Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. ��, No. �, October ����. Printed in the United Kingdom# Cambridge University Press

Reviews

A history of heaven. The singing silence. By Jeffrey Burton Russell. Pp. xv­­ills. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . £. ($±).

The author of a four-volume study of Satan, as well as a A history of witchcraft,turns now to explore the other side. After a brief consideration of Jewish sources,Jeffrey Russell traces the concept of heaven within Christian tradition, ending inthe fourteenth century with ‘the highest expression of the tradition’, Dante’sParadiso. His chapters move quickly from one era to another, summarising thespeculations of theologians in the east and west, juxtaposing medieval visionswith the analytic work of the schoolmen, and concluding with the poet whoseemingly brings everything together. Along the way Russell considers relatedtopics : free will and grace, the angelic orders, the status of the body in theafterlife, cosmology. Although his volume contains a number of illustrations, heis interested primarily in texts, in verbal imagery rather than in the rich historyof visual representation. By ending with the early fourteenth century, moreover,Russell stops at the same historical moment as Jacques Le Goff in The birth ofpurgatory (), who similarly concludes his study of the afterlife with a synopsisof the relevant canticle and an apotheosis of its author. But what about thecontinuing development of the idea of heaven since Dante? In his preface Russellsays that the present effort is but a prolegomenon to a detailed, multi-volumestudy, presumably with the scholarly apparatus that goes along with suchendeavours but that is missing here. Perhaps in this subsequent work he will bringhis research forward in time, as Colleen McDannell and Barnhard Lang do inHeaven: a history (). But even if Russell does consider the ongoing story, theresult promises to be different. McDannell and Lang, he says, ‘offered sociologicalinsights but grasped little of the interiority of the subject ’ (p. xiv) ; he, by contrast,looks at heaven from the inside, from the position of personal commitment. Thisadvocacy for his subject indeed produces a kind of devotional scholarship thatmay well disconcert readers who expect a dispassionate overview of the topic ;they will find instead a passionate author unwilling to assume any neutral,middle distance. The book’s full title, in fact, advertises the bipolarity of Russell’sapproach. A history of heaven suggests the rhetorical plain style of an historian ofideas who will stick to the ‘ facts ’ ; the subtitle, however, hints that Russell hasother ways to do history. Thus, heaven ‘ is the singing silence, the stillness of Godthat he sings to the world’ (p. ), is ‘an unbordered meadow of meaning’ (p. ).It is as if Russell decided that to do justice to his material, he would move intothe lush linguistic world of metaphor and paradox that characterises speechabout heaven; he would not only summarise the thoughts of Bernard or Dantebut attempt to write like them too, as in his final line: ‘So shall every love every

love more enkindle, until the cosmos coruscates with loving light, living more andever more’ (p. ). More than offering the history of heaven, Russell extends aninvitation.

Y D S P S. H

Sacred games. A history of Christian worship. By Bernhard Lang. Pp. xiii­ incl. ills. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, . £.

The Roman Catholic theologian Romano Guardini entitled a chapter of a book‘The playfulness of the liturgy’, and the Swiss Reformed theologian Jean JacquesVon Allmen could speak of worship as ‘an eschatological game’. Lang is in goodcompany, therefore, when he entitles his study of the history of Christian worshipSacred games. In fact Lang posits six sacred games which he alleges are played outin Christian liturgy – praise, prayer, sermon, sacrifice, sacrament and spiritualecstasy – and his book is an investigation under these themes. All of this promisesa highly imaginative treatment of a traditionally dull subject. Such might havebeen the result had the author not been wedded to a rather dated history ofreligions approach to his material, and had he not expounded highly speculativehypotheses which have no historical basis.

Under the theme of praise Lang considers the understanding of the termsthanks, praise and acknowledgment as found in the Hebrew Scriptures and theNew Testament, and especially as found in the Psalms. For biblical people, heconcludes, worship culminated in praise which included songs of thanksgiving,hymns of glorification and anthems of adoration. These three types form the basisof case studies of different types of worship – the use of the daily office by thecanonesses of St Michael’s convent (with a brief history of the western office),personal testimonies of Cotton Mather, the Wesleys and Charles Finney, andBaroque splendour. Yet the concluding remark that ‘overlapping, mixing, andblending into ever new configurations, real worship often belies our cleanacademic distinctions ’ surely calls into question his delineation of three distincttypes.

When turning to prayer (intercession) Lang insists on looking first atintercession in the classical pagan religions, particularly prayer addressed toZeus, as well as Jewish prayer. Petitionary prayer is linked to a crisis, has specificreasons, and ends when the crisis is over. But his discussion leads him to thedefinitions of thaumaturgical and theurgical, and concludes that it was in theworld of these expectations that Christian prayer originated. Asserting that theLord’s Prayer must be seen in the context of first-century Jewish prayer, andparticular the Ahabah and Amidah, Lang illustrates his neglect of the importantwork of Talmon and Reif, which calls into doubt whether these prayers existed inthe first century . However, Lang then unfolds his first hypothesis : the Lord’sPrayer was not the prayer Jesus gave to his disciples, but the prayer which Johnthe Baptist gave his disciples. Illustrations of different types of intercession rangefrom modern rites, such as from the Book of common worship, to a limestonerelief of a blessing from the Egyptian sun god.

The section on the sermon is probably the best part of this book. An initialchapter traces styles of sermon from Luke to Luther, and a further chapter

considers types of modern preaching – evangelistic (Edwards, Finney), neo-Orthodox (Barth, of course) and liberal (Harry Emerson Fosdick). The claimthat Christianity was not interested in education prior to the sixth century seemsto overlook the efforts of the Apologists, not to mention the quite sophisticatedschools of Edessa and Nisibis.

A fourth sacred game which Lang identifies is sacrifice, introduced with a verydated discussion of sacrifice which ignores more recent anthropological studies.Yet having accepted the older view that sacrifice usually entailed blood, Langturns to the Last Supper. Here he unveils his second, and quite eccentrichypothesis. He reconstructs a Jewish Temple ritual, totally unknown to all exceptLang, which entailed the priest addressing the one offering an animal sacrifice,with bread and wine, and saying ‘This is N’s blood’ and ‘This is N’s body’, Nbeing the name of the offerer. The priest elevated the bread and wine. This iswhere Jesus obtained the rite, though being anti-Temple, he dispensed with theanimal sacrifice, and named himself as offerer. Lang admits with sadness,‘Unfortunately, this interpretation remains conjectural ’ (p. ), but undaunted,continues as though this was a well-documented and established fact. After thisrevelation, a more scholarly discussion of the term sacrifice as applied to theeucharist follows, juxtaposing ideas of sacrificial receiving and sacrificial giving.

Under the term sacrament Lang explores the understanding of presence in theeucharist, and here builds upon his hypothetical origin of the Last Supper.Presence originates with magic as properly understood – thaumaturgy andtheurgy. The simple supper of Jesus, derived from the Temple ritual, became amagical meal. A thaumaturgical pattern is found in the Synoptics, and atheurgical pattern is reflected in Paul and John, representing the inroads ofHellenism and Gnosticism. The Apostolic Tradition is invoked to show how aChristian philosopher and magician, Hippolytus, rejected pagan and unorthodoxmagic, but the Amen spoken at the end of the eucharistic prayer is a ‘magical ’word of assent.

The last section records ecstatic worship in the Old Testament, its eruptionin Corinth, its occurrence in pagan religions, as well as in modern Pentecostaland charismatic worship.

It is difficult to know just how serious this book purports to be, and onewonders at times whether the author is playing games upon the reader. Theinvention of a English Prayer Book (p. ) must be a printer’s error. Moreserious is Lang’s complete lack of awareness of current discussion on the statusand intention of the so-called Apostolic Tradition, as for example by Allen Brent,and also of the Didache. Sources are used to illustrate themes with little regardfor their date, provenance and theology, which is quite remarkable in a bookwhich claims in a subtitle to be a history. The use of jargon from the realms ofmagic is unnecessary, and ultimately quite unhelpful. However, the mostdisturbing thing about this book is Lang’s hypotheses on the Lord’s Prayer, andthe Temple origin of the Lord’s Supper. Other alternative and more plausibleviews are not presented. Furthermore, to explain something we have someevidence for (that Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer; that the LastSupper may have been a Passover meal) by things for which we have no evidence(other than Lang’s say-so), is flawed methodology. What had the makings of anextremely interesting and refreshing study has been ruined by too many own

goals. This is certainly not a book for the undiscerning undergraduate, thoughparts of it will prove entertaining sport for a graduate seminar.

Y U B D. S

The journey of the Magi. Meanings in the history of a Christian story. By RichardC. Trexler. Pp. xiii­ incl. ills. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, . £ ($).

The theme of this very learned book is revealed in the subtitle. Professor Trexleroutlines the history of the Magi from its origin in Matthew’s Gospel to the presentday, discussing the various ways in which it was interpreted and celebrated atdifferent periods, and relating those ways to the political and social, as well asreligious, situations in each era. In Matthew, for example, the story is used tolegitimate Jesus and his ‘new upstart sect ’, while a little later Christians used itto justify themselves, representing themselves as donors to God and his Church,as the Magi had been to the infant Jesus, and hoping to receive salvation inreturn, as they were believed to have done. When Constantine made Christianitythe ideological foundation of his imperial rule, the Magi were seen, not as wisemen, but as kings, or their representatives, and so undergirded the support ofChristianity by royal rulers. ‘The magi were the only positive heraldic image inthe Christian biblical tradition, and thus the one standard iconographic image bywhich the secular power could be shown continuingly to legitimate the infantJesus and his church’. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of the relevant details,the author leads the reader through the subsequent periods, showing, forexample, the very large part played by the story of the Magi in the search for,and exploitation of, the Americas (and their gold), or the ways in which thehandling of the story was affected by the Reformation. He takes his account downto the great procession carrying the supposed remains of the Magi through thewar-devastated streets of Cologne in , commenting that ‘once again, thejourney of the magi would culminate in resurrection’. The Magi story emergesas more prominent and influential in cultural development, especially in thewest, than might have been supposed. The letterpress is accompanied by fifty-four illustrations, all of which are apposite though some are too small andindistinct to serve their purpose quite satisfactorily, particularly in cases wherethe colour of one of the Magi is at issue. The English – or rather the American – isnot exactly elegant, and the argument is sometimes dense and could in placeshave been better organised. Nevertheless, this is a book based on solid research,and it will be compulsory reading for those concerned with the social andpolitical conditions of the various period with which it deals, and also for thosestudying the way religious symbols operate in different cultural contexts.

K C, D NO

The Nag Hammadi Library after fifty years. Proceedings of the ���� Society of BiblicalLiterature commemoration. Edited by John D. Turner and Anne McGuire.(Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies, .) Pp xviii­. Leiden–NewYork–Cologne: Brill, . Nlg . ;

It was probably in December that Egyptian peasants chanced on a large jarcontaining thirteen leather codices concealed at the base of cliffs near the modernvillage of Nag Hammadi and some three miles from the site of Pachomius’monastery at Chenoboskion. The codices contained fifty-two texts written inCoptic that can be described broadly as Gnostic, though including writings, suchas a fragment of Plato’s Republic, from non-Gnostic sources. The fiftiethanniversary of this discovery was celebrated by a special meeting held inPhiladelphia on – November of the Nag Hammadi and GnosticismSection and Thomasine Christianity Group of the Society of Biblical Literature.

It must be admitted, however, that for an anniversary meeting com-memorating one of the great discoveries relating to early Church history, anumber of the twenty-four papers plus extensive bibliography collected in thisvolume are disappointing. Where one would look for broad visions, emphasisingperhaps the importance of the survival of a powerful current of Gnostic thoughtin the Egypt of Athanasius, one finds too much source criticism, a narrowattention to textual detail, and argument over situations whose existence cannotbe proved, such as the presumed conflict between those Christians relating theirfaith to the Fourth Gospel and those relating it to the Gospel of Thomas. Onecould have hoped for better.

Much attention will be focused on James M. Robinson’s opening address,‘Nag Hammadi: the first fifty years ’. Nothing can detract from the hard work,drive and sheer ingenuity that enabled Robinson to assemble the wholecollection, and in to publish an English edition in face of prolongedacademic disputes and delays. But Robinson is not always generous to the effortsof his predecessors. Jean Doresse, who identified the texts originally as a Gnosticcollection in September , was not an ‘adventurer ’. Like other energeticyoung researchers he made the best use of his opportunities but was baulked firstby the early death of his friend and former classmate Togo Mina, director of theCoptic Museum at Cairo in , and then by the selfish opposition ofH. C. Puech, his supervisor of studies. In the same vein, Robinson makes nomention of the contribution of Gilles Quispel, the Utrecht scholar who in first alerted the scholarly world to the great importance of the discovery in hisbook ‘Gnosis als Welt-Religion’, and whose lecture to the Oxford PatristicConference on September marked the real beginning of accuratescholarly research on the Gospel of Thomas. American biblical scholarship may‘have come of age in part due to the Nag Hammadi codices ’, but its success hasbeen built on a generation of endeavour by European scholars.

Nevertheless, the conference established a number of markers for futurescholarship. The existence of a movement which could be identified as GnosticSethianism and whose prime texts in the collection are the four versions of theApocryphon of John seems certain. Platonism was playing a somewhat similar partin the Alexandrian Gnostic approach to Scripture as it had in Philo’s biblicalexegesis. While the Gospel of Philip is a difficult, if not incoherent, text, ElainePagels was able to show that Philip’s sacramental theology had much in commonwith that of his orthodox Christian contemporaries. ‘The cup of prayercontaining wine and water is a type of the blood which is the eucharist and it isfull of the Holy Spirit ’, suggests a more spiritual view of the eucharist than thatfound in Justin Martyr ( Apol. , ). Baptism also, for Philip, was rebirth and

resurrection; and one finds a direct challenge to orthodoxy in his critique of theassertion that ‘Mary was conceived by the Holy Spirit ’ (Gospel ; Robinson,‘Nag Hammadi’, ).

It is not surprising that Gnosticism, especially Valentinian Gnosticism,appealed to Egyptian Greek intellectuals, as Origen admits (Contra Celsum iii.).It is to be hoped that future conferences on the Nag Hammadi documents willconcentrate on broader questions, such as the missionary power and theology ofGnosticism in the second and third centuries, and in the fourth, its relationshipin Egypt with Coptic Manichaeism. The Gnostic movement belongs to thehistory of the early Church as much as it does to New Testament studies.

G C C, W. H. C. FC

Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, I : Epistulae I–LXX ; II : Epistulae LXXI–CXX ;III : Epistulae CXXI–CLIV. nd revised edn. Edited by Isidorus Hilberg.(Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, , , }. Opera, Sect. Pars , , .) Pp vi­ ; v­ ; vii­. Vienna: O> sterreichischenAkademie der Wissenschaften, (first publ. –).

Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, IV: Epistularum indices et addenda. Comp. byMargit Kamptner. (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, }.Opera, Sect. Pars .) Pp. . Vienna: O> sterreichischen Akademie derWissenschaften, .

The Vienna Academy of Sciences began its great critical edition of Latin Christianwriters in with Sulpicius Severus. Thanks to Professor Adolf Primmer itsdetermination has not faltered in recent years, and of its distinguished volumesspecial value attaches to Hilberg’s three-volume edition of Jerome’s letters. Theanastatic reprint of an edition long unobtainable is obviously most welcome, andnow it has been enlarged and enhanced by a supplementary volume containingindices of biblical quotations or allusions, authors cited, names of persons andplaces, recipients addressed, manuscripts mentioned by Hilberg, and finallyseventeen pages with a valuable list of some of the annotations scattered in diversecorners by learned readers, including both emendations to the Latin text andnotes of literary reminiscences. This latter list could have been even larger. In thelist of manuscripts the present location of a fragmentary Phillips piece is evidentlyno longer Chaltenham, Middlehill, and needs adjustment. There will be a touchof regret that the opportunity has not been taken to include Jerome’s letter toPraesidius, an obviously authentic letter given in PL xxx. as spurious, butedited by G. Morin in Bulletin d’ancienne litteU rature et d’archeU ologie chreU tiennes iii(), –. This document was likewise neglected by Labour’s severelycriticised but useful French edition (–).

O H C

Enkyklopaidiko prosopographiko lexiko Byzantines istorias kai politismou, I : Aamr –Alphios ; II : Alphios – Antiocheus. Edited by Alexis G. C. Savvides. Pp. ,. Athens: Metron}Iolcos Publications, , . ; X; (set)

The Oxford dictionary of Byzantium contains entries only on the most prominentindividuals in Byzantium, while the forthcoming Prosopography of the Byzantineempire is expected to attempt exhaustive coverage. There is room – in fact a need– for a prosopographical enterprise lying between those extremes, and the firsttwo volumes of the project organised by Dr Savvides bid fair to fill the gap. Itschronological scope is from c. to c. and its covers non-Byzantineindividuals and families having some connection, direct or indirect, withByzantium, as well as Byzantine ones. Thus Alp, Arslan and Avicenna feature inhere as well as more obvious candidates such as Agathias, Patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria and Andrew the Holy Fool. The entries offer extensivebiographies of the more important individuals and full bibliographies of thesources about them and such works as they wrote themselves. The secondaryliterature is understandably biased towards works in Greek, but some account istaken of western European publications. Quite generous coverage is given of thelives and deeds of lesser-known Byzantine monks and churchmen: for example,twelve bishops named Anastasios are featured here. Ideally, one would wish forconsistent references to the primary sources, rather than sometimes findingcitation only of secondary works which mention them. None the less, this is avaluable feat of synthesis and it will be of use to students of the history oforthodoxy and of east–west relations.

F H, J SC

Studien zur Lichtmotivik bei Iuvencus. By Wilfrid Ro$ ttger. (Jahrbuch fu$ r Antike undChristentum, – .) Pp. . Munster, Westfalen: Aschendorff, .DM .

Caius Vettius Aquilinus Iuvencus was a Romano-Spanish aristocrat whoflourished in the latter part of Constantine’s reign, as he tells us (Libri evangeliorumiv. ) and was probably an early convert to Christianity. He became apresbyter and composed four books of hexameters relating the life of Christ fromthe Advent to the Resurrection. The resulting work was not merely a verse-paraphrase of the Gospel narrative. It was an epic poem in which the author,though using Matthew as his base text, often rearranges the order of events inChrist’s life derived from all four gospels for dramatic effect. Often he draws hisown moral lessons and criticism of paganism from them. He writes as one steepedin the Classics and draws heavily for style and expression on Vergil’s Aeneid withless frequent reminiscences of Ovid, Horace and Statius. The relative absence ofdirect quotations from the Old Testament suggests that Juvencus may havewished to rewrite creatively the Gospel narrative in a way which members of theupper classes could accept. Like some of his western contemporaries, includingConstantine himself, he may have found a Christian interpretation of Vergil’sworks as great an influence towards conversion as the prophecies in the OldTestament.

One of the features of Juvencus’ poem is the equation of Christ with DivineLight, contrasting with the darkness and blindness of the pagan world and its

works. Christ was the divine messenger sent by God to illumine mankind andguide it towards salvation. No other being, not even John the Baptist, could beportrayed in these terms. Ro$ ttger, in his Regensburg University dissertation,collects and analyses all the passages where Juvencus describes Christ as light. Heshows how light symbolism is to be found in all the major incidents in Christ’s lifewhich he records, and compares these with the handling of the same incidents inthe Gospels, where it is often absent. He pays full regard to Juvencus’ genius asa poet and as a theologian in the orthodox tradition of Justin and Irenaeus. Hepoints out, in particular, the strongly eschatological tendency in his poem.Pagans were doomed to eternal damnation. It may perhaps have lain beyond hisbrief to have asked whether the dualism implied in representing Christ as DivineLight confronting powers of evil, could not also have led to Manichaeism as wellas orthodox Christianity. As it stands, however, Ro$ ttger’s scholarly andpainstaking analysis of Juvencus’ poem has added considerably to ourunderstanding of the impact the Gospels were beginning to have among theliterate classes in the west in Constantine’s reign.

G C C, W. H. C. FC

Christianity and paganism in the fourth to eighth centuries. By Ramsay MacMullen. Pp.vi­ incl. figs. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, . £.

MacMullen’s aim is to attack what he sees – quite astonishingly – as a consensusamong twentieth-century historians ‘rarely called in question before the s ’.The substance of this alleged consensus is that ‘nothing counted after Constantinesave the newly triumphant faith’ ; a Christian empire eclipsed the rival religious‘ system’, paganism. This is the ‘Grand Event ’ MacMullen sets out to debunk.This consensus ignored, we are told, the fact that the ‘national religion [sic][remained] stubbornly alive ’ for centuries to come. Despite the authorities’ effortsto extirpate paganism, and despite the bishops’ disapproval, it persisted, becom-ing gradually assimilated by the empire’s Christian masses. This process wasaccompanied by the rise of new elites, ecclesiastical and secular, who lacked theempirical and sceptical habits of mind typified by Pliny, Plutarch and Plotinus.These were crowded out in the emerging popular Christian culture ; the Church’seducated leadership shared the superstitions of ignorant rustics. To establish allthis MacMullen deploys truly enormous learning. His use of it bristles withassumptions we have, or should have, learnt to question. Although MacMullenallows (though not until his second chapter) that paganism had no single centreor definite structure, as did Christianity, it is nevertheless odd to find it treatedas a ‘religion’, on all fours with Judaism and Christianity. As a corollary to thisidea, MacMullen somewhat naively identifies Christianity with the viewspropounded by the clerical elites and the secular authorities which sought toenforce them. Where these differed from what Christian lay people thought orpractised, the latter are simply ‘pagan survivals ’, ‘ superstition’, ‘ idolatry’, takenuncritically at the bishops’ estimation. Imperial cult, civic festivals, seasonal

rituals, their shrines and so forth are quite simply assumed to be ‘pagan’ andobjectionable, either tolerated or explained away, or alternatively attacked assuch (generally ineffectually) by clergy. It is noteworthy that MacMullen doesnot apply the same argument to the adoption by Christians of established(‘pagan’?) artistic or literary styles, philosophical concepts and the like. Thereis much talk of ‘religion’, but no serious attempt to consider its limits and relationto what lies outside them, the secular. What MacMullen fails to recognise is thepresence of the kind of tension and complexity within Christianity which hereadily attributes to paganism. For him Christianity is a fixed quantity,unchanging and identifiable with official doctrine. That its limits and its contentare themselves subject to historical change and local variety, is a notion whollyforeign to him, and the nature of the changes and the pressures behind them ofno interest. He is more at home with simple oppositions of rationality andsuperstition (see for instance his remarks on Averil Cameron as a ‘champion ofirrationality ’ – p. and n. ). For all its vast learning, the book has adistinctly nineteenth-century flavour.

N R. A. M

Studies in the cult of Saint Columba. Edited by Cormac Bourke. Pp. incl.frontispiece, figs, tables and maps. Dublin: Four Courts Press, .£ (cloth), £. (paper). ;

The th anniversary of Columba’s death was marked in by a conferenceat Derry in July, whose proceedings will appear in due course, and by a spate ofpublications. Distinguished among these we may mention the issue of the InnesReview, which devotes three papers to the subject, and the present volume,comprising ten essays, edited by Cormac Bourke of the Ulster Museum. Some ofthese essays will most likely become standard points of reference on their topics.Aidan Macdonald analyses the witness provided by Adomna! n’s Life of St Columbafor the buildings and life of the Columban monastery of Iona; he rightly observesthe emphasis on coenobitical life and uses this judiciously to guide his reading ofthe text, even where it conflicts with common assumptions about early Irishmonastic life. Finbar McCormick draws together in a useful manner the resultsof archaeological work on the island over a period of forty years, challengingsome interpretations that have tended to become orthodox. Raghnall O; Floinnand Cormac Bourke between them survey what is known about relics associatedwith Columba in Ireland and Scotland, in the process providing material forconsideration in assessing the role of native relics in these areas down to the lateMiddle Ages. Nollaig O; Muraı!le presents a long-needed replacement of Reeves’s listing of Columban place-names together with apposite discussion and aseries of maps by Maura Pringle. Other contributions bring new insights to thetextual sources. Jennifer O’Reilly’s paper, ‘Reading the Scriptures in the Life ofColumba ’, brings her knowledge of the Bible and of Christian authors available toAdomna! n into play in reading several passages of the Life, creatively teasing outthe resonances that may have been in the writer’s mind or his audience’s. ThomasO’Loughlin considers the evidence for how Adomna! n perceived the geographicallocation of Iona between Terra and Oceanus and its implications for how he

viewed the work of the Church. Cormac Bourke offers a speculative interpretationof what the ‘Delg Aidechta’ (‘Thorn of the Testament’), a brooch worn by thecoarb of Columba, may more precisely have been. Two papers are also includedfor which St Columba is not central – Timothy O’Neill’s survey of evidence forthe technology of writing in medieval Ireland and Jane Hawkes’s placing of theeighth-century Columban iconography of the Virgin and Child in its insularcontext. The collection is well-balanced and well-edited with an engagingpreface. Work of this kind shows how much more scholarly is the interest in thesesubjects now than when pious publications poured out at earlier Columbananniversaries in and .

F M H, R. SO

The reception of the church Fathers in the west. From the Carolingians to the Maurists. vols. Edited by Irena Backus (with Antoinina Bevan). Pp. xxix­ ;vii­–. Leiden–New York–Cologne: Brill, . Nlg. .. ; ;

Twenty-six learned papers of high quality are assembled on a major theme ofChristian history, directed to the question of the kind of authority, if any, to beattributed to the patristic age when Christianity was acquiring the shape thatlater generations recognise. For medieval divines the ‘Fathers ’ were crucial inthe prickly conversations between Greek east and Latin west, each siderecognising the other’s great figures as their own also. W. Otten expounds theecclesiology of Libri Carolini, Alcuin and Eriugena; J. Werckmeister, expert in thehistory of medieval canonists, treats the patristic presence in canon law (a paperwhere translation or printing has sometimes suffered); Gratian has a mass ofpatristic matter, not all submissive to Augustine, for example on Joseph andMary not having a real marriage; but the Isidorian decretals bring in so exalteda doctrine of papal authority as to make the Fathers secondary and papal powercentralised and limitless. The sources of the Glossa Ordinaria (identified by BerylSmalley) are treated by Ann Matter. Peter Lombard’s superb student textbook,the Sentences, notoriously owed much to Augustine, but had direct knowledgeonly of De doctrina christiana, Enchiridion, Div. Ou. LXXXIII and Retractationes (J. G.Bougerol). In a clear discussion of Anselm, Abelard and Bernard, B. Prangerobserves that Bernard could attack Abelard for repeating Anselm’s view, and hasa good discussion of the meaning of ‘ scholastic method’. N. Lewis handles theimpressive (learned in Greek) but relatively uninfluential Grosseteste. B. Fleithcatalogues sources of the Golden Legend. Bougerol is again valuable on Anselm’sinfluence on Bonaventura. L. J. Elder illustrates Augustine’s authority forAquinas, and Augustine’s influence on later medieval writers is handled by E. L.Saak. The devotio moderna owed much to the great erudition of Grote(N. Staubach).

The second volume opens with the Renaissance reaction against scholasticism,with Valla on the incompatibility of Bible and Aristotle, and Italian humanistsinsisting on Greek, as being necessary for reading the Greek Fathers. Traversariis given merited prominence. Scholars wanted to read Origen’s Contra Celsum.

Nicolas of Cusa spotted Proclus’ language in Denys. Papalists wanted anti-conciliarist texts and in practice Gratian provided a rich store (D. Rutherford).The defects of Erasmus as an editor of patristic texts are candidly noted by Janden Boeft. His love of Origen and Jerome sufficed to make them bogies forLuther, who is given full and illuminating treatment by M. Schulze. Thecontemporary reluctance to learn the languages was for Luther a mark of declineand corruption in doctrine and morals. He acknowledged that at periods in thepast the papacy had been holy and devout, not a worldly empire (WA .),and had kind things to say about Gregory the Great.

The learned editor herself writes on Zwingli, many of whose books have beenfound in Zu$ rich library, among others his collection of Erasmus’ patristiceditions. He and Bucer were aware that the early Fathers were judges ofcanonicity. J. van Oort discusses the familiar but not exhausted theme of Calvin’sdebt to Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings. His humanist education comes out inhis identification of spuria, but did not prevent him believing Pope Joanhistorical and Athanasius to have presided at Nicaea. Ralph Keen well brings outthe Counter-Reformation thesis that the reformers were challenging continuityand therefore an entire culture. For the Council of Trent (on which, even in somassive a collection, one could have wished for more) the Fathers are auxiliary,not normative – an opinion strikingly close to that of Melanchthon. Flacius’sombre estimate of church history as progressive decadence is analysed byE. Norelli from the Magdeburg Centuries. It might be added that his influenceon John Foxe made him important for the English Puritans. Mark Vessey listsEnglish versions of the Latin Fathers, both Protestant and recusant. Thesixteenth-century division encouraged the old practice of altering crucial texts tomake them better adapted for supporting a cause, and Bodley’s first librarian,James, attacked Roman Catholic editions as partisan. Protestants wereembarrassed by Basil, De spiritu sancto, and denied its authenticity. These themesare examined by Professor Backus, observing that the discredit attaching to thepractice of tampering with texts became an element in stimulating conscientiouseditions faithful to the manuscripts. To that heroic task the Jesuits of theseventeenth century contributed more than their fair share, and the distinguishedrecord is catalogued by D. Bertrand (Fronto du Duc, Sirmond, Cordier, Petau,Chifflet, Labbe, Garnier, Bollandists etc.).

Two major papers are contributed by J. L. Quantin. For Roman Catholicdivines the Fathers attested tradition. Whether they were also teachers withauthority was more difficult to determine. Augustine was wonderful but had saidthings that were hard to take unless one was a Jansenist. Trent had beatifiedTradition but gave no list of traditions. And did the Fathers cease with Gregorythe Great? Or with Bernard on the eve of scholasticism? It resembled theProtestant difficulties with ‘Fundamentals ’ : one could not give a precise listshowing what was in and what was out. The controversy greatly stimulated ahistorical approach to Christian antiquity, which at Rome seemed a threat topapal authority. Quantin’s second chapter deals with the Anglicans, such as Bull,found congenial by Bossuet and the Gallicans, but so emphasising the patristicage best continued in the Church of England as to make dogmatic theology amatter for the learned in universities (not a position without medieval precedent).This fine book ends with the Maurists, heroes for all patristic scholars since their

time, and major creators of modern critical historical scholarship not only intheology.

O H C

Evidence for Christianity in Roman Britain. The small finds. By C. F. Mawer. (BritishArchaeological Reports, .) Pp. vi­ incl. numerous ills. Oxford:Tempvs Reparatvm}Archaeological and Historical Associates, . £.

Nearly half a century ago Professor Jocelyn Toynbee wrote a famous article on‘Christianity in Roman Britain’ (Journal of the British Archaeological Association rdser. xvi [], –), in which she reviewed all the archaeological evidence, inparticular the then brand new evidence for the ‘house-chapel ’ at the north endof the Roman villa at Lullingstone. She also looked at all the other materialremains for Christianity in Roman Britain, including what archaeologists call‘ small finds ’. This new volume in the British Archaeological Reports series nowproduces for the first time a detailed catalogue of all known ‘Christian’ portableobjects from Britain found up to the end of . It also reassesses all the objectsand places them in four categories : ‘Accepted’ (as of unequivocal Christiansignificance), ‘Possible ’, ‘Rejected’ (of Roman date, but of no obvious Christiansignificance), and Falsa (fakes and post-Roman artefacts). All the objects aredivided into six different classes : structural materials, ritual objects and furniture,vessels and utensils, personal ornaments, propitiatory and amuletic items, andutilitarian objects, but most of the structural materials and ritual objects such asaltars, tombstones, sarcophagi, coffins etc. are omitted, to be ‘treated elsewhere’.We are left, therefore, slightly strangely, with a ‘part ’ of small artefacts inthis volume, of which exactly half are rejected. All are, none the less, carefullyanalysed and discussed, but it has to be said that there is very little in the wayof new conclusions, and we are left in almost exactly the same position as half acentury ago. Any new ideas about Christianity in Roman Britain will have tocome from a reassessment of buildings like the Roman villas at Lullingstone,Hinton St Mary etc., and the ‘churches ’ at Silchester and Richborough, thelatter with its hexagonal font, that was only recognised in long after it wasexcavated. This is therefore a very useful and carefully produced volume for thosewho need to check on the details of artefacts (there is a full bibliography, anda concordance and series of indices of devices, personal and place names), but wemust await the ‘first ’ part before we can fully reassess the archaeological evidencefor Christianity in Roman Britain.

S, T T-BW

Karolus Magnus – alter Aeneas, alter Martinus, alter Iustinus. Zu Intention und Datierungdes ‘Aachener Karlsepos ’. By Christine Ratkowitsch. (Wiener Studien, Beiheft. Arbeiten zur mittel- und neulateinischen Philologie, .) Pp. . Vienna:O> sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, . O> S (paper).

After decades of relative neglect as an historical source, the poem that Du$ mmler

titled Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa moved to the forefront of discussion of theprehistory and ideology of the imperial coronation of when Beumann arguedfor composition at Paderborn in . The generally accepted view today is thatits lines are merely a fragment of a much longer poem, composed at Aachenafter Charlemagne’s return from Rome. To extensive use of the Aeneid and ofFortunatus’ Vita S. Martini, Professor D. Schaller in unexpectedly addedthat of Corippus’ In laudem Iustini, one of the few substantial Latin worksdocumenting a post- eastern emperor. Ratkowitsch, taking her cue fromAlcuin’s letter to the king (at Paderborn) about the three persons ‘hitherto mosteminent in the world’, skilfully and concisely pursues the implications : the poem,whether by Einhard or someone else, uses scenes and verbatim citation from allthree authors to show how the Christian Frankish king has subsumed andsurpassed the virtues and achievement of their heroes. Here, if anywhere, is aliterary justification of his acceptance of the imperial dignity, although onenecessarily directed to a very restricted audience. The precise dating of the poemremains open. Ratkowitsch produces new arguments for the ‘Karlsepos ’ as laterthan Modoin’s Eclogues, with which it has indisputable literary links ; and sheclaims that Modoin’s phraseology also means that Alcuin was still living. It isunlikely that she has said the last word on this.

S A D. A. B

Women’s monasticism and medieval society. Nunneries in France and England, ���–����.By Bruce L. Venarde. Pp. xix­ incl. frontispiece, figs and tables.Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, . £..

Contrary to the popular view that the status of religious women declinedmarkedly before , Bruce Venarde argues that the fortunes of female religiousprospered in a wave of rapid expansion of monastic foundations from the sto the s. In this book he provides a useful comparison of the foundations ofFrench and English nunneries, –, in two English archdioceses (York andCanterbury), eleven French archdioceses (Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Auch,Bordeaux, Bourges, Lyon, Narbonne, Reims, Rouen, Sens and Tours) and thethree suffragan dioceses of Metz, Toul and Verdun. Venarde has compiled adatabase of nunneries, considering location, dates of foundation andinformation on founders and patrons. The broad sweep of this work necessarilyresults in a superficial overview; however, the comparative, long-term stanceprovides insights to the patterns, rhythms and diversity of monastic foundationsin north-western Europe. Venarde’s overarching study emphasises the economicand political context of the process of nunnery foundation; one must lookelsewhere, however, for insights into the daily lives of religious women, theirinteraction with local communities and the nature of their spirituality. Venardeoffers his own new perspective on the nature of monastic provision for women,arguing that although inspired by male monasticism, the female religiousmovement was substantially independent of male-centred innovation, and notsignificantly assisted by male religious. Of particular interest is the evidence fortenth- and eleventh-century women living together and practising a religious life

in non-regular communities, outside the coenobitic framework. Profiles ofnunnery foundations c. – are reviewed for England, western, centraland north-eastern France, and the biographies are contrasted of ordersestablished for women by Robert of Abrissel, Norbert of Xanten and Gilbert ofSempringham. In all regions during this period it seems that the primary agentsof new foundations were hermits, preachers, bishops and the lower nobility, withthe co-operation of lay and religious benefactors apparent, and the expertise ofreligious women as property managers in evidence. In contrast, the periodc. – witnesses a sharp decline in the number of new foundations,together with the tendency for closer proximity to towns, the higher status offounders and a more intimate association between female houses and male-centredreligious congregations. Venarde observes that the thirteenth century providedcontrasting opportunities for religious women in England and France: the in-creasing popularity of anchoresses in England versus the new lifestyle of beguinesin the Low Countries and northern France. However, recent work has shownsuch divergences to have been over-emphasised. Women living similarly tobeguines flourished in the towns of East Anglia, while those emulating the livesof anchorites prospered in north-western continental Europe. This congruenceis in itself evidence supporting Venarde’s thesis that religious women sharedcomparable experiences and treatment across medieval Europe.

U R R G

Light to the isles. A study of missionary theology in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Britain. ByDouglas Dales. Pp. . Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, . £.(paper).

The convert kings. Power and religious affiliation in early Anglo-Saxon England. ByN. J. Higham. Pp. x­. Manchester–New York: Manchester UniversityPress, . £ (cloth), £. (paper). ;

Douglas Dales’s interest is in the spiritual stature of mission leaders during theconversion period, in the dominant personalities, that is, ‘whose careers shedmuch light on the growth of the English Church and its intellectual and spirituallife ’ (p. ), the literary evidence concerning whom reflects ‘ the multifacetedactivity of the Latin Church in and around the British isles, during a period ofprolonged upheaval ’ (p. ). The book offers relatively short, simple andstraightforward studies of Martin, Patrick, Samson and Gildas, Columba andColumbanus, Augustine and Paulinus, Aidan and Cuthbert, Theodore andWilfrid, Bede and Willibrord, Boniface and many others, based on the Lives ofthese saints and}or on Bede’s Ecclesiastical history. The footnotes are skeletal andthe bibliography limited and somewhat carelessly produced. The publishers statethat ‘Much of the writer’s primary source material is not generally available forstudy. ’ It would be interesting to know what they have in mind. This is verymuch a traditional, old-fashioned book, retelling, as a foreword by BenedictaWard puts it, ‘ the successful conversion of a nation by love’. It would havegained greater depth if it had really focused on its own subtitle and treated moreextensively the Christian sense of mission as expressed in the writings (where such

survive) of these churchmen in the context of the theological thought of westernChristendom at the time.

By contrast, though Dr Higham acknowledges the importance in earlyEngland of ‘access to novel kinds of magical power’ (p. ), his essential andsecular concern in this ‘ study of the political imperatives underlying conversionin the first generation’ is not with the spiritual dimension (to which he attacheslittle significance) but with what practical considerations motivated paganAnglo-Saxon kings to accept Christianity – or, as he puts it, ‘ the focus adoptedhere is quite specific to religious affiliation as an aspect of politics ’ (p. ) ; and hisconclusion is that ‘Christianity eventually emerged as the favoured religion ofrulers not for any spiritual reason but because of the particular value to them ofits ideological, organisational and authoritarian characteristics ’ which ‘offeredkings novel means of augmenting or reinforcing kingship and ‘‘overkingship’’and facilitated their gradual shift away from tribalism and towards stateformation’ (p. ).

The author begins in an anthropological and sociological context byestablishing how difficult it can be to determine what conversion signified toconverts from paganism as opposed to its meaning for those in the Church andproceeds then to consider at length the circumstances attendant on the baptismof Æthelberht of Kent and the conversion of Edwin of Deira and concludes withan examination of the Bernician patronage of the Irish mission. Higham detectsshifts in papal policy with the sending of Augustine and interweaves stages in theprogress of this mission with the changing circumstances of the Frankish politicalscene as he interprets the many facets of early Kentish development. He seesEadbald of Kent as an apostate rather than a pagan whose paganism was a wayof reaching an accommodation with Raedwald, king of East Anglia and overlordafter Æthelberht, and thinks it was Raedwald’s death, which he places in –,which led to the marriage of Eadbald’s sister to Edwin of Deira in, as Dr Highambelieves, . (But did Raedwald survive to –? According to Higham ‘hisobit is of course unknown’ [p. ]). Once baptised, Edwin used his new-foundChristianity ‘ to legitimise the expansion of his kingship at the expense of hisvarious neighbours ’ whose conversion and}or subjugation he saw himself as‘divinely appointed to effect ’ (p. ), the first king of the Anglo-Saxons to doso on such a scale and creating thereby a precedent for the next generation. But‘ the most opportunistic and successful ’ of the convert kings, for Higham, wasOswiu of Bernicia, ‘ the foremost political pragmatist of his generation’ (p. ),who understood more than Oswald the need to manage the Mercians if hiscontrol of southern England was to be secure and who, when Wulfhere of Merciabegan to prove too powerful, abandoned Iona at Whitby in in favour ofCanterbury and Rome in order to replace a declining military influence in thesouth with a new-found ecclesiastical authority.

Currently one of the most prolific historians of Anglo-Saxon England, Highamhere offers a closely argued, at times ingenious, interpretation of the history of theconversion period. He does concede, however, that ‘a great deal of hypothesis ’characterises this volume (p. ). Supposition and conjecture – the recurringuse of ‘ if ’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘may have’ – is to some extent unavoidable whenwriting about early Anglo-Saxon England and such qualifications abound in thislast volume of Higham’s trilogy on the origins of England, the author’s

progression from hypothetical proposition to established fact leading at times (onhis own admission on one occasion [p. ]) to ‘highly speculative’ recon-structions. However, Higham argues, hypothesising ‘should be preferred toignoring the questions altogether ’ (p. ). He concludes that ‘Despite thedistinct slant of the literature, conversion did not dominate the world in whichmen like Oswiu lived’ (p. ).

Not surprisingly the relative paucity of material and a range of alternativeinterpretations can give rise to tensions in the treatment of the available evidence.Dr Higham says he will ‘accept Bede’s text only with due caution’ (p. ) andconsiders that many of the details in the Ecclesiastical history are more likely to be‘eighth-century reconstruction than an accurate reflection of reality ’ (p. ),but takes others to task when he disagrees with them on the grounds that to deny‘the fundamental integrity and interaction of the various parts of Bede’s story’ isto be in ‘real danger of ending up with a ‘‘pick-and-mix’ ’ approach’ (p. ).

B’ W D. P. K

Government, religion and society in northern England, ����–����. Edited by JohnC. Appleby and Paul Dalton. Pp. xiii­. Stroud: Sutton Publishing,. £.

This is a collection of papers from a Northern History conference, held in by Liverpool Hope University College. The editors are to be congratulated onputting their new university firmly on the academic map in a way their compeersmight envy, and for their courage in tackling such a controversial and wide-ranging field as government, religion and society in the North. They havegrasped a potentially contentious nettle : the question of what constitutes theNorth of England. Professor Pollard’s provocative paper on the mythology of thewhole concept as a fifteenth-century invention will have blown the cover of manyNorthern historians, happily living off the legacy of that myth and busilyengaged in pointing out Northern differentness.

For there is of course no one North. There are the Borders proper, commonlycalled the Far North; Cumberland and Westmorland, including or not theBorders, to taste ; Tyne-Tees, the remnant of ancient Northumbria; the Duchyof Lancaster ; and the near North, commonly called Yorkshire. The histories ofthese diverse areas have not necessarily much in common. Thus, papers onYorkshire nunneries, Tudor Chester and King David of Scotland find themselvesin uneasy proximity, each appropriate to their own kind of Northernness butlacking cohesion. It was inevitable that in seeking to cover seven counties andseven centuries the editors have encountered such problems, and unevenness oftreatment is to be expected. Essentially, this is a medieval collection, linkingusefully some early modern material. The attempt is laudable but not entirelysuccessful ; to range from tempus regis Edwardi to the Glorious Revolution in onecollection is perhaps to glean too widely. Whilst one would not willingly forgoany contribution of Michael Mullett’s to ecclesiastical history, the twoseventeenth-century pieces do lie rather uneasily with their fellows.

All Northern history is liable to be a construct of bricks short of straw, and toconcoct a viable paper, contributors tend to glean the two most fertile stubble

fields : the twelfth and thirteenth, and late fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries. Thisthen is not a survey, but more a Sammlung, in which scholarship has at timesleaped into print to justify its departmental ratings. Sadly, the scholar who, afterfruitless gleaning in limited Northern fields, finds he has nothing to say, must sayit anyway. As a result, certain papers draw no firm conclusions. Most disarmingis the gender contribution of Dr Meikle, finding that really, but for the Border,the lives of sixteenth-century Northern women were little different from those ofany other women of the time.

There is, however, something for everyone in this wide territorial andchronological sweep. Government, religion and society are indeed investigated indifferent aspects and periods : Cheshire society in the eleventh and sixteenthcenturies, government in twelfth, thirteenth and seventeenth, monasteries fromthe high Middle Ages to the Dissolution, the balance between Church and Statein medieval and early modern England. The breadth of scope must provideuseful cross-fertilisation for medievalists and early modernists who are familiarwith the North between relatively limited parameters. One becomes forciblyaware of the problem of distance: the remoteness of London, the frankirrelevance of the North to central government, be it Stephen’s or the Tudors’ ;the proximity of Edinburgh and potential disaffection; the centrality of York;the focal significance of Carlisle, Chester, or Newcastle.

For the student of Northern history, perhaps the most instructive papers arethose discussing various aspects of the twelfth-century border lands. For theecclesiastical historian, the focus is very much on the later Middle Ages and theDissolution: we come in halfway through the chronological presentation.N. J. Higham evaluates the use of personal names in the Domesday Book forCheshire to assess the distribution of patronage and power. Three papers on thefar North follow: Paul Dalton points out the extension of royal authority in thetwelfth century, whilst W. M. Aird considers the problem this posed for theBorderers, no longer able to exist as a self-sufficient community but forced tochoose loyalty either to the king of England or king of Scots. Keith Stringer thenassesses the role of David as ruler of the Far North, showing how far frominevitable was the eventual border alignment, and how acceptable his rule to thenorthern English. The development of Anglo-Scottish relations in the thirteenthcentury is later discussed by Alan Young; perhaps strict chronology might havebeen abandoned here to highlight these complementary pieces. Instead, Young’sseparates two papers on Yorkshire : Graeme White on the question of ‘waste ’ inStephen’s reign, and Barbara English on the geldable land of the thirteenthcentury and the sheriff’s role in tax collection. Similarly Janet Burton’sconsideration of the social background of Yorkshire nuns, their dowries and thefinances of their houses forms a complement to Claire Cross’s analysis of thedissolution in Yorkshire and the fate of the ex-religious. Between these companionpieces A. D. M. Barrell discusses the problem of pluralism in York and Durhamdioceses in the later Middle Ages, Professor Pollard explodes the myth of theNorth, and Jenny Kermode inquires into the Protestant credentials of HenricianChester. Pluralism is shown as inevitable in the circumstances, and Chester’sproblems compare with those of other municipalities. Maureen Meikle deals withthe role of women in the sixteenth-century borderland; this paper, like Stringer’s,places as much emphasis north of the Border as on northern England. Finally,

after a considerable chronological gap, Fiona Pogson investigates the influence ofWentworth as the absentee President of the Council of the North in the s,and Michael Mullett brings Lancashire into the reckoning in a perceptiveevaluation of the role of the religious minorities, especially the recusants, in localgovernment and society in the period –.

This is an interesting offering; it is to be hoped that future conferences may beas fruitful.

U C L M C

Peter Abaelard, Theologia ‘Summi boni ’. Tractatus de unitate et trinitate divina.Abhandlung uX ber die goX ttliche Einheit und Dreieinigkeit. Lateinisch–Deutsch. Editedby Ursula Niggli. (Philosophische Bibliothek, .) Pp. xlvi­.Hamburg: Felix Meiner, . DM (paper).

In his Theologia ‘Summi boni ’, Peter Abelard explores for the first time theTrinitarian nature of God, the supreme good, in terms of the attributes of divinepower, wisdom and benignity. The treatise proceeds through an acute analysis ofthe meaning of the words ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit ’ as names of humanimposition applied to divine attributes that have been identified in different waysby philosophers through natural reason, as well as by the prophets. In manyways, the Theologia ‘Summi boni ’ is the easiest to read of Abelard’s variousdiscussions of the Trinity, the least weighed down by careful analysis of patristicteaching, intended to rebut potential criticism. Ursula Niggli has performed avaluable service in making available an annotated German translation of thetreatise, originally published in , and now released in its third edition. Theaccompanying Latin text of the Theologia ‘Summi boni ’ is essentially that ofHeinrich Ostlender, as published in . Niggli has, however, been able toindicate variants between this edition and that prepared by the late Eligius-Marie Buytaert and completed by myself for the Corpus Christianorum, ContinuatioMediaeualis, xiii () within her apparatus. The introduction and annotationsto the treatise are brief, but to the point. The sources identified in the text arefrequently cited in the form provided by Ostlender, often without reference tomore recent editions. The translation itself provides a helpful way of making animportant text accessible to a wider audience. The fact that the publishers havethought to produce a third edition is to be welcomed.

M U C M

A handlist of the Latin writers of Great Britain and Ireland before ����. By RichardSharpe. (Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin, .) Pp. xxxvii­.Turnhout: Brepols, . B. Fr. , (paper).

Since its launch in , the Journal of Medieval Latin has established itself as anessential resource for medievalists. With this volume, inaugurating a companionseries of Publications, the Journal presents a truly major work of reference. Sharp’sLatin writers is a dazzling achievement. Its scope is huge: the chronological span

extends from c. to , the named authors number ,, and there is a totalof around , titles. As a research tool it is eminently ‘reader-friendly’ – clearlyset out and arranged alphabetically by authors’ baptismal names. The system isexplained and discussed in an introduction which is a model of lucidity and goodsense : particularly valuable are sections on surnames and place names, and onsignatures, ascriptions and attributions. For examples of the practical applicationof the principles of authorial attribution, readers should study the entries for sixmen named Richard the Englishman (see also Richard de Mores). Theindividual writers range from the major figures, such as Anselm and John Wyclif,through the minor, such as Walter Daniel, and the obscure, such as Godeman,to those whose works are not known to survive, such as Reginald, abbot ofWalden, and on through authors attributed doubtfully, such as David of London,and wrongly, such as Bertram Fitzalan, and those who did not write in Latin,such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Richard Sharpe, down to ‘ghosts ’, such as Serloof Canterbury. The generous inclusion of authors who were not of British or Irishorigin but were previously treated as such, as well as those foreigners whosecareers had a British or Irish connection, gives us such literary giants as HonoriusAugustodunensis and Goscelin of Canterbury (Saint-Bertin). For titles notavailable in modern printed editions, manuscript references are listed. Theamount of information presented in Latin writers is enormous, but it is so wellcontrolled by Sharpe’s editorial hand that the individual entries are readilyunderstandable, economical and focused, often giving masterly summaries ofcomplex arguments on authorship (for example, Godfrey, bishop of Bath). BeforeSharpe, earlier scholars had attempted bibliographical lists – among themLeland and Bale (to whose authors there is a useful key), Baxter, Johnson andWillard (whose Index of Latin writers, a compilation of a mere or so pages,Sharpe modestly states it is his purpose to supersede), J. C. Russell (to whosepreviously rather under-valued work Sharpe rightly pays tribute), and Sir RogerMynors (to whose , or so manuscript slips Sharpe fell heir). But Sharpe’scontribution is immense and every page bears the mark of his original work. Ofcourse, as he points out in his unpretentious preface, works of this kind can neverbe complete or perfectly accurate : he welcomes additions and corrections. Thatsuch revisions will come from scores of specialists is a tribute to the breadth ofSharpe’s own scholarship. His Latin writers, by facilitating and stimulating futureresearch in medieval Latin texts, will expand and transform our understandingof our literary heritage.

L D G

The first crusaders, ����–����. By Jonathan Riley-Smith. Pp. x­ incl.frontispiece­ maps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . £.

Crusade historians inevitably face two difficult and fundamental problems: first,how to explain the immediate positive response to Pope Urban ’s call for the FirstCrusade; and second how to account for the crusade’s longevity as an institutionin European life. Riley-Smith argues in his latest book that historians in searchof answers to both questions need to look into the genealogy of participants in the

First Crusade. Numerous transactions involving crusaders are recorded incartularies and similar documents. From these records Riley-Smith has identifiedclusters of related families whose members regularly participated in crusadingventures, generation after generation. These families, Riley-Smith maintains,furnished a core group of individuals who were predisposed because of familytraditions and family interests to respond repeatedly to calls for crusadethroughout the high and later Middle Ages. Members of these clans, notsurprisingly, emerged as key leaders not only in crusading expeditions, but alsoamong the governing elite of the crusader settlements in the Latin East. Riley-Smith demonstrates that relationships among families that furnished dis-proportionate numbers of recruits furnish critical evidence that goes far towardexplaining the ability of the crusading movement to maintain itself for so long asa basic element in medieval politics and society.

U K J A. B

Benedictines in Oxford. Edited by Henry Wansbrough and Anthony Marett-Crosby , introduction by Cardinal Basil Hume. Pp. xvi­­ plates.London: Darton, Longman and Todd, . £. (paper). X

The centenary of the foundation of a Benedictine house of studies at Oxford byAmpleforth Abbey in has been marked by the publication of a varied andilluminating collection of essays. They range from the technically academic to theanecdotal, but overall they demonstrate the continuing and positive encounterbetween the oldest of the religious orders in England and the oldest of theuniversities. Henry Mayr-Harting argues that the Benedictines’ search for legaleducation gave impetus to the first beginnings of the university in the twelfthcentury. Other contributors, including Barrie Dobson and James Campbell,demonstrate the role and importance of the Benedictine foundations (Can-terbury, Durham and Gloucester Colleges) in a medieval university dominatedby friars and secular clergy. Particularly striking is the place of the monks in theyears of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Peter Cunich reminds us (p. ) thatthe Benedictine presence ‘was the most conspicuous of all the religious orders atOxford in the early sixteenth century’. Anthony Marrett-Crosby, the joint-editor, provides some human interest for the period in his exploration of the surviving manuscript letters of Robert Joseph, monk of Evesham, who was astudent at Gloucester College, Oxford, from –, and fully involved in theNew Learning and the changing ecclesiastical policy. A balance is provided inthe essays by discussion of the Cistercian presence at Oxford and the Benedictinenuns of Godstow. With the revival of the English Benedictine idea in the earlyseventeenth century Oxford converts formed the core of the first generation ofmonks. Their distinction as individuals and as writers is recorded by Philip Jebband their context described by Geoffrey Scott. Personalities predominate in thehistory of the Oxford Benedictines after with such contrasting characters asOswald Hunter-Blair, Justin McCann and James Forbes. The twentieth-centurymonks of Oxford have produced a Cardinal, Basil Hume, archbishop ofWestminster, but the long tradition of ecclesiastical eminence also recordsCardinal Adam Easton, monk of Norwich, who died in . In total a

worthwhile book which casts light on a previously neglected dimension of Oxfordhistory.

D A D A B

Die Register Innocenz’ III, VII: Pontifikatsjahr, ����}����. Texte und Indices. Editedby Othmar Hageneder and others. (Publikationen des Historischen Institutsbeim O> sterreichischen Kulturinstitut in Rom. II. Abt. Quellen. . Reihe.)Pp. lxvii­­ colour plates. Vienna: Verlag der O> sterreichischenAkademie der Wissenschaften, . o$ S . X

The present volume, the seventh in the edition of the register of Pope Innocent covers the seventh year, from February – the first letter dated February – to February . It consists of letters, all edited to theusual high standards of the Austrian Academy. It is an appropriate moment totake stock of the enterprise. Five volumes have now been published over the lastthirty-three years (–), comprising the first and second, and the fifth, sixthand seventh pontifical years (–, –) : volumes iii and iv, for theincomplete third and fourth years, will be reconstructed and have yet to come.The importance of having a full text of this the first, almost complete, papalregister to have survived, is paramount. While it would not be possible ordesirable to edit later registers in extenso, for the early thirteenth century it needsno defence. Anyone not convinced of the importance of an entirely new textshould take a look at the old, unexplained and corrupt text of the pope’s registerin Migne’s Patrologia (ccxv. –, for the seventh year) or at the pagesfor Innocent in Calendar of entries in the papal registers relating to Great Britain andIreland, i, ed. W. H. Bliss. Bliss made no effort to identify either persons, places orscriptural sources. The seventh year includes the famous decretal letter‘Pastoralis ’ (no. ) to Eustace, bishop of Ely, printed in Cheney and Semple’sSelected letters of Pope Innocent III, which furnished answers on numerous legalpoints. I pick particularly on this letter because it provided the decretal collectorswith much interest and work and one of the many joys of the present edition isthat it gives a full list of the letters they used. Besides this there is a splendid listof biblical quotations and allusions. The full importance of these will not beobvious until the great labour is completed and the day of the pope’s death( July ) reached. It will undoubtedly tell us of the preferences of thedrafters of the letters.

The Austrian Academy is serving the scholarly world well with this importantedition. Six colour plates at the end give a wonderful flavour of the originalregister. There are letters to recipients all over Europe, and several ‘ in ’ letters– from Andreas, prince of Dalmatia and Croatia and Regent of Hungary, andfrom the primate of the Bulgarians and Wallachians. Each volume brings its ownparticular riches. The constructive labours of a skilled team of editors workingunder the direction of Professor Othmar Hageneder cannot be praised too highly.

U C, J SL

William Ockham. Opera politica, IV. Edited by H. S. Offler. (Auctores BritanniciMedii Aevi, .) Pp. xviii­. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for TheBritish Academy), . £.

Finis coronat opera. This impressive volume, work on which was finished not longbefore Professor Offler’s death in , ‘completes ’ (in the editor’s own words)‘ the edition of Ockham’s shorter political writings ; only Dialogus remainsoutstanding’. No one will think any the less of a lifetime’s achievement in rigorousscholarship because it could not be extended to include that gargantuan work(now, Professor Luscombe tells us in his foreword to this volume, in the processof being made available in ‘an electronic edition and translation’). Offler’sinvolvement in the editing of Ockham’s Opera politica began before the SecondWorld War. Besides being responsible for the second edition () of vol. i, firstpublished in , he was the principal editor of vol. ii (), and the sole editorof vol. iii (). Thus all four volumes stand as a monument to his dedication,his learning and his superb editorial skills. The five texts in this fourth volumecomprise two (Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico ; De imperatorum et pontificumpotestate) that are unquestionably Ockham’s work; one (Compendium errorumIohannis Papae XXII), of which his authorship (Offler concluded) ‘can be upheld’ ;and two (Allegationes de potestate imperiali ; De electione Caroli quarti) for which ‘hisresponsibility must be regarded as very far from assured’. Each is preceded by aconcise but closely argued account of its history and of the sources and textualproblems. The editor’s brief general preface includes a careful defence of ‘[t]hedecision to close at this point the list of dubia to be included’ and a list of eleven‘polemical compositions which at one time or another have been imputed toOckham by scholars of repute, but which will find no place in Opera politica ’. Fewscholars, it seems safe to say, will question these decisions or doubt that we nowhave a definitive presentation of Ockham’s polemics apart from the Dialogus. Asto the interpretation and evaluation of these ‘political works ’, the debate willdoubtless long continue. Elsewhere – for he would not have seen a scholarlyedition as an appropriate forum for such debates – Offler dissented from (forexample) Walter Ullmann’s view that Ockham’s political ideas can beunderstood only in the context of his philosophy and theology. For Offler thepolitical writings were, rather, livres de circonstance, responding to the immediatedemands of this or that event or situation. In any case, his colleagues in thevarious fields where Ockham’s work is important, whatever stance they mayadopt in arguments of this kind, will always be conscious of an inestimable debtto Offler’s work, crowned as it aptly is by this posthumous volume.

U C, J. H. BL

St Bridget’s revelations to the popes. An edition of the so-called Tractatus de summispontificibus. Edited by Arne Jo$ nsson. (Studia Graeca et Latina Lundensia,.) Pp. . Lund: Lund University Press, . ;

One of the collections which the exiled Spanish hermit-bishop of Jae!n, AlfonsoPecha, compiled out of the revelations of St Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden

(–) contains her messages to the supreme pontiffs of her period. Scholarshave discussed the original idea of this compilation without agreeing upon thenumber of texts it contained. Jo$ nsson argues convincingly that the originalcompilation must have consisted of no more than thirteen texts, identifiable assuch in but a few manuscripts, among others Ashb. in the Laurenziana inFlorence, which because its rubrics and lay-out takes on a special role in Jo$ nsson’sargument (p. ; cf. BL, Harleian , pp. –). The edition of the thirteentexts (pp. –) is exemplary, sometimes improving Hans Aili (Revelaciones BookIV, ) as in Rev. (¯Lib. , ) § cardin!al"es, in accordance withTryggve Lunde!n’s Swedish translation (Himmelska uppenbarelser , Malmo ,). Jo$ nsson is reluctant to admit any essential conflict between the hermit-bishop’s aims for his compilation and St Bridget’s original messages as directedto individual popes. As a prominent result of his investigation the compilation ofthe thirteen revelations ad summos pontifices now receive their proper place inrelation to Alfonso’s further writings already edited by Jo$ nsson in his thesis(cf. his contribution in Birgittiana i []).

O U T N

The grief of God. Images of the suffering Jesus in late medieval England. By Ellen M.Ross. Pp. xiv­­ ills. Oxford: Oxford University Press, .£.. X

This study aims at exploring the contexts within which late medieval Englishpeople may have encountered and experienced the image of the Suffering God,of Christ’s Passion. The book’s four main chapters discuss the image’s use infour representational contexts : () sermons and devotional writings (includingMargery Kempe and Julian of Norwich); () fourteenth-century Books of Hoursand wall-paintings situated in parish churches (with special reference to SouthNewington, North Walsham, Great Tew and Peakirk) ; () religious drama (theYork and N-Town Corpus Christi plays) ; and () hagiographical writing whichpresents the female body (ancient martyrs such as Margaret and Katherine andmore recent devotees like Elizabeth of Spalbeek and Margery Kempe). The bookpowerfully argues that images of suffering have been misunderstood and taken assigns of excessive emotionality in the culture, rather than, possibly, tokens of acomplex understanding of the salvific promise of wounds, and the healing powerof suffering, Christ’s and that of humans. Ross contends that mystics distinguished‘flavours ’ of pain: of contrition, empathy and longing. For less subtle soulsChrist’s suffering could move to performance of acts of love; as she says in thediscussion of plays, these ‘ functioned as an invitation to enter the world madepresent there’ (p. ) through good works, reception of sacraments and love forone’s neighbour. This is a thoughtful book which is written with care and is madeaccessible to the reader in various ways. It sustains its argument through severalmedia and genres. This focusing on the image’s power has, however, led, perhapsinevitably, to a strange lack of historical context : issues related to the productionof the images – visual, textual and dramatic – are left almost totally unexplored.The varying degrees of access to images experienced by medieval people are littleanalysed, so that the multitude of Christians are almost undifferentiated, except

in a gender-related analysis of hagiographic suffering in ch. iv. Notwithstandingthese comments the book will be valued by historians, students of literature, artand theology; it marks a further experiment in the practice of multi-disciplinaryhistorical investigation.

P C, M RO

Richard II. By Nigel Saul. Pp. xiv­ incl. maps­ plates. NewHaven–London: Yale University Press, . £.

‘Yes, yes, yes ’, cried parliament three times during the procedure for Richard ’sdeposition and Henry ’s accession in . The bishop of Carlisle, it is nowagreed, probably stayed silent. But, if Richard there and then found few friends,his following amongst twentieth-century historians, attracted by the busyness ofevents and themes in the last quarter of the century, has been embarrassinglylarge. It is Henry who appears friendless ; Richard the over-ripe candidatefor a few seasons of ‘ set-aside’. Nigel Saul’s new biography had both to masterand marshal this flourishing literature, and yet offer new insights. It is achallenging brief, achieved in the detail and the magisterial aside more than inthe capture of the king’s shifting nature. Richard’s fascination with kingshiprituals, here consummately anatomised, has attracted much attention, but Ifound explanations of his psychology, beyond a plausible narcissism, un-convincing. Sudden shifts in the king’s actions, first in the years after the Merciless Parliament, and then in the tyranny of the final two years, are read as‘ situation dependent’, responses to changes in the ‘psychological environment’ ;the prosecution of the early Lollards (Richard’s epitaph praised him for‘ suppressing the heretics and scattering their friends’) as sublimated angertowards political enemies. More striking is the success with which the politicalnarrative is throughout set within a provincial English, a regional (notably Irishand Scottish) and a wider European context. The Irish settlement of is themodel for royal policy in England after . Bishop Despenser’s crusade toFlanders in , and Gaunt’s to Castile in , both testimony to the GreatSchism, occupy a properly central place. The French chronicler Jean Froissart’stestimony on English politics, unfairly disparaged by historians, is given its dueweight. Saul’s political history embraces the whole of Europe and the wholenation, and convinces. Richard was perhaps personally opposed to the deathpenalty, certainly drawn to peace. To his father and grandfather’s victories atPoitiers and Cre! cy he could add only a trouncing of Charles in three days ofsartorial display at Ardres in . But if Richard was a bad king (in the Englishsense), then surely the English (in any moral sense) were a worse nation, militant,disruptive in Europe and fiscally mean. Politics and the developing ideas ofkingship are threaded through the whole narrative ; piety and the Church aremore comfortably accommodated within discrete chapters. Despite the radicalreligious atmosphere of his youth it was perhaps inevitable that Richard’s laterpiety would be both personal and conservative. An innovative kingship and therise of curial and orthodox bishops like John Waltham and Edmund Stafford,perhaps also Archbishop Arundel’s equation of heresy with social unrest, blocked

sympathy for religious reform. Devotion to Mary and the Confessor, andpatronage of pre-Conquest English saints, cathedrals and the Carthusianscreated little fashionable following. Had Anne of Bohemia, an intellectual andpossible patron of the devotio moderna (the brief portrait of her on pp. – is amodel of the author’s command and communication of detail) lived it might havebeen different and the reign enticing for other reasons.

U K P M

Lollardy and the gentry in the later Middle Ages. Edited by Margaret Aston and ColinRichmond. Pp. viii­ incl. ills and maps}tables. Stroud: SuttonPublishing}New York: St Martin’s Press, . £. ;

As the editors remind us, it is twenty-five years since K. B. McFarlane’s lectureson the Lollard knights were published. Not that this book offers much in the wayof an explicit reappraisal of McFarlane’s views, apart from Geoffrey Martin’srehabilitation of Knighton as a reliable and important source for early Lollardy.The seven servants of Richard upon whom McFarlane concentrated featureonly marginally here. The emphasis instead (in keeping with the general trendin late medieval studies) has moved away from the court towards the widerconstituency of county and parish gentry, although even with this widened remitnot all the contributors find much to say about the gentry. They feature most inJohn Thomson’s essay on knightly piety, Maureen Jurkowski’s reflections on theattractiveness of Lollardy to lawyers, and in the two essays exploring Lollardy atthe turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries : Andrew Hope’s reconstructionof the career of William Sweeting, and Rob Lutton’s rather inconclusivediscussion of Tenterden wills as evidence (or not) of Lollard sympathies amongthe townspeople and gentry of the Weald. The presentation of the TwelveConclusions to parliament in , with its implied appeal to gentry interests,links a number of other contributions, and parliament also features in AlisonMcHardy’s valuable discussion of De heretico comburendo. These references toparliament are the closest the volume comes to discussing central authority, andthe apparent failure of Lollardy to acquire the requisite number of friends in highplaces. Although the importance of gentry support at a local level is touched onelsewhere, there is no sustained exploration of the claim made in the introductionthat it is patronage rather than book production, teaching or literacy whichneeds to be in the foreground of discussion (p. ). Again in conformity with recenthistoriographical trends, the concern of most contributors is not with Lollardy’sfailure to acquire an institutional launch pad, but with the nuances of individualbelief, and the volume’s strength lies in its evocation of the shades of responsebetween rejection and enthusiastic endorsement. A number of contributorsdescribe colonists of that middle ground as ‘evangelical ’ and although thatparticular word (recently used in a more precise sense by Diarmaid MacCullochin his biography of Cranmer) may muddy the waters, it does at least drawattention to the need to find an appropriate vocabulary in which to discuss thosepeople who shared aspects of ‘Lollard’ belief while wishing to remain securelywithin the Church. In considering the events of the succeeding century it is the

role of those occupiers of the middle ground, rather than of the ‘Lollards ’, whichmay well raise the most fruitful questions.

F C, R HC

Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum. Verzeichnis der in den Supplikenregistern derPoX nitentiarie vorkommenden Personen, Kirchen und Orte des Deutschen Reiches, IV:Pius’ II. ����–����. Text edited by Ludwig Schmugge, Patrick Herspergerand Be! atrice Wiggenhauser ; indices by Hildegard Schneider-Schmugge andLudwig Schmugge. (Deutsche Historische Institut in Rom.) Pp. xxxvi­.Tu$ bingen: Niemeyer, . DM . X

Die Supplikenregister der paX pstlichen PoX nitentiarie aus der Zeit Pius’ II. (����–����). ByLudwig Schmugge, Patrick Hersperger and Be! atrice Wiggenhauser.(Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, .) Pp. xii­.Tu$ bingen: Niemeyer, . DM . ;

The penitentiary was the department of the papal Curia responsible for issuingspiritual favours, mainly dispensations of different types. It is aptly described inthese volumes as ‘eine Zentrale der Verwaltung des Gewissens ’. The penitentiaryhas its own historical archive, which has been generally accessible to scholarssince . The earliest records in it are registers of petitions, which begin in thefifteenth century (there are no corresponding registers of outgoing letters of thepenitentiary). The six registers from the pontificate of Pius are the principalsource of the present volumes. Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum, iv, is the firstvolume to appear in a new series published by the German Historical Institutein Rome. The volumes concerning earlier material have not yet been published,but it is expected that a volume covering the pontificate of Eugenius will bethe next to appear. The purpose of the series is to calendar the entries in theregisters of the penitentiary concerning Germany, and it will complement thevolumes of the Repertorium Germanicum which deal with the corresponding entriesin the chancery registers. The entries are arranged according to the divisions ofthe registers themselves : De matrimonialibus, De diversis formis, De declaratoriis(concerning offences whose absolution was reserved to the apostolic see), Dedefectu natalium and De uberiori (dispensations to those of illegitimate birth toreceive the higher orders and benefices with cure of souls), De promotis etpromovendis (dispensations to those suffering an impediment to ordination aspriest), De sententiis generalibus and De confessionalibus in forma ‘Cupientes ’ (licencesto clergy to grant absolution to their parishioners in cases of a sentence of generalexcommunication), and De confessionalibus perpetuis (licences to choose a confessor).The method of publication varies according to the nature of the petition. Thus,the entries for standard forms are very brief, while the text of De declaratoriispetitions is given in full. Eleven indices complete the volume. Great care and skillare evident in its preparation. It has a useful introduction; but this does notconsider in detail the historical interest of the material calendared. Rather, thisis the subject of a separate monograph, Die Supplikenregister der paX pstlichenPoX nitentiarie. After three introductory chapters, there are seven chapters whichdiscuss the different types of petitions according to the categories listed above.

The authors explain clearly the canonistic background, vital to an understandingof sources of this type. It soon becomes clear that the registers are a fascinatingsource not only for clerical careers and religious life but also for many otheraspects of fifteenth-century German society. The authors are not content simplyto describe what they have found in the registers ; they are constantly askingquestions about the nature of the sources – and attempting to answer them. Onetopic which recurs frequently, and is the subject of the final chapter, is therelationship of the penitentiary and chancery registers. Why did the penitentiaryand the chancery deal with petitions of the same type; and, in particular, did thechoice of the one or the other department result from the decision of the curialpersonnel or from that of the petitioners and their proctors (cf. p. )? All in all,these two volumes are amongst the most important contributions ever made tothe study of the papal penitentiary.

C C C, P. N. R. ZC

La Bibbia al rogo. La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (����–����).By Gigliola Fragnito. (Saggi, .) Pp. . Bologna: Il Mulino, .L., (paper).

The Bible in the sixteenth century. Edited by David C. Steinmetz. (Duke Monographsin Medieval and Renaissance Studies, .) Pp. vi­. Durham, NC–London: Duke University Press, (first publ. ). £. (paper).

Professor Fragnito begins her survey with a paradox. Pope John Paul recentlydeclared the ‘Year of the Bible ’ ; but ignorance of the Bible is widespreadand profound in Italy – not because of indifference, but because of centuries ofcensure by that same Church of which the pope is the head. Between and no Italian-language edition of the Bible or of the New Testament wasprinted in Italy. In the early seventeenth century, public ceremonies were heldfor the burning of heretical books and of Bibles (rogo means ‘fire’) ; people becameaccustomed to associating the Bible with heresy. In Pope Paul angrilyasked: ‘Do you not know that so much reading of Scripture destroys the Catholicreligion?’

Professor Fragnito traces the surprisingly complex story which led from athriving industry in the publication of Scripture at the beginning of the sixteenthcentury to a total ban at the end. The main lines are already known, thanksamong others to J.-M. de Bujanda and his team in vols viii and ix of the Index deslivres interdits, notably the introductions by Paul Grendler : after an inconclusivedebate on modern-language translations of the Scripture in Session of theCouncil of Trent, the Tridentine index of imposed a ban on Bible-readingin modern languages except by permission of the local bishop or inquisitor (thefamous Rule ) ; this became a total ban, without exceptions, in the Index of .But, basing herself on new research in various archives, including access to therarely opened archives of the Congregation of the Index, Fragnito brings out wellthe complexities of the story. First the problem of a ‘universal ’ legislation appliedto different local situations : in much of northern Europe the propinquity of

Protestants made it necessary for Roman Catholics to know their Scriptures,whereas in Italy and Spain there was no similar challenge to the ecclesiasticalauthorities. Second, what texts are covered by the generic term ‘Bible ’? Not onlythe text of Scripture, but also extracts, paraphrases, expositions, postils,versifications of Scripture, poems or plays on biblical subjects, historical works onthe creation of the world…! All come under threat.

But it is in the field of the competing authorities in Rome that the greatestcomplexities arise. The Congregation of the Index, the Congregation of theInquisition, papal advisors, the successive popes, the bishops (not to mention theVenetians, admirably documented in earlier work by Grendler), all claimed tohave a say. Thus the Tridentine index entrusted to the bishops the right to grantlicences for the study of Scripture in the vernacular ; in the Congregation ofthe Inquisition decreed that this permission was to be granted in no circumstancesat all. As a result, thirty years elapsed between the Tridentine index and the‘Clementine’ index of (with two false starts in and , whenpublication of an already printed index was blocked at the last moment). Behindthe personalities and the infighting was the fundamental question of how the laityshould be treated: with a serious attempt at education, or with authoritariancontrol. In the upshot, ‘ad un popolo religiosamente maturo si preferı' un popolofanciullo, a cui somministrare piccole dosi misurate della Scrittura’ (p. ).

A comparison with Paul Grendler’s introduction to vol. ix of the Index des livresinterdits is illuminating. Grendler is cautious and non-judgmental (and treats thepapacy with great caution); Fragnito is writing histoire engageU e, moved by a senseof indignation and shock at the treatment given by the Catholic Church to thesource of divine revelation. It makes for lively reading, as well as being based onsolid research.

The Bible in the sixteenth century is in another sphere altogether. The bookcontains most of the papers presented at the Second International Colloquy onthe History of Biblical Exegesis in the Sixteenth Century, held at Duke Universityin . The clothbound edition did not appear until (which also saw theacts of the third colloquy of the series) ; it was not reviewed in these pages at thattime, so a notice on this paperback edition is justified.

It is in some senses obsolete : during the fourteen years since the colloquy,several major works have appeared in the field: Le Temps des reU formes et la Bible,directed by Guy Bedouelle and Bernard Roussel in the series Bible de tous les temps(), Bedouelle again on Le ‘Divorce ’ du roi Henry VIII (), T. H. L. Parkeron Commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans, ����–���� (), to mention but a few.However, given the range of approaches possible within the field of biblicalexegesis, these papers retain considerable interest for the specialist. They varyfrom H. C. E. Midlefort’s sociological study of the notion of family in sixteenth-century Germany, and the consequent understanding of biblical texts relating tothe family, to Gerald Hobbs’s wide-ranging survey of psalm versions andcommentaries, analysing the respective authority attributed to the ‘hebrewtruth’ and to traditional interpretations, to a challenging paper by RichardMuller on Calvin’s hermeneutical method (not so revolutionary as most of usthought), to painstaking study of specific biblical passages (John Payne onErasmus’ treatment of Romans iv. – ; Jean-Claude Margolin on Romans xi asseen by Valla, Colet, Lefe' vre and Erasmus; Irena Backus on changes to Bucer’s

exegesis of John vi. , , before and after the Wittenberg Concord). It is abook written by professionals for professionals ; specialists in the field willwelcome this greater availability of an impressive series of studies.

U G F H

Johannes Eck und der oberdeutsche Zinsstreit, ����–����. By Johann Peter Wurm.(Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, .) Pp. v­. Mu$ nster :Aschendorff, . DM (paper). ;

An embarrassment to any glib association of Protestantism with the rise ofcapitalism is the fact that Luther himself frowned on the money economy andharked back to an agrarian idyll. It was instead his arch-opponent, the staunchRomanist Johann Eck, who took the Fuggers’ shilling and defended moderateinterest rates as free from the stain of usury. In a revision of his doctoral thesis,Wurm sheds much light on this episode in Eck’s early career. He does a good jobof setting Eck’s activity in a variety of contexts, including the socio-economicclimate of the great entrepreneurial centres of south Germany, the forward-looking economic theory of the ‘Tu$ bingen school ’ of Summenhart and Biel, thedebate between the Augsburg jurist Ilsung and the Nuremberg abbot, Kress, andthe scholastic background (a treatment that naturally owes much to Noonan).Wurm’s familiarity with Eck’s unpublished notes and recently published lettersenables him to challenge some accepted dates ; but this – and his valuable editionof Eck’s manuscript Consilium of – apart, readers will chiefly be grateful tohim for delineating more clearly the pre-Reformation Eck. South Germanexponents of the new learning evidently had little time for new money, and stillless for a scholastic who prostituted his debating skills in its cause; this prehistoryhelps to explain why some humanists were so ready to take Luther’s side at theLeipzig disputation, and why Eck himself, preferring his revenge cold, added thenames of Bernhard Adelmann and Willibald Pirckheimer (amongst others) to thelist of those outlawed by Exsurge Domine in .

U H D B

Priests and prelates of Armagh in the age of reformations, ����–����. By HenryA. Jefferies. Pp. incl. maps and tables. Dublin: Four Courts Press,. £.

The study of the early Reformation in Ireland is a task fraught with difficulties.Lack of source material and the ethnic division of the population both contributeto the complexity involved. Dr Jefferies’s book is the first substantial contributionto untangling these knotty problems. Using the unique collection of documentsmisleadingly described since the seventeenth century as the Armagh ‘registers ’,Jefferies steers a sure course through the problem of religious change in the earlysixteenth century in the multi-ethnic diocese of Armagh using the provision ofpastoral care as his theme. Taking his lead from recent English historical writing,which emphasises the strengths of the late medieval Church and popularattachment to it, Jefferies argues in the first five chapters of the book that boththe Irish and Anglo-Irish parts of the late medieval diocese of Armagh were

vibrant places. They were well served by clergy, albeit of a traditional kind, andthe diocesan administrative structures of synods and visitations enabled problemsin pastoral care to be dealt with speedily. Clerical discipline in matters such asconcubinage may have been lax but that had little impact on the effectiveness ofthe pastoral mission. In only one area, that of diocesan finance (discussed inchapter vi), were there potential problems. Lack of landed wealth meant that thearchbishops were forced to rely on the spiritualities for the main bulk of theirincome, a situation which would have severe implications for the Church afterthe Henrician reforms when some of these spiritualities were appropriated to thecrown. The final two chapters discuss the implications of this situation for theimplementation of the Henrician reforms and the Marian restoration ofCatholicism. It is these two chapters which are the weakest in the book, due insome part to the less forthcoming nature of the sources after the Henrician processof reform had begun. However there are also conceptual weaknesses here. I, forone, am not convinced of the dichotomies which are set up between ‘Catholicreform’ which Jefferies argues continued in this period and the Henrician reformswhich failed to make progress. To argue that the conservative nature of thevisitation articles of is shown by the questions about the celebration of mass,the fabric of the parish church, and the provision of liturgical equipment seemsstrange for these were also concerns of the Henrician reformers. Such quibblesaside, this is surely a book which will place the debate about the nature of theReformation in Ireland on a new plane. It shows how much can be garneredfrom already well-known sources and challenges us all to follow Dr Jefferies’sfine examples and look at the evidence afresh.

N U I, R GM

Divine and human authority in Reformation thought. German theologians on political order,����–����. By Ralph Keen. (Bibliotheca Humanistica & Reformatorica, .)Pp. viii­. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, . f.

Good books on the political thought of German theologians in the period of theearly Reformation are none too plentiful and worthwhile contributions to thegenre are always welcome. The author of this new study attempts, by means tobe described more fully below, to do justice to both the ‘theological dimension’of Reformation thought on political order and to its secular component as well.The former, he says, has been unduly neglected by secular historians while thelatter has been too little heeded by historical theologians. Unfortunately, hisattempt in this book to bridge the gap between the two approaches is underminedby a series of fundamental flaws.

The first of these is a writing style so abstract, general and vague thatcomprehension is routinely difficult and frequently impossible. Sometimes theproblem is ambiguity. The assertion, for example, that ‘ the Reformers appealedto secular authorities [on the basis of] a conception of authority that secularizedthe ecclesial order and subordinated it to the political order ’ (p. ) is either trueor false depending on which of several possible meanings one assigns to it.Similarly, the statement that for Protestants ‘religious error is something personal

and does not fall under institutional supervision’ (p. ) is true only if onedefines ‘religious error ’ very carefully and narrowly. In neither case are theauthor’s intentions clear. At other times, the problem is the omission of neededinformation, as in the failure (pp. –) to explain either who it is that has calledProtestant thought ‘primitivist ’ and Catholic thought ‘progressivist ’ or whatthose terms mean. Most often, however, the problem is simply baffling obscurity.The briefest example is to be found on p. : ‘An attribution of supremacy tothe Bible in which secular rule prevails subordinates the rule of the church to thatof government and so gives church government derivative power only.’ Suchprose defeats even the most persistent efforts to understand it.

A second flaw in the work is the liberal sprinkling of the sort of gaffes that castdoubt upon the author’s knowledge of sixteenth-century German history and hiscredibility as a reader of the sources. His description of Charles as ‘a youngSpaniard’ (p. ), for example, is surprising. His description (p. ) of Luther’streatise On secular authority as ‘an exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount’, on theother hand, is positively startling. Even more so is his assertion (p. ) thatMelanchthon, in his commentary on the Politics of Aristotle (), sought ‘ toundermine the Holy Roman Empire ’, in which the emperor was ‘ subject… tothe pope’ but that, out of respect for the German electoral system, he did notattack ‘the German Empire ’. The ‘Holy Roman Empire ’ and the ‘GermanEmpire ’ were, of course, the same thing. What Melanchthon actually says in thepassages cited is (a) that secular princes, including the emperor, hold, their powerdirectly from God rather than from the pope, and (b) that neither pope noremperor exercises political sovereignty over the whole world. Most astonishing ofall, however, is the author’s claim (pp. –) that the ecclesiology and the viewof the princely office found in Melanchthon’s works of – are somethingentirely new. No one who had read and taken seriously Melanchthon’s politicalwritings of the s could have made such a claim.

The author’s failure to discuss Melanchthon’s early writings is a prime exampleof a further flaw in the book, namely, the omission of so much relevant material.No theologian, with the possible exception of the Catholic apologist, JohannesCochlaeus, is represented by the entire corpus of his works relevant to the themeof divine and human authority and political order. Key works by majortheologians (for example, Melanchthon’s Scholia on Colossians of } andLuther’s Commentary on Psalm ��� of ) are not mentioned, while relativelyunimportant work by them and by minor authors (for example, HieronymusWeller) are included. Moreover, whole categories of presumably relevanthistorical development – the emergence of the early modern state, and the pre-Reformation development of secular control over religious life – are either passedover in silence or else only alluded to briefly and in passing.

Finally, in the case of the theological works that the author does discuss, thereader has to contend with the puzzling arrangement and uninformative natureof his treatment of them. He shows scant regard for their chronological sequence:texts separated by as much as several decades are often juxtaposed, without thedates being given, and discussed in reverse order. Moreover, the author tendseither to ignore historical context or, as in the case of Melanchthon’s De ecclesiaand De officio principum, to offer highly debatable observations about it (pp.–). Most serious of all, the contents of the works are almost never

adequately described. The author comments at length on the significance that heperceives the works to have but he does not really summarise their argument forthe reader. His treatment of Luther’s On secular authority (pp. –) and that ofthe two treatises by Melanchthon already mentioned are prime examples.

Much of this trouble could have been avoided had the author set himself amore reasonable goal. His stated aim is to demonstrate two theses. The first is thatall the German theologians who wrote on the problem of political order in theperiod – had in common both their theological perspective and theirinsistence on the subordination of human to divine authority, but that theydiffered in the use they made of the Bible and of non-biblical sources (law, reason,history). The second is that is it therefore possible to study those theologianscomparatively and arrange them into significant patterns. In pursuit of this aimthe author offers a typology, too complicated to be summarised in detail here, inwhich the Protestant reformers are ‘ inclusively biblical ’ in their theologicalapproach and their ecclesiological preferences while the defenders of Catholicismare ‘ inclusively ecclesial ’ and the Radicals are ‘exclusively biblical ’ in theirs. Theauthor is at least as interested in validating the approach and the method as heis in the thought of the theologians in question, with two unfortunateconsequences. First, he has to deal with all three major groups of theologians (notto mention all major aspects of the large and multi-faceted topic of politicalorder) rather than focus his attention more narrowly and productively. Thisundertaking, as the author himself acknowledges (p. ), is simply too vast.Second, the method, rather than the texts, becomes the real subject of the book.That is why the author appears to jump so haphazardly from one theologian orissue or decade to another and back again and to be apparently so little interestedin delving more deeply into the argument of the individual texts or morecompletely into the thought of any one thinker: he has fallen into the trap ofusing the texts to validate the method rather than using the method to facilitatea deeper understanding of the texts. In the end, it is difficult to see that he hasproved anything more momentous than that theologians tend to think liketheologians within the constraints of their ecclesiastical commitments.

In fairness to the author, it should be noted that much of what he says in thisbook is entirely sound. In particular, the pages devoted to Johannes Cochlaeusare interesting and clear and very much better written than the rest of the book.They are, in other words, an indication of how good the book might have beenhad it been planned and executed differently.

V C, J M. EU T

The concept of equity in Calvin’s ethics. By Guenther H. Haas. (Editions SR, .) Pp.xi­. Carlisle : Paternoster Press (for the Canadian Corporation forStudies in Religion), . £. (paper).

Professor Haas has identified the concept of equity as a significant motif inCalvin’s ethics, and so added considerably to our understanding of the GenevanReformer’s thought. The central expository chapters (on equity, love and justice ;equity and the law; equity as the harmonisation of biblical law; equity in thecommandments of the second table ; equity in the State and the Church; and

equity and usury) are preceded by three chapters of historical background. Haasshows the significance of equity from Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, throughRoman Law and the medieval commentators, to the Renaissance and theReformers, and makes sensible judgements about the positive influence of thistradition on Calvin.

He makes two main claims for Calvin’s use of equity; that he firmly recognisedthe use of equity in non-Christian sources ; and that he uses equity as abenign interpreter of the law, tempering its rigours by mercy and clemency,rather than (for example) as with Aristotle, the rectification of positive law.

Haas is more convincing on the first of these claims than on the second. Heshows effectively that for Calvin equity is a basic principle of natural law. But inhis treatment of Old Testament legislation does not Calvin use equity as acorrector of such legislation not (as with Aristotle) on account of its generality butbecause it is an inadequate measure of the true meaning of the law of God asrevealed in Christ? And if there is a natural awareness of equity, does Calvin notopen the door for a valid critique of Old Testament legislation based uponnatural law by those who have never known, or accepted, the law of Christ?

K’ C, P HL

Philip of Spain. By Henry Kamen. Pp. xvi­ incl. maps­ plates. NewHaven–London: Yale University Press, . £.

Professor Henry Kamen’s Philip of Spain will be read at two levels, those of theintelligent general reader and the specialist historian. Among the former thesenior school student and the undergraduate will benefit greatly from thisstraightforward narrative, of a long and eventful reign. Well-written, in-telligently illustrated, and presented chronologically (if somewhat episodically),the text, concentrating largely on Spanish domestic issues, is generally enhancedby the personal observations of an author steeped in the Spanish sources enablingKamen to use Philip’s own words, written or recorded, to illuminate royal policy,its articulation and results. This wide scholarship encompasses contemporaryreactions favourable or otherwise to the king and his reign, presenting in anaccount free of the nationalistic and confessional bias all too frequently associatedwith this subject, a rather benign portrait. There is little new for the churchhistorian in Kamen’s view and treatment of Philip’s religious faith, althoughKamen notes a ‘ tendency to religion’ (p. ) incident upon the death of Philip’swife Anna of Austria in . Philip would not tolerate Protestantism in his owndominions but ‘came to accept the inevitability of toleration in specificcircumstances ’ (p. ), citing as examples England c. , and the Netherlandssome years later. Since Philip had no control over the first area, and had lostcontrol over much of the second his acceptance is unsurprising. His view ofaspects of the papacy’s secular politics he inherited from his father. Philip’sattitude to the Church in Spain is exemplified by that curious duality ofconcerned religiosity and personal advantage that passed for Hapsburg religiouspolicy – ‘unswerving’ (p. ) support for the inquisition (not mirrored in Spainat the time), the acceptance of the decrees of Trent, and the nomination to thesee of Toledo of, as Philip wrote, ‘ some old man who will not live long’ (p. )

so that his nephew, the Archduke Albert, could have it when canonically of age.(The nominee, the seventy-eight-year-old Quiroga, lived on for nearly twentyyears.) The specialist historian will have difficulties with some of the claimsadvanced by Kamen, not least his statement in the preface that the bookrepresents ‘ the first full-length and fully researched biography of the king’, thisof a monarch who has been the subject of two very useful biographies in English,those of Peter Pierson in (not referred to in the bibliography), and ofGeoffrey Parker in . This latter brought to English readers the portrait of amore congenial Philip, using sources that throw some doubt on Kamen’s furtherclaim at the same place in his preface that ‘at every point ’ he has used ‘entirelynew manuscript sources ’ (p. xii). There is a tendency to decry the work of otherhistorians with whom he disagrees, for instance dismissing the well-researchedwork of M. J. Rodriguez Salgado on policy differences between Charles andPhilip in the years leading up to the former’s abdication, which Kamen himselfdescribed as ‘major ’ (p. ), as ‘unduly exaggerated’ (p. , n. ). The mostsurprising claim made by Kamen in a biography dedicated to understanding‘the thoughts, motives and preferences ’ (p. xii) of this significant ruler, is that‘Philip was by temperament tranquil, subdued and always in control of himself.For the rest, his character was utterly normal ’ (p. ). It is ironic that Kamen’sskill in research and in writing this book gloriously refutes the last clause. Philiphad a remarkable character.

L S M

The making of the Anglican Church worldwide. By W. M. Jacob. Pp. viii­ incl.map. London: SPCK, . £. (paper).

There has long been a need for a book which provides a compact account of thedevelopment of the Anglican Communion from its sixteenth-century origins tothe s. Jacob has provided just such a work. He stresses that ‘ the AnglicanCommunion’, a term which itself requires considerable unpacking, evolvedpragmatically, largely as a consequence of the impact made upon different partsof the world by the English}British state and peoples. Constitutional issues ofconsiderable complexity arose, first in the British Isles themselves, then in NorthAmerica and subsequently in other colonies of settlement and conquest.Missionary enterprise, as the author makes abundantly clear, carried with it notinfrequent disputes over boundaries and jurisdictions. A little misleadingly, theauthor talks about ‘South Africa’ and ‘Australia ’ in the nineteenth cen-tury – when no such entities existed. The history which is recounted, however, isvery bishop-centred which is perhaps excusable in an episcopalian communion,but one would like to have heard more about what, if anything, the making ofa worldwide Church meant below the purple. There is also a disappointingabsence of figures. Although there is a complete list of Anglican provinces anddioceses, there is no indication of their respective numerical weight. It is scarcelya surprise to learn that the communion is multi-national and multi-racial but itwould have been good to have been given some facts and figures.

U W, K RL

The English hymn. A critical and historical study. By J. R. Watson. Pp. xi­.Oxford: Clarendon Press, . £.

Abide with me. The world of Victorian hymns. By Ian Bradley. Pp. xvii­. London:SCM Press, . £. X;

Prefacing his study with the due modesty of one in duty bound to afford thereader some explanation of why ‘another book on the English hymn’ shouldappear, it is likely that Professor Watson has nevertheless written what willwidely be regarded as a definitive work of scholarship. Compared with DrBradley’s ‘unashamedly enthusiastic study’, The English hymn is a decidedlycritical piece. It is not about hymns in worship, nor yet about tunes, or evenhymns as poetry. Instead the author’s focus provides ‘a chronologicalstudy – systematic though not complete – of the genre ’ (p. ix). How appropriatethen that Bradley – already well-known for his Penguin book of hymns – should offera thematic and topical approach and, concentrating on a spate of Victorianhymns often dismissed as ‘ trivial, mawkish, sentimental and shallow’, show nomean measure of ‘respect for the integrity of the genre ’ (p. xiv).

Apparently convinced that the English hymn is ‘ in danger of becoming asubject for academic study rather than a living form of worship’, ProfessorWatson is not one of those scholars who demean it as ‘a second-rate poetic formlimited in its aims and expression…disfigured by sentimentality, inflexiblemetres, self-congratulation and religiosity ’. Rather he seeks, on an immensecanvas, to block in literary and musical highlights and so complement theessential content of Christian faith, that sine qua non the work of the late ErikRoutley never ceased to prize. His aim – to return hymns to the world of‘ordinary thinking and fully human being’ where they belong – will certainly stirup the dialectic. For Watson aims to dispel the idea of hymns as a churchpreserve, and would make them available to all ‘who feel the stirring of somereligious sense, of some deeper and more poignant emotion, or some half-felt orhalf-understood apprehension of the spiritual ’ (p. ).

What follows, if it inevitably has its peaks and troughs, is the kind of finecritical narrative that guarantees a magnum opus shelf space in the referencelibrary. John Wesley’s grasp of German Pietism and ‘seventeenth-centurymysticism’ gives him the accolade of a skilful ‘adapter ’ (p. ) ; there is acharming tribute to the ‘ fresh and unusual ’ poetry of Christopher Smart ; andCowper’s ‘ sensitivity ’ is well grasped. On the other hand, ‘ the tangled andcomplex way’ of Reformation seems to have confused Watson about the IsaacWatts determined to wean the faithful from those inflexible orthodoxies of aperiod that prized metrical psalms as the legacy an austere Calvinism decreedremained unaltered. For, in the shrewd judgement and succinct expression ofR. W. Dale, Watts ‘redeemed the psalmody of the Congregationalists fromJudaism, and made it Christian’. As for hymns as homilies, these displease theprofessor’s literary sense. When Newton therefore preaches in his hymns, he isforthwith accused of a rather disagreeable authoritarianism. Heber’s tendency topreach is likewise deplored to the extent that will prompt faithful folk to wonderif kerygma constitutes something of a blind spot for literary critics? Yet Watsondoes not shrink from pursuing that elusive will o’ the wisp to appreciate that, interms of the so-called ‘Romantic Period’, ‘while hymn-writing was in one sensecutting itself off from English poetry…in another way it was coming closer ’ (p.

). He can find James Montgomery ‘the greatest hymn-writer on the difficultsubject of prayer ’ (p. ), and John Mason Neale ‘ the Ruskin or Morris ofhymn-writing’ (p. ). Throughout there is an impressive grasp of ‘Hymn-books, of every style ’ which adds to the overall excellence of the bibliography. Nowonder the analogy with Darwin’s ‘ survival of the fittest ’ can be sustained for nofewer than six pages of what is termed ‘hymnological Darwinianism’.

Ian Bradley prefers a contemporary parallel to plead that ‘Hymns playedmuch the same ro# le in Victorian culture that television and radio soap operasdo today’ (p. xi). His work is lively and always readable, but many will deem itlaughable to find Tractarian hymnody and Hymns Ancient & Modern, ‘ solid andvenerable ’ as they are, ‘ touched up to suit changing tastes ’ and the world of TheArchers ! The aim, of course, is rehabilitation, but to preface his work in this way,even if Bradley soon repents the irreverence (p. xv), scarcely inspires confidencein constructive criticism. The author’s ‘ trawl through sources ’ certainly revealsmore anecdotes than any sympathetic grasp of purpose, together with a flippancythat detracts from the ‘respect ’ he claims to show for his subject.

This is the approach of the social historian – even at times the sociologist – andBradley is at his best viewing ‘west gallery music and minstrels ’, the ‘cheerfulanarchy’ that had to give way before ‘ the onward march of Tractarianism’ (p.). It was a revival that set musical missionaries to work to enliven a Church ofEngland bypassed by ‘Wesleyans and Dissenters ’ who, if musically aware, largelyused ‘ light and trivial ’ tunes (Vincent Novello). It followed that hymn booksbecame big business and, in the hands of an essentially social historian, a chapteron ‘The making of Victorian hymn-books ’ proves particularly good value.Lengthy focus on a full range of hymn-writers draws attention to the fascinatingvariety of places and circumstances which prompted such poetry.

Abide with me will prove invaluable for its ‘Who’s Who’ of both Victorianhymnwriters and those who composed hymn tunes. It tells a tale – even to theway modernising clergy and liberal theologians find hymns repellent, emascu-lating them ‘in the cause of inclusive language and political correctness ’ (p. ).Some aspects of Bradley’s book suggest a critical update of Routley’s work. Butthere is also a measure of prophecy in his surmise that once parish churchEvensong (‘Evening Prayer’) goes, traditional hymns will soon follow. Or has anAberdeen church historian forgotten the Free Churches and the revival of thewestern Church itself where such hymns now flourish far more than in theincreasingly marginalised sect that is the contemporary ‘Church of England’?

R C, P N BC

All’ombra dei Barberini. Fedelta[ e servizio nella Roma barocca. By Irene Fosi. (‘Europadelle Corti ’. Centro studi sulle societa' di antico regime. Biblioteca delCinquecento, .) Pp. . Rome: Bulzoni Editore, . L. ,.

It is a pleasure to welcome a book that makes a substantial contribution toRoman social and ecclesiastical history in the Barberini epoch. Irene Fosi tracesthe rise of the Sacchetti family to prominence in the Roman world between

and . Her work is solidly based on the family and Florentine–Romanarchives. It documents the insertion of a new merchant family into the Romanworld by means of land purchases, grain speculation and the acquisition of office.It discreetly but firmly revises some established landmarks. Thus the Florentinecolony in Rome, far from yielding to the competition of Genoese families in themid sixteenth century, underwent a fresh access of strength with the arrival ofanti-Medici exiles.

The new immigrants were cohesive. Through the Florentine confraternity ofS. Giovanni they established a network of patrons in the Roman world: Fosiexamines the baptismal records with a clear eye for the social significance ofgodparenting. Her debt to the work of John Bossy is here generouslyacknowledged.

Under the patronage of the Barberini (the ‘ombra’ of the title is aMediterranean shade, protective, on the whole), the Sacchetti family gainedimportant banking favours, in return for ‘ fedelta[ ’ and ‘ servizio ’. The familycorrespondence reveals the mutual bonding of family and patron, as hingingupon the central role of the ‘uomo di chiesa’, Giulio Sacchetti, at once padronedella famiglia and Barberini creatura. From this difficult double responsibility – forthe welfare of his own family and that of his patrons – there emerges a fascinatingportrait of Giulio, the central figure in the family, and therefore of this book.Giulio Sacchetti’s career was, in one sense, guaranteed by the election ofUrban , who promoted him from the Bologna vice-legation to the Madridnunciature, and from there to the Ferrara legation, where he distinguishedhimself in the work of protecting and feeding the city in time of plague and war.After that he was made responsible for Rome’s public health system andcontinued to support and encourage the rise of able servants in the papaladministration. On the other hand, Urban ’s patronage meant Spain’senmity, and the Spanish veto excluded him from the papacy twice, in and. He does not seem to have been personally ambitious, preferring to promotethe Chigi candidature to the papacy, with the help of Mazarin, thereby securinga moral authority in the papacy of Alexander . What emerges clearly fromFosi’s account is his high understanding of office, guided by a sense of Christianduty. Giulio Sacchetti’s career was distinguished by the absence of thatextravagance which was de rigeur among the Roman aristocracy, and whichfound in Scipione Borghese, in the Barberini nephews, and in those ofAlexander an exploitation of famiglia which went beyond what Fosi clearlyidentifies as the normal and responsible exercise of advancement utterly essentialto the working of ‘buon governo’ in the seventeenth-century Church and in civilsociety. What counted with the Sacchetti family was the Florentine tradition ofsound financial management, preserving and developing the family patrimonio forthe sake of the future. They did not depart from this tradition until the economiccrisis (and Barberini debts) of the s drove Matteo, Giulio’s banker brother,to follow the path of Roman ennoblement, with its attendant social requirementof keeping up appearances at ruinous financial levels. The education of Matteo’schildren fell upon Giulio, the cardinal. The elder boy he correctly identified asawastrel ; the younger,Urbano (significantly), destined for theChurch, respondedto the counsels of Christian humility, but proved unable to assist the family tosustain its place in Roman society. The ensuing collapse of the family, predicted

by Giulio, brings this book to a conclusion, leaving, in this reviewer’s mind, twoquestions : whence did Giulio, given the apparently irreversible decline of theFlorentine confraternity of S. Giovanni as a religious institution, find the spiritualformation, the ‘ interior detachment’ which Fosi discerns in his attitude to office?Perhaps the cardinal’s library might provide some light. Secondly, did theSacchetti standard of buon governo (reaching back to Sixtus ) find an echo inother sectors of the Roman administration? To judge by the posthumous use ofGiulio Sacchetti’s name as an exemplar of what should be looked for in papalgovernment, it would seem so. Fosi’s book will certainly have the effect ofdelivering the study of the papal court in the ancien regime from an insufficientlynuanced understanding of nepotism and accasamento, restoring it to its properposition in a political and religious culture clamouring to be understood in itsown right.

T O, D FB

L’Age de raison (����}��–����). Edited by Marc Venard. (Histoire duChristianisme des origines a' nos jours, .) Pp. incl. ills and maps.Paris : Descle! e, . Fr. .

This is the ninth of a fourteen-volume history of Christianity. Under the directionof Marc Venard, twenty other historians (fifteen holding academic posts inFrance, the others being professors at the universities of Montreal, Rotterdamand Lublin, the head of the Mission historique française at Go$ ttingen and thearchivist of the Vatican) have made contributions, all interlocked in a patterncontrived to form a seamless whole. The book is a brilliant example of hautevulgarisation and more, some of the chapters being innovative, going far beyonda summary of received opinions, and as a whole constituting a work of referencefor scholars, a sort of eU tat des questions of the old Clio series put into polished prose.Together with the footnotes, the bibliographies provide a guide to recenthistoriographical writing in every European language. (Oddly Ceyssens andTan’s definitive work on the Bull Unigenitus is not here, while Blet’s volume isincluded – though learned it has tendentious omissions.) As might be expected,France holds the dominant place, though this is chiefly because the Frenchhistorians have invented the methodology to explore so many aspects of religiouslife. The balance between the various Churches and sects is maintained, thoughofficial Lutheranism (Pietistic movements apart) is dismissed in a cursory fashion.The chapters are grouped into four sections. The first concerns religion andpolitics in a divided Europe, concluding with a study of initiatives for tolerationand mutual understanding. Next, individual Churches are examined, togetherwith an additional essay of Jansenism. The chapters on the Church in Russia(Pierre Gonneau) and the various Churches of the Balkans and the Near East(Giuseppe Croce) are packed with new information. So too are the chapters onSouth America, Africa and the Far East (Dominique Deslandres, Philippe Denisand Philippe Le! crivain) in section . The final section has discussions ofspirituality and religious practice, of religion and culture (including biblicalstudies and apologetics), Christianity and morals, and the role of the arts and

music in worship. There is a brief chronological table, an index of personalnames, twenty-six black-and-white illustrations and ten excellent maps.

A S C, J MMO

George Herbert, The temple. A diplomatic edition of the Bodleian manuscript (Tanner ���).Edited by Mario A. Di Cesare. (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies,.) Pp. lxxx­­. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts& Studies, . $.

Materials for the life of Nicholas Ferrar. A reconstruction of John Ferrar’s account of hisbrother’s life based on all the surviving copies. Edited by Lynette R. Muir andJohn A. White. Pp. xxi­ incl. frontispiece. Leeds: Leeds Philosophicaland Literary Society, . £. within the EU, £. overseas, incl.post and packing from The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society Ltd,City Museum, Calverley Street, Leeds LS AA.

These editions are, in their completely different ways, peculiarly ambitious.Mario di Cesare’s A diplomatic edition of the Bodleian manuscript (Tanner ���) is afurther development in the bid to replace Thomas Buck’s edition of TheTemple as the authoritative source for editors of Herbert, a project which beganwith the facsimile edition of the Bodleian manuscript produced by himselfand Amy Charles. The need for a diplomatic edition is expressed in terms of thefailure of the facsimile to offer up the kind of detail to which Di Cesare drawsattention in no less than five sets of textual notes, as well as attempting to renderit in terms of print technology. Di Cesare notes all correction, erasure anddiffering inks, and has attempted to do justice to the visual aspects of themanuscript : spatial layout, decoration and the complex practice of ‘dis-tinguished’ lettering employed in both Herbert manuscripts. Taking seriouslythis visual element along with others, Di Cesare suggests persuasive new readingsof poems such as ‘Unkindnes ’ and ‘The collar ’. Di Cesare admits the difficultyof allocating the scripted letters to printed forms, and the manuscript illustrationswhich face some pages of the edition reveal that his judgements on typeface aresometimes arbitrary: this edition aims ‘to present and report fully and accuratelywhat is actually there’, but it is of course an interpretation, albeit one informedby enormous knowledge and meticulous scholarship. The text of The Temple datesfrom the period when manuscript circulation is hegemonic, and the value of thisedition may not in the end be in the impressive detail, or even in what is the firstcomplete cross-index to Herbert’s poems, but in the iconoclastic aim to ‘violatethe economy of the typographic medium’ (p. xv). Attention to the specifics ofchirography and layout does reveal much about what Di Cesare calls the‘ logistics ’ of Herbert’s poetry.

Materials for the life of Nicholas Ferrar is not a bibliography of surviving texts, ora printed edition of obscure sources, although this edition offers both and theymay be its most valuable contribution. It represents an attempt to recover a losttext by Nicholas Ferrar’s brother John. Whereas Di Cesare attempts to be faithfulto the manuscript practice of the scribes who produced Tanner , these editorsfollow another Little Gidding idiosyncrasy, the production of a macro-text

produced by assembling various different versions of one narrative. Arguablymore appropriate for sacred text, this editorial practice minimises the need toassess the validity of different readings. The editors include every detail from thesix extant manuscript copies, but also from any contemporary works which mayhave drawn on John Ferrar’s materials. Thus there are radical discontinuities inthe text, as when it lurches from the personal hagiography of John Ferrar’s Lifeto Barnabas Oley’s political propaganda. The editors attempt to erase differencesin the sources by modernising spelling: disjointedness is masked by the allocationof numbered paragraphs to various sections of biography. Maximum informationis the aim of this edition: concerns of textuality, Di Cesare’s absolute priority, arecompletely sacrificed.

N T U E C

Union, revolution and religion in ��th-century Scotland. By David Stevenson. (CollectedStudies, .) Pp. xiv­. Aldershot : Variorum. . £..

The federal theology of Thomas Boston. By A. T. B. McGowan. (Rutherford Studiesin Historical Theology.) Pp. xix­. Carlisle : Paternoster Press (forRutherford House, Edinburgh). . £. (paper).

An ecclesiastical republic. Church government in the writings of George Gillespie. ByW. D. J. McKay. (Rutherford Studies in Historical Theology.) Pp. x­.Carlisle : Paternoster Press (for Rutherford House, Edinburgh). .£. (paper).

One of the most prolific and influential Scottish historians of the twentiethcentury has drawn together sixteen previously published papers in the familiarformat of the Variorum Collected Studies series. In a preface to the collection DavidStevenson remarks fairly on the pivotal role he has played in transforming themodern understanding of seventeenth-century Scotland in general and of theScottish revolution in particular. In the late s, rejecting the assumption that‘Scottish history was church history’, he set out to uncover the secular forces atwork in the politics and culture of seventeenth-century Scotland, mostly in thedozen books he proceeded to publish, but also in the essays he has now reissued.Scottish historians will already be familiar with these studies, many of which areof fundamental importance for the topics they deal with. Ecclesiastical historianswill wonder what interest studies aimed at shaping a ‘secular history for a secularage’ may hold for them, and what the word ‘religion’ is doing in the title of thecollection. One answer is that four of the essays deal directly with ecclesiasticalthemes, two revealing the presence of a radical party in the kirk between and , the others examining the impact of the covenanting movement on thekirk between and . A further answer, put forward in the preface, is thatnone of the essays was ever meant to deny that ‘religious motivation was centralto what had happened’. The collection as a whole helps to place the ecclesiasticalhistory of Scotland in a broader setting, defined in terms of union and revolution.

There is a sense in which Stevenson may be described as a British historianavant la lettre, for he has always been concerned with Scotland’s relations withEngland and Ireland, and has always given prominence to the union question as

‘perhaps the most central of the many themes of seventeenth-century Scottishhistory’. Even more central than religious motivation? In his less guardedmoments Stevenson does talk as if religion served a purely instrumental functionin providing ideological fuel for conflicts that were caused by competing visionsof union. The problem with this thesis is that it cannot be sustained simply byshowing that there were secular sources of conflict. Stevenson may well be correctthat where cultural history is concerned ‘the dominance of narrow and gloomyreligious literature tends to repel ’, but until historians overcome their feelings ofrevulsion and attend closely to the religious literature the jury will have to returnthat most Scottish of verdicts. Admittedly, five of Stevenson’s essays are reprintedunder the heading ‘Political thought’, and his innovative piece on ‘the Englishdevil of keeping state ’ might easily have been reprinted under the sameheading. But only one essay deals with political thought in the conventional senseof the term, and it confirms the dominance of religious authors like SamuelRutherford and John Maxwell without exploring their explicitly religious beliefs.It has been left to other historians to adduce evidence from religious sources, asthey are at last beginning to do. The measure of Stevenson’s achievement is thedegree to which they will have to locate these sources in the secular setting he hasrecovered.

In the meantime historians may hope to learn from theologians who feel moreat ease with the religious literature. Andrew McGowan has provided a usefulreview of a number of debates in defending the thesis that Thomas Boston was‘a consistent federal Calvinist ’, arguing that federal theology was not asantithetical to Calvin’s teaching as has often been claimed, that the WestminsterConfession of Faith may be regarded as an accurate representation of Calvin’steaching, and that it is the ‘Marrowman’ Boston rather than his critics whodeserves to be viewed as a genuine Calvinist. Historians should find McGowan’sbook a useful guide to the debates he reviews – dealing with topics like theatonement and predestination, justification and assurance – so long as they bearin mind that it is an exercise in historical theology rather than in the history oftheology. The aim is to reconstruct a coherent tradition of thought, setting Bostonagainst his contemporary critics on one page and against his current critics on thenext, and recovering the historical context of his statements only ‘on one or twooccasions, where we felt that it was necessary to the argument’. Similarly,historians should find David McKay’s book on George Gillespie’s ecclesiologyhelpful as a guide to the debates he engaged in, especially at the WestminsterAssembly, so long as they are mindful of the aim and method of his study.McKay’s aim is not so much to reconstruct the debates at Westminster as toengage directly with Gillespie in discussion of the Presbyterian system of courts,the role of ministers and ruling elders, and the exercise of moral discipline.Gillespie is frequently criticised for his polemical style, the arguments of hisimmediate opponents are not mentioned unless they contribute to a continuingdiscussion, and his own arguments are repeatedly dismissed as having appeal tohis contemporaries alone. As a result the views imputed to Gillespie are oftenthose he might most sensibly have held rather than those he might most plausiblyhave held. In due course historians will have to review the primary sources usedin these two books for their own purposes, though it may be hoped that they willdo so with as much care and commitment as the two authors, both of whom –

writing originally as PhD students – appear to have been more intent on learningfrom Boston and Gillespie than on scoring points over those who have dealt withtheir views in the past.

G C C, J D. FC