Renaissance Cardinals and Their Worldly Problems. by D. S. ChambersReview by: Thomas V. CohenThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 626-628Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544592 .

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626 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 2 (1998)

Not surprisingly, the authors quote frequently from the Bible.There are over 2,500 biblical citations, one-third from the Old Testament and two-thirds from the New. The gospels and epistles are cited about equally. Interestingly, this is almost exactly the same breakdown found in the sermons of post-Reformation Catholic preachers in France.

Part 3 explores the theology found in the pamphlets.These are fighting works, whose language and imagery highlight the nature of the battle.They juxtapose Truth vs. Lies, Good vs. Evil, and Light vs. Darkness in an overtly confrontational structure. The dichotomy of Christ vs. the Pope, so prominent in the popular images examined by Robert Scribner in For the Sake of Simple Folk, is here presented in words.The Antichrist figures prominently, as the apocalyptic texts of the Bible are used to present graphically the great struggle that was unfolding.They show a historical consciousness in the early Reformation that the actors are participating in the renewal of Christian thought.

A more "everyday" theology is also present, emphasizing the study of the Bible, and ful- minating against works of righteousness, images, monasticism, confession, and the Catholic hierarchy.

In their conclusion, Moeller and Stackmann analyze the corpus they have assembled. Extreme positions, such as those of Miintzer, find few echoes here; the group is surprisingly homogeneous, anchored in justification by faith and dealing with the real problems of a new church and theology. For all of this, Luther is their foundation, especially his treatise On the Freedom of a Christian, often presented as "the sum total of a Christian life." The uniformity of the message, in both its positive and negative aspects, accounts for the great early successes in the free imperial cities.

This is an important book that makes little-known sources accessible to the scholarly community. One can only hope it will be followed up by studies on the period after 1530 as well as social histories that examine the reception of preaching, including the behaviors, attitudes, and reactions of the public. Larissa Juliet Taylor ...................................................... Colby College

Renaissance Cardinals and Their Worldly Problems. D. S. Chambers. Aldershot: Variorum, 1997. xii + 360 pp. $98.95.

To read the solid, careful, Rankean essays of D. S. Chambers is to travel back in scholarly time. The research is close to impeccable. The historian has spent countless hours in rich archives, copying with care and fetching out sharp details and entire documents, which he publishes with exemplary care. His bibliography of corroborating works is exhaustive, his knowledge of the politics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy exemplary. And yet, the reader of his careful essays begins to wonder what ever happened to the intellectual history of our waning century. It is as if it had never taken place. For in this volume one finds no echo of social history of any sort, of economic history with its secular trends, of Braudelian panoramas, or Ginzburgian obsessive microscopic delving. Moreover, the textual enthusi- asms of the past two decades, with their fascination with ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning, cast no shadows on Chambers, for whom the written word retains enviable trans- parency and directness of meaning. Chambers is cautious. He thinks small. The result is a virtuous book, but not an exciting or provocative one. For the reader, the rewards are mostly in the many handsome details.

Variorum Press has collected ten essays, published over a period of twenty-one years (from 1966 to 1987). It has appended an eleventh hitherto unpublished chapter, not so much essay as scattered afterthoughts. Although there have been a few updatings, the republished

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Book Reviews 627

essays remain in their original form, pagination, and typeface, and retain their occasional minor errors.

Accordingly, as almost always with collections, the title promises far more than the book delivers. Only in the first, earliest chapter have we a wider view of Renaissance cardinals; there is no retrospective, synthetic survey of their worldly problems. Rather, we have Gonzaga cardinals, but not really all ten of them. The book concentrates on the first, Francesco, the one whose appointment Mantegna famously celebrates in the "Camera degli Sposi." Seven chapters go to him and his entourage, and an eighth to his bastard son. One essay turns to the seventeenth-century Ferdinando, who forsook the church to shoulder the duchy. What holds the collection together, really, is the Mantuan archives and especially the rich collection of Gonzaga correspondence, which is full of letters home from the cardinal and his servants and minders. In whole or part, many of these documents appear in the notes and appendixes of the book. This body of lively papers allows the historian to reconstruct fascinating details about the inner workings of a cardinal's household.

Two themes run through the book: finance and material conditions on the one hand, and personnel on the other.The first chapter reviews the somewhat ramshackle structure of cardinals' revenues. Ecohistorians will be delighted to learn that the cardinal of Ostia as late as 1520 still expected 100 annual pounds ofTiber sturgeon.The second chapter surveys the housing problems of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, who, like his fellows, had to trail around central Italy in the train of the landscape-loving Pius II.A reader of the pope's bucolic Com- mentaries will recognize his 6tapes and note the long-suffering curial struggle to improvise lodgings in a countryside more Georgic than commodious.The third chapter deals with the housing, not of a cardinal, but of a Mantuan monastic house, pried from its residence by the ducal family to make way for Alberti's church of Sant'Andrea.The fourth chapter returns to the issue of personnel by tracing the tensions between the Gonzaga cardinal in Rome and his ducal family over the provision of Mantuan benefices.The cardinal, of course, wants the clerical incomes to feed his staff, while the duke, in the name of good service to the parishes, combats absenteeism. Chambers argues that, despite their notoriety, absentee clerics were in fact not always inferior servants of the faithful.

