans that Christianity appeared as a ‘new’ religion? I would judge Christian disdain for the gods to have been much more of an issue.

At various points, Erhman somewhat wistfully laments the ‘intolerance’ that marked early Christianity in general (against Roman paganism) and against ‘heretical’ Christian views as well. It is, however, perhaps a bit too easy for us to disapprove of the efforts of people who thought that they were striving over matters of eternal consequence. Perhaps, especially in books for the general public, it would be better to help readers appreciate sufficiently the ancient situations that seemed to demand the sorts of vigorous efforts that can draw the scorn of our genteel age. Moreover, Ehrman somewhat blurs the crucial distinction between the periods before and after Constantine’s recognition of Christianity. In the pre-Constantinian period, the battles among Christian views had to proceed (commendably, in my view) without the dubious benefit of state coercion.

Ehrman is to be thanked for providing a very useful introduction to the diversity of earliest Christianity, and he is right to celebrate the renewed scholarly interest in various groups that wound up being heterodox. But in considering many of the versions of Christianity advocated in the texts of Lost Christianities, I am reminded of the words of the American comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, ‘Sometimes the road less taken is less taken for a reason!’

New College,
L. W. Hurtado

Edinburgh

Eloquent virgins from Thecla to Foa an of Arc. By Maud Burnett McInerney. (New Middle Ages.) Pp. xi +250 +6 ills. New York-Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. £32.50. o 31222350 I
7EH(56)7 E H(56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So022046904272189
The themes of this book, virginity, sanctity and female autonomy, are familiar these days to patristic and medieval scholars. The virgins and the authors covered by Burnett McInerney (including the apocryphal heroine Thecla, the über-bishop Ambrose of Milan, the abbess, author and composer Hildegard of Bingen, and the ever-controversial heroine Joan of Arc) are also well known to us. The theorists name-checked in the introductory chapter (including Judith Butler, Derrida, Freud and Foucault) are perhaps equally inevitable. What Burnett McInerney seeks to do which is more ambitious, however, is to investigate the story of the virgin, and particularly, the virgin martyr, across the longue durée, from the third to the fifteenth century. This enables the reader to see, perhaps more clearly than is usually possible, the transformations undergone by both the constructed and the real virgin in the course of this extensive period of time. Hence, if we accept Burnett McInerney’s readings, we can trace the virgin’s development from an eloquent and troubling figure (Thecla) to a purely passive and symbolic cipher (Ambrose’s Agnes), and from

a distinctively and positively feminine divine creation (Hildegard’s Ursula), to a real threat posed by a still controversial ‘historical’ virgin (Joan of Arc). Burnett McInerney sets out to show us that we would be mistaken to read virgins as either positive role models or repressive symbols: they were both. Inevitably, much of this is not new; it is well-known, for instance, that female autonomy was progressively subdued in the course of early Church history and that virginity came to provide the key marker of sanctity in the course of the fourth century. However, a focus on the eloquence of the virgin, on the dual impulse ‘toward speech and agency on the one hand and silence and passivity on the other’ (p. 195) enables some interesting and valuable analysis. Ultimately, Burnet McInerney presents us not with the universal success of the patristic, patriarchically constructed virgin but with a more variegated picture, whereby (unfortunately rare) female authors could still present virginity ‘as an entirely positive and genuinely powerful condition for women’ (p. iog). While specialists might contest some individual readings this book none the less provides a worthy addition to a burgeoning field.

University of Edinburgh
Lucy Grig

The hope of the early Church. A handbook of patristic eschatology. By Brian E. Daley. Pp. xiv +303 . Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003. £17.99£ 17.99 (paper). I 565637372 7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904282185
This is a paperback reprint of the 1991 hardcover edition of the same title published by Cambridge University Press (reviewed this Journal xliii [1992], i4I). Minor corrections were made to the text, and the bibliographies at the end, arranged by topic, have been helpfully expanded and updated to the year 2002. The word ‘handbook’ in the subtitle aptly describes the book’s nature as a summary of the eschatological thought of scores of authors and movements considered chronologically up to Gregory the Great and John of Damascus. Given its ambitious scope, it is a masterful compilation made from a vast, complex and daunting array of materials in several ancient languages. The reader is not simply introduced to this or that peculiarity of an author, nor presented with a mere set of tabulations on a small number of eschatological topics, but is made familiar with each author’s eschatological thought, in its religious-historical context, and in some cases, with its significant repercussions. The longer sections on Origen and Augustine are particularly appreciated. In the preface, Daley writes that he believes ‘that the hope of people in our own age can be nourished and inflamed by an informed acquaintance with the hopes of earlier generations’. An ‘informed acquaintance’ of the hopes of the early Church is surely achievable with the help of his book. If this study of the Church’s hope leaves any hope of this reader unfulfilled, it is that the author might yet be encouraged to undertake a complete, updated revision of his superb book on the future at some point in the future. In the meantime, it is wonderful to have this book in print again, and at a price which makes it easy to recommend to students.

Reformed Theological Seminary,
Charles E. Hill
Oviedo,
Florida

Ignatius adversus Valentinianos? Chronologische und theologiegeschichtliche Studien zu den Briefen des Ignatius von Antiochien. By Thomas Lechner. (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae. Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language, 47.) Pp. xxvi +373 . Nlg 211,56. Leiden-Boston-Cologne: Brill, 1999. 9004 II505 6; 0920623 X
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904292181
Several times during the twentieth century the scholarly consensus on Ignatius of Antioch was challenged. It holds that seven letters by Ignatius were penned to Asia and Rome during Trajan’s reign. The Eusebian dating (rejected by Lechner at pp. 75-115) places them in the first decade of the second century. Writers such as Delafosse, Weijenborg, Rius-Camps and Joly, with different results, questioned some or all of the material, positing interpolation or wholesale falsification. Joly drew particular attention to language and ideas which seemed better suited to a date c. 165. In the late ig8os and the ig9os Reinhard Hübner was promoting a theory which placed the writings in the decade of the 170s. The journal ZAC\mathcal{Z} A C vols i-iii gives a flavour of the debate. Now Thomas Lechner, a student of Reinhard Hübner, argues on theological grounds that they can be dated ‘relatively exactly’ (p. 306), between 165 and 175 and are the products of an author who lived and worked in Asia Minor. In this book, key elements of the debate are rehearsed in part I, viz. the issue of Polycarp’s letter(s) to Philippi (rejecting P. N. Harrison’s thesis), then (pp. 46ff) the various theories of falsification and their detractors. Irenaeus’ citation of Ignatius, Romans (AH 5.28.4) provides a terminus ante quem in the 180-190s where Ignatian chronology is concerned. Part II (pp. I2Iff) seeks to contextualise the polemic in terms of opposition to Valentinian gnosis. Ignatius, Ephesians 16-20 is examined in detail (pp. 121-300), considering the integrity of the Ephesian text in the light of Religionsgeschichtliche, Traditionsgeschichtliche and rhetorical studies. The so-called ‘Star Hymn’ of Eph. ig is characterised as the literary and polemical high-point of the letter (p. 135), the core of a Christ-hymn to which the Glaubensformel of Eph. 18 (discussed later at pp. 150-219) acts as prooimion. In consideration of the Valentinian myth to which the ‘Star Hymn’ was a polemical commentary, Lechner pays special attention to the language of the ‘cry’, ‘aeons’ and the concept of ‘silence’. In the ‘dance of the stars’ motif the myth is parodied and there is an insistence on the redeemer’s ( == the new star’s) ‘unlikeness’ (anomoios) to the Valentinian aeons. In this study the Asian context and the evidence of Irenaeus are important. Missionaries of Marcosian stance may have been a factor in determining the need for response. Lechner builds on Hübner’s finding that the Glaubensformel in Eph. 7.2 and Pol. 3.2 related to the anti-Valentinianism of Noët of Smyrna. Ignatius, so dated, would have been one of the earliest theologians of the young catholic Church to take issue with the Valentinians (p. 307). This carefully-prepared book has good bibliographies and indices of references. It is a valuable and thought-provoking addition to a continuing debate. I expect, nevertheless, that for many readers, a plethora of questions about the Ignatian corpus stays unaddressed. The sum of its many oddities and anomalies remains no better explained than for those who take the not-altogether-reliable Eusebian witness at its word.

The sex lives of saints. An erotics of ancient hagiography. By Virginia Burrus. (Divinations. Rereading Late Ancient Religion.) Pp. vi +216. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. £30 ($42.50). о 8г22 37455
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904302186
Informed by Michel Foucault’s thoughts on sexuality and asceticism as forged in his engagement with George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot as well as by subsequent theorists of gender, the erotic and the subaltern, Virginia Burrus’s book focuses on what Alexandre Dumas père, aptly called ‘the irresistible attraction of mystical voluptuousness, the most devouring of all’ (The three musketeers, 524). However, rather than merely highlighting the undeniable eroticism of the late antique saints’ Lives - all variations on the theme of burning desire for something almost but never fully revealed, almost but not (quite) yet in the hero(ine)‘s grasp - Burrus concentrates on queerness, masochism, sadisms and seductiveness. These are also the themes of the four chapters, which alternate male and female saints’ Lives to focus on strategies of gender transformation as means of heightened sublimation, as in Jerome’s Lives of Paul and Hilarion; on female saints, whose true literary life begins in the moment of their highly eroticised death; on models of hypermasculinity such as St Martin, the soldier-saint; and on those of hyperfeminitity, namely the Lives of the so-called harlots. Of course, the focus on what Burrus (following Karmen MacKendrick) calls ‘countererotics’ is programmatic: it seeks to reflect the fullest spectrum of the human celebration of ‘sacredness’ (p. i6). This book is a wonderful read. Of course, some who like theory may quibble with certain theoretical assumptions, others with certain readings of the texts, and yet others still may be distracted ‘if only momentarily so’ by visions of Virginia at the hairdressers. I dare anyone, however, not to be seduced into enjoying this truly exuberant book.

University of California at Berkeley
Susanna Elm

Les Sept Passions de Prudence. (Peristephanon 2. 5. 9. II-I4.) Introduction général et commentaire. Edited by Pierre-Yves Fux. (Paradosis. Études de littérature et de théologie anciennes, 46.) Pp. viii +504. Freiburg: Éditions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 2003. €62. 2827 I 0957 3; I422 4402
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904312182
Prudentius, like Grandma Moses and César Franck, belongs amongst the late starters. Born 348 (a Spaniard as were the great Pope Damasus whose verses influenced his own and his near contemporary the Emperor Theodosius) he waited to publish until he was fifty-six (Fux’s correction of the usual ’ 57 '). His poetry, in bulk as much as Vergil and Horace combined, became classic within a few generations. His lyric pieces, in the Peristefanon and the Cathemerinon, were not in origin liturgical, but a handful of poems cast in suitable metres found a place in breviaries and hymnals. The most widely known lines, I would guess, are in the Howells anthem for John F. Kennedy Take him earth for cherishing (Cathemerinon io. i25ff: ‘Nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum/gremioque hunc concipe molli!’). Pierre-Yves Fux characterises Prudentius as an ‘Alexandrine poet’, in the sense that the forms are learned and draw upon established tradition with many verbal echoes. He constructs cleverly and Fux sees him as deliberately vying with Claudian, his great contemporary, in metrical techniques. He is not ‘alexandrine’ in the sense that the style is overtly

complex: the Latin is easy and the art concealed. The importance for the church historian, as distinct from the literary analyst, of Prudentius lies in the period to which he belongs and changes he helped to bring about. He lived at a time when Rome was becoming a Christian city. He wrote against Symmachus and the altar of Victory was indeed removed from the senate. Churches and shrines of the new religion proliferated. The ancient temples remained, protected by law from despoliation but left as memorials to a past whose meaning had been radically changed by the city’s conversion to Christ. Prudentius celebrates the perduring grandeur of Rome of old, defaced by demonic idolatry but now endowed with a bright destiny. He never mentions Constantinople. Fux edits here, with extensive annotation to his translation and full introduction to the backgound to the Peristefanon, the passion narratives of Laurence, Vincent, Cassian, Hippolytus, the Apostles Peter and Paul, Cyprian and Agnes. These form a group as attested by the titles and manuscript tradition. A plausible order of composition is suggested. Of interest to the historian is the connection with holy sites and liturgical commemorations. The tortures are gruesome and varied, but the horror, as Fux points out, is no bloodier than you will find in Lucan. Prudentius is a pleasure to read, and Fux earns our gratitude with this fine edition.

Skelmanthorpe
Lionel Wickham

Conversion. In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Seeing and believing. Edited by Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton. (Studies in Comparative History. Essays from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.) Pp. xi +283. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003. £50. I 58046 I25 5; I539 4905
Conversion. Old worlds and new. Edited by Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton. (Studies in Comparative History. Essays from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.) Pp. xix +30I. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003. £50. I 58046 I23 9; I539 4905
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All the papers published in these twinned volumes were originally delivered during a two-year project on ‘conversion to, within and around forms of western Christianity’, conducted at Princeton University (1999-200I). Conversion: in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (eight papers) contains studies presented at a special symposium that inaugurated the project. Conversion: old worlds and new (eleven papers) consists of investigations into aspects of the subject between thirteenth-century England and late twentieth-century India. Throughout, history gives the dominant inspiration. Though some nympholeptic moments owe much to sociology, psychology is almost entirely absent. Given the extremely disparate subjects of these studies, and the range of methods applied in them, readers seeking pointers for future cross-disciplinary investigations (one objective of the Princeton project) will particularly welcome two contributions specifically designed to locate similarities in dissimilars: the one, an essay by Neil McLynn concluding Late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, an intellectual tour de force that may owe something to the author’s experience in mediating occidental ways to Japanese scholars, and the other, the editors’ own imaginative and learned introduction to the second volume. It must be

said that the focus on ‘western Christianity’ wavers. Six of the eight contributions bearing on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages belong to the field of Greek patristics. The golden age of evangelism in western Europe (between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries) is entirely missing. Papers representing that period deal with particular incidents of conversion outside Europe, graphically illustrating the different perspectives of converters and intended converts. Authors recognise that, though converters were to themselves gatekeepers of faith, they were gatecrashers to indigenous peoples, and these studies demonstrate how, often, in the push-and-pulls of evangelism, the law of unintended consequences eventually denied final victory to the alien evangelists. The general definition of conversion as ‘a shift of affiliation’ makes a category into which all these studies of evangelisation (late antique, medieval and modern) can be juxtaposed. However, in defining conversion as ‘a shift of affiliation’, the pointillism of this collection not only leaves out the historical precondition of Europe’s overseas evangelisation (that is Europe), but also renders conversion ‘an immensely worldly phenomenon’ (Late antiquity, p. ix; Old worlds and new, p. 26I). Empiricist historians may well leave God out, but to omit the spiritual aspirations of converters and converts erects one kind of barrier to contemporary historians’ entering into the empiricisms of people in earlier generations, centuries and cultures, that the editors recognised. In fact, two contributors did break through to earlier spiritual empiricisms in exemplary fashion: Suzanne Elm, in her abundantly fruitful analysis and contextualisation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ doctrine of baptism, and John Van Engen, in his enlightening venture into affective spirituality of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In short, these volumes constitute a valuable, and provisional, re-mapping of the terrain known as ‘conversion’, and challenge scholars both to cross the borders of their particular disciplines as they explore the areas present and absent from the present survey, and to enter into past worlds with tact and empathy rarely seen in the mission field.

Rutgers University
Karl F. Morrison

English diplomatic practice in the Middle Ages. By Pierre Chaplais. Pp. xiv +277. London-New York: Hambledon and London, 2003. £25. I 852853956 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So022046904332185
This work forms part of massive undertaking concerning the practices of the English crown in diplomatic relations in the Middle Ages. Three volumes by Pierre Chaplais have already appeared under the title English medieval diplomatic practice, two of them containing editions of texts with learned and elaborate commentary (1982) and one of them plates (1976). They were published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office on behalf of the Public Record Office, but subsequently the HMSO withdrew from this type of publication. Scholars have reason to be grateful to the present publishers for taking over the series. Two volumes, which will provide a systematic treatment of the subject, are envisaged, of which this is the first. Typesetting for it began in the mid-rg8os, and it contains few, if any, references to publications of a later date. Yet this does not seriously detract from its value and usefulness. There are three chapters. The first describes forms of diplomatic communication in the period to cc. i200, when written sources are sparse. The remaining chapters (called ‘Diplomatic correspondence’ and ‘Simple and solemn missions’) deal with the

period after c. 1200 and draw on the exceptionally rich archives of English royal government extant in the Public Record Office. Chaplais also makes telling use of English diplomatic documents extant in foreign archives. Moreover, since there are parallels between the behaviour of the English royal government, on the one hand, and that of foreign powers (including the papacy), on the other, he frequently cites sources concerning the latter and thus provides a considerable body of material for comparative studies. The author is careful to clarify the distinctions between different kinds of documents and procedures. Much of the analysis is technical; and Chaplais is able again and again to show that his approach has important implications, for instance in the case of the discussion of the use of the title ‘king of France’ and related terminology by the kings of England during the Hundred Years War (pp. 107-10). Human and personal touches are also present; for example, the description of the difficulties that envoys might face in gaining access to the potentate to whom they had been sent (pp. 242-3), or the ‘outrageous rate of one goose per week’ that one wardrobe clerk paid another in I3II in order to borrow a copy of works of Petrus de Vinea and Thomas de Capua (p. 115). The range of Chaplais’s book is extraordinary, both chronologically (from classical antiquity to the Renaissance) and geographically (England, France, Italy, the Iberian kingdoms, the German Empire, etc.). He displays in addition a profound understanding of the sources and meticulous attention to detail. This is a combination of qualities that few medievalists can match.

Cambridge University Library
P. N. R. Zutshi

Porphyrogenita. Essays on the history and literature of Byzantium and the Latin east in honour of Julian Chrysostomides. Edited by Charalambos Dendrinos, Jonathan Harris, Eirene Harvalia-Crook and Judith Herrin. Pp. xxvii +530 incl. 26 plates. Aldershot-Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2003. £57.50. o 754636968
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Thirty-four papers in four roughly equal sections constitute an impressive tribute to the interests and reputation of Julian Chrysostomides. In lieu of a full list of contents, attention will be drawn to some highlights. In the first section, ‘Byzantine history and historiography’, these include Jonathan Shepard’s discussion of sacred time and its uses in Byzantine diplomacy and Speros Vryonis, Jr’s close textual analysis of the end of Romanos iv. Several papers point the way to larger studies: Paul Magdalino’s identification of astrological allusions in the Alexiad; Tia Kolbaba’s pursuit of manuscript references to 1054; and Ruth Macrides’s thoughts on historical writing in the thirteenth century, which constitute a fine prolegomenon to her forthcoming edition and translation of Akropolites. Section two, ‘Byzantine hagiography, theology and monasticism’, features insightful papers by Ken Parry on Melkite icon veneration under iconoclasm, and by Johannes Koder on Romanos Melodos’s views on monasticism, plus two contributions on Demetrios Kydones by Athanassia Glycofrydi-Leontsini and Norman Russell. The third section reflects Chrysostomides’s enduring concern with ‘Latins in the Greek east’, and includes contributions by Bernard Hamilton, the late Nicolas Oikonomides, David Jacoby and Antony Luttrell. Together these papers offer a useful new overview of Frankish

lordship in ‘Romania’. The fourth section, ‘Byzantine texts and Greek palaeography’, features the first critical editions of a number of fascinating texts, including a funeral oration on Manuel in Palaeologos, first identified by Chrysostomides in a unique fifteenth-century manuscript in the Vatican Library, here published by Charalambos Dendrinos. Equally compelling is Eirene Harvalia-Crook’s edition of an anonymous collection of icon stories, dating from the tenth century, although the editor should have made reference to Halkin’s earlier edition of the ‘translation of the holy tile’ (BHG3 8oln). In addition, Andrew Louth dates John Damascenes’s Fount of knowledge (to 743) by alternative means; Patricia Easterling considers the continued relevance of Sophocles to the Byzantine student; Joseph Munitiz revisits Nikephoros Blemmydes and offers translations of his letters to Manuel II; and George Dennis offers yet another perspective on Kydones.

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Paul Stephenson

Füdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext in kulturräumlich vergleichender Betrachtung von der Spätantike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Edited by Christoph Cluse, Alfred Haverkamp and Israel J. Yuval. (Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden, Abteilung, A, 13.) Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2003. €54. 37752562293775256229
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This volume is closely connected to the research conducted by the Arye-MaimonInstitute at the University of Trier on the history of the Jews. Alfred Haverkamp and Christoph Cluse are major players in this effort and have for a long time closely collaborated with Israel Yuval of the University of Jerusalem. As Haverkamp makes plain in his introduction to the volume, the project aims to study the history of the Jews in conjunction with the history of Latin Christendom in all its facets. Full recognition is given to the diversity not only within Latin Christendom but also between medieval Jewish communities. And Jews are regarded as active protagonists in the shaping of their history. This volume, which goes back to papers delivered at an international conference in 1999, reflects these ground rules. It opens with a section of introductory material and a section on the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. A part on medieval regional contexts is followed by a part on Jewish communities examined in their local contexts. The book closes with chapters on Jewish organisational structures in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. As one would expect, some contributions are better than others. Some seem to reach rather few conclusions and come across as working papers rather than articles ready to see the light of day. To give a flavour of the book I shall comment on some of the chapters which are most interesting from the vantage-point of my own research. Israel Yuval juxtaposes Jewish and Christian concepts of time. He argues convincingly that medieval Jews adopted the Christian idea that the Romans expelled all Jews from the land of Israel after the destruction of the second Temple because they could fashion this idea into their own messianic message of hope for the return of the Jews to Zion. This message deliberately posed a direct challenge to the Christian eschatological message of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Sonja Benner and Alexander Reverchon’s detailed analysis of the Jews of Champagne offers a welcome antidote to the predominant attention many scholars pay to the fate of the

Jews living in French royal lands. They include extremely useful maps which show the expansion of Jewish settlements in the region. The patterns traced clearly demonstrate how intricately bound Champagne Jews were to comital authority. Before 1284, the year in which Philip the Fair married the daughter of the last count of Champagne, the counts were usually friendly towards the Jews. The execution of thirteen prominent members of the Jewish community of Troyes on trumped-up charges of ritual murder in 1288 reflects royal ascendancy in the county. Robin Mundill provides a useful diagram of the different components of the Jewish community of England and the different aspects of royal control of those communities. Of particular interest is the article by Matthias Schmandt about the position of the Jews in Cologne. By comparing it with that of other independent associations in Cologne he argues that the Jewish community was an integral part of the patchwork of urban associations comprising medieval Cologne, enjoying considerable autonomy. Finally, Rainer Barzen sheds more light on the collective authority of the Jewish scholars of Mainz, Worms and Speyer - the three large Jewish communities denoted in the literature as SchUM. His suggestion that it would be useful to compare this Jewish collaboration with Christian connections between the three cathedral cities should be pursued. All in all this volume shows how much detailed work is being done and still needs to be done to write a really comprehensive history of the Jews of the Latin west. It also shows how important it will be constantly to keep the larger historical picture in mind.

Lucy Cavendish College,
Anna Sapir Abulafia
CAMPRIDGE

Guerriers et moines. Conversion et sainteté aristocratiques dans l’occident médiéval (IXe-XIIe siècle). Edited by Michel Lauwers. (Collection d’Etudes Médiévales, 4.) Pp. 68o. Antibes: Éditions APDCA (for Centre d’Études, Préhistoire, Antiquité, MoyenÂge, Nice), 2002. €35 (paper). 2 904110 35 6; 1281 6809
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Most medieval saints had been religious figures during their lives: bishops, monks or nuns, hermits and recluses. A few of them had been laymen, most notably, from the late twelfth century on, the penitent and the poor. But earlier, between the ninth and twelfth centuries, warriors and powerful lords were also sometimes held up as models of sanctity. French scholars have very recently begun to study the relationship between the aristocracy and the Church. This volume, which grows out of a roundtable conference held in 1999, includes twenty-three articles, of which the editor, Michel Lauwers, contributed four as well as the introduction and epilogue. All of the articles focus on warriors who gained sanctity, especially St Gangulf, whose murder in the eighth century by his wife’s lover was later reinterpreted as martyrdom; the ninth-century William of Orange, who founded and probably entered the monastery of Gellone; and Gerald of Aurillac, lauded in the tenth century by his friend Odo, the abbot of Cluny. These men and other warrior-saints were praised by monks and presented to lay society as possible exemplars of sanctity, whether they had ever converted from the secular world or not. The authors of the various articles are less interested in whether the Lives of these saints were historically accurate - a sterile question, because they were never intended to be - but rather in the ideology

proposed in the Lives and the social function they served when monks presented them to their secular neighbours. As such, these Lives were part of the genre of ‘Mirrors for princes’ developed for the first time in the ninth century, as discussed by Alain Dubreucq and Raffaele Savigni in the two opening articles. This is a rich collection, of value to both social historians and historians of hagiography. Of especial interest is the article by Dominique Iogna-Pratt on the various ways in which modern scholars have used Gerald of Aurillac - without however reexamining whether the usually-cited printed text of his Life actually is the tenth-century composition of the abbot of Cluny - and that by Michel Lauwers on the eleventhcentury Count Burchard the Venerable of Vendôme. My only quibble with this excellent volume is the sparcity of references to the anglophone scholars who have been studying for some twenty years the relationships between the medieval aristocracy and the holy.

University of Akron
Constance B. Bouchard

The legend of Basil the Bulgar-slayer. By Paul Stephenson. Pp. xvii + 164 incl. 3 maps and 15 figs +7 colour plates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. (C30. o 521 8I530 4
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This study of Basil II (976-1025) stands comparison with Donald Nicol’s The immortal emperor, which was devoted to the last Byzantine emperor Constantine xi Palaiologos (1449-53). It is well written and has that strong sense of Byzantium’s place in the hellenic tradition. Both books deal with the life and legend of a Byzantine emperor. Stephenson admits that the legend of the last Byzantine emperor was more enduring than that of Basil II. Certainly, Basil II never spawned anything like the Palaiologan court maintained until quite recently on the Isle of Wight. This cannot obscure the fact that the life and reign of Constantine xi pale beside those of Basil II. The thrust of this examination of Basil II’s legend is that the true nature of his achievements has been distorted by over-attention to his Bulgar-slaying activities, which have been much exaggerated. An obsession with the Bulgarians seems distinctly un-Byzantine. The emperors of Constantinople preferred to leave the Bulgarians, even if they were Tsar Symeon, to stew in their own juices, while they got on with more important matters. With less weight given to Bulgarian affairs Basil II’s reign now seems to conform to a more traditional pattern. The key event, as Michael Psellos saw, was his victory in 989 over the great military families of Phokas and Skleros. Thenceforth Basil II ruled unchallenged. The famous frontispiece of Basil II’s psalter is as likely as not to be a celebration of this victory; not, as normally supposed, of his triumph over the Bulgarians. Stephenson’s skilful dissection of triumphal conventions demonstrates that the frontispiece can have nothing to do with the victory over the Bulgarians. If the treatment here of Basil II’s achievements is largely negative, it does open up the way for a proper assessment of a reign which has been strangely neglected since 1900 when Gustave Schlumberger completed his Épopée byzantine. The positive side of the book is historiographical as it follows the emperor’s treatment by historians, medieval and modern. There are valuable insights into later Byzantine history. It was not until the end of the twelfth century that Basil II materialised as the Bulgar-slayer at a time when the Bulgarian peoples were again a

threat to Byzantium. In I260, while surveying the defences of Latin Constantinople, Michael viII Palaiologos had the Bulgar-slayer’s corpse disinterred and laid in state beside the imperial tent, which suggests that by the end of the period of exile he had become a symbol of the regeneration of Byzantium. A detail of this incident caught the imagination of the poet Kostis Palamas (1859-1943): the corpse was found with a shepherd’s pipe between the lips. This inspired his poem The king’s flute, which on the eve of the Balkan Wars assimilated Basil II to the needs of romantic Hellenism. Not the least of the pleasures of this book is the way Stephenson uses the successive reincarnations of his emperor to plot the passage from Byzantium to modern Greece.

University of Edinburgh
Michael Angold

Eremites de France et d’Italie (XIe-XVe siècle). Edited by André Vauchez. (Collection de l’École française de Rome, 313.) Pp. ix +522 incl. 6 figs +5 plates. Rome: École française de Rome, 2003. €53 (paper). 272830659 I
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904382187
A survey of this ambition has not been attempted in nearly forty years. Although local investigations into medieval solitary lives have flourished since the landmark L’Eremitismo in occidente nei secoli XI e XII (Milan 1965), combinative and comparative studies have remained few. This volume consists of André Vauchez’s brief introduction and twenty-two essays (twelve in French and ten in Italian) by a range of contributors, including a number of the leading authorities in the field. They are Anne-Marie Helvétius, Jean-Marie Sansterre, Cécile Caby, Jean-Hervé Foulon, Mathieu Arnoux, Hervé Oudart, Paulette L’Hermite-Leclercq, Jean-Marie Martin, Francesco Panarelli, Benedetto Vetere, Anna Benvenuti, Antonella Ghignoli, Italo Moretti, Odile Redon, Pietro Clemente, Mario Sensi, Vauchez himself, Marina Miladinov, Catherine Santschi, Isabella Gagliardi, Sylvie Allemand and Sofia Boesch Gajano. The book’s scope is wider even than its title would suggest. The descriptor ‘hermit’ here encompasses wandering solitaries, enclosed anchorites, hermit-monks and monk-hermits. Although there is inevitably a concentration on the France and northern Italy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries - of such as Romuald and Robert of Arbrissel - the volume’s chronological sweep ranges from the earliest western hermits (fifth century) to the post-medieval period, and the fizzling out of the French reclusories in the eighteenth century, while its geographical range extends to Normandy, Sicily, Switzerland and Hungary. There is even a mention of Godard, the twelfth-century (Norman) hermit of Stratfield Saye (Hampshire). The essays’ chief concern is with the sources for the study of the eremitic life: their survival, location and character, and the methodological and interpretative problems that attend them. (There is - as one might expect given Vauchez’s involvement in the project - a particular sensitivity to the problems and potentialities of hagiographical sources.) As such, they are well suited to the volume’s stated aim of providing the materials and stimulus for further research. As Vauchez reminds us in his introduction, this is a field in which ‘l’essentiel reste à faire’. This collection represents a very significant step forward.

Ælfric’s abbey. Excavations at Eynsham Abbey, Oxfordshire, 1989-92. By Alan Hardy, Anne Dodd and Graham D. Keevill. (Thames Valley Landscapes, i6.) Pp. xxv +636 incl. 180 figs, 7 I plates and 150 tables. Oxford: Oxford Archaeology, 2003. £49.95. 0 947816917
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The small Oxfordshire town of Eynsham grew up in early or middle Anglo-Saxon times, possibly out of a prehistoric predecessor. It became the seat of a well-endowed minster - a sort of team ministry, as we would now say. In 1005 the nobleman Æthelmaer re-founded the minster as a monastery, replacing the secular clergy with Benedictine monks. For a few years it flourished under the great Ælfric as abbot, before falling on evil days. In 1105 King Henry I again re-founded it, and this time it continued as a middle-ranking, though well endowed, Benedictine abbey until Henry viII liquidated it in 1536 .

Building stone must then have been scarce at Eynsham: the buildings stolen from the abbey were demolished and recycled until by the eighteenth century not one stone remained upon another, even below ground. The town already had its own parish church very close to the abbey church; of the abbey nothing was visible except the fishponds. So matters remained until 1989, when the medieval town church and the nearby Roman Catholic church both needed bigger graveyards. The resulting rescue excavation of part of the abbey site is written up in this book.

This was not an easy excavation; the robbing of the walls had left the archaeology preserved mainly in the floors and rubbish pits. Every page bears witness to the painstaking detail with which Oxford Archaeology and their many specialists investigated and recorded it. Anyone interested in how Anglo-Saxons constructed the wattle infill of timber-framed buildings, or a dozen patterns of ridge-tile from medieval roofs, or the sophisticated metallurgy of a medieval pocket-knife, or how monks got inside their oysters, should look here. Evidence is also drawn from surviving fragments of the monks’ own archives and from similar houses elsewhere.

What do we learn about the monks? Of their strictly spiritual life, almost nothing. The abbey church still awaits excavation: all that remains of it are fragments of stained glass, including a fine Crucifixion, found dumped in a common cesspit. Some people still remembered the abbey as a sacred site nearly a century after the Dissolution, for three recusant Roman Catholics were secretly buried in the refectory.

Of the monks’ everyday activities and lifestyle, their rubbish, especially kitchen rubbish, speaks eloquently. Meticulous archaeological study reveals their vast and varied fish diet, comprising at least thirty species. From the eleventh century onwards most of the fish came from the distant sea. Like English people down to my own childhood, the monks ate huge quantities of red herrings and lesser numbers of cod and whiting. From Anglo-Saxon times onwards immense quantities of oysters were brought from the south coast. Despite the construction of the fishponds, freshwater fish - pike, eels and carp - were in a minority. The people who lived on the site after the Dissolution seem to have eaten more rabbits than herrings.

The original Benedictine Rule forbade monks to eat meat unless they were sick. Down the centuries exceptions were made, for example that meat might be eaten but not inside the refectory. The animal bones show that already in Anglo-Saxon times either the monks were sick most of the time or exceptions had become the rule. Large amounts of meat were eaten, and not only the proletarian mutton (which

might have been the diet of lay servants, as it was later to be of this reviewer’s poorly-endowed Cambridge college) but pork and beef too. At first much of the beef came from superannuated cows or retired plough-oxen, but from the thirteenth century beeves kept only for meat appear.

As in Cambridge colleges, a surprising variety of beasts and birds mounted the table at feasts. These included the expected hare, rabbit, goose and swan (though not pheasant, nor turkey, which had not been discovered). There were also at least seventeen wild birds - not only ducks and heron (eating which must surely have been a penance) but occasional hapless godwits, cranes and even the fabulous spoonbill. Red and roe deer turn up at all periods; fallow deer after their introduction to England c. iıoo. The obvious source of deer would have been Wychwood Forest a few miles away, of which the abbey owned a sector, which would have given opportunities for snaring deer or acquiring them in some more official way. (According to my files the king seems to have consumed no deer out of Wychwood but fallow: maybe he did not mind the monks helping themselves to red and roe?) The occurrence of roe deer, at all periods from Anglo-Saxon to Tudor, is a notable addition to what is known of this poorly-recorded and apparently rare animal.

The excavation covered less than one-quarter of the abbey site, but a significant quarter from the point of view of the monks’ temporal lives, between the cloister, kitchen and latrine. They and their servants comprised a well-to-do and wellorganised community, carrying on tasks and crafts which included alchemy, brewing, gardening and milling (with lava quernstones brought from German volcanoes). It is satisfying to find such a thorough and completely published excavation of a complex many-period site.

Corpus Christi College, Oliver Rackham
CAMPridgE

Theology, rhetoric and politics in the eucharistic controversy, 1078-1079. Alberic of Monte Cassino against Berengar of Tours. By Charles M. Radding and Francis Newton. Pp. xii +197 incl. frontispiece and 3 figs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 49.5049.50\49.50 49.50 (cloth), 18.5018.50\18.50 18.50 (paper). 0231 I2684 0; 0231 I2685 9
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Most historians trace the early discussions of the eucharist in medieval Europe to the episcopal school at Tours, to Berengar (c. 999-1088), its leading biblical exegete. This student of the great Fulbert of Chartres (d. I028) became known in the Io4os for his position on the eucharist (his earliest surviving work on the subject is from IO50, a letter to Ascelin the Breton). Berengar insisted that the substance of the bread and wine remained unaltered after the consecration. He developed Augustine’s definition of a sacrament as sacrum signum, and demanded that the physicality of the signum be respected. His position led to condemnation at councils of Rome, Vercelli and Tours in the Io5os. Under Pope Gregory viI he was forced to accept a Roman formula, in 1078 and in 1079, one which insisted on the transformation of the bread and wine into flesh and blood. This was a distressing concession; it also marked the end of Berengar’s public teaching. Berengar was distinguished not only by the complexity of his thought, but by the quality of polemic which his ideas attracted; it inspired in Lanfranc some of his most interesting writings. The Berengarian debate

fructified discussion of language, grammar, sacramental theology and biblical exegesis a century before the full impact of Aristoteleian categories was felt in the schools. Among his opponents, Berengar named Alberic of Monte Cassino ‘not a monk but a demoniac’, whose text has not been known. Charles Radding and Francis Newton argue that a text which survives in manuscript at Aberdeen University Library is Alberic’s text. They offer a new edition and translation with copious contextual information. Their powerful case is made through stylistic, historical and intellectual arguments. This handsome volume will help to make an immensely important moment in European culture accessible and comprehensible, for students and scholars alike.

Queen Mary,
Miri Rubin
University of London

The book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales. By John Reuben Davies. (Studies in Celtic History.) Pp. xii +244. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003. £50. I 843830248843830248 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S00220469044I2I84
This well-written and expertly produced book is an important contribution to the ongoing analysis of the formation of Welsh bishoprics under the dual reforming influence of Norman ecclesiastics and their ideas for church-rejuvenation and the adoption, and adaption, of such powerful and seductive programmes by native Welsh church elites. Llandaf is particularly well suited to such an examination due, in part, to the survival of the Liber landauensis/Book of Llandaf, a fundamental source of fiendish complexity, whose ultimate purpose was, up to now, unclear. This is the textual production that Davies examines within his work: he provides a convincing argument for the genesis of the text, and of its importance within contemporary Anglo-Norman settings. The general argument is that the Liber landauensis was a product of the episcopate of Urban (IIO7-34), the first bishop to use the place-name Llandaf as the title of his diocese: bishop and clerical elite launched an ambitious project to link early twelfth-century reality with a past that was made glorious by the dynamic careers of Welsh holy-men, and the many, widely spread, religious communities they founded. In many instances this was a mythic past, but one whose stories resonated in the imaginations of Urban and his clerical family. Indeed, the linkage of the past with the present was of the greatest importance for the emerging diocese of Urban’s ambitions. Past religiosity was the key to twelfth-century success: if Urban could prove, to his own, if not others’ satisfaction, that his bishopric was directly descended from the religious networks of his mighty, miracle-working, predecessors, Llandaf’s ecclesiastical power would then be augmented and protected from the rival claims of St Davids, under the guiding hand of the agile Bernard, and the bishopric of Hereford, which had always prided itself as being one of the bastions against Welsh political and ecclesiastical claims. Davies’s book is divided into two sections: the first examines the legacy of the pre-Norman ecclesiastical network; the Norman conquest of south-east Wales; and Urban’s intensive campaign within royal, and especially papal circles - and in so doing produces a comprehensive study of the ecclesiastical situation (and stories) that directed the ambitions of Urban, and his subsequent episcopal career, and hence the context and the motivation for the

production of Liber landauensis. The second section is an exhaustive and impressive piece of textual deduction, which aims to study the complete text of the Liber landauensis, and the methods that were employed to utilise the past to first create a diocese, and then to project that organisation forward into a confident and secure future.

BANGOR UNIVERSITY
M.J. PEARSON

Women and the Church in medieval Ireland, c. II40-I540. By Dianne Hall. Pp. 252 incl. 7 tables, 2 graphs and 16 figs + errata. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. €37.50 (£27.50). I 851826564
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904422180
This is a major piece of research, originating as a PhD thesis, but recast into more readable form, while retaining its abundant footnotes (conveniently placed at the bottom of each page). Sources for medieval nunneries and the pious practices of laywomen are extraordinarily sparse in Ireland, and the author had to comb through a very wide variety of administrative records and literary texts, including bardic poetry, to glean, in her own words, ‘small references to lay and religious women, some so slight that they had been overlooked previously’. Her achievement has then been two-fold: first, she has very thoroughly recorded her findings. All medieval Irish nunneries with their affiliations, dates of foundation and dissolution are listed in appendix I, while every named nun that she met with in her researches is listed and referenced in appendix 2, allowing one to perceive the switch from Gaelic office-holders to Anglo-Irish ones or vice-versa in the case of individual foundations. Second, she has used her extensive background reading of similar studies in England and on the continent to give a context and pattern against which the discontinuous scraps of Irish information can be compared, revealing very similar pious practices and concerns to those found elsewhere in medieval Europe, with some contrasts, relating, for example, to the marriage customs and property rights of women in the Gaelic Irish communities. There are eight chapters altogether, the first six covering general topics: ‘Lay women’s piety’; ‘Women’s patronage of religious institutions’; ‘Foundation of nunneries in medieval Ireland’; ‘Convent buildings and estates’; ‘Income, management and conflict’; and ‘The permeable cloister’, this last dealing with the relations between nunneries and the surrounding lay community. This point is driven home in the seventh chapter, ‘Elicia Butler and Kilculliheen’, dealing with the exceptionally well-documented career of a scandalous aristocratic abbess of the early sixteenth century. The eighth and last chapter, ‘The end of the medieval period’, deals with the Henrician dissolution of the Irish convents. In an effort to marshal the disjointed fragments of information available about Irish nunneries as a whole into recognisable patterns, the author has made use of a number of tables and graphs, some more enlightening than others. Of particular value was table 3 on p. 98, giving area measurements of surviving convent ruins which were then compared to the size and scale of monastic buildings for monks within Ireland, and nunneries in England and Wales. In places the author’s efforts to solve the enigmas left by a severe shortage of records are over-elaborate, but she is never betrayed into false certainty, and the amount of information retrieved is astonishing, given the

almost complete absence of medieval Irish manorial or parish records such as are used to trace the history of women and religion elsewhere.

Trinity College, Katharine Simms Dublin

Leper knights. The order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem in England, II50-I544. By David Marcombe. (Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 20.) Pp. xx +322 incl. 9 plans, 7 maps, 8 tables and 40 plates. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003. £45. o 851158935
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904432187
William Frankis, described as ‘formerly a fellow’ of Burton Lazars, died at Melton Mowbray in 1555. Burton Lazars, the chief house of the Order of St Lazarus, had been suppressed eleven years before, and William had been surviving on a pension. His world was very different from that in which the order had been founded, when Roger of Mowbray had established a house for lepers at Burton in c. 1157. Roger was an ardent crusader, who was captured at the battle of Hattin in 1187 and died in the Holy Land the following year. William Frankis had no role in the confrontation with the Ottomans and, indeed, it is improbable that he had ever seen a Turk. This book traces the history of the order in England over the four centuries, showing that, while striving to maintain its public image as a charitable crusading order, its nature and functions changed so profoundly that they would hardly have been recognised by the twelfth-century donors. St Lazarus was originally a hospitaller order, established in the crusader states as a refuge for leper knights. It had developed military functions by the I220s and, it is suggested here, performed a role not dissimilar to that of a relic, paraded before armies accustomed to regarding their fate as dependent upon divine will. Such an order needed to create a solid economic base and, in England, Burton Lazars was the ‘jewel in the Lazarite crown’, making substantial contributions to its frontline work for over a century and a half. Thus, whatever the public liked to imagine, its English estates were not primarily concerned with the care of lepers, but were there to service the order in the east. This role could be justified until the fall of the crusader states in 1291, but became much more questionable afterwards, especially once it became clear that there would no swift reconquest of Palestine. In England the order survived by playing on its charitable image while simultaneously marginalising its practical application, a policy which enabled it to survive the crises of the fourteenth century, and in the I400s to accommodate existing religious sensibilities through the formation of confraternities, the offering of masses for the dead and the building of an impressive collegiate church. What changed all this was the new climate created by the dissolution of the monasteries, when it was not difficult to justify an attack upon such an apparently anachronistic institution. David Marcombe’s book is a very thorough investigation of this process, making extensive use of both archival and printed sources and, with the help of the Burton Lazars Research Group, attempting to reconstruct the nature of these houses through archaeological research. The Lazarites may not have been as inventive as, for example, the Carmelites, but they are, nevertheless, another striking illustration of the way late medieval orders constructed images of themselves

which bore little relation to either their own histories or their contemporary functions.

University of Reading
Malcolm Barber

The Holy Grail. Imagination and belief. By Richard Barber. Pp. xv +464 incl. 23 ills +8 colour plates. London: Allen Lane, 2004. £25. 0 7I3 992069
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904442183
For more than forty years, Richard Barber has been one of the most respected authors on medieval culture to operate outside the academic system, and his latest book should consolidate his reputation. It is a massive work, the actual number of pages concealing a word-count much amplified by small print, and tackles its subject in three stages. The first considers the ‘original’ body of romances that deal with the subject of the Grail. The second puts them in their contemporary cultural context. The third leads the reader through the ways in which the Grail has been exploited, analysed and explained as a motif by subsequent authors of romances, novels, plays, literary studies and works of history and mythology, and also by artists and filmmakers. Barber seems to be equally at home in French, German, British and American culture, and the result consists in many respects of hundreds of book reports and reviews, laid end to end: probably a comprehensive coverage of the subject and, if not exhaustive, at times exhausting. None the less, if the argument of the book is often in danger of becoming buried in its data, it is strongly and sensibly made. It conceives of the Grail as simply a literary motif, which achieved instant celebrity because of an accident: that it featured in the unfinished final romance of one of the most admired and influential composers of medieval romance, Chrétien de Troyes. This automatically challenged other artists to complete and explain his tale, and about half a dozen of them did within half a century. In the process they produced some of the classics of medieval literature, which were distinctive in their (usually) effective blend of the ethics and tropes of knightly adventure with an orthodox Christian piety focused on the cults of relics, the Passion and the eucharist. The motif of the Grail managed economically to combine all three of the latter within the framework of courtly violence valued by the contemporary warrior elite. After its boom period ended in the mid-thirteenth century, it continued to inspire a trickle of further compositions and revisions before the medieval romantic tradition hit the twin rocks of Renaissance and Reformation. After that silence fell for about three hundred years, until Romanticism brought about a slow revival of interest in the subject. It is one of the chief strengths of the book that it follows this revival in detail, luxuriating in the irony that a motif linked directly to orthodox Latin Christianity became appropriated by writers determined to root it in paganism, heresy and a range of esoteric teachings; a process that is still accelerating. The book concludes with a very clever, and unexpected, twist of scholarship.

La disputatio dans les facultés des arts au moyen âge. By Olga Weijers. (Studia Artistarum. Etudes sur la Faculté des arts dans les Universités médiévales, io.) Pp. 383. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. €65 (paper). 2503513565
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So02204690445218X
This work continues a study of disputed questions in the arts faculties of medieval universities that began with Weijers’s La ‘disputatio’ à la Faculté des arts de Paris (I200-I350 environ): esquisse d’une typologie (Turnhout 1995). Together these books bring to light an important dimension of medieval scholastic activity far less known than the literature of the theological faculties. The present volume differs in several respects from the earlier, which was limited to Paris in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This second volume has a wider geographical and chronological range. It covers the genre and examples of disputed questions at Paris through the remainder of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well as those at a select number of European universities from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries: Oxford, Cambridge, Toulouse, Montpellier, Avignon, Perpignan, Bologna, Padua, Florence, Prague, Vienna and Erfurt. For Paris the author abandons the arbitrary date of 1350 used as the end point for the first volume and chooses instead cc. 1320, which she feels marks a turning point in the history of this genre. She also has changed the structure of her analysis. While retaining the twofold consideration of statutes and texts, Weijers abandons both the separate consideration of the ‘lectio’ and its relation to ‘questiones’ and the separate discussions of ‘disputatio’ in the various disciplines of grammar, dialectic and natural philosophy, since differences in the form and method of disputation in these disciplines were negligible. Apart from the continuation of developments at Paris, the present volume is divided into regions: England, southern France, Italy and central Europe, and within each of those the type and context of disputed questions receives consideration: the ‘disputatio’ in commentaries, independent questions, disputations de quolibet, sophismata, obligationes, insolubilia and particular exercises and examinations. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography of primary sources and secondary literature, as well as an appendix containing the statutes governing disputations at Bologna, Florence and Padua. There is also an index of medieval authors and their works, along with an index of manuscripts. It is hoped that parallel developments in Spain, Scotland, Scandinavia, Belgium, the Rhine valley and the Low Countries will eventually be investigated, especially those at Cologne and Louvain.

University of Wisconsin
William J. Courtenay

Women of the humiliati. A lay religious order in medieval civic life. By Sally Mayall Brasher. (Medieval History and Culture, 19.) Pp. xvii + I46. New York-London: Routledge, 2003. £45. 0415966345
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904462186
The central thesis of this short book is that in the north Italian order of the humiliati the women outnumbered the men. Jacques de Vitry, writing from personal experience of the recently approved order gleaned during a visit to Milan in 1216, identified ‘religious women’ amongst the humiliati resisting heresy in the city. He suggested that the order already had some 150 double houses in the diocese of Milan,

without counting the tertiaries. Later he recalled the enthusiastic conversion of ‘matrons and virgins’ alongside nobles and powerful citizens after humiliati preaching in city squares and secular churches. Half a century on, Humbert of Romans wrote a model sermon for the women of the order in which he catalogued their virtues contrasted to women of more dubious religion. They were enclosed, lived together in ‘fraternal love’ for one another and their brothers, were subject to the [male] provosts of the order, worked assiduously and accepted all sorts of women (‘omne genus mulierum’), while observing lay practices concerning the office and prayers, a sign of greater humility. Neither Jacques nor Humbert was concerned with relative numbers, although both writers were very interested in relations between the two sexes in the houses of the order. The contrast with Brasher’s approach is of course vast. Her main conclusions are based on a statistical analysis of surviving catalogues of houses (I298, I344) and a survey of the fragmentary notarial records. She confirms Humbert’s view that the humiliati included women of all kinds, though by this she intends women of all social means, whereas he meant not just virgins. Her account also echoes Humbert’s belief that the women worked hard, but where Humbert saw these women as proof that subjection to male supervision was to be preferred (‘constat autem quod melius est regi a viris’), Brasher looks for evidence of the women’s autonomy. She is hard put to add to the sources identified by earlier historians and, as always with the humiliati, most of what she cites is late, vitiating any conclusions about the movement before the second half of the thirteenth century. The volume includes an unfortunate number of errors, typographical and other (there was, for example, no house simply called ‘Cristoforo’, p. 3I), but it demonstrates that the participation of women in the order is a topic deserving of attention. Perhaps this would have pleased both Jacques and Humbert.

University of St Andrews
Frances Andrews

Die Chronik des Saba Malaspina. Edited by Walter Koller and August Nitschke. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores, 35.) Pp. x +430. Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1999. DM I40. 377525435 8; 03432157
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So022046904472182
Saba Malaspina described the subject of his chronicle as the res gesta of the kings of Sicily from the birth of Manfred (1232), the kingdom’s last Hohenstaufen ruler, to the death of Charles I (1285), its first Angevin king, though Saba largely concentrates on events after the death of Manfred’s father Frederick II (1250). Saba wrote his account between 1283 and 29 March 1285, following the Sicilian Vespers, and the last four of its ten books concern this revolt against Angevin rule and the subsequent Aragonese invasion of Sicily. Saba was dean of Mileto, a Calabrian town near the Angevin frontline against the Aragonese, and he appears to have witnessed some of the events he describes. He wrote his chronicle, however, at the papal curia, where he was a scriptor, though apparently he had no access to the papal registers. His immediate audience was curial officials and proctors, though he also saw himself as writing for posterity. Understandably his stance is pro-papal but not uncritically so; he praised Gregory x and Nicholas III but regarded Martin IV as too pro-French. The central figures in his account are not, however, popes but kings: Manfred and Charles.

Manfred is the villain of the piece and Charles the hero, at least in books II-IV where as athleta ecclesiae he defeats the Church’s enemies, Manfred and Conradin, the last of Frederick II’s male heirs. Both Manfred and Charles are, however, shown to bring ill fortune on themselves because of their defects of character, notably ‘cupido regni’. Saba admittedly regards Charles’s authority as legitimate and the Aragonese invasion as ‘usurpation’ but blames the ‘Vespers’ on Angevin tyranny. Saba sympathised with the resentment of his fellow Italian subjects towards the new French ruling class, and he is critical of the heavy taxation and abuses of the Angevin administration, much of which he must have observed at first hand. He thus perceives the ‘Vespers’ as a divine judgement on Charles’s moral failings as king. For Saba Charles’s fate also illustrated the mutability of human fortune and transitory nature of earthly power, and indeed his and Manfred’s reigns are both depicted in terms of rise and fall. Clearly the chronicle is no eulogy of its subjects, but it has an epic quality. It borrows heavily from Virgil’s Aeneid, particularly in its stylised descriptions of warfare, and is regularly punctuated by passages of direct speech, especially addresses before battle. Despite such literary embellishments, it is an excellent insider’s view on events in the regno, especially the ‘Vespers’, though Saba is less well informed about matters beyond its borders. Koller and Nitschke are to be commended for bringing a long planned critical edition of this important source to fruition. Otto Cartellieri had first proposed to edit it for the MGH in 1896 and Nitschke began this ‘new’ edition, completed by Koller, in 1953. The text is accompanied by an informative introduction, exhaustive notes and indices of names and of citations from papal and royal letters, the Bible and other literature.
Robinson College, Peter D. Clarke
CAMPridGe

Lucae Tudensis Chronicon mundi. Edited by Emma Falque. (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis, 74.) Pp. clxviii + 4I4. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. €240. 25030374 I 0; 2503030009
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904482189
During the last ten years of his life the author of the Chronicon mundi ( †1249\dagger_{1249} ) was bishop of Tuy, the Spanish city that looks across the River Miño to Portugal, and accordingly he is remembered as Lucas Tudensis, or in Spanish circles as ‘el Tudense’. However, as is also so in the case of Rodericus Toletanus ( †1247\dagger_{1247} ), ‘el Toledano’ - the Navarrese archbishop of Toledo, his co-episcopal historian and close contemporary (though probably his not so close episcopal colleague) - the geographical identification is misleading. For, whether or not, as Peter Linehan has suggested, he was born outside the Iberian peninsula, what is indisputable is that it was not to Tuy that D. Lucas was principally attached, but to León. It was in León that he wrote most of his works, in the capital of a kingdom which eight centuries on has still to resign itself to its annexation by Castile in 1230.

The main interest of the Chronicon mundi is the Leonese perspective it provides on what purports to be a ‘History of the World since the Creation’. Such a view is already latent in the first two of its four books and provides the agenda for the third, the main narrative source of which is a spurious seventh-century chronicle attributed

to S. Ildefonso, archbishop of Toledo ( †667\dagger 667 ), a farrago of nonsense calculated to undermine Toledo’s claims and to benefit its rivals, Seville and Seville’s surrogate, León. The fourth book - the ‘compilator’s masterpiece’, in Falque’s estimation - is equally skewed, using epic poems and (in this case authentic) Leonese chronicles, and its thrust is differently directed, significantly so indeed, from that of the two contemporary Castilian chronicles, those of ‘el Toledano’ and Juan de Soria, bishop of Osma.

Until recently we have lacked for critical editions of these three competing episcopal chronicles. Now Falque’s Lucas brings to a triumphant conclusion a CCCM project initiated in 1987. Because they cover the same terrain, continuing their story down to the year 1236, in their final sections in particular these chronicles offer contrasting and sometimes contradictory vistas of an historiographical oil-field the possible riches of which Peter Linehan, G. Martin and I. Fernández-Ordóñez have all recently remarked upon. In the case of Lucas of Tuy, however, scholarly speculation has hitherto been hampered by the inadequacy, not to say the rarity, of Mariana’s 1608 editio princeps with its humanistic upgrading of the author’s rustic Latin. Serviceable though it has proved for antiquarian seekers after facts, for students of thirteenth-century history and philology, Mariana’s text has proved wholly inadequate. Falque’s faithful, neo-Lachmannian edition provides those students with what they have long been waiting for.

The editor is a skilful guide across difficult terrain, conducting her readers with enviable assurance through tangled clumps of textual thickets. In a richly detailed introduction she describes the historical context to which her text belongs and provides an authoritative overview of its four books. Her account of the nuts and bolts discernible in the textual history of its nineteen extant manuscripts is judicious throughout. While noting that it was only with Mariana that the four-book division of the work was established, she argues for the retention of the arrangement because it reflects the Chronicon’s main fault lines. She also provides a new and more practical division of chapters, an arrangement which proves especially helpful in the case of book iv. Emma Falque has provided a model edition of a long and difficult text, supported by a critical apparatus which systematically offers the variants in the five main manuscripts while engaging with the other fourteen as well as with Mariana’s text whenever such engagement appears warranted. This is a landmark in the history of scholarship on the historiography of medieval Spain. Barring the unlikely event of the discovery of D. Lucas’s holograph, it will remain the last word on the subject.

Carleton University,
Francisco J. Fernández
Ottawa

The medieval English cathedral. Papers in honour of Pamela Tudor-Craig. Edited by Janet Backhouse. (Harlaxton Medieval Studies, io.) Pp. xvi +239 incl. frontispiece + 2 figs and 73 plates. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003. ¿40. I 900289555 7 7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904492185
The successful publication of conference and Festschrift papers in today’s scholarly climate cannot be taken for granted. For these, as for a monograph, there must be a stated theme which unifies the contents. This collection of fifteen papers, delivered at

the Harlaxton Symposium of 1998, is a tribute to Pamela Tudor-Craig, Lady Wedgwood, who was herself the initiator of this highly esteemed annual gathering of scholars now in its twenty-first year. Three of the six sections that make up the volume are concerned with the administration, art and architecture, and the liturgy of medieval cathedrals in which Canterbury, Durham and Salisbury have a prominent place, and also Peterborough Abbey on the strength of its elevation to cathedral status in 154I. Of the remaining three sections one is devoted to old St Paul’s in London, another to diocesan coats-of-arms and episcopal rings (with the apt title ‘symbols of identity’) with the third consisting of two essays under the uncertain heading ‘antiquarian studies’. These final contributions, however, include a skilful attempt at scholarly detection by George Henderson to trace the origin of the wooden panel in Ely cathedral known as the Tabula eliensis, and a history and assessment of the cathedral monograph by Eric Fernie, a fitting summing-up and critique to conclude the volume. The other contributors, who are also widely respected scholars, are Caroline Baron, Paul Binski, John Cherry, Barrie Dobson, Peter Draper, Eamon Duffy, Richard Foster, P. D. A. Harvey, Nigel Morgan, Nicholas Rogers, Lucy Freeman Sadler, Daniel Williams and the editor herself. The seventythree plates are black-and-white photographs, most of them well-produced, and plans of five of the cathedrals treated in the text. A list of the publications of Pamela Tudor-Craig and a select bibliography are useful additions to this book in which a wide diversity of subject matter admirably achieves the essential unity of theme.

Robinson College,
Joan Greatrex
CAMPRIDGE

Francs et orientaux dans le monde des croisades. By Jean Richard. (Collected Studies, 770.) Pp. xii +354. Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2003. £59.50. о 860789179 FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So02204690450218X
This, the fifth collection of Jean Richard’s articles under the Variorum imprint, contains twenty-six papers published between 1992 and 1999. In them he considers aspects of the crusades themselves, the institutional and ecclesiastical history of the Latin east and relations with the Mongols. Professor Richard is the doyen of crusade historians. His continuing rate of publication would be commendable in a young historian, but he is now over eighty years old and the crusades have always been only one of his interests. He is also a distinguished historian of Burgundy and has written the best study of the papacy and medieval missions. His first major work on the Levant, a history of the county of Tripoli in the twelfth century, was published nearly sixty years ago. In the 1950s he and Joshua Prawer revolutionised the history of the Latin east and there can be no doubt that Jean Richard has been in the end the more influential of the two. His history of the kingdom of Jerusalem, published as long ago as 1953, marked the point at which the existing interpretations of its constitutional history were overturned and a more penetrating, questioning sourcebased study of its institutions was introduced. In this respect Jean Richard, who has also transformed the history of late medieval Cyprus, is a thoroughly modern historian. When young, however, he came under the influence of the great René Grousset and he is the last living representative of that line of superb French historians which originated in the work of Joseph François Michaud in the early

nineteenth century. These scholars, most of whom were devout Catholics, treated crusading as an ideological force, and they believed that they could see in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the emergence in the eastern Mediterranean settlements of a ‘Franco-Syrian society’, in which a genuine synthesis of European and oriental cultures was taking place. Although this feature of their approach was violently attacked in the 1950s by R. C. Smail in Cambridge and Joshua Prawer in Jerusalem, it has been revived in recent research. Jean Richard is in many ways the most sensitive of this distinguished line of scholars and his writing is the most nuanced. It is indicative of the subtlety of his mind that faced with the advance among his younger contemporaries of the ‘pluralist’ definition of crusading, which gives equal treatment to other theatres-of-war than the east and to other enemies than Moslems, he did not dismiss it out of hand, but concentrated on what he perceived to be the specific and individual features of crusades to the east within a pluralistic framework. The result was by far the most convincing defence of the traditional position.

Emmanuel College,
Jonathan Riley-Smith
CAMPRIDGE

Byzantium. Faith and power (I26I-I557). Edited by Helen C. Evans. Pp. xxii +658 incl. frontispiece, map, I50 black-and-white and 450 colour plates. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2004. £50. I 58839 II3 2; I 58839 II4 0; о 300 10278 X
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904512186
This magnificent book accompanies the last of three important exhibitions on Byzantine art held at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, between 1978 and 2004, and covers the last period of Byzantium, from the Palaeologan recovery of Constantinople in I26I until Hieronymus Wolf first coined the term ‘Byzantium’ in 1557. Both the exhibition and the publication are major achievements and the latter constitutes a work of reference which will be consulted for many years. It is divided into an introduction by the editor and sixteen contributions by leading scholars in different fields, each followed by entries on individual objects, and with many illustrations, mostly in colour. The richness of late Byzantine cultural production is almost overwhelming, and unlike the exhibition the book is able to include a chapter on the important architectural heritage of the period. Particularly striking is the inclusion of some forty manuscript illustrations and icons from St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai. The inevitable term ‘decline’ is not absent from some of the discussions, and a ‘Byzantine Renaissance’ is denied by at least one, but the influence of Byzantium after I453 in the Islamic world, the Middle East and the west is memorably treated. Even more striking, and very well illustrated here, is the extent to which these late Byzantines already inhabited a changed world and were themselves part of a cosmopolitan culture permeable to both the west and the east. As this book shows, their artistic response showed an energy and creativeness for which they are not often given credit.

Keble College,
Averil Cameron
OXFORD

Clergy in London in the Middle Ages. A register of clergy ordained in the diocese of London based on episcopal ordination lists, 136I-I539. By Virginia Davis. Pp. x +76 incl. 5 figs, 12 tables + CD-ROM. London: Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, 2000. £14.95 (paper). I 8713348595
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904522182
This publication is not what it seems to be at first sight. Hidden in the slim volume is a massive source edition, an extensive research resource for everyone interested in the late medieval English Church in the form of cc. thirty thousand names, made available on a CD-ROM. The introduction to the material, structured into two sections, deals with the legal and practical context of ordinations and provides statistical information on the number of ordination ceremonies in the diocese, the geographical origins of Englishmen as well as aliens, their numbers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, their education as well as important background information on religious houses in the area. Some observations, for example the reduced number of ordinations to the priesthood in the fifteenth century, attributed to a possible decline in the birth-rate and a general ‘lack of enthusiasm’ (p. 23) could perhaps be due to other factors, like changes in the pattern of mortality, but this must remain a subject of future detailed investigation. The basis for such research could hardly have been laid in a better way. This is not the place to enter into a discussion about the respective advantages and problems of traditional editions and the opportunities provided by new information technology; however, it is important to note that the databases - one for the secular clergy and one for members of religious orders - are easy to use and the material can be copied easily. The editorial principles as well as clear instructions for the use of the CD can be found in the second part of the introduction (basic information on pp. 52-9). This edition is the impressive result of what must have been a long and complicated, perhaps pioneering, project.

University of Birmingham
JENS RÖHRKASTEN

Angels and earthly creatures. Preaching, performance, and gender in the later Middle Ages. By Claire M. Waters. Pp. xi +282. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 5555\55 55 ( £38.50£ 38.50 ). o 812237536
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904532189
This book aims to develop a synthesis between two usually distinct strands of medieval ideas: those about preaching, and those about gender (or rather, women). In particular, it seeks to consider how ecclesiastical culture worked against female participation in preaching while concurrently allowing a female role to creep in through the cracks in the theoretical edifice. As might be expected from a book in this series, it is a serious analysis: the endnotes take up half as much space again as the main text; the bibliography is solid. However, the overall treatment often seems vague and at times lacking in depth. The seven chapters tackle their own separate themes, seeking to establish the feminine or feminised attitudes which link aspects of preaching to hostility to women, such as the status of the vernacular (chapter iii), or the subtleties and enticements of rhetoric (chapter iv). The coverage is broad: chronologically this ‘late Middle Ages’ seems to begin in the eleventh century, the discussion occasionally travelling back as far as Tertullian; the geographical spread

implicitly extends to the whole of western Europe, but with an intermittent implicit emphasis on England, especially when Chaucer comes on to the scene. The project’s very ambition perhaps ultimately works against it: whatever its promises, and promise, the analysis, while occasionally close, is often suggestive rather than demonstrative. The volume ends with a discussion of preachers and women in relation to estates satire, but there is no formal conclusion - nor any sense of one. The jacket promises a ‘close and insightful reading of a wide variety of texts and figures’, but in fact the discussions often seem cursory: Hildegard of Bingen is limited to four and a half pages; Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena share eight and a half. A mirage of an emerging Chaucerian focus created by attention to the Parson and the Pardoner in chapter ii soon dissolves - as do many of the discussions - against the broader background. This is a pity, because there are important ideas floating around in this book, relevant for studies of preaching and of gender, and indeed of how the two might overlap. Waters has clearly read extensively, and critically; yet several elements of the volume have a preliminary and tentative feel about them, as though the book reflects initial steps towards a larger and more compelling synthesis. It is to be hoped that this book is the launching pad from which the author will go on to develop her ideas in more depth and detail.

University of Birmingham
R. N. Swanson

Art, identity and devotion in fourteenth-century England. Three women and their books of hours. By Kathryn A. Smith. (The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture.) Pp. xix +364 incl. 145 figs, 5 maps and 2 genealogical tables +8 colour plates. London: The British Library/Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. £45 (paper). 0 7I23 4830 I; 0 7I23 48506
7ˇEH\check{7} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904542185
Over recent decades several volumes have appeared dealing in detail with specific manuscripts especially privately-owned psalters and books of hours, and how they individually aid understanding of medieval culture. Kathryn Smith’s book adds to that flow with an analysis of three such texts, all dating from the first half of the fourteenth century. Her discussion marries an art-historical commentary on the manuscripts with another key strand of recent work on book-owners and medieval literate culture by assessing them precisely as books owned (at least initially) by women of gentry or lower aristocratic status. The de Lisle Hours (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, ms G.50) are linked to Margaret de Beauchamp, of the family of the earls of Warwick; the de Bois Hours (Pierpont Morgan Library, ms M.700) are presumed to have been owned by a Hawisia de Bois who is effectively known only from her assumed association with the book; and the Neville of Hornby Hours (BL, ms Egerton 278I) belonged to Isabel de Neville, née de Byron. Of the three, Hawisia de Bois is the most elusive; indeed, her ‘identity’ can really only be created from the internal evidence of her manuscript, as her genealogical ties and personal situation are wholly matters for surmise. After a brief introduction, Smith splits her text into four chapters. Basic contexts are established in the first (‘The books of hours as historical documents’), pinpointing the original owners (as far as possible) and setting out the social background. Chapter ii, ‘Concepts of time’, offers a complex analysis

of the devotional and commemorative purposes of the books, among other things tying their use to the historical memory of early Christianity. The third chapter turns more explicitly to art-historical and spiritual issues, looking at ‘Devotional themes and pictorial and textual strategies’. The last chapter, on the ‘Functions of the book of hours’, allows Smith to develop an argument about the significance of gender, seeing the book of hours as particularly apt for the religious education of women (perhaps in contrast with the psalter, which is regularly portrayed throughout the book as primarily a male text). Four appendices provide fairly detailed descriptions of the manuscripts, and assess the heraldry in the de Bois volume. As might be expected from a volume which appears in the British Library Studies in Medieval Culture series, the book is extensively illustrated, with 145 photographs in black-and-white, and eight colour plates. Some of the analysis will not strike readers as particularly novel; but as a multi-disciplinary cultural enquiry which ranges far beyond the central focus on the three manuscripts, seeing the books against their social context and analysing them as products of their age, it is certainly a volume to be recommended.

University of Birmingham
R. N. Swanson

Quellen zur Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der grossen Konzilien des 15. Jahrhunderts, I: Die Konzilien von Pisa (I409) und Konstanz (I4I4-I4I8). Edited by Jürgen Miethke and Lorenz Weinrich. (Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, 38a.) Pp. x +555. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. €ıı8. 3534 o6876 9; oo67 o650
Quellen zur Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der grossen Konzilien des 15. Jahrhunderts, II: Die Konzilien von Pavia/Siena (I423/24), Basel (I43I-I449) und Ferrara/Florenz (I438-I445). Edited by Jürgen Miethke and Lorenz Weinrich. (Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, 38b.) Pp. 510. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002. €ı32. 3534024362
7EH(56)7 E H(56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So02204690455218i
The disruption in the western Church brought about by the Great Schism led to the intensification of calls for the reform of the Church ‘in head and members’ (that is, for the reform of both the papacy and the local churches). The general councils of the Church of the fifteenth century provided a forum for the expression of such ideas. These volumes, which were made available for review together, publish sources concerning ecclesiastical reform in this period, especially as it manifested itself in the general councils. Each volume begins with a lengthy and judicious introduction by Jürgen Miethke, with extensive references to primary sources and the secondary literature. The editors explain clearly the method of publication and the criteria used in selecting from the mass of material that might have been included. They modestly disclaim any intention of providing critical editions of the texts, but in most cases they have improved on earlier printed editions by collating additional manuscripts. The first volume includes treatises by Matthew of Cracow, Dietrich of Nieheim, Pierre d’Ailly and Job Vener, and reform proposals and enactments associated with the councils of Pisa and Constance. The second volume contains several further treatises but is mainly taken up with reforming decrees and documents from the

Council of Basle. The accuracy of the transcriptions, apart from the occasional misprint, appears to be high. In accordance with the practice of the Freiherr vom Stein-Gedächtnisausgabe, a parallel translation into German (the work of Lorenz Weinrich) is provided. This means that the work will be as welcome to Germanspeaking undergraduates as it will be to specialists in fifteenth-century ecclesiastical and political history.

Cambridge University Library
P. N. R. ZutSHI

A strange tongue. Tradition, language and the appropriation of mystical experience in late fourteenthcentury England and sixteenth-century Spain. By John D. Green. (Studies in Spirituality. Supplement, 9.) Pp. viii +227 incl. frontispiece and 5 ills. Leuven-Paris-Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2002. €30 (paper). 9042912367
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904562188
This discussion of some major Christian spiritual writings has a lively style and presentation. The arrangement of the book tends to be repetitive and at first confusing but in fact it is in two sections, each with an overview of the literary and social background to the texts to be discussed. There is, for instance, a prologue about Chaucer as a background to the English mystics, Julian of Norwich, the author of the Cloud of unknowing and Walter Hilton. A prologue about Cervantes introduces the Spanish writers, Ignatius of Loyola and John of the Cross. There are six illustrations, well-chosen and badly reproduced, a workmanlike bibliography but no index. This book provides a refreshing approach to these important spiritual writings, Perhaps two caveats will help to illuminate the author’s intention. First, the title is taken from Peter Brown’s provocative book on early Christian asceticism, The body and society (1990) where he analyses forms of monastic renunciation, elegantly describing them as expressed ‘in the strange tongue of a long lost Christianity’. Green applies this phrase rather differently, using it to introduce a discussion of the changes in the understanding of the language of prayer in two later periods, the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in very different places from the fourthcentury deserts of Egypt and Syria. Secondly, the phrase ‘discerning of spirits’ is used frequently but not quite in the sense that Evagrius or other fourth-century monastic writers would have used it. The concept of diakresis, discernment, is one of the fundamental themes of the early monastic writings, whether in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or by theological commentators. Here it is used in a narrower sense, not so much about the inner ways of understanding the guidance of God in life but how the writers discussed recognised their experiences in prayer as genuine. It is perhaps unfair to see Green’s use of this term in any other than his own way of using it, that is, as the history of ‘the process of discernment and the evolution of tradition’ (p. 20I). The main theme of the book is to look at some of the well-known and highly influential texts of these two periods, suggesting their social context and literary background, indicating how to understand their essence today, to which end this book makes a notable contribution.

Harris Manchester College,
Benedicta Ward
OXFORD

The Franciscans and art patronage in late medieval Italy. By Louise Bourdua. Pp. xiv +242 incl. 74 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. £50.0521821584£ 50.0521821584 Die Fresken der Oberkirche San Francesco in Assisi. Ikonographie und Theologie. By P. Gerhard Ruf (with Stefan Diller and Ghigo Roli). Pp. 336 incl. 155 colour plates. Regensberg: Schnell & Steiner, 2004. €49.90. 37954 I528 4
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904572184
The first of these books concentrates on three detailed case studies, San Fermo at Verona, San Lorenzo in Vicenza and the Santo at Padua with the aim of understanding the role of the Franciscans in their artistic projects. As such it provides an absorbing examination of three major mendicant churches in the Veneto as well as exploring the overarching theme of the burial church of St Anthony as a comparator to the much more intensively studied church of San Francesco at Assisi. In this it succeeds admirably. San Fermo was a church taken over from the Benedictines, as had been the main Roman church of the order, Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Roman Capitol. It was substantially adapted and received a now badly damaged programme of painting, which reveals the impact of Giotto’s revolutionary cycle at Padua. Examination of it allows the author to mount a circumstantiated and ultimately compelling critique of Dieter Blume’s theory of a centralised artistic programme disseminated by the order itself. Bourdua reveals the local situation to be much less tidy and ultimately more convincing. She makes important observations about the manual work of the friars themselves at her sites, and the stratagems employed to circumvent the prohibition on the handling of money. Local bishops and monastic orders were surprising early supporters of the Minors. At San Lorenzo in Vicenza, an enormous purpose-built brick Franciscan church, appeared a highly unusual sculpted façade programme executed by Andriolo de Santi at the behest of a local notable Pietro da Marano, an interaction between a major lay patron and the Franciscans which makes a striking complement to the situation at San Fermo, where Guglielmo di Castelbarco, is portrayed Cromwell-like warts and all on the choir arch. The comparison drawn with the figure of Enrico Scrovegni at the Arena Chapel is certainly correct, but there are also analogies with the internal façade of the Cappella San Nicola at Assisi. Bourdua makes deft use of the abundant documentation to trace the progress of the commission. Friar Pace da Lugo’s career at San Lorenzo prompts comparison with Filippo da Campello (not Campanello as here) at Assisi. Finally at Padua she shows how the early church was subsequently modified by the addition of important private chapels. The unreliable Andriolo de’ Santi was once again commissioned to build a major family chapel dedicated inexplicably to St James and decorated by Altichiero. The desire of the Lupi family for prominent tombs conditioned important features of the chapel design, as it was subsequently to do at the Oratorio di San Giorgio nearby. A probing analysis of another major addition to the saint’s church, the chapel of the Beato Luca Belludi, frescoed by Giusto di Menabuoi, shows how the hagiographical narrative was contaminated by local political circumstance and the ambitions of the Conti family. Bourdua furnishes one of the best accounts currently available of the varieties of mendicant patronage, their flexible and mutable relationships with artists, local promoters and the commune. It provides interesting parallels, which might perhaps have been more explored, with the situation in Venice. There the Frari, like San Fermo in Verona, early enjoyed a communal subsidy. In a significant way Bourdua redresses a balance which has for

too long been over-weighted by Assisi, and reveals the Franciscan order’s pervasive and enduring effect on architecture, painting and sculpture in north-eastern Italy.

Padre Ruf’s book, a development of his exegetical Franziskus und Bonaventura (1974) returns to a different generation of Franciscan painting scholarship. For the author the fresco decoration of the Upper Church at Assisi indisputably constitutes a theological continuum, uniting biblical and hagiographical cycles. Whilst the tone is unabashedly apologetic, the book contains many perceptive insights, clearly demonstrating that stylistic analysis alone is an inadequate instrument for the examination of these still enigmatic frescoes.

University of Warwick
Julian Gardner

Spain and the Mediterranean in the later Middle Ages. Studies in political and intellectual history. By J. N. Hillgarth. (Collected Studies, 764.) Pp. xii + 304. Aldershot: Ashgate/ Variorum, 2003. £59.50. o 860789128
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904582180
For medievalists and Hispanists alike this volume is no less a basket of delights than its author is an example to us all. So tirelessly, since sometime in the 1950s, has Jocelyn Hillgarth dedicated himself to the task that there is virtually no part of the history of the Spanish Middle Ages that can fairly be said to have escaped his attention. Observing that murky millennium from both its extremities, and advancing purposefully from the age of Isidore of Seville and Julian of Toledo until well into its aftermath (witness his The mirror of Spain, 1500-1700 [2000]), and in sympathy with his subject prudently jettisoning the Visigothic myth when the time came to do so, Hillgarth has always had trenchant things to say. En route, he has given us a model study of the figure of Ramon Lull and the endless complexities of his ‘Great universal art of finding truth’ as well as a two-volume history of the peninsula in the later Middle Ages, my own copies of which I cannot refer to as I write this because some time ago I made the mistake of lending them to my pupils. And on account of its inclusion of his article on ‘The problem of a Catalan mediterranean empire, 1229-1327’, the same fate immediately overtook the copy of the volume under consideration, so that only on getting it back am I able to take stock of the riches contained in this most recent of Variorum’s contributions to the serious study of the Middle Ages and to appreciate to the full the importance of the seventeen studies reproduced here. Many of these (and it is these that will be of particular interest to readers of this Journal) are on Lull, his ‘Art’ and his prolific literary production, fifty-nine items of which the learned author’s index lists. Others are on the history of Lull’s and Hillgarth’s own beloved Mallorca. Despite the subtitle of the volume, it is above all the author’s intellectual rather than his political phase that we enter into here in a largely thirteenth-century collection containing one paper (on the royal accounts of the crown of Aragon) which unusually is republished before being published in the first place, topped and tailed by a sharp-edged and characteristically wide-ranging piece on Spanish historiography and a paper on Jews and Christians in the age of the Catholic Monarchs, the conclusion of which suggests that that furious antisemite, Julian of Toledo, would have found himself very much at home eight centuries on. On this occasion there are no retractationes, Variorumstyle. The learned author keeps his second thoughts to himself. But other than for those readers with access to the best endowed of libraries, what this volume repeats

will afford a feast of pleasures, with some of the juxtapositions of its index providing added savour.

St John’s College, Peter Linehan
CAMPRIDGE

The work of Heiko A. Oberman. Papers from the symposium on his seventieth birthday. Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr, Katherine G. Brady, Susan Karant-Nunn and James D. Tracy. (Kerkhistorische Bijdragen, 20.) Pp. xii +207 + frontispiece and 15 plates. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2003. €io8. 90 04 12569 8; o169 845I
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This volume of collected essays complements another birthday Festschrift edited by R. J. Bast and A. G. Gow, Continuity and change: the harvest of late-medieval and Reformation history: essays presented to Heiko A. Oberman on his 7oth birthday (Leiden-Cologne-Boston 2000). Oberman died six months after his birthday festivities, and this slim volume, comprising nine essays that focus on Oberman’s achievements, ends with a reflection by G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes on his life. The essays either assess Oberman’s contributions directly, frequently against the background of earlier historical trends, or validate his insights through case studies.

As W. J. Courtenay sums up nicely (p. 134), Oberman’s work revealed the longue durée of ideas, in particular by situating the ideas of the reformers in their late medieval contexts. This, as S. Hendrix observes, was in line with the scholarship initiated by B. Hägglund, L. Grane and G. Eberling (p. 15), but Oberman was also reacting against E. Bizer who sought to find in Luther a moment of a clear break with medieval theology. In The harvest of medieval theology: Gabriel Biel and late medieval nominalism (1963), Oberman argued for a Luther ‘between the middle ages and the Reformation’. As B. Hamm points out, this Luther - who was neither medieval nor modern - was also a companion to Oberman the theologian, who could not place trust in the almighty God in this world, especially in the face of the mass murder of the past century (p. 48).

Situating early modern figures in their medieval contexts remained one of the hallmarks of Oberman’s scholarship, as was the case with Calvin. J. D. Douglass describes how this approach led Oberman to argue that Calvin’s vision for reform extended beyond the walls of Geneva, thereby challenging G. H. Williams’s view of Calvin the ‘magisterial reformer’. Similarly with Erasmus. As N. Mout shows, Oberman argued that Erasmus’ anti-scholasticism was in line with the medieval tradition of eschewing vana curiositas; he also argued, against H. Blumenberg, J. Huizinga and R. R. Post, that Erasmus did share something with the Brethren of Common Life - a criticism against the monastic monopoly of the ascetic life. Recent findings of scholarship in late medieval philosophy that Oberman helped to foster have in turn meant that the very background against which Luther’s work was originally assessed now requires some revision. It is now highly problematic, as Courtenay argues, to speak of ‘schools of thought’, with fixed and universally identifiable positions and tenets, be it ‘Ockhamists’ or ‘nominalism’. Furthermore, it is probable that Buridan was behind the opposition to Ockhamists, and that Jean Gerson helped establish the via antiqua. What has endured, however, is Oberman’s original insight that the covenantal approach to the order of nature

and salvation was a major theme in late medieval theology. F. Oakley defends the longue durée of this convenantal approach in understanding Robert Boyle’s physico-theology. Oakley’s point remains that the particular configuration of Boyle’s natural philosophy can only be made sense of in the context of a European scholastic tradition which dealt with deterministic world views through the distinction between potentia absoluta dei and potentia ordinata. In fact, Oakley defends intellectual history against the reductionist tendencies of social constructivists of science, whom he charges with taking authorial claims too much at face value, loose logic and mono-causal explanations. (Oakley perhaps echoes Oberman’s concern that some social history has an exclusive and limiting agenda, noted elsewhere, p. 54 .)

Three essays demonstrate how Oberman’s insights can inspire and encourage specific case studies in Reformation history. C. Ocker takes his cue from Oberman’s point that reforms in practice solidified the autonomy of small groups (rather than greater social cohesion), whose privileges could become targets of popular hatred. Ocker shows how the Franciscans in mid-fifteenth century Frankfurt ‘reformed’ by allowing the city council to administer its property when the interests of the council (to pre-empt interference from the archbishop of Mainz) and the friars (to dissociate themselves from the wider Observant movement) coincided. But as a group whose privileges rested with ecclesiastical authorities and whose survival depended on the ability to manipulate competing courts, the friars became the target of popular attack, just as the Jews did - an ironical point since friars were themselves frequent instigators of anti-Jewish sentiments. P. Blickle pays homage to Oberman’s article on the Peasants’ War, ‘Tumultus rusticorum’, the horror of which, Blickle argues, Dürer expressed in a nightmare of a flood and rationalised in the figure of a beaten peasant deprived of his rights. A. Pettegree concurs with Oberman’s identification of the latter half of the sixteenth century as the promising area of future Reformation studies. Pettegree shows how research at the St Andrews French Book Project is unravelling the importance of the printing press for the surge of Protestantism in the 1550 in Catholic France. Jean Saugrain, a printer in Lyon, specialised in the production of short pamphlets with sharp anti-Catholic verse that also appealed to the elites. These anti-Catholic verses, intended to be sung to the tune of a Psalm, were an important means to reach a popular audience. The hardhitting tone of anti-Catholicism in these pamphlets helps cement the sense of an irreconcilable gulf between the two faiths. As the Huguenots lost ground in Lyon, Saugrain eventually left the city which turned into a centre for Counter-Reformation print.

Though several of the contributions have something to offer in the way of revision or correction in Oberman’s works, these tend to be specific points which one would expect from the scholarship of a generation or two of students. Methodologically, the value of social history to intellectual history is questioned in one particular contribution (Oakley) and its usefulness acknowledged in a limited way by another (Courtenay, p. I43). Although Oberman was a master of the close reading of texts and an intellectual historian at heart, he was open to the possibilities of contributions by other approaches. As Douglass reminds us, Oberman pleaded - and it is a plea that should be heeded - for a " “total history” which would take full account of social reality but also of intellectual history, which would deal with common belief and also collective forms of behaviour’ (p. 54). The tone of the contributions is one of

respectful and constructive engagement rather than adulation, and is a fitting celebration of the academic life of a remarkable scholar.

Trinity College, Sachiko Kusukawa
CAMPRIDGE

Dai margini la memoria. Johannes Hinderbach (I4I8-I486). By Daniela Rando. (Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 37.) Pp. 587+24587+24 colour plates. Bologna: il Mulino, 2003. €33 (paper). 88 I5 088296
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904602181
Daniela Rando has produced a complex and detailed study of Johannes Hinderbach, prince-bishop of Trent (I4I8-86). The work is divided into two parts: the first, an exhaustively researched investigation and analysis of Hinderbach’s career and its historical context; the second, an assessment of the bishop’s thought and learning through a study of the voluminous marginalia of his books. About ioo manuscripts and some incunabula belonging to Hinderbach survive, distributed across the libraries and archives of the continent. The material in his glosses illustrates an active and engaged mind at work, and one which reflected the signal events and defining ideas of his time. Born into the conciliar age of Constance, and educated in Vienna and Padua, Hinderbach was sought for diplomatic service and high ecclesiastical preferment, serving as a secretary in the imperial court of Frederick III as well as entering the papal curia in Rome. A consummate, humanistically trained, courtier, lawyer and churchman, he managed to navigate the often dangerous currents of conciliarism, imperial ambitions and papal prerogative with a good deal of success, despite his unconditional adherence to the house of Habsburg. Given the richness and fecundity of his mind, and the range of his contributions to both Church and State, it is unfortunate that his memory has been so damaged by his aggressive antisemitism, occasioned by his harsh persecution of the Jews of Trent after charges of the ritual murder of a Christian boy in I475. Thus, although Hinderbach often emerges from Rando’s interpretation of the marginalia as a sensitive, pious and learned humanist observer and thinker, his hostility to those outside the Christian confession was intense. He was a man of his age; and he believed the world contained dangerous forces which threatened Christianity from both within and without. A rigorous uniform faith was part of his response to these elements, and it was this belief that caused so much suffering for so many of his subjects.

Victoria College, Kenneth Bartlett
University of Toronto

Women in early modern Britain, I450-I640. By Christine Peters. (Social History in Perspective.) Pp. v +206. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (2003). £16.99 (paper). о 33363358 X; о 333633598
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904612188
Described on its back cover as a ‘comparative survey and analysis of the diversity of women’s lives in Britain’, this book explores certain selected themes: the making of

marriage, women’s work, female scolding and sexual misbehaviour, witchcraft and magic, and female piety. The delightful portrait of a mother and child on the front cover is perhaps somewhat misleading, since the survey says little about women’s experience as mothers. Nor does it examine their experience of conjugal partnership at any length: the chapter ‘Work and the household economy’ concentrates on opportunities open to the single woman, efforts to regulate women’s participation in work and the gradual narrowing of opportunities for women to act as independent producers, especially in brewing. The comparative treatment of the selected themes is however impressive and largely successful. Contrasts between English, Welsh and Scottish expectations and practices are fruitfully explored. The Church’s relatively weak control over marriage in Wales and large areas of Scotland is well illustrated. The late and partial Welsh acceptance of the English stereotype of the witch is carefully explained. Some distinctive local devotional patterns in late medieval Britain, it is suggested, influenced the reception of the Reformation in different areas, and (more particularly in Scotland) left their mark on the ways in which Protestant female piety was conceived and expressed. Refreshingly characteristic of this survey are Christine Peters’s closely argued disagreements with other scholars on topics ranging from the importance of marriage alliances in Scotland to the significance of English defamation suits.

University of Reading
Ralph Houlbrooke

The archaeology of Reformation, I480-I580. Papers given at the Archaeology of Reformation conference, February 200I, hosted jointly by the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology. Edited by David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist. (The Society of Post-Medieval Archaeology. Monograph, i.) Pp. ix +486 incl. 220 figs +4 colour plates. Leeds: Maney, 2003. £75. I 904350000 3; I740 4924
jˉEH\bar{j} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904622184
The neglect of archaeological evidence by early modern historians is astonishing. How can such riches of material evidence be so wantonly ignored? Certainly in the past, archaeologists have not always kept track of the latest frontiers of historical research, but on the evidence of this splendidly enjoyable volume of papers, they have mostly made up for lost time in recent years, and historians should note their good example. Twenty-nine contributions here represent the fruits of the second (200I) joint conference of the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology: a necessary conjunction of chronological interests for that most liminal of events, the Reformation. The combination means that there is due attention to the stripping of the altars, but also a significant interest in what was put in their place. So one section of papers deals with the losses suffered by gilds and civic institutions - for example, the wanton destruction in I549 of England’s earliest truly public library at Guildhall, London, encouraged by such men of literary refinement as William Cecil - and a large group of papers chronicles the fate of monastic buildings; but several creative papers examine how burial customs and funeral monuments were transmuted rather than impoverished by the Reformation, and there are various forays into the new material culture of Protestantism. A fascinating if adventurously speculative paper from Paul Everson and David Stocker

looks at the building activity of Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, in Lincolnshire: they link the new structures to some clear visual statements that he was a viceroy for Henry viII’s new religious dispensation. At his new houses at Kirkstead and Barlings, Brandon seems deliberately to have left substantial monastic ruins standing explicitly as ruins in the new ensemble - even ‘ruin gardens’ - as a symbol of godly victory: an ideological statement which can be paralleled in other rebuildings to provide great houses for gentlemen at Hailes Abbey (Glos.) and Newstead Abbey (Notts.). Margaret Aston in a crisp summary of her work on iconoclasm makes a similar point in relation to what was left standing in church interiors as ‘monuments of indignation and detestation’. Niall Oakey reminds us how very different later agendas might also produce destruction. In his sample counties, 30−4030-40 per cent of surviving medieval screenwork seems to have disappeared in Norfolk churches during the nineteenth century, and 40−5040-50 per cent in Dorset - much of it at the hands of Anglican High Churchmen who convinced themselves that their church ‘restorations’ were undoing the harm of the Reformation. Very usefully this volume’s focus on Britain has not excluded perspectives from elsewhere in northern Europe, well summarised in Andrew Spicer’s masterly survey of parallel Reformed Protestant contexts in the Netherlands and Scotland, and reinforced by the reminder from Elizabeth Tingle’s Brittany that the Counter-Reformation quickly proved almost as destructive to pre-Reformation church arrangements as Protestant zeal. Markus Hiekkanen presents pioneering research on dating church-building in the diocese of Turku (modern Finland), which reveals how dire was the effect of Gustav I Vasa’s sudden confrontation with the traditional Church in the late 1520 s: a host of ambitious Finnish church projects were permanently halted in their tracks, in line with the major destruction well-known in relation to the churches of Stockholm. That is evidence for the continuing vitality of the Church before a sudden caesura, though Axel Bolvig’s study of the often astonishing contents of late medieval wallpainting schemes in Danish parish churches suggests that the religion that the Reformers encountered might be very little like the relatively tidy theological agendas of the church hierarchy. Not surprisingly, the even tidier theology of Lutheran Protestantism found it necessary to compromise, just as Catholic bishops had done before. That reminds us of the dangers of seeing the western Church on the eve of Reformation in terms of a static tableau, whether of glorious universal devotion or of decay and corruption: there was movement and mutation of all sorts. Manuscript and archaeological evidence from Chester friaries, gathered by Simon W. Ward, suggests a shift in their function from preaching-places to houses of burial and funeral masses; new cults, such as the Name of Jesus (as analysed by Hugo Blake and others), spread at different rates in different regions and might even interact with early Protestantism. Stove tiles, as David Gaimster illustrates, could in one era bring the imagery of the reredos into the parlour, and then during the Henrician Reformation, provide portraits of Philipp of Hessen and his wife to cheer up a Protestant merchant or German mercenary soldier fortifying himself against winter cold. It is true that often interpretation of the material data remains difficult. What was the intended meaning of the large fragments of the shrine of St Werburgh at Chester when they were redeployed as a base for the throne of the newly-created bishop? Equally obscure is the motivation of the civic authorities of Edwardian Coventry, who in 1551 provided repairs to the spire of the former Greyfriars Church (otherwise completely demolished), and in doing so preserved it as part of the city

skyline despite threats as diverse as Henry viii and the Luftwaffe. Long may archaeologists present historians with more such pleasurable puzzles.

St Cross College,
DiArmaid MacCulloch
Oxford

Lollards of Coventry, I486-I522. Edited and translated by Shannon McSheffrey and Norman Tanner. (Camden 5th Ser., 23.) Pp. x + 36I + frontispiece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (for The Royal Historical Society), 2003. £45. o 521830834
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904632180
Between I486 and I522, seventy-nine people appeared before the bishops of Coventry and Lichfield on suspicion of heresy, sixty-seven of them in the years 15II-I2. In this handsome volume, Shannon McSheffrey and Norman Tanner bring together the extant documents concerning these prosecutions, including excerpts from the episcopal registers of John Hales and Geoffrey Blyth as well as from the Coventry civic annals, Foxe’s Actes and monuments and, most important, the Lichfield court book (probably the original record of the 15II-I2 trials). The city of Coventry played host to a Lollard community of some long standing; its members were generally of the artisan class (cloth and leather trades predominated) and were connected through webs of familial and commercial ties. Uniquely among Lollard cells, its female members met in separate conventicles. McSheffrey and Tanner survey the procedures by which suspected Lollards were tried, the penances imposed on them (capital punishment only once), their demographics and their religious practices. Students of Lollard belief may come away slightly disappointed, not through the editors’ fault: the formulaic nature of the records and Blyth’s lack of interest in the dissenters’ beliefs tend to conceal, though (I would add) not entirely to obscure, ‘any more detailed alternative conceptualizations of Christianity the Lollards might have held’ (p. I5). The editors deserve thanks for making these records available in a user-friendly format and in fluid English translation. Only the absence of page numbers from a table of the defendants’ biographical details mars a volume that will be treasured by students of later Lollardy.

St Cross College, J. Patrick Hornbeck ii
Oxford

Creating Christian Granada. Society and religious culture in an old-world frontier city, I492-I600. By David Coleman. Pp. xii +252 incl. frontispiece, 4 figs, 3 maps and 4 tables. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 2003. £23.95 ($39.95). o 8014 4III o 7 EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904642187
Ever since Washington Irving rediscovered the glories of the Alhambra, the city of Granada has attracted the attention of romantics and scholars, but it has been viewed almost exclusively in a Reconquest context, as the last frontier of the Moors and later the Moriscos. Professor Coleman points us in a new direction, towards Christian Granada. He deals with three main aspects of the city after its fall to the army of Ferdinand and Isabella in I492: as a frontier where social, religious and

racial contacts were evolving; as a unique challenge to the Christian missionaries who saw the opportunity to win souls; and as a Christian society that was different and therefore affirmed its own special identity. The author gives us a concise, welldocumented and closely argued account, which brings us up to date through careful use of the latest research. His chapter on immigrants to Granada is by far the most authoritative available in English, informing us, for example, that women were a significant proportion of newcomers, and that Jewish conversos also had a role. He makes a good case for the view that many in the indigenous Islamic population were beginning to accept a place in Christian society and were not necessarily in a state of revolt. Coleman has an absorbing section about zoning arrangements in the multicultural city, and shows how inter-racial coexistence seems to have succeeded to the extent that immigrant Christians actually wore Moslem dress, and Christian churches were built in the Moorish style. The information in this first half of the book is a welcome corrective to the excessively simplified picture, given by most historians of Spain, of an oppressed population for whom the only logical solution was rebellion. The second half is a study of the impact of the Counter Reformation, and is innovative, closely researched and fascinatingly informative. All the great names of the Catholic reform movement of those years - Hernando de Talavera, Juan de Avila, Juan de Dios, Archbishop Guerrero - centred their efforts on Granada. As he says, ‘post-conquest Granada presents a unique opportunity to observe the creation of a new, local, urban Christian religious culture within the Iberian peninsula’. The author delves deeply into crucial themes such as wills and confraternities, clerical reform and the nature of charity, new church rules and the introduction of the Jesuits. The combined efforts of the clergy were, of course, not enough, and Coleman examines why there was an eventual failure, so much so that by the midI56os the archbishop was frankly pessimistic. It was the eve of the great rebellion of 1569-71, which destroyed the society of old Granada. Coleman ends with the events of the Sacromonte in the 1590s, when leaden tablets with supposedly new gospel texts were discovered in caves near the city. The tablets, as he shows, were a golden opportunity for the leaders of Christian Granada to claim for themselves a new (mythical) identity that would enable them to hold their heads high. With its excellent scholarship, fine narrative and perceptive social analysis, Coleman’s book is one of the most valuable contributions made to Hispanic history in the last few years.

Barcelona
Henry Kamen

Gesungene Innigkeit. Studien zu einer Musikhandschrift der devotio moderna. (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, ms. I6 H 34, olim B II3.) Mit einer Edition der Gesänge. By Ulrike Hascher-Burger. (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, io6.) Pp. x +545. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2002. €ı19. 90 04 12034 3; 008ı 8607 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904652183
This substantial monograph is the result of doctoral research in musicology undertaken under the supervision of the late Kees Vellekoop (Utrecht). The author comprehensively studies and presents a relatively neglected late fifteenth-century codex of sacred song. The analysis of its structure, notation and liturgical anchorage convincingly localises the bulk of the manuscript in brother-houses of the Common

Life (devotio moderna) in the Ijssel valley, most probably Deventer or Zwolle, with a first gathering stemming from a female house in the same region. The textual and musical notations (the latter comprising neumatic, mensural and stroke notation) are considered in the light of N. Staubach’s concept of ‘pragmatic scripturality’ (pragmatische Schriftlichkeit), which acknowledges unorthodox and purpose-driven attitudes in copying and assembling. The author also proposes an understanding of ‘cursive script’ as a procedure that affects textual and musical notation analogously. The codex is an informal assembly of small units or gatherings which were copied in varying grades of textual and musical script, and whose genesis and function might be compared to those of the rapiaria for personal use of Regulars. This evaluation builds a bridge from the codicological data to the historical mentalities and devotional practices represented by the collection. It is shown how the songs, mostly Latin and some Dutch, were in their verbal and musical structures related to ‘devotion’ (Innigkeit) as they accompanied meditation and solitude through reading and private singing. This function is impressively demonstrated with regard to the Passion meditation ‘Philomena preuia temporis ameni’, extant in the codex with its traditional musical setting for two voices. A detailed consideration of the liturgical status of the song-texts, and of the compositional and performative techniques of the polyphonic pieces, also helps to qualify stereotyped assumptions about a ban against polyphonic music in the circles of the devotio moderna. The Latin songs written in chant notation have predominantly prose texts and are mostly identifiable as ‘paraliturgical’; the rhymed monophonic and polyphonic Latin and Dutch songs are labelled Lieder (rather than cantiones, a term the author has not found in devotio moderna documents). It is shown how the scribes’ understanding of mensural notation was selective or incomplete. The relationship with other written testimonies, and with oral practices and repertoires, is also explored, confirming the activity of users as a practice dominated by writing and reading. The 121 items provided with musical notation are edited together with their complete texts in mostly modern chant notation. Concordances listed cover a total of more than forty other sources stemming from the ‘Low Land’ (das Niederland, including north Germany). Apart from some small facsimile illustrations documenting aspects of script, no facsimiles are given. This has the disadvantage that the editor’s decisions concerning word underlay, rhythmic coordination of voices, pitch reading and special neumes can rarely be checked. The indices and bibliography are of outstanding value; the English summary is sometimes puzzling.

Faculty of Music,
REInHARD Strohm
OXFORD

Christians and missionaries in India. Cross-cultural communication since 1500. Edited by Robert Eric Frykenberg. (Studies in the History of Christian Missions.) Pp. xii +419. Grand Rapids, MI-Cambridge: Eerdmans/London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. £25£ 25 (paper). о 80283956 8; о 700716009 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So02204690466218X
The range of disciplines and backgrounds from which the seventeen contributors to this recent volume in the Studies in the History of Christian Missions series have been drawn is, in itself, a testament to the breadth of ‘cross-cultural communication’ in

India’s experience of Christianity. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists and ethnologists have been brought together to address, in the words of Robert Frykenberg (series and volume editor), some ‘misconceptions and misperceptions that have clouded historical understandings of Christianity and missions in India’. In particular, Frykenberg wants to compensate for long years of eurocentric scholarship by seeking Indian perspectives as far as possible. Special reference is to be made to ‘caste, conversion and colonialism’; complex concepts in their own right and highly contentious when discussed in combination, as historians of Christianity in India frequently must.

As Frykenberg points out in his introduction, there is need for refinement of these concepts, in light of the difficult times currently faced by India’s Christians and also because of the historiographical tendency to dismiss missions as the slightly eccentric flotsam of imperial expansion, and Christian conversion as simple socio-economic and political response, shorn of religious meaning. There has been considerable work in the past ten years, however, to challenge the relative marginalisation in South Asian history of slippery concepts such as religious belief and personal conviction, and the current volume is valuable for bringing together a wide range of recent scholarship rather than for breaking new ground. Frykenberg’s main article, on the ‘complex origins’ of Christianity in India, sets a trend for the book of clear writing which is accessible for the general reader, while still providing fresh and stimulating perspectives for specialists. His emphasis on the creative and mediating role of Indian culture in moulding Christianity on the subcontinent, highlighted particularly in the case of ‘Syrian’ or ‘Thomas’ Christians (who claim origin in converts made by the Apostle Thomas in the first century), is a theme taken up by a succession of writers, including Heike Liebau in her piece on the eighteenth-century Danish-Halle mission in Tranquebar. Liebau looks at the pivotal role of Indian ‘agency’ in facilitating communication between foreign missionaries and local populations: as country priests, catechists and schoolmasters, as well as language teachers and intelligence gathers for missionaries. Their key role is analysed, that of adapting the missionaries’ message in such a way as to render Christian converts easily acceptable; as Indians to the non-convert population, and as Christians to missionaries.

Similar themes are taken up by Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Avril A. Powell. Peterson presents the poetry of two nineteenth-century South Indian intellectuals, King Serfoji it and Vedanāyakam Sāstri, as a fresh departure in Tamil literature which drew at once on Indian culture, Christian spirituality and western scientific knowledge. Powell’s article on the Revd Maulvi 'Imad ud-din, a prominent Moslem convert to Christianity in nineteenth-century Punjab and the first Indian convert to receive a doctorate in divinity, adds a Moslem perspective to a debate on ‘convert theology’ usually dominated by converts from Hinduism. Powell also draws attention to the difficulty for historians of picking out the authentic voice of Indian Christianity in many of the available pre-twentieth-century sources, amidst various levels of foreign missionary noise. Even in the few cases where an Indian ‘agent’ wrote and was published, the final say of the missionary as editor and/or translator remains a major barrier. The problem of accurately tracing cultural cross-currents is made more acute by the partisan blend of Christian teaching, western learning and accounts of local mission activity which characterised the enthusiastic publishing output of many European and American missions in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries. Jayeeta Sharma’s article on the ‘print culture’ of American Baptists in Assam gives an insight into this war of paper, which often missed its intended targets and generated unpredictable responses.

Articles by Richard Fox Young (on ‘Hindu responses to science and Christianity’), Geoffrey Oddie (on Protestant missionary representations of ‘Hinduism’) and Iwona Milewska (on European missionary investigations of Sanskrit) further contribute to the broad scope and high academic standards on display here, although some readers might be disappointed by the book’s tendency to hint at, rather than attack head-on, the serious political and social controversies with which foreign missions and Indian Christianity were - and still are - associated. Gunnel Cederlöf’s analysis of South Indian rural mobilisation and missionary response in the late nineteenth-century ‘mass movements’ of Christian conversion goes some way towards restoring a balance, however, and the book certainly succeeds in its aim of putting Indian perspectives to the fore. It is to be recommended as a colourful, scholarly and up-to-date introduction to the rich history of cultural interaction which Indian Christianity embodies.

St Antony’s College, Chris Harding
OXFORD

Contexts of conscience in early modern Europe, 1500-1700. Edited by Harald Braun and Edward Vallance. Pp. xviii +237 . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. £50. I 4039 I565 2
7EH(56)20057 E H(56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904672186
As with any system of policing, the conscience is at its most quietly effective when there is a consensus about what is right. Faced with an unfamiliar question (is insurance a legitimate business? How far can Platonic love go?) or with fundamental matters of authority or psychology (can a bad king bind conscience with an oath? Is my corrupted conscience to be trusted?), the early modern consciences that are the subject of this lively collection of essays felt the need for casuistry and other spiritual guidance to restore them to calm.

The consciences of early modern believers were exposed to painful questions about political authority and human capability put by the Reformation. Preaching and print served to broaden access to cures for ills of conscience, partly by creating the very diseases they sought to remedy. The essays by W. F. Stone, James F. Keenan and others show, however, that the casuistry inherited from scholastic sources was still relevant in this changed landscape, although this tradition was, as Keenan argues, more commonly transmitted via summaries or spiritual directories rather than as casuistry proper. Stone and Rudolf Schüssler seek to rehabilitate the scholastic notion of ‘probabilism’, the butt of much anti-casuistical abuse from Pascal and others. Far from a laxists’ charter, probabilism is shown to have been a way of defining the extent of reasonable moral choices. Such freedom as probabilism permitted was within the bounds of the ‘probable’ (where experience or respected authorities backed an opinion). Perhaps the ‘probabilist’ needs to take his place next to the ‘Machiavel’ and the ‘Puritan’ as one of the creations of polemic holding as much interest as the reality of which he is a caricature.

Regardless of the method used to reach a conclusion in conscience, there was little demurral from the belief that conscience was a form of overwhelming

authority - although Hobbes, who saw conscience as nothing more than opinion, is an important exception, as Johann Sommerville’s and John Spurr’s essays show. Civil and ecclesiastical bearers of authority (often pretty overwhelming themselves) were well aware of this, and were keen to harness the power of conscience for their own ends; and to deny or destroy it when it opposed them. The oath was tailormade for pinning down the wavering and for identifying the dissident conscience. As John Spurr startlingly (but convincingly) puts it, the oath was a provisional self-curse which becomes operative if what is said is proved untrue by future action or inaction. His essay is the best of the collection, combining a lucid description of the place of conscience among the faculties with an analysis of what he terms the ‘inherently destabilising’ claims of conscience. Both Spurr and Sommerville discuss the views of Hobbes, Locke and other thinkers in relation to conscience. If, as Hobbes argued, conscience was nothing more than a kind of opinion, individuals had no right to cling to it when the demands of authority differed from it. Another way of thinking about this is through categorisations of the matter rather than the relevant faculties - regardless of how authoritative conscience was, once a distinction was admitted between essential matters and ‘things indifferent’, there was room for dispute about whether human laws could bind consciences: conscience was king, but there were differences about the extent of his dominions. The conflict between conformist and Puritan in the English Church was the crucible for fighting this out. The former emphasised the importance of obedience as in itself a matter of conscience. The importance of obedience, when coupled with the view that many matters were ‘indifferent’ meant that - as a matter of conscience - in the absence of alternative authority, the state was to be obeyed on such matters. Puritans, with their view of conscience as something very like the voice of God, could not so easily set it aside when faced with the non-scriptural imperatives of mere humans. They felt that authoritative rulings on such matters could be obtained from reading the Bible and weighing questions in conscience. Sommerville describes how Locke moved from agreement with the conformists to the opposite view - he concluded that in religion nothing is really indifferent, which means that everything is potentially a matter of conscience. Human laws should therefore be penal, but no more.

One of the book’s great strengths is its interest in the peripheries of the period and the subject. As well as a sensitivity to the scholastic heritage, there is also an attempt by Bernard Capp to reconstruct some of the moral dilemmas experienced by early modern women that were not the subject of clerical manuals and works of edification, but can be teased out of ballads and court records. David Turner’s contribution explores a different seam of evidence - the emergence into print, courtesy of John Dunton’s ‘Athenian Mercury’, of new sorts of question, which some suspected of inclusion for salacious rather than conscientious reasons, but which nevertheless widened the discursive scope and social reach of conscience.

A number of the essays consider the passing of the preoccupation with conscience that reached its height in England (although the book does not confine itself solely to England) in the seventeenth century, and its later legacy. Alexandra Walsham’s chapter deals with the discomforting recognitions between Catholics and Protestants as they persecuted each other, ‘glimmers of a future in which sincerity of intention was elevated above correctness of belief’. Although there are some suggestions that the changes in attitudes towards conscience might indicate passage from a ‘shame’ to a ‘guilt’ culture, there is much in the book to suggest that modern consciences owe

much to their early modern predecessors as far as basic structure (if not, for the most part, intensity) is concerned, sharing a sense that behaving well requires us to not quite be ourselves. The Reformation changed conscience, which came to function as a kind of psychological stockade as the theological and moral consensus rumbled and cracked - a last line of defence against a stranger world. The refuge could also be a trap.

London
Jason Yiannikkou

Westminster Abbey reformed, 1540-1640. Edited by C. S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer. Pp. xvi + 293. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. £59.95. o 7546 o86o 3 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904682182
This splendid collection of essays does not pretend to provide a comprehensive picture of Westminster Abbey during the first century after Henry viii’s refoundation, though each sheds valuable light on some significant aspect of its history. Between them, nine chapters give some account of the Henrician foundation, abbey musicians, mid-Tudor coronations, the abbey’s sanctuary, relations between the abbey and the town of Westminster, and four eminent individuals (two deans and two canons). Charles Knighton’s introduction includes a useful historiographical survey and makes helpful connections between the chapters that follow. His own first essay details the constitution, personnel and endowments of Henry viii’s Westminster chapter and traces its history as far as the king’s death in 1547. Stanford Lehmberg shows that the abbey was a notable centre of sacred music. Among the grandest and most solemn ceremonies celebrated in the abbey were coronations. Dale Hoak’s thought-provoking conclusions concerning those of Edward vi and Elizabeth I have implications far beyond the history of the abbey. Thomas Cranmer, Hoak maintains, transformed the rite in such a way as to emphasise the God-given authority of the nine-year-old Edward, preparing the way for a Reformation by prerogative. The foremost early propagandists of Elizabethan queenship were however already convinced that Elizabeth’s government must be parliamentary as well as evangelical. Their convictions were graphically conveyed by a tableau displayed during the queen’s coronation procession. William Cecil, Hoak believes, helped to recast Elizabeth’s coronation oath, ensuring the inclusion of a clause binding the queen to act “according to the Laws of God, [and] the true profession of the Gospel established in this Kingdom” - the latter not yet achieved at the time of the coronation. David Loades traces as far as possible the Tudor decline of Westminster’s sanctuary ‘one of the greatest … in England’ and ‘by far the most sensitively placed’. J. F. Merritt gives a fascinating account of the chapter’s tenacious resistance to the efforts of the townsmen of Westminster to establish a corporation independent of the abbey’s jurisdiction. A scene of rapid urban expansion and growing social problems, Westminster comprised both the principal royal residence and the chief seat of government. Nominally a city from 1540, possessing its own judicial sessions from 1618, it nevertheless lacked proper corporate government throughout this period. William and Robert Cecil were high stewards of Westminster from 1561 to 1612 , and dominant partners in a close and mutually beneficial alliance with the abbey. Their interest helps to explain the failure of two attempts to gain more independence for the Westminster burgesses.

John Redman (canon 1540−511540-51 ) is the subject of a fine essay by Ashley Null. His close analysis of Redman’s distinctive and gradual theological development leads

Null to the conclusion that ‘Redman died too catholic on the chief article of protestant belief but too protestant on the chief articles of catholic belief’ (p. 73). His deathbed opinions on faith and justification elude precise description (pp. 63-4), but it seems clear that he had not embraced Luther’s doctrine. He had, however, gone well beyond Luther in his eucharistic belief, allegedly holding not only that bread remained during the ministration of the sacrament, but that unworthy communicants did not receive Christ’s body. Reception was in the soul by faith. He nevertheless maintained the closest possible connection between the sign and what it signified. The widespread esteem commanded by Redman’s learning and character ensured that his last words, uttered at a decisive moment of the Edwardian Reformation, gave rise to conflicting interpretations and rival bids for his legacy by evangelicals and conservatives. A leap of over fifty years takes the reader to the deanship of Richard Neile (1605-10). A native of Westminster who owed his rise to the patronage of Dean Goodman (1561-1601) and the Cecils, Neile appears to have been a capable and conscientious administrator who took care that his repairs, improvements, acquisitions and charitable works should be carefully recorded. Neile’s taste for order and ceremonial, his reverence for the sacraments and his patronage of ‘proto-Arminians’ have ensured him an important place in all accounts of the rise of a new style of churchmanship under the early Stuarts. Despite his later considerable influence, Neile was nevertheless, Andrew Foster remarks, ‘clearly no great intellectual’, and disliked involvement in theological controversy. John Williams (dean 1620-44) was an altogether more flamboyant character who somewhat unusually combined a love of music and ceremony with severe Calvinism. The complementary studies of Williams and Peter Heylyn, would-be instrument of the dean’s nemesis, by Charles Knighton and Anthony Milton respectively, constitute an appropriately lively finale to this volume. Knighton describes with discreet relish Williams’s shamelessly uninhibited pursuit of preferment. In 1621 he became lord keeper of the great seal and bishop of Lincoln. ‘It was not quite all Williams had wanted, but it represented nevertheless a concentration of dignity in church and state unmatched since Wolsey’ (p. 238). Immediately replaced as lord keeper after Charles i’s accession, the still powerful prelate resented the rise of William Laud (canon 1621-8), who had supplanted him in royal favour. Peter Heylyn (canon 1631-62), Laud’s ‘personal nark’ at Westminster (p. 25I), reported in 1632 disrespectful remarks by Williams about the king and Star Chamber, helped organise a long petition against Williams by the junior canons in 1634 and under cover of anonymity attacked Williams’s own anonymous statement of the communion table policy he favoured as bishop of Lincoln. ‘Even in a period notorious for the venomous style of its polemic’, Milton remarks, ‘Heylyn’s exchanges with his dean exhibit remarkable reserves of vitriol’ (p. 220). Yet Heylyn became ‘the officially accredited voice of Personal Rule policies’ (p. 231). Williams, casting himself as the representative of ‘moderate mainstream’ churchmanship, showed remarkable prescience in his assessment of the fragility of the Caroline experiment, though he had to suffer disgrace and three years imprisonment before the meeting of the Long Parliament brought him restoration to favour and promotion to the archbishopric of York. The coming revolution would sweep away both his archbishopric and his deanery of Westminster.

The Protestant clergy of early modern Europe. Edited by C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte. Pp. x +245. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. £45. o 333917766333917766
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904692189
This valuable collection examines the social, cultural and political characteristics of the Protestant clergy who replaced the mass-saying priesthood in much of central and northern Europe in the Reformation era. The headings in the editors’ introduction pose some of the questions at issue: ‘the protestant clergyman and the confessional state’, ‘pastors and parishioners’, ‘the character of the social group: estate or profession?’ In addressing them, the essays are far from univocal, and collectively neither reinforce existing grand narratives nor supply a new one. Instead, they open up spaces for discussion, and that is all to the good. Scene-setting is allotted to Robert Swanson. In a characteristically subtle and thought-provoking contribution he notes the ambivalences surrounding sacramental priesthood in the later Middle Ages: the ‘quasi-donatism’ encouraged by reforming clerics’ excoriation of unworthy priests; the implicit challenge to the clerical monopoly of ritual performance contained within the countervailing insistence that sacraments operated by virtue of correct words and actions. Contrasts with the pre-Reformation predecessors - some self-evident, some less so - are evoked in most of the subsequent essays. As a control experiment for what was distinctive, successful or dysfunctional about Protestant ministry, however, greater attention to the Tridentine Catholic parish clergy would arguably have been more useful. (Indeed, by restricting attention to the Protestant clergy the volume can only hope to tell half the story about ‘confessionalisation’ or ‘professionalisation’ in the early modern period, or supply half the ammunition for shooting at these fashionable paradigms.) The contributors themselves are reassuringly ambivalent about the contribution of (specifically Protestant) clergy to the ‘modernisation’ of European society. In a crisp distillation of the themes of his last two monographs, Ian Green emphasises the achievements of (particularly English) clergy in producing a mass of sermons, catechisms and treatises which had considerable success in helping to form the ‘unspectacular orthodoxy’ and ‘undogmatic Protestantism’ (p. 175) of the laity. R. Emmet McLaughlin examines the theological underpinnings of the clerical estate, and finds processes of desacralisation and greater dependence on the state which ‘contributed to the larger intellectual and cultural evolution resulting in the modern age’ (p. 6o). His somewhat hyperbolic contention (p. 72) that the institution of clerical marriage ‘doubled the clerical ranks’ is qualified by Susan Karant-Nunn’s sensitive analysis of the paradoxes confronting the ‘pastoral family’ in sixteenth-century Germany. Lutheran parsonages were intended to be exempla of domestic propriety, but evidence suggests that clergy wives often struggled to maintain their status or stay out of local squabbles. Thomas Kaufmann’s useful survey of the education of Lutheran pastors stresses the centrality of universities in shaping a distinctive vocational outlook, though ends up conceding that the evangelical clergy could often find themselves torn between pressures of ‘social integration’ into the life of the commune and the ‘structural disintegration’ required by the demands of their calling. The theme is elaborated in Jay Goodale’s lively and engaging account of the travails of ministers in Electoral Saxony, obliged to participate both in ‘the culture of rule and the culture of the ruled’ (p. 103). Some managed the tricky balancing act involved, but others, who looked exemplary to visitation committees, succeeded in poisoning relations

with their parishioners through heavy-handed attacks on traditional culture and insistence on fiscal rights. Life was no easier for the Reformed clergy in Zürich. Here, as Bruce Gordon ably demonstrates, there were pressures from all sides: a civil government that failed properly to fund the ministry, yet demanded it should inculcate good citizenship; a laity that expected pastoral care without intrusive moral reformation. Mark Greengrass’s examination of the Huguenot pastorate in France is refreshingly sceptical about the utility of current confessionalisation paradigms in circumstances where the Reformed Church developed independently of, and in opposition to the state. The social discipline promoted by Huguenot pastors was less about the production of well-regulated subjects than about the identity-formation of a beleaguered minority, and through their production and transmission of manuscript sermons, ministers acted as ‘guardians of the Protestant collective memory’ (p. 194). In a generally sure-footed collection there are inevitably a few small slips. It is not actually the case (pp. 65, 80) that secular priests took vows of celibacy in the Middle Ages (though they were certainly required by canon law to be celibate). The assertion (p. 68) that the sacrifice of the mass ‘repeated’ Calvary is problematic, to say the least. Historians of Reformation England will have difficulty in recognising its Church as ‘non-Calvinist Protestant’ (p. 75), and still more in identifying the ‘layman William Tyndale’ (p. 168) and the ‘Puritan George Herbert’ (p. 200). None the less, the essays here are of a consistently high standard, and all have interesting and important things to say. Perhaps quality has been ensured at the expense of breadth of coverage. Most of the chapters focus on German-speaking lands: there is nothing on how a new Protestant clergy was coping in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia, Scotland or Ireland, or in the confessional jigsawpuzzle of eastern Europe. Somewhat modestly, the editors bill the volume as ‘a survey of the state of current knowledge’ (p. 2); there is clearly more work to be done. Yet future studies would do well to take note of the approaches here, particularly the caution about invoking progressivist models and typologies. While much recent scholarship has cast Protestant clergymen as agents of the state, or (more subtly) as ‘brokers’, ‘mediators’ or ‘cultural amphibians’, the firm impression from the best essays in this collection is of inadequately financed and sometimes ill-prepared men (either under- or over-educated) finding themselves in difficult, often impossible positions in the exercise of their ministry. As Luther himself was aware (p. 107), being a pastor could be ‘an extremely burdensome and dangerous business’.

University of Warwick
Peter Marshall

Anglicanism and the western Christian tradition. Continuity, change, and the search for communion. Edited by Stephen Platten (foreword Archbishop Rowan Williams and Cardinal Walter Kasper). Pp. xi +276. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003. £19.99 (paper). I 853 III 5592
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904702183
The first ever exposition of Anglicanism in Rome took place in 2002: a colloquium at the Gregorian (from which the chapters of this book derive), an exhibition in the Vatican Museums and choral music from the English cathedral tradition. At a time when lack of progress at the official level in overcoming historical obstacles between Churches is generating reappraisal of the ecumenical movement, this event was a

sign of hope for the future. Most chapters of this book survey the various phases of Anglicanism, from its origins in the sixteenth century (MacCulloch and Duffy), through the paradigm of Hooker (Lake) and the traumas of the mid-seventeenth century (Maltby), to the attempted redefinition by the Tractarians (Nockles) and the emergence of the Anglican Communion (Jacob), while Croft provides a cameo of the Cecil family. MacCulloch, Duffy, Lake and Nockles take up the question of the historical identity of Anglicanism and the stance of the English Reformation in relation to medieval Catholicism and continental Protestantism. Their broad assertions are heuristic and invite discussion. The historical defining moment turns out to be a moving target: Henrician, Edwardian, Elizabethan, according to the author’s stance. It is actually impossible to generalise about the ecclesiology of the English Reformation unless we agree on the parameters of the period and the respective weight to be accorded to political measures and theological texts. While Anglo-Catholics played down the discontinuities and played up the Catholicity of the English Reformation, a corrective emphasis can be pushed too far. MacCulloch’s claim that the Elizabethan divines rejected the real presence is only true if it is equated with transubstantiation. And Duffy is too sweeping when he dismisses as ‘ultimately perverse’ Dugmore’s claim that the eucharistic theology of the English Reformers was shaped by Augustinian symbolic realism. Duffy oversimpifies by equating Elizabethan anti-Romanism with a lack of Catholicity: Hooker, Andrewes and the later seventeenth-century divines are equally implacable about Roman claims, but their theology is incarnational, sacramental and mystical - authentically Catholic. Lake’s ambiguous interpretation of Hooker (the juxtaposition of irenicism and methodological radicalism) raises more questions than it answers. Maltby whets our appetite for more on the ‘hidden years’ of the Church of England and the transformations that Anglicanism underwent in persecution and exile. Although Nockles dissociates himself from Frank Turner’s recent interpretation of Newman and evangelicalism, his discussion points in the same direction as Turner’s view of radical Tractarianism as partisan and ultimately sectarian.

Council for Christian Unity,
Paul Avis
LONDON

Reformulating the Reformation. A. G. Dickens. His work and influence. Edited by Rod Ambler and Glenn Burgess. (Historical Research, 77, 195.) Pp. iii + I42 incl. frontispiece and 3 figs. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. ¿io (paper). 0950 347I
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So02204690471218X
This special volume of Historical Research, essentially the proceedings of the A. G. Dickens Memorial Conference held at Hull in 2002, encapsulates in a collection of papers by distinguished scholars the views of the new millennium on Dickens as a historian. Patrick Collinson’s expressed hope, that in burying Caesar he was not presiding over an autopsy, was largely realised: the long knives evident at similar gatherings were mercifully shortened if not entirely dulled. Closely following the sequence adopted by the conference, its two introductory papers give a personal tribute from a former pupil, John Newton, and an illustrated introduction by John Bernasconi to the art collection given by Dickens to the university in memory of his wife, a collection which raises more questions than it answers about his work and

influence. Patrick Collinson’s overview of Dickens’s career gives the measured assessment of a fellow Protestant scholar of Dickens’s achievement, while Christopher Haigh presents the revisionist case for his more limited hegemony of Reformation studies. Andrew Pettegree discusses his work in both the European and English Reformation contexts, illustrating some subtleties of Dickens’s thought and re-emphasising, as Dickens had averred, the importance of the Edwardian Reformation. Of the two papers originally given by continental scholars, one is replaced by an exciting new contribution from Regina Pörtner, putting Dickens in context as a Christian scholar of the Reformation, and opening fresh avenues of historiographical research. Robert von Friedeburg shows the continuing validity of Dickens’s contribution to the European debate, especially in the Germanic discussion of national identity. Eamon Duffy returns the debate to England, disagreeing, with characteristic wit and humour, with Dickens’s traditional Anglican view of the medieval Church. Finally, Claire Cross provides a meticulous consideration of Dickens’s contribution to Yorkshire local studies, a paper which unfortunately, because of adherence to the conference format, appears as something of a codicil. The whole collection offers a wide range of views on Dickens’s work, and some insights into his historiographical influence: a role variously estimated according to the context in which he is appraised. If it fails to do full justice to the popular influence of some of his best known works - few other historians are such familiar names to sixth-formers - and to the influence of his personal charm and enthusiasm for history and culture, remarked by colleagues and students alike, Hull has nevertheless succeeded in paying Caesar a fair tribute of praise.

Ludlow
Margaret Clark

A dialogue on the law of kingship among the Scots. A critical edition and translation of George Buchanan’s De iure regni apud scotos dialogus. By Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith. (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.) Pp. lxxvi +228 incl. 2 ills. Aldershot-Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2004. £49.50£ 49.50. I 859284086 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904722186
George Buchanan’s De jure regni apud scotos: dialogus (written 1567, first printed 1579) ranks as one of the most radical works of political theory of the entire sixteenth century. Constantly reprinted (and constantly banned), the tract would prove hugely influential throughout Europe for the next two centuries. Appearing in revolutionary London and revolutionary Philadelphia as well as revolutionary Edinburgh, it played a major role in creating what is today termed the Atlantic republican tradition. Surprisingly, there has been no satisfactory modern edition. Now Roger Mason and the late Martin Smith have produced what will be the definitive text for the foreseeable future. The volume is a major achievement.

In what surely reflects the heavy hand of J. H. Burns, Mason and Smith claim to offer a close and simple translation, piously renouncing any effort ‘to capture the spirit or rhythms of Buchanan’s Latin’ (p. lxxiv). Perhaps appropriate for a prose work, yet in fact their translation is at times highly colloquial and generally quite readable. And it does provide an accurate rendering. There will inevitably be quibbles, but no structural problems. Further, Mason and Smith have constructed an elaborate and useful apparatus. Cicero, Livy and Seneca appear prominently

among the sources, as we might expect, but the annotations also draw attention to Buchanan’s extensive use of Aristotle’s Politics. Possibly only natural for a sometime professor of Greek, but the centrality of this text along with other such republican writings, points up the civic values that so utterly suffuse the dialogue. If the dialogue draws on the advice literature prevalent in the earlier sixteenth century - and notably Erasmus’ Education of a Christian prince (1516) - it travels well beyond the mirror for princes genre. Rather, it seeks to be a mirror for citizens, the monarch being simply the archetypal citizen.

Mason’s lengthy introduction effectively explicates the dialogue’s startling and multi-levelled originality. Buchanan had long embraced a civic spirituality, a republican ‘pietas’, that breathed Stoic discipline and eventually fit quite comfortably with Calvinism. In the dialogue this sensibility led him to a humanist analysis of the early Christian communities that so severely (and insightfully) contextualised the New Testament as to drain it of all immediate relevance. Where earlier Protestant theorists like the Marian exiles and subsequent ones like the French monarchomachs sought to turn to advantage the great Pauline pronouncements, Buchanan directly discounted them. As Mason comments, the implications were ‘little short of devastating in the religious culture of sixteenth-century Europe’ (p. xlviii). At a crucial point in this discussion Buchanan’s words sound remarkably like language in Erasmus’ Paraclesis to the Greek New Testament (1516). But Buchanan’s radical Erasmianism reached well beyond anything the great humanist might have imagined.

Buchanan’s preoccupation, as Mason shows, was the exercise of civic virtue rather than institutional procedure, moralism rather than constitutionalism, the personal responsibility involved with direct action rather than any duties incumbent upon ‘lesser magistrates’. He indicated no interest in a balanced constitution or in the classical legislator, and, astonishingly, the citizen derived not from rank, nor office, nor property, but solely from his selfless passion for the public good. If Buchanan admired aristocratic Sparta and Venice, it is clear that his telling models are Athens and republican Rome.

It is likely that Buchanan draws more on the political thought of Renaissance Italy than Mason acknowledges. Buchanan’s obsession with the creation (or recovery) of civic virtue directly parallels the central concern of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses. His expression of confidence in the populace also palpably echoes Machiavelli’s statements. His doctrine of tyrannicide, wherein any citizen is called upon to strike down a tyrannical ruler, surely grows out of the Brutus cult so prominent in early sixteenth-century Italy.

Yet these additional dimensions in no way detract from the signal importance of this volume. It will be a source of surprise to many that Cambridge University Press is not publishing the dialogue as part of its series on the history of political thought (a series that includes vastly more marginal works). Visibly, Ashgate intends to challenge the leadership of such more prominent, if also more conservative presses. Bravo Ashgate.

California State University, Arthur Williamson
Sacramento

Nuntiaturen des Giovanni Delfino und des Bartolomeo Portia, 1577-1578. Edited by Alexander Koller. (Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland nebst ergänzenden Aktenstücken. Dritte Abteilung, 1572-1585, 9.) Pp. li +603 incl. 3 ills. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2003. €94 (paper). 3484 8oI6I I

7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904732182
The usual exemplary standards of editing are found in this, the latest volume of the Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland, 1572-1585. The closing months of the relatively long nunciature of Delfino at the imperial court were followed by the briefest of tenures by Portia, hardly more than three months. But the range of business conducted between the nuncios and Rome represented an even greater continuity, as is clear when this volume is compared with the preceding one (edited D. Neri, 1997), which covered the years 1575-6 within Delfino’s tour of duty. The political and ecclesiastical issues remained largely the same, while at this date some confidence could be felt about the Emperor Rudolph. The actions of other members of the Habsburg dynasty might cause more concern, particularly in relation to the situation in the Netherlands. Pope Gregory xim included German affairs among the priorities of his pontificate, but wider questions such as the papal reform of the calendar naturally arose as well. Training of clergy for the German lands to a better standard underlined the importance of the Society of Jesus, generally favoured by Gregory in any case. The Friulan family background of Portia meant that in a broad sense at least his succession to Delfino was intended to represent continuity of policy, and the short-lived nunciature of the former hardly left time for any specific questions to arise relating to Venetian concerns.

University of Leeds
A. D. Wright

Conferences and combination lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582-1590. Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582-1590. Edited by Patrick Collinson, John Craig and Brett Usher. (Church of England Record Society, io.) Pp. cxvi +300 incl. frontispiece, 4 plates and 4 maps. Woodbridge: Boydell Press (for the Church of England Record Society), 2003. £60.0851159389;13513087£ 60.0851159389 ; 13513087 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904742189
At the heart of this volume is a long-awaited transcription of the English materials in John Rylands English ms 874. These mostly record the activities of the Dedham conference, a regular meeting of Puritan ministers in Essex that commenced in 1582 and ended in 1589 . What exactly the conference was was a question at the time. To some of its members, it was a continuation of the prophesyings of the 1570 and an opportunity for shop talk, while to others it represented the embryo of a Presbyterian Church of England. The formidable internal strains and external pressures facing the Puritan movement in the 1580 os are reflected in these invaluable materials, which also include some items from the Puritan agitation at the beginning of the reign of James I. Previously available in print only in an incomplete form, they will be much welcomed. The volume also contains a transcription of a manuscript by the minister John Rogers. Rogers was booted out of the Puritan-run combination lecture at Bury Saint Edwards in 1589 after he unexpectedly attacked a sermon by Laurence Chaderton in defense of Presbyterianism. The manuscript is an angry rebuttal of the charges made against him to the bishop of Norwich to justify his removal. The

transcriptions come with detailed editorial introductions. The editors have also provided Conferences and combination lectures with an overview of the Elizabethan Church of England and of religion in East Anglia at the time. There is a lengthy biographical register and the transcriptions are copiously annotated. Both of the documents included have already been extensively analysed elsewhere by the editors, but students of the period will be grateful to have them readily accessible in such a meticulously presented form.

University of Georgia
Michael P. Winship

Richard Hooker and Reformed theology. A study of reason, will, and grace. By Nigel Voak. (Oxford Theological Monographs.) Pp. xviii +348 incl. frontispiece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ¿50. о 199260397
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904752185
The title of this book may suggest that Nigel Voak’s analysis of Richard Hooker’s ideas on reason, will and grace shows how close Hooker was to the Reformed theology of his day. In fact, Voak argues that historians and theological commentators who have taken this position are mistaken. Though Hooker began his career as a theologian very much within the Reformed fold at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was a pupil of the distinguished Calvinist theologian John Rainolds, he subsequently moved away from orthodox Reformed theology, according to Voak. In Hooker’s principal work, Of the lawes of ecclesiasticall politie (1594-1662), he opposed the views upheld by Puritan spokesmen on polity, liturgy and discipline. But he also took issue, according to Voak, with some of their fundamental philosophical and theological principles. Hooker’s treatment of these issues then led several writers within the Established Church to attack the Lawes as contrary to the theology of the English Church as stated in the Thirty-Nine Articles. Their attack on Hooker, published anonymously as A Christian letter (1599), argued that Hooker was decidedly not Reformed on such matters as freedom of the will, human reason, the nature of divine grace and the ability of human beings to perform good works. Hooker’s last months before his death were spent in compiling an answer to these detractors. Voak examines in detail Hooker’s manuscript notes and essays, called ‘The Dublin fragments’ from their location at Trinity College, Dublin. His conclusion is that though Hooker defended himself vigorously against the authors of A Christian letter, with specific reference to the Thirty-Nine Articles, his arguments are sometimes inconsistent and even evasive. Hooker’s thought on the doctrine of grace, by Voak’s account, was not in conformity with significant aspects of late sixteenth-century Reformed theology nor with some portions of the Church’s official formulary of doctrine. Voak thus disagrees with much of the interpretation of Hooker’s theology provided during the past two decades by W. J. Torrance Kirby, Nigel Atkinson and Alister E. McGrath. On the other hand, Voak is in general agreement with Peter Lake, especially with Lake’s Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988), and with his article on the ‘immediate reception’ of Hooker’s Lawes, this Journal lii (2001), 456-86. Voak’s book is complex, sophisticated and occasionally perplexing. In a crucial chapter on Hooker’s late works, Voak himself refers to the ‘rather labyrinthine structure of this chapter’ (p. 309). One of the difficulties with his argument is that he finds it

necessary to explain Hooker’s theology by means of a principle of ‘common grace’, though he acknowledges that Hooker never uses this term or any other that conveys exactly the same meaning. A recurring strength of Voak’s analysis, however, is that he brings to his work a detailed knowledge of scholastic theology, especially the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, but also that of later medieval thinkers such as Duns Scotus. Voak is persuasive in his argument that Hooker was deeply indebted to medieval thinkers and that under their influence, as well as in reaction to Puritan theologians such as Thomas Cartwright, he moved away from mainstream Reformed thought. Voak’s method of analysis is informed not only by a widely ranging knowledge of the history of ideas but also by the skills of a literary scholar. His treatment of Hooker is richly informative and provocative. Students of Hooker will find the book indispensable, whether they agree with it or not. Richard Hooker emerges as a subtle, original and perceptive thinker, distinct in important ways from most of his contemporaries, with a more optimistic view of human nature than was the norm in the English Church and in the international Reformed community of his time.

University of the South,
W. B. Patterson

SEWANEE,
TENNESSEE

Taking sides? Colonial and confessional mentalités in early modern Ireland. Essays in honour of Karl S. Bottigheimer. Edited by Vincent P. Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann. Pp. 315. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2003. €75 (£55). I 85182683 I J¨EH\ddot{J} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So022046904762181
Karl Bottigheimer has made two significant contributions to the writing of Irish history. His monograph English money and Irish land (1971) gave a new statistical precision to discussions of the massive transformation of ownership brought about by the Cromwellian and Restoration land settlements. Subsequently he was a contributor, along with Nicholas Canny and Brendan Bradshaw, to a wide ranging debate, conducted mainly in the pages of this Journal, on the reasons for the failure of the Irish Reformation. His Festschrift is likewise divided between the secular and the religious. The contributions not on religious topics are loosely grouped around the volume’s chosen theme of taking sides. Thus Steven Ellis explores the complex but unequivocal Englishness of the inhabitants of the late medieval lordship, through a study of the Pale notable Darcy of Platten. Vincent Carey examines the predicament of the recusant historian Richard Stanihurst, arguing that his departure for exile on the continent was a response, not just to the growing intolerance of the Elizabethan state, but to disillusionment at the failure of his patron, the eleventh earl of Kildare, to live up to the idealised role of Renaissance gentleman that Stanihurst had created for him. Nicholas Canny surveys the career of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, presenting him as a pragmatist who placed himself at the head of a Spanish-backed Catholic revolt only when it became clear that he could no longer hope to maintain his position as an autonomous regional magnate under the English crown. It is a plausible conclusion, though one that seems to add puzzlingly little to what has already been said by Hiram Morgan, Henry Jefferies and John McCavitt. A more original piece by Bernadette Cunningham uses a study of the antiquarian and genealogist Michael Kearney to illuminate the grievances of Gaelic Catholics on the

eve of the crisis of the 1640 s. Two other articles reflect the honorand’s interest in the Restoration period. Toby Barnard offers a richly documented account of the rise of the Warings of Co. Down from trade into the ranks of the squirearchy, and Michael Perceval-Maxwell reviews a pamphlet controversy over the events of the 1640 s conducted during 1680−21680-2 as a by-product of the Popish Plot.

The essays on religious topics cover more than three centuries. Katherine Walsh’s study of John Bale’s brief and contentious tenure of the diocese of Ossory in the reign of Edward vi notes the importance of Bale’s eschatology, but otherwise adds only marginally to an already familiar story. Alan Ford, introducing a forceful statement against religious toleration from Malcolm Hamilton, Scottish-born archbishop of Cashel, emphasises the uncompromising anti-Catholicism of early seventeenthcentury Irish churchmen, and the potential for disputes on religious policy to put the crown at odds with otherwise compliant subjects. Elizabethanne Boran uses a study of the support expressed by Ussher and other Irish bishops for the work of Comenius and John Dury to argue that the precarious position of the Church of Ireland made its leaders more flexible on matters of Protestant unity than the majority of their counterparts in England. Aidan Clarke examines the execution for sodomy of John Atherton, bishop of Waterford, in 1640 . The real motive behind the prosecution, he concludes, was resentment at Atherton’s vigorous contribution to Thomas Wentworth’s campaign to recover misappropriated church lands. At the same time it seems likely that the bishop’s enemies exploited rather than invented the offences for which he died. A mischievously casual aside reveals that the episcopal colleague noted in contemporary gossip as vulnerable to the same charges that had brought Atherton to the gallows was none other than the celebrated John Bramhall, later archbishop of Armagh.

Bottigheimer’s main contribution to the debate on the Irish Reformation was to fix attention on the 1590 and early seventeenth century as the period that saw the transition from passive evasion of official religious policy to a positive Catholic identity. Colm Lennon fleshes out this insight with a fine piece on the components of that confessional ideology, drawing attention particularly to the role of a new breed of hagiographer that reinterpreted the often confused conflicts of recent decades in order to create a roll call of martyrs for the faith. Raymond Gillespie uses the writings from the 1680 and 1690 os of the future archbishop of Dublin, William King, to explore the mechanics of the new genre of religious controversy made possible by the removal of restrictions on printing.

Three further pieces deal with later periods. Monica Brennan’s analysis of conversions to the Established Church in eighteenth-century Kilkenny demonstrates that these actually became more frequent in the second half of the eighteenth century. This confirms suggestions that the conformity of the Catholic propertied classes had as much to do with a desire to participate fully in public life as with the notorious restrictions on ownership and inheritance that were by this time being repealed. There is also some arresting evidence showing how attempts to institutionalise religious divisions were consistently undermined by the willingness of Protestant settlers, including even Cromwellian soldiers, to take Catholic wives. Ute LotzHeumann examines the career of the German pioneer of early modern Irish history, Moritz Julius Bonn, while Ciaran Brady explores the philosophical underpinnings of J. A. Froude’s bitterly resented The English in Ireland. Brady’s wide-ranging and sophisticated analysis looks beyond the usual vague references to the influence of Carlyle. Instead he shows how a sustained engagement with Christian theology, and

also with the philosophy of Spinoza, brought Froude to the eventual conviction that history, properly written, represented the most effective means of developing and keeping alive an awareness of the moral foundations of the universe. This unexpected contribution, by a leading Tudor specialist, to the intellectual and religious history of nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland appropriately rounds off a varied and thought-provoking volume.
Queen’s University,
S.J. Connolly

Belfast

Puritanism and its discontents. Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers. Pp. 264. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press/London: Associated University Presses, 2003. £39.50. o 874138175
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904772188
The essays in this collection originated in a conference held at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and as in all such efforts, the contents are but loosely connected. However, as is also common, most who are interested in the general theme - in this case Puritanism - will pass quickly over some essays while finding exciting insights in others.

Laura Knoppers’s introduction provides a good map to the collection by reviewing current scholarly views on the nature of Puritanism and points to the specific questions that the various contributors are addressing. As with many recent contributions to the field, the collection takes a trans-Atlantic perspective rather than more narrowly focusing on the movement in either England or New England.

A section of essays organised as ‘Defining Puritanism’ opens with a thoughtprovoking piece by John Morrill entitled ‘A liberation theology? Aspects of Puritanism in the English Revolution’. Morrill focuses on ‘a central irony that for the greater number it [the English Revolution] was a struggle to secure both liberty for themselves and the liberty to impose their own vision on others’ (p. 27). He illustrates his exploration of the complex meaning of liberty in the period by investigating the views and experiences of Sister Cornish, William Dowsing and Oliver Cromwell. Dwight Brautigam writes on ‘Prelates and politics: uses of “Puritan”, 1625-1640’, and concludes that ‘by using “Puritan” as an inflammatory label … the Laudians made an already bad situation worse’ (p. 62). Approaching matters from the perspective of a different century, John Netland writes on ‘Philistines and Puritans: Matthew Arnold’s construction of Puritanism’.

Part II of the collection is a set of essays on Puritanism and institutions. Margo Todd once again demonstrates her extensive knowledge of the thought of the period in ‘Anti-Calvinists and the republican threat in early Stuart Cambridge’. She uses the controversy that surrounded the 1627 lectures of Isaac Dorislaus on Roman history to explore the connections between Calvinism and republicanism. Steven Pointer offers new insights into the 1622 election of John Preston to succeed Laurence Chaderton as the new Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Barbara Olive analyses Mary Chudleigh’s The story of the three children paraphras’d to explore the fabric of Puritanism in the post-Restoration era.

A pair of essays offers an examination of a third theme, ‘Puritanism and its others’. Richard Pointer focuses on Puritan-Indian discourse in seventeenth-century

New England, and Glenn Sanders offers a review of images of the Turk in antiPuritan polemic.

The final grouping focuses on ‘Puritanism and community’. Timothy D. Hall takes a look at a familiar controversy in his 'Assurance, community, and the Puritan self in the Antinomian Controversy, 1636−381636-38 '. While recent books that relate to the subject by Michael Winship, David Como and T. Dwight Bozeman, make the essay appear somewhat dated, it nevertheless repays attention for readers interested in the subject. Using a literary approach, Stephen Woolsey offers a valuable insights into efforts to revitalise the Puritan heritage in his ‘Staging a Puritan saint: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana’.

Millersville University of Pennsylvania
Francis J. Bremer

The redemption and restoration of man in the thought of Richard Baxter. A study in Puritan theology. By J. I. Packer. Pp. 43I. Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2003. $49.95. I 5536 I 0202 ; I 573831743 7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904782184
This is the 1954 DPhil. thesis of J. I. Packer, attractively reset and reprinted almost unchanged from the original. It was one of the first theses of the post-war period on Puritans and Puritanism, if not the first, tooling up for what has since become a heavy industry. Seeing his role chiefly as an expositor, Packer sets out in succinct, clear and expert form the main features of Baxter’s thought in its engagement with Antinomian, Arminian and High Calvinist opponents. In looking at the grand Christian themes of ruin, redemption and restoration (which form three of the four parts of the thesis), Packer distills from Baxter’s almost uncountable printed words a Baxterian systematic theology. He sees Baxter within the Calvinistic camp (as measured by Dordt and Westminster), though recognising his Amyraldianism (a reaction to his early advocacy of Twisse’s supralapsarianism) and the presence of Arminian elements in his theology. These differences are largely put down to Baxter’s ‘political method’ which he borrowed from Grotius. (Unlike mainstream Calvinism, Baxter did not regard the law of God as eternal and unchangeable but law as a device variously employed by God in different eras, and so the Christian Gospel is a ‘new law’.) All this leads Packer to offer a somewhat ambivalent verdict on Baxter. He sees him as, in intention, a mediator between Calvinism and Arminianism, a ‘dazzling virtuoso’ recasting the terms of debate in an attempt to bring healing. Yet this very virtuosity gave rise to suspicion on the Calvinistic side, a classic case of the failure of minds to meet. (Whether the minds would have met had Baxter not used the conceptual terminology of Grotian jurisprudence seems doubtful, though Packer appears to think that they might have.) Yet Baxter is also seen as a dated figure, his philosophy pre-Newtonian and pre-Lockean, and his theology dominated by passé political models. On the substantive disputed questions of atonement and justification Packer sides with John Owen against Baxter. But Packer also takes us beyond the peculiarities of Baxter, to the heart of Puritanism, to its world view and its life style. Baxter is certainly a paradigm of Puritanism in this sense, passionately concerned to promote the practice of piety, seeing theology as sapientia rather than scientia, as The saint’s everlasting rest (his first and best book, in Packer’s estimate) and numerous other titles suggest. Even here there is paradox, for

Baxter undergirds his Bunyanesque approach to religion with an overabundance of theoretical machinery as he battles against the nefarious influences of antinomianism. Packer, now the doyen of evangelical theologians of a Reformed persuasion, is professor of theology at Regent College, Vancouver, where this reviewer has been honoured to serve as the first J. I. Packer Professor of Philosophical Theology. Unlike chunks of Baxter’s theology this fifty-year-old thesis remains pleasingly up-to-date, and ought to be consulted by any serious student of Puritanism.

Fifield
Paul Helm

Korrespondierender Pietismus. Ausgewählte Beiträge. By Dietrich Blaufuss (ed. Wolfgang Sommer and Gerhard Philipp Wolf). Pp. 496. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2003. €32 (paper). 3374020798
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904792180
The slightly odd title and the actual nature of this collection of eighteen papers put together by a couple of Blaufuss loyalists as he approaches his sixty-fifth birthday is explained by the history of the recipient and writer. Blaufuss was trained in Erlangen, Heidelberg and Hamburg, under professors as distinguished as Walther von Loewenich, Wilhelm Maurer, Hans von Campenhausen and Kurt Dietrich Schmidt, and young dozenten destined for glory such as Bernhard Lohse and Bernd Moeller. From them he learned method and an addiction to primary source material which has actually got in the way of his academic advancement. After a lifetime’s labour on the sources for Pietist history, recorded here in a personal bibliography approaching 400 items, he is a pastor in gymnasial school service. His original thesis (published in 1977 as Reichstadt und Pietismus: Philipp Jacob Spener und Gottlieb Spizel aus Augsburg) was based on the discovery of 2,000 letters between the two and this kind of basic ferreting-out has characterised his work ever since and occasioned the Korrespondierender of the title of this collection. For seventeen years he was joint editor of the invaluable annual bibliography of Pietist studies in Pietismus und Neuzeit and from 1979 he assisted Erich Beyreuther (until the latter died in 2001 aged 99) in the production of the reprint edition of Spener’s works, a Sisyphean labour due for completion in time for the Spener tercentenary in 2005. This edition left Blaufuss on the losing end of a ferocious battle for principle and resources which leaves its mark on the sixteenth and seventeenth essays in this collection. A reprint edition (begun by Beyreuther) was all that could be contemplated by scholars in the DDR and it had the advantage not only that it could be completed relatively quickly and cheaply, but that it could be true to the (very inconvenient) mixture of correspondence and expert theological opinion that Spener began to publish in his own lifetime. The sheer scale of a completely new edition led to the decision to exclude everything which was not correspondence in the narrow sense. As things have turned out Wallmann’s machine is turning out work of surpassing editorial quality, while Blaufuss’s reprint edition will be giving service for many years before its rival is completed. This experience affects one’s judgement of the other items in the collection. The Spener essays are not out-dated, but are somewhat overshadowed by what has come since; British scholars are likely to find the smaller studies on Hus, the Pastorius’ father and son and Breckling more interesting. And there is one essay which bears directly on the

sort of British history which seems never to get written - the reports which Samuel Urlsperger extracted from the Salzburger exiles in Georgia and had published. These were subject to a process of censorship in Halle, with a view to keeping up the spirits of subscribers. Blaufuss’s meticulous disentangling of all this, aided by American editors, is characteristic, and leads to the surprising conclusion that Wesley’s rather threadbare account is in some ways preferable.

Petersfield
W. R. Ward

Maîtrises et chapelles aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Des institutions musicales au service de dieu. Edited by Bernard Dompnier. Pp. 568. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2003. €35 (paper). 2845162138
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Most of the twenty-nine essays in this collection concern ‘the lost world’ of the musical establishments of the great French non-monastic churches, especially the choir schools, under the ancien régime. Remarkably numerous (many hundreds, it seems), and ever more costly as standards rose, they combined ‘a multitude of functions which our age has divided up, and were at one and the same time conservatories, junior schools, boarding establishments, seminaries, committees for communal festivals’ (p. 165). They were often musically undistinguished and sometimes unruly, but they trained and employed the majority of musicians; their efforts made church services more attractive; and they offered a quasi-clerical education to mainly local boys from modest backgrounds, some of whom went on to higher things, musically or ecclesiastically. Most of the essays in the volume concern particular churches or localities. Philippe Lescat, for example, shows that in the churches of Paris, exceptionally, all the personnel had had to submit to a competition before being appointed, and standards were no doubt generally higher than elsewhere. But at Amiens cathedral, as we learn from Frédéric Billiet, the past glories of its music were self-consciously emulated by the eighteenth-century establishment. There are chapters on the musical efforts of companies of priests (Stéphane Gomis) and noble canonesses (Gilles Deregnaucourt). One essay only concentrates on the music that was sung, in seventeenth-century cathedrals (Jean Duron). In the last section eight chapters describe similar institutions in Italy, Spain, Portugal, New Spain and Lutheran Germany. The volume is full of fascinating, archive-based information, and the editor has ensured some consistency in the subjects dealt with: recruitment, for example, is discussed by many of the authors. The editor’s introduction and the article by Philippe Loupès make some attempt at generalisation of the results of all this research. But at least one major issue is unresolved. For Loupès the story comes to a dead stop in 1790, while Nicole Desgranges, writing about Saint-Quentin, provides a coda on the revival of church music in the city after 1799. This phenomenon must be observable elsewhere. Maîtrises et chapelles is a truly innovative book, deserving of wide attention. An English reviewer, however, must express regret that, at a conference on this theme in 2001, no author so much as mentioned McManners’s Church and society in eighteenth-century France (1998), which is not only by miles the best book on its subject but contains a characteristically well-based and elegant section on cathedral music and musicians. It would have been valuable to have a French reaction - friendly or critical - to the synthesis to be found in this magisterial work, but that it should be simply ignored

seems to bear out every criticism of the insularity of French historians. There seems also an element of perversity in offering comparisons with Lutheran Germany and New Spain while making no reference to the Church of England.

Sidney Sussex College, Derek Beales
CAMBRIDGE

The prince and the infanta. The cultural politics of the Spanish match. By Glyn Redworth. Pp. xiv +200 incl. 18 ills +25 colour plates. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2003. £25. o 300 IOI98 8
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A study such as this is long overdue. Richly descriptive, beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, it makes the fullest, most detailed and best documented account of Prince Charles’s failed bid to win the hand of the Infanta María during his sojourn in Spain in 1623. The basic argument is more or less in line with that of S. R. Gardiner: the wedding negotiations were misconceived from the start; the decision to make the journey was due to Charles’s foolishness and James’s respect for Stuart gallantry; the tortured path of negotiations in Spain was determined by vanity and ambition; Olivares alone masterminded the resistance and kept nearly everyone else in the dark; and England’s potential involvement in the Thirty Years’ War was little more than an excuse for Charles’s decision to pull out of the deal. More could have been done to justify the subtitle. Explicit discussion of ‘cultural politics’ entails a single sentence on the first page of the prologue. Readers are then left to their own devices to decide what does or does not constitute ‘the warp and weft’ of cultural politics throughout the rest of the book. Numerous arguments interlace the narrative, and many are incontestable. At times, however, the author makes statements that cry out for further explanation: for example, ‘James needed an alliance with Spain more than ever to save him from his subjects and a war in the Palatinate.’ Other interpretations are open to debate, but this is to be expected in any monograph devoted to such a complex and contorted subject.

Desales University, Brennan C. PurSELL
Pennyslvania

The English radical imagination. Culture, religion, and revolution, 1630-1660. By Nicholas McDowell. (Oxford English Monographs.) Pp. ix + 219. Oxford: Clarendon, 2003. £45. o 199260516
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904822188
In The English radical imagination, Nicholas McDowell argues that some of the most important radical writers in mid seventeenth-century England, who frequently portrayed themselves as uneducated and who were regarded as such both by their contemporaries and later historians, were in fact far from unlearned, and had either attended one of the universities or become acquainted with the key texts of humanist learning through their own private study. From a detailed textual analysis of the works of the Leveller, Richard Overton, the Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, and the Quaker, Samuel Fisher, he demonstrates how these authors repeatedly bit the hand

that had fed them by employing the textual, rhetorical and linguistic skills they had acquired at Oxford or Cambridge to attack these same universities for their privileging of an elitist, Latinate learning and their sanctioning of clerical claims to a monopoly of theological truth. McDowell also suggests that, even though Overton’s fellow Leveller, William Walwyn, had not attended a university, he too should be seen as a partaker in the mainstream academic culture of his day, as he had acquired a high level of learning through his own private study of noted humanist authors, in particular Montaigne. This latter suggestion is, however, rather less convincing; for while Walwyn possessed the means to acquire an extensive library and was undoubtedly well-read, he was predominantly self-taught and, as McDowell himself points out, the fact that Walwyn remained unable to read Latin was enough to condemn him as illiteratus. McDowell’s conclusion is that ‘literacy begot heresy, not vice versa’, and that the explosion of radical writings during the 1640 and early 1650 should be ascribed less to the fact that the breakdown of press censorship had made visible a long-established underground radical tradition dating back to the Lollards, and more to the fact that increased numbers had attended the universities during the 1630 and that some of these new students had been exposed to literary influences which led them on to challenge current orthodoxies. This thesis, which bears more than a passing similarity to Thomas Hobbes’s explanation for the emergence of subversive ideas in the mid-seventeenth century, is eloquently and persuasively argued, and all future accounts of seventeenth-century radical thought will have to take account of it. But, as McDowell acknowledges, if the radical writers he discusses were not in fact illiterati, a number of others, such as Lawrence Clarkson, Gerrard Winstanley and George Fox, could still genuinely claim to have acquired their theological beliefs primarily from their own undirected reading of Scripture, and their political and social beliefs from their witnessing of what they regarded as the harmful effects of the unequal distribution of wealth and power within their contemporary society. For if some of those who wanted to turn the mid seventeenthcentury world upside down had acquired their radical views from their immersion in elite humanist and classical culture, others had got them from a literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount, and others still as a direct response to the poverty and injustice they saw around them.

St Mary’s College, Christopher Durston
Twickenham

Fohn Winthrop. America’s forgotten founding father. By Francis J. Bremer. Pp. xviii + 478+16478+16 plates. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. £25. o 19514913 o
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: 10.1017/S0022046904832184
John Winthrop, of course, is not forgotten, though many Americans may well never have heard of him. The first (and twice) governor of Massachusetts, he was instrumental in setting off much of the burgeoning colony’s development. Students of colonial North America will welcome Bremer’s substantially fresh and welldocumented biography, which recognises that during his first four decades Winthrop was an Englishman in England and in America was an Englishman still during his last two. As for many others, ‘the land was his before he was the land’s’. Bremer

pursues Winthrop’s forebears back into fifteenth-century East Anglia and then on through the Tudors, when, with godly neighbours, they somewhat outpaced the state’s own Reformation. They were, in short, Puritans. In what Bremer calls the early Stuart ‘crackdown’ Winthrop himself is seen aspiring to reconcile worldly ambition with a tender conscience - he had a good supply of both. At length, attracted by the opportunity and the challenge of contributing to the formation of a godly community away in a ‘howling wildernnes’, in 1630 he took on the governorship from which more substantial men hung back. A central place is given to Winthrop’s acceptance ‘sermon’ on Christian charity. Little noted then, it was transformed by time and circumstance into a key American text, much anthologised and presidentially quoted. Its rather commonplace metaphor of ‘a city built upon a hill’ accompanied a view of a God demonstrating his power in the very diversity of the social order observed back in England and now to be continued in Massachusetts. Conveniently ‘God’s hand’ co-operated by intervening to devastate with smallpox the native population whose lands were (without embarrassment) being appropriated. As governor, Winthrop genuinely worked hard to maintain a religious unity soon threatened by the ‘upstart opinions’ of ‘enthusiasts’ (Bremer’s term) like Anne Hutchinson, disinclined to think it possible they might be mistaken. As new arrivals swelled the population and other colonies grew alongside, the problems of government became more intense, not eased by ‘the troubles’ back home in England. The 1640 s proved a ‘bitter-sweet’ time for Winthrop, who, Bremer fairly concludes, was a really good man but not the great one the situation demanded. Yet he did leave a discernible mark of his own upon the future Massachusetts. John Winthrop is well-constructed, balanced and persuasive - expertly proof-read, too. But it is unfortunate that the very last sentence is marred by an egregious slip. For ‘early sixteenth century’ read ‘seventeenth’.

University of Exeter
Ivan Roots

Prosperity and plunder. European Catholic monasteries in the age of revolution, 1650-1815. By Derek Beales. Pp. xviii +395 incl. 40 ills, 4 maps, i fig. and 5 tables + colour frontispiece and 9 colour plates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. £35. 0521590906

7EH (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904842180
Derek Beales’s important and impressively presented and illustrated book is written with a strong sense of mission. His purpose is to put right the historical perception of the monastic orders in Catholic Europe from the apogee of their power in the first half of the eighteenth century to the waves of persecution and dissolution that were visited upon them during the late eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. His point of departure, as stated with repeated emphasis throughout the book, is that the historiographical neglect of the multiple religious, social, economic and cultural roles performed by monasteries in Catholic regions of Europe amounts to ‘a grave distortion of history’ (p. 9). The religious orders, Beales argues, simply do not fit with our map of the eighteenth century, in which they are all too often perceived as the decadent debris of earlier times whose indolence and corruption provided the basis for the anticlerical attacks of Enlightenment satirists and their Revolutionary successors. Nor has the rediscovery in recent years of a

more nuanced religious history of the era done much to rescue the monks. Though he accepts that women’s history has focused attention on nuns, the ‘new religious history’ has concentrated overwhelmingly on the secular clergy and the beliefs of the laity, leaving in obscurity what Beales estimates to have been the 15,000 monasteries and 200,000 monks in Catholic Europe in 1750.

Beales’s impressively wide-ranging survey does much to right this omission. Though his centre of gravity is unmistakably and unsurprisingly in Germanspeaking Europe, and more especially in Austria, his intellectual curiosity leads him to provide chapters on the varied monastic cultures of Italy, the Iberian peninsula, France and the Austrian Netherlands. If one senses that by the time his tour reaches Naples and Portugal the author is skating on slightly thin ice, his enthusiastic commitment to his subject carries him through. Throughout, his focus is primarily on the male orders and, in his vivid descriptions of the Benedictine abbeys at Melk in Austria and of St Peter in Ghent, Beales triumphantly succeeds in recapturing the richness of the monastic life of the eighteenth century. He demonstrates not only the enormous place that monasteries occupied in the rural economies and spiritual and cultural life of Catholic Europe, but also the vigour of the institutions. The members of communities such as Melk did live in more splendid buildings and greater personal comfort than had been the case in previous centuries. Feasts were more frequent and the vows of poverty and celibacy sometimes regarded (at least in Italy) in a more relaxed manner. But it is a peculiarity of our own times which equates monasticism with an ascetic austerity. The monks of the eighteenth century were not necessarily personally or collectively decadent because their cells were sometimes heated or their stomachs occasionally over-full, and Beales stresses the religious, intellectual and cultural achievements of individual monks and monastic communities. Indeed, in what employees of the two institutions might be forgiven for regarding in the present political circumstances as a rather dangerous comparison, he describes the scientific and scholarly activities of certain monasteries of the ancien régime as rather akin to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge in their collective pursuit of learning.

If numbers of monks were rising in much of Europe, at least until around 1750, and their institutions confidently erecting new and imposing buildings, how then should we explain the subsequent despoilation of so many of the monasteries? Within forty years of their inauguration with substantial pomp by Louis xv in 1764, the buildings of the abbey of Ste Geneviève in Paris had become the Revolutionary Pantheon while many hundreds of monasteries in Germany and the Habsburg lands had been forcibly dissolved and their wealth sequestrated by the state or sold off to the highest bidder. For what he clearly regards as this wanton and unnecessary act of vandalism on a European scale, Beales holds Enlightenment pamphleteers and the ‘febrility’ (p. 245) of the legislators of the French National Assembly to blame. But he reserves his greatest ire for the rulers of Catholic Europe who, in collusion with a quiescent papacy, seized upon Enlightenment principles of rationalisation to close smaller monasteries and oblige monks to accept pensions or more ‘useful’ occupations as parish priests. Their principal purpose, however, was all too often the opportunistic one of state enrichment. When Charles III suppressed the Jesuits in Spain in 1767 in the aftermath of a dispute about their activities in Latin America or when the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire decided in February 1803 to place the property of all monastic orders at their disposal, the dictates of state self-interest were

more important than any ideological project. Seen in this way, the radical and abrupt diminution in the powers of the monastic orders at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first years of the subsequent century was less the by-product of Revolutionary zeal than the delayed consequence of the ascendancy of notions of absolute state sovereignty over the preceding centuries.

By reasserting the central role that monasticism occupied in ancien régime Europe, Beales is therefore also seeking to change the ways in which we think about the character of eighteenth-century Europe. His bold statement at the outset of chapter i that ‘It was in the middle years of the eighteenth century that the CounterReformation reached its apogee’ (p. 27) forms part of his wider concern to see the religious culture of the eighteenth century as the continuation of the trends of the previous two centuries. The vitality of the religious orders was reflective of the settled civilisation of Catholic Europe in which, regardless of the scurrilous attacks of illintentioned pamphleteers, monks and their communities formed an accepted element of the social landscape. Popular animosity towards the religious orders was, in Beales’s account, almost entirely absent, even during the French Revolution, and when their privileges were undermined by secular rulers, as in the Austrian Netherlands during the Josephist reforms of the 1780 os, the population rallied to their defence. Seen from the palatial windows of Melk, looking out over the Danube and its substantial estates, this is a perspective which makes much sense. It also, however, lends an indisputably partisan temper to the wealth and detail of Beales’s account. In the struggle at the end of the century between the monasteries and the secular rulers of Europe, Beales leaves his readers in no doubt as to where his sympathies lie. Echoing in his conclusion Edmund Burke’s lament for the lost world of French monasticism, he pleads retrospectively for the ‘halfway house’ which ought to have been possible between the excessive privileges of the monastic orders and the destructive ambitions of ‘philosophic spoilers, revolutionary vandals or powerhungry rulers’ (p. 315). It is an alluring historical daydream but also one which does imperfect justice to the complex intensity of the dynamics which at the end of the eighteenth century led to the suppression, albeit often temporary, of the religious orders in many areas of Catholic Europe. As this book so magnificently demonstrates, the monastic orders occupied too important a place in the landscape of eighteenth-century Europe to be the subject of historical nostalgia.

Balliol College, Martin Conway
OXFORD

La Paix clémentine. Défaite et victoire du premier jansénisme français sous le pontificat de Clément IX (I667-I669). By P. Dieudonné. (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 167.) Pp. xxxix +3 io. Louvain: Leuven University Press/ Louvain-Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2003. €70 (paper). 905867283 2; 90429 I238 3; 2877236963
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904852187
Given the degree of scholarly attention that Jansenism has received, one might have thought that there was no need for another chronicle of its turbulent history. However, the greatest virtue of P. Dieudonné’s study of the period before and just subsequent to the Clementine Peace or Paix de l’église (1669), as it is most commonly known, is to return the details of this tangled narrative to the mainstream academic

market. In truth, there is little in this book that a researcher familiar with seventeenth-century French Jansenism will not have found already in Saint-Beuve’s Port-Royal (Paris 1954) or in the standard biographies of the four Jansenist bishops. However, Dieudonné has made effective use of the Port-Royal archives in Utrecht, bringing into print again some original manuscripts of the principal Jansenist players in the Paix de l’église. Perhaps more important for those who have not spent long periods engrossed in Jansenist correspondence, hagiography and diatribes, Dieudonné’s publication provides detailed coverage of a tortuous series of events and a peace that only temporarily satisfied warring parties involved in the Formulary affair.

The book begins with a detailed commentary on the emergence of the antiJansenist Formulary that was designed to rid the Catholic Church of the neoAugustinian ‘heresy’ of Cornelius Jansen and his followers, most notably Antoine Arnauld and the Port-Royal communities. It then tracks the divisions that soon developed, not only between the French Church and Rome, but between the French Church and the monarchy and within the French Church itself, over this contentious attempt to construct the dogmatic limits of Catholicism. It is very well known that four members of the episcopate earned papal and royal wrath in the late 1660 for their adamant refusals to submit to the Formulary, or to force their clergy to do so, without an explanatory distinction between the droit and fait of the popes’ condemnations of Jansen’s Augustinus. Eventually, it seems that sheer exhaustion contributed to the papacy’s decision to back down, but even here the peace that was forged was not straightforward. Fearing that the French Church would become schismatic rather than submit to the Roman will, and hoping for Louis xiv’s aid against the Turks, Clement ix accepted the peace substantially brokered by three indefatigable French bishops (Gondrin, d’Estrées and Vialart), who were determined to have peace on almost any terms. This final section of the book is undoubtedly the most incisive; Dieudonné reminds the reader that the Peace is too often seen as bringing an abrupt end to hostility (at least for a time) when, in fact, months after the four Jansenist bishops had signed up to it, their enemies in Rome still hoped to persuade a wavering pope to reject their overture on the grounds that they had simply not capitulated. In fact, these enemies were absolutely right, for the quartet of bishops and their defenders regarded the Paix as an absolute victory for their camp and a categorical rejection of papal absolutism and infallibility. Ultimately, the papacy saw it in this light too; it emerged badly scarred by the experience and determined to avoid such an attack on papal authority again. Therein, as Dieudonné suggests, lay the long-term significance of the crisis for the Catholic Church.

University of Durham
Alison Forrestal

The Church of England in industrialising society. The Lancashire parish of Whalley in the eighteenth century. By M. F. Snape. (Studies in Modern British Religious History, 9.) Pp xii +228 incl. i fig. and io tables. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003. £50. I 84383 oI4 o
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This is a compact and thoroughly researched book, based upon the author’s Birmingham PhD of 1994. It proposes, based on the study of the Lancashire parish of

Whalley, that the Church of England lost the affection and allegiance of those living in populous, industrialised areas, and that this decline can be measured between 1689 and 1804. In addition to the historiography on the Church in the localities, the work is situated within the context of discussions of the Church as the bulwark of social and political order. Following Jonathan Clark, Snape argues that the fortunes of the Church in individual parishes demands attention, since it helps to explain the growth of ‘radicalism’ and the ‘constitutional upheavals’ that took place between 1828 and 1832 (p. 4). The six main chapters are arranged by theme, and are concerned with popular Anglicanism, folk Christianity, education, the courts and moral discipline, and the careers and income of the clergy. In all, the Church had to contend with an affluent laity willing to impose conditions on its material support of the Church, the rise of Methodism and the persistence of a variety of popular beliefs, the Mandevillean attack on charity and the subsequent decline of parish support for the poor, the encroachment of secular courts and statutes, and the deeply-rooted problem of the competence, support and morale of the clergy. How is the decline measured, especially in light of the fact that the Church faced similar challenges from the late sixteenth century onward? For Snape, the crux lies in the tone of visitation reports that told of ‘drunkenness’ and ‘Sabbathbreaking’, and of those who ‘absent themselves’ from ‘all Public worship’ (p. 193). Between 1778 and 1804, the year of Majendie of Chester’s visitation, the tone of the reports became ever more dour, and this is taken to signal decline.

While the book’s central chapters provide valuable insight into the inner workings of an eighteenth-century parish, it is less clear that these researches support the ambitious thesis put forth in the introduction and conclusion. The title implies that the theme of ‘industrialisation’ will bulk large in the argument, but it is not defined nor are its putative effects discussed here. Instead, the language in which the decline of the Church was expressed appears - based on the excerpts quoted here - to have had less to do with economic factors than with the persistent problem of the coherence of the Church as both doctrinally orthodox - the only show in town - and materially capable of sustaining this primacy. Since the study ends before the age of Reform, it is difficult to judge whether this was a true decline, or part of the larger story of the disruption of the Church which began immediately upon its reestablishment under Elizabeth I. That having been said, the value of this book lies in the light it sheds on the daily life of the Church in a prominent diocese, and the questions it will prompt readers to ask about the institution on the eve of Reform.

Queen’s University at Kingston
Charles W. A. Prior

The rise of evangelicalism. The age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys. By Mark A. Noll. (A History of Evangelicalism, i.) Pp. 316. Leicester: Apollos, 2004. £16.99. I 8447400 I 3
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So02204690487218X
The history of evangelicalism used to be largely the province of its modern descendants and denominational historians. Accounts of its manifestations by others tended to be rather unsympathetic or, so far as the eighteenth century origins were concerned, a matter of qualified commendation for its challenge to the allegedly moribund condition of the contemporary Churches. With revisionism now well

under way for the Church of England, the work of the early revivalists may perhaps appear somewhat less necessary. Yet their importance, at least as an alternative style of Christianity is, if anything, increased by recent developments in its American version. Happily for students of the subject, it has in recent years moved closer to the mainstream of historical scholarship. Mark Noll has made valuable contributions to this process, though he modestly acknowledges that the present work is ‘undergirded’ by leading scholars in the field. Despite the subtitle this is much more than a study of a few great names. It is in fact the first of a projected fivevolume history of evangelicalism. Though focused on the English-speaking world, recognition is given to Pietist pressures and the way in which Moravians often spearheaded developments in the rest of the evangelical world. The final volume in the series (on ‘global influences’) will presumably cover missionary expansion, already foreshadowed in the present volume. To define evangelicalism, Noll follows the influential formula of David Bebbington in Evangelicalism in modern Britain (1989): conversionism, biblicism, activism, crucicentrism. Although this has proved its value as a guide, Professor W. R. Ward has recently offered an important corrective, emphasising some of the discontinuities in evangelical history, notably from eschatology and mysticism (see his ‘Evangelical identity in the eighteenth century’, in D. M. Lewis [ed.], Christianity reborn: the global expansion of evangelicalism in the twentieth century, Grand Rapids 2004). Noll’s is a broadly narrative account dealing with the origins, development and diffusion of early evangelicalism and is particularly useful for correlating events in different parts of the transatlantic world and their interconnections. The importance of Africans, women and lay people is freshly emphasised and theology, hymns and personal experience briefly characterised. There is also a valuable chapter on ‘explanations’ for the rise of the movement. While emphasising that this was at heart a religious movement, centrally concerned with changing lives and providing spiritual nurture, careful consideration is given to the political, social and economic factors which, while not ‘explaining’ the movement in any simple way (as has sometimes been implied) certainly helped to shape its character and timing. This, like much else in the book, suggests a programme for further research. Meanwhile, we are offered a readable, up-to-date, sympathetic but also realistic account of a significant religious movement.

Manchester
Henry D. Rack

Papacy and politics in eighteenth-century Rome. Pius VI and the arts. By Jeffrey Collins. Pp. xxii +355 incl. 187 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. £60. o 521809436
7ˇEH(56)2005\check{7} E H(56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904882186
Collins’s ‘story begins and ends’ with Giovanni Angelo Braschi, Pope Pius vi, whose pontificate lasted from 1775 for a period of almost twenty-five years. Collins argues that Pius’ artistic patronage and his political and economic policies were carefully synchronised; that Pius’ many visual campaigns were not a matter of taste, but rather part of a wider papal policy for Rome and her territories. The book is organised thematically into six chapters. A short opening chapter ‘Politics and possibilities’ surveys the strategies Pius implemented for reforming the infrastructure of the papal government and to counter attacks from outside, specifically from

Jansenism and Josephism. The following four chapters focus on Rome: on Pius’ images of sovereignty, his completion of St Peter’s, his involvement in the creation of the papal museum and the realisation of his vision for the urban fabric of the Eternal City. The final chapter, ‘Creating a nation’, shifts to the provincial projects orchestrated and overseen annually by the pope, including the modernised new town and Borgio Pio at Terracina. At the end of chapter iii, ‘Completing St Peter’s’, Collins refers to the posthumous Monument to Pius VI, by Antonio Canova and Adamo Tadolini, 1817-22. Unable to rescue Pius’ monument from the sacre grotte of St Peter’s, where the former pope kneels and prays to a fluorescent light, rather than the dome of Michelangelo in the Confessio where it was formerly situated, Collins’s narrative deftly recovers Pius’ reliance on the arts in a period when the papacy’s secular and spiritual authority was diminished. In other words, how Pius used the arts as a form of propaganda to maximise the symbolic prestige of the papacy. Much of Collins’s narrative relies on unpublished sources unearthed in archives in Rome. This enables him to discuss a number of schemes for the exteriors and interiors of the papal palaces and museums, some of which were executed, others, never bought to fruition, lost or destroyed by bombing. The text, consisting of lengthy descriptions, can be difficult to follow, as when Collins discusses Marchionni’s work at St Peter’s and reconstructs an eighteenth-century visit to the Museo Pio-Clementino. His contention that the architectural embellishments at St Peter’s translated Pius’ vision for the papacy into bricks and mortar might have been clarified with a map or diagram. Elsewhere, the text is generously illustrated, with 187 black-and-white images. Collins’s is an engrossing narrative, packed with examples of visual culture - architecture, interiors, paintings, sculptures, furniture, medals, bronzes, inscriptions, busts, liturgical plate and inkstands - that are testimony to the visual ambition of Pius’ political vision for Rome. Well-known Roman artists like Pompeo Batoni and the goldsmith Luigi Valadier are discussed alongside lesser-known figures in Rome’s cultural elite. Like Pius touring the workshops of the Roman artists he patronised, Collins takes us through Pius’ ambitious artistic schemes for maintaining the increasingly rhetorical power of the papacy.

University of Edinburgh
ViCcy Coliman

Itinerant temples. Tent Methodism, 1814-1832. By John K. Lander. (Studies in Evangelical History and Thought.) Pp. xix +268 . Carlisle-Waynesboro, Ga: Paternoster, 2003. £19.99 (paper). I 84227 I5I 2
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So022046904892182
A rewritten doctoral thesis (Open University 1999), this invaluable book is the only systematic study of Tent Methodism, a minor and short-lived secession from early nineteenth-century Wesleyan Methodism, hitherto largely known through a biography (1865) of John Pyer, its second most important leader, written by his daughter Kate. A lay evangelistic movement, originating in Bristol in April I8I4 under George Pocock, it deployed two portable tents to mission the rural poor at eighty locations in Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Hampshire during its first five years. Operating outwith the preaching plan, it incurred opposition from official Wesleyanism after 1815, and by early 1820 the conflict with the district and circuit authorities was so fierce that the three most prominent Tent

Methodist local preachers (Pocock, Pyer and Samuel Smith) were effectively expelled. Tent Methodism quickly established itself as an independent sect, around mid-April 1820, and enjoyed a few years of relative success, missioning some fifty additional places and founding societies in thirty-four between 1820 and 1824, in Bristol, Bath, London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, as well as Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Monmouthshire. Chapels replaced tents and an estimated peak membership of 3,500 was reached in December 1825, a combination of new converts and defectors from Wesleyanism. By 1826 decline had commenced, and within six years the Tent Methodists had disposed of all their tents and chapels. Pocock rejoined the Wesleyans and Pyer became a Congregational minister; many members probably returned or transferred to the Wesleyans. In painstaking detective work, Lander has combed a wide variety of primary and secondary sources for scraps of evidence about Tent Methodism. However, he has been unable to trace the Tent Methodist Magazine for 1824 and a history of the sect referred to in Pyer’s biography. He has also apparently missed a few extant pamphlets, such as Pocock’s satirical The Methodist pill (1820), in the British Library; and To all who are concerned for the spread of our redeemer’s kingdom (1821), in the John Rylands Library. Lander tells the story of the movement in a series of chronological chapters, generally well-written, albeit a trifle wordy. They are interspersed with some analysis, including comparisons with the Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians. One major difference was the absence of female ministry in Tent Methodism, another the educated and wealthy nature of its leadership, and yet another its increasingly Congregational polity. The penultimate chapter is good in explaining the demise of Tent Methodism, attributed to Pocock’s lessening interest (as he focused on his inventions), the loss of key preachers, lack of geographical coherence (thereby dissipating resources), tendencies to local autonomy, burdens of chapel management and denominational indistinctiveness. A final chapter, on the significance of the Tent Methodists in the early nineteenth-century religious scene, somewhat overstates their achievements. Seven appendices list, inter alia, the places reached by Tent Methodist preaching, their societies, their preachers and the membership of Wesleyan circuits affected by Tent Methodism. The bibliography is rather muddled in arrangement and omits some key primary sources cited in the footnotes.

The British Library,
Clive D. Field
LONDON

The Romanesque revival. Religion, politics, and transnational exchange. By Kathleen Curran. Pp. xxvii +364 incl. 180 figs +8 colour plates. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. $80. o 271 o2215 9
7EH(56)7 E H(56) 2005; DOI: 10.1017/S0022046904902187
In 1828 the German architect Heinrich Hübsch asked a question that would resonate throughout the century - In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? His answer was the Romanesque; the Rundbogenstil of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Not everyone agreed with him, of course. The gothic and the Greek, the Italianate and the Roman all had their champions too. But Hübsch and his allies were remarkably successful at defining, defending and exporting their distinctive architectural approach.

Moreover, as Kathleen Curran argues, their success represented more than just an aesthetic achievement. The adoption of Rundbogenstil architecture - the making of a Romanesque revival - reflected wider social, cultural and religious changes in Germany, America and beyond. The story starts, as is only right and proper, with Hübsch himself. His defence of the Romanesque rested on a number of assumptions: that it was functionally superior, theologically appropriate, morally sound and eminently suited to the German national character. These claims were taken up first in Catholic Bavaria and then in Protestant Prussia. Both Ludwig i of the former and Friedrich Wilhelm iv of the latter then exported this thoroughly German style to America. At the same time, Curran argues, a Romanesque revival was being fomented in England. Here, as in Europe, the Rundbogenstil was justified by reference to its early Christian origins and promulgated in contrast to the gothic enthusiasms of High Churchmen. This, the book continues, was a tendency which was magnified in America, where ‘Low Church Episcopalians and Calvinist denominations facilitated a preference for the round arch over the pointed arch that led to a national movement’ (p. 220). It was a tendency which was equally exemplified in the building of the Smithsonian and in Trinity Church, Boston. ‘Far from being a narrowly American phenomenon’, the author asserts, ‘the ecclesiastical Romanesque Revival was part of a widespread northern European movement, most vividly expressed in Prussia and in England. The intention was to modernize Protestantism through a sweeping Calvinization which would bring the church back to its early principles and release it from Catholic, ritualist practices’ (p. 293). It is a striking conclusion to a fascinating and wonderfully well-produced book. Not all of it, though, is wholly convincing. Curran is simply far better on Germany - which takes up more than half of the book - than she is on England or America. Further work on both would have been extremely useful. It might, for example, have widened the focus of her highly original and important section on the American Romanesque. It might also have corrected a number of mistakes which mar the passages on England. A look at Tim Mowl’s 198I Oxford DPhil. on the Norman revival or at Clyde Binfield’s work on Nonconformist architecture would have immensely improved the argument. None the less, it would be graceless to deny the importance or the usefulness of The Romanesque revival. This is a splendidlyresearched, engaging account, which fills a real gap in the literature and will be of genuine value to anyone interested in nineteenth-century architecture.

St John’s College, William Whyte OXFORD

The Oxford Movement. A thematic history of the Tractarians and their times. By C. Brad Faught. Pp. xi +184 incl. 8 ills. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. $29.95. o 27 I 022493
7EH(56)7 E H(56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/S0022046904912183
The subject of the Oxford Movement and of its leading protagonists, notably John Henry Newman, partly thanks to the happy coincidence of various anniversary commemorations, has enjoyed almost a surfeit of scholarly attention in recent years. In view of this, one has to ask whether there is room for yet another study with any claim to originality either in terms of sources utilised, evidence uncovered, or

analysis and interpretation conveyed? The author of this work makes no ambitious claim to such originality, and nor need it be judged by that yardstick. For, as he rightly argues (p. xi), the ever burgeoning bibliography on the subject in itself engenders a periodic need for a modern, brief, synthetic account of the main personalities, events and issues. Judged on these more modest terms, this book fulfils its promise and purpose, even if in this respect it somewhat overlaps with the content and replicates the methodology of George Herring’s What was the Oxford Movement? (Continuum 2002). Faught, however, admirably draws together the many different strands of the Oxford Movement by means of a thematic approach, devoting five chapters to an examination of the important categories of politics, religion and theology, friendship, society and missions. The chronology rarely strays (except, necessarily, in the last chapter) from the core twelve-year span, 1833 to 1845 , originally assigned and conceptualised as the era of the Oxford Movement by Dean Church in his classic The Oxford Movement: twelve years (1891). The result is a balanced and integrated overview, deftly combining analysis with narrative, within a coherent thematic framework. The primary focus might be on context, events and personalities, but the overriding ideas and practices of the movement as it evolved are not neglected.

Faught gives pride of place to the political background, context and milieu, which did so much to provide the original impetus to the Oxford Movement, acknowledging his debt in this respect to several contemporary scholars such as Owen Chadwick. However, the absence of any reference to Christopher Dawson’s seminal Spirit of the Oxford Movement (1933), which so perceptively highlighted the Oxford Tory and High Church political inspiration for much in early Tractarianism, is somewhat surprising, especially given the mention of Geoffrey Faber’s reductionist and Freudian psycho-historical Oxford Apostles published in the same year.

It is perhaps inevitable that in a work which attempts to cover so much - High Churchmanship, the study of patristics, pastoral and devotional practice, lay activism, the revival of sisterhoods and the monastic life, architecture and aesthetics, ritualism and church furnishings - some elements of what constituted ‘Tractarianism’ receive better coverage than others. Faught gives Newman’s sermons sensitive attention (pp. 59-6I) and touches on key doctrinal questions such as the apostolical succession and justification, along with the ascetical and liturgical aspects of the Oxford Movement, but such issues tend to be raised within the narrative of controversies as they arose. He mentions (though does not develop) the importance of the notion of the ‘communitarian Church’ in Tractarian theology (p. 56), but in general perhaps gives less than due space to the core theological dimension of the Oxford Movement, especially its characteristic sacramental theology, mysticism and emphasis on ethos (those facets of Tractarianism which most set it apart from the characteristic ‘high and dry’ churchmanship as well as Evangelicalism and liberalism of the day), at least in comparison to his admirable treatment of the Movement’s political aspects and also of its leading personalities. One also missed more extended treatment of some of the questions recently raised by Frank Turner’s provocative study, John Henry Newman: the challenge to evangelical religion (New Haven 2003), such as the extent to which the Oxford Movement was primarily an assault upon Evangelical Protestantism and not merely rooted in opposition to the erastianism and liberalism of the day, as conventionally presented. Faught’s study might also have been enriched by considering how far the compass of

the Oxford Movement might be understood to have been, at least implicitly and unconsciously, pointed in the direction of Rome, rather than in defence of a mere party within the establishment, as Newman argued in his Lectures on Anglican difficulties (1851), as the Oxford Movement’s Protestant critics notoriously alleged. Dawson presented some compelling evidence for this view in his Spirit of the Oxford Movement. For Dawson, Hurrell Froude’s via ultima was as much central to the Tractarian message as Newman’s concept of via media. In so far as Faught engages in this debate, his understanding of the Oxford Movement appears to be the somewhat conventional one of so many of its later hagiographers (notably of the 1933 centenary vintage): a chapter in the history of Anglo-Catholicism rather than an important seed-bed of conversions to Rome (a dimension almost ignored in this study). Newman’s conversion is given minimal treatment and there is no mention of his doctrine of development which overturned his earlier allegiance to the via media. Moreover, there is also little reference to the many recent local studies of the Oxford Movement ‘on the ground’ or in the parishes, pioneered by Nigel Yates, George Herring and, most recently, by Jeremy Morris and Frances Knight, which have done so much to enrich our understanding of the Oxford Movement.

Faught’s final conclusions, given as an ‘afterword’, are rather brief and uncontentious. None the less, his last chapter on missions, with its discussion of how the principles of the Oxford Movement were carried overseas through Tractarian influence on the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) and eventually several key colonial bishoprics, represents his most original contribution to the historiography on the subject. Faught is especially insightful in showing how far the Tractarians overcame an early mistrust of overseas missionary endeavour partly caused by its associations with their Evangelical opponents and exacerbated by Newman’s own well-known break with the Church Missionary Society in 1830. One hopes that this fascinating chapter, in which the author goes beyond the role of synthesiser, will provide the basis of a more extended study of a still somewhat neglected aspect of the Oxford Movement and its legacy.

University of Manchester
Peter Nockles

All things human. Henry Codman Potter and the social gospel in the Episcopal Church. By Michael Bourgeois. (Studies in Anglican History.) Pp. ix +292. Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. $34-95. o 252 o2877 5
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/So02204690492218X
Henry Codman Potter (1835-1908) was the seventh episcopal bishop of New York and the scion of an important ecclesiastical family. His father had been bishop of Pennsylvania and he succeeded his uncle as bishop of New York. Henry Potter was the bishop of the most influential diocese of the Episcopal Church during a period when Church and Nation flourished. The public status of the Episcopal Church was at or near its peak. The United States was emerging as an industrial and world power. Potter was known as the ‘citizen bishop’ because he never confined himself strictly to the ecclesiastical sphere. He worked for moral and political reform and improved industrial relations. Earlier biographers had considered Potter as the church parallel of Teddy Roosevelt, the reforming police commissioner of New York and later president of the United States. Bourgeois states that this book 'is not a

biography’, and he examines in detail Potter’s activity in five areas: the institutional Church, race and immigration, women and moral reform, political reform and industrial relations. The book has a two-part thesis: to show that Broad Churchmen, such as Potter, continued the tradition of the moderate Evangelicals of the antebellum Episcopal Church, and secondly, to demonstrate that the Broad Church movement’s focus on ‘practical Christianity’ was not an escape from theology, but a legitimate and distinct theological expression. Bourgeois tackles his subject with vigour and provides many valuable insights to this little-studied period in the history of the Episcopal Church. His book provides a thoughtful contribution to the ongoing dialogue on the history of Episcopal Church in the United States, following in the tradition of R. Bruce Mullin, Diana Butler and Allen Guelzo. However, Bourgeois only partially completes his tasks and the work suffers from some irritating and limiting shortcomings. The book would have benefited from a tighter structure: it too often jumps between eras and personages. Bourgeois is prone to extending his conclusions beyond prudent limits of the available evidence. He expends too much effort establishing the continuity of the Broad Church movement with the earlier Evangelicals. The result is that he fails adequately to consider the new intellectual and theological challenges of the era on Potter and the Episcopal Church. Bourgeois also minimises Henry Potter as churchman, so that he seems isolated from the contemporary intellectual and ecclesiastical movements of the Episcopal Church. Finally, Bourgeois demonstrates a lack of awareness of and sensitivity to the distinctive Anglican ethos, particularly the relationship of Church and Society. The author ignores the increasingly ‘establishment’ character of the Episcopal Church in this period and the influence of this on Potter. For example, Bourgeois fails to grasp the radical implications of Potter’s support for the cathedral movement, regarded by many as the importation of an un-American institution. Overall, Bourgeois concentrates too much on Potter as ‘citizen’ and not enough on Henry Codman Potter as ‘bishop’.

The General Theological Seminary,
Ronald B. Young
New York

Pentecostal and charismatic studies. A reader. By William K. Kay and Anne E. Dyer. Pp. xxxiii +332 . London: SCM Press, 2004. E25\mathcal{E}_{25} (paper). 0334029406 7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904932186
William Kay and Anne Dyer both work at the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies at the University of Wales, Bangor, and this book grew out of Kay’s desire for a reader to put into the hands of his students there. The volume will be welcomed by others teaching in the field. It is clearly organised, with helpful introductions to the various sections provided by the two editors. An initial, brief section on the history of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movements is followed by more extensive treatment of various aspects of the movements’ theology, including chapters on eschatology, healing and charismatic gifts. The next section looks at ‘Theology in practice’, covering everything from beliefs about holiness to the practice of evangelism, while the fourth and final section contains a selection of documents on issues such as ecumenism, prosperity, social concern, morality and spiritual warfare. The book also contains an annotated bibliography, a glossary and a timeline, all of which will prove useful to students. It should be noted, however,

that Kay and Dyer have focused almost entirely on Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the English-speaking world. The editors are straightforward about their omission of material from the Churches of the developing world, and express their hope that scholars from Latin America and Asia will ‘compile their own collections in due time’. Nevertheless, a single reader encompassing the variety of global Pentecostalism could still be of great value for those wanting to introduce students to the breadth of Pentecostal thought and experience.

Westmont College,
Alister Chapman
Santa Barbara

Scholarship and faith. A tale of two grandfathers. By Maurice Wiles. Pp. xiii +167 incl. io ills + pull-out genealogical table. Cambridge: Biograph, 2003. £12.50. I 90398 I oi 8
7EH7 E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.ioi7/Soo22046904942182

It is only recently, Maurice Wiles tells us, reflecting on his own academic career in retirement, that he has come to think of himself as following in the footsteps of his two grandfathers. He then set out to discover as much as he could about them. The result, at one level, is simply a piece of family history. He never knew them himself and they did not know or meet one another. At first sight, they might have seemed two of a kind. Both were Oxbridge classical scholars and both became Christian preachers and ministers. One, however, became a Strict and Particular Baptist pastor, first in Cambridge and then in Devizes, while the other ministered to rural parishes in Dorset. The former was essentially the minister of a gathered congregation, the latter the minister of a parish. The pattern of their activities and of their family lives reflected that difference. The picture of the two men that the author has been able to build up from different sources is by no means complete but certainly sufficient to establish their characters and some of their family and wider relationships. We see how, in one case, small differences (as they now appear) between brothers concerning ways of preaching, in the light of a high Calvinist doctrine of election, could lead to an irreparable parting. Yet what makes this more than a family memoir is the fact that both men, though not pursuing academic careers, were scholarly. They could not avoid the issues for faith which emerged from the scholarship of their time. Their evaluations of that impact were, however, as Wiles puts it, ‘poles apart’. The material available makes the negative Baptist reaction come through most strongly. The other grandfather, it would appear, anchored as he believed in the traditional faith of the Church, was prepared to show very considerable freedom in evaluating the character of the biblical texts. What gives the book additional interest is the concluding piece of autobiography in which the author sketches his own career and intellectual development. The answers he has arrived at take him far beyond the standpoints of either grandfather, though there can still be a kind of dialogue with some of their concerns. We may think that our intellectual convictions stem from the application of pure reason, but this account suggests we can only properly understand them when, for good or ill, they are situated in the inescapable network of families and communities.

University of Wales, Keith Robbins
LAMPETER

Russian Orthodoxy on the eve of revolution. By Vera Shevzov. Pp. xi+358 incl. 29 figs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. £30. o 19 5154657
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904952189
Caught between the condescension of the intelligentsia in the nineteenth century and the unrelenting hostility of the Soviet state in the twentieth, the Orthodox Church has, with a few notable exceptions, been poorly served by historians. On both sides of the historical divide of 1917, historians have seen the Church as an obscurantist institution which presided over a population whose Christianity was little more than a veneer for paganism. Vera Shevzov’s magisterial new survey of Orthodoxy in the half century before the Revolution has provided an important corrective to these simplifications. Drawing on national, local and diocesan archives, some of which have only recently become accessible, Shevzov has produced an authoritative account of a vibrant, dynamic and complex period of church history. Her book is organised around five ‘sacred centres’ which stand at the heart of Orthodox life: the community, the church building or temple as she calls it, chapels, feasts and icons. By examining these Shevzov is able to put before us a fascinating picture of a Church which simultaneously was divided over precisely what being Orthodox meant and how Orthodoxy should be lived but shared a vision of itself as a single community of believers. In essence, according to Shevzov the Orthodox Church experienced in the nineteenth century the debates over authority within the Church that had been going on in the west since the Reformation. Shevzov demonstrates convincingly that the laity, including the peasantry, were not bystanders to these debates but were passionately involved in matters that were of exceptional importance to them. Her account of popular religion shows that far from being a pagan survival it was wholly within the broad mainstream of official Christianity. Points of emphasis naturally differed at the local and national levels, but this did not undermine a deep sense that what united the Church was more important than what divided it. For the peasantry Orthodoxy was an integral part of peasant identity, offering solace in a difficult life, tying present generations to past and future ones and providing a profound emotional attachment to the immediate locality. Shevzov’s book makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of religion in imperial Russia on many levels. She shows how important the Church remained in Russia on the eve of the Revolution not just in institutional terms or as part of the state apparatus but in the daily lives of millions of ordinary people. The Church certainly was beset by problems as has been endlessly pointed out, but it also possessed enormous resources not least the devotion of millions of ordinary people.

University of YORK
Shane O’Rourke

Un cristiano sul trono di Pietro. Studi storici su Giovanni XXIII. Edited by Enzo Bianchi, Lucia Butturini, Enrico Galavotti, Agostino Giovagnoli, Valeria Martano, Andrea Riccardi, Giuseppe Ruggieri, Micol Tancini and Alberto Melloni. Pp. 399 incl. 9 ills. Bologna: Servitium/Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII, 2003. €30. 88 8i66 2108
FEH\mathcal{F} E H (56) 2005; DOI: io.1017/So022046904962185
Nine distinguished Italian historians (the editors) provide an excellent status quaestionis on studies of Pope John xxili. For some time anglophone readers relied largely on his autobiographical Journal of a soul (1965), translated from Il giornale dell’anima (1964),

and Peter Hebblethwaite’s John XXIII: pope of the council (1984). Over the years, however, much work has been done in collecting and ordering his extensive personal papers - including his correspondence and sermons - which are now preserved at the diocesan seminary in Bergamo and, for the most part as copies, at the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII in Bologna. Pope John was beatified in 2000 and the process produced considerable further documentation. In addition, the pope and facets of his short pontificate have been the subject of numerous secondary studies. The result in the present volume is no revolution of interpretation but many of the known features are broadened and deepened. While Roncalli remained proud of his country roots in the Bergamo region, any lingering myth of a simple peasant is finally laid to rest. Indeed his going to minor seminary at a tender age meant uprooting and the permanent tension in his life between natural affinities, and the responsibilities given to him, is evident throughout the book. His reading was wide and inquisitive: of English writers his favourite was John Henry Newman, though he seems to have been limited to French translations of works by and about him. He was a respected church historian, both as seminary professor and scholar, notably as editor of the Atti of Charles Borromeo. He wrote on many other topics, especially those of a pastoral and spiritual nature. The broadening influence upon him, and an ability to relate to peoples of different beliefs and outlooks, resulting from his over twenty years as apostolic delegate in Bulgaria and Turkey, is well brought out, as is his skilful tenure as nuncio in post-war France. His theology and spirituality are seen as both traditional and open to the ‘signs of the times’. The Church was to be seen as a fountain or garden rather than a museum (p. 260), theology was above all ‘liturgia meditata, al alimento della vita cristiana’ (p. 274). In personal and political terms, in the affairs of both Church and State, he empathised with both right and left, conservatives and progressives. Thus is dispelled another myth, that of the conscious revolutionary liberal except in the sense that every Christian is revolutionary. In turn, a very wide range of people could relate with him. Two chapters describe the process of his beatification and the contents of his archives. The photographs taken at different stages of his life are particularly well chosen.

Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Norman Tanner Rome