The next several chapters are biographic.The fifth follows the modest military career of Cardinal Francesco, who fitted a galley for Pius II's aborted crusade and then, as legate to the papal army, until his death, enthusiastically oversaw the Ferrara war.The reader notes in pass- ing the papal janissaries, Turkish prisoners from Otranto enlisted-until they soon deserted-under Saint Peter's banner.The next chapter, based on rich letters to the Mantuan duchess, describes young Francesco's trip to Florence in 1462, a visit marked by courtesies; gifts of lampreys, eels, and marzipan; interviews with Cosimo; and much admiration of col- lected antiquities. Chapter 8 lays out the life of the Cardinalino, Francesco's bastard, a poxy remittance man of small soul who kept falcons, dumped his wife amidst squalid accusations, and for three decades battened modestly off the Gonzaga house.

The biographic strain continues with two studies of members of Francesco's household. Giovanni Pietro Arrivabene, humanist, orator, author of a sycophantic Gonzaga epic, became secretary to the adolescent Cardinal Francesco, and wrote wonderful letters back to the duchess. At the cardinal's death, he attached himself to the papal court and died bishop of Urbino. Bartolomeo Marasca, the son of a fish-weigher, pious, censorious, gloomy, self- deprecating, and no humanist, became Francesco's maestro di casa. He shared the young car- dinal's bed, to his growing irritation, and fussed, with reason, over his gaining weight. Later, he became the master of the household of Paul II and ended his life as bishop of Citta' di Castello.

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628 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 2 (1998)

The book closes with a single chapter on a later age, a biographical sketch of first Cardi- nal, then Duke Ferdinando (1587-1626), a man of real intelligence who in his youth wrote madrigals and performed in pastoral comedies. As cardinal, he doted on botany and alchemy and composed love songs. As duke, he bungled his marriages, famously discarding a beloved mistress for a chilly, childless dynastic union. Chambers, in a rare flight of whimsy and spec- ulation, notes that it was appropriate that a man so changeable should wish to decorate his palace with motifs from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This is a modest book about men of modest importance, useful for its thoroughness of documentation. It is solid in its scholarship; the larger meaning, however, is almost entirely up to the reader. Thomas V. Cohen ........................................................... . York University

Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution. Glenn Burgess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ix + 224. $30.00.

The thread that runs throughout this book is the author's belief that modern students of political theory-among whom J. P. Sommerville looms largest-have overemphasized the influence of absolutist thought and overestimated the number of real absolutists in early Stuart England. In Burgess's view, the ideological linkage between absolutism and arbitrary government was forged by Parliamentarian propagandists after 1640, who, in order to explain their own opposition to the king, developed an interpretation of "unlimited" mon- archy as tyrannical. By showing that the current view of seventeenth-century political thought reflects this "parliamentary hermeneutic," Burgess aims to "rescue the early Stuarts from yet another layer of Whig distortion" (233-34). In so doing, he aligns himself with revisionist" historians of the English Civil War, such as Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe.

Burgess frames his argument in two sections, dealing in turn with the historical back- ground to absolutism and constitutionalism while simultaneously suggesting that, if paired, they form a false dichotomy. He announces that he will focus on ideas about monarchy, rather than the actual practice of kings, but rejects the notion that the early Stuart period saw a rise of absolutism" even in the arena of political theory.Absolutism was a "marginal" phe- nomenon, noteworthy chiefly for the united opposition it aroused. Historians who assign it a more widespread influence have employed anachronistic and simplistic assumptions about what it entailed. Throughout, Burgess is concerned to restore a sense of complexity and ambiguity to the discussion, and this is easily done by examining the interaction between theories of government, legal conventions, and specific cases. Not surprisingly, careful defi- nition of terms is at the heart of the enterprise and provides its principal grounds for success.

Burgess does find a few champions of the king's power to rule without consent, and he concedes that the recent redating of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha to the 1620s makes it impos- sible to deny an absolutist presence in the pre-Civil War period. But other historians, he asserts, have exaggerated the impact of absolutist thought by failing to distinguish between the issues of resistance, on the one hand, and limitation, on the other. In fact, Burgess main- tains, most men in the early Stuart era accepted the idea that the king's authority was "abso- lute" without fearing that it was "arbitrary," in the sense that it could be limited only by violent opposition. In general, they were content to repose trust in the common law as guar- antor of the subject's rights.The royal prerogative was seen as a part of the law, not in conflict with it: "resistance was never the crucial issue." To illustrate this shared understanding of the 'ancient constitution," Burgess deploys an impressive range of parliamentary and legal sources as well as the overtly polemical. His chapter on "The PoliticalThought of Sir Edward

